What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You (and probably didn’t know)
January 14, 2024
Dr. Roger Ray
These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485
I was born in 1956, just 11 years after the end of World War II. So, the adults who filled my childhood days had all grown up in the midst of that global war. Oddly enough, mentions of that world war were few. It was a profound and horrifying nightmare that all of the adults knew about but the adults in my world elected to only speak of it rarely and only then in hushed and somber tones, usually beyond the hearing of children.
My father fought in the South Pacific where everyone he went into basic training with died during the course of the war. During the war, my mother was a part of a huge typing pool among the thousands of other Congressional secretaries in Washington, D.C. After the war, my father was hospitalized in a mental ward of Bethesda Hospital and it was during that time that mutual friends introduced my mother to my father. They were married in a park in Washington, and soon came back to Kentucky to raise a family. My father went to work for the Rural Electrification Association, building the electrical grid in the rural south, and my mother became our church’s secretary.
My father’s nerves never got a lot better. He stuttered a lot, had occasional night terrors, and sometimes had to have surgery to remove bits of exploded shrapnel buried in his body. He even had a few relapses of malaria, but he never told war stories. And I suppose that I should be grateful for that.
They had experienced a lot during the war years but they came back to their hillbilly roots with all of the racial prejudice, anti-semitism, and even Anti-Catholic feelings they had been raised with, but thankfully, they rarely brought any of that up. There were some embarrassing things said when schools and city parks and pools were integrated and some genuinely stupid things said about the Kennedy family, but they mostly avoided passing that stuff on to their kids.
But when I got married in 1976, I married into another southern family. My father-in-law was a different kind of war veteran. He had been an airplane mechanic stationed in Europe. He told war stories all of the time. He was proud of his military service and attended all of the reunions and veterans events that he possibly could. And boy howdy, they were racist, and anti-Semitic, and Anti-Catholic, and Anti-immigrant, anti-communist, and anti-Democratic, and very very very devout Christians who believed that they were members of the only true church. They were not fond of me, but they would sometimes audibly console themselves with the fact that at least their daughter had married a white man.
Holiday visits were hard for me to take and one year I couldn’t take the combination of war stories and racism anymore and I asked him, “Why did you fight against the Nazis since you agree so passionately with their beliefs?” It was a sincere question. From what little I knew about the Nazis and what I knew way too much about my in-laws, the whole Mississippi tribe, they would have fit right in, in Nazi Germany.
But from that unpleasant conversation, the last time I visited my in-laws, until just the last few years, I never thought again about the roots of fascism in Americans.
I assumed that the racism in my own family and among my in-laws was purely a product of their lack of education and their own feelings of inferiority and I never tried to understand it any deeper than that.
I had some real holes in my own education. In undergraduate school I studied Greek philosophy. I tested out of all of the basic history courses and never had to sit in a classroom and be exposed to much information about modern history. In grad school, I studied biblical history, theology, church history, and even with three degrees and a dozen years of classroom education, my knowledge of early 20th century world history could have fit in a thimble and still had room to rattle around.
My awareness of American history really didn’t begin until this century when I had a chance opportunity to hear the American historian, Howard Zinn, speak at Missouri State University. I devoured his book, A People’s History of the United States, and I had subsequent opportunities to hear him and spend time in conversation with him when I was a fellow at Harvard, and later when I was teaching at Drury University. When I started the little progressive church where I have worked these past 16 years, our first adult class was a 9 month long study of Zinn’s work because I wanted the whole congregation to be aware of the truth about Christopher Columbus, the genocide of the Native Americans, about child labor, poverty, women’s rights, civil rights, and our nation’s history of racism, sexism, classism, and American nationalism.
I realized that my public school education in history had been what my old friend, Joe McAdoo, used to call, “a home on the range” version of history, “where ner’e is heard a discouraging word.” The book I am picturing here with Zinn’s book, is a more flatfooted attempt at demythologizing the lies we were told in school that tended to foster our belief that Americans were always the good guys.
I think that “lies” may be too strong of a term. I suspect that my teachers were not so much lying to me as they were simply repeating the version of history that they had been taught. I don’t have too much room to complain about that since I spent the first 15 years of my life in ministry repeating myths that I had been told, even long after I had been to graduate school and knew how much balloon juice the church was filled with. In 2008 I emptied an entire file cabinet of my early sermons into a dumpster so that no evidence would remain of my history of perpetuating myths.
When you look behind the cheap, two dimensional, stage props of the religion and national history we were taught, you can discover some very disappointing things about the rise of the American empire and the firm establishment of white, male, hetero privilege.
Just a decade ago, one of our listeners turned me onto another important chapter of American history when he suggested that I read General Smedley Butler’s book, War is a Racket. If you are a regular listener, you will have heard me mention him and this short book several times.
Robert DeNiro played a character based on Smedley Butler in the recent movie, Amsterdam, but even though I would recommend the movie to you, it was at least 90% fiction, but it preserved at least the kernel of truth about the fact that corporate billionaires tried to raise an army of veterans to overthrow the American government during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and they tried to get Smedly Butler to lead that army. Instead, Butler cleverly led them along, gathering names and information until he was ready to expose the plot to the American Congress where, though the plot was foiled, not a single billionaire was indicted, tried, or imprisoned. . . . because, well, America.
The movie rather whitewashes the whole of the story of fascism in America and that is what I am wanting to highlight today. It turns out that it wasn’t just my family and my in-laws who harbored Nazi styled prejudices, and it certainly wasn’t just the uneducated who promoted Hitler’s agenda in America. In fact, many of the leaders were Harvard grads with otherwise important and influential careers.
We have mostly only been exposed to the tiniest tip of the iceberg of this sad dimension of our history and that is why we are so easily being seduced right back into it.
For example, many of us are aware that Henry Ford was antisemitic and that he kept a picture of Adolph Hitler, whom he admired, in his office, but not many of us would have known that Hitler kept a picture of Henry Ford in his office and credited Ford with being his inspiration for his campaign against the Jews in Europe.
It turns out that my young adult quandary about why my parents and my in-laws seemed to be so proud of the American victory in WW II while holding so many of the beliefs of the Nazi movement in Germany was not such a rare issue. It turns out that the Nazi influence in America and America’s influence on the Nazi movement had a lot of cross pollination.
I am going to recommend one more book to you this morning and while the three previously mentioned are very important and they were certainly seminal to my own awakening to a more honest view of American history, I’m going to say that as hard as it is to let the facts in this book into our skulls, it is well researched, well written, and absolutely vital information.
In Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” she carefully describes how America’s post-Civil War racial apartheid, inspired the racism behind Germany’s antisemitic laws that led up to the holocaust. It is over 300 pages long and I have to admit that I have not been able to skim it for highlights. This is a book that demands to be read, one word at a time. If you can’t see yourself doing that in the very near future, then I encourage you to listen to a series of podcasts that Rachel Maddow has out that includes most of the research for this book. Go to iTunes or whatever podcast provider you use and search for “Ultra.” Seriously, please make a note of it and listen to or read this material soon.
I always read, pen in hand, highlighting, underlining, or putting stars in the margin of important passages. My normal habits of marking up a book have been irrelevant in this case because I end up highlighting almost everything. I wish that I had a photographic memory. It is all important to our current political environment. This is not a history lesson, it is a detailed example of how church going, patriotic Americans can be seduced into supporting a totalitarian dictator because the dictator exploits our latent racism and fear.
In the past few years, most of us have frequently wondered aloud how we could be going backwards so quickly? We have used the word “unprecedented” constantly to describe the moral outrages that have fallen on us like hammers on an anvil, turning a blind eye to political leaders who are guilty of rape, theft, of taking bribes, and undermining democracy, of legitimizing sexism, even to the point of overturning Roe v Wade, and making it a crime to seek legal reproductive care in other states or other countries. Well, what we need to know is that it has happened before and that this slide into fascism has many more supporters among us than we ever would have suspected even a decade ago.
Remember when America elected its first black president? Yeah, me too. But that America does not appear to exist anymore and what has taken its place should be horrifying to all of us.
Maddow talks about Father Charles Coughlin, a violently antisemitic priest who had a radio show that drew an audience of more than 100 million, more than anyone before or since, who insisted that what was being done to the Jews in Germany was justified and that we should be doing the same in America. He organized an armed militia that had a serious plan to overthrow the American government.
She tells us about the famous female pilot, second only to Emilia Earhart in fame and popularity, a relative of the famous author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura Ingalls, the pilot, actually flew over the Whitehouse and dropped fascist pamphlets all over the property.
It was just that there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in America, it is also true that Nazis learned a lot about how to be Nazis from America. Hitler sent Heinrich Krieger, a German lawyer, to Fayetteville, Arkansas to study American law to learn how, with a constitution that clearly forbid racial discrimination and institutionalized equality, that Americans were managing to pass and enforce Jim Crow laws, legalizing segregation and turning a blind eye to lynching.
Krieger reported to Hitler on how, even after the Spanish-American War, when the US took possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines, that we still refused to give the brown people who lived there the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to white citizens. Krieger paid special attention to the laws that made it possible to reduce the population of native Americans from tens of millions to a few hundred thousand, taking their property and confining them to reservations.
Krieger spent two years in Arkansas and returned to Germany to help write the laws that took citizenship and property away from German Jews, leading up to the holocaust.
In spite of our history of genocide against Native Americans, our enslavement, and later segregation with all of its lynching and economic oppression of black people, and our slow acceptance of women’s rights, inter-racial marriage, and gay rights, America didn’t slide into fascism early in the 20th century but this image of a fascist rally held in Madison Square Garden in 1939 should demonstrate that we certainly could have and we came way too close to a violent overthrow of the American government when Franklin Roosevelt was in office.
Three years ago, inspired by the fascist rhetoric of Donald Trump, thousands stormed the Capitol building and tried to overthrow a free and fair election, which could have resulted in installing Trump as a dictator for life. I cannot imagine that out of some fear of right wing reprisal, Trump was not impeached and imprisoned three years ago but not only has he and many other legislators and gullible citizens been allowed to avoid prosecution, Trump now stands on the threshold of re-election, in spite of the horrifying similarities between him and Hitler and other fascist dictators.
Men and women, it is not hyperbole to say that the presidential election to be held later this year may very well be the last American election if Trump is re-elected and if we do not purge our senate and our congress of members who have tried to make the January 6th insurrection a part of our normal political process.
I understand that churches don’t want to turn their Sunday services into political rallies or discussions of current events. I recognize that almost all religious people instinctively want to hunker down and work on personal piety, moral improvement in themselves and their families, but most churches were silent about slavery in the 19th century but we only talk about the religious leaders who stood for liberation.
Most churches in my childhood were silent about segregated schools, neighborhoods, toilets and even drinking fountains…. They were silent about the war in Vietnam and the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. But we only remember and praise the religious leaders who went against that silence, kicking at the darkness.
I have lost a lot of friends through the years, loudly asking in ministers’ meetings, “Do you really believe that Jesus was crucified for being a moderate?”
