the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt one)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Even in the United States, proto-Fascist movements were flaunting their presence. Twenty thousand Americans of German descent joined the German-American Bund and went to summer camps for military drill in brown storm-trooper uniforms. The group staged mass rallies at Madison Square Garden and elsewhere modeled on those of the Nazis. The great majority of Italian-American newspapers and organizations were enthusiastic backers of Mussolini, and several hundred young Italian Americans sailed for the home country to volunteer for his army. In Atlanta alone, 20,000 whites joined the Order of the Black Shirts, also known as the American Fascisti, which terrorized people of color. Meanwhile, 16 million Americans, most of them non-Catholics, listened to the “radio priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin, a fist-shaking anti-Semitic orator with a voice of gold. “He could carry an audience, rub their emotions raw and juggle them at will,” wrote one reporter who watched him address a huge crowd ringed by young male followers in uniforms and puttees. “His voice was a clear tenor with an operatic ring, there was a pent-up savagery in each of his sentences which he punctuated with his arm like the downward thrust of a stiletto.” Although Coughlin had started off on the left, as the 1930s went on he found ever more to admire in Hitler and Mussolini, and attacked President Roosevelt for being in thrall to both Jewish Communists and Jewish bankers.