Alan Glenn - Amerikan Eagle

He got into the Packard, one hand on the steering wheel, saw the numeral three on his wrist. Three. Sarah and Toby and him. A lifelong reminder of what was important, what counted.

He started up the Packard and headed home.

The author wishes to express his deep thanks and appreciation to Chief Lou Ferland and Deputy Chief Stephen DuBois of the Portsmouth, N.H., Police Department for their assistance in the research of this novel. Thanks as well to the library staffs in Portsmouth, Exeter, at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and at the University of New Hampshire.

Thanks as well to my agent, Nat Sobel, and his associates, for their extraordinary devotion and advice, and to my editor, Kate Miciak, for her sharp eye and unflagging enthusiasm for this novel, as well as to Randall Klein. I would also like to thank Hilary Hale, Donald Maass, Freddie Catalfo, and Liza Dawson for their thoughtful and helpful suggestions.

On February 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara, a thirty-two-year-old Italian anarchist, was at Bayfront Park in Miami, where he opened fire with a .32-caliber revolver at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whether because of the unsteady chair that he was standing on or because a woman nudged his arm, his shots missed Roosevelt and instead struck Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who later died from his wounds.

Zangara was promptly charged with Cermak’s death, put on trial, and executed just over a month later.

At the time of this assassination attempt, the Vice President–elect was John Nance Garner of Texas, Speaker of the House of Representatives, an opponent of Roosevelt’s New Deal and an isolationist. Most historians find it doubtful that he could have provided the leadership the nation so desperately needed at the height of the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate soared to 25 percent and public commentators such as Walter Lippmann called openly for the new President to assume dictatorial powers.

Huey Long, governor and then senator from the state of Louisiana during Roosevelt’s first term, made no secret of his desire to become President of the United States. In fact, he outlined his plans in the novel My First Days in the White House , published in 1935. Long was also an isolationist, and he often boasted that he never traveled abroad and did not care about the fate of other nations.

The novel was published posthumously, as Senator Long was shot on September 8, 1935, in the statehouse in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and died two days later. At the time of Senator Long’s death, President Roosevelt considered him one of the most dangerous men in America.

The public statements made herein by Huey Long, Winston Churchill, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Charles Coughlin are factual. Only the time and place of their comments have been fictionalized.

Walter Tucker’s recollection of the visit to Harvard in 1934 of its alumnus, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Nazi Party member and head of the foreign press operations for the Third Reich, is based on a true event.

Even though refugees and escapees told of the true nature of the holocaust during the 1940s, their stories were not believed by government officials and the media until the Allied victory in 1945 and the subsequent liberation of the Nazi death camps. One of the little-known stories about the holocaust was the Madagascar Plan, a proposal by the Nazis to deport the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. In May 1940, in his book Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East , SS head Heinrich Himmler declared: “I hope that the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony.” The Madagascar Plan was abandoned after 1940, since Great Britain remained undefeated and its navy was still a formidable foe to German shipping.

The mostly unsuccessful attempts by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to convince the government to admit more Jewish refugees to the United States is a matter of historical record. So, too, is the bloody Memorial Day massacre of the Republic Steel strikers in 1937.

The city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is real, as are the naval shipyard and its vital role in the peace treaty signed by Japan and Russia in 1905 that led to President Theodore Roosevelt receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. However, certain geographical and historical aspects of Portsmouth and its police department have been changed for the purpose of this novel. Any errors of geography or history are the author’s.

This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear… is fear itself… nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

Amerikan Eagle is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A Bantam Books Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2011 by Alan Glenn

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52760-8

Cover deign: Carlos Beltran

Cover photo: Jack Delano / Library of Congress

www.bantamdell.com

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