The Great Lawfare Event of 1944

2,103 words

Lawrence Dennis & Maximilian St. George
A Trial on Trial: The Great Sedition Trial of 1944
First published in 1945 by the National Civil Rights Committee
Torrence California: Institute for Historical Review, 1984

In 1944, when the Allies were on the cusp of winning the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration’s Justice Department put thirty people on trial for “sedition.” The trial was not justice. It was lawfare meant to suppress wise ideas masquerading as a public relations stunt. The story of this lawfare, and the people involved, still resonates eighty years after the trial’s conclusion. In many ways, the internationalist and anti-white system in place in the 1940s remains as strong today as then, but in some ways, there are significant changes.

The Victims of the Lawfare

The thirty on trial were unjustly prosecuted by a leftist US Justice Department attorney named O. John Rogge. His victims were: Joseph E. McWilliams, George E. Deatherage, William Dudley Pelley, James True, James Edward Smythe, Lawrence Dennis, Howard Victor Broenstrupp, Robert Edward Edmonson, E. J. Parker Sage, William Robert Lyman, Jr., Garland L. Alderman, Gerald B. Winrod, Elizabeth Dilling, Charles B. Hudson, Elmer J. Garner, George Sylvester Viereck, Prescott Freeze Dennett, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, Hermann Schwinn, Hans Diehel, Franz K. Ferenz, Ernest Frederick Elmhurst, Robert Noble, Ellis O. Jones, Eugene Nelson Sanctuary, David Baxter, Lois de Lafayette Washburn, Frank W. Clark, Peter Stahrenberg, and August Klapprutt.

More than two-thirds of the group were native born Anglo-Saxons or old-stock Americans. The rest were Germans who were sympathetic to both isolationism and Nazi Germany. Collectively they’d argued for an America First foreign policy and tended by be anti-Communist. All were wise to the Jewish Question. The defendants were tried under the Sedition Act of 1940. This act applied in peacetime, and it had a clause that one couldn’t encourage insubordination within the service, which according to the Justice Department, the defendants were attempting on a grand scale.

All were respectable citizens. Eugene Sanctuary and Lawrence Dennis had served in the military. Dennis had served in the infantry during World War I, and then served in the US State Department afterwards. Dennis also attempted a second enlistment – as a commissioned officer in the military police – during World War II. William Lyman was in the US Merchant Marine shipping supplies to England when he discovered he’d been indicted. George S. Viereck’s son, was killed in action while serving in the US Army in Italy. Prescott Dennett was distributing isolationist content as part of the ordinary wider political network of two congressmen.

Three had been convicted of offences prior to this trial. William Dudley Pelley and Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze were convicted of the Espionage Act of 1917. George Viereck had been convicted of a crime earlier also. He’d been a registered agent of the German Government prior to the war, and after America entered the conflict, was tripped up in a process crime – a “your papers are out of order” sort of thing.

William Dudley Pelley and George Viereck had a considerable nationwide following before the trial, but most had small, albeit nationwide and dedicated audiences, or were mostly engaged in local affairs. None had the prominence of any mainstream politician of the time. All were engaged in constitutionally protected speech. Lawrence Dennis and his lawyer Maximilian St. George published a book about the trial after its conclusion.

“The biggest single idea of the [1944 Sedition] Trial,” writes Dennis and St. George, “was that of linking Nazism with isolationism, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism. The fallacy of the identification in each instance is obvious to the informed and thinking person. American isolationism was born with George Washington’s Farewell Address, not with anything the Nazis ever penned. As for anti-Semitism, it has flourished since the dawn of Jewish history. It is as old and widespread as the Jews. The only large areas where anti-Semitism does not exist are areas in which Jews are not found.” (p. 34)

Those Calling for the Lawfare

The prosecutor for the trial was representing a vengeful constituency comprising three parts. The first part consisted of leftists who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union or simply anti-fascist liberals who acted as International Communism’s useful idiot supporters. The second was the Organized Jewish Community. The Anti-Defamation League had sent infiltrators and spies into anti-war, anti-communist organizations prior to World War II and had handed over the illicitly gathered information to America’s semi-competent Praetorian Guard, the FBI. Jews had also done everything possible to maneuver the US government into the Second World War prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The final group is the most significant. They were Anglo-Saxon internationalists and progressives. (Anglo-Saxons here being Anglos, Celts, Scandinavians, Germanics, and related peoples who’d coalesced, more-or-less, into a single people in the United States after the Civil War.) This group was acting on a genuine group evolutionary strategy which, at the time, was two sided.

The men and women on trial represented the first group evolutionary strategy – avoid Jews, malignant social ideas like communism, and avoid overseas military commitments. The second strategy was internationalism, which was a policy presumed to be led by Anglo-Saxons and for Anglo-Saxons with other peoples uplifted in some way.

This second strategy had some overlap with the first in that it was first propagated by Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalists like Josiah Strong in the 1880s. However, Strong’s “Social Gospel” had a logic which led to an ever-expanding progressive internationalism which created a mob of voters who disliked sin but liked American internationalism and global government schemes such as the League of Nations. During World War II, this group was inspired by the book One World (1943), written by Wendell Willkie. They also were inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s idealism. Other internationalists were Vice President Henry Wallace, who supported the prosecution from his official position throughout the trial, and people like Alger Hiss.

This internationalism also contained the negatives of Anglo-American culture. Included in it was Negro Worship, the plantation economic system, and the naive belief that setting up a Parliament of Man would civilize dangerous tribes rather than empower them with modern weaponry gained through international trade connections. Probably the last genuine Anglo-Saxon internationalist of this stripe was President George H.W. Bush, who got America involved in a pointless deployment in Somalia after being voted out of office in 1992.

The Trial

The Trial was held in Washington D.C. and started on April 17, 1944. The Prosecutor’s opening statement was long, filled with moralizing over “Nazism,” and it bored the jury. Dennis and St. George wrote:

Periodically, throughout his opening statement, Rogge would refer to the law and the charge in the indictment and then go off again on a tangent of argument and interpretation revolving around the Nazi movement in Germany. (p. 172)

The opening statement and its lack of evidence continued throughout the trial, which went on until late November. “The evidence provided no surprises, thrills, sensations or even newsworthy material. Therefore, the press gradually dropped the Trial and stopped covering it, with the exception of some two or three reporters who remained to the end.” (p. 294) The most sensational event, if there was one, was when the government’s witness, Henry D. Allen, who was a member of Pelley’s Silver Shirts, and was therefore a hostile witness for the prosecution, broke down on the witness stand when describing an Antifa attack on his son. During this episode, and his daughters – two beautiful young women – ran to comfort him.

Henry D. Allen’s daughters comfort him during the trial. This was the most shocking moment of the trial. (AI image)

The scene helped the defendants. Dennis and St. George wrote:

“Seldom does a criminal trial furnish a scene as poignant and affecting. It was as spontaneous as it was theatrical. Rogge had asked for it by putting such a witness on the stand. And he got it. The defense could never have found as good a witness to justify or excuse the violent anti-communist and anti-Semitic utterances of certain defendants as the government obligingly put on the stand in Henry D. Allen.” (p. 334)

Another government witness was Henry Hoke, who wrote several sensationalist books about domestic “Nazis.” However, his evidence, such as it was, turned out to be non-existent when subjected to cross-examination. Indeed, the idea of a worldwide “Nazi conspiracy” was bunk. Dennis and St. George write:

“In the given state of the known evidence, it was impossible to prove that the Nazis ever formed a world conspiracy to Nazify the world by means of causing insubordination in the armed forces; and it was equally impossible to prove that any of the defendants were members of the Nazi party. ” (p. 303)

Most of the thirty defendants didn’t know each other before the trial. Some of the defendants represented themselves, but most had hired lawyers. Some of the lawyers were working pro bono so the trial only occurred after lunch and ran until 6 PM so the pro bono lawyers could make a living in the morning doing work that paid. As the trial progressed, the defense lawyers become a team which ran circles around the humorless prosecutor and judge. The affair ended in a mistrial when the judge died.

A Modern Look

Although the largest pressure group driving the government’s repression of the thirty America First defendants, was internationalist old-stock Americans, it is certain that Jewish pressure was critical in bringing about the lawfare. Additionally, had the case been tried in a different venue, it would have gone a different way. Dennis and St. George write:

“The government case was as unnatural and as lacking in human appeal as the Marxist dialectic. And it was tried not on a Union Square, Bronx or Brooklyn jury, but on an average southern middle class jury. To win easy convictions, the government should have staged the Trial in the Bronx or on the East Side of Manhattan and packed the jury venire with only readers of New Masses, P.M., The New York Evening Post or the B’nai B’rith’s Messenger.” (p. 347)

The authors also show that William Dudley Pelley’s earlier conviction for “espionage” was based on what would be called today, “junk science.” A New Deal supporter, social scientist Harold D. Lasswell, had served as a critical expert witness for the prosecution during Pelley’s trail. Lasswell compared fourteen points of Pelley’s writings to fourteen points of genuine Nazi propaganda and claimed these points were related and thus Pelley was a Nazi spy.

Dennis and St. George looked over the information and determined that the overlap between Nazi statements and Pelley’s statements didn’t matter. Catholics, Methodists, and Moslems could easily be shown to have common beliefs consisting of fourteen points but still have vastly different overall theological ideas. Furthermore, most of what Pelley and the Nazis were saying was factually true – such as the fact that the British Empire was on the edge of collapse in the 1940s.

The Jewess propagandist Rachel Maddow did mention the case on her show in 2022. Maddow was attempting to tie the America First defendants of 1944 to modern Right-wing activists, arguing that current Rightists are “subversives” seeking to give this-or-that away to “the Russians.” Maddow is correct in that America First ideas remain valuable, for Israel certainly isn’t a country worth defending. However, it is curious why a Jew would care about subversion. All serious subversion efforts and espionage are due to Jews. This includes the mostly Jewish New Left which did everything to undermine American military operations during the Vietnam War, and Jewish espionage which gave atomic secrets to the Soviets in the late 1940s. The Jew Jonathan Pollard passed classified information to Israel in 1987, and America’s “greatest ally” in the region passed that on to the Soviets. Creating a push to root out subversives will certainly net a coincidence of Jews.

The America First defendants represented a large cross section of American whites. It wasn’t the usual Yankees verses Jews arguing over something, like the meaning of alleged UFO abductions or immigration restrictions. Their prosecutors were also not Jewish. Indeed Rogge, was from a Plattdeutsch immigrant family who were sympathetic to FDR’s leftism. His background and beliefs were very similar to Walter Reuther, who was a major supporter of the Democratic Party twenty years later. Harold Lasswell’s ancestry can be traced back to colonial Virginia. In the eighty years since the case was adjudicated, similar unjust trials against white advocates have occurred, but the prosecutors and judges are usually sub-Saharans or Jews. In the eighty years since the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, more old-stock Americans have come around to the point of view of the “seditionist” defendants, however this has not manifested in political power or the dominant social narrative – yet.