Washburn insisted she was no Nazi. She claimed to be a great granddaughter of the American Revolutionary war hero, the Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette, and that one “cannot be a loyal, patriotic American citizen without being ‘motivated by a strong nationalistic spirit,’ ” which she asserted was a defining feature of fascism. For her and many others, fascism and Americanism, or as some called it, “Ultra Americanism,” were one and the same.
In Seattle, at the time of her indictment in early 1943, she had been the subject of an FBI investigation into her activities. As she prepared to leave for trial, she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that she
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