Book review: Maddow reminds US that those who don’t learn from the past, repeat it

This rollicking bestseller confirms at least partially that old saying regularly polished up by historians who sometimes feel unloved and ignored. Study the past or you are doomed to repeat it, they warn — an invocation all too often ignored. 

This time it’s different, and all that wishful thinking trumps the all-too-accurate insights of historians.

It may be an apples-and-oranges comparison — just — to equate Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to the hinge-eyed but comparatively modest number of 1930s and ’40s white supremacists who saw Hitler’s racist, anti-democratic autocracy as a foil to an increasingly diverse America. 

Make America White and Protestant — no more Paddy emigrants! — might have been their rallying cry, but the energy, the dynamics, and even the choreography deliciously detailed by podcast galactico Rachel Maddow seem, in every respect except scale, distressingly contemporary.

That loose posse of Klansmen, Silver Shirts, Country Gentlemen, anti-union industrialists, the Knights of the White Camelia, isolationists and Jew haters, and sleazy politicians were determined to ensure that America did not join the Second World War and help defeat Nazi Germany.

To achieve that, many not only contemplated treason but embraced it — only avoiding clink time because the judge in a mega trial of Nazi collaborators died of the stress involved in a months-long confrontation with Uncle Sam’s wannabe einsatzgruppen.

We imagine this is a post-truth age but, as ever, there’s little new under the sun. 

Hitler and his acolytes did all they could to undermine America’s confidence through mass propaganda long before the first jackboot trod on Polish independence.

They were greatly helped by a well-intentioned convention that saw speeches made by politicians in Congress, printed for mass distribution through subsidised post.

This measure, intended to inform constituents of the great work of their representatives, was ruthlessly exploited by Germany. Speeches written in Berlin were delivered by useful idiots in Washington — for a fee, naturally.

Imagine how effective those interventions might be had the internet and its unfettered reach been available to the Nazis. Frightening indeed.

The chief orchestrator of this corruption was George Sylvester Viereck whose son, also George, died fighting in Italy in 1944 while his father was in jail for supporting Nazis.

While Viereck the traitor was in prison, his wife left him and sold his possessions and gave the proceeds to Jewish charities. A sliver of justice in a swamp of amoral betrayal.

Ireland, for whatever reason, remained “neutral” in that catastrophe — but two of the ogres recalled by Maddow have such deep links to Ireland that, in any other circumstances, we’d be proud to call them Sons of Erin.

Industrialist Henry Ford, the man with roots in Cork’s Ballinascarthy, was such a venomous antisemite that his sanity must be questioned.

That he bought the Dearborn Independent newspaper to spread his toxins through the continent-wide network of Ford dealerships sharpens that unfortunate question. 

His hatred of the Jewish people was matched, if not surpassed, by another figure who had a considerable following in Cananda, America, and Ireland.

Fr Charles Edward Coughlin, the founding priest of Canada’s National Shrine of the Little Flower, built a huge radio following by promoting the rosary and antisemitic hatred that — even in today’s world — shows an intensity that seems utterly insane. 

That the Vatican took so long to bring this tyrant to heel suggests many things, none of them admirable.

The take-home message from Maddow is that, despite enough evidence to fuel half a dozen Dublin Castle inquiries, the American public were largely kept in the dark about the domestic threat to democracy.

President Harry Truman buried the files and, even today, it is impossible to consider this without wondering why he hid a conspiracy intended to destroy democratic America.