“There’s certainly a raw and visceral shock to seeing swastikas displayed in American streets,” Hart tells TIME. “But this is a topic I’d been working on for quite a while at that point, and while it wasn’t something I expected, it was a trend I’d been observing. I wasn’t terribly shocked but there’s still a visceral reaction when you see that kind of symbolism displayed in the 21st century.”
Hart, who came to the topic via research on the eugenics movement and the history of Nazi sympathy in Britain, says he realized early on that there was a lot more to the American side of that story than most textbooks acknowledged. Some of the big names might get mentioned briefly — the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, or the highly public German American Bund organization — but in general, he says, the American narrative of the years leading up to World War II has elided the role of those who supported the wrong side. And yet, American exchange students went to Germany and returned with glowing reviews, while none other than Charles Lindbergh denounced Jewish people for pushing the U.S. toward unnecessary war. In its various expressions, the pro-Nazi stance during those years was mostly focused not on creating an active military alliance with Germany or bringing the U.S. under Nazi control (something Hitler himself thought wouldn’t be possible) but rather on keeping the U.S. out of war in Europe.
So why was that past overlooked for so long?
In part, Hart theorizes, it’s because the American story of World War II is such a powerful national narrative. The United States, that narrative says, helped save the world. Rocked by Pearl Harbor, Americans stepped up to turn the tide for the Allies and thus solidified their nation’s place as a global superpower. That narrative doesn’t have much room for the relatively small, but significant, number of Americans who were rooting for the other side.
“It’s always been uncomfortable in this country to talk about isolationism, though the ideas are still out there,” he says, “It’s part of the American mythology. We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war.”
It was also possible for those who had participated in Nazi-sympathetic groups to later cloak their beliefs in the Cold War’s anti-communist push — a dynamic that had in fact driven some of them to fascism in the first place, as it seemed “tougher on communism than democracy is,” as Hart puts it. (One survey he cites found that in 1938, more Americans thought that communism was worse than fascism than vice versa.) Such people could truthfully insist that they’d always been anti-communist without revealing that they’d been fascists, and their fellow Americans were still so worried about communism that they might not press the matter.
jesus christ we’ve been TELLING you this
More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here’s Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn’t Better Known
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