Special episode: Rachel Maddow in conversation with Steven J. Ross, author of 'The Secret War Against Hate

Hey, thanks for joining us. I am very excited to share this with you. I recently got to sit down with one of my favorite people, someone from whom I have learned a ton and who has become a real friend. So much of what I have written about and podcasted about and talked about in the news over the last few years about fighting fascism here in America, so much of that stuff that I have learned, I have learned from a man named Stephen J. Ross. Stephen J. Ross was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his incredible, just shocking book, Hitler in Los Angeles. And now he's got a new book, which is just as jaw-dropping as that one. The new book is called The Secret War Against Hate, American Resistance to Anti-Semitism and White Supremacy. Resistance is the key word. I devoured this book. It picks up right at the end of World War II and goes through this incredible period in U.S. history that's very poorly understood. Stephen J. Ross, thank you so much for joining us. Stephen J. Ross is an incredible historian. More than that, he is an incredible storyteller. He joined me live in front of a live audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Oh, I'm so excited. I'm very excited to be here. Um, okay. So I'm gonna read you a tiny little squib from Stephen's book, and then I'm gonna, say a couple of things, and then Stephen and I are going to talk, and then we're gonna take your questions. So there's no surprises. The Second American Civil War began on the evening of October 20th, 1945. As millions of veterans came back from World War II, Ku Klux Klan leaders sounded a battle cry to preserve their beloved white Protestant nation from its many enemies. Fifty-five-year-old obstetrician and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Samuel Green warned Atlanta's returning warriors, white supremacy is threatened. America, he said, is calling every white man who has red blood into the fight. Samuel Green, who proudly supported a Hitler-style mustache, renewed the fight for racial purity that balmy October night in Georgia. He did so by holding the region's first major cross-burning since Pearl Harbor. Again, this was 1945. Patriotic Klansmen had halted cross-burnings during the war, Green explained, because it was necessary, he said, that all factions unite to win the war. But that night in October 1945, Klansmen signaled the start of a new domestic war by lighting a gigantic fiery cross that would be used to fight the war. The war was a war that would be used to stretch 300 yards across the top of Stone Mountain, Georgia, and could be seen 60 miles away. To ensure that no disruptions would occur, Green asked an Atlanta policeman and loyal Klan enforcer, John Nash, and his fellow Klansmen-slash-cops to guide traffic and preserve order. That day, 300 men, many of them wearing their U.S. Army uniforms, paid their ten-dollar initiative to fight the war. The war was a war that would be used to fight the war. Posing as a sympathetic Klansman. As he watched the cross burning atop Stone Mountain, Stetson Kennedy worried that a new race war was brewing. A national war that would, as it had in 1861, pit American against American. Kennedy, the Southern journalist, would do all he could to stop that from happening. And thus starts the drama. In Stephen Ross's new book, Everybody has heard of the Klan. But it turns out that the Klan is part of a big, unhappy, very dysfunctional family. The Klan has lots of siblings and lots of inbred cousins and lots of unloved and neglected children. And they are groups whose names you might have heard once, or maybe you've never heard them, but you definitely never remembered them all. Um, the National States Rights Party. Not to be confused with the States Rights Voters League. Not to be confused with the National Socialist League. Not to be confused with the National Socialist Party of America. Not to be confused with the National Socialist White People's Party. Not to be confused with the White American Nationalist Party. Not to be confused with the Christian Nationalist Party, the American National Party, the National Renaissance Party, the American Nazi Party, the America First Party, the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, which is not at all what you think. The National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination. That was a real subtle one. The National Gentile League, the United White Party, the White Party of America, the Columbians, the National Alliance. I could go on and on and on and on. But the point is, part of the reason the far right has been a little bit hard to grasp in our time, a little hard to get our heads around, despite its very consequential recent ascendance, is because I believe the proper nouns associated with it, for the most part, are very forgettable. They mean nothing to us. The how did we get here history of the far, far right in America really is a musical chair set of unfamous characters and lookalike uniforms and insignias. two things. Number one, to unite with each other, to defeat what Steve calls their too-many-fuhrers problem, to unite with each other, to unite under one leader, and number two, to ascend to real political power. Which means, yes, it took a long while, but they are having a good few years right now. Maybe their best ever. The secret war against hate is about that movement, how we got it, how it took root and then failed, how it grew and then failed, how it metastasized and then failed again, all leading up to what it is right now. Happily, it is also the story of the shockingly effective, controversial, and mostly forgotten tactics that have been used against them. Used against them by some very tough leaders. Very brave Americans who came up with this strategy against these groups on their own and who again and again risked their lives for it. These are Americans whose names might otherwise be lost to history without Stephen J. Ross to tell us their stories and to show us what they did. Please join me in welcoming to the stage my friend, distinguished professor of history at the University of Southern California, Stephen J. Ross. Thank you very much, Dr. J. Ross, and thank you for having me on the show today. Well, that was a nice introduction. And I just want to say before we start, I don't want you to be nervous. Every Monday, you look into a camera, there are no people. And now you have 900 people here. Why do you think that's the case? Why do you think I just changed my glasses? Damn it. Because now you're an invisible blob. If you're further away than my wrist, you're gone. Steve, did I get anything wrong in that summation of your argument? No. No. We think of the. Some people think about the Klan in its iteration in the 1920s. I think a lot of people think about the Klan in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some people think of it in terms of Reconstruction. I don't think that most Americans think of the immediate post-World War II years as being a huge high point for the Klan. What happened that night in October 1945 with that huge cross-burning? What was going on there? Many of the men and some women who went to fight in World War II went to fight as patriots, but they did not sign up because they wanted to fight for democracy against fascism and Nazism. They weren't trying to defeat the Klan. They weren't trying to defeat Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini. They went to fight because Japan bombed us. And if you're a good old boy, and the good old boys we're talking about here are the 11 Confederate states across the Southwest up to California. And they went to war claiming they were patriots. And when they came back, they felt they were betrayed by Congress, by what they were doing. They were insulted and offended by what they call President Rosenfeld. And they came back, and I call them the betrayed generation. And what they said is, and here's what I would say for all of you, if you think this is a kind of clown show that's lasted all these decades, you're really wrong. They are dedicated Americans up to right now who believe they were betrayed by our government. Why were they betrayed? Because while they were fighting at war, the government made it easier for Jews and blacks to compete for housing and jobs. And they came back, and they discovered black people were moving into their neighborhoods. Black people were taking their jobs. And they said, before the war, we had no trouble with Jews and blacks because they knew their place. But now they've come back from war. They're demanding all these things, and everything has been turned upside down. And we are going to restore the nation to what it was founded upon as a white Christian nation. You focus on what you call four godfathers of white supremacy. I think of the four, George Lincoln Rockwell from the American Nazi Party is probably the only one who counts as famous, the only one people might have heard of. But you really land on this guy, Jesse B. Stoner, or J.B. Stoner. J.B. Stoner, describing him as having the largest impact on American white supremacy of anybody of multiple generations in the 20th century. Can you explain who Stoner was and why he's so important to understand? Right. Well, I have the far right from 1945 to today has had many different leaders. And one could have written books about a whole bunch of them. But the four people I chose to write about, Jesse B. Stoner is one of them. Emery Burke, the head of the New York Nazi Party, post-war party, founded in New York City in 1949, James Madol, and then Rockwell. These were unusual people because they all knew each other. They were all rivals, and yet they all worked together from 1945 until their death, all of them. And Jesse B. Stoner, at the age of 18, grew up in Tennessee. He suffered polio as a young man. He actually wrote to German doctors before the war asking if they could fix his leg. And they promised that, yes, once they conquer America, they will come over and fix his leg. And he was at 18 the youngest Klan Kliegel, which is the organizer for the state of Tennessee. And while he was a young man, he was going to a place called Atlanta. At the same time the Klan was reviving, there was a group that was even further to the right than the Klan called the Columbians. And the Columbians were saying their leader, Emery Burke, said, I am going to finish the job that Hitler began, but I'm going to do it with much more modern techniques. I'm going to exterminate every Jew in America, and I'm going to send every black man, woman, and child to Africa. And he said, I'm going to do it with much more modern techniques. So you're accusing him, you're a coward, you're this. You've got to be part Jewish and part black. And he just kept Adam and Adam. And finally, the attorney general wheeled around and punched him out, knocked him out, knocked him down on the floor. And when Emery Burke got it back up and said to the judge, did you see that? Did you see that? The judge said, I must have looked away at that. Tell me about the spying operations, particularly by the non-sectarian anti-Nazi League, a group that doesn't exist anymore, but maybe could stood to be revived. We could stand to have a non-sectarian anti-Nazi League in America these days. What were their tactics against groups like the National Renaissance Party, but also the Colombians? Yeah. Well, Stetson Kennedy was born in Florida. As I write in the book, he was born at the wrong time to the wrong family and the wrong people. His family had been Confederate leaders. And his uncle was one of the Klan leaders in Florida, very well known. And Stetson Kennedy was too small to be drafted, but all his friends were drafted. And he said, I've got to do something. They're all dodging bullets. Well, I'm willing to dodge Klan bullets. And so he took himself from Florida to Georgia, where he enrolled in the Klan. He enrolled in the Klan under a fictitious name, related saying that he was the nephew of this famous Klan leader. And he then met James Sheldon from the non-sectarian anti-Nazi League, who also asked him, will you work for us? And he would go to Klan meetings. And later he went to the Colombian meetings. He joined the Colombians as well. And in weekly reports, he would write down after every meeting, he would go back to his room. And he's a journalist. He was writing articles under the name Stetson Kennedy. But no, he never had a picture taken. So no one knew who Kennedy was. And eventually he writes to Sheldon in New York saying, look, I just went on a run, a ammunition run with one of our, the meanest person I've ever met in my life, who would cut your throat as soon as look at you. And they've now bought dynamite as well as rifles. And they are planning to blow up the Southern Baptist Convention. And we need to do something. And he said, you've got to send in agents, because this is getting serious now. This isn't, you know, for some of you out there who think, well, these right-wing groups, maybe they're Keystone cops. A few of them, you know, a few members were, but they were dead, literally deadly serious. Two spies, Mario Buzzi and Rene Fruchtbaum. Oh, Rene Fruchtbaum. Rene Fruchtbaum. So good. And they came down to meet with the Colombian leaders. And they said, look, we are organizing the Italian fascists in New York City. And we want to make a alliance with you because you are preaching the same message as we are. Get rid of Jews and blacks. And we'd like to partner with you. And the Colombians were in. They were ecstatic that they could now have a stronghold in Jewdom America. You may not know, but New York City was Jewdom America. And Rene walks in and she says, well, I'm an independently wealthy New Yorker, and I'm bored with everything. So I've come down to help you, too. And I see your headquarters or your files. They're a mess. They're just a mess. You know what? I've done secretarial work. I'll get all your files organized. And so for the next three nights, she went in after everyone went home. And she did. She got all the files organized. And when they came back, they said, oh, wow, this is unbelievable. Everything's in order. It's filed right. What they didn't know, and this is right out of James Bond, is every night she would pull out her cigarette lighter, which was a camera. And she photographed over 200 of the documents. And when she wrote, actually, she called Sheldon from Atlanta, told her what she had, and he said, get back here immediately. They went back to New York. She said, my mother's ill, went back. They processed the 200 pages. And then they sent it to the attorney general, assistant attorney general. And that evidence was enough to basically get rid of the charter of the Colombians, who had been chartered as an educational institution. And the two leaders, Loomis and Burke, were sent to jail. And that was the end of the Colombians. The sort of knock-on effect, the ripple effect on the far right of those operations against them being so effective, does it undermine their effectiveness, their ability to work together, their ability to plan long-term? It seems to drive a real schismatic and sort of purge-driven internal discipline that was very unhealthy for those groups in the long run, just to have had them infiltrated successfully in some key cases. Yeah, and word would get out. Word would get out. All three groups were sending spies down. And here's one of the few things that actually got the proverbial hair on the back of my neck to stand up, was in May 1945, May 8th, by the way, is VE Day, victory in Europe, and my birthday. Well, actually, it's significant. My parents were both Holocaust survivors. And imagine, they went from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen to Salzwedel, my father from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, and eventually to Dachau. And four years to the day after the war, they gave birth to a child that they never thought they'd have. In May, the first week of May, right before the war ended, the three offices of the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Nazi League were in midtown Manhattan, literally just a few blocks from one another. And I came across the three memos they wrote exactly the same week. And the three memos said the same exact thing, which is, we can defeat any one group, even the Ku Klux Klan. But what we really are afraid of is one day, all these scattered far-right groups are going to find out a way to communicate instantaneously. And once they're able to do that, we don't know if we can stop them. And our second great fear is that some of these people from these far, far-right groups are going to make their way into one of the two mainstream parties and take these far-right ideas and move them from the margins. To the mainstream. And then every American will be in trouble. But these people felt they had to do something, the three groups. And the men and women who went to spy for them, who were almost all Christian, and even though they were spying, they knew they were spying for Jewish groups. They never felt they were working for the Jews. They were working for America. Because they argued in America, it's not okay for another American to kill an American because of their religion. Their race, religion, their ethnicity, or their immigration status. Steve, I want to ask you about violence and the tactical role of violence for these guys. How many bombings do you think J.B. Stoner, Jesse Stoner, was involved in in the South? Close to 100. Jesse B. Stoner was the leading bomb expert in the South. He was known as the mastermind. He would help groups, tell them how to make bombs. He would actually go to local communities, and on the back of a truck, he would give them instructions on how to make bombs. There was, I think between 54 and 59, there were something like 80 bombs that went off around the South. And they would bomb synagogues. They would bomb churches, black churches. They would bomb the homes of ministers. There was, I think between 54 and 59, there was something like 80 bombs that went off around the South. And Jesse B. Stoner, when the National States Rights Party started, said, we are the only ones who can stop the bombing. You got to vote for us, because we can actually stop it. What he didn't say is, well, we're the ones doing the bombings. So yeah, we know how to stop all the bombings. And Stoner would outlive the three other, as I call them, godfathers of white supremacy. And on his deathbed in, I think it's 2002, he was asked by a reporter, do you regret anything you've ever done? And he said, imagine. should never regret anything when he knows that everything he has done is right. When you talk about these guys running for office, it's jarring because immediately you always go to the fact that they didn't get many votes, they didn't win. But it's also weird that they were running because they were explicitly anti-democracy. In the very influential National Renaissance Bulletin, the newsletter of the National Renaissance Party here in New York, you describe it having on its masthead a quote from Hitler denigrating democracy. And these guys are all very much in favor of an authoritarian type of government that would get rid of any of what we understand is the protections of our republic. What I was interested in, though, is that they're anti-democracy almost on a religious level. It's not that they just wanted a whites-only democracy. They call themselves patriots. They wrap themselves up in the flag. They say they're super Americans. Their stupid party names have American and patriotic in them. But they're not talking about the American form of government just reserved for us. They want to abolish democracy and instead have an authoritarian leader. Why is that? Because democracy is a political system for weaklings. This is what they argued, that democracy was a system that had too many others in it, and that it is who built Western civilization. It was white. White Anglo-Saxon Christians. And what we need is an autocracy. What we need, you know, not dissimilar to Lenin on the left, who wanted, you know, his 10th, you know, the top 10 percent would be running the Russian government. People like James Madol and the National Renaissance Party, Jesse B. Stoner, when they got into office, they basically wanted to undermine democracy, abolish democracy, and put in authoritarianism. Authoritarian leaders who would raise the standard of our government, that we not be weaklings anymore. And also, they were in favor of what we now call trad wives. So that the Colombians, for example, said if they get into power, because they promised in 1946. So here's what you also have to make. We haven't talked about this. 1946, Atlanta. They are marching down Peach Hill. They're marching down Peach Hill. Street, the main street in Atlanta, in Nazi uniforms. They made their own Nazi uniforms in the style of Hitler's SS. And they were marching down those streets. And they wanted true manhood again. And what they said is when we get into power, no woman can ever have a divorce. No woman can ever wear makeup. And women should be at home taking care of the children. That is their job. And to support their men. I have that in my notes as the Taliban issue. I'm going to ask one last question, and then we have audience questions. And this is a little bit of a thought experiment. But you're very clear-eyed, I think, and very forthcoming about the limitations of these groups. The blood-curdling aims that they had, but also their inability to put themselves in power. I'm going to ask one last question, and then we'll put it together to get as far down the road as they wanted to. Had these groups had high-level validation from the highest levels of the United States government, if they had, these groups had had that kind of validation and sort of ideological endorsement from the highest levels of the U.S. government, would that have supercharged their capabilities? Would that have made them more dangerous? Absolutely. And you referred to something in your introductory remarks, which is what I called the too-many-fuhrer problem. The reason that we didn't see these groups unite is in large part because every one of these groups, and there were literally hundreds of them, and in the 1960s, James Sheldon estimated that there were roughly 10 million people in America who either belonged to those groups or were not. And he said, well, we don't know. We don't know. those groups or subscribe to their newsletters, their newspapers, whatever, 10 million. And the reason they never really united is because they kept calling for fascist unity. They had meetings, Washington, D.C., 1968, the Congress of Racial something or other, where they were all calling for unity. And they all wanted one head, but no one was willing to not be the Führer. Every one of them wanted a fascist front, but they wanted to be the Führer. And what changed all that was 2016, when they found one man they could all unite around. And they finally had a single Führer who in 2017, after Charlottesville, said, They're a group of fascists. They're good people on both sides. Now, I try to be an objective historian. I try to put my own prejudices aside. But here's what I want to tell you. If you're a fascist, you're not a good person. There were no good people on the other side there, period. Striking that the Charlottesville event that we can all imagine, the tiki torches and all that, the name of that event was Unite the Right. That's it. It was yet another attempt. Yeah. All right. Audience questions. You're all not only very, very good looking, you're very, very smart. And these are very, very good questions. What do you think is the most successful argument against the modern right and white supremacy for the younger generation? I find it difficult to argue against those who don't deeply understand the rights, bigotry, and the harm they're causing. It's a good question. I wish I had a full answer. I simply would ask, what kind of nation do you want to live in? What kind of country do you want? Do you want to support a group? One of the things I learned in writing this book is one of the things that these far-right groups, and particularly the militia movement, which really gets started in this country, after all these groups realized that they can't get Jews and blacks out of America, they either can't kill them or Jesse B. Stoner once offered, black people, if you leave and we are in government, we're going to give every black family $10,000 and a Cadillac if they go to Africa. These groups, all believe the militia movement, the core belief was Christian identity, which proclaims that Jews are not the chosen people, that Anglo-Saxons are the chosen people, that Jews are the offspring of Satan and Eve. And to kill a Jew is to do their unborn children a favor because their children will never be baptized and so they'll go to hell. And black people, they're not even people, they're mud people, as well as other people of color. And therefore, to kill a mud person is not to kill a human being, and to kill a Jew is to do them a favor. So I would ask young people, what do you think about that idea? Because that's what many of these far-right people are saying, and they also want an end to democracy. Do you have any friends who are of color or are not Christian? Do you want to see them either being deported or killed? Because that's what these groups are still arguing for in the militia groups. And before I came here a few days ago, I googled Christian identity churches and Christian identity militia, and they're still all over the country. This is not dead. This is not dead. And I would simply ask young people, what kind of nation do you want? I think the solution is to talk about really obscure history stuff on cable news all the time. See if it catches on. This is a very good question, and I'm just going to preface it with another quote from your book. You quote a reporter named Albert Deutsch in 1946, who's writing at the time about the Colombians. The Colombians are in Nazi uniforms in Atlanta, 1946 into 1947. By 1947, they're getting punched out in court. But this is Deutsch in 1946. There are great numbers of young men like these. Poor moorings and no anchorage, who feel like outcasts, who feel that they have nothing to look forward to, whose natural craving for adventure is not socially directed into constructive channels, who have been poisoned by regional and national prejudices, who don't feel that they belong, who wish desperately to latch on to something concrete with the colorful overtones that youth yearns for. These men, he concluded, were, quote, duck soup. For fascist demagogues. Put that in mind. One of our audience members asks, is there a common psychological trend that defines or binds together fascism? far-right hate groups? Well, amongst the men, it is a feeling that white men have been ignored in this country, that a lot of these people who joined, the young men who joined, felt that they had missed out on World War II. They had missed out. Here's the irony. They missed out serving their country. They missed out on both serving their country as patriots, and they missed out on the excitement, what they thought was the excitement of war. And they loved the idea of being able to carry weapons, beat up the enemy, even if the enemy was domestic. And also, they found themselves, not unlike this present generation, having a hard time finding jobs. And many of them, in the next decade, as the government began really starting to do some civil rights activism, they said, why is the government doing all this for Black people, and we're not getting anything? And this would go on for decades. It went on again after the Vietnam War. It was going on, I think, today, why we're seeing all these militias, all these young men who are going around. You know, the Proud Boys like to say, we like to get tanked up on beer, and then go out and beat the shit out of everyone. It gives us great pleasure. It makes them feel that they've done something. And again, what is really important is they see themselves as patriots. And if you don't understand that, then it's never going to end, because somehow we have to reach youth of America to make them understand that hate is not patriotic. Killing is not patriotic. Steve Ross, thank you for enlightening us. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you all for coming tonight. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you very, very much.