Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

In 1938, Henry Allen, a key member of the Silver Shirts and the organizer of the paramilitary organization The American White Guard, rained down propaganda from the rooftops of San Diego, along with three other companions. All four men were arrested, thanks to a tip from an informant. Allen remained in custody, but the other three were released. One of them, Charles Slocombe, contacted Allen’s wife, who informed Slocombe that Allen had an important briefcase that Slocombe needed to retrieve.

The next day, Slocombe traveled back to San Diego with his boss, Leon Lewis. Slocombe was in fact a spy working on Lewis’s behalf. The son of Jewish-German immigrants, Lewis started his career as a lawyer for the Anti-Defamation League. During his time there, he worked to counter the efforts of Henry Ford, a prominent businessman and antisemite who used his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to publish antisemitic screeds every week for two years. These papers were distributed to all his dealerships and placed in Model Ts. Ford enshrined his writings as a four-volume series of books and had it translated into 12 international editions. Maddow asserts that Ford’s crusade constituted “the most prolific, most sustained published attack on Jews the world had ever known” (82).