Rachel Maddow and Ken Burns on U.S. and the Holocaust & the American fight against fascism

hey it's Ken Burns I'm very excited to welcome you back to another uh Unum conversation this time with one of my most favorite people on the planet Rachel mattow uh the last time I was on your show Rachel was believe it or not 10 years ago oh wow we were discussing our friends the Roosevelts and out of 14 or 15 hours of footage you to my complete surprise pulled out this amazing footage from the Civilian Conservation Corps the CCC this great sense of Americans coming together to work for a common purpose in this case the depression of putting young people to work in the face of massive unemployment and there was one scene that you particularly liked and I was celling over because it was one that made me cry and still makes me cry of just hundreds of people raising their their shovels and raising their pickaxes and raising everything together hundreds of people in a kind of Unison that spoke to the kinds of ways that Roosevelt was trying to bring us together and so that's the last time I left you there's been a lot of water under the bridge and so um I'm very very pleased um for you to join us today we're talking about your new book uh prequel which is uh got a subtitle of an American fight against fascism and it feels like during the last 10 years we've been out there exploring similar themes in in American Life ones that unfortunately resonate a bit too much uh today and and not in a good way your book tells the story of the rise of a fascist movement within the United States in the Years leading up to World War II with the incredible effort to expose and diffuse that movement and while you were working on your book and doing the research we were bringing out our film the US and the Holocaust and for us we were trying to understand what currents in American Life long before World War II and leading up to it basically blocked Jews and others from being able to escape from what would later be called uh the Holocaust we were specifically looking at it in that context as we were having other films but we were looking at how long those issues have been with us in America so first tell me a bit about why a book on American fascism and why the title prequel first of all Ken I'm so so happy to be having this conversation with you first of all I I I miss you and we should talk more frequently we should do stuff like this and uh and talk about Mutual interests more often um but I have to say um I the thing that I learned the most from us and holocost um was about I mean the the documentation about what happened in the Holocaust what happened in Europe stunning and life-changing um particularly a lot of the way that you documented and and found very very difficult to find footage from Eastern Europe that was just I mean honestly life-changing for me to witness that but the way that you documented how anti-Semitism in the United States worked to change American policy to determine the range in which FDR was allowed to operate while he was fully aware of what America was capable of doing for good and and and and the the Peril that the world was in from what the Nazis were orchestrating in Europe and how American public opinion so constrained our response and and and ultimately defined our response so that it's something that we can't be proud of we can't be proud of the way that we dealt with Jewish refugees um in in the face of the Holocaust as much as we can be proud of what we did on a milit on on the battlefield in terms of stopping the Nazis and that is that does shail with what I've been working on which is American pro-fascist sentiment American pro-nazi sentiment and American anti-Semitism and those not being foreign things it wasn't you know just the influence of our enemies abroad and spies and a fifth column and all that stuff it's something native to the United States and that is I think really important to understanding what happened then it's also really important to understanding what we're contending with in the sort of modern iterations of some of these fights now you know um the historian Peter Hayes in our film says that excluding people is as American as apple pie even though the myth is of give us you're tired you're poor and the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus poem sort of became for us touchstones of of how to understand it just as we were eroding those touchstones with a reality of America that didn't Bell a support for that but as you said narrowed the possibilities of what Roosevelt could do like he's not going to let in 20,000 Jewish children because he knows what the politics are the real politics of an American uh people that's the thing we don't want to accept an American Congress and American politicians and his own Administration people in it that are reluctant so in our film we're we're trying to look at the Historical antecedence of antisocial ISM and xenophobia and restrictions on immigration n painter sort of following Peter Hayes says early in our film part of our national mythology is that we are good people we are Dem rcy and we are a democracy and in our better moments we are very good people but she goes on that's not all there is to the story and I think if we're going to congratulate ourselves on our democracy which I think we should we also need to face up to the other side and as you detail in the book there were American grown Nazis who gathered in cities reached out to their neighbors organized camps to indoctrinate their children we include a clip in our film that shows what appears to be a typical American Summer clam except it's a Nazi summer camp and we felt compelled to date stamp it with the New Jersey location because it looks like an American picnic with the American flags but oh yes there are swastika flags as well and you referenced this in your book as you wrote here at home World War II vibrates with such moral intensity for Americans that it's hard to picture hard to believe hard to conceive that there were Americans let alone um lots of them who thought that not just we should stay out of the war but if we did decide to fight we should join the ACT Powers who be uh better yet the better bet to go on and one of the people who was placing their moving their chips over onto that Nazi Square was Charles Lindberg who became the most outar great Aviator hero became the most outspoken uh uh person of the of the America First committee his undoing and a kind of an a rearing of an American Conference takes place in De MO Iowa where he gives a speech that is so rabidly anti-semitic that nobody can no longer tolerate and everybody goes so it's ironic that we are now in the Lee of an Iowa caucus which is endorsed a person who has spoken the same words of Adolf Hitler about people poisoning Bloodlines about the Vermin that that opposition represents all of the things that were part and parcel of the dialogue of that time can you just you know this is gobsmacking to me and that there's not uh somebody like an army McCarthy have you no shame have you no sense of decency we've lost all of that it it's Shameless a majority of Ians were shocked shocked by what Charles Lindberg said and a majority of uh Republican Ians just supported a man who quotes liberally from the speeches of Adolf Hitler yeah I I mean I think I I think it's not so much that we have an American reality and an American Myth but that we have competing American realities because I do think that the Emma lasarus poem is on the Statue of Liberty for a reason and I think there are lots of Americans who have devoted their their lives and their fortunes and their Fates toward making that promise true it's just that there are Americans who have fought on the other side of that as well and so I think that you know there concerns about lindberg's pro-german pro-nazi sentiments lindberg's anti-Semitism the America First committee and what they were trafficking in I mean the America First committee as you as you note in the film 800,000 people it's the largest anti-war organization ever in American history might be the America largest American political organization of its time depending on how you look at it it's it's it's full of incredibly influential people Charles Lindberg is you know the consensus American hero but there's all these Titans of Industry it's the most influential people the most respectable people in the country but there are concerns pressed by other Americans about the fact that they're trafficking in anti-Semitism and why is it that thugs from the Christian front and the silver shirts and all of these other native fascist groups are flocking to those organizations why is it that a paid Nazi spy like Laura Engles who was another celebrated Aviator she was told by her Gusto Handler the best thing she could do for the Third Reich was to keep giving speeches for the America First committee I mean this stuff was getting exposed in prosecutions of Laura Les in activism by Americans who are advocating against them and it was their push back I think that drove the public reaction against what Lindberg said on September 11th in De Moine in that speech that got people so upset it's a constant fight I mean that's why I called my book prequel not because we are we have bad guys now and they look like the bad guys in the past but because there is a prequel for fighting against this sort of stuff in America there are generations of Americans before us who have fought pro- authoritarian anti-democratic anti-semitic nativist xenophobic violent movements in this country and we should learn from them the the the the scary thing though it seems to me is the fragmentation of media so that generally people got it from newspapers that were trusted radio stuff that could have characters like father cogin on it spewing anti-semitic uh but there was a general sort of sense and apparently more than 65% of the Republicans who voted in the caucus in Iowa believe that Joe Biden didn't win the election so we've got a place to go I mean we're now debating the 14th Amendment and whether that could be applied to Donald Trump as having sponsored an Insurrection the actual event of the Insurrection isn't as important as the assault on the ideas of us meaning the US meaning the Constitution and of course we have the example in the past of Harry Truman electing not to prosecute the Nazis who were clearly active in this way and so you know maybe that's a manifestation of our charitable and forgiving side but we also have a way of letting these things slip away like The elusive bar of soap in the tub and so I'm wondering you know um you know how do we how do we reckon with this what's what's your description in a world in which the people who believe that Joe Biden didn't win as he did by more than 7 million votes um live in a universe and are fed a certain diet that do not actually permit them to cross over into a reality that would say 2 plus 2 is four the Earth is round not flat and that we could agree on some generally accepted things if we are going to be and I'm so happy to hear you articulate so so forcefully the idea of prequel is also a call to every middle sex Village and farm to to sort of gge yourself for the big anti-fascist anti- tyrannical anti-authoritarian fight before us yeah um how does that Army um unite and do the kind of good we want it to do obviously free of violence um and and and seek those objectives if if people are reading off entirely different scorecards it's interesting I I think that there is a really like Earnest good faith fight to have about the different types of media that we've had over different generations and how how relatively dangerous each one was I mean if you look at father cogin who you talk about in Us in the Holocaust in great detail um you know the thing that's amazing about him is the combination of his radicalism and his reach right in a time when there's less than 200 million people in America he's reaching 25 or 30 million people in a week that kind of reach is just unheard of in terms of modern media and that means that he was a big deal he got great ratings but at the same time he is saying I take the Franco way meaning we need a military dictatorship in the United States I take the road of fascism um he's calling for bullets once the ballots stop working and importantly and inconceivably he's organizing his listeners into what he calls platoon he's organizing his listeners into armed militia groups to pursue an armed fascist takeover of the US government and in fact some of the Christian front members who find who who who who follow in his in his orders effectively get put on trial for sedition in New York City in in in 1940 for a plot to overthrow the US government that was going to start with the murder of a dozen congressmen and so that is something that we couldn't have today in today's fragmented media landscape you couldn't have somebody with that much reach and that radical because you'd never have anybody reaching that large a proportion of the American public so that that was sort of dangerous in its own way I feel like through cogin and through some of these other stories of that time the thing that I've come to is that the real danger is in the connection between radicalism and reach it is not necessarily a shock to our system that you've got pro-nazi anti-democratic Pro violent anti- athor uh authoritarian movements we've always had those in this country the real risk is when they get hooked up to real power when they in the 1930s in the time that I write about in prequel get hooked up with two dozen members of Congress who are working with a Nazi agent to promote German propaganda through the US Congress to the American people the real danger is when a movement that believes that elections can be undone because you say that you don't believe in the outcome hooks itself up to one of the two major governing parties in the United States the Republican party if the Maga movement were the Pat Robertson movement of the 1980s we wouldn't be having this conversation right now it's that the Maga movement has ascended and taken over the Republican party and once you've got radicalism of that degree linked to something that powerful then you've got an existential crisis for our Constitution and for our democ and we can just I mean I was beginning to feel pretty good about what you were saying about the fragmentation I was but then you know you made me feel miserable again because I remember the first days of the Trump first Trump Administration he closes the door and brings the Russians in to the Oval Office bans the US press and the only pictures we have of the event are from the Russian news sources and they're having some conversation and we're you know what happened I think we do ring our hands and tend to be sort of like oh my goodness we have these homegrown Nazis at the same time perhaps the more disturbing or Sinister manifestation is the way in which the Germans were themselves influenced by us yes and our actions and our history of racism Northern as well as Southern race laws and of course the larger history of genocide against indigenous peoples which Hitler wrote about and was just incredibly admiring that we are able to kill them all or at least isolate them into reservations he might call them concentration camps um were you surprised to learn about the impact of American history had on the formation of Nazi ideology and laws I mean you can tell us a bit about creger and the German government sending him to the University of Arkansas School of Law in 33 to learn about American race laws I mean the German laws that they passed um you know that came out of this study were kind of mild compared to what it was in as the statutes and many said in quotes a drop of negro blood what does that make 164th whatever but if you were one8 Jewish you could still be okay in Nazi Germany but you're not okay in the former Confederacy of the United States that to me is the is the is the the thing that's so disturbing we're talking about people trying to get out and we did let in more people than any other Sovereign Nation nowhere near enough a fifth of maybe perhaps what our immigration our terrible immigration laws the Johnson Reed act could have permitted if we hadn't been so stingy within the findes of those laws and move the barriers but maybe we could have done 10 times as many which means we're knocking off maybe 2 million off to six million and maybe by knocking that off you've given other people in different choke points uh inspiration to to move on it but they're looking for a piece of paper that you need to get a physical body across the border the ideas don't the ideas good and bad travel and I think your book is really good at the idea of just how how much of a two-way street this is this isn't just Nazi propaganda coming here this is Nazis going oh you have a lot to teach us yeah yeah you know Ken when when I watched Us in the Holocaust um one of the pieces of film that you had that I was shocked by I had to stop it and go back and keep rewinding it and watching it again is that you had footage not just the still images and some of the short video clips the lot of us have seen from the German American Bond rally in in February 1939 at Madison Square Garden but you had sound of the speakers two of them Fritz cun who was the head of the German American Boon who has this very thick German accent and um and he ends up in jail for embezzlement be before we're pretty far into World War II but then oh exactly yeah it turns out a lot of these guys are Crooks weird right yeah authoritarianism and corruption go together it's crazy that way why is it that you don't want the rule of law oh I see um but you also had this guy named Gart Willam Kun KU nze until I saw that footage in your film I always assumed that he had a big thick German accent just like Fritz cun he does not at all he's the propaganda Minister for the Bund he's born in the United States he's absolutely pro-nazi he says in court he would he he hoped to go fight to to to renounce his US citizenship and go fight with the Nazis against the US Army in the case of armed conflict between our countries when I heard him speak in your film I went back and I looked at the text of what he said at that speech and one of the things he said that day in Madison Square Garden was it has always been American to protect the Aryan character of this nation and he talked about anti-race mixing laws and he talked about the genocide of the Native Americans and he talked about segregation and all this American is apple pie racism stuff and yes that that is he was right about that and and the Nazis did you know talk about holding up a book I brought the James Q whitmann Hitler's American model book so you could see to credit because he's done so much of the original archival research about the Nazis sending over a a lawyer named Hinrich creger to the University of Arkansas law school to study American race laws to help them form the nurburg laws to find out that the Nazis looked at American race race relations and and and that they thought that lynching was uncivilized they thought that our Lynch laws in the Southeast and the the the de facto legal lynching of black Americans was something that they as Nazis couldn't countenance but they wanted to build on the ideas of it I mean that is humbling yeah to us to say the least in terms of our our moral role here and our and what it means for our moral responsibility to fix it I agree and you know and and I think that since we are so interested in boldfaced names and and and famous people we brought up father cogin and um and Charles Lindberg you know there's George Sylvester verc is that how you pronounce his name who's who you know but there's Henry Ford and can we stop this is one of the titans of American industry you know who's held up as an example of this who is so virant anti-semitic that he believes that Jews are responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the change he's detected in the taste of his favorite candy bar and more importantly he buys the Dearborn independent turns it into the second largest circulation newspaper in the country and then reprints issue after issue after issue the the protocols of the Elders of Zion which we know is this late 19th century Russian hoax which is the most you can't really read it today and and and not cringe at at its sort of overt Andy I mean this is all out in the open and you describe in your book you say a double helix of the violent Nazi supporting and Nazi supporting thread in the United States it was part foreign and part domestic part propaganda and part armed paramilitary how home grown of these ideas where do they stem some where do you think American fascism is unique from other National fascist movements I could just tell you maybe has a little bit of a silver lining I'm making a film on the American Revolution which is not 55 white guys in Philadelphia deciding everything and not dealing with slavery but dealing with Union it's really about the most diverse group of people who came together to make it and it's uncomfortable with with all of this the the undertoe that everybody from George Washington on down has but you know the militias the sturdy militias often disappeared and the guys who won the war the Continentals were this ragtag group of you know you know exons and teenagers and unemployed and recent Irish and German immigrants and black both free and runaway people and um you know just an amazing assortment as as polygot as you could possibly imagine the idea that that all of these 13 colonies let alone with their div interests could come together to create the country with all of the asterisks and all of the sbots is pretty amazing and yet at the same time all of this other stuff is somehow incubating not necessarily on a back burner yeah yeah that's right there is I'm I'm very interested in the sort of transnational character of authoritarianism and and fascism and you see that you mentioned Henry Ford I mean from people reading my book The anecdotally what I hear is the most shocking Moment In the book is when I recount how a a reporter uh from the from a Detroit newspaper went and met with Hitler in his office in Munich before he became Chancellor and um what Hitler wanted to talk about was his admiration for Henry Ford he had a portrait of Henry Ford on the wall behind his desk um the German language edition of um the international Jew which Henry Ford published in uh you know nine languages including German was incredibly influential the head of the Hitler Youth in Germany says that it was Henry Ford who opened his eyes to the Jewish problem and made him want to become a national socialist I mean that there is a transnational two-way street going on there and you do see um both then and now you see authoritarians try to cross borders and support one another and try to build up each other's movements that said there is no such thing as foreign fascism right fascism always is nationalist for fascism is always the most patriotic thing in the world and you'd never import a fascism from another country to your own because it will always always be about you being the super Patriot of your own country and so you see these things that are incredibly nationalistic incredibly specific to the location and to the political movements that exist there uh before the rise of an authoritarian fascist movement but they rhyme with each other you know I mean you see there's a reason that Hitler and musolini got along so well there's a reason that Hitler and Hitler was so supportive of the Nazi movements here in the United States uh there's a reason that American hard right right now is you know doing their conferences in in Hungary with Victor Orban in love with Victor Orban yeah yeah I mean and there there's a reason that for all the other things that he's doing in the world and in his own country Vladimir Putin nevertheless finds time to interfere in the democracies around the world um and to push protin pro- authoritarian parties everywhere he can in the United States in France in Germany everywhere there is a transnational character of of of authoritarian movements and that's that happens over time but when it rises in your own country it you know it's the cross and the flag and it's the most patriotic thing imaginable and one of the things that anti-fascists need to learn is how to recognize the signs how to speak the language and how to interrupt some of the ways that those kinds of movements Market themselves to to people and make themselves popular it is a popular message to tell people that we were a great nation and we're not we've been victimized we've been humiliated we need to get our pride back the law can't help us we need Extraordinary Measures violence is purifying and Noble we need to do something desperate I mean that's that's those those are famous fascist motivators and they're alive and well right now in our country in our country and it's always creating another right now it's the Immigrant but it always has lots of subgroups that include once again American Jews and Jews in particular across across the world um could you tell us briefly the story of Henry H I mean the advertising executive uh who's basically you know a Woodward and Bernstein of following the paper trail yeah God I love the story of Henry H because he's totally forgotten in history and he shouldn't be I would love for him to be famous again but also he was just a citizen he was a regular guy he um had a little trade publication he was an expert in direct mail advertising he would like help people design you know 3x5 cards that would have the maximum effect in terms of making people try this new product you know he was that he was that he was an ad guy and his son went off to University his son went to the University of Pennsylvania and his dad uh he contacted his dad not long after he'd been away at Penn to tell his dad that he was unhappy at school and he maybe wanted to come home he maybe didn't want to stick it out his dad pressed him on what was going on and he said that one of the things that made for a very unsettling atmosphere on campus was that they were getting getting just inundated with tons and tons of anonymous propaganda that was anti-semitic pro-german pro-nazi um and and reactionary in ways that he felt was uncomfortable and Henry hul thought this must be some sort of Scandal at Penn and so he started looking into it at pen and contacting professors and then pretty soon he realized it wasn't just at pen it seemed to be in Philadelphia more broadly he contacted other dads with other kids at other schools realized it was at those schools then realized it wasn't just at these universities in these University towns it was that every insurance agent in the country was receiving this stuff every dentist office Public School teachers every type of organization that you could imagine to which you could affix a mailing list was getting this propaganda by the ton as a direct mail expert he actually knew how to follow that stuff to its source and figure out who was doing it he recognized it as expensive as state-of-the-art as very well done he recognized that somebody needed to be sort of masterminding it and he traced it back to German consulates to George Sylvester ver who was the top Nazi propaganda agent in the United States and ultimately to the US Congress where two dozen senators and US congressmen were helping verc distribute this stuff often at taxpayer expense using the Congressional franking privilege uh and he I just he started publishing articles about it in his little trade publication you know this wasn't the Washington post it was just you know Henry hoa's advertising magazine but he followed that thing and lobbied and had this just sense of purpose about it as a regular citizen that changed the world changed the country so maybe preo could be Emanuel I mean if there it's filled with people of or so-called ordinary Americans right like that who sort of rise up and and let's name a few names let's say Gerald NY of North Dakota and Burton wheeler from Montana and Hamilton Fish from New York these are people in active service of German Nazi propaganda and of American Nazi homegrown interests and what ultimately holds them in check are the actions of people like hul and and ordinary people who are inventing A playbook to do that I mean perhaps we spend way too much time in conversations like this and we're not composing the mailer that the direct mailer that goes to the people or the the post or the blog or the or or whatever it takes to get to the people to perhaps have them disengage to pry their hands from the from the gun a little bit of of this the certainty that they have the great certainty which is the death of democracy is of course certainty that you know these people are bad these people are wrong these people are poisoning us so I mean do you do you see that what is the um what's the Playbook of of prequel in terms of resisting this it's in the hoax story it's in a lot of other people yeah I mean ultimately the story that I tell in prequel is a hopeful one because the effort of activists like Henry hul we are just describing what he did um journalists I single out people like Drew Pearson and who was a crusading columnist very influential in his day and also just a regular line reporter named Dillard Stokes at the Washington Post who did amazing shoe leather reporter reporting exposing this stuff ultimately the impact of all that stuff being exposed and the justice department did good work in exposing it too and some of the prosecutions that they brought the exposure meant that the American people knew that this was happening and so they were able to connect these messages that they had been receiving that didn't really seem to come from anywhere identifiable they were able to connect them to a massive German government Nazi government operation targeting the American public and they were able to see which Americans knowingly confederated with that effort in order to help the Germans against America against America and once the American people knew that they took action and they voted out almost all of the members of Congress and Senators who were involved in this stuff and they people like Geral Dy and and Burton wheeler and Hamilton Fish they weren't just run-of-the-mill backbench members of Congress these were the most powerful members of Congress that there were they were household names everybody thought that Geral NY was going to be presidential Timber at some point Hamilton Fish was from one of the most powerful political families in American history at that point and you know Hamilton Fish I think was in Congress 22 or 24 years before he was voted out but when he was voted out it was a campaign that was about his working with a Nazi agent and it was that exposure which drove him out because the American people didn't want it and that to me is hopeful because that gives you the Playbook which is expose it explain it put it in context and let the American people stand up for democracy when you have given them the tools to do so so well that's that's what that's clearly what the whole nub of it is I mean I think of the Stein beckian almost hog farmer in Iowa who I want to reach I mean this is called Unum it's not pabus it's Arthur ler saying there's too much pabus and not enough Unum and how it is that we get together and decide we're not going to decide as you say all one thing it's not going to be Kumbaya moment except of course when in the CCC we raise our tool shs in common in purpose but we do wish there was a way that we could reach that guy who believes that Joe Biden didn't do this that is okay if we're going to close our borders there people who do not see immigrants and probably could use some immigrants to help their business but no matter and and that somehow anything that's going on that is against Donald Trump has been manufactured by his enemies when in fact those who who sort of participate in looking at this see that there's sort of real church and state delineations within the state between investigations and and and things like that so I I just want to go back and I want to reach the hog farmer and just please please don't believe this remember Iowa went for Barack Obama in 2008 and and and now you it seems kind of lost to the LIE yeah well you know I mean I I I think that it is uh it is a tide that rises and falls and it is something that is always with us I do think that we have to be alert and aware to the fact that there are Ultra right movements in America that wax and Wayne that are always here there is um a very homegrown form of anti-Semitism racism and authoritarianism anti-democratic movement which we've just always got and that what that means is that you know part of a democracy is that you never eradicate your enemies you just Prevail for a while and then you have to fight you live to fight another day and that's part of what we do you know I want to mention one other thing about one of those members of Congress that you mentioned Burton wheeler Burton wheeler did a lot of good things in his time as as a as a Montana Senator but one of the things that he did is that he prevailed upon the Attorney General to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the Nazi propaganda scheme that Burton wheeler was part of and not but two US Attorneys General uh Francis Biddle and Tom Clark acceded to those demands and Harry Truman a seeded to Burton wheeler Harry Truman was friends with Burton wheeler from the Senate and Burton wheeler came to Harry Truman as president and said you got to get rid of that prosecutor because I'm in his crosshairs and Truman did it and got rid of him and the lesson for that is not oh you know Truman's a bad guy or bore that b Burton wheeler he's a bad guy it's that we need to protect law enforcement we need to the the rule of law doesn't stand up for itself if we allow people with power people with political influence um to pressure it and to make sure and to to see that people with power get preferential treatment and stuff gets gets buried we are in a moment right now where a major issue of accountability with the leader of the anti-democratic movement on the ultra right in America right now is facing multiple forms of legal accountability standing up for the legal system to ensure that it can do its work without fear or favor and without physical intimidation is the challenge of our time right now Burton Wheeler's story tells us that from the 1930s and the 1940s but I I feel like we don't know that enough in our gut right now about how much you justice department isn't perfect you know Attorneys General and District Attorneys they aren't perfect but the the Judiciary must be protected and you can't let your feelings about individual Supreme Court Justices or or ethics rules or how things are going in the Judiciary Aude The View that I think we must all agree on that we have a tripartite system of government in the Judiciary has to be free to hold people to account in in accordance with the rule of law and there isn't enough urgency and I even I think discussion about that right now and that's the that's the moment that we are in with with judges getting swatted and having bomb threats at their home and death threats and and prosecutors wearing bulletproof vests and having to move their families this is this is a really serious part of what we're contending with right now yeah I agree i' I I've developed a real Odd Couple unlikely friendship with Michael luttig who who I I presume politics are the exact opposite of mine uh but we share a similar love of the systems and and the need to protect them the rule of law feel the same thing about Liz Cheney and Adam kiner people who I probably have never agreed on a particular thing but I agree wholeheartedly in what they're doing we interviewed somebody that you interviewed uh for our last unim conversation Cassidy Hutchinson a kind of real hero of of of what's going on a socalled ordinary person who you know I did ask her a tough question at the end I hope it was a tough question which is you were right there you saw the Tantrums you saw the food go up against the wall you saw this the magnetometers you saw the you know you heard about the the going to the Congress no going back to the White House and yet you were still going to go down to maralago and take a job and finally your mom just sort of said you can't fix him yeah and she goes through two depositions with a trump lawyer and suddenly has a crisis of conscience so it takes a long so how do we do this she said to us if Trump is elected as the next president of the United States We Are One Step Closer to operating under a dictatorship and Liz I think said it even pler than that we're sleep walking towards a dictatorship yeah I mean one of the things that I think is important for us for people like you and me in learning Cassidy Hutchinson's story is that there has to be a Cassidy Hutchinson story yes in that we need we as a country tell each other stories about American history and about American citizenship that are in effect fables that teach us values and that give us Heroes to want to be like and learning about the heroic exploits of the normal people among us and the difficulties that they faced and how they found the strength to do the right thing and then telling that story in a way that it can be absorbed and repeated and understood as one of the Hallmark moral moments of our time that's an important part of standing up for our country making sure that those stories are known I want people to know about Henry hul I want people to know about John raggy I want people to know about Dillard Stokes I want people to know about Cassidy Hutchinson I want people to know about what Liz Cheney who I disagree with on everything everything what she sacrificed yes for what she believes is the Constitutional order of the United States telling thoseo understanding those stories telling those stories and protecting those people is part of how we try to save the country part of my mantra for the last few years has been something that a colleague of mine gave me from the novelist Richard powers that the best argument in the world and my goodness all we do is argue uh won't change a single person's point of view the only thing that could do that is a good story I've fortunately been in the story I hope good story business for 50 years trying to tell stories with exactly that in mind that you're not putting your thumb on the scale there's always undertoe the greatest hero always has extraordinary flaws I mean yes we're dealing with George Washington right now who we don't have a country we have people we have historians who go I don't believe in the great man theory of history but I don't see how we're a country without George Washington I mean it's pretty amazing and yet also right after Yorktown he's going okay that regimen and that regiment go get all the black people and send them back to their plantations right wow so you know and a slave owner and all very complicated but that's who we are so I'm I'm wondering and I may be going back and combining two different things we've dealt with one is this idea of holding up the Cassidy Hutchinson's and the Liz chenies and the hoax and the other people who are doing the good work creating stories and and and examples but also saying how do you get to those people who simply sweep all of this out of the rug and under the rug and believe that you know this guy is evangelists who think that this is you know this clearly unchristian man is sort of the new Savior and the new Messiah I mean there's a moment in The Wizard of Oz when the water is doused on the wicked witch and all of a sudden instantly her her Legions who have been the scariest people on on earth besides the monkeys are suddenly liberated you know Hil Dorothy you know do we have in our storytelling toolbox the ability to provide us we've given you Liz Cheney somebody from your own ranks we've given you a young anenu from your own ranks Cassidy Hutchinson at what point do you stop discrediting them and go oh my God maybe they're right what can what can I do I mean even Chris sonunu the governor of my state who's been pretty good suddenly says he'll vote for Trump of course yeah right I me you just go but wait a second you know wh what does that mean what kind of profile in lack of Courage does that represent yeah and actually just this week um I was struck by Marco Rubio endorsing Trump as well because of Marco Rubio's own words when he was running against him in 2016 something along the lines of like at some point people you're going to snap out of it and have to justify your support of this man and how will you possibly I mean that that was Marco Rubio telling the American public butw the sway of a figure like this and here he is um in endorsing him um not that much long later after all of the things that have happened ever since one of the things that I I did recently just to kind of reenter myself and and um you know like clear you know clear shock um is I went back and I read the New York Times article um that ran on the front page of the New York Times the day the Senate intelligence committee report came out about Russian interference in the 2016 election Senate intelligence committee chaired by Margaret Rubio that report shared by that report shared by Marco Rubio finding that Putin wanted to interfere in the election in order to inter in in order to promote the likely election of trump and that the Trump campaign campaign welcomed it and that the Trump campaign knowingly fed proprietary helpful information about the campaign to a Russian intelligence officer right like oh that happened wait a second and that was a republican-led senate intelligence committee that concluded that and the man who helmed that report is now endorsing yeah Trump um and so what I what I take away from that is that there is no bucket of water there is no magic disc qualification potion there is no um you know this is not a canary with a with a thing over the cage and then you wake and then it wakes up and it starts singing again um this is an this is an ongoing fight this will be the fight of Our Generation and I think part of what's important about it is to recognize that it is not just the work of one man that there is something in the American public that wants to hear that democracy and the r rule of law and Science and expertise and journalism and all these things are weak and they are not up to the terrible challenges that we face now and we need a real man to actually do it we have to understand the appeal of that and argue not just against Trump but against authoritarianism we need to argue not just against the creeping threat of fascism and authoritarianism in our country we need to argue for democracy and I think so many of us who feel like we're in the fight for democracy right now also indulge in real cynicism and even shod and Freud about the failings of our democracy and we run down Congress and we talk about people running for office as being you know not credible people or people are not really doing anything except for themselves every time we're running down democracy we're doing the work of authoritarian right that's right I I I I spoke uh last year to Nicole Wallace uh you know back in February after the president had visited um Ukraine and said you know this is El this is elder abuse you know I mean this guy has legislative accomplishments that are as great maybe the third greatest in the last hundred years after FDR and and LBJ and if he cured cancer people would be complaining that he had put too many doctors out of work you know I mean you you cannot buy a break and I agree that that cynicism or that passivity or that willingness to be distract detracted or distracted by the latest little thing is the greatest danger to us I mean we know we've met the enemy and he is partially us uh to paraphrase Pogo from the 40s but um what do we do I mean I'd like you to talk you've talked about hul and about rogi and there's one other character that I'd love you to talk about is Leon Lewis is as somebody who you know can be an example for us should be an example for us Leon Lewis I feel like is almost on the border of again not I'm no no I do not believe in the great man theory of history but Leon Lewis is somebody who's almost not quite a regular American like what he did was so heroic and so above and beyond that I think most people righteously cannot ever imagine themselves doing something that brave Leon Lewis was a a World War I veteran he was a lawyer he was Jewish he lived in Los Angeles and he in the pre-World War II era 1930s Los Angeles realized that this friends of New Germany group uh which soon became the German American Bond and uh the silver shirts paramilitary anti-semitic militia that was forming and the appeal that these groups had to members of the LAPD and members of the National Guard and even to active duty marines that were working um in the Port of Long Beach like he started to realize like oh I've seen these sorts of Dynamics at work in Europe and I know where this goes and we should at least be monitoring this to figure out what's going on particularly because law enforcement appears to be kind of partial toward it like law enforcement is not only not alarmed here but there appear to be a lot of cops who are involved in these movements and Leon Lewis almost single-handedly formed a private spy operation um in which he recruited fellow World War I veterans uh he was Jewish but the people he recruited were almost all not Jewish they were German Americans because they were the ones who would fit in in these undercover groups that he wanted them to join and they collected information on what these fascist groups were doing and they fed it to law enforcement and it took them nearly a decade of collecting this information and trying to feed it to law enforcement before finally um the justice department took them seriously and collected all the work that they had done but they laid the groundwork for the Sedition trial of 1944 for the court Marshals of multiple US Marines who were shoveling US military material out of the armories to these fascist paramilitary groups um it was a it was a a absolutely uphill battle it was incredibly trepidacious there's evidence that at least one of Leon lewis' spies may have been murdered by the by members of the group that he had infiltrated it was just incredibly dangerous work and he just fared away at it for more than a decade was never thanked for it never got any credit for it his obituary when he died as a relatively young man he had a heart attack while he was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway one day his obituary made no mention of the fact that he had done this but he's a big part of the reason that we know what American fascists were doing at that time and he's a big part of the reason that Nazi organizing Nazi funded paramilitary work in the United States was exposed and stopped you used the word rhyme uh a while ago and and clearly that Echoes from uh a phrase that we think Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself uh but it Rhymes um I I I felt that in all of my work that every project that we've done whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or about the celibate religious sect the Shakers obviously about the Roosevelts or Vietnam or the US and the Holocaust it's rhyming powerfully sometimes terrifyingly in the present particularly the latter film we we Advanced it's it's um it's release a year which caus great disruptions among the heroic people who were doing the dayto day on that but we wanted it out to be part of the conversation uh of the midterms you know I just think as we as we leave today I'd love to have you just I mean I think you've said it well prequel I think for many people might seem to be like yikes this is going to happen to us but prequel also means here are all the people that made sure that that did not happen and so take take from them the manual the operating instructions on how you maintain a democracy so talk to me about your level of hopefulness and what the rest of us Rachel need from you in order to sort of we don't write these books just to see our name in print what do you want us to do I think that the most important and it's maybe G to sound too simple but the important thing is to name the thing that we are fighting for and in all of its flaws in all of its frustrations we have an ancient by the world standards we now have an ancient democracy and that means we've got a Judiciary it means we've got a legislature and it means we've got an executive branch and they are co-equal and we maybe need to relearn a that we've got those things and B why we have them because we have to both fight to preserve them and we have to use those things as our weapons to fight and so you cannot fight an authoritarian movement with an authoritarian impulse you have to stand up for democracy if if if one of the things we're worried about is the scapegoating of the other scapegoating of immigrants the scapegoating of trans people the scapegoating of of liberals and the opposition and the Deep State as Vermin that must be exterminated in this country you can't do that by saying the people who making those claims are themselves Vermin are themselves monsters are themselves inhuman instead you have to embody the values that you are fighting for nobody who is fighting in for the future of this country right now against me however different they may be approaching this however opposite they may be approaching this none of them is subhuman nobody is a monster nobody is irredeemable I believe as a matter of my faith that everybody until the last breath on Earth is capable of salvation is capable of change is capable of redemption you can repent and you can be redeemed until your last breath on Earth and I believe that as a matter of Faith but I really believe that as a matter of our democracy as well and I don't think that anybody the farmer that you are imagining talking to right now in Iowa anybody who is absolutely susceptible to these conspiracy theories and these comforting stories about strongman leadership and how that will save us I don't believe that any American is Beyond seeing through that someday and we just need to make good arguments to not give up on anybody to stand up for our democracy to protect the rule of law to make sure that people who are working as cogs in the Democratic machine election workers people like you know sheam moss and Ruby Freeman or people like that are protected that their stories of heroism are told and advanced there's no magic bullet there is no magic bullet we have to do all of these things all at once but Americans before us specific specifically in the 1930s and the early 1940s were up against something a little bit like this that also had Nazi Germany pulling in that pulling in that in in that direction while they were steamrolling all of Europe and killing six million Jews they were up against a form of American fascism that had centripetal force from what was going on in Europe that is nothing like what we are dealing with today and if Americans in that context could beat it here we can beat it here we can we have to um and it's just going to take a lot of work you know going back to that old democracy in its founding document a few phrases after the famous ones that we all know Thomas Jefferson wrote All experience has shown that mankind are disposed to suffer while Evils are sufferable what it seems to me that he was saying is that all Human Experience here to for has been essentially under authoritarian rule that we have been subjects superstitious peasantry and not this new thing that was being suggested by this deeply flawed but beautiful new model which is Citizens and I think what you have said is a kind of call to to the highest office in the land which is citizenship in which you participate you know the history that's called Civics which we don't teach but it doesn't take much to understand the basic things that you and I have been talking about today and to engage in them actually to not argue as much as to tell the stories and then do the leg work necessary uh to protect this beautiful but clearly a flawed thing Rachel it is such a pleasure to talk with you uh Rachel's book is prequel which is an American fight against fascism I uh urge everyone to buy the book and then join thank you so much thank you Ken this is fantastic conversation you've inspired me really every time I talk to you I feel I feel smarter and and brighter and more energized I really really really love talking to you about this stuff same here same here thank you so much this has been a wonderful wonderful hour um it's really really great

Channel: UNUM Ken Burns

Views: 210,727

Keywords: ken burns, ken burns pbs, pbs, UNUM ken burns, u.s. and the holocaust, fascism, fascist, donald trump, insurrection, rachel maddow

Id: 42trXBJ3MGo

Length: 56min 13sec (3373 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024