Rachel Maddow and Mike Yarvitz on ULTRA and PREQUEL
"The origin story usually brings you someplace even crazier than the insane character who attracted you to the story in the first place."
Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES! A couple months ago, as I was devouring the latest season of her hit podcast ULTRA, I texted Rachel Maddow to see if she’d be game to wonk out about the research into ULTRA and its related #1 New York Times Best Seller, PREQUEL, as befits the conceit of this column. No Trump talk. No cable-news jibber jabber. Just archives and FBI files and arcane texts and the like. Not only did this sound like Rachel’s idea of interview heaven, but she suggested we rope in her fellow document hound and longtime narrative partner-in-crime Mike Yarvitz. So the three of us hopped on a Zoom for the fascination-filled gab sesh that follows…
Usually I do these interviews about a single book, or sometimes a single podcast. Whereas in this case, we’re talking about a story that’s told through two seasons of a podcast and its related book—about the threat of American fascism in the lead up to and aftermath of the Second World War.
RACHEL: The basic idea is to tell what I think is mostly a forgotten history about the ultra right in America, and its surprising ties to stuff that we thought all Americans were united against, like, say, Nazis. [It covers] the Nazi propaganda agent who worked with a surprisingly large number of members of Congress in the lead up to World War II; the Great Sedition Trial that the Justice Department brought during World War II to put on trial Americans who were accused of working with the Nazis; and then the Americans who tried to help the surviving Nazis at the end of World War II—both in terms of the war crimes trials of various levels and stripes immediately after the war, but also by promoting and trying to rehabilitate Nazism in the United States—and their surprising ties to people with electoral power. So it's a real sunshine and bluebirds kind of story.
And a relatively obscure story before you pulled it all together. How did you discover it?
RACHEL: I’m not sure that I totally remember the chronology, but I know that we were talking about the origins of Holocaust denial in the United States, and we were thinking about the overlap between the beyond-the-pale extremists and electoral politics.
MIKE: We got really interested in a guy named Willis Carto who surfaces at the end of ULTRA season two. We've done now ULTRA season one and two, and actually the stuff that we were most interested in at the beginning I think was the stuff that ended up in season two. And so it was Francis Parker Yockey and Willis Carto and these guys who were at the roots of Holocaust denial and antisemitism in the U.S. And I think the chronology of it was, we started looking into those guys and what they were involved with. And then we came upon the story of Ernest Lundeen, this sitting U.S. senator who was tied up with a Nazi agent, and we got super interested in that, and that led us towards the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. And so we zeroed in on the story that we tell in season one, of members of Congress who got very close to Nazi agents. It's this kind of history that has largely been forgotten.
RACHEL: And for me, that's a prototypical origin story for how we end up telling a story that most people don't know. This is true for MSNBC. This is true for most of my books. This is true for both seasons of this podcast. You find someone in a story, whether it's contemporary politics or in history, who seems unbelievable. And then you try to figure out, how did this seemingly unbelievable person come to be? The origin story usually brings you someplace even crazier than the insane character who attracted you to the story in the first place.
Had you already heard of some of these characters, or were you literally kind of discovering them with your jaws on the floor?
RACHEL: I definitely knew about Charles Coughlin, for example, but I didn't know about the Christian Front. I knew there had been sedition prosecutions during World War II, but I didn't know that there had been thirty people put on trial all at once. I knew there had been the America First Committee, and everybody knows Charles Lindbergh, everybody's read THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, Philip Roth's novel about all that stuff. But I had no idea there were so many active members of Congress involved in it, and that those members of Congress ended up implicated in the Great Sedition Trial, and with this Nazi agent.
Who are some characters you’d never heard of beforehand?
RACHEL: George Sylvester Viereck, the Nazi agent who has all these members of Congress working for him. I mean, his story alone, every bit of it, is so insane. He was an agent for the Germans during World War I, and part of the reason we know that is he wrote a tell all book about his time as a German agent during World War I, and it involves these insane stories about him, like, leaving a briefcase on the elevated train on Sixth Avenue while he was being tailed by federal agents. And in the briefcase were all the details about all the people who are being paid off by the German government to secretly support them and keep the U.S. out of World War I. That's the pre-history of him. That's before you even get to the stuff where he's got two dozen members of Congress on the payroll while he's the highest paid Nazi agent in the United States. He is the pioneer of gay vampire fiction. He did one of the most famous interviews ever with Adolf Hitler. He was a terrible poet and playwright who nevertheless was very famous for both of those things in his life. And when you find George Sylvester Viereck’s papers, when you go to the archives and go through his files, you have to get through all the naked stuff, because all of these guys were such creeps.
MIKE: Just to jump in, to your point about, how are these stories that aren't just known: How is it not known that a sitting U.S. senator died in a plane crash with a speech in his pocket written by a Nazi agent? How is that just not a thing that we know about?
When did the research begin in earnest?
RACHEL: I think 2020. But we thought we were going to do one podcast, one season that was going to cover 1940 to 2020. But then it was like, no, you're going to do one season that covers 1940 to 1944, and then you're going to pick back up in 1946 and cover that maybe to 1960. But each of your podcast episodes is going to have to be an hour long in order to get there.
Give me an overview of the sources that went into this, from court records, to archives at libraries and universities, to newspapers, books, whatever else.
RACHEL: We kind of split it up. I'm definitely the librarian. I'm the one who's always mailing out random copies of books from the 1940s to everybody on the team. We split the online archives and FBI files. Obviously FBI files are a very rich source for us. This is a DOJ-heavy investigation in both cases. And then there's the physical archives out in the world, at Stanford and the University of Iowa. The University of Maryland.
MIKE: The University of Wyoming, to look through all of Senator Lester Hunt's papers. Stanford University had the Lawrence Dennis and H. Keith Thompson papers. H. Keith Thompson was a sort of contemporary of Francis Yockey who was wrapped up in this world of the ultra-right.
RACHEL: And luckily a pack rat.
MIKE: We took a trip to Columbia University to have a look at some materials related to the National Renaissance Party. It's all a combination of books that have been written on the subject, FBI files that are voluminous, and then these physical archives that give us material that, in many cases, has never been published.
What was some of the most obscure material you uncovered? Like, crazy research breakthroughs?
RACHEL: I have two that I want to mention. One of them was totally central to the story, and it just was something that we didn't know we were going to find until physically it was there, which was in Lester Hunt's papers. So, in ULTRA season two, there's these two senators who are at loggerheads. One of them is very famous, Joe McCarthy. The other one is Lester Hunt of Wyoming. And Lester Hunt is repulsed by Joe McCarthy in every possible way, but they're also very different personalities. And while McCarthy is just an attack dog, Lester Hunt is not confrontational. He's the polar opposite. We knew McCarthy was wrong about something that the Nazis did during World War II. He essentially perpetrated a hoax in which he tried to say that this group of Nazi war criminals, they were innocent and they were the real victims, and it was terrible Jews in the U.S. Army who victimized them. And Lester Hunt knew that he was wrong, but we didn't have very much in the record to reflect the fact that Lester Hunt knew that McCarthy was making this stuff up. You could sort of tell through circumstantial evidence, but you couldn't see it in the transcripts of the hearings, because Hunt just wasn't a confrontational, yell-at-him kind of guy. And then in Lester Hunt's files, there is his own printed copy of the report that Joe McCarthy wrote on this fricking Nazi hoax! And throughout it, in pencil, in Lester Hunt's own hand, is his rebuttal to basically everything McCarthy said that was wrong, showing not only that he objected, but that he angrily objected. That, to me, was kind of the ultimate fact check.
And what was the other thing?
RACHEL: In those H. Keith Thompson files—he's Yockey’s, like, patron and friend and contemporary, and involved in all of Yockey’s Nazi stuff, and in the middle of it, there is a commendation, like a certificate for H. Keith Thompson from the Republican Party. Signed by Ronald Reagan. Because it turns out that in addition to all the other things he was, H. Keith Thompson was a very prolific donor to Republican causes. So he got named to this stupid donor's recognition thing, and in the middle of all of his, like, legit Nazi stuff is his certificate from Reagan!
MIKE: Going back to Lester Hunt, the thing that became clear to me as I sat there for a couple of days just sort of going through his Senate papers, what was kind of eye-opening and enlightening was just to see, through the course of his years in the Senate, how activated he became on the issue of Joe McCarthy and the danger that McCarthy posed to the Republic. Towards the beginning, there are constituents writing to him about Joe McCarthy, and he's never really engaging with it. And then you kind of jump towards the end and you see him very much focused on the danger that McCarthy poses, and how he's so disappointed with his Republican colleagues in the Senate for their inability to stand up to McCarthy.
What material was the most difficult to get your hands on? Like, did you have to fight with the FBI about accessing anything?
RACHEL: I mean, unsuccessfully, yeah. One of the things that was chilling was, Francis Parker Yockey's been dead since 1960, and there are whole swaths of files on him that are still redacted. And I don't think it's laziness. Given how aggressively he was wanted by the U.S. government, and for how long, and what he was involved in, it freaks me out a little bit to know what might still need to be redacted in there.
MIKE: We have an outstanding FOIA request into the CIA for any additional material they have on Yockey. So, CIA, if you're listening…
RACHEL: One other thing that we didn't get—somebody reached out to me whose elderly father had written an undergraduate thesis at Harvard, in the immediate post-war years that had covered a bunch of the characters in PREQUEL and season one of ULTRA. And one of the people who he spoke to for his undergraduate honors thesis, who kind of advised him on it and helped him with it, was John Rogge, who was the hero of season one. And he noted in his undergraduate thesis that Rogge was working on a manuscript about the Great Sedition Trial. And I was like, did he ever share with you the manuscript? And he didn't. And we've seen Rogge’s files and archives and it doesn't seem to be anywhere. Whatever manuscript he was working on, as far as I know, is still out there.
I had the good fortune, Rachel, of actually being inside your home office when you were in the weeds with the research for season one, and I guess also for PREQUEL. I remember it being this sort of organized chaos—stacks of folders on the floor and whiteboards and stuff.
RACHEL: You mean, how I'm going to die, which is by being crushed by a falling tower of paper? I am a paper-based life form, and when it comes to a research project, it makes for lots and lots and lots of paper files, which usually start off on the floor, and then they grow into stacks tall enough that they start falling over, and then they need to be put in some sort of lateral situation. And lots of books. And then whiteboards—very, very deeply abused whiteboards, where I'm always writing things that I think I only need to remember for a second, but then they get circled and walled off and they can't be erased. And then you need a new whiteboard.
Can you quantify the voluminous-ness of the material you both accrued? Like, tens of thousands of pages? Dozens of boxes? It would fill a small office floor to ceiling?
RACHEL: Our notes documents alone are probably more than a thousand pages, easy. Maybe a couple thousand. I've basically built a good-sized library of just written material on this stuff. I mean, many, many, many linear feet of material
MIKE: It also becomes a little problematic sometimes. I think both of our significant others at some point have had the experience of seeing some swastika book in the mail and saying, How many books on Nazis do you actually need?
It’s often the case that research from one project leads to some idea for a next project. Is that the case here? Is there anything you discovered that could become an entirely new podcast or book in its own right?
RACHEL: Oh, it's such a can of worms. This is the problem with Mike and me—there's a lot of ideas. I mean, I think we only just sort of got to the stuff that made us originally interested in this topic in the first place. The question is, whether or not we continue in this vein. We certainly have some other branches off of this that we're kind of obsessed with. There's something that happens at the 1944 Democratic National Convention, these two amazing things happen that have now been forgotten. One is that Hitler is almost assassinated, and the conventioneers learn about this assassination plot and it's this incredibly electrifying thing. Does this mean it's the end of the war? What does this mean in terms of FDR and a fourth term and all this stuff? The German who foils the assassination plot against Hitler then has a whole American next chapter of his life involving the American ultra right and a lot of craziness.
Are you sure you want to give these ideas away??
Aaaaa! Also in 1944, the conventioneers at the DNC are being flyered on their way into the venue, by the mother of an American who at that moment is in jail in Great Britain for spying for the Nazis. And he goes on to have an incredible next chapter in the American ultra right. It’s something I'm completely obsessed with and that I bombard Mike about.
Sounds like you have your next couple of seasons and another book or two lined up.
RACHEL: There ya go.
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(Photos courtesy of Rachel Maddow / Mike Yarvitz / the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University / Wikimedia Commons)