Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra
Episode 5: Coming Home
The U.S. government’s search for American fascist Francis Yockey picks up steam as Yockey secretly returns home to America and joins forces with the growing pro-Nazi American ultra right. With investigators continually one step behind, Yockey suddenly turns up alongside one of the country’s most powerful political figures who is ascending toward the height of his powers.
(NBC NEWS RADIO CHIMES)
Anthony Mostrom: Well, in my twenties, I happened to walk into a used bookshop up in Van Nuys, California, where I was living.
Rachel Maddow: That’s journalist Anthony Mostrom.
Mostrom: It might have been the unusual book jacket design, but it just grabbed my eye. I had no idea what it was.
Maddow: That book that he spotted that day, it had a sort of a magenta-colored cover. It was thick as a phone book.
And it was just strange enough looking that he decided, you know, what the heck. He stuck it under his arm, brought it up to the counter.
Mostrom: I bought it. You know, it’s -- it was a used book for like five bucks or whatever, took it home. And, you know, after that, I didn’t really think much more about it. It was just sort of, I put it on -- in my home library. And it was just another one of my extremist books on my shelf, right?
Maddow: Across the country, right around the same time, a historian named John Jackson was having a similar experience.
John Jackson: I found a copy in the early 90s in a used bookstore. And so I went up to the counter and put it down. And, the -- the bookseller kind of looks at the book and kind of looks at me, a big, bald white man, (LAUGHTER) and kind of says something like: “Oh, that’s a controversial book.” (LAUGHTER) And I quick -- “I’m a historian! This is -- interested. I’m not a Nazi. Please don’t — please don’t think that.”
Maddow: This book that both John Jackson and Anthony Mostrom are describing here, this book they both happened upon in used bookshops, it’s a book called “Imperium.”
And the content of that book is why a bookshop owner might shoot a sideways glance at somebody who was picking it up.
Mostrom: It’s very much an antisemitic book. It’s very much a hate book.
Maddow: “Imperium” was published in the late 1940s, but only barely. Its initial print run was maybe a couple hundred copies. And the author of the book, that was kind of hard to figure out. The book was published under a pseudonym.
Mostrom: Ulick Varange. Ulick is a given Irish name and Varange refers to a nomadic tribe of Vikings who some historians say were the first to settle Russia.
Maddow: Ulick, or “Yoo-lick,” Varange was listed as the author. But that was a false name. “Imperium” had to be released under a false name because the real author of the book, when he wrote this thing, he was on the run.
Ulick Varange was the pseudonym of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey. By the late 1940s, by the time he wrote this book, Yockey had been wanted for questioning about his relationship with a Nazi saboteur who was executed in the United States during World War II.
Reporter: They brought with them a great store of explosives with which to blow up factories and demoralize civilian life.
Maddow: He had been linked to the German American Bund and to the Silver Shirts, the leadership of which had been charged with sedition during World War II.
Yockey himself had gone AWOL from the U.S. Army. He’d been thrown out of the U.S. Army, which listed him as a Nazi sympathizer. And, after all that, astonishingly, he had been given a job as a U.S. government lawyer at the Nazi war crimes trials in Germany.
Reporter: Twenty-two Nazi war criminals went on trial at two minutes after 10 this morning.
Maddow: Once there, he became a mole inside the prosecutions, using his position to surreptitiously help the Nazi defendants he was sent there to prosecute.
Army counterintelligence files from the time say Yockey also was trying to recruit German Army officers, Nazi veterans, into an underground movement that would rise up against the Allied occupying forces in Germany.
But when U.S. intelligence officials decided they wanted to go question him, he was gone.
Mostrom: He’s being tracked by U.S. intelligence, yet he’s able somehow to fly out of Germany without any -- you know, no one stopping him.
Maddow: Francis Yockey somehow slipped out of Germany ahead of the counterintelligence agents who were looking for him. He left behind his wife and his two young daughters.
Jackson: What do they call it in the spy shows? He goes to ground.
Mostrom: Yockey is always slipping in and out, using false passports, false names, and just jumping from continent to continent.
Maddow: Where Yockey first surfaces is way off the beaten path.
Mostrom: He secured a room at a small inn on the Irish coast to write what would eventually become a 600-page book which was called “Imperium.”
Maddow: Francis Yockey holed himself up inside that little cottage for months working on that book that you can still stumble across in a used book shop. You can get odd glances from the shop owner if you dare pick it up.
You might also find one of the many newer editions and reprints of this book, or the French edition, or the Spanish edition, or the one in German.
Mostrom: For a lot of people on the far right worldwide nowadays, the bible is “Imperium,” replacing “Mein Kampf.”
Maddow: The book that Francis Yockey churned out inside that cottage on the Irish coast is a sprawling, unrelenting, 600-page long, super boring fascist battle cry.
It’s basically an argument for the creation of a global fascist empire to finish what Hitler started. The book is actually dedicated to Hitler. Yockey calls him the hero of the Second World War. The book calls Jewish people culture distorters. It rants about the supposedly poisoned bloodstream and lost vitality of the West. It’s all the fault of the Jews and it’s the fault of democracy.
Jackson: It is the duty of the West to rule the world, and that can only be accomplished through strong leadership, democracy is a sham, and the Jews are the great enemy and need to be dealt with.
Maddow: Democracy is a sham and America is a lost cause.
According to Yockey, America’s global influence was really just another way for the Jews to secretly control the world.
In “Imperium” and also in his later writings, what set Yockey’s Nazi claptrap apart from other more garden-variety Nazi claptrap is that while he was harshly critical of the U.S., Yockey said he admired Russia instead, not for its communism, but for its antisemitism, for the Stalinist show trials and purges and pogroms and murders of Jews.
He thought Russia had a pure and somehow primitive culture that was preferable to America’s modern, terrible multiracial democracy. And so, in Francis Yockey’s “Imperium,” Europe would finish the genocide of the Jews, and would have a fascist empire in cahoots with Russia against the Great Satan, which was the United States.
Down with NATO, up with Russia. That is what Francis Yockey cooked up while on the run from American authorities.
Mostrom: The Yockey lore is that he wrote the book in six months, all 600 pages, without any notes, no books, no references.
Jackson: They always talk about, oh, Yockey was such a genius that he sat in this little cottage in Ireland, just didn’t have any books to refer to, and just came -- and just knew all this stuff and wrote it up, you know, which is not the way you write a scholarly book, right? (LAUGHTER) Yeah, well, it’s easy. It’s easy. You don’t need a library of stuff if you’re just making it up.
Maddow: Yockey’s manifesto would have decades of influence on the American right. It was also nonsense. It was just made up.
And it was also the American starting point for one of the most dangerous lies in human history. For people like Yockey, who wanted to revive Nazism who wanted to keep the fascist dream alive after World War II, explaining the monstrous body count from the Nazis’ time in power was a real challenge.
There were basically two paths you could choose. The first path, the most direct path, was to argue that the Holocaust was good, that it was somehow justified, that the Nazis had a right to do it.
That defense was tried at the war crimes trials.
Prosecutor: During the first nine months of Ohlendorf’s year in command, this force destroyed more than 90,000 human beings, killed at an average rate of 340 per day.
Maddow: The trial of this one particular Nazi commander is famous still to this day.
Mostrom: An S.S. commander named Otto Ohlendorf was responsible for the killing of about 90,000 Ukrainians during World War II.
Maddow: This remains a notorious case even decades later, not only because of the huge number of victims attributed to this one Nazi S.S. commander, but also because of the defense that was mounted for him at trial.
His defense was that it wasn’t a crime to kill tens of thousands of civilians, it wasn’t even a bad thing, because the victims were Jews. S.S. death squads needed to kill every Jewish man, woman and child they could find because even Jewish babies were going to still grow up to be Jews, and Jews were inherently communists, and communism was an existential threat to Germany.
So, those civilian massacres, the defense argued, those massacres of tens of thousands of people, those were necessary, they were justified.
This wasn’t just a defense of this one accused Nazi war criminal. This was an argument for Nazism, for the Holocaust, for what they did. American prosecutors at that trial, when they realized that was the defense they were up against, they were just shocked by it.
Prosecutor: Some of these defendants still believe that what they did was not murder because the victims were Jews. No system of domestic or international penal law could possibly survive under which the determination of guilt for murder is governed by the political or religious creed or racial origin of the victim.
Maddow: The lawyer who mounted that defense in that case, the ubiquitous Nazi defense lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer, he got help in preparing that defense.
Mostrom: Yockey would surreptitiously send exculpatory documents to Ohlendorf’s defense lawyer behind the scenes.
Maddow: American fascist Francis Yockey had used his position at the American war crimes trials in Germany to steal material to help in the notorious Ohlendorf defense.
So, Yockey tried that path. He tried claiming the Nazis were right to do what they did. But he also tried the other path, the more insidious path, which was to deny that any of it happened.
Yockey wrote in “Imperium” that gas chambers -- quote -- “did not exist” and that thousands of people who had supposedly been killed weren’t killed at all, because they -- quote -- “published accounts of their experiences in these camps.”
Yockey’s book “Imperium” is considered by some scholars to be the first written instance, the earliest example of Holocaust denial by an American.
Yockey was writing this just after World War II had ended, while the world was still absorbing the scale of the Nazis’ atrocities, the images of the concentration camps and the gas chambers.
This isn’t even history at that point. It’s current events.
There are myriad living survivors who escaped the horrors themselves, thousands of Allied troops who liberated the camps, who saw it all with their own eyes. Yockey himself had just come from the Nuremberg trials, which dealt with vast, vast quantities of evidence.
Prosecutor: Deliberate, premeditated murder, murder on a gigantic scale, murder committed for the worst of all possible motives.
Maddow: But Yockey would write that none of it had happened, that it was all a hoax.
And then he was on the move again. U.S. authorities tracked him to Italy, where he spoke at fascist meetings. They tracked him to England, where he gave speeches and did organizing for the British fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been imprisoned during the war.
Yockey helped form something called the European Liberation Front.
Mostrom: Yockey wrote that the European Liberation Front was calling for the expulsion of all Jews and other parasitic aliens from the soil of Europe.
Maddow: Advocating for expelling all Jewish people from Europe, writing America’s “Mein Kampf,” sowing the first American seeds of Holocaust denial, that’s what Francis Yockey was working on.
But Yockey would not just be a problem we created and then unleashed on the world, a rogue American fascist who we exported. He was about to become our problem, too, because he was about to come home to the America that he hated. He had friends here who wanted him to get to work here. And he did in what would turn out to be surprisingly high places.
This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
Steven Ross: Democracy, he argued, is no good. His goal was to seize the American government
Sen. Joseph McCarthy: I’m completely dissatisfied with this whole investigation. Any man who can add two and two must be dissatisfied.
Ross: He attracts all kinds of far-right people to his group
Sen. Herman Welker: One of the greatest living foes of communist slavery, that man is Joe McCarthy!
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Maddow: Episode 5: Coming Home.
It was a big ad in The L.A. Times for a multi-day convention that was going to be held in downtown Los Angeles. Four days at the Embassy Auditorium. And there was a huge photo of the headline speaker for the event. It took up almost half the ad.
In the unlikely event that readers didn’t recognize his very famous face, there was his name right across the top in big letters: Gerald L.K. Smith.
Gerald L.K. Smith: Preserve America as a Christian nation.
Ross: Gerald L.K. Smith was a religious leader, a self-proclaimed religious leader who in many ways took over the mantle of antisemitism from Father Coughlin.
Maddow: That’s historian and author Steven Ross.
Before World War II, Gerald L.K. Smith headed up something called the America First Party. During the war, he ran for president on the America First Party platform, which included the sterilization and expulsion of all Jewish people from the United States.
Gerald L.K. Smith: There is a highly-organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition.
Maddow: After the war was over, Gerald L.K. Smith shifted from his America First Party to a new organization. He called it the Christian Nationalist Crusade.
Ross: He attracts all kinds of people, all kinds of far-right people to his group. Their enemies are Jews and communists who are trying to take over America, and we loyal Christians are going to stop this effort to pervert our country.
Maddow: It’s Los Angeles in the summer of 1950, and Gerald L.K. Smith is gearing up to treat his followers to four whole days of that.
Mostrom: Some of the speakers included one of Smith’s loyal lieutenants. She spoke against what she called mongrelization of the white race in the United States. And this seems to have been the main theme of the conference, actually.
Maddow: Journalist Anthony Mostrom again.
Mostrom: It’s kind of hard to believe for us now, especially a native Angeleno like myself, to think that this was a well-attended convention of very far right-wing political speakers, but there they were.
Maddow: There they were, packed into the Embassy Auditorium.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Maddow: Thousands of people.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Maddow: There was one speaker at the Embassy Auditorium for that event who was a surprise to the crowd. He hadn’t been listed on the program, but Gerald L.K. Smith got up himself and told the crowd who he was, and that he would be speaking.
He was a young man with an unusual name. He introduced him as Ulick Varange. It was Francis Yockey.
Mostrom: Yockey was the only one, to my knowledge, who was not mentioned in the programs at all, probably because of his outlaw status at this point.
Maddow: Francis Yockey had come home, back to the United States. He was wanted by U.S. authorities, wanted for questioning. But, somehow, he slipped back into the country undetected. And once he was here, he linked up with the remnants of the America First movement. He started speaking at these Gerald L.K. Smith rallies across the country, in the Midwest, in Oklahoma, in California.
FBI files record that these events featured calls to lock up President Harry Truman, lock him up for treason. One speaker claimed that he had inside information that one of Truman’s top White House advisers had been forced to change his name because he was secretly a pedophile.
One speaker yelled to the crowd that the real Communist Party in this country is the Democratic Party. And then Francis Yockey, with a speech that would take the bark off a tree.
Mostrom: The substance of Yockey’s oration was that the Nuremberg trials, which he had attended and which he worked as part of, that the Nuremberg trials were a sham and that thousands of what he called white Christian Germans had been convicted without trial, and that the Jews control the world today.
Maddow: According to accounts from the time, Francis Yockey was the only speaker in Los Angeles to receive a full-on standing ovation from the crowd.
Mostrom: Yockey would later boast to a friend that he delivered what he called a tremendous speech to this convention’s 3,000 attendees.
Maddow: That is not a typical way to hide from the feds when you’re wanted for questioning. But there he is, after years on the run, back home, basking in the applause, somehow staying one step ahead of investigators.
Mostrom: J. Edgar Hoover was -- was being apprised of Yockey’s movements. There are thousands of documents that Hoover himself signed off on, telling various FBI offices across the country where there might have been a sighting of Yockey.
Maddow: While FBI files and newspaper archives trace the trail of Yockey’s 1950 speaking tour with Gerald L.K. Smith, the man whose speeches were the real hot ticket in American politics just then was a senator.
Welker: One of the greatest living foes of communist slavery, that man is Joe McCarthy.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Maddow: In early 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy had delivered the speech that would make him a household name, his “I hold in my hand the list of known communists” speech.
That speech was only a few months after his crusade to try to make the Malmedy massacre trial a scandal. Multiple reviews of the Malmedy case and a comprehensive, monthslong Senate investigation disproved the kinds of wild claims he was making.
The Senate investigation even found that where those lies came from was from unrepentant Nazis who were trying to come back to power in Germany. But those conclusions, the actual truth of the matter, never got much traction in the press. The false allegations got headlines, the truth not so much.
“The New York Times” put on its front page the -- quote -- “storm of charges” about outright brutality by U.S. soldiers.
But then the determination that that storm of charges had been made up, and made up by Nazis, and made up specifically to hurt the United States, well, that didn’t make the front page, nor did the much more explosive story lurking there in plain sight, which was that senators like Joe McCarthy had uncritically stovepiped a false and dangerous Nazi propaganda operation right into the United States Senate and, well, right onto the front pages of “The New York Times.”
Reporter: The senators are probing reports that the Germans were beaten and starved to get confessions from them.
Maddow: McCarthy’s lurid and outrageous lies had been comprehensively disproven. They’d even been exposed as a Nazi propaganda plot. But McCarthy never paid for that, because he was learning in real time that shocking lies will always get more and better press than the calm, rational debunking of those lies.
And if you are a talented and ambitious demagogue, that’s the kind of lesson you don’t forget. That’s more than a lesson. That’s a game plan.
Reporter: Hearings on Senator McCarthy’s charges of communism in the State Department developed into a committee wrangle to find out whether McCarthy had in his files the name of the high official who allegedly covered up commies.
Maddow: McCarthy’s shocking, confrontational claims about all the supposed communists he knew about in the government, those claims got a ton of press, just as his claims about Malmedy had got a ton of press. And, just like Malmedy, those claims would soon be the subject of a full-blown Senate investigation.
Reporter: You believe, as of the moment, there are communists in the State Department?
McCarthy: Communists or worse.
Reporter: Or what?
McCarthy: Communists or worse.
Reporter: Want to name a few?
Maddow: When the Senate started its investigation into McCarthy’s claims about communists in the government, he did what he had done in the Malmedy case. He basically hijacked the investigation and turned it into a spectacle.
Sen. Millard Tydings: Have you in your possession any memorandum, any affidavit, any paper, any photostat, or other material which would tell us who this individual is, not where you got it, not how you got it, not who gave it to you, but have you the material?
McCarthy: All of the affidavits...
Tydings: Oh.
McCarthy: ... all of the photostats...
Tydings: Why don’t you say you haven’t got it or you have got it?
McCarthy: All the affidavits, all the photostats are easily accessible to you. You can get them without any trouble at all. They’re all in those files.
Maddow: Senator Millard Tydings led this investigation, and he and McCarthy wrangled for months. The investigation looked into all of McCarthy’s claims exhaustively. And, just like with the Malmedy case, this investigation also concluded that McCarthy basically didn’t know what he was talking about.
But it wasn’t just that he was wrong. It was worse than that.
Tydings said that what McCarthy was pushing was not just false. It was pernicious. It was confusing and dividing the American public. Like the Malmedy investigation, though, this official debunking of his false claims, the spotlighting of what damage those false claims were doing, it didn’t make much of a splash.
What did make a splash had been McCarthy’s initial shocking charges, and also his new charge when the investigation was over, when McCarthy said it had all been rigged.
McCarthy: I’m completely dissatisfied with this whole investigation. Any man who can add two and two must be dissatisfied. We’ve had the most fantastic exhibition I have ever seen put on by a Senate committee.
Maddow: To McCarthy’s growing legion of fans, this rejection of him by the Senate was a call to arms. There was a cover-up. The whole Senate was in on it. The whole government was in on it. Joe was the only one they could trust.
And so, naturally, McCarthy’s next step was to set out to destroy the man who had dared to oppose him. He started implying that this longtime conservative Senator Millard Tydings was maybe himself a communist. He said Tydings was -- quote -- “suspiciously kind to traitors.”
Then it got worse. Tydings was up for reelection that year. McCarthy and his staff produced a fake photo that made it look like Tydings was secretly meeting with a leading communist. They distributed that fake photo all across Tydings’s home state. And after holding that seat for 24 years, Millard Tydings lost. He was defeated for reelection, because that’s what you got when you crossed Joe McCarthy.
McCarthy: Little Millard is with us no longer.
(LAUGHTER)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Maddow: “Little Millard is with us no longer.” This was his playbook. The insistent, dangerous lying, the no-holds-barred revenge on anyone who confronted him, also the belittling of his opponents, the name-calling.
And then there were the journalists who seemed to make McCarthy the most viscerally upset.
Drew Pearson: This is Drew Pearson. I’ll be back in a minute with a prediction on Senator McCarthy and the latest inside news from Washington.
Maddow: Columnist Drew Pearson had done as much as any national reporter to criticize Joe McCarthy. McCarthy’s attacks on Pearson included violence.
In 1950, at the Sulgrave Club in Washington, D.C., McCarthy physically attacked Pearson. He tried to beat him up. He kneed him in the groin. He hit him in the head. He had to be pulled off of him. The American Veterans Committee called for McCarthy to be impeached from the Senate for that.
But Pearson wasn’t the only one. When columnist Joe Alsop criticized McCarthy, McCarthy started calling him not Alsop, but “Al-Slop.”
McCarthy: I don’t care how high-pitched becomes the screaming and squealing of the left-wing element of press and radio. I don’t care what the -- what the Drew Pearsons, and the Mark Childs, and the “Al-Slops” and the Time magazines, I don’t -- I don’t care what they have to say. I don’t care how much they scream and squeal.
As long as I am in the Senate, and I hope that’s for some time yet, as long as I am in the Senate, this task is not going to become a dainty task. And if anyone wants to come in and remove them in some dainty fashion, they are welcome to it. But in the absence of that, if lumberjack tactics are the only kind of tactics that that crowd understands, then take my word for it, those are the kind of tactics we are going to use on them.
Maddow: With each of these public battles, up to and including the name-calling and the violence, McCarthy, of course, turned off Americans who were repulsed by that kind of politics, by that kind of man. But not everyone disapproved.
Gerald L.K. Smith: The two greatest symbols in this civilization are the cross and the flag.
Maddow: Senator McCarthy was not only building an increasingly large, increasingly fervent mainstream public following, he was also becoming a hero, sort of a North Star, to figures on the edge, like Gerald L.K. Smith.
Smith: Fight mongrelization and all attempts being made to force the intermixture of the Black and white races.
Maddow: In 1950, not long after his Francis Yockey, anti-mongrelization, anti-Nuremberg speaking tour, Gerald L.K. Smith actually did work with Joseph McCarthy in the U.S. Senate.
Anchor: Anna Rosenberg presented a detailed account of the new defense setup to a Senate committee.
Maddow: Anna Rosenberg was one of the most accomplished women to have ever served in American national security. Among other things, she devised the national manpower plan for America’s wartime military buildup for World War II.
When the U.S. government created a new award at the end of the war, the Medal of Freedom, the first American ever given that award was Anna Rosenberg for her wartime service. But then, after the war, Anna Rosenberg had the misfortune of getting nominated to a top Defense Department job just as Joe McCarthy was reaching the height of his powers.
David Austin Walsh: She was nominated to a position in the Defense Department.
Maddow: That’s author and historian David Austin Walsh.
Anna Rosenberg’s Pentagon nomination at first sailed right through the Senate Armed Services Committee. But then there was a hitch in the process.
Walsh: McCarthy went after her.
Maddow: McCarthy teamed up with Gerald L.K. Smith to try to make the Anna Rosenberg nomination into another national scandal.
He met with one of Smith’s top aides who was becoming well-known in his own right as a Holocaust denier. He said his stated mission in meeting with McCarthy was to -- quote -- “keep the Zionist Jew Anna Rosenberg” from becoming -- quote -- “dictator” of the Pentagon.
McCarthy and his allies turned on the spigots of conservative media against her, and they persuaded the Senate to reopen Rosenberg’s confirmation hearings, whereupon McCarthy produced a bombshell witness who swore that he had personally met Anna Rosenberg at a communist meeting in New York.
But it wasn’t true. None of it was true. McCarthy’s star witness had never met Anna Rosenberg, not at a communist meeting, not anywhere. Rosenberg told the Armed Services Committee -- quote -- “I would like to lay my hands on that man. It is inhuman what he has done to me in the past few days.”
Her outrage was shared by at least one of the senators on that committee: Lester Hunt of Wyoming. He told reporters: “I just hope that no Hollywood producer ever gets hold of the complete transcript of this thing. If it were put into a movie, it would do more than anything so far to discredit Congress.”
Senator Lester Hunt had seen Joe McCarthy’s tactics up close during the Malmedy hearings, and now here it was again. Senator Hunt’s personal files show him writing to a colleague about McCarthy’s attacks on Anna Rosenberg, saying: “That’s all it’s summed up to be. She happens to be Jewish.”
Hunt’s files also reveal stacks of vile letters he got from the public, letters smearing Anna Rosenberg, accusing her of disloyalty and worse, none of it true. These smears were being spread by known antisemitic agitators like Gerald L.K. Smith, and also now by Lester Hunt’s own Senate colleague, Joe McCarthy.
Walsh: McCarthy was happy to go along with it. He would take information wherever he could find it. And if it meant working with far-right people with a specific agenda, then he would do that.
Maddow: And once you start down that kind of a road, it can get real dark real fast.
That’s next.
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Maddow: It used to be called East River Drive because it ran up the edge of Manhattan right alongside the East River. But, in 1945, after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they renamed it in his honor. It would now be FDR Drive, which must have seriously annoyed Yorkville.
Ross: Yorkville had been the heart of Nazi America before World War II.
Maddow: That’s historian and professor Steven Ross.
Ross: If you were a Jew living in the Yorkville area, you had to be very afraid for yourself. You had to be very afraid of what you would wear that was openly Jewish, whether it’s a yarmulke or whether it was a Star of David.
Maddow: In Yorkville, right at the end of World War II, a new American pro-Nazi group opened its headquarters on the East Side of Manhattan right near the newly christened FDR Drive.
They were funded in large part by a wealthy German-American who had been interned during World War II as a Nazi supporter. After the war ended, he funded Nazi groups in Europe and in Latin America and also in Manhattan, in Yorkville, the home of the new National Renaissance Party.
Ross: The very name National Renaissance Party was inspired by Hitler’s last political testament. Before his suicide, he wrote that he hoped for a radiant renaissance of Nazism throughout the world inspired by what he had done in Germany.
Maddow: A radiant renaissance of Nazism.
Ross: James Madole, who was head of the National Renaissance Party, was trying to mobilize New Yorkers and a nation to understand the Jewish, Black threat to white superiority, white Anglo-Saxon superiority. And therefore, he was holding regular demonstrations on 88th Street and First Avenue in New York, the heart of Yorkville.
Maddow: The idea behind the National Renaissance Party was not subtle. This was not a soft sell they were making.
Ross: He told a crowd in Yorkville -- and I’ll quote him -- “I will plant the swastika in Washington.” And he promised the crowd -- quote -- “What Hitler accomplished in Europe, the National Renaissance Party shall yet accomplish in America.”
Maddow: The National Renaissance Party’s stock-in-trade was to be as visible and as provocative as possible.
Ross: They would dress in Nazi uniforms. They would give the Nazi salute. They would actually engage from time to time in open violence with Jewish war veterans.
When Madole would deny the Holocaust ever occurred, they would often try to break through the police barriers and attack him. Sometimes, the Nazis won. Sometimes, the Jewish war veterans won. But the Nazis always claimed victory.
Maddow: Street violence was sort of the calling card of the National Renaissance Party. That’s what they wanted to be known for, for their physical menace on the streets.
But they were aiming at more than just hurting people physically. They were trying both to terrorize and to galvanize. They were trying to set something off.
Ross: Democracy, he argued, is no good. He would create a fascist government in America that would educate the entire country into sort of we would now call white supremacy.
There would be a rebellion that Christians, loyal Christians, would join in, understanding that Jews and Blacks were perverting their nation, and they would create a new country, a new renaissance that would create an America that would realize Hitler’s dreams for the world. Only, it would start in the U.S. rather than Germany.
Maddow: The National Renaissance Party was small, but they were growing.
Ross: He had chapters in Atlanta. He had chapters in Louisville. He was trying to open chapters in every city in America.
And many of those chapters were accumulating arms. His goal was to seize the American government, either preferably through an election and, if not through an election, through amassing so many troops that they would take over the American government.
Maddow: It was still happening.
During World War II, the leaders of American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi groups that had done stuff like this, they’d all been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department in what was called the Great Sedition Trial.
Now, after the war, the most famous of all the Great Sedition Trial defendants...
Reporter: George Sylvester Viereck, the man who has been prominent for several years as a Nazi propagandist --
Maddow: ... he was working as an early adviser to the National Renaissance Party.
George Sylvester Viereck had been indicted in the Great Sedition Trial. But in addition to that sedition indictment, he had also been indicted and tried and convicted and imprisoned as a Nazi agent for coordinating a multimillion-dollar German propaganda operation that covertly targeted the American public.
When he had been a highly paid, highly-placed agent for the Hitler government, Viereck’s secret weapon had been his close ties with America First members of Congress, like Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, for whom Viereck wrote speeches, like Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, whose office Viereck used as a clearinghouse for literally tons, millions of pieces of German government propaganda.
But in the post-war era, for groups like the National Renaissance Party, Hamilton Fish, Ernest Lundeen, politicians like that were the old class, the previous generation. Who could these guys hope to work with now?
Here’s Steven Ross with producer Mike Yarvitz.
Mike Yarvitz: Were there any particular elected politicians that they liked, that they were kind of drawn to, that the National Renaissance Party saw as singing a similar tune as them?
Ross: Saint Joe. Joseph McCarthy was the one politician that James Madole and many of the others rallied around, that they thought he was the only one speaking the truth.
Maddow: Saint Joe, Joseph McCarthy, that’s who the National Renaissance Party believed was their guy.
Ross: Madole found Joe McCarthy the only American politician really worth listening to and supporting. He spoke their language. He never tried to dissociate from far right groups that supported him. And they considered him as, they would say at meetings, Saint Joe, and he was a true American patriot.
Maddow: They took the name for their group from Hitler’s last testament. They had designs on a fascist government in America, and they were quite open about that.
Their stock-in-trade, what they were known for, was beating up Jewish people in the streets. They were working with a notorious convicted Nazi agent. And they believed there was one politician out there who was truly speaking for them.
Ross: When Madole would start his meetings by heiling Hitler and then heiling McCarthy, word of that got back to McCarthy. He never said boo. He wasn’t going to stop any group that supported him, even if they were heiling Hitler.
Maddow: Now, you can’t control who likes you. And while they were heiling him along with Hitler, it’s not like Senator McCarthy was heiling the National Renaissance Party right back.
But it wasn’t a total mystery why they liked him. And it wasn’t only because of his public image. In the early 1950s, Senator McCarthy tapped an employee at the Library of Congress to help him as a researcher. That researcher -- his name was Eustace Mullins -- was also a member of the National Renaissance Party. He would occasionally refer to himself as “Fuhrer Mullins.”
There was also the speech.
In 1952, Senator Joseph McCarthy was invited and he quickly accepted an invitation to speak at an event that was billed as an “American-German Friendship Rally.”
The event, naturally, was in Yorkville. The chairman of the rally was from the National Renaissance Party. The list of scheduled speakers included a who’s who of early Holocaust deniers and antisemitic and pro-Nazi authors and also sitting Senator Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy then enlisted someone to write a speech for him for that event, a man who, by this point, needs no introduction:
Mostrom: There’s no doubt that Francis Parker Yockey met Senator Joe McCarthy.
Maddow: Francis Parker Yockey, that’s who McCarthy brought on board.
Here’s journalist Anthony Mostrom:
Mostrom: Yockey was staying in Washington, D.C., and he met McCarthy through a lawyer friend.
Maddow: Francis Yockey at this point is on the run from American authorities. He had been a mole inside the war crimes trials in Germany to help the Nazis there. He had founded a group pledging to cleanse the soil of Europe of all Jews.
He had pioneered American Holocaust denial. He had published his 600-page fascist manifesto that was considered to be America’s “Mein Kampf.” It advocated for the creation of a fascist empire and the destruction of the United States of America. So, obviously, in a career like that, the next step is U.S. Senate speechwriter?
But that is who McCarthy enlisted to write this speech for him, this speech for Yorkville.
Mostrom: Yockey landed what you might call an unusual job. And that job was writing the speech for Senator Joe McCarthy at a German-American Friendship meeting in Yorkville, New York.
Maddow: Yockey wrote to a friend about it at the time. He explained that a lawyer for one of The Chicago Tribune’s chain of conservative newspapers had made the arrangements.
Through that lawyer, an appointment had been -- quote -- “arranged for me with Senator McCarthy for Saturday night.” Yockey said -- quote -- “He wanted me to write a speech for him based on a whole batch, a huge corpus of material, to have it ready by Monday.”
Even Yockey himself couldn’t quite seem to believe it. He said -- quote -- “There are still several things to settle with him” -- quote -- “but it looks as though I have a job.”
And, apparently, he did. And one of the ways we know he did is because the FBI was on to it too. The FBI became aware of the speech. And in FBI records from the time, they take great pains trying to give Senator McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, to say that, based on some passages of the speech, it looked like maybe the senator himself wrote it, although maybe it was this guy Yockey. They really couldn’t be certain.
The FBI reports say that Yockey’s -- quote -- “location at the present time is unknown.” But given what they were learning about this relationship between a powerful U.S. senator and this Nazi guy who they were searching for, given all the information they then had, the FBI memo says that agents -- quote -- “may desire to contact Senator McCarthy” to learn more.
Yeah, maybe.
Mostrom: If any anti-McCarthy journalist had learned about this connection, I think Joe McCarthy’s career would have been severely damaged right then and there. But the fact is, no one found out.
Maddow: Senator Joe McCarthy, by this point in 1952, was ascending to the heights of American politics. He was building a major popular following. He had the conservative press cheering his every move.
He was running roughshod over his political enemies, both in the Democratic Party and also his own party. He had pushed a Nazi propaganda hoax to the American people about Jews in the U.S. Army in the Malmedy case supposedly torturing Nazi soldiers. He was also pushing for individual convicted Nazis both here and overseas to be freed from prison.
After helping win parole for American fascist William Pelley, McCarthy also helped Senator William Langer campaign for clemency for Martin Sandberger, a Nazi S.S. commander who had been convicted and sentenced at Nuremberg.
In Congress, McCarthy worked with some of the most fire-breathing antisemites and Holocaust deniers to make false accusations against a prominent Jewish U.S. government official. And now McCarthy was hiring an influential American fascist to speechwrite for him.
The speech was about how America had been too tough on Germany in the war. It was to be delivered by McCarthy at an event chaired by a National Renaissance Party guy, which is literally a group that dresses up like Storm Troopers.
The speech Yockey wrote for McCarthy -- you can read it in the FBI files -- it ends with a rallying cry that -- quote -- “We shall sweep America clear of its inner enemies.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy never did deliver that speech in Yorkville that Francis Yockey wrote for him. And that is because the press, a handful of journalists, got wind of McCarthy’s involvement in that rally and they started exposing who McCarthy was preparing to share the stage with.
The journalists reported that one of the announced speakers had been linked to street violence there in Yorkville. Another of the speakers was becoming renowned as a Holocaust denier. Another speaker had been calling for the execution, the hanging of Dwight Eisenhower. Another was quoted saying: “Here in America, we hate the Jews and the Negroes.”
After that reporting, Senator McCarthy’s office discovered that, actually, he had a scheduling conflict he hadn’t noticed before. His name was already printed on the posters for the Yorkville event, but they sent late word that Senator McCarthy could no longer make it.
Mostrom: There was such an outcry that the roster of speakers was stuffed with pro-Nazis that canny Joe McCarthy decided to bail out.
Maddow: In the end, Senator Joe McCarthy narrowly avoided reading the words that had been written for him by the fugitive godfather of American Holocaust denial. And, ironically, he probably had the press to thank for that.
But while McCarthy’s political star was rising at the same time as his radicalism, while the circle around him was getting weirder and wilder and more and more reckless, so were his tactics, so was his war with the press, and so was his war with his fellow senators.
Pearson: That Senator McCarthy will have no more luck bulldozing his fellow senators than he had in silencing me. What he doesn’t like from his fellow senators now is anyone who opposes him or exposes him.
McDaniel: His bullying and his dishonesty and his brazen willingness to ruin the lives of people who got in his way was something that Lester Hunt had never encountered, probably could not have imagined, until his encounter with McCarthy.
Maddow: McCarthy’s bullying, his total dislocation from the truth, his increasingly impassioned followers, who trusted no one but him, his willingness to introduce threats and violence into American politics, things like that tend to eventually reach the point of no return.
McDaniel: He made the decision, this -- this would be the last day of his life.
Maddow: That is next time on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
“Ultra” is a production of MSNBC.
This episode was written by myself and Mike Yarvitz. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It’s produced by Jen Mulreany Donovan and Kelsey Desiderio. Our associate producer is Vasilios Karsaliakos. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Catherine Anderson.
Our head of audio production is the indefatigable Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Kutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC.
Archival radio material is from NBC News, via the Library of Congress.
I’d like to acknowledge the late Kevin Coogan, whose book “Dreamer of the Day” is the definitive scholarship on the life of Francis Parker Yockey. Links to Mr. Coogan’s book and other key sources on this subject, like Larry Tye’s great McCarthy biography, “Demagogue,” those are all posted at our website, MSNBC.com/Ultra.
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David Brinkley: My sister Mary Driscoll had a job on Capitol Hill as Joe McCarthy’s executive secretary. I despised him. And she did not.
I could not discuss him without getting into four-letter words, and I still can’t, because he was a -- the biggest liar in the history of the United States. I think that rings true. I can’t think of a bigger liar we’ve ever had.
So, I loathed him. She did not. And I asked her, my sister Mary: “He said he had the names of 205 communists. Where did he get them?”
And she said: “He made it up.” And she knew. She was in his office with him.