Plot Synopsis

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is an historical documentary series that chronicles the lives, accomplishments and impact of incredible people, as well as epic stories about historic events, that have shaped America's past and present.

On Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 9pm (check local listings), PBS premiered the 29th season of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, featuring a one-hour biopic about Nikola Tesla, who has had electric cars, rock bands, a unit of measurement, a minor planet and a lunar crater named after him. During his lifetime, he gained international fame for his invention of a system of alternating current that made possible the distribution of electricity over vast distances and is the basis for the electrical grid that powers 21st century life. But the visionary Tesla imagined much more -- robots, radio, radar, remote control, the wireless transmission of messages and pictures, and harnessing the wind and sun to provide free energy to all -- but he was eclipsed by contemporaries such as Edison and Marconi. Participants in the film include: Marc Seifer, internationally recognized as an expert on Nikola Tesla; Peter Fisher, a professor in the Physics Department at MIT; Jill Jonnes, an author whose books include :Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World"; John Staudenmaier, an historian at the University of Detroit Mercy; Samantha Hunt, an author whose works include the novel "The Invention of Everything Else"; Harold Clark, director of STEM Educators at the Liberty Science Center; and Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe.

Season 31 of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE premiered on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings). The two-hour season opener, "The Swamp," tells the story of humanity's attempts to conquer the Florida Everglades, one of nature's most mysterious and unique ecosystems. Told through the lives of a handful of colorful and resolute characters, from hucksters to politicians to unlikely activists, this documentary explores the repeated efforts to transform what was seen as a vast and useless wasteland into an agricultural and urban paradise, ultimately leading to a passionate campaign to preserve America's greatest wetland. As the world copes with increasingly deadly weather events, "The Swamp" is a timely tale of the perils of mankind's abuse of nature. Based in part on the book "The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise" by Michael Grunwald, "The Swamp" is produced and directed by Randall MacLowry and executive produced by Mark Samels.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE returned for its 33rd season on Monday, January 11, 2021 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings). Narrated by Kate Burton, the one-hour season opener, "The Codebreaker," tells the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work decoding thousands of messages for the U.S. government would send infamous gangsters to prison and bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in WWII. A suburban wife and mother, she led a secret double life that would only come to light decades after her death, when classified government files were unsealed. But together with her husband, the legendary cryptologist William Friedman, Elizebeth helped develop the methods that led to the creation of the powerful new science of cryptology and laid the foundation for modern codebreaking today. Based on the book "The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies" by Jason Fagone.

Season 34 of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE debuts on Monday, February 7, 2022 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings), with Michael Bicks and Anna Lee Strachan's "Riveted: The History of Jeans." Worn by everyone from presidents to supermodels, farmers to rock stars, they're more than just a pair of pants -- America's tangled past is woven deeply into the indigo fabric. From its roots in slavery to the Wild West, youth culture, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, hippies, high fashion and hip-hop, jeans are the fabric on which the history of American culture and politics are writ large. The ultimate symbol of cool, jeans have become a wardrobe staple worldwide -- at any given moment, half the people on the planet are wearing them. "Riveted" explores the garment's rich history, featuring interviews with a diverse cast of historians, authors, designers and so-called denim heads. The story of jeans usually begins with Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant looking to make his fortune selling garments to the 49ers during the California Gold Rush. But half a century before Strauss, enslaved people in the American South were wearing a precursor of denim made from a coarse textile known as "slave cloth." The blue hue of jeans resulted from an arduous dyeing process using the indigo plant. Eliza Lucas, the daughter of an 18th-century colonial governor, has long been credited as the savvy entrepreneur who jump-started the southern economy with indigo production. Left out of this narrative are the West African enslaved people, whose invaluable expertise for growing, processing and dyeing the plant had been brought with them.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE returned for its 35th season on Tuesday, January 3, 2023 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings). The season opener, "The Lie Detector," is written and directed by Rob Rapley and executive produced by Cameo George. This new one-hour installment is a tale of good intentions, twisted morals and unintended consequences. In the first decades of the 20th century, when life was being transformed by scientific innovations, researchers made a thrilling new claim: they could tell whether someone was lying by using a machine. Popularly known as the "lie detector," the device transformed police work, seized headlines and was extolled in movies, TV and comics as an infallible crime-fighting tool. Husbands and wives tested each other's fidelity. Corporations routinely tested employees' honesty and government workers were tested for loyalty and "morals." But the promise of the polygraph turned dark, and the lie detector too often became an apparatus of fear and intimidation.
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On Tuesday, January 23, 2024 at 9pm (check local listings), PBS premiered "Nazi Town, USA" to start the 36th season of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. Says director Peter Yost, "Nazi Town, USA traces the rise and fall of the German American Bund and the threat posed by domestic fascism in the 1930's. There's a resonance in the film with today's fractured times and I hope the story can serve as a reminder of both the fragility -- and resilience -- of American democracy."

In February 1939, more than 20,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a "Pro-American Rally." Images of George Washington hung next to swastikas and speakers railed against the "Jewish controlled media" and called for a return to a racially "pure" America. The keynote speaker was Fritz Kuhn, head of the German American Bund. "Nazi Town, USA" tells the largely unknown story of the Bund, which had scores of chapters in suburbs and big cities across the country and represented what many believe was a real threat of fascist subversion in the United States. The Bund held joint rallies with the Ku Klux Klan and ran dozens of summer camps for children centered around Nazi ideology and imagery. Its melding of patriotic values with virulent anti-Semitism raises thorny issues that we continue to wrestle with today. Produced, directed and written by Peter Yost, produced by Edna Alburquerque, and executive produced by Cameo George.

The German American Bund emerged in the 1930s, a period that tested the fabric of American democracy. The economic hardships of the Great Depression left many Americans fearing that the whole social order might collapse and extremist groups on both the right and the left found willing converts. Many, like the Bund, saw European fascism and Nazism as models that could and should be emulated in the United States.

1930s America was also a place of deep anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racial segregation. Millions of Americans belonged to the KKK, including dozens of members of Congress. The popular right-wing radio priest Charles Coughlin told listeners that Jews were destroying their country, and industrialist Henry Ford devoted his time and money to the widespread dissemination of anti-Semitic conspiracies. All of this led members of the Bund to believe that America offered fertile ground for their ideas.

Headquartered in the Yorkville neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the Bund was organized into over 50 districts across the country and made great efforts to appeal to families and children, running summer camps nationwide. Some of the largest -- including Camp Siegfried in Long Island and Camp Nordland in New Jersey -- essentially functioned as indoctrination centers for young and old alike. The Bund also created a network of storm-troopers that marched openly in cities across America and a front organization called the German American Settlement League to establish planned communities for German-American families. In Yaphank, Long Island, they built a community called German Gardens, with streets named after prominent Nazis including Adolf Hitler.

The isolationist sentiments of the Bund's leader, Fritz Kuhn, known as "The American Fuhrer," aligned with the ideas of "America Firsters," including Charles Lindbergh, who pushed to keep the United States out of the war in Europe by fanning nativist sentiment. Ultimately, the Bund opposed democracy and believed government was best when organized hierarchically, with a powerful dictator at the top. Kuhn imagined that America would be a kind of star in a constellation of pro-Nazi governments around the world, and his leadership climaxed with the massive 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden when some 20,000 Bund supporters gathered -- only to be opposed by tens of thousands of counter-protesters outside.

By then, grassroots resistance to the Bund was gaining steam, including actions organized by Jewish mobsters and investigations by intrepid journalists who infiltrated the Bund to expose its inner workings and call out American fascism. Soon after the Madison Square Garden rally, Fritz Kuhn was jailed on embezzlement charges and ultimately deported as an unregistered foreign agent. Many Americans, however, continued to support right wing organizations like the Bund and isolationist groups like Lindbergh's "America First" right up to the United States' entry in World War II, when the Bund finally collapsed. Its ugly history was largely forgotten and few ever reckoned with the appeal that fascist ideas had held to many Americans during the tumultuous 1930's.

About the Participants

- Arnie Bernstein is the author of Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund.

- Sarah Churchwell is a professor at the University of London and the author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream."

- Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

- Bradley W. Hart is the author of Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States.

- William Hitchcock is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is currently writing FDR and the Dictators: Fascism, Democracy and the Awakening of America, which explores reactions in the United States to the rise of fascism in Europe from the 1920s to 1941.

- Leah Wright Rigueur is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins.

- Steven J. Ross is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and author of Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.