Philip Johnson fully expected to be indicted alongside his friend Lawrence Dennis and so many of his fascist fellow travelers in the early 1940s. Johnson had for years taken meetings with Nazi officials and had personally funded some of the ugliest ultra-right, violent antisemites in the United States. In his bestselling Berlin Diary in 1941, journalist William Shirer had described Johnson as not just a fascist and a Nazi sympathizer but likely a Nazi spy. Given the nature and frequency of Johnson’s contacts with officials from Hitler’s government at the time, that prospect is not impossible; contemporaneous Office of Naval Intelligence files confirm that Johnson was officially suspected of espionage.
Although Johnson was summoned in May 1942 to appear before the federal grand jury investigating U.S. fascist and Nazi plots inside America, friends in high places appear to have intervened to keep Johnson out of the dock; the secretary of the navy and the supervising architect of the federal Public Buildings Administration were among those who met with Attorney General Francis Biddle—at his home—to discuss Johnson’s case.
While the story of Johnson’s fascist years was never a secret, exactly, it had a way of sinking out of view for long periods as he ascended into the firmament of America’s most celebrated architects. In 1957, as the Museum of Modern Art considered electing Johnson to its board of trustees, Blanchette Rockefeller proclaimed him absolved of any past fascist sins. “ Every young man should be allowed to make one large mistake,” she said.
When Johnson died at age ninety-eight, in 2005, the burning question among the cognoscenti in New York was who might inherit Johnson’s regular daily lunch spot at the Four Seasons restaurant (table thirty-two, Grill Room) in the Seagram Building. Johnson had designed both the restaurant and the building. “It was his place,” another renowned architect and sometime dining companion explained to a reporter. “He knew everybody there and he always had the best seat in the room.” Johnson’s history with antisemitic, Nazi-friendly fascism landed in the sixth paragraph of the obituary that ran in The New York Times, described blandly as a “bizarre and, he later conceded, deeply mistaken detour into right-wing politics.”
Lincoln Kirstein served honorably—and memorably—in World War II as part of the Allies’ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit, which found and retrieved important works of European art looted by the Nazis. (In the 2014 film The Monuments Men, Bob Balaban’s character, Preston Savitz, is modeled on Kirstein.)
In early 1944, while he was still in the army and his old friend Philip Johnson was facing possible indictment for sedition, Kirstein wrote a letter vouching that Johnson had surely grown out of his fascist phase: “ I am a United States Citizen…. I am of Jewish origin…. In his most rabidly facist [sic] days, [Johnson] told me that I was number one on his list for elimination in the coming revolution. Since being in the Army, I have seen Pvt Johnson frequently…. I am convinced that he has sincerely repented of his former facist beliefs, that he understands the nature of his mistake and is a loyal American.”
That very generous apologia from Kirstein predated by several decades any statement of contrition from Johnson himself.
In New York after the war, Kirstein founded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
After infiltrating U.S.-based Nazi groups for the Chicago Times, John C. Metcalfe spent a year in Washington leading investigations of Nazi and fascist groups for the Dies Committee. Returning to journalism during World War II, he served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, Time magazine, and other publications. In 1946, he was named an honorary citizen of Norway in recognition of his coverage of Norwegians’ fight against Nazism.
Leon Turrou’s work on the Warner Bros. blockbuster movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy and his bestselling book Nazi Spies in America raised his profile to become perhaps America’s most widely admired G-man. It also earned him the lifelong enmity of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Despite Hoover’s efforts to blackball Turrou from any form of government service, Turrou in 1943 lied about his age to enlist in the army, where he was able to secure a position with the military police. After the war, the famed investigator ended up in charge of the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, which hunted down Nazi war criminals worldwide. CROWCASS was headquartered in Paris, and Turrou lived the rest of his life in France, dying there in 1986 at the age of ninety-one.
After the sedition case ended in mistrial in 1944, Lawrence Dennis remained a quasi-intellectual figure of the American ultra-right, writing contrarian essays on American foreign policy right to the end. The mystery that Anne Morrow Lindbergh had noted—“that curious downward pout of the mouth that is almost like the terrible mouths of the Greek masks for tragedy. He has suffered, this man, been badly hurt”—had by then been solved by a few who knew him best. The answer to that mystery puts a very strange cast on Dennis’s advice to his Nazi friends back in Nuremberg in 1936: “Why don’t you treat the Jews more or less as we treat the Negroes in America?”
Turns out America’s best-known fascist intellectual had been born Lonnie Lawrence Dennis, son of a white man and a Black woman who were not married. He was never acknowledged by his birth father, and his birth mother had given young Lonnie to his aunt and uncle (both Black) to raise. Lonnie Lawrence enjoyed a brief celebrity, before he reached double digits in age, as a boy preacher—first on the circuit of Black churches in America and then in Europe. When Dennis turned twenty, he later said, “ I decided I had to go to college, so I sort of broke with my mother and I applied to go to Exeter.”
Light-skinned enough to pass, Dennis renounced his family—his mother and his aunt and uncle who had raised him—and never looked back.
When Dennis’s first wife divorced him in the 1950s, he lamented to a friend that he couldn’t understand her pique; the women he’d had affairs with, he explained, had always quite liked him: “ What jolts me is that over sixty-two years in which I had lots of affairs and nearly a dozen women one time or another who seriously wanted to marry, I never had a single one turn on me…. This is the first time a woman ever turned on me. The only logical motivation must be spite. But why?” Why, indeed. After his second wife died, Dennis moved in with one of his daughters in New York. His biographer, Gerald Horne, writes, “In a final act of definition, perhaps rebellion, he finally allowed his hair to grow, taking on the newly popular hairdo—an ‘Afro.’ ” Dennis was eighty-three years old when he died in 1977.
Father Charles Edward Coughlin remained in the pulpit of the Church of the Little Flower in Michigan until 1966, but his star had dimmed greatly. After the death of the bishop who had acted as his professional heat shield, the Catholic Church finally forced Coughlin to give up his national radio show in the early innings of World War II. The federal government also banned his Social Justice magazine from the mails.
By then, however, the yield from all his years of public appeals to support the Coughlin parish, the Coughlin publication, and the Coughlin cause had somehow accrued personally to Coughlin. By 1942, investigators discovered that he had amassed a nice little nest egg (worth more than $15 million today), which he had stuffed in a secret overseas bank account. This nest egg allowed for a second career as an intrepid and successful real estate speculator; he maintained homes in multiple states. When he died in 1979, Father Coughlin was no longer a man of influence. He was no longer even really a public figure. But he did die rich. And unapologetic. The Associated Press described Coughlin in 1962 as a man still “insisting he was right in his caustic denunciation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the days during the rise of Hitler.” In an interview he granted on his seventy-seventh birthday, in 1968, Coughlin told a reporter that he “couldn’t honestly take back much of what I said in the old days when people still listened to me.”
John F. Cassidy, the onetime “Little Führer” of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front, popped up in the news at the end of May 1995. Fifty-five years after his national-headline-blaring trial, Cassidy claimed that he and the Country Gentlemen had only been arming themselves back in 1940 for the same reason that every American should have been: to fight off the imminent communist revolution.
The New York Times 1995 profile of Cassidy (“Jack to his friends and followers”) ran on the occasion of his finally receiving his law license from the State of New York. After his 1940 acquittal on sedition charges, Cassidy succeeded in getting his guns back from the court, but a state board would not permit him to practice law. He gave up trying for the license after a failed appeal of the ruling in 1947. “Brokenhearted, he retired from political activism,” the Times wrote of Cassidy—you could almost hear the sad violin playing in the background. “[He] made a modest career as a field accountant for construction projects, and became involved in his Brooklyn parish.”
But in 1995, with the help of friends and followers, Cassidy finally won acceptance to the New York bar. He had no intention of hanging out his legal shingle; he was eighty-four years old, with failing eyesight, the Times noted, but “it restores his reputation, he says.”
The 1995 profile of Cassidy was published at one of those moments when something other than hope rhymes with history. Timothy McVeigh had just demolished a federal office building in Oklahoma City with a seven-thousand-pound fertilizer bomb, killing 167 people, including 15 children in the second-floor day-care center. There were false conspiracy theories circulating (stoked by the ultra-right) that militant Muslims in America were responsible, even though McVeigh was already in custody and the evidence against him was overwhelming. The twenty-six-year-old former tank gunner in the U.S. Army was a weapons-crazed, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, right-wing militia member who believed this murder of innocents was a righteous attack on the federal government. He hoped it would set off an apocalyptic race war.
Busy “restoring his reputation,” John F. Cassidy refused in his New York Times interview to condemn McVeigh, or any of the latest generation of right-wing militias. “I don’t think they are a threat to the country that the Communists were,” he told the Times reporter. “You don’t know who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City yet. I wish I were a defense lawyer.”
When the Nazis brought George Deatherage to Erfurt, Germany, to attend the “World Conference of Antisemites” in 1938, he became a mentor to Emory Burke, another young American fascist who was also invited to attend. In the immediate postwar period, Deatherage’s mentee founded America’s earliest neo-Nazi party, the Columbians. The Columbians aimed to deport all Jews and all Black people from the United States; until that could be done, they contented themselves with dynamiting the homes of Black families and beating up Black men in the streets of Atlanta.
Deatherage himself contributed to the early founding discussions for the Liberty Lobby, a far-right, antisemitic Washington-based lobbying group that exercised surprising sway over the elected American right for decades, while also shilling Holocaust denial on the side. Deatherage died in 1965 at age seventy-one.
William Pelley’s Silver Shirts organization was packed away by 1941, and he avoided conviction with the other Great Sedition Trial defendants thanks to the mistrial in 1944. Separately, however, Pelley was convicted of sedition and treason on his own, and he faced repeated legal sanctions for a creative fraud scheme in which he sold fake “stock” in his Silver Legion and then pocketed the proceeds. Pelley spent all of World War II behind bars and remained jailed until 1950.
Upon his release from prison, he retreated to his pseudo-spiritual “I’ve seen heaven” grift, in later years adding new twists involving UFOs and extraterrestrials. In the years since his death in 1965, Pelley’s writings—both the fascist, antisemitic ones and the ones about the afterlife and aliens—have enjoyed fairly robust circulation, particularly on the conspiratorial far right.
For a flavor, consider Pelley’s florid introduction to a book-length violently antisemitic screed published by his fellow sedition trial defendant Ernest F. Elmhurst: “ Jews, murderers and liars—and the sons of murderers and liars…no price is too great to pay personally, to see this pestilence of Jewry forever exterminated from a Christian United States!” To this day, you can purchase this publication (and many others by Pelley) at Amazon and other fine retailers.
General George Van Horn Moseley lived out his life in high style in a fancy hotel in downtown Atlanta, thanks to his army pension and his wife’s inheritance. After his semi-voluntary retreat from public life, Moseley’s name still occasionally found its way back into the news. He made multiple appeals to the Georgia Parole Board on behalf of neo-Nazis, including Emory Burke, the Deatherage mentee who had been convicted for, among other things, illegal possession of dynamite. Moseley supported a convicted Nazi war criminal for the chancellorship of Germany. He chaired the Texas Education Association, an anti-Jewish group that offered monthly grants and endowments to schools that agreed to restrict their enrollees to white Christians. In 1949, the disgraced general continued to warn of the Jewish plot that Bernard Baruch and Justice Felix Frankfurter and their friends at the Harmonie Club were (still?) hatching. Moseley also made the occasional suggestion on fighting crime in America, urging “the horse-whipping of juvenile delinquents at Five Points, Atlanta’s busiest intersection.”
When Moseley died in November 1960, the day before the election of John F. Kennedy, his passing went largely uncovered by the mainstream press. Although he had served at the very highest levels of the military—he had at one point been a serious contender for army chief of staff—his few obituaries simply referred to him as a white supremacist and an antisemite. His last known publication was an article titled “ Let’s Rescue Uncle Sam” submitted to a far-right racist newsletter in August 1960. It argued for white racial solidarity against the threat of Black Americans’ rising political power.
Elizabeth Dilling resumed her antisemitic organizing while World War II raged and then became a leading voice of the ultra-right’s bold new invention—Holocaust denialism. She claimed that President Eisenhower was a secret Jew (“Ike the Kike,” she called him) and that his successor, President John F. Kennedy, was pushing the “Jew Frontier.” She opposed Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run for president because he chose as his running mate a man who had prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
Bizarrely, at the beginning of the Tea Party movement in 2010, then Fox News host Glenn Beck tried to revive interest in Elizabeth Dilling, enthusiastically promoting her books on his highly rated cable news programs and radio show. Dilling, he said, had been “doing what we’re doing now.”
In the wake of Senator Ernest Lundeen’s death, his widow, Norma, briefly and unsuccessfully ran for Congress herself. If she had expected to ride her dead husband’s coattails into that job, there were two fundamental problems with the plan. First, her husband was barely cold before he was exposed for his knowing, well-compensated role in a Nazi propaganda plot. And second, his aggrieved staff—who told federal investigators about the plot—weren’t going to let her forget it. At Viereck’s trial, Norma testified that she had been warned off by her husband’s chief aide, who threatened to “ run her out of the state” if she tried to follow her husband into Congress.
Unfazed, Mrs. Lundeen found another way to stay in Washington. She married another U.S. senator, this one from Oregon, a high-ranking Ku Klux Klansman.
Norma went on to give speeches at racist rallies organized by Gerald L. K. Smith, the protégé of Huey Long’s who had eulogized Long at his funeral back in 1936. Smith preached something he called Christian Nationalism—a segregationist, white supremacist doctrine—and joined Elizabeth Dilling as a pioneer of American Holocaust denial. Smith ran for president in 1944 on the America First Party ticket, which called for the sterilization and deportation of all American Jews.
Among the U.S. Senate’s wingmen for the Nazi agent Viereck and the sedition trial defendants, William “Wild Bill” Langer was the only senator to survive the scandal politically. Star journalist Allen Drury used the erratic and cantankerous Langer in his 1963 book, A Senate Journal, to illustrate the Senate’s unsettling capacity for growing and empowering mean old weirdos. “Langer’s filibuster collapsed this afternoon…. If his ideas have any value, no one will ever know it, for he presents them at the top of his lungs like a roaring bull in the empty chamber, while such of his colleagues as remain watch him in half-amused, half-fearful silence, as though in the presence of an irresponsible force they can neither control nor understand.”
After assailing the sedition trial and championing the idea of paying U.S. government reparations to Viereck, Langer proposed legislation to encourage self-deportation of all Black Americans to Africa. It was taken up as a rallying cry by the National States’ Rights Party—another early neo-Nazi group, whose members were put on trial for allegedly bombing an Atlanta synagogue in the 1950s. Senator Langer also assailed the postwar military tribunals in Germany, including those at Nuremberg. He agitated—successfully—for the United States to grant clemency for at least one convicted senior Nazi war criminal. Langer died in office in 1959 at the age of seventy-three.
Hamilton Fish had a long and contented life after he lost his congressional seat. He liked to boast that the Fish family—whose run in political office proceeded uninterrupted from 1843 to 1995—was as notable as the Adams family, only the Fishes had more money. “ We are indeed unique,” he said of his family in the late 1970s.
At the time of his death, in 1991, at the age of 102, his progeny were still trying to buff up Ham’s marred reputation. He accepted that ride in the Nazi plane back in 1939, Fish’s eldest son explained, only because his long discussions with the German foreign minister had put his father so far behind schedule that it would have been impossible for him to get to the Oslo “peace conference” on time any other way.
Although Fish never claimed any regrets about his interactions with the Nazi government and his involvement with Nazi propaganda efforts in America, he did hint in an interview on his hundredth birthday that his Keep America Out of Foreign Wars effort might have been less driven by any particular ideology than by personal animus. Mostly, he suggested, it was his beef with a single, notable constituent in his congressional district, President Franklin Roosevelt. “ I know he hated me,” Fish said in 1988, “but I really don’t believe in hate. So now I don’t hate Roosevelt—but frankly I despise him.”
In 2023, trustees of the locally beloved Desmond-Fish Public Library, endowed by Fish and his third wife in Garrison, New York, began considering the possibility of changing its name.
Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan, summoned to testify four times before the federal grand jury investigating Nazi propaganda operations in the United States, was also a rare political survivor of the scandal. He gave speeches for Gerald L. K. Smith’s America First Party, with its platform to deport and sterilize American Jews, and promoted Elizabeth Dilling’s antisemitic literature. He described the precise (and secret) location of the government’s bomb shelter for President Roosevelt and White House staff, and had it printed in the Congressional Record. In the U.S. House after World War II, Hoffman was vociferously opposed to civil rights legislation of all kinds. Having refused to sign up for Medicare as “socialized medicine,” Hoffman died of pneumonia in 1967, at the age of ninety-two.
George Sylvester Viereck—the Nazi agent—was convicted in his retrial, in July 1943, for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The conviction held up on appeal this time, and he was jailed from 1943 until 1947. Viereck’s eldest son and namesake, George Sylvester Viereck Jr., did not live to see his father’s release; he was killed in battle in Italy in 1944, fighting heroically against the Nazis as a U.S. Army corporal, while his father sat in jail for his service to the Nazi cause.
By the time he got out on parole, Viereck Sr.’s wife had left him and sold all his earthly possessions, donating the proceeds to Jewish and Catholic refugee groups. Viereck moved in with his younger son, Peter, an accomplished professor and poet at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In declassified FBI files, Viereck was revealed to have been advising the National Renaissance Party, another early neo-Nazi party in the United States, before his death. Viereck died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962, at age seventy-seven.
With circulation in the hundreds of thousands and the additional unique distribution channel of Ford dealerships around the country, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent amounted to a mechanized, mass-production antisemitic propaganda engine in early twentieth-century America. His real innovative leap, though, came when he chose to not copyright The International Jew, the four-volume collection of antisemitic essays and commentary that had first run in his paper. Those volumes have been translated into more than a dozen languages and remain in the public domain and widely available today. As the centennial of his purchase of the Dearborn Independent approached in 2019, an article in a municipally supported local history magazine explored the long-standing influence of Ford’s antisemitic writings and his continuing status as a validator and inspiration for ultra-right and neo-Nazi movements. Dearborn’s mayor responded by ordering the destruction of that issue of the magazine and then the firing of the journalist who wrote it. The fearless alternative news site Deadline Detroit published it anyway.
William Power Maloney retired from the federal government in 1946 and went on to a long, colorful career as a criminal defense attorney. He retained his talent for inducing screaming fits from both adversaries and judges. “ Still a lawyer and still exuberant,” one newspaperman described Maloney in 1964, in a story about the rumor that one of Maloney’s clients, the mob boss Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno, had been assassinated: “It was Maloney who had described how two men, presumably gangsters, had wrestled Bonanno into a car outside Mr. Maloney’s apartment last Oct. 21. Mr. Maloney, a small wiry man, also ducked a shot fired in his own direction, he said.”
John Rogge remained a high-profile figure in the late 1940s; he was considered a potential vice presidential running mate for Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Rogge helped lead the defense in the notorious “Trenton Six” civil rights case, in which a group of African American men were convicted of murder by an all-white jury. Rogge also pleaded (unsuccessfully) with the U.S. Senate to vote down the Supreme Court nomination of Tom Clark, the attorney general who had fired him upon his return from Germany with evidence of Nazi penetration of the U.S. Congress.
Rogge criticized Red-baiting by the later iterations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he railed publicly against the Truman administration’s loyalty oath. He was denounced as a communist by his opponents on the political right, and then, for what it’s worth, he was denounced by the communists with equal fervor.
At the spying trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Rogge represented Ethel’s brother, who dropped the dime on his sister and brother-in-law in exchange for lenience for himself and his wife. In the 1990s, Rogge’s client would recant his testimony about his sister Ethel, by which point of course it was far, far too late.
Rogge’s book on his findings in Germany, The Official German Report, was a bust when it was published in 1961. He disappeared as a public figure by the mid-1960s and died in relative obscurity in 1981. His obituary was headlined “O. John Rogge, Age 77, Anti-Nazi Activist.”
Dillard Stokes, the Washington Post reporter who dug and dug and faced down threats, harassment, and lawsuits to get the story of George Sylvester Viereck’s Nazi propaganda operation (and his accomplices) inside the U.S. Congress, won one of the most prestigious awards in newspaper journalism for his efforts back in 1942. The rest of his life’s work was in the quiet service of American democracy and American institutions. Stokes was the president of the Washington Newspaper Guild and a military intelligence officer in World War II and then won plaudits covering the judiciary (one Supreme Court justice called him “one of the best men covering the court”). He wrote an early book on the Social Security system; served as a lawyer for the AFL-CIO’s political action committee; moved to Iowa, where he won more awards for his reporting; and then served as the assistant attorney general of the state. He died in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1980. “An award-winning journalist,” was the underwhelming lede in The Washington Post, “who covered congressional investigations and the U.S. Supreme Court.” He deserved better.
Henry Hoke’s 1970 obituary was of the same ilk. He was “a leader in direct mail advertising for many years,” was the lede in The New York Times, who “founded and published…[a] monthly trade magazine.” There was no mention of Hoke’s remarkable public campaign to uncover the Nazi propaganda operation in America and no mention of the threats to himself and his family that this ordinary citizen was willing to endure to do this important work. The Hoke legacy lives on today, of all places, in the awards programs of a direct-marketing trade organization.
Leon Lewis was also a forgotten man at the time of his death, at age sixty-five, less than ten years after the end of World War II. His passing was not national news, a chance to recall the extraordinary things he had done to safeguard American democracy. Even the death notice in the Los Angeles Times, his hometown newspaper, was thin, announcing the cause of death (“a heart attack Thursday night while driving to his home”) and the time and place of the funeral services two days hence. The few paragraphs summing up his life neglected to mention his grueling, thankless, and ultimately successful decade-long enterprise to reveal and destroy the most dangerous agents of Hitler-inspired fascism in America. But he did do that, and it’s not too late to shout it to the rooftops. Lewis’s contemporaneous reports from his spy operation, preserved at California State University, Northridge, now offer historians a window into one man’s remarkable, daring, harrowing contribution to the task, and the honor, of repairing the world: tikkun olam.