The Huntington Library, Seaver Rooms 1-2 Free Event

Free Event

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

12:00 - 1:00pm

The Huntington

Munger Research Center

Seaver 1-2

 

 

Two new books that explore the history of hard-right politics on the ground in the American West.

Recent histories of modern American conservatism often highlight powerful businessmen and the thinkers whose work influenced them.  This event features instead two versions of hard-right politics on the ground — in Los Angeles and Colorado Springs — during the 1930s. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish attorney Leon Lewis recruited military veterans—and their wives and daughters—to go undercover and join Nazi and fascist groups in Los Angeles.  Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America tells the story of how this daring group of men and women uncovered Nazi plots to kill the city’s Jews and to sabotage American military installations.  Shortfall unearths a forgotten chapter of our financial history—the Depression-era collapse of the building and loan industry.  A history told in microcosm through the B&L crisis in Colorado, Shortfall exposes the dangers of unfettered capitalism as well as its appeal, even to defrauded depositors, who rejected the New Deal collectivism usually associated with the 1930s.  What gives this story its especially intimate feel and power is the family connection between the book’s central figure and the book’s author.

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