Prequel by Rachel Maddow

Author:Rachel Maddow [Maddow, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Henry Hoke with candidate Emily Taft Douglas, who defeated Representative Stephen Day, another ally of Viereck, in 1944

Hoke did not back down, even if both the letter itself and the decision to send it to his home address were meant to shake him. Henry Hoke would make no retraction, he told Herr Schmitz. He would in fact welcome the chance to present evidence in open court. “I refuse to be intimidated by you or by any other German controlled organization,” he wrote back. “You, and all the other Nazis who are abusing the privilege and hospitality of this free nation, are trying to dupe and dope the American Press and Public…. Americans resent your campaign to create fear and awe of German Might, a campaign which hides behind the protective skirts of our generous laws.”

Hoke kept up his private, personally funded investigation, only now he was starting to get some help in amassing evidence. After the publication of “War in the Mails,” other private citizens around the country started sending him samples of the Nazi propaganda they were receiving. One concerned German American sent Hoke twenty-five separate pieces of mail he had received, originating in different locations in Germany, in a single month. One thing that struck Hoke about the German propaganda campaign was the technical competence of Nazi copywriters. Each mailing was a simple, straightforward attack on a single subject: President Roosevelt’s war preparations, or the Jews, or the Catholics, or America’s licentious freedoms, or the British. Sometimes the mailings included messages from the newly formed isolationist group the America First Committee. Sometimes they included reprints of quotations by famous America Firsters, like Charles Lindbergh, who had just told a rally of forty thousand people at Chicago’s Soldier Field that it was time to make a deal with the new master of Europe, Adolf Hitler: “An agreement between us could maintain civilization and peace throughout the world as far into the future as we can see.”

Hoke kept going, publishing a series of stories throughout the summer of 1940 on the vast and growing propaganda campaign the German government was waging in America. He was still gathering receipts, and those receipts were starting to turn up links between the German government’s disinformation operation and powerful Americans who really ought to know better. Who maybe did know better. Congressman Jacob Thorkelson of Montana, Hoke found, and Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, honorary chair of the late Ernest Lundeen’s Islands for War Debts Committee, had both made isolationist speeches lifted straight from the German-authored Facts in Review.

Hoke’s appearance as a witness at the Dies Committee in the last week of August 1940 gave the direct mail expert a chance to present Congress with the evidence he’d gathered about the German propaganda campaign in America and to explain to legislators why they were going to have to come up with some kind of strategy to contend with it. Congress should perhaps reconsider the international Postal Union treaty, which obligated the United States to deliver anything sent from another country—including Germany—free of charge.

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