Rachel Maddow publicizes Philip Johnson’s fascist activity

Prequel: An American Struggle Towards Fascism | Rachel Maddow | Penguin Random Home | $32

“Each younger man needs to be allowed to make one massive mistake.” In 1957, Blanchette Rockefeller, MoMA president and partner of John D. Rockefeller III, emphasised this maxim to MoMA’s board of trustees after the gaggle convened to debate if they need to admit a brand new member. The “younger man” in query was Philip Johnson, and the “mistake” he made wasn’t singular per se, however relatively a protracted listing of actions that made Johnson an essential actor within the prewar U.S. fascist motion. Johnson takes middle stage in Prequel: An American Struggle Towards Fascism, Emmy Award–successful MSNBC correspondent Rachel Maddow’s New York Occasions #1 Finest Vendor, printed final October. 

Touring Nazi-occupied Poland in 1939 with SS officers, attending a 1939 Hitler rally in Nuremberg, actively spying for the Nazis, designing a stage for the fascist radio persona Father Coughlin, and translating texts about Nazi political financial system into English over a 20-year interval have been just some of Philip Johnson’s so-called “errors.” Blanchette Rockefeller herself had good cause to scrub Johnson’s arms: All through World Battle II, the Rockefellers laundered cash for the Nazis by way of their Chase Nationwide Financial institution workplace in Vichy, France, facilitating commerce agreements for the fascists with full impunity, as described by Michael Parenti in Blackshirts and Reds. 

Whether or not or not Johnson’s rap sheet is forgivable is a subjective alternative, aware about the reader’s personal ideological proclivity. Prequel’s first chapter, “The Man within the Glass Home,” borrows its title from Mark Lamster’s ebook, and focuses on Johnson who stays a continuing character throughout the remainder of the ebook. Maddow affords an unsentimental takedown of Johnson and the far-right circles he ran in. As its title suggests, Prequel makes an attempt to make connections between the U.S. earlier than World Battle II and right now, as fascists across the globe win elections. Maddow makes clear allusions to right now’s plutocrats in the USA, clearly rendering the similarities they bear to yesteryear’s fascist cohort: “America’s Hitler” Lawrence Dennis, automotive large/anti-Semitic media mogul Henry Ford, Louisiana demagogue Huey Lengthy, and others. 

The ebook resulted from Maddow’s podcast, Extremely, that charts the rise of latest fascism. Following the opening chapter about Johnson, subsequent ones reveal a matrix of capital, concepts, and assets, and the way every moved between figureheads. Collectively, these chapters present simply how deep fascism penetrated authorities and society at-large earlier than World Battle II, and the way it was thwarted. Thus, the ebook might be concurrently learn as a playbook for confronting the modern tides of far-right wing zealotry.

Provided that Philip Johnson’s legacy has come beneath hearth, largely by activists demanding that MoMA take away his identify from the museum, Rachel Maddow’s new ebook affords essential insights. In Prequel, Maddow portrays Philip Johnson as a fascist first and an architect second; the ebook makes solely scant reference to his design contributions. Readers could stroll away from Prequel with the opinion that Johnson was a belief fund child from a WASP household in Ohio with an excessive amount of time on his arms in his twenties who selected to make use of his privilege for evil. Maddow describes intimately Philip Johnson’s plans to “curate and fund American fashion fascism” by vignettes like when Johnson informed a Jewish staffer at MoMA that he could be “primary on his listing for elimination within the coming revolution.” 

In Prequel, Maddow renders Johnson’s affinity for Lawrence Dennis, a Phillips Exeter grad that went on to develop into what many have referred to as “America’s Hitler.” She describes how Johnson and Alan Blackburn, an previous Harvard roommate, drove right down to Louisiana to assist the demagogue Huey Long term for president. She stated at one level, Johnson’s personal private assistant, Ruth Merrill, informed FBI investigators that Johnson himself aspired to develop into “America’s Hitler.” She cites an essay Johnson wrote, “Are We a Dying Individuals?” in a German-funded journal printed within the U.S. that Maddow described as “a thinly-veiled name to cleanse America of Blacks, Irish, jap Europeans, and naturally Jews.”

Maddow additionally alludes to a 1940 article by a celebrated columnist, Dorothy Thompson, who referred to as Lawrence Dennis and his protégé Johnson the “Tweedledee” and “Tweedledum” of American fascism, respectively. “Seldom instantly, however by consciously directed indirection, their enterprise is … to penetrate excessive locations—facilities of political affect and financial energy—attain the so-called realists and convert them to the concept that democracy wants appreciable streamlining, self-discipline, and authority, and that the financial pursuits of the USA, its welfare and its peace, can greatest be served by collaborating with the Germans,” Thompson wrote. 

Johnson’s function in Prequel ends within the Nineteen Fifties simply after his FBI investigation concluded. It doesn’t go into his later relationships with the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, a buddy of the tyrannical Senator Joseph McCarthy, or a younger developer Donald Trump. “Trump is mad and fantastic!” Johnson informed an interviewer for The New York Occasions in 1984 after designing for him an unbuilt mission in Manhattan referred to as Trump Fort.

For basic readers, Prequel’s findings could also be jarring; imagery that seems within the ebook like of Hitler Youth camps in suburban New Jersey circa 1934 isn’t a fairly sight. However for a lot of architects, Johnson’s function comes as no shock, particularly after Mark Lamster, Joan Ockman, and the Johnson Examine Group have made clear the prolific architect’s politics. In that sense, nothing Maddow presents about Johnson is new. 

What’s new is the sheer quantity of people that will now hear this message, given Maddow’s prowess and celeb. Upon its launch final October, Prequel was primary on The New York Occasions Finest Vendor Record, and it’s anticipated to promote a whole bunch of hundreds of copies. With Maddow’s viewers, this accomplishment makes the details about Johnson that a lot tougher to disregard.