Leon Lewis: Real Hollywood Hero

USC Professor Steven J. Ross

For many people, the national media justifiably focusing its spotlight on the fallout from the indictments of former Trump campaign members Paul Manafort and Rick Gates (and former Trump campaign advisor George Papadolous' guilty plea), is a positive step for democracy, the rule of law and basic American principles.

The downside is that the two white supremacist rallies that took place in Tennessee last weekend are quickly fading from the news cycle.

But the deeper danger that those rallies represent, and the divisive ideology that spawned them, is still very real.


An interesting article in the September 20th Hollywood Reporter about a concerned American who took it upon himself to uncover, confront and fight Nazis and fascist anti-Semites in Los Angeles in the 1930's serves as an important reminder that the hate that has seeped to the surface in the wake of Trump's campaign and election, is not new in America.

The article, "When the Nazis Tried to Exterminate Hollywood", is a fascinating excerpt from a new book by Steven J. Ross.

A professor of history at the University of Southern California who received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University, a philosophy degree from Oxford and his PhD in history from Princeton, Ross also serves as the director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, and is the co-founder and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC.

Ross has written and edited four critically-acclaimed books on Hollywood film history, including Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics - his 2011 Pulitzer Prize-nominated examination of the influence of the film industry on both liberal and conservative political activism in America.

But it's his latest book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, released on October 24th, that seems particularly timely given the outsized influence that neo-Nazi sympathizers and white nationalists now openly wield inside a Trump White House that actively cultivates their views - and covets their supporters as political allies.

Since last November, I've watched and read prominent members of the American media trying to dissect the root causes of the disturbing rise in racist and anti-immigrant attacks against innocent people, irrational xenophobia, and the almost-seismic shift of fringe white supremacists and neo-Nazis into the light of mainstream political coverage.

(Many of those same journalists, "opinionaters" and media talking heads failed miserably at holding Trump up to the same level of scrutiny given to Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates during the divisive 2016 campaign.)


So I was pretty taken back after I read the excerpt from Ross' new book in THR yesterday. 

Not just because it's a compelling story that's been all but left out of American history about the impact of the Great Depression on American society and the rise of Nazi sympathizers and pro-fascists leading up to World War II.

But because it also sheds light on the dangers posed by neo-Nazi and white nationalist efforts to expand their influence into mainstream society in the Trump era.

Hitler in Los Angeles examines how Nazi ideology spread from Germany to Los Angeles, its roots and rise amongst LA citizens, particularly German-Americans and disaffected WWI veterans, and a small but determined group of concerned Jewish citizens who worked with U.S. veterans to infiltrate, spy on and confront the Nazi threat in LA.

ADL co-founder Leon Lewis

One of the central figures of the book is a man named Leon Lewis, a WWI vet who, as Ross writes, earned his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1913 and became the first executive director of the Anti Defamation League - the ADL's charter states the group's purpose is (in part) "to fight anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry (in the United States) and abroad".

Sparked by a determination to monitor Adolph Hitler and the growing threat he posed to Jewish people, Lewis became convinced that the U.S. government wasn't doing nearly enough to keep the growing influence of Nazism in America in check.

As Ross wrote in the excerpt of his book published in THR last month, on July 26, 1933, just seven months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, a group of "100 Hitlerites, many dressed in brown shirts and sporting red, white and black swastika armbands, held their first public meeting at their spacious downtown headquarters in the Alt Heidelberg building."

According to Ross' research, the group heard an address by Hans Winterhalder, the propaganda chief of a Nazi organization known as the Friends of the New Germany (FNG) - a group created as an American outreach effort in May, 1933 at the behest of Rudolph Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Winterhalder's outline of a plan to bring the numerous German-American organizations that were located throughout California under one umbrella that espoused the National Socialism ideology of the Third Reich, and were loyal to Hitler and the Nazi Party, made clear to Leon Lewis that action needed to be taken.

As Ross told John Williams in an October 29th New York Times interview about his book, he first learned of Lewis' role in forming a spy ring to infiltrate the Nazi organizations in LA back in 1999 while he was doing research on actor Edward G. Robinson's anti-Nazi activities in Hollywood for his book Hollywood Left and Right.

He learned that Lewis befriended and recruited white Christian WWI veterans like John Schmidt and one-time Long Beach, California KKK member Charles Slocombe to join, infiltrate and spy on anti-Semitic pro-Nazi organizations like the FNG, American National Party, Silver Shirts and the Lode Star Legion.

Friends of the New Germany leaders Herman Schwinn
(2nd from left) & Hans Winterhalder (far right)

Ross reveals that those groups weren't just meeting to talk and socialize.

As Lewis' network of male and female Los Angeles spies would discover, Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels saw Hollywood as a dangerous threat because of the American film industry's ability to churn out movies that revealed the dark side of Nazi Germany and motivated people in the U.S., England, France, Canada and other countries to support the growing allied effort to stop the German war machine. 

On New Year's Eve 1935, Lewis learned that the leader of the American National Party, Ingram Hughes, was working with FNG leader Herman Schwinn on a terror plot to kill at least 20 influential Jewish members of the Hollywood community.

Winterhalder later "testified about FNG's private militia, its acquisition of arms" and plans to infiltrate the California National Guard - so these characters weren't just talking the talk.

Those targeted by the FNG-ANP plot included Lewis, Superior Court Judge Henry Willis and director Busby Berkeley - as Ross notes, Hughes was reported to have said, "Busby Berkeley will look good dangling on a rope's end." 

(Such a threat was not made lightly in 1935 - according to Wikipedia's extensive article on lynchings in the United States, "1934 saw 15 lynchings of African-Americans with 21 lynchings in 1935").

But as Ross writes, that plot was never carried out because Schwinn (correctly) suspected that the FNG had been infiltrated by spies working for Lewis.

UK fascist Leopold McLaglan

Two years later in 1937 his spies spoiled another plot by British fascist Leopold McLaglan to assassinate 24 well-known Hollywood influencers including:

"some of the most famous people in the world, including Edie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, Samuel Goldwyn, Al Jolson, Jack Benny, James Cagney, Frederic March, Paul Muni, Joseph Schenck, B.P. Schulberg, Gloria Stuart, Sylvia Sidney, Donald Ogden Stewart, Walter Winchell and William Wyler."

Fortunately, Lewis' spy Charles Slocombe was able to successfully trick two of McLaglan's co-conspirators (fascist Henry Allen and Silver Shirts leader Ken Alexander) to cut a deal with the DA which led to McLaglan's arrest and eventual deportation.


These were dangerous people committed to a twisted ideology based on racial and ethnic hatred.

Against the backdrop of a town known in the 1930's for larger-than-life, handsome celluloid heroes, it's interesting that a low-key Jewish attorney from the midwest would become the catalyst for attacking the spread of Nazism in Hollywood and taking the leaders of its fledgling pro-Hitler movement head on.

I'd venture to say that Lewis would take it as a compliment that the Nazis considered him "the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles."

Patriot Leon Lewis' actions and Steven J. Ross' book offer valuable insight into the dangers of government apathy in the face of Neo-Nazi extremism - a very real concern today considering the white nationalist advisers like Stephen Miller who still surround Trump.

As Ross said of Hitler in Los Angeles in his New York Times interview on Sunday,  the book
"offers important lessons for today. Leon Lewis and his spies defeated a variety of enemies bent on violence and murder. They showed us that when a government fails to combat extremists, democracy demands that every citizen protect the lives of every American, no matter their race or religion."