America First 

The rise of Donald Trump is a signal of the seething resentments that continue to define the American South, which have been exploited by the modern Republican Party in what has been called the Southern Strategy. The South has been particularly vulnerable to exploitation by cynical campaign managers, who recognize its significance as a voting bloc, who can be relatively easily mobilized by tapping into its nascent racial bigotry. The South, which is by far the largest region in the United States by population, representing 38% of the total, compared to 17.3% in the Northeast, 20.9% in the Midwest, and 23.8% in the West.[1]

Trump made an overt reference to the key language of the Southern Strategy during his inauguration speech, when he deliberately emphasized the phrase, “America First.” “America First” began as a slogan of the Ku Klux Klan, which held numerous ties to the America Fist Committee (AFC), an organization that resulted from the activism of Afbau member and British and Soviet double-agent, Boris Brasol. The Klansmen of the AFC represented the new Klan. The members of the first Klan in the South had been exclusively Democrats. In the nineteenth century, Southern Democrats comprised whites in the South who believed in Jeffersonian democracy. In the 1850s they defended slavery in the United States and promoted its expansion into the West against northern Free Soil opposition. The United States presidential election of 1860 formalized the split, and ensued in war.

In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, having used insurgent paramilitary groups such as the White League and the Red Shirts to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officeholders out of town, and intimidate blacks to suppress their voting. After Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s, they controlled all the Southern states and disenfranchised blacks (who were Republicans). The “Solid South” gave nearly all its electoral votes to Democrats in presidential elections. Republicans were seldom elected to office outside some Appalachian mountain districts and a few heavily German-American counties of Texas.

The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. By 1870, similar organizations to the KKK, such as the Knights of the White Camelia and the White Brotherhood, had sprung up across the South. Through fear, brutality, and murder these terrorist groups helped to overthrow local reform-minded governments and restore white supremacy, and then largely faded away. With numerous autonomous chapters across the South, the Klan was suppressed around 1871 through federal law enforcement.

In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded that same year by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, in Georgia, with two aging former members and other new members. Simmons declared himself the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In a pamphlet titled “ABC of the Invisible Empire in Atlanta” published in 1917, Simmons identified the Klan’s goals as:

…to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism.[2]

Simmons’ Klan claimed it had around six million members, though most historians place the number somewhere between two to four million.[2] In The Ku Klux Klan and Freemasonry in 1920s America, Miguel Hernandez has shown that while researchers still struggle to explain how such a minor organization became the dominant fraternity of the early 1920s, one of the main factors in its growth was its alignment with Freemasonry. Simmons founded his order based on the various different fraternities he belonged to like the Freemasons or the Knights Templar. The Klan ritual he created, including its props, ceremonies, and ranks, drew heavily on Masonic rites.[3] The Klan attempted to recruit members from almost all of the prominent fraternities, but was particularly focused on Freemasonry, going to great lengths to make it appear as if the two orders were connected.[4] Klan recruiters typically began by using Masonic lodge membership lists. As reported by Nancy McLean, almost all the traveling organizers (kleagles) hired by the Imperial Palace were Freemasons, and used the lodges to recruit prospective Klansmen. Often, the Klan to meet in their lodge halls. Nationwide, 500,000 Freemasons had joined the Klan by 1923. Along with members of other fraternal organizations, like the Elks, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, and the Shriners, they often formed the backbone of local chapters.[5] One Mason reported that, “Klan-joining became contagious and ran epidemic” throughout the lodges of Freemasonry during the 1920s. Wherever the Klan was particularly strong, so were the Masons. In some locations, 60 percent or more of Klansmen were Masons.[6]

Presidents William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding, who were all members of the Klan, used the phrase America First to promote isolationist and/or protectionist foreign policies. The Klan claims McKinley was the first U.S. President who was a member of the KKK. The second was Wilson, who ran for re-election on an America First platform in 1916. A popular song called “America First!” was dedicated to Wilson and published in 1917. Wilson himself was the descendant of Confederate soldiers and identified deeply with the “Lost Cause” narrative, according to which the Confederacy was a government of noble men trying to preserve a decent agrarian way of life against crude Northern industrialists.[7]

Historian Wesley Moody describes Wilson’s most famous book, A History of the American People, as “steeped in Lost Cause mythology.”[8] The book, which quoted The Birth of a Nation, was generally sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, describing them as “men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the courts, who meant to take this means to make their will felt.”[9] According to Nick Ragone’s Presidents’ Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Extraordinary Executives, Colorful Campaigns, and White House Oddities, Wilson actually contributed to the expansion of Klan membership by providing screenings of The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation for members of his Cabinet, Congress, and the Supreme Court.[10]

Harding was the next president who was a KKK member. According to The Fiery Cross, Harding was actually sworn in at a KKK ceremony that was held in the Green Room at the White House by Imperial Wizard Colonel Simmons.[11] Harding was not the only president to allow Klan activities to be held on White House grounds. Coolidge was a well-known and active Klan member who allowed cross lightings on the Capital steps and also reviewed the giant Klan parades of 1925 and 1926 that were held in Washington DC.[12]

The Klan declared “America First” one of its most prominent slogans and went so far as to even claim to hold the copyright.[13] A photo of KKK members marching with an “America First” banner dates from the 1920s and can be found in the Getty Images archive. In Klan literature, its credo was “America first, last and forever,” or its variant as uttered by a KKK speaker quoted in the Binghamton, New York Press and Sun-Bulletin in 1923: “I stand for America first, last and always,” the speaker began. “I am opposed to any organization which tries to bring in foreign and alien ideals.” Another variant is enshrined in an “Imperial Proclamation” submitted as evidence during a Congressional hearing on the Klan’s activities in 1921: “[The Klan] stands for America first — first in thought, first in affections, and first in the galaxy of nations. The Stars and Stripes forever above all other and every kind of government in the whole world.”[14] In January 1922, the Klan staged a parade in Alexandria, Louisiana, bearing two flaming red crosses and banners with slogans including “America First” and “White Supremacy.” That summer the Klan took out an advertisement in a Texas newspaper: “The Ku Klux Klan is the one and only organization composed absolutely and exclusively of ONE HUNDRED PER CENT AMERICANS who place AMERICA FIRST.”[15]

In the late 1920s, the Klan lost much of its influence and membership fell almost as rapidly as it had arisen. By 1927, Klan membership was down from several million to about 350,000. Adding to their downfall, the organization was fraught with numerous scandals. In Oregon, dentist Ellis O. Willson was convicted twice for raping his secretary and killing her while attempting to perform an abortion. Philip Fox, editor of the Imperial Night-Hawk, was sentenced to life in prison for killing his rival, William S. Coburn. In Indiana, Klansman Governor Ed Jackson was indicted for bribery, the officers of the state’s major Klan bank were indicted for embezzlement and grand larceny, and a Klan minister was accused of crimes “so sensational that persons who heard the sordid details were loath to believe they were true.”[16] The final blow was Indiana Grand Dragon Stephenson’s conviction for kidnapping, raping, and murdering his secretary, an outrageous scandal covered widely in the national press.[17]

In May of 1927, approximately 1,000 Klansmen gathered to march in the Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, accompanied by 400 members of their women’s organization, the Klavana. When some of the reported 20,000 spectators in Queens that day objected to the Klan’s presence in a civic parade, fights broke out and it turned into a riot. In the days that followed, the New York papers revealed the names of a total of seven men who had been arrested. Five of them were identified as “avowed Klansmen.” A sixth, who was arrested, arraigned and discharged, supposedly by mistake, was Fred Trump, father of Donald Trump.[18]

Shickshinny Knights

Boris Brasol was described as one of the principal advisers and the “brain trust” of the America First Committee (AFC).[19] The AFC represented a confluence of right-wing organizations, including the Silver Shirts, the German America Bund, the Ku Klux Klan and Father Coughlin, all of whom were closely associated with Brasol. During World War I, Brasol held the rank of Lieutenant in the Tsar’s army. In 1916, he was recalled from the Russian front and sent to the US to work as a lawyer for an Anglo-Russian purchasing committee. After the October Revolution in Russia, Brasol stayed in the United States as an emigrant. During his time in the US, Brasol was an ardent supporter of restoration of the monarchy in Russia, and served as the official representative of Grand Duke Kirill in the United States, who helped him spread the Protocols.

Genealogy of Grand Duke Kirill

• Tsar Paul I (Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem) + Natalia Alexeievna (descended from Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Gotha, founder of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha dynasty, member of Fruitbearing Society)

  • Tsar Alexander I (under influence of Madame von Kruderer, famous psychic and friend of Madame Germaine de Staël)

  • Tsar Nicholas I (Order of the Golden Fleece) + Charlotte of Prussia (1798 – 1860, d. of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, son of Frederick William II of Prussia, who belonged to the Golden and Rosy Cross)

    • Tsar Alexander II (Order of the Golden Fleece) + Marie of Hesse (interested in occultism) - (see above)

      • Tsar Alexander III of Russia (Order of the Golden Fleece) + Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark)

        • Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (Order of the Golden Fleece) + Alexandra Feodorovna (granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, grandson of Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), friend of Adam Weishaupt))

      • Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia + Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin

        • GRAND DUKE KIRILL VLADIMIROVICH OF RUSSIA (SOSJ) + Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (see below)

        • Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia + Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark

      • Maria Alexandrovna + Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (son of Queen Victoria)

        • Alfred, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

        • Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha + GRAND DUKE KIRILL VLADIMIROVICH OF RUSSIA (SOSJ)

        • Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha + Ernst II, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (member of Nazi party)

Aufbau’s ideas of reconstructing the Soviet Union along National Socialist lines appealed to Hitler. Aufbau leader General Ludendorff assigned Walter Nicholai—the leader of German Military Intelligence during World War I—to develop the Sovereign Order of Stain John (SOSJ) intelligence service for Grand Duke Kirill, in order to closely cooperate with Aufbau.[20] Aufbau member Pavlov Bermondt-Avalov was accused as a terrorist in connection with Organization Consul and expelled from Germany in 1922 by the Socialist Weimar Government. He and Ataman Semenov—a friend of the “Mad Baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg—traveled to New York City and were involved with meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel offices of American Grand Prior, William Nelson Cromwell, founder of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, where Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster started their careers. This resulted in the formal re-establishment of the Sovereign Council of the SOSJ in 1922, with Cromwell becoming its President.[21]

After the Aubfau had consolidated itself into a powerful conspiratorial force in the first half of 1921, under Scheubner-Richter’s de facto leadership, they tried and failed to unite all White émigrés in Germany and beyond behind Grand Duke Kirill for a pro-National Socialist crusade against the Bolsheviks, in order to establish nationalist Russian, Ukrainian, and Baltic successor states. However, to further complement right-wing German and Russian interests, Hitler assisted the pro-Grand Duke Kirill faction within the Aufbau. For its support, Kirill granted Hitler’s Nazi Party considerable subsidies towards the German–Russian national cause. Until his death in 1938, Grand Duke Kirill was to be the chosen candidate of Hitler for Tsar of Russia when the Soviet Union was defeated.[22]

In a proclamation dated November 24, 1936, Kirill conferred upon former Nazi Colonel Charles Pichel (1890 – 1982) the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, First Class in Gold for his “zeal in defending and helping to perpetuate the noble history of Imperial Russia and the Imperial Families of Russia.” Kirill’s order was “signed by the President of the Committee of Imperial Orders and the Delegate of the Emperor in the United States,” presumably Brasol.[23] On July 15, 1933, Pichel had written to Ernst Hanfstaengl offering his services as a liaison between the American right and Hitler.[24] For fifty years until his death, Pichel was the Grand Master of the American branch of the Knights of Malta, known as the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. The order claimed descent from the Medieval Knights Hospitallers, but via the Russian line of succession. Although it poses as a Catholic organization, the order is a Masonic group that merely claims to be the real Knights of Malta.[25] Also known as the “Shickshinny Knights,” the group was headquartered in the small town of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. Many of its members had settled in White Russian communities in the US and Europe after the Russian Revolution.[26] Pichel claimed that on January 13, 1934, Grand Duke Kirill, from his place in exile in Saint Briac, France, confirmed the legitimacy of Pichel’s Order.

Pichel and Brasol were associated with Howard Victor von Boenstrupp, a.k.a. Count V. Cherep-Spiridovich. Boenstrupp said he got his title after being legally adopted by a real White Russian count, Major General A. Cherep-Spiridovich, original head of the SOSJ, who died a suicide in 1926.[27] A close associate of Silver Shirt leader William Dudley Pelley, Boenstrupp was indicted along with Pelley on sedition charges on July 21, 1942. Walter Laqueur ranked Boenstrupp among a number of “Russian experts” whom Nazi ideologue and Aufbau member Alfred Rosenberg befriended and consulted.[28] During his time in the United States, Brasol travelled regularly to Germany where he met Rosenberg and other Nazis.[29]

In 1938, Brasol, who was by this time an American citizen, helped to organize a clandestine anti-Comintern congress in Germany with the approval of the Gestapo and Himmler’s SS. The assembly included representatives from America, Canada, France, England, and Switzerland.[30] US Army investigators became suspicious that Brasol had visited Germany almost every year between Hitler’s rise to power and the outbreak of the war.[31] Brasol was said to have been a representative of a Nazi propaganda organization called the Deutsche Fichte Bund.[32] Named after German nationalist and philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the Fichte Bund, also known as The Union for World Veracity, was a German, nationalist, anti-Semitic organization, founded in 1914. According to a Danish memorandum of the Nuremberg trials, the Fichte Bund was subordinate to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda during the Third Reich, and tried to systematically influence public opinion abroad in the Nazi cause.[33] In addition to standard propaganda, the organization distributed translations of major speeches of Hitler, Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg and other key Nazi figures around the world.

During the 1930s, Brasol maintained a wide array of contacts among right-wing Russians in the United States.[34] Among them was “Count” Anastasy Vonsiatsky (1898 – 1965), ex-Tsarist officer anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré and Japanese agent based in the United States from the 1920s. In August 1933, Vonsiatsky founded the Russian Fascist National Revolutionary Party in the United States, whose official emblem was the swastika. Vonsiatsky was also on close terms with other Aufbau members like General Vasili Biskupsky and General Konstantin Sakharov. According to the history of the SOSJ, Sakharov was the “head of the military division of the Russian Grand Priory” of the order.[35] Sakharov was also close to Alfred Rosenberg, who would later compliment Sakharov’s work “as perfectly suitable to convince simple-minded people of the role of Jewry in Bolshevism.”[36]

In 1934, Vonsiatsky visited Tokyo, Harbin and other Far Eastern centers, and conferred with members of the Japanese High Command and fascist White Russians, including Baron Ungern-Sternberg’s collaborator, Ataman Semenov. From Japan, Vonsiatsky went to Germany where he met with Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels and representatives of the German Military Intelligence. Vonsiatsky kept the Germans and Japanese regularly supplied with espionage information from the United States.[37] However, Vonsiatsky became a subject of FBI investigation and was indicted in 1942 for conspiring to assist Hitler’s Germany in violation of the Espionage Act. Released early from prison in 1946, Vonsiatsky lived out the remainder of his life in the United States.

Pioneer Fund

Vonsiatsky was associated with Wickliffe Draper (1891 – 1972), a textile magnate, who founded the Pioneer Fund, a Neo-Nazi organization established in 1937 that promoted eugenics research.[38] According to the order’s own history, the four orders of St. John, which included the SOSJ, the SMOM, the German Order of St. John and the British Venerable Order of St. John, competed for influence in American society, and the constant interaction with European aristocracy motivated some American members to become involved in genealogical and racial studies. In accordance with the rules of the SOSJ, to qualify for knighthood was nearly impossible for Americans. The result was the founding of the National Genealogical Society, interaction with the College of Arms of Canada, and the founding of Pichel’s American Heraldry Society, as well as support of the early racial eugenics movement. [39]

During most of the interwar years, the SOSJ and its affiliated organizations were under the direction of William Nelson Cromwell, who had his offices at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.[40] That included associations with the American Coalition of Patriotic, Civic and Fraternal Societies, founded by John B. Trevor (1878 – 1956). Trevor was a member of the Eugenics Research Association, the American Eugenics Society, the Immigration Restriction League, and the American Defense Society. an architect of the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Asian immigration and established quotas that stood for forty years until 1964. He married Caroline Murray Wilmerding, one of the oldest friends of Eleanor Roosevelt. Their son, John B. Trevor Jr. (1909 – 2006) was also involved with the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, and was on the board of the Pioneer Fund.[41]

Draper, who was fascinated by eugenics, and sympathetic to the Nazis, founded the Pioneer Fund in 1937 “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” According to a 1960 article in The Nation, an unnamed geneticist said Draper told him he “wished to prove simply that Negroes were inferior.”[42] The fund’s first president was Harry Laughlin, also an early admirer of the Nazi eugenics, and an advocate for restrictive immigration laws and national programs of compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled. Laughlin was one of the founders of the American Eugenics Society, formed after the success of the Second International Conference on Eugenics New York in 1921.

During the 1920s, Laughlin became a close associate of Dr. Walter A. Plecker, registrar of vital statistics for the Commonwealth of Virginia, who was allied with the newly founded Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America which persuaded the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Law of 1924.[43] Founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1922 by musician and composer John Powell and Klansman Earnest Sevier Cox (1880 – 1966), the Anglo Saxon Clubs of America was a white supremacist political organization which was active in the United States in the 1920s, and lobbied in favor of anti-miscegenation laws and against immigration from outside of Northern Europe. The two laws were Virginia’s implementation of Laughlin’s “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” published two years earlier in 1922. The Nazis passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933, closely based on Laughlin’s model.[44] In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University, scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler’s 1934 purge of Jews from the faculty, to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the “science of racial cleansing.” Being unable to attend the ceremony, Laughlin picked up the award from the Rockefeller Institute, which he proudly shared with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the “common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics.”[45]

Cox wrote White America, proposing the repatriation of all Blacks to Africa. Cox is also noted for having mediated collaboration between White southern segregationists and African American separatist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia to advocate for repatriation legislation, and for having been a personal friend of Black racial separatist and UNIA founder Marcus Garvey (1887 – 1940). During the 1930s, Draper provided the finances for Cox’s repatriation campaign, an effort that Draper planned to resume after the war.[46] Draper also made large financial contributions to efforts to oppose the American Civil Rights Movement and the racial desegregation.

Laughlin was the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office founded with initial support from E.H. Harriman’s wife Mary Williamson Averell, and John Harvey Kellogg, and later by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.[47] Laughlin was also fascinated with the idea of establishing a world government, which he believed would promote the eugenicist aim of preventing the intermixing of different races. Many leading internationalists expressed interest in Laughlin’s world government plan, including Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy adviser.[48]

Order of the Blue Lamoo

In early 1939, Father Peter Baptiste Duffee, or “Father Duffy,” was interviewed by Brasol’s collaborator Casimir Pilenas-Palmer—whose British superior had been Round Table member Sir William Wiseman—then acting as an investigator for the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. In Pilenas’s report, Duffee linked Brasol to an occult order called the Ancient and Noble Order of the Blue Lamoo, one of whose members was Count Cherep-Spiridovich, and at the head of the group was Charles Pichel.[49] Duffee claimed the Blue Lamoo was a rogue branch of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta and the ubiquitous Sovereign Order of St. John.[50] The order held ideas similar to those of William Dudley Pelley. Headquartered in Black Hills, South Dakota, the Blue Lamoo was said to be founded by “Atlantian Initiates of the Sun.” Membership was limited to “Aryan People of all classes.” The purposes of the group were to free Aryans from the “financial bondage of the Judeo-Mongols,” and “To Unite Science and Religion, whereby the Aryans again may be Supermen and Superwomen and establish the Aryan Race as the Christ Race leading the World into the Millennium.”[51] This lore, Duffee insisted, disguised the order’s true function as a “Nazi propaganda organization,” which he linked to the better known German propaganda front, the Fichte Bund, of which Brasol was allegedly a representative.

American investigators connected Brasol to the following list of anti-Communist and Nazi agitators: Laura Ingalls, William Dudley Pelley, Elizabeth Dilling, Leslie Fry, Father Charles Coughlin, Colonel Eugene Sanctuary the author of The Talmud Unmasked and leader of the American Christian Defenders, who collaborated with Rev. Gerald Burton and the KKK; James True the author of the anti-New Deal and anti-Semitic newsletter Industrial Control Reports (True was also the inventor of the “kike-killer,” a patented club made in two sizes: one for men and a smaller size for women[52]); and Allen Zoll a close associate of Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front.[53] Zoll founded American Patriots—which was later placed on a subversive list by the US Attorney General—in in 1936, the same year, according to John Spivak, Zoll reportedly traveled to Germany and met with Joseph Goebbels.[54]

Leslie Fry, who had worked with Henry Ford, corresponded with participants in the Berne Trial, a famous trial into the authenticity of The Protocols held in Berne, Switzerland between 1933 and 1935, which caused an international sensation. The defendants in the Berne Trial were financed in their defense by Nazi agents working for the German government. The Berne Trial was instigated with the selling of the Protocols by the National Front of Theodor Fritsch, founder of the Germanenorden. Fritsch declared the Protocols genuine, and as having been produced during the First Zionist Congress at Basel, and cited what he regarded as incriminating testimony from Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis (1869 – 1951) of the Stockholm Synagogue, who helped Herzl establish the first Zionist Congress.

Working on behalf of the defense was a disciple of Fritsch, German anti-Semitic propagandist Ulrich Fleischhauer (1876 – 1960). Through their common Völkisch circles, Fleischhauer also developed friendships with a number of other organizations such as the Thule Society, and was especially close to Dietrich Eckart.[55] Fleischhauer headed Welt-Dienst/World-Service, the international Nazi propaganda agency, which was dedicated to the “resolution of the Jewish question” and the dissemination of The Protocols. According to World-Service, the “Jewish question” could be resolved through “total Zionism”, the establishment of a Jewish national state in Madagascar.[56] Fry discussed the trial with Alexander Spiridovich—the former head of the Okhrana, who wrote a biography of Rasputin—and Pyotr Rachkovsky, whom the trial linked to the emergence of The Protocols.[57] Based on Rachkovsky’s father’s extensive archives, Fry wrote a long article “Occultism in Tsarist Russia. Philipe—Nilus—Rasputin” published in 1935.[58]

Fry worked for Fleischhauer’s Welt-Dienst/World-Service in the 1930s.[59] After she came to the United States in 1936, she was strongly opposed to Roosevelt’s New Deal, Fry argued that it represented “the transformation of the Constitutional form of American government into that of the Kahal, or Jewish form of government. It has been called the New Deal and the Jew Deal. Both are correct and synonymous.”[60] She created a national network of propaganda which was rumored to be supported directly from Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.[61] In recognition of her services, Fry was awarded the title of “Honorary Dame” by the Imperial Constantinian Military Order of St. George, which included Rudolf von Sebottendorf.[62]

In the Fall of 1939, an anti-fascist activist in Pittsburgh warned of the danger of “Coughlin our next Führer, with Reynolds, Moseley, Deatherage etc. our Goebbels and Göring.”[63] Leslie Fry’s friend George Deatherage, a 1920s Klansman who led a revived Knights of the White Camelia, claimed Hitler had learned anti-Semitism and the Nazi salute from the Klan, and suggested the Klan switch to burning swastikas.[64] Deatherage was financed by Tyler Kent, a Knight Commander of Justice of the Shickshinny Knights, who was suspected by British intelligence of being a Soviet agent.[65]

Dilling was a speaker at America First meetings. In 1934, she published The Red Network—A Who’s Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, which catalogs over 1,300 suspected communists and their sympathizers. Dilling visited Germany in 1931 and, when she returned in 1938, noted a “great improvement of conditions.” She attended Nazi Party meetings, and the German government paid her expenses.[66]

Deatherage was an important player in domestic and international anti-Jewish circles in the 1930s and 1940s, and was one of the Welt-Dienst/World-Service chief American correspondents.[67] Deatherage was a close associate of the head of the American section of World-Service, Johannes Klapproth, an early member of the Nazi Party in Germany, who came to the United States in 1928 and helped to organize the Friends of New Germany in San Francisco.[68] William Dudley Pelley frequently printed World-Service articles in his Silver Legion of America magazine, Liberation, advocating a “purge of Jews and Communists in Hollywood.” Other American publications, including Father Coughlin’s Social Justice, Robert Edward Edmondson’s American Vigilante Bulletins, and those issued by the Gerald Winrod, were equally willing to push the World-Service anti-Semitic propaganda. The publications recommended by World-Service included, Fry’s Waters Flowing Eastward, Count Cherep Spiridovich’s The Secret World Government, Nesta Webster’s The Socialist Network, Fred R. Marvin’s Fools Gold and Olov E. Tietzow’s Aryan Americanism. Swedish-born “patriot” Tietzow was a head of The American Guard, “The White Man's Party,” whose credo was “Unite Under the Swastika— Symbol of Loyalty to American Ideals.”[69]

As liaison agent, Fry used ex-convict Henry Douglas Allen, though she herself was under the orders Conrad Chapman.[70] Documents found by San Diego police in Allen’s briefcase in 1938 implicated Fry as a paid Nazi agent, but she escaped prosecution at the time.[71] In 1937, Fry attempted to unite the nationalist forces in the United States, sending Allen to consult with Deatherage, True, Winrod, Edmondson, and Kuhn. At Fry’s instruction, Allen met with Hiram Evans—the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and a 33º Mason—to arrange the purchase of the group’s copyrights and mailing lists for $75,000. Fry wanted to revive the Klan on a national level, especially in California, but the offer was refused.[72] As reported by Joseph Howard Tyson, because Hitler was impressed by the US’s Jim Crow laws, its genocide of Native Americans and distrust of Jewish bankers, he ordered Kurt Ludecke to visit Evans in Alabama.[73] Ludecke’s chief work and major claim to fame was his book I Knew Hitler, originally published by Scribners in 1937.

In 1937, Fry participated in a convention of the American Nationalist Confederation in Kansas City, to unify pro-fascist organization. Deatherage was the organizer. The goal was to make General George Van Horn Moseley a military dictator under the pretence of protecting the United States from communism.[74] Deatherage wrote speeches for General George Van Horn Moseley, who came to be seen as a highly promising as a national leader who could unite the disparate right-wing organizations.[75] A veteran of the Philippines and World War I, Moseley had served alongside Pershing and MacArthur, and he was a good friend of ex-President Hoover. Moseley first attracted attention in May 1938, when he asserted that future immigrants should be sterilized as a means of protecting the American race. After taking retirement in 1938, began speaking denouncing Jewish power, and its effects on America in the New Deal. Some of the groups who attended the initial meeting were: the Militant Christian Patriots, American Vigilante Intelligence Federation, Defenders of the Christian Faith, American People’s Party, Silver Shirts of America, Crusaders for Economic Liberty, Edmond­son Economic Service, Washington’s Bodyguards; and the German-American Bund.

In 1939, the House Un-American Activities Committee exposed a plot against the government instigated by Deatherage, Moseley and James Campbell, a captain in the Army Reserve. The year before, Deatherage had outlined to Moseley a plan to bring many anti-communist groups together in one organization under Moseley’s leadership. According to Arthur (Avedis) Derounian, an Armenian-American investigator for the anti-fascist Friends of Democracy, who wrote Under Cover in 1943 under the pseudonym of John Roy Carlson, the plot was the brain child of Baron Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, Consul General of San Francisco, was led by Fry and involved Deatherage, Chapman, Allen, Fleischhauer, as well as the German-American Bund, the Ku Klux Klan, Silver Shirts, Christian Front, Irish nationalist elements and many smaller groups.[76]

German-American Bund

The AFC was the principle organization of the Old Right, providing the foundation for its non-interventionism.[77] Many pro-Nazis and other fascist organizations supported the AFC, including Radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts and the Ku Klux Klan.[78] William Dudley Pelley, founder of the Silver Shirts and Guy Ballard’s “I AM” movement, was at times associated with Merwin K. Hart (1881 –1962).[79] Count Cherep-Spiridovich and Count Vonsiatsky were also close to Pelley, who together were indicted on sedition charges on July 21, 1942.[80] Vonsiatsky also was very close to the German-American Bund and its leader, Fritz Kuhn. In fact, it was Vonsiatsky’s dealings with the Bund that mostly led to his arrest and conviction for violating the Espionage Act in June 1942.[81]

Fritz Kuhn, the founder of the German American Bund, was someone else Brasol denied ever meeting, though there is information to the contrary.[82] The Bund was a German-American pro-Nazi organization established in 1936. In 1933, Rudolf Hess gave German immigrant and German Nazi Party member Heinz Spanknöbel authority to form an American Nazi organization. Shortly thereafter, with help from the German consul in New York City, Spanknöbel created the Friends of New Germany. In 1935, a Munich-born German Army veteran of WWI named Fritz Kuhn was chosen as the organization’s national leader, and the group was renamed the German-American Bund. The Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities concluded that the Friends represented a branch of German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in the United States.[83] The peak of the Bund’s activities was a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939, where 20,000 people heard Kuhn criticize Roosevelt by referring to him as “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” calling his New Deal the “Jew Deal” and denouncing what he believed to be Bolshevik-Jewish American leadership.

The Bund’s vice-president declared that “The principles of the Bund and the principles of the Klan are the same.”[84] Following the rebirth of the modern movement in 1915, certain KKK groups began openly seeking working relationships with neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups, such as the Bund and the Silver Shirts. Upon seizing power in 1933, Hitler instantly suppressed Germany’s Klan, the German Order of Fiery Cross. However, collaboration between the Nazis and the American Klan began soon after Hitler took power.

Membership in the Silver Shirts drew extensively from the Klan. One of the national leaders of the Silver Shirts was Harry F. Sieber who was an active organizer in the Philadelphia area and in Delaware, while other Philadelphia Silver Shirts can be identified as Klansmen.[85] “Major” Luther Ivan Powell, who founded the Washington State Ku Klux Klan in 1922, and who also organized Klan chapters in California, Oregon, and later Idaho, Alaska, and Montana, became an organizer for the Silver Shirts. Powell’s organizing strategy relied heavily on using the membership lists of “fraternal, civic, and social” groups, especially Freemasons and secret societies to locate and lure new members into the Klan.[86] Powell’s former KKK rival in the Northwest, Fred Gifford, also joined the Silver Shirts in 1933 in an attempt to revive his “invisible empire” in Oregon.[87]

Although Brasol denied knowing Coughlin, he did concede indirect contact through a friend, “Father Duffy.” [88] Despite Coughlin’s Catholic following, which had been a stumbling block for the anti-Catholics of the Klan, the two sides were brought together by the efforts of Edward James Smythe, an active Klansman and head of the Protestant War Veterans Association, who would later organize a joint rally of Klansmen and the Bund.[89] By 1934, Father Coughlin was perhaps the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. After the 1936 election, Coughlin increasingly expressed sympathy for the fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini as an antidote to Communism. He claimed that Jewish bankers were behind the Russian Revolution and that Russian Bolshevism was a disproportionately Jewish phenomenon.

Father Coughlin was allied with racist clergyman Gerald L.K. Smith, a former member of the Silver Shirts.[90] Smith was also an associate of Henry Ford and Wickliffe Draper. Smith met Senator Huey P. Long in 1929 and became his national organizer during the Great Depression, when he launched the Share Our Wealth society. Long called him “the only man I ever saw who is a better rabble-rouser than I am.” Smith was known as a charismatic speaker and demagogue, about whom H.L. Mencken wrote: “Gerald L.K. Smith is the greatest orator of them all… He is the master of masters, the champion boob-bumper of all epochs, the Aristotle and Johann Sebastian Bach of all known ear-splitters, dead or alive.”[91] Smith authored anti-Semitic works such as Jews in Government, on “Jew Zionist” plot to acquire “world power and control” through “Jew banking houses,” the “Jew-controlled and Jew directed” KGB, and “Jew control” of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.[92]

In 1940, Smith joined the AFC and in 1943 formed the America First Party, with Smith as the party’s presidential candidate in the 1944 US presidential election. This America First Party was renamed the Christian Nationalist Crusade in 1947, as an extension of the Christian Nationalist Crusade (CNC) which Smith founded in 1942. The CNC sold and distributed, Ford’s The International Jew, and subscribed to the anti-Semitic views outlined in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which it also published. CNC also produced monthly magazine, called The Cross and the Flag. In 1952 a rump America First Party nominated Douglas MacArthur for President.

America First Committee

One of the key founders of the AFC was Merwin K. Hart (1881 – 1962), who was a man at the center of the numerous connections behind the American far-right.[93] Hart was an “alleged promoter of the American Fascist movement,” according to FBI files.[94] Hart was also at times associated with William Dudley Pelley.[95] In April 1929, Hart and others founded the New York State-wide Economic Council, a legislative lobbying organization that sought to curtail government interference into the economy in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929. In 1931, the council renamed itself the New York State Economic Council (NYEC). In 1937, Hart toured Europe and was and came to regard Franco’s Spain positively as a country that could stop the menace of Communism, writing America, Look at Spain. In 1939, Gerald K. Smith had met Hart, and soon received support from the NYEC.[96]

By far the most prominent leader and spokesman of the AFC was the famous American aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, a long-term friend of Henry Ford, who first came under FBI scrutiny for his association with Hart.[97] Starting in early 1931, at the Rockefeller Institute and continuing during his time living in France, Lindbergh studied the perfusion of organs outside the body with Alexis Carrel, a member of the Center for the Study of Human Problems (CSHP) with synarchist Jean Coutrot and Aldous Huxley. Lindbergh had paid his first visit to Germany in the summer of 1936. Lindbergh traveled as a guest of the Nazi Government, where lavish parties were thrown for him by Field Marshal Hermann Göring and other Nazi elite. “German aviation ranks higher than that in any other country,” he told the Luftwaffe ace, General Ernst Udet. “It is invincible!”[98] Axel von Blomberg, the son of the Nazi Minister of War, after attending a party given for Lindbergh in 1936, said “He’s going to be the best promotion campaign we could possibly invest in.”[99]

Two years later, in the days preceding the Munich Pact, Lindbergh visited the Soviet Union. On his return, he began spreading the word that the Red Army was badly ill-equipped, poorly trained and commanded. He claimed that Soviet Union would be a weak ally in any military alliance against Nazi Germany. In Lindbergh’s opinion, it more advisable to co-operate with, not against, the Nazis.[100] Lindbergh, who had already distinguished himself as a pro-Nazi and anti-Soviet agitator in Europe and America, became interested in Stuart’s idea of uniting opposition to the coming war. Not only was Lindbergh a known Nazi sympathizer, but his friend, fellow aviator Laura Ingalls, who was the leading female spokesperson for the America First Committee, was subsequently convicted as a paid agent of the Nazi Government.[101]

The AFC was committed to opposing America’s entry into the war, and spread anti-Soviet, anti-British and isolationist propaganda among the American people. The AFC grew out of a student antiwar organization, led by R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., son of the first vice-president of the Quaker Oats Company. With Charles Lindbergh’s advice, Stuart sought the support of General Robert Wood, then Chairman of Sears Roebuck Prior to Pearl Harbor, and an apologist for Hitler. In 1940, the AFC was incorporated, and Wood became its first chairman. John Foster Dulles wrote the charter.[102] Funding was supplied from a few millionaires such as William H. Regnery, H. Smith Richardson of the Vick Chemical Company, publisher Joseph M. Patterson of the New York Daily News and his cousin, Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, a member of the SOSJ.[103] Its leading members included Henry Ford, and American physician, Dr. William Sohier Bryant, a member of the Shickshinny Knights and an associate of Brasol.[104]

Peaking at 800,000 paid members in 450 chapters, the AFC was one of the largest anti-war organizations in American history. Other celebrities supporting America First were novelist Sinclair Lewis, film producer Walt Disney, actress Lillian Gish and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The many student chapters included future celebrities, such as author Gore Vidal (as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy), and the future President Gerald Ford, at Yale Law School, future Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he was part of the Kennedy family, serving in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Future President John F. Kennedy contributed $100, along with a note saying, “What you all are doing is vital.”[105]

The AFC was also secretly financed by the Third Reich.[106] Werner C. von Clemm, later convicted of smuggling diamonds into the United States in collusion with the German High Command, served as an undercover strategist and financial supporter of the New York branch of the AFC. Frank B. Burch, who subsequently convicted of having received $10,000 from the Nazi Government for illegal propaganda services in the United States, was one of the founders of the Akron, Ohio, branch of the Committee.[107]

The FBI interrogated Friedrich Auhagen (1899 – 1952), a Columbia University lecturer and the leader of the American Fellowship Forum, who was later imprisoned for failing to register as a Nazi agent. According to Auhagen, the AFC was an agency of the German Government, designed to distribute its political material. Hoover concurred with this conclusion.[108] Auhagen started working for German intelligence shortly after Hitler came to power. In June 1947, Auhagen was deported to Germany. In Germany he was arrested for war crimes and tried in Nuremberg in August 1947. He was later released after a review showed he had no real connection with the previous National Socialist government. Auhagen’s American Fellowship Forum published Today’s Challenge, for which Lindbergh was a contributor.

In 1941, Lindbergh was hired Henry Ford’s son Edsel as a member of his executive staff. Edsel was on the board of American I.G. and General Aniline and Film throughout the 1930s. American I.G./Chemical Corp, a core part of what Charles Higham referred as the Fraternity behind the funding of the Nazis, was founded in 1929 by Edsel and Hermann Schmitz—the CEO of IG Farben and a board member of Bank for International Settlements (BIS)—along with his nephew, Max Ilgner, Walter Teagle of Standard Oil, and Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank. Following their meetings with Gerhardt Westrick at Dearborn in 1940, Edsel and his father refused to build aircraft engines for England and instead built the military trucks that were the backbone of Nazy army transportation. German Ford employee publications, as Higham noted, included such announcements as, “At the beginning of this year we vowed to give our best and utmost for final victory, in unshakable faithfulness to our Führer.” While Lindbergh took over as consultant, to ensure Ford interests in France following the German invasion, Edsel had them managed by Paris financier Maurice Dollfuss, who according to Higham, “was more than a mere Nazi collaborator working with Edsel Ford. He was a key link in The Fraternity’s operation in Europe, scheming with Pucheu, the Worms Bank, the Bank of France, the Chase, and the Bank for International Settlements.”[109]

Both Ingalls and Lindbergh were associated with Boris Brasol. Brasol’s most obvious links to Lindbergh were two Russian émigré aviators, Igor Sikorsky and Boris Sergievsky, both of whom shared Brasol’s monarchist and anti-Red convictions, and both of whom were close friends with Lindy.[110] According to a source of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), dated 1940, after Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932, in what American media called the “Crime of the Century,” it was Brasol who was “responsible for the French stories of the Lindbergh child ritual murder.” [111] Also in 1940, the ADL, reported that Brasol was “very close” with fellow Aufbau member, Thulist and source of Nazi occultism, Alfred Rosenberg.[112]

In September 1941, another ADL source reported that a link between Brasol and Lindbergh was Lawrence Dennis, “America’s No. 1 intellectual Fascist.”[113] Dennis was the son of a prominent White Atlanta lawyer and his mulatto mistress. By the age of five, he was preaching before large audiences in Atlanta, and was soon achieved fame around the country as “The Mulatto Boy Evangelist,” and taking his road show as far as England.[114] Dennis was later educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and then Harvard. The Nazis were impressed with his book on American Fascism and he was invited to Nuremberg to attend the 1936 Party Congress, where he met with Alfred Rosenberg and Ernst Hanfstaengl.[115]

In 1943, the NYEC changed its name again, to the National Economic Council. In the 1940s, Hart became briefly a target of Secretary of State Harold L. Ickes, who spoke of “fifth column” in the United States, and classified Hart as being part of the “native fascist minded group.”[116] According to Charles Higham in American Swastika, Hart met with representatives of Nasser’s Egypt while former SS officer Otto Skorzeny was “advising” the regime. After the war, he engineered the 1946 election of Joseph McCarthy.[117]

George Swastika Viereck

According to Carlson, Hart was “chummy” with George Sylvester Viereck, who worked on black propaganda during World War I with Aleister Crowley and the network connected to Kuhn Loeb, and was also a friend of Alfred Kinsey and Nikola Tesla.[118] Viereck was also a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.[119] In early 1923, Viereck conducted an interview with Hitler. When no newspaper considered the interview worthy of publication, he published it in his own journal, the American Monthly, where wrote: “If he lives, Hitler for better or for worse, is sure to make history.”[120] Viereck was eventually dubbed “Hitler’s prostitute” because of his role as Germany’s highest paid pro-Nazi propagandist.[121] Viereck’s grandfather Kaiser Wilhelm I had a son in the Gestapo, who Viereck used to get close to Heinrich Himmler, who wished for as a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy.[122] Viereck advised officials in the German Foreign Office, particularly Hans Dieckhoff, who was German ambassador to the United States in the mid-1930’s, and the German consul in New York City, on the state of American public opinion and the mood of Congress regarding Germany and the European situation.[123]

Viereck’s book, Spreading Germs of Hate (1930), a study of the propaganda of the major participants in World War I, became regarded as a classic on the subject, even receiving the praise of propaganda expert Harold Lasswell. In a subsequent work, The Strangest Friendship in History: Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House (1932), Viereck abandoned his long-standing hatred of Woodrow Wilson, finding him a genuine man of peace. His reading of Wilson's letters to Edward Mandell House, he said privately, had “completely revolutionized” his attitude. Another book, The Kaiser on Trial (1937), defended he leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom he visited annually for many years.[124]

In 1933, Viereck again met with Hitler, now Germany’s leader, in Berlin, and in 1934, he gave a speech to twenty thousand “Friends of the New Germany” at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in which he compared Hitler to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and told his audience to sympathize with National Socialism without being anti-Semites. “The meeting ended,” according to the Times, “with singing of the Horst Wessel Song, the official song of the National Socialists in Germany, shouts of ‘Heil, Hitler,’ and the Nazi salute for President Roosevelt and for President von Hindenberg of Germany.”[125] His Jewish friends denounced him as “George Swastika Viereck,” but he continued to promote National Socialism.[126]

Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Nazi government waged an extensive secret propaganda campaign to help the anti-interventionist cause, largely through the efforts of Viereck.[127] In his book Spreading Germs of Hate, which he wrote after the war, Viereck explained: “Every propagandist drapes himself in the flag. The objective of German propaganda was three-fold; to strengthen and replenish Germany; to weaken and harass Germany’s foes; and to keep America out of war.”[128] Viereck became a registered agent of the Nazi party, and was a member of Auhagen’s American Fellowship Forum.[129] In 1938, Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, began publishing a series of articles by Viereck, followed by reprinting sections of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.[130] Viereck later published American Monthly, on whose masthead was the motto: “America First and America Only.”[131]

Outside of Charles Lindbergh, Viereck was the most significant contact to Hans Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires of the German embassy in Washington, who acknowledged that the Nazis had “subsidized” Scribner’s Commentator and the Herald.[132] Lindbergh supported the efforts of Douglas Stewart and George Eggleston, to buy the Scribner’s magazine and convert it into an anti-interventionist mouthpiece called Scribner’s Commentator, designed to counter the propaganda of the liberal “Jewish-dominated” media. In 1941, Stewart and Eggleston started a new magazine called the Herald, more open in its Nazi views. Viereck received over a half million dollars from Thomsen to bribe, corrupt and undermine members of Congress and to distribute propaganda. Just before the Pearl Harbor attack, Thomsen was involved in a curious attempt by William Donovan, the United States Coordinator of Information, a predecessor of the OSS, to recruit him to the American side. Thomsen had been supplying information on Germans. These messages included various warnings that the Japanese Empire was compelled by its position to attack the United States. Donovan and Roosevelt were not sure what to make of this information. Just before the attack, Donovan offered Thomsen a million dollars in exchange for publicly distancing himself from the Nazis. Donovan’s efforts failed, and Thomsen returned to Germany at the end of the year as America entered the war.[133] In September 1944, John T. Flynn, a co-founder of the America First Committee, launched the “Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory” when he published a forty-six page booklet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor, which argued that officials in the US government had advanced knowledge of the attack.[134]

[1] Cameron McWhirter. Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC., 2011) p. 65.

[2] Miguel Hernandez. The Ku Klux Klan and Freemasonry in 1920s America (Routledge, 2019).

[3] Linda Gordon.  The Second Coming of the KKK (Liveright, 2017).

[4] Hernandez. The Ku Klux Klan and Freemasonry in 1920s America.

[5] Nancy McLean. Behind the Mask of Chivalry. The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 7-8.

[6] Linda Gordon.  The Second Coming of the KKK (Liveright, 2017).

[7] Dylan Matthews. “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time.” Vox (November 20, 2015).

[8] Wesley Moody. Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and the Civil War History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), p. 126.

[9] Dylan Matthews. “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist.”

[10] Nick Ragone. Presidents’ Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Extraordinary Executives, Colorful Campaigns, and White House Oddities (Potomac Books, Inc., 2008).

[11] Wyn Craig Wade. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 165.

[12] “REVEALED: 5 US Presidents Members Of Racist Cult Ku Klux Klan (PHOTOS).” The Trent (July 19, 2014).

[13] Sarah Churchwell. Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “the American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

[14] United States Congress House Committee on Rules. The Ku-Klux Klan: Hearings Before the Committee on Rules, House of Representatives, Sixty-seventh Congress, First Session (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921).

[15] Sarah Churchwell. “End of the American dream? The dark history of 'America first’.” The Guardian (April 21, 2018).

[16] Gordon. The Second Coming of the KKK.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Sarah Churchwell. “End of the American dream? The dark history of 'America first’.” The Guardian (April 21, 2018).

[19] Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” Part II, p. 700.

[20] “Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem.” www.osjknights.com (accessed January 26, 2017).

[21] “History since 1798.” Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. Retrieved from

http://www.theknightsofsaintjohn.com/History-After-Malta.htm

[22] Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 14.

[23] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, pp. 606-608.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Russ Bellant. The Coors Connection, (South End Press, 1988), p. 45.

[26] Levenda. The Hitler Legacy, p. 559 n. 9.

[27] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, pp. 606-608.

[28] Walter Laqueur. Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston: Little Brown, 1965), p. 31.

[29] Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

[30] Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism, p. 249.

[31] Brasol hearing, 32, FBI, File 100-15704, cited in Richard Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant: The Antisemitic Activities of Boris L’vovich Brasol, 1910-1960, Part II: White Russians, Nazis, and the Blue Lamoo.” Journal of Antisemitism (Vol 4 Issue #2 2012), p. 701.

[32] Ibid., p. 698.

[33] “Official Memorandum of the Danish Government” = Document 901-RF, printed in volume 38 (document volume) of the IMT on p. 600ff (citation from p. 606), quoted on the 49th day of the hearing (2 Feb. 1946) IMT volume 6, p. 551f.

[34] Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” Part II, p. 691.

[35] Ibid., p. 687.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Michael Sayers & Albert E. Kahn. Sabotage! The Secret War Against America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942).

[38] S.J. Rosenthal. “The Pioneer Fund Financier of Fascist Research.” American Behavioral Scientist, 1995, 39(1), pp. 44-61.

[39] “History since 1798.” Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. Retrieved from

http://www.theknightsofsaintjohn.com/History-After-Malta.htm

[40] “History since 1798.” Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. Retrieved from

http://www.theknightsofsaintjohn.com/History-After-Malta.htm

[41] “Founders and Former Directors.” Pioneer Fund. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20121130130929/http://www.pioneerfund.org/Founders.html

[42] R.W. May. “Genetics and Subversion.” The Nation (May 14, 1960), 190: 421.

[43] Jason McDonald. “Making the World Safe for Eugenics: The Eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin’s Encounters with American Internationalism.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Volume 12, Issue 3, July 2013), p. 383.

[44] Harry Bruinius. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Vintage Books, 2007).

[45] Paul A. Lombardo. Three generations, no imbeciles: eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (JHU Press, 2008), pp. 211–213.

[46] William H. Tucker. “A Closer Look at the Pioneer Fund: Response to Rushton.” Albany Law Review Vol. 66 (2003), p. 1146.

[47] Harry Laughlin. “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States.” Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago.

[48] Jason McDonald. “Making the World Safe for Eugenics: The Eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin’s Encounters with American Internationalism.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Volume 12, Issue 3 July 2013).

[49] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, pp. 606-608.

[50] Brasol hearing, 32, FBI, File 100-15704, cited in Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant.” p. 698.

[51] “This Fascist Racket.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (August 2, 1934).

[52] “The Curtain Rise.” Time (May 1, 1944).

[53] Brasol hearing, 32, FBI, File 100-15704.

[54] John L. Spivak. Shrine of the Silver Dollar (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940), p. 140.

[55] Hauptarchiv Reel 54, “Dietrich Eckart” folder no. 1311. Letter from Fleischhauer to Huttke, dated 7 April 1938. NSDAP Hauptarchiv Collection. Microfilm (Stanford, California: Hoover Institute).

[56] Michael Hagemeister. “The American Connection: Leslie Fry and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Kesarevo Kesarju: Scritti in onore di Cesare G. De Michelis (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2014).

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Philip Jenkins. Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

[60] Glen Jeansonne. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (University of Chicago Press, Jun. 9, 1997), p. 228.

[61] H. Lavine. Fifth Column in America (New York, 1940), p. 198; cited in Michael Hagemeister. “The American Connection: Leslie Fry and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Kesarevo Kesarju: Scritti in onore di Cesare G. De Michelis (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2014).

[62] Hagemeister. “The American Connection.”

[63] Philip Jenkins. Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)

[64] David Mark Chalmers. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Duke University Press, 1987) p. 322.

[65] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, p. 604-5.

[66] Glen Jeansonne. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 9.

[67] Carlson. Under Cover; Jenkins. Hoods and Shirts.

[68] House of Representatives Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, p. 1174

[69] Carlson. Under Cover.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Laura Rosenzweig. Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles (New York: NYU Press, 2017), p. 127.

[72] Testimony of Henry D. Allen, August 22, 1939, before the House of Un-American Activities Committee, p. 3994.

[73] Joseph Howard Tyson. Hitler’s Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Milieu (iUniverse, 2008), p. 400.

[74] Glen Jeansonne. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (University of Chicago Press, Jun. 9, 1997), p. 229.

[75] Jenkins. Hoods and Shirts.

[76] Carlson. Under Cover.

[77] Justin Raymond. “They Fought the Good Fight: The Legacy of the America First Committee.” AntiWar.com (July 25, 2001).

[78] Wayne Cole. America First - The Battle Against Intervention 1940-1941 (Read Books Ltd, 2016).

[79] Ralph Morris Goldman. The Future Catches Up: American Political Parties and Politics (Writers Club Press, 2012), p. 89.

[80] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, pg. 607.

[81] Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” Part II, p. 696.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ryan Shaffer. “Long Island Nazis: A Local Synthesis of Transnational Politics.” 21 (2). Journal of Long Island History (Spring 2010).

[84] Jenkins. Hoods and Shirts.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Penelope McMullen. “Popular Reaction to Ku Klux Klan Activity: Washington State, 1924 Elections.” Unpublished undergraduate Skidmore College paper, 1995. pp. 2-3.

[87] Trevor Griffey. “The Washington State Klan in the 1920s.” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project (http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_powell.htm)

[88] Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” Part II, p. 698.

[89] Jenkins. Hoods and Shirts.

[90] Albert E. Kahn and M. Sayers. The Plot against the Peace: A Warning to the Nation! 1st ed (New York: Dial Press, 1945), p. 196.

[91] Ezra Mendelsohn. Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume IX: Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas (Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1994), p. 219.

[92] William H. Tucker. The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 161.

[93] Sharlet. The Family, p. 124.

[94] Cary McWilliams. A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Transaction Publishers, 1949), p. 196; William W. Turner. Power on the Right (Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 165; Sharlet. The Family, p. 124.

[95] Ralph Morris Goldman. The Future Catches Up: American Political Parties and Politics (Writers Club Press, 2012), p. 89.

[96] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 118.

[97] Sharlet. The Family, p. 124.

[98] A. E.Kahn & M. Sayers. The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia. 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946), chap. XXIII.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Ibid.

[101] Sayers & Kahn. The Great Conspiracy, p. 365.

[102] Adam Miller is cited in Lee. The Beast Reawakens, p. 365.

[103] “History since 1798.” Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. Retrieved from

http://www.theknightsofsaintjohn.com/History-After-Malta.htm

[104] Richard Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant.” Part II, p. 684.

[105] Ken Burns. The Roosevelts: An Intimate Portrait. PBS documentary, 2014, pt. 6.

[106] Lee. The Beast Reawakens, p. 85.

[107] A. E. Kahn & M. Sayers. The Great Conspiracy.

[108] Charles Higham. American Swastika (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1985), pp. 14-15.

[109] Higham. Trading with the Enemy.

[110] Brasol hearing, 32, FBI, File 100-15704.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “Report on Boris Brasol.” (November 26, 1940), p. 2.

[113] Ibid.

[114] Justin Raimondo. “Tale of a ‘Seditionist’–The Lawrence Dennis Story.” AntiWar.com (Posted on April 28, 2000).

[115] Wallace. The American Axis.

[116] “Ickes Denounces ‘Appeasers’ Here.” New York Times (December 18, 1940). p. 30.

[117] Charles Higham. American Swastika (Doubleday, 1985).

[118] Carlson, Under Cover, pp, 457-460.

[119] Ibid. p. 60.

[120] George S. Viereck. “Hitler the German Explosive.” American Monthly (October 1923), pp. 235–238.

[121] Joseph P. Farrell. Reich of the Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons & the Cold War Allied Legend (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005), pp. 107-108.

[122] Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 130.

[123] Niel M. Johnson. “George Sylvester Viereck: Poet and Propagandist.” Books at Iowa, no.9, 1968, pp. 22-36. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17077/0006-7474.1312

[124]  Justus D. Doenecke. “Viereck, George Sylvester.” American National Biography Online (February, 2000). Retrieved from http://www.anb.org/articles/06/06-00673.html

[125] John Strausbaugh. Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers during World War II (Grand Central Publishing, 2018).

[126] Tom Reiss. The Orientalist. Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 288–289.

[127] Ibid.

[128] Carlson. Under Cover.

[129] Higham. American Swastika, p. 40.

[130] Carlson. Under Cover.

[131] Ibid.

[132] Wallace. The American Axis.

[133] Christof Mauch. The Shadow War Against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America’s Wartime Secret Intelligence Service. transl. Jeremiah Riemer (Columbia University Press, 2005). pp. 33–34.

[134] Charles Lutton. “Pearl Harbor: Fifty Years of Controversy.” Journal of Historical Review (Winter 1991–1992). 11 (4): 431–467.

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio