Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

Maddow describes George Sylvester Viereck as “a pillow-lipped and self-professed sensualist who said he worshipped Wilde as one of his three life models, alongside Napoleon and Christ” (xvii). The Prologue discusses Viereck’s early writing as an entry point into the topic of Nazism in the US. She treats Viereck, a “German immigrant, American citizen, Nazi agent,” with a wryly mocking tone, describing the overblown prose from his book The House of the Vampire (xiii). The text, according to Maddow, is a “voluptuous, pretentious, deeply stupid romp” that is “seen today by precisely no one as the world’s greatest gay vampire fiction” (xvii). Maddow transitions from this humorous observation into more serious descriptions of Viereck, portraying him as someone who wanted to get close to men he viewed as powerful—including Hitler. She compares Viereck to the protagonist of The House of Vampire, a character who preys on the talent of other men:

After World War I, as he neared his forties and came to realize he was unlikely to ever scale the tiers of fame he desired, Viereck began, vampirically one could say, to cultivate relations with more celebrated men. He shuttled between Europe and America, seeking out famous statesmen, soldiers, doctors, scientists, businessmen, and writers, then persuading them to sit for interviews (xxi).

Viereck’s recounting of these interviews casts him as self-important:

‘To me the men to whom I have talked and whose thoughts I record are flashes of the great World Brain,’ he wrote in a collection of these personality profiles. ‘Some are incandescent in their intensity; in others the divine flame burns more dimly. Their colours are more varied than the spectrum. I am the spectroscope that reveals the stuff of which they are made, or, translating colour into sound, I am the trumpet through which they convey their message’ (xxii).

Clearly, even before he became a Nazi agent, he viewed himself as a central figure that could amplify the messages of other, more powerful men. Indeed, he became the primary orchestrator of Nazi propaganda campaigns in the US.

Viereck is one of the book’s most important figures because he was responsible not only for fueling Germany’s propaganda efforts during World War I but also for the expanded reach of Nazi propaganda in the years leading up to and during World War II. After World War I, he advised the German government to increase their spending on propaganda campaigns; their only failing during World War I, in his eyes, was their stinginess. In the years before World War II, the now Nazi-run government did significantly increase their spending on propaganda. Viereck, who was on the Nazi payroll and benefited from the government’s lavish spending on propaganda efforts, was also responsible for discovering the loophole that enabled the Nazis to essentially mail propaganda throughout the US for free. Viereck had Senator Lundeen form a committee so that Viereck could use the senator’s franking privileges to mail out postage-free propaganda. This project expanded, and Viereck was soon using other senators’ franks to mail out propaganda as well. Essentially, Viereck was responsible for not only crafting propaganda but also intertwining US elected officials with the Nazi cause and disseminating it via taxpayer money.

Maddow describes Huey Long as a “Louisiana pol who gave America a 1930s test-drive for dictatorship” (xiii). As evidenced by the book’s title, one of Prequel’s core arguments is that the Interwar period and World War II formed a prequel to the current domestic conflict between democracy and fascism in the US. Long epitomizes this argument because he was a precursor to future authoritarian leaders. The text casts Long as “a glimpse of what post-democracy strongman rule might look like in the United States” (11). In America, this type of strongman rule emerged from within the system:

[It was] signaled not by a uniformed march on Rome or a Reichstag fire but by a governor who became senator while simultaneously keeping the governor’s job, breaking the spine of democracy in his state with the help of a cadre of brass-knuckled bodyguards, engineering kidnappings of his enemies, and defeating or sidestepping multiple impeachments and indictments and investigations (11).

The text emphasizes that Long was able to dismantle democracy all while enjoying immense popularity, “soaking up adoration at a muddy rural rally with farmers or in a roaring ballroom full of tuxedoed and gowned admirers” (11).

Long encapsulates one of the book’s themes, The Allure of Power. Maddow depicts Long as a charismatic and powerful figure who commanded the attention of “vast and disparate audiences” who were “too in love with his charm to much care what he actually meant” (12). The text emphasizes the invulnerable nature of Long’s popularity as she expresses shock and disbelief that he maintained widespread support despite the way he flouted democratic ideals:

He once commanded National Guard troops to mount an actual true-blue armed military assault on the municipal government of the largest city in his state. The man launched an armed invasion of New Orleans!—and got away with it. The best contemporaneous biography of Long in Louisiana was subtitled ‘The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship’ (12).

In addition, Long underscores the book’s theme of Prominent Americans Versus American Ideals, as a political figure who rose to great power and popularity despite, and even because of, how he defied his country’s democratic tenets.

Maddow depicts Long as a complex and contradictory figure, “somehow simultaneously cherubic and menacing in appearance” (12). His contradictory nature extended to his politics: He fulfilled campaign promises yet was also deeply corrupt. A “populist, a rule breaker, a shockingly gifted orator, and a thug” (12), Long ran on an egalitarian platform of wealth equality, all while viewing himself as a dictator-like figure who deserved to enrich himself through a program of bribes and kickbacks. Long openly admitted that “a perfect democracy can come close to looking like a dictatorship […] a democracy in which the people are so satisfied they have no complaint” (17). Moreover, he embraced violence, surrounding himself with hair-trigger bodyguards at all times: “When the Kingfish did emerge from his suites, you could barely see him for the ever-growing cadre of armed men surrounding him, a scene that screamed ‘dictator’ in any language” (33). These bodyguards regularly assaulted reporters who crossed Long’s path.

Understandably, those who wrote about Long after his death had a hard time summing up his legacy. Upon reviewing Long’s obituaries, Maddow acknowledges that Long “was a deeply corrupt public figure, hungry for power and money, and remarkably adept at accruing both” (390. She adds, “But the single idea he rode to political power—that America needed to confront economic inequality and injustice head-on—had enormous appeal. As did the schools and hospitals and toll-free bridges and roads he built” (39). In other words, Long’s platform was powerful, and not without merit, even though the means he used to actualize it were corrupt. Maddow notes that The Washington Post wrote after Long died that he had “a streak of deep sincerity, a sympathy by no means hypocritical, with the sufferings of the dispossessed, which brought a popular following his other qualities could never have commanded” (39). Nevertheless, The Washington Post piece admitted:

[I]n the career of Huey Long is epitomized the essential weakness of democracy—the pathetic willingness of the electorate to trust a glib tongue and a dynamic personality. Quite justifiably he was called a forerunner of American Fascism (40).

Long evinces The Allure of Power as a theme, showing how political figures like him attracted, and were attracted to, a following of people who believed that the means justified the ends and that a dictator could be more effective and deserving of power than a democratic leader.