(I wrote this essay last summer in the hopes of placing it in the PR lead up to pub day for The War Begins in Paris. We never found a great spot for it and, since I hate the idea of filing it away unpublished, and I really like how it turned out, let’s put it here on the blog.)

The whole year before the Unite the Right white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, I had reported on the 2016 presidential election. As a journalist, I’d been heckled at Trump campaign rallies; called a liar; called a traitor; been slandered as an elitist. In the press pit, I set up next to Fox News reporters who, off-camera, lamented to each other how dangerous the politics of grievance Trump was activating could be, but who would then turn around and pump oxygen into the campaign from that same event. Outside other political rallies, I’d seen street teams of demonstrating young men with Nazi haircuts and stormtrooper button-downs who had bought into the fantasy of white nationalism. 

For several years already, by that time, I’d been reading about the history of American fascists, in the early days of what would become a novel, seeing that nationalism and neofascism were on the rise globally in the last decade. 

What happened in Charlottesville shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it was. Seeing men wave Nazi and fascist flags that included iconography dreamed up by Goebbels and Mussolini, to hear them chant Blood and Soil and other Antisemitic slogans, seeing the spiral into violence. What we were going to face had become obvious enough. A turning point had arrived. The nationalist shock troops were on the ground.

How devastating to see these symbols being so blatantly trumpeted in the homeland. Even for someone who grew up in the Nineties, when separatist and nationalist groups were certainly in the zeitgeist, this still felt different. In the Nineties the phenomena felt regional—the Michigan militia, the Oklahoma City bombing, whatever was going on up in Montana—but this movement was marching through Thomas Jefferson’s college town. It wasn’t new, exactly, and maybe that’s why it felt so threatening. What happened in Charlottesville demonstrated that an old threat, something we thought was dead, had been revived. This was a usually dormant but long-present thread of American life. 

There have always been plenty of authoritarians here at home, specifically close to my home. Omaha’s longest serving mayor, Jim Dahlman, was the leader of a movement called “Fascisti in America” in the mid-1920s and wore a ceremonial black coat as the group’s “grand lictor.” Dahlman wanted to provide the group—founded as an alternative to the Ku Klux Klan, but with religious tolerance for Catholics—with a toehold in the Midwest. It didn’t take. But a decade later, one of the German American Bund’s paramilitary training camps was built just south of Omaha, so it didn’t go away either. There have long been plenty of right-wing nuts on the Plains, but these were legit Fifth Column types. 

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the descendants of these folks (by relation or otherwise) still abound.

At home, in 2017, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville played out in a different, but still chaotic way. I shouldn’t say at home when what I mean is how this played out on Facebook. 

The entire Trump presidential run had made for many awkward family gatherings. I live in Nebraska and have more political diversity among my family and friends than probably most people in the country do, certainly more than my friends on either coast. Over and over, in 2016, my wife had conversations with her Silicon Valley coworkers who expressed grave doubt that anyone would buy into what Donald Trump was selling. Even for us, living in the Blue Dot in a deep red region, the schtick was hard to take seriously. A politics of grievance can always be attractive, though. We saw more than a few friends go from traditional Bush Republican to silent Trump supporter. That’s why Charlottesville was such a shock. Not that there were neo-Nazis and hate groups active in the US. Not that these groups had been gaining steam in the decade prior and saw the election of Donald Trump as validation of their worldview. I understood that. But it was surprising that almost every one of the staid, conservative Republicans I knew went along with this as well. When they saw what was happening in Charlottesville that weekend, they took the side of the Blut-und-Boden-shouting skinheads, the ones who marched (ridiculously) with tiki-torches like angry villagers.

I lost more friends that day than at any other time in my life. I couldn’t understand it. How could these people I had been close to see an angry neofascist mob cosplay a pogrom, see Nazi tropes dredged up from the dustbin of history, and then sympathize with the fascists?

Charlottesville doesn’t just represent a rupture that has taken place in this country, it represents that rupture in a personal way for so many of us. I could delete Facebook, I could block whomever I needed to, but curating my feed couldn’t erase what had been said and done. And it didn’t change anything for all those people who were still out there muttering “on both sides, on both sides.”

But I knew too that the response to Charlottesville was a moral necessity. 

Richard Spencer got jacked in the jaw. Many of those nationalists went to jail. Many lost their jobs when the videos of them marching with swastika flags went viral. They had to go back into hiding. Trump’s ham-handed response (whether he meant to normalize the movement or not) was met with fierce outrage. He wasted a massive amount of political capital and spoiled any honeymoon he might have had as a new president. Sure, there were many who swallowed the line that there were “very fine people on both sides” (and in a way that would prepare them to swallow bigger lies later about “sightseers in the Capitol” on January 6, 2021). But the lesson to me was that democratic resistance could work, especially when there were frontline journalists there to tell the story in intellectually honest, compelling ways. 

I knew then that I wanted to write a novel that would help people appreciate the importance of democracy, and, specifically, the importance of the Fourth Estate. So I set out to do just that. 

While reading into the historical record of American journalists during the World Wars, I came across a Harper’s article by William L. Shirer about a group of people he called “the radio traitors.” His writing is equal parts straight reporting and what becomes an elegiac memoir about these old friends of his that he’d lost forever because they went fascist. That’s the piece that really got me going on this novel, the part that hit home, especially after seeing what happened in Charlottesville (and on Facebook) in 2017. I saw that the novel I was writing should be about friendship and community and belonging, and how we hold on to these things, or don’t, in the face of a monumental crisis of politics and humanity. 

It was in that Shirer article that I first heard the story of Jane Anderson, an American journalist who ended up doing radio propaganda work for the Nazis. I saw at once that Jane could be the vehicle for the novel I wanted to write.

Jane Anderson was an Atlanta debutante who became a pioneering female war correspondent in her early twenties as she reported from trenches, biplanes, and submarines, while writing for the London Daily Mail during the First World War. However, Jane Anderson is not famous because she was a contemporary of trailblazers like Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson—Jane Anderson is now mostly known as one of those “Radio Traitors” Shirer wrote about, that group of American journalists who broadcast propaganda into the United States on behalf of the Nazi regime. More or less, Jane could have been remembered fondly, like her friends West and Thompson, except Jane turned fascist.

Anderson is the kind of minor historical figure who is perfect for the internet age. Notorious, once-famous, once-glamorous, with few existing photographs except ones that exhibit her youthful glamor—but not much else is known about her aside from her political rot and her notorious alcoholism. (Sort of like an erstwhile Rudy Giuliani, if Giuliani had once been a beauty queen.) There’s enough online about Jane Anderson to pique the interest of amateur historians, with enough gaps to ignite the imagination of conspiracy theorists.

Jane’s historical record is fuzzy through much of the 1930s. It’s believed that she was all but washed up, trying to do research for a novel about prostitution in the Parisian underworld, possibly working as a hired woman herself, until she ended up so addicted to drugs that she had to be rescued by an order of Carmelite nuns. She became a devoted Catholic thereafter. 

It was the Spanish Civil War that saved Jane Anderson’s career. She was living then in Extremadura on the estate of a new husband, raising sheep and growing cork oak. When war broke out, Jane saw her chance and immediately started sending dispatches about the war to British newspapers. She didn’t last long, however, before she was captured by Republican guards, taken to Madrid, and imprisoned in the notorious Cheka de Mujeres. The Communist guards tortured Jane, according to her own accounts, and imprisoned her for forty-three days. She was scheduled for execution, yet, before Jane could be shot, she was freed on the request of the US State Department. That’s when Jane’s new career blew up.

In the spring of 1937 she wrote a series of six newspaper columns about her experience in Spain that were syndicated across North America. For close to a year, after that, she toured on a lecture circuit, largely telling stories to crowds of Catholic women about cathedrals being ransacked and priests murdered by Communists. It was a good business for Jane. Monsignor Sheen, president of the national Catholic University in Washington DC, called her “a living martyr” and Catholic Today said she was “the world’s greatest orator in the fight against Communism.”  Her conversion to political extremism gave her a huge audience. By the end of 1938 she found a job working as Francisco Franco’s publicist. Two years later she started appearing on the radio in English-language broadcasts that originated in Germany. She had a few different aliases, including The Georgia Peach and Lady Haw-Haw (playing off the most famous radio traitor, William Joyce’s Lord Haw-Haw character). Jane parroted the company line for Goebbels, that FDR was beholden to a cabal of Jewish bankers, that if the Soviet Union wasn’t stopped the entire world would soon merely be used as “a footstool to Stalin.” She was never anti-American (the whole point was to get the United States into the war, but on the side of Germany), but she was always anti-Roosevelt, anti-Communist, anti-Semite. She signed off each evening with this line: “Always remember, progressive Americans eat Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and listen to both sides of the story.”

She didn’t last long on the air after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s immediate, disastrous declaration of war against the United States. Within months Jane would fall out of favor with the Nazis. They didn’t need her anymore. But Jane Anderson had already blazed her own path to oblivion by going all in on fascism. 

It should be little surprise what inspired me to resurrect this old story. The political climate of 2016, the threats against journalists, the denigration of honest reporters and elevation of propagandists. All of this was on my mind as I worked on what would become The War Begins in Paris.

While all the gaps, lies, and con jobs in Jane Anderson’s story have proved a frustration for historians, these openings are perfect for a historical novelist. Her flamboyant personality, her libertine morality, all her colossal missteps made for an easy entry into the world of American foreign correspondents in Europe during that era. 

Often stories about World War II simplify things too much, I believe, looking for an easy binary of good versus evil that portrays the evolution of democracy as on a linear, predetermined path. But Jane Anderson’s story shows that the truth then was as far from simple as it is now. While it’s painful to think about America’s past dalliances with fascism and authoritarianism, it’s reassuring to know that our divisions are not unique and that our struggle is not an impossible one to win. For every cynic like Jane Anderson who preyed on the worst instincts of her fellow citizens, I found that there were dozens of journalists who believed in democracy and acted in humanistic good faith while reporting on what they saw taking place in Europe. That’s not just consolation, that’s a way forward.

I kept coming back to that Harper’s article by Shirer about the radio traitors, his lament, for the most part, about these old friends of his that he’d lost forever because they went fascist. That’s the piece that really got me going, especially after Charlottesville. Jane Anderson is undoubtedly an interesting character—equal parts attractive and repellent, even in the best of times, who then went off the deep end in middle age. I wondered what it would have been like to have been friends with somebody who turned out like that. Part of the experience of the 1930s wasn’t just seeing the rise of fascism, it was seeing people you were close to get caught up in the wave. That was the real point of entry. The emotional heart of the story I wanted to tell, as it happened to be the emotional heart of our experience, too.

This is a novel about friendship and loss, in my opinion, a friendship between a fictionalized Jane Anderson and a young woman who is completely fictional, a young woman whose is propelled by circumstances from a Mennonite farm in Iowa, to a job as a foreign correspondent in Paris, to a devastating crux when she comes to believe that her friend’s politics are so abhorrent that her friend deserves to die. The War Begins in Paris pits these two women against each other amid global strife in a way that allows for us to confront our own struggle to either confront or forgive—or both, somehow, ideally. That’s the heart of The War Begins in Paris. That young woman, Marthe Hess, tries to forgive her friend Jane more than she should. Certainly I have written off friends with much less agony, but Marthe hasn’t had many friends in her life, and never a friend as exciting to be around as Jane. I came to see that Marthe would always hope that Jane might come around, that she might give up her harmful actions, that she might see the bigger picture. We have all had relationships like this in one way or another. Marthe’s struggle to get away from Jane and Jane’s politics haunts her throughout the novel.

For years, as I was working on the book, I avoided Facebook, for self-preservation. Facebook seems to have cooled down since then—though that’s certainly an effect of having reinforced my bubble. I don’t really know what’s in the hearts of my friends and neighbors, but if they are sympathetic to fascists and authoritarians, they’re quieter about it, maybe less trusting of TV personalities, maybe too embarrassed by the endless stream of nonsense. (There’s a big gap between being tolerant of Trump’s made-for-TV antics, it should be said, and being tolerant of what happened in Charlottesville and at the US Capitol on January 6. There is still a significant portion of Americans who are tolerant of both.) I don’t know if a quiet fascist-sympathizer is better than a loud one. They might be. History shows that that flirtations with authoritarianism of some sort has always been part of the American experience. If it always will be, then it will always need to be confronted to keep it pushed out to the darkest fringes of our culture.

Fourteen years on the beat was enough for me. But, since I stepped away, I do have a greater appreciation for the work journalists perform in service of shining the light on extremists. When you’re in the middle of a job like that, it feels impossible, one where the only success that can be achieved is a compromised one. Now I see that as progress. Holding ground against racists and fascists is a good thing.

On its face, it isn’t exactly heroic to witness, record, and make public government action, much less the actions of a political campaign or fringe extremist groups. I certainly don’t claim much honor for my own reporting. But in the right moment, when the stakes are high, maybe being a journalist can be courageous by simply doing this often mundane job. The stories of World War II reporters show them to be heroes, certainly, and I’m proud to tell their story in good faith, as part of the argument for why these are struggles that must be won.

(More here about The War Begins in Paris.)