I would bet a barrel of reichmarks that these were real people. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that "Mr. C" is the "saturnine" Lawrence Dennis, a former State Department diplomat and Wall Street advisor considered the guiding intellect of 1930s American fascism.

Fascinatingly, Dennis didn't grow up "Southern white trash." No, he actually was a famous African-American child preacher, a background that he did hide successfully (though, reading between the lines of the article, not perhaps to everyone) as he disavowed his family, appeared at Exeter on scholarship, and traveled in the upper reaches of American society and eventually to the far fringes of American, Italian and German fascism. It is a surpassing irony that his hatred of Jim Crow segregation and contempt for the democracy that allowed it led him to be welcomed inside the sanctum of those men who would have imprisoned, shot or gassed him had they known the truth of his background.