The previous 12 months had shown that the federal government, time and again, was behind the eight ball when it came to this gathering threat at home from the ultra-right the plotting and planning of extremists in this country who were inclined towards violence and, in many cases, hooked up with the Hitler government. Space for freedom and opportunity, creativity and ingenuity, and access to support and connection to help when a season of life is so heavy as to overwhelm a fellow Coloradan. Radio Reporter: Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a leader of the America First Committee, has threatened to demand a Congressional investigation of the way the Justice Department has been handling the prosecution of Nazi sympathizers. DENVER Below is the transcript of Colorado Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeens (R-Monument) speech on the opening day of the First Regular Session of the 74th General Assembly. Services Learn more about Sustain. Norma Lundeen: Only a few days after the husband and father we loved had been laid away, this storm of malice broke. Private activist groups operating outside law enforcement were tracing stolen U.S. military weapons and complex, violent plots involving homegrown violent fascists with help and financing from Berlin. Hart: He realizes very quickly that one Senator isn't enough here. Radio Reporter: George Sylvester Viereck, well-known publicist, has been indicted by a grand jury which pictures him as using congressional franks to send-out his material. Post something that gets attention and likes and shares and viral explosion, or post something that informs, even if it informs people of something theyd prefer not to hear. Norma Lundeen: A number of photographs of my husband were taken while he was speaking. Well that material was supplied to Francis Moran by George Sylvester Viereck. Much broader. A - Agriculture. Lundeen was carrying these pages when he died, and they were found near the scene of the plane crash. Covering Third Parties and Independent Candidates Since 2008. She told the staff that she wanted the Viereck files. Maddow: And that right there, that is where Norma Lundeen slipped up. This is a deliberate falsehood designed to mislead. The Justice Department had failed to convict the members of the Christian Front who tried to overthrow the government. Together we must find balance in our discussions and a willingness to look to that far horizon. With additional sound from CBS News. Declaring her candidacy shortly before the states filing deadline, Lundeens last-minute entry created a three-way race for the Farmer-Labor Partys U.S. Senate nomination, forcing former Gov. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. What George Sylvester Viereck figured out was that he could weaponize that against the American people. In reality, a number of the most high-profile America First members of Congress were in cahoots with a paid agent of the Hitler government who was supplying them with propaganda intended not just to keep the U.S. out of World War II, but also to divide Americans along political lines, racial lines, religious lines, class lines, all in the interest of national demoralization." There are challenges. And less than 48-hours after her husband had died, she in one of her memorable hats marched into his Senate office in the U.S. Capitol. Shortly before Sen. Ernest Lundeen's death, a newspaper called P.M. published a report that exposed Lundeen's scheme with a paid Nazi agent to distribute German propaganda throughout the United States. When Senator Lundeen boarded that doomed Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane in August 1940, remember that his final destination was back home in Minnesota, where he was slated to deliver a speech on Labor Day weekend. That speech was also a speech against America getting into the war. Young: Norma Lundeen directed, upon her husband's death, to have given to her all the Viereck files. Like the people of Colorado do every day, we must all lean forward and strain toward the prize of a better Colorado for ourselves, our children and our posterity. When these speeches are published, he's actually splitting the profits with this German agent of influence. The prosecutor who was appointed was named William Power Maloney. Filter members by last name, committee, district number, or party (type (D) (R) for party): Home Page. Here at Senator we create products that set the stage for people to do amazing things. Maddow: The America First Committee started up in 1940 as a pressure group, to try to stop the United States from getting involved in the Second World War. Like the charter airplane accident that killed DFL Sen. Wellstone, his wife and daughter and four others near Eveleth, Minn., Oct. 25, 2002, the accident that took the life of the 62-year-old Lundeen changed the course of Minnesota and perhaps even American political history. Laws & Agency Rules. This statement is malicious and atrociously false. To reach that kind of scale, he needed more speeches. This was in no way a secret and Lundeen must have known the man he was dealing with was at least pro-German, if not actively working on behalf of the German government. A letter Sen. Ernest Lundeen wrote to himself on the eve before he was sworn in to the United States Senate. The book on your desk has the subtitle of talking politics without the noise. It offers each side of the aisle the ability, at least in some small way, to seek first to understand before seeking to be understood. ", On the afternoon of August 31, 1940, Lundeen was a passenger on Flight 19 of Pennsylvania Central Airlines, flying from Washington, D.C. to Detroit. William Maloney was an experienced federal prosecutor. And yet we must not mislead ourselves into believing that the government can solve all problems. Maddow: Millions of Americans. Just as she failed to find justice in the courtroom, the soft-spoken and attractive Lundeen found little fondness and impartiality for her husbands memory at the ballot box as Benson, still enormously popular among Farmer-Laborites in the Twin Cities and with miners on Minnesotas Iron Range, easily captured the partys U.S. Senate nomination, garnering 66,051 votes to Lundeens 24,019 and 17,163 for Arens. In his time in the Senate, was accused of demanding kickbacks from his employees. Norma Lundeen: A pair of columnists had written that two Department of Justice agents were on the plane with my husband when it crashed, that they had been assigned to watch him. Hart: It's really a scheme of, of genius in some ways. To commemorate the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and recognize the service of the first female senator in 1922, learn about the Women of the Senate. [10] Norma tried to prevent that narrative by claiming that "no one wrote [her] husband's speeches" and threatening to sue one of the journalists who was reporting on it. According to the secretary, Ive gone too far to turn back, was about all Lundeen said. In that demand for the papers, there is what could be read as an acknowledgement of guilt. Contents 1 Party affiliation 2 Leadership 2.1 Presiding officers 2.2 Majority leadership 2.3 Minority leadership 3 List of senators 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References This is the man, who after the grave had closed on him, and he could no longer defend his good name, has been ruthlessly slandered by repeatedly suggesting that Senator Lundeen was not a loyal American. He was fully capable of writing his own, and he wrote his own. (CROWD CHEERING AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN). It was disbanded when Derrick was only six, after that grouchy old ultra-Libertarian Senator Timothy de Illy [10] Viereck's defense called her as a witness during his trial. Together we face some persistent problems and it is likely that new challenges will arise. Despite the bill's Communist origins, the party mustered considerable support for it, including from union locals, international unions, and state labor federations. And then in the run-up to World War II, he was basically the poster child in the Senate for leaving Germany alone to just do its thing. We must not use the resources and mechanisms of state government in a way that encumbers our grandchildren with a burden that cripples their future economy or saddles those precious souls with a debt they can never repay. Maddow: Despite her efforts to hide her husband's relationship with Viereck, her removing the documentary evidence from her husbands office right after his death. Young: Norma Lundeen is going all spouse-proud and, "My husband was not a Nazi," saying things like that to the press. It wasnt surprising, therefore, thatTIME Magazine, in a particularly vicious swipe at the late lawmaker,referred to Norma Lundeen shortly before the primary as the 46-year-old widow of British-hating, German-loving Senator Ernest Lundeen.. Maddow: This idea that there was American unanimity against the Nazis, this sort of wishful historical nostalgia we have for an era in which Amerians were supposedly all on the same page about the need to fight Hitler, for the need to pull together to meet this grave global challenge, that is a tidier, happier memory than what is justified by the real history. Norma then proceeded to falsely testify that she indeed took the Viereck files, but the files are gone due to a burglary that has taken place at their residence. On the afternoon of August 31, 1940, Lundeen was a passenger on Flight 19 of Pennsylvania Central Airlines, flying from Washington to, Detroit. The plane crashed near Lovettsville, Virginia, and all 25 persons on board were killed. Republican State Senator Paul Lundeen could be the next President of the State Senate if Republicans take the majority. He had close ties to George Sylvester Viereck, a leading Nazi agent in the U.S. Viereck often used Lundeen's office, and "sometimes dictated speeches for Lundeen, openly using the Senator's telephones to obtain material from Hans Thomsen at the [German] embassy. That's what they were expecting. Fr nhere Informationen zur Nutzung Ihrer Daten lesen Sie bitte unsere Datenschutzerklrung und Cookie-Richtlinie. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. But the speaker was in fact doing something unusual. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. He was one of 50 representatives to vote against the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917. But when she turned up at his office, she wasnt there to comfort his staff, or to speak with his colleagues, or collect his personal effects. His very, very well-funded mission in the United States was two-fold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, but also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us just less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called "kernels of disturbance" in the United States. Lundeens secretary arrived at the senators office on that fateful morning and found Lundeen slumped over on his desk: Hes got his head down on his desk, his head is Current Membership: Each Senator represents 931,349 Californians. senator. We inspire possibilities for people to change the world in a million different ways, big and small, local and global, every day. Senator. The agent sent this letter to Lundeen, telling him not to worry about the press being onto them, and that the whole thing was a \"witch hunt.\". Senator Paul Lundeen. Please include your return postal mailing address when corresponding with a Senate office. And while he was doing that, he was also wheedling his way into the heart of American power. The speech written for Sen. Ernest Lundeen by a paid Nazi agent. Global Reach Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is a production of MSNBC and NBC News. The saying in this body is that the minority gets their say, and the majority gets their way. Copyright 2022 Colorado Senate Republicans.All Rights Reserved. The bill was narrowly voted out of the Labor Committee, but it was killed by House leadership, which wanted no competition for Wagner-Lewis. Majority Leader, colleagues, families, guests here in the Capitol, and to the People of Colorado : Welcome. A copy of the Congressional Record from 1940, containing Sen. Ernest Lundeen's last speech on the floor of the Senate. Hart: We have a U.S. But historians who've studied this have made the very obvious point, how could she have not known his connection to Viereck and the Nazis? Maddow: When Senator Ernest Lundeen died, there was a stack of smoking-gun evidence locked inside a filing cabinet in his Senate office in the U.S. Capitol. Initially, his Communist sympathies remained strong: in 1936, then Senator-elect Lundeen addressed a meeting of the "Friends of the Soviet Union" at Madison Square Garden as Tovarishchi ("Comrades"). Maddow: This wasn't just pocket money, this was a whole new second stream of considerable income for the Senator. Senator Smith. As far as prosecutors could tell, this D.C. publicist, and Senator Ernest Lundeen, and Viereck the Nazi agent, theyd all been involved together in a scheme to secretly disseminate pro-Nazi disinformation and propaganda. IE 11 is not supported. Senators died in relative obscurity in 1983 at the age of 87. In 1940, FDR was running for an unprecedented third term as US president. Phone: (202) 224-2441. Senator Ernest Lundeen, a scandalous story had begun to unspool about how the Senator was tangled up with a Nazi agent. That's when he had first gotten to know Viereck. near Lovettsville, Virginia and all 25 persons on board were killed, including Senator Lundeen. It turned out that Viereck also helped write speeches for several isolationist congressmen, including ghostwriting at least six speeches for Lundeen all of which came out during his closely-watched trial in early 1942, seven months before the Minnesota primary. Nazis in America: FDR 1940 and the 'Trump Era' To make up for lost time, to get out from behind the eight ball, the Attorney General finally decided to appoint a special prosecutor, someone to start paying attention to these kinds of threats to our democracy. Lundeen was elected to the United States Senate in 1936 as a member of the Farmer-Labor Party. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1901 and then studied law at the University of Minnesota Law School. But he remained isolationist and was later denounced by the party as a reactionary. Dec 13, 2022 DENVER Today, Senator Paul Lundeen (R - Monument) announced committee assignments for the Senate Republican Caucus during the 74th General Assembly of the State of Colorado. Hart: We have a number of the biggest figures in American politics in this period, men who are truly household names, the biggest names really in Republican congressional politics, they all fall under the spell of this Nazi propaganda operation. Letter from Attorney General Robert H. Jackson addressed to Sen. Ernest Lundeen's widow, denying that there was ongoing investigation into Lundeen at the time of his death. Now, that was unusual because she did not work for NBC. May God bless you and your families today and your future generations. She also went right after the journalists who she said were responsible for the smears against him. Sitting members of Congress, and the America First movement, take part in an elaborate scheme to subvert democracy. Committee Assignments. Viereck needed to reach large numbers of Americans, to start turning the tide of public opinion away from U.S. interests and towards Germany. His excellent, excellent book is called Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States. Highest recommendation, 12 stars out of ten! America First Committee. And random people dont just get to jump on a national radio broadcast whenever they feel like they have something to say. When you find yourself challenged, the extraneous, the minutia, the distraction, falls away. He should write books or something! A special thanks to historian Bradley Hart. Senator have been manufacturing at our technology plant in Gro-Bieberau for 100 years. Hart: What we know is true is that Viereck is receiving much of the material for these speeches from the German embassy itself. As representative, he was one of 50 Congressman to vote, against the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917.v He served as a Party member in, the House from March 4, 1933 to January 3, 1937 in the 73rd and 74th congresses. He was very good at it. President, Mr. The composition and powers of the Senate are established by Article One of the United States Constitution. Welcome. The German agent would provide speeches to Senator Lundeen, Lundeen would then deliver on the Senate floor, theyd get tons of copies made, then the publicist would run logistics on getting those copies mailed out to the public. Radio Announcer: Youre about to hear an address delivered before a meeting of the America First Committee. My Republican colleagues elected me as Senate Republican Minority Whip to ensure that Republican ideals like freedom and independence will not be cancelled in the culture war we Hart: We believe it's millions of Americans. If any media outlet requires photographs of any of our Senators, they are invited to use anything contained on our Flickr account with attribution to Colorado Senate Republicans.. Norma had an answer for that. We cannot, nor should we ever, expect the people of Colorado to unwillingly surrender anything that is theirs, including their hard-earned money, their closely-held beliefs, their livelihoods or small businesses, or their basic rights as enshrined in the United States Constitution. We are The Senator Group Senator Products Go to senator.online Allermuir Products Go to allermuir.com Discover What we offer _All Services Environments Global Reach Sustainability Services Learn more about our workplace consultancy. His speech lasted 1 hour and 10 minutes and touched on a broad range of topics, from climate change to affordable housing, water to public safety. Im entitled to a little justice., During and following the trial, the mainstream media playing to the war hysteria that swept the country after Pearl Harbor delighted in dragging the Lundeen name through the mud at every opportunity. Not so much when we talk common sense. George Viereck and the Nazi government were using the America First movement and America First members of Congress for those ends. Minnesotas Norma Lundeen, widow of the Farmer-Labor Partys Ernest Lundeen, an isolationist who was later accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, unexpectedly entered the race for her late husbands U.S. Senate seat in July of 1942. Viereck was not some kind of code word. Probably too big a lift but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. He served from January 3, 1937, in the 75th and 76th Congresses until his death. We wont be able to fix every problem this state faces during these next 119 days. Hart: This is a moment of great political danger, I think for these men. He served from January 3, 1937, in the 75th and 76th Congresses, until his death. Initially, his Communist sympathies remained strong: in 1936, then Senator-elect Lundeen addressed a meeting of the "Friends of the Soviet Union" at Madison Square Garden as " Tovarishchi " ("Comrades"). [8], In 2022 Rachel Maddow released a podcast series titled Ultra, which explored Lundeen's complicity in Nazi Germany's intelligence and propaganda operations in the U.S. during the 12 to 18 months immediately preceding America's entry into World War II. We face some tough issues this session, those empty shelves I mentioned earlier, unaffordable goods and services, crime, a struggling education system, soaring energy costs. 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