Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture 9780226822457

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Expressing Fascism
Part I 1909–49
Why Fascism?
1 Fascism before Fascism, 1909–35
2 Franklin Roosevelt and Political Culture, 1932–36
3 Perplexity at Home and Abroad, 1934–38
4 Foreign and Domestic Contradictions, 1938–40
5 The Coming of the War, 1939–42
6 Fascism Penetrates Popular Life, 1936–49
Part II 1942–2020
Performing Words
7 Fascism on the Right, 1942–70
8 Europeans Bring Fascism to the States
9 Fascism Triumphs over Communism
10 Scholars Approach Fascism
11 Fascism Everywhere, 1970–2020
12 Democracy and Fascism
Conclusion: Fascism without Fascism
Notes, Sources, and Methods
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

Fascism Comes to America

Fascism Comes to America A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture b ru c e k u k l i c k

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22  1 2 3 4 5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82146-­7 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82245-­7 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822457.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kuklick, Bruce, 1941- author. Title: Fascism comes to America : a century of obsession in politics and culture / Bruce Kuklick. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022012517 | isbn 9780226821467 (cloth) | isbn 9780226822457 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Language and languages—Political aspects. | Fascism— United States. | United States—Politics and government—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: lcc p119.32.u6 k83 2022 | ddc 306.44—dc23/eng/20220316 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012517 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Charles Myers and Rosemarie D’Alba

’Tis writ, “In the beginning was the Word!” I pause, perplex’d! Who now will help afford? I cannot the mere Word so highly prize; I must translate it otherwise .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . The spirit aids! from anxious scruples freed, I write, “In the beginning was the Deed!” g o e t h e , Faust “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—­neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—­that’s all.” l e w i s c a r r o l l , Through the Looking Glass

Contents

Introduction: Expressing Fascism

1

pa r t i :   1909–49 Why Fascism?

9

1

Fascism before Fascism, 1909–35

11

2

Franklin Roosevelt and Political Culture, 1932–36

33

3

Perplexity at Home and Abroad, 1934–38

51

4 Foreign and Domestic Contradictions, 1938–40

64

The Coming of the War, 1939–42

76

5

6 Fascism Penetrates Popular Life, 1936–49

98

pa r t i i :   1942–2020 Performing Words

113

7

Fascism on the Right, 1942–70

116

8

Europeans Bring Fascism to the States

133

9 Fascism Triumphs over Communism

145

10 Scholars Approach Fascism

161

11 Fascism Everywhere, 1970–2020

173

12 Democracy and Fascism

185

Conclusion: Fascism without Fascism Notes, Sources, and Methods  199 Notes  205 Acknowledgments  237 Index  239

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introduction

Expressing Fascism

Google “fascism comes to America,” or search the same topic on Amazon. Thousands of entries pop up. Reformers are fascists. Conservatives are fascists. Corporate business leaders are secret fascists. We find crypto-­, egalitarian, fastidious, modern, neo-­, and respectable fascists. Fascism can creep or be friendly or feel at home on Park Avenue. It can be sweet or mild and watery. During the 1930s, US followers of the Russian communist Joseph Stalin called the communist adherents of Leon Trotsky social fascists. During the same decade, some citizens dreaded that fascists might declare themselves antifascists. More certainly, the government later chastised other citizens for their premature antifascism. During the 1970s, the Black Panthers of Oakland, California, identified liberals as fascist pigs, but another Oakland-­based organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army, announced the assassination of a Black leader for his fascist plan for public school safety.1 Fascism has functional equivalents. Fascists often reemerge, while some politicians count as fascist-­oid or fascist-­like. Roosevelt’s New Deal had fascist affinities, and so did the Reagan Revolution. The Jim Crow South evidenced fascism, but so did its opponents in the Civil Rights movement. Barack Obama was a fascist, but so was John McCain. Donald Trump was undoubtedly a fascist. Fascism has also implied vague doctrines of subversion and illogical violence that have marked American literature and culture since Benito Mussolini invented himself as a fascist and climbed to rule in Italy in 1922. During the 1920s, Herbert Croly of the New Republic urged that “whatever the dangers of fascism,” it accentuated a common national purpose that the United States lacked. In 1934 Edward Dahlberg wrote Those Who Perish, one of the first novels distressed about the nation’s fascist tendencies. Witter Bynner’s 1946 poem, “Defeat,” about segregation during World War Two, regretted that

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in carrying the day over fascism, the United States vanquished the essentially American: “It is again ourselves who we defeat.” In 1964 the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb brought fascism to the White House, as a Nazi madman by that name counseled the president. The baseball movie Field of Dreams (1989) introduced an opponent of a high school curriculum in Iowa; this “Eva Braun” or “Nazi cow” believed in book burning. In 2004 Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America fictionalized an alternative fascist history of the era of Franklin Roosevelt. And The Man in the High Castle, in which German and Japanese fascists have taken over the United States, succeeded as a television series from 2015 to 2019. For the last one hundred years, politicians and political commentators have compulsively examined fascism and provoked fevered public concerns. Fiction, cinema, Broadway, radio, television, and most recently blogs have considered disaster after disaster. Despite the antithesis between democratic and fascist values, Americans have perceived fascism as a constant presence or threat. Is the republic as fragile as some witnesses claim—­or moderate and firm, as its existence for 225 years might suggest? Why does the enticing peril of fascism endure? Because the flame attracts the moth? Because Americans have nightmares that they will mature into what they truly are? Or because they fear weakening in the face of evil? This book explores the spectacle of fascism in the United States—­the imagination of it in America and the outlook from America. I have perused political history and the political theory based on this history to determine what has generated the enchantment and how it has been generated. While the Europe of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s informed Americans, the horror over fascism has derived not entirely from distant affairs but also from internal disputes. Moreover, popular forms of expression have contributed to an array of fascist portents. Fascism Comes to America reconnoiters print and internet punditry and nonfiction. Amusements on the screen, on the page, on television, and on the stage are surveyed to see how they accommodated fascism. To these sources we must add learned commentary that also requires study over several decades. Finally, over many years, European savants in the United States contributed to anxieties by warning that the seeds of fascism had sprouted in America. Three themes run through this book. A history first traces how the term fascism has altered in American English. Thousands of items tell us of fascism. Newspaper articles and editorials—­during the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s, and onward—­offer summaries of various forms of fascism at the time of the writing. Erudite volumes that aim at precision and objectivity have produced theories of fascist philosophy and practice up to a given author’s present. Many

e x pr e s si ng fa s c is m

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of these endeavors urge that we can rationally locate fascism, a subsisting phenomenon. My history of the concept of fascism differs. I do not offer a definition, or an evolution of discrimination, or a refinement of analysis. From the book’s perspective, offering definitions, discriminations, or refinements makes primary what is secondary. Trying “to break down the notion” of fascism or “to make it less vague” bewitches us, for fascism does not have a bundle of coherent significations. It expresses loathing more than it identifies a reality or a growing series of realities. The verifiable ingredients have never compared to the deleterious emotional weight the word lays on the scale. Fascism does not so much describe as it accomplishes reproof. There is no elemental fascism or much empirical content. Every political posture has been christened as fascist. Unable to associate fascism with any stable observables over one hundred years, I am unconvinced that they exist. Having fascism in a vocabulary demands some explanation other than that the speaker is singling out some attributes. This form of political address takes us to a world of nonrational feeling. But this does not mean that fascism is devoid of meaning or that it is a vacuous signifier. It is rather a part of language that is more evaluative than factual. Fascism belongs in a category of what may be designated the “less than cognitive” in that it does not so much refer to anything that exists as it accomplishes disapproval. To put fascism on paper or to utter it in conversation complexly resembles canceling a magazine subscription in disgust or throwing a tomato at a speaker at a public event—­but not worrying much about retaliation. Fascism does not so much isolate a thing as it does some stigmatizing. Of course, such a finding does not suppose the frivolity of the hocus-­pocus. Indeed, the opposite is to be inferred. Verbal action more than logical inquiry constitutes fascism, although the insult is hemmed in, and regularities govern how the insult occurs. The force of the back-­of-­the-­hand depends on fascism’s common establishment as insult. Shared conventions also regulate when the insult can be employed and how it insults. And while speakers and writers are engaged in denigrating, we finally cannot deduce lack of justification for the denigration. Fascism Comes to America sets out the variety of contexts in which fascism has taunted over the years. The conceptual history asks the reader to look at this constituent of our politics from an altered point of view. A second theme searches for the connection between how politicians have dealt with fascism and how learned commentators have treated the abuse. Politicians latched on to fascism (and other particulars in their dictionary) in a struggle for power characterized by speeches, state papers, electioneering,

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and policies. In recycling the terminology of the actors, social scientists and historians have not probed matters with an impartial framework. The university has served as a guardian of the politicians’ tools and has depended on the politicians’ taxonomies. The core notions of real politics—­fascism in this inquiry—­have become the categories through which students have understood politics. The treatises—­so many, over so many years—­continue politics by other methods. Research about politics, like politics itself, displays standard sentiments as much as the research conveys disinterested information. Especially problematic in a heated political atmosphere, the language of scholars enables advocacy. My argument invites the reader to be more skeptical about this research. A final theme implicitly and explicitly contrasts mass amusements to literate clarifications of fascism. In schooling Americans about fascism, entertainment—­ with a focus on Hollywood—­overwhelmed scholarship (such as mine) and at least competed with the politicians in importance. In warning the public about fascism, Sinclair Lewis’s fiction of 1934, It Can’t Happen Here, was more significant than scrutiny of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia of the following year. In 1939 the movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy starring Edgar G. Robinson arguably changed perception as much as did conversation about the Munich Agreement that had occurred eight months before. More than Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency, I believe, the television series The Handmaid’s Tale that began in 2017 alerted many suburban women to political challenges. The account begins in the early part of the twentieth century, even before Mussolini engaged American attention during the early 1920s. The first part of the book ends with World War Two and the immediate postwar years. The book’s second part covers the time from the war to the period of Vietnam, civil rights, and student rebellion, and then through the early twenty-­first century. The narrative is thus chronological, although only roughly so. In several places I have had to get a little ahead of the history or retrace my steps in providing a proper context, or I have had to make detours to track down puzzling episodes. I have also interrupted the narrative with my best estimate of how to fathom events, especially those about the language of politics. And the last chapter, which makes a stab at explicating the fixation on fascism by examining the fixation on democracy, does not carry my report forward in time but even manages the reverse. Only a small number of experts knew of some of the arguments about fascism. National officials conducted other dialogues with the educated public. The uneducated public enjoyed varied entertainments, especially the Hollywood motion picture. A web of attitudes encompassing fascism underlay American culture. In inspecting this web and in outlining the connections

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among experts, politicians, and national pastimes, I have striven for the comprehensive but not the encyclopedic. Yet the story has gaps, and synonyms for the paradoxical litter these pages. I have formulated my own interpretations and conclusions. But readers should take them as tentative, for the central idea has not been to prove a thesis but to show what fascism is. This case study of a significant item in our political thesaurus suggests, to me, the fragility of our grip on a rational understanding of public life. Readers are nonetheless encouraged to arrive at their own views based on the evidence presented.

*

I have deliberately not discriminated between mention and use. The reader decides whether to take fascism as the word fascism (mention—­bracketed with quotation marks or set in italics) or the politics of fascism (use), or something in between, as perhaps intended by those who employed the language. The same kind of reasoning has led me to forego distinguishing Fascism (typically referring to Mussolini’s regime) from fascism (characteristically a more generic designation).

pa r t i

1909–­49

Why Fascism?

Part 1 surveys fascism during a period that ended in the aftermath of World War Two, a war in which Italy, Germany, and Japan had existentially threatened the United States. During this period of some forty years, fascists had a checkered and complex history. After Mussolini took over Italy during the 1920s, the United States initially honored his regime, and its success caused American intellectuals to look back differently at their own politics of the first decade of the twentieth century. By the late 1930s, however, fascists had become indistinct villains—­the noun might apply to anyone but did so with increasing negativity. Then, when the United States entered World War Two, the term was affixed to certain kinds of politicians on the right—­it received a more or less secure locus. For some fifteen years, from the early 1930s to the late 1940s, fascism was a way of categorizing at the forefront of collective American brooding, and after that era it remained the word of choice when a certain kind of condemnation was required.1 Why is it fascism—­and not one of the many other items of vilification that came to the lips of Americans during the late 1930s and early 1940s—­that has survived for a century? Mussolini constructed fascism. While Adolf Hitler did not dispute fascism as an approach to understanding his rule in Germany, he did little to exploit it, and the Germans never sought the phraseology. Even scholars know the adherents of National Socialism in Germany as the Nazis. The Germans of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)—­the National Socialist German Workers Party—­never employed Nazi, for it was an idiom of reproach. It originated as a colloquial affront for a clumsy peasant. Then, following Sozi to pillory German socialists during the 1920s, Nazi—­playing on Nationalsozialistische—­mocked that party’s members as repugnant rednecks. Exiles from Germany used the demeaning name after Hitler took over,

10

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and then it spread in anti-­German lands as the repellent characterization for his government. Contemporary academics render German documents that mention “the NSDAP” as “Nazi” in English. This is extraordinarily prejudicial. We may liken it to a scholar translating “the United States” in official government texts as “AmeriKa” (with a K), and about as neutral. So why not latch on to Nazi, at one time as negative as fascist and more conspicuously German, as the pejorative of choice? Or Hitlerism? During the World War Two period, US policy specialists linked German and Italian ideology to the Japanese. But in Japan itself, the controlling military never had a Western-­style name connected to fascism. Tojoism, after Hideki Tojo, the most prominent Japanese leader, never caught on as execration. For Americans, these Asian views were “Japanese fascism.” One regime nominated itself as fascism: Italy.2 Part of the reason for the later omnipresence of fascism may simply be that the Italians had the name first. For a few years after Hitler rose to command, he was subordinate to Mussolini, and fascism signified the sort of polity that the National Socialists secondarily exemplified. We had a fascist genus and two species in Hitler and Mussolini—­and later Japan. Yet these details, I believe, hardly explain why fascism was victorious, especially since, by the mid-­1930s, bystanders had often spoofed the Italians as doltish and bungling and not people who incarnated wickedness. There is no good answer to the question, Why fascism? Nor is it at all clear what fascist had conveyed by the late 1930s. Neither Italians nor Japanese primarily came to mind. Speakers of political English, moreover, did not always think that the non-­Italian “Caucasians” or “Nordics” referred to were German. Even when words like Nazi or Hitlerite were deployed as a kind of substitute for fascist, they, too, ceased to have an essential connection to Germany. These peculiarities frame the discussion in part 1.

1

Fascism before Fascism, 1909–­35

Fascism’s rise to primacy began when knowledgeable Americans initiated discussions comparing America and Italy as soon as Benito Mussolini had taken power in 1922. This dialogue in the United States from the early 1920s to the mid-­to late 1930s proceeded in the context of the country’s recent history. First, the emergence of the third-­party populists—­the Peoples Party—­at the end of the nineteenth century, and especially the 1896 election, when they gave votes to Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Next, the rise of another third party, the Progressive Party, that former Republican Theodore Roose­ velt created for a second presidential run in 1912. Finally, context included the resurgence of conservative Republicanism in 1919–­20, after World War One, when the Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. These earlier events determined how Americans understood what was going on in Continental Europe from the 1920s till the late 1930s.1 The Structure of American Politics After the Civil War, the Republicans—­the Grand Old Party, or GOP—­dom­­ inated national life. The Democrats had two more or less suspect wings—­ former plantation Confederates in the South and mainly Irish immigrants in the North. Associated with Thomas Jefferson, a vague ideology of liberalism that honored the autonomy of small communities and some toleration for difference barely kept these wings together. The Democratic Party hardly ever secured a national majority. In 1896 William Jennings Bryan, an agricultural spokesman, gained the Democrats’ nomination, though he frightened northerners. Joining Democrats was the new and edgy Peoples Party. These southern and midwestern populists represented the economically and politically

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dispossessed in farming communities. Some of the populist-­inclined electorate dreamed about a winning alliance with the metropolitan poor. The Peoples Party might link farmers and workers, and Jeffersonian liberalism might legitimate this link. But such a coalition of “producers” never took place. Although rural areas were more formidable than districts of northeastern laborers, some of whom were in unions, the two constituencies could neither coalesce nor individually challenge the status quo. The “fused” Democrats and Peoples Party lost to the Republican, William McKinley, for whom many people in the cities voted. Scholars have deemed 1896 a critical election. Modern businessmen and sometimes a genteel reformism, mainly Republican, dominated politics for the next thirty-­five years. Militants who claimed to act for workers and who advocated the transformation of capitalism played less than a major role. Agrarian Democrats were permanently detoured, although for a time populism lived on in American belief as a purveyor of social democracy and as a threat to an unjust standing order. More important, some politicians who labeled themselves populists later contended that they were like Mussolini, and even later the American populists were analogized to the Italian fascists. Voters reelected McKinley in 1900, but in September of 1901, just after taking office for the second time, he was killed by an assassin. Theodore Roosevelt, whom the Republicans had put on the ticket as vice president in June of 1900, was elevated to the presidency when he was just forty-­two years old. A wealthy graduate of Harvard University, Roosevelt led effectively. He had in him a touch of authoritarian masculinity, having served as New York City’s police commissioner and briefly as an officer during the Spanish-­American War of 1898. He also had a dose of self-­righteous activism, sure of what government needed to do and convinced that the university-­trained should rule. Elected on his own in 1904, he had been in the White House almost eight years by 1908. Satisfied that he had held office for the two stints that George Washington had established as seemly, “Teddy” Roosevelt—­or TR—­handed the job over to his selected successor, William Howard Taft. Four years later, disillusioned with Taft, Roosevelt broke with the Republicans and stumped for the presidency as the candidate of a breakaway group, the Progressives. They were composed, in 1912, of that branch of the Republican Party committed to TR’s dynamic programs and others drawn to his charisma. In the future, because of his charm and activism, this Roosevelt would be favorably compared to Mussolini. In the more distant future, TR would be denounced as a fascist. Roosevelt, however, had split the Republicans. Any satisfactory Democrat could win the election, and Woodrow Wilson did. A professor of politics who

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had risen to the presidency of Princeton University, Wilson had gained the governor’s office in New Jersey in 1910. He defeated TR and Taft in 1912 and got another four years in 1916. Standard contrasts illuminated the two men, Roosevelt and Wilson, who defined politics from 1900 to 1920—­the warrior and the priest, for example. But they were much alike. With his sanctimonious Calvinist Protestantism, Wilson was styled as ministerial. No less moralistic, Roosevelt practiced a less sectarian Dutch Reformed Protestantism. While Wilson shied away from militarism, his second administration, from 1917 to 1921, revolved around US participation in the world war (World War One), during which time the president brandished a taste for battle. The two leaders moreover operated in a framework of “progressivism” that TR had explicitly named in a party but that had saturated the atmosphere from before the turn of the century. Progressivism crossed party lines and gave prominence to nationalistically inclined, intellectual leaders. Especially respected by college graduates, such leaders would provide professional management to the country and its economy. Progressivism would soon be compared to fascism. Roosevelt and Wilson blended old-­fashioned Protestant certitude and up-­ to-­date know-­how. Among Republicans, TR Progressives contrasted with the Old Guard, the standpatters, or the regulars, exemplified by those who had voted for Taft in 1912. Among Democrats, progressivism diverged from Bryan’s lowbrow enthusiasts and from the more well-­thought-­of but now-­ outmoded liberalism attributed to Jefferson. Wilson compromised his party’s traditional beliefs in the rights of the little guys and of the states over the federal government. TR and Wilson cast themselves as wedged between two groups of the uneducated. US industrialism exploited, first, many average Americans; second, rich men, the robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, George Pullman, and John D. Rockefeller, sometimes did the exploiting. Progressives would evenhandedly serve as stewards for the first group and pilots for the second. Each side would get its due from a state that campus learning captained. Again, years after, some commentators would argue that the stronger state under construction was the precondition of fascism in the United States. The World War Wilson had progressive domestic commitments in his initial two years, 1913 and 1914. Then, in August of 1914, World War One broke out. From 1915 on, the perils of US neutrality increasingly stalked the president. Germany and Austria-­Hungary, the Central Powers, had squared off against England and

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France, the Allied Powers, who also combined with Russia. Germany and Austria-­Hungary thus fought on two fronts, against the Allies in the west and Russia in the east. The conflict caught up many other nations, but Americans worried most about the western front, a long battlefield running through Belgium and France. The English and French to the west, and the Germans to the east, slaughtered one another. More momentous for the United States, the British navy cut off supplies over the Atlantic to Germany, and the Germans retaliated with a new weapon, the submarine, that might attack surface ships swiftly and stealthily. As a leading maritime power, the United States could not avoid serious issues and tilted toward the English. It traded with Britain, allowed that country to thwart shipping to Germany, and denied the legitimacy of the German U-­boats. Commerce and travel made for dilemmas that propelled the United States to combat. Despite his holier-­than-­thou persona, however, the president wanted to keep the nation out of the fighting. Although events and his preachiness pushed Wilson toward belligerency in a 1916 campaign of “preparedness,” he resisted Teddy Roosevelt, who led confrontational Republicans. They questioned the president’s manhood, begged to engage the Germans, and exuded more public testosterone than Wilson. In any event, continued encounters over the US role in the Atlantic resulted in a declaration of war against Germany in the spring of 1917. The United States “associated” itself with the grateful Allies in the west and connected with the Russians. In 1917 the president worried that shedding blood in France would awaken a US frenzy. But he launched a crusade against the Germans and lifted his fellow citizens into vehement patriotism. Wilson’s soaring slogans stirred fury against the enemy, while he only half-­heartedly attempted to check the fury unleashed. If the president did not provoke the curtailment of civil liberties, he stood by as the White House incited a narrow love of country. Indeed, he shared the passions he had stimulated. From the view of America, it had gotten into the conflict in the nick of time and had brought the Germans to their knees. They had signed an agreement with Russia on the eastern front and had turned all their forces west for an assault that came in March of 1918. The advance stalled east of Paris, with Germany now fighting the United States. Because of America, said the Americans, the enemy retreated from France and surrendered in November of 1918. Although it was implicit earlier in US foreign affairs, Wilsonianism articulated the first rationale for a planetary, missionary diplomacy, and through 1919 Wilson worked to realize his agenda. His speeches inspired people everywhere. He formulated policies that would carry progressivism forward overseas. Just as politicians with a thoughtful bent could right wrongs in America,

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so, too, they could fashion a more reasonable international order—­or so the president and his party reasoned. An unselfish worldview guided an America opposed to despotic and dictatorial rulers with voiceless publics. On the contrary, the United States most perfectly represented democracy, a morally superior regime indebted to England, but one more genuine than that which existed there. America would make the world “safe for democracy.” The Great War, “the war to end all wars,” would eventuate in a novel organization guaranteeing that no future bloodshed occurred. The peace conference at Versailles outside Paris constructed this brainchild of Wilson’s, a League of Nations, to secure inclusive amity. The colonial system of Europe would end, and in its place a fraternity of ethnically homogeneous states would arise. Wilson lectured on the morally right in resolving all the muddles that had brought on the war. Nonetheless, historians have mainly judged the Versailles Conference a failure. Wilson managed only a settlement that held Germany guilty and penalized it for causing the conflict. Then, a reaction set in to the United States’ entry into the war and to its enhanced role around the world. The president’s ideas did not long convince the electorate, and the US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles that would have brought America into the League. Wilson, who had endured a stroke during his attempt to have the institution approved in 1919, left office in 1921 a broken man. By the early 1920s, the United States had returned to “normalcy.” After the GOP presidential victory in 1920, less-­sermonizing politicians exhibited more cynicism than Wilson. The progressive belief in the executive declined. Observers thought inserting the United States into Europe had been a mistake, and Americans suspected the British, who had inveigled America to their side. During the 1920s and 1930s, a perception of the fiasco of Wilson’s effort and of the unfairness of the Versailles Treaty reinforced apprehensions about America’s ability to influence events abroad positively, and Democrats had the burden of defending Wilson. Yet his notions about an enlarged responsibility for the United States around the world lingered, as did those about an international community that would enforce order. Foreign policy gurus debated these concepts for two decades, and many revered the heroic if crushed former president. We gauge Wilson’s accountability with difficulty. What his administration wanted to happen did not; and things that Wilson surely did not want to happen did. In the end, he made the choices, and is implicated in the sequels—­intended and unintended—­of his commitment. Had he not delivered the United States to involvement in the war, it was argued, the conflict might have ended in a stalemate. National Socialism, the product of Germany’s humiliating defeat, might never have arisen. Had Wilson set the stage

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at Versailles when he promoted German war guilt? Critics finally speculated that his ambitious policies and the decision to intervene contributed not just to the emergence of fascism but also to what some eventually took to be fascism’s alter ego, communism. Communism and Fascism In March of 1917, shortly before Wilson asked Congress for war, the Russian Empire had imploded. A weak social democratic administration, the Provisional Government, took over. Yet in April, to disrupt Russia, the Germans spirited an exiled radical, Vladimir Lenin, into the country. Lenin and leaders like him had a vision of Europe and America more extreme than the socialists who had irritated American politics since the 1880s. Socialists were dedicated to continuing democracy after voters replaced capitalism with state ownership of industry. However, Lenin’s communists—­the Reds or Bolsheviks—­ would violently end capitalism. They endorsed a “dictatorship of the proletariat” based on the views of the nineteenth-­century political theorist Karl Marx. Marxist communism, according to Wilson, now threatened the harmony of nations. In less than a year the Reds overthrew the Provisional Government, and Russia—­as I have remarked—­at once signed a peace treaty with the Germans. Lenin did not care which side won; he did want Russia out of the war. When the Bolsheviks threw in the towel, the Germans left the eastern front, and had almost overrun France in the west in the spring of 1918. Meanwhile, it took four years for the communists to overcome an array of opponents in a civil war in Russia, and by 1922 Lenin had given birth to a new antibourgeois union of “soviet” socialist republics—­the USSR. When Wilson set out his aims as a belligerent and his ideas about the League of Nations, he offered a choice between a reformed capitalism and the anticapitalist revolution of Lenin. Wilson versus Lenin. Whose side were you on? This question vexed the Versailles Conference, and Bolsheviks not only troubled American diplomacy in 1919 and 1920 but generated a domestic uproar. A great majority of Americans loathed communism, and a Red Scare occurred in the United States. The communists brought together frightening revolutionaries and the disliked socialists. Russia would command the antipathy of the United States for the next one hundred years. At first the rise of fascism in Italy garnered far less hostility in America. In 1919 and 1920, also hating communism and feasting on postwar disorder, politicians tested ineffectual rule in Italy. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist and journalist, stood for an assertive foreign policy, a subservient labor movement, and an eclectic religiosity that nonetheless respected a form

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of Roman Catholicism. But decisions shaped doctrine as Mussolini and his allies wrestled for rule. It is wrong-­headed to stress the concepts, for intellect was not at the forefront in the commotion of politics. Nonetheless, Mussolini brought together elements of nationalism and socialism with a measure of the Romantic irrationalism of European writers at the end of the nineteenth century. He said that his policies had sources in the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Vilfredo Pareto, men who stressed the mythic foundations of life. He named his party the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento—­roughly the Italian Combat Leagues—­but changed the name in 1921 to the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the National Fascist Party. Its members were Fasci, fascists. To enforce his views, Mussolini formed squads of military police, the Blackshirts. Fasci is the plural of  fascio, an alliance or joining-­together. The Italian comes from the Latin Fasces, an ax tied to a bundle of switches. The Roman magistrate carried this symbol of authority and a means of punishment—­the Blackshirts had this role under Mussolini. The Fasces of the ancient world and the Fasci in the modern were also powerful because united. Americans recited E pluribus unum—­Out of many, one—­and argued over how robust the one should be. For Mussolini, many individuals might be weak, but a corporate entity was undestroyable, the Fasci. From this etymology, the metastatic growth of fascism took place, not least in American English. In 1922 Mussolini and his fascists marched on Rome. Soon they had also restored some solidity to Italy. But furthering security and prosperity circumscribed personal freedoms, and Mussolini repressed opposition whenever necessary. He did not tolerate strikes or labor actions against his order and conceded the needs of workers by having different kinds represented in the administration itself. This “syndicalism” replaced the labor parties in other countries—­for critics, it amounted only to unions that the state regulated. From the early 1920s to the mid-­to late 1930s, American diplomats consistently sought to work positively with Italy. They heralded Mussolini for keeping the country from bolshevism. While they readily granted that his politics were inappropriate for the United States, they reiterated that his regime worked for a primitive, uneducated, and childlike people such as the Italians. For his part, Mussolini wanted affable relations with America. He negotiated a settlement of the Italian war debts to the United States, a question that plagued the diplomacy of the 1920s in respect to other European nations. He welcomed US investments and took up US ideas about disarmament and about international politics. The American State Department looked to bolster Il Duce—­the leader—­and sought public allies who might advertise the beneficial aspects of Italian politics.

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Intellectuals Embrace Fascism In the early going, scholars and journalists agreed with the State Department. Civil servants compared Mussolini to Teddy Roosevelt. Intellectuals went further, creating a new interpretation of American politics of the earlier years of the twentieth century. They revisited progressivism, found anticipations of fascism, and formed an appreciation of how ideas like those of Mussolini had first crystallized in the United States. Italy was now modifying them for its own use. In 1909, thirteen years before Mussolini led Italy, New Yorker Herbert Croly had written a book called The Promise of American Life. Croly, a forty-­ year-­old monied ne’er-­do-­well, had a Harvard background—­incomplete over an extended decade. He had a perspective indebted to his famous Harvard instructors, Josiah Royce and William James. Royce advocated a “philosophy of loyalty,” in which ever-­widening communities of social regard defined individuals, the supreme community comprising those loyal to loyalty itself. James had invented “pragmatism.” He believed individuals basic, contrary to Royce. But a theory of truth lay at the heart of James’s doctrine: truth was what worked for individuals over the long run. By this standard, James defended religion as true because people found it essential in meeting the trials of life. Croly picked up lessons from Royce and James—­the first that only an ensemble could give individuals an identity; the second that, in such an ensemble, leaders forged the will for a quasi-­divine polity. Croly’s thought—­as we have seen for Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—­was situated in the standoff between immigrant laborers and wealthy manufacturers, each concentrating on their own well-­being. Croly wanted a presidency that a vigorous man of mind would steer. Such a leader would overcome selfish public affairs with a politics of mutuality. The executive would encourage prosperity but also concord in the country and devotion to it. Croly’s murky but trenchant Promise of American Life applied his education from Harvard to formulate these notions. America had a problem, wrote Croly, in linking democracy to single persons. He proposed that the United States redefine democratic impulses as collective. In such a commonwealth, the collective would have a transcendent nature promoting shared well-­being. Croly had heroes who were carriers of his ideas. He took up the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton. He easily located himself in a Hamiltonian tradition that was pitted against the laissez-­faire views of Jeffersonian liberalism. For Croly, only Hamilton’s strong state could establish Jefferson’s end of justice—­that all men are created equal. Next, according to Croly, Abraham Lincoln had furthered Hamilton’s

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vision through the Northern victory in the Civil War. Lincoln had expanded democracy—­the positive aspect of Jefferson’s ideology—­by accentuating national unity. With his sense of a mystic American race, he enlarged a people’s government by eliminating slavery. During the twentieth century, Croly argued, the United States must light on rulers who could submerge disagreement in a scheme of pseudo-­Christian renewal. He looked to Roosevelt as the one figure in the arena who brought together an imperial nationalism and a dedication to communal fairness. Compared to Hamilton and Lincoln in The Promise of American Life, TR could easily claim that Croly had espoused the former president’s concepts abstractly. Both sides got something in the exchange: Roosevelt a learned endorsement; Croly fraternity with a past president.2 Quickly known for articulating progressive ideas, Croly founded the magazine the New Republic in 1914. Along with coeditors Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl, he used the publication to delineate for the intelligentsia the meaning of progressivism for practical politics. Croly and his friends at TNR nudged Wilson in the direction he should take—­generally toward an idealized version of what they hypothesized Roosevelt might have done. They finally favored the world war and Wilson’s decision-­making that tacked away from the more belligerent TR. Talented people challenged these statist inclinations. During the war, Randolph Bourne wrote a series of savage attacks on the assumption that thought could restrict the ferocity of conflict, and in Liberalism in America (1919) Harold Stearns evinced dismay over what Wilson had done to traditional liberalism in the United States. Nonetheless, TNR still stood out in shaping the heritage of Roosevelt and Wilson.3 With the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, TNR lost its centrality to debate, and its political ideas seemed as though they had passed an expiration date. Yet later during the 1920s, they came under renewed discussion, and in a different light, as Americans pondered Mussolini. For some intellectuals, the new Italy awkwardly brought together the grand history of the Roman Empire and backward paisans, some of whom had made their way to Ellis Island. Fascism was not for America, which did not have a premodern society that leaders must escort into the twentieth century. And no one defended the coercion of the Blackshirts or the suppression of civil liberties. But in Italy, fascism was having a positive effect. Croly drew parallels between progressive democracy and Mussolini’s fascism. Both sought to end strife by damping down the scuffle of parties and legitimating supraindividual obligations. Croly and Mussolini accepted that a country and its elite had a semi-­sacred status. Each believed in an efficient and affluent state that somehow transcended the merely efficient and affluent.4

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S. S. McClure, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell had all been muckraking progressive journalists before World War One. After the war, when they turned to Italy, they all applauded Mussolini, and talked Croly’s talk. For Steffens, God had “formed Mussolini out of a rib of Italy,” while McClure found corporatism “a great step forward and the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American republic.” Tarbell claimed moral uplift for Mussolini’s “world of work,” and because of her reputation as a feisty radical, the State Department’s diplomats appropriated her views for their own promotion of fascist Italy.5 Mussolini was contributing to a reconsideration of progressivism in the United States after the disenchantment with Wilson at Versailles, the Democratic loss of 1920, and the victories of Republican regulars in 1920 and 1924. One could investigate how Italy confidently approached its public issues and could suggest that progressivism still had much to teach the United States. Mussolini had a peculiar progressive-­like administration that could help Americanize Italy. Even if the singularity of fascism unfit it for the United States, it might rejuvenate progressivism. During the 1920s, when Republicans had rejected progressivism for the standpat, and Democrats had rejected it for an outdated pre-­Wilson liberalism, some reflective citizens argued that the nation’s renewal of 1901–­14 had much to recommend it. Mussolini’s successes evidenced the possibility that organic nationalism could still regenerate the United States. Croly might hold up fascist-­like commitments to a postwar generation as something to emulate rather than to belittle. Or so Croly and his circle thought. Mussolini gave himself a US pedigree, as did commentators in the United States. In addition to Nietzsche, Sorel, and Pareto, Mussolini—­and Croly—­ nodded in the direction of  William James as an inspiration for fascism. When James had argued that what worked constituted truth, he had spoken of a “will to believe,” the name of a celebrated (or infamous) essay of 1896. We wanted some things to be true, and in some cases our wanting helped realize the truth. Not unreasonably, many students reckoned James a relativist or subjectivist. He had disregarded doctrine, and gambled on what succeeded and responded to deep individual wishes. Giovanni Papini, an Italian philosopher, promulgated James’s ideas, and the American had recognized him as a fellow pragmatist. Later, after James’s death, Papini defended fascism in Italy. He associated it not with intellectual principles but, as in James, with the willful nature of human beings and their needs. James did become part of the hodgepodge that accompanied Mussolini’s choices and policies. Fascism was being positively associated with TR, Croly was being acknowledged as an

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expert on Italian politics, and Mussolini was announcing pragmatism as an element of his governance. Although many in the TNR clique touted Mussolini, we should not classify him as a progressive. Moreover, something goes amiss in retroactively categorizing Croly as fascist, if only because he antedated by more than a decade the invention of a fascist state. He and his admirers described themselves as progressives, and Mussolini identified as a fascist. At the same time, it is well to note that fascism meant something far different in the United States during the 1920s than it did from the late 1930s onward. Little Italy Fascism in Italy, in political theory, and in the heads of the privileged was one thing. Italians in the United States were different. Hyphenated Americans filled many cities—­New York in particular. Some of these people were known at best as Italian-­Americans, more regularly as Italians, and often as “dagoes” or “wops.” Mussolini had in some ways rescued Italy and given a sense of pride to many Italian-­Americans. With his bluff masculinity, Il Duce prefigured the media-­style politics coming into being in the United States. At once, New York had societies of Italian-­American fascists and Blackshirts. These groups were probably the only authentic fascists ever to have existed in America, if we limit fascism to Italians with some direct connection to Mussolini. Hollywood stars perhaps expectedly admired Mussolini’s ability to pitch his authority in public. The silent-­screen heartthrob Rudolph Valentino was Italian-­American and boosted Mussolini’s allure because, for some moviegoers, the two personas of Valentino and Mussolini blended. Indeed, Valentino’s shocking death in 1926 led to an international dispute between Italians and Italian-­Americans over who could claim the actor’s affections.6 An Italian-­American elite, the so-­called prominenti, took sides for or against Mussolini, and debated fascism in ways distinct from Croly and his peers. The prominenti spoke for naturalized citizens and those of Italian descent who had been born in America. The leadership also voiced opinion for immigrants, some of whom did not remain in the United States or did stay but never became citizens. The elite stirred things up among these groups. Italian-­Americans might cause trouble in the United States because of the notion that even Italians who had permanently emigrated embodied Italianità, an essential Italianness. After some public brawls among various Mussolini-­ stimulated hooligans, a New York Times editorial of 1925 advised “They Should Go Home for Fighting.” In 1927 the New York Telegram published a

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much-­reprinted series of essays, “Fascism in the U.S.” about how the Italians were bringing European ways to America. In 1929 Harper’s Magazine had a long and detailed piece: “Mussolini’s American Empire: The Fascist Invasion of the United States.”7 Writers analogizing progressivism to fascism contrasted with Italian-­Americans articulating their native land’s politics in the United States. But despite some extravagant US journalists (and Italian antifascist newspapers), the possibility of the transfer of fascism to America was neglible. As soon as Mussolini had established his rule, he attempted to influence other nations. US organizations tried to manipulate opinion in favor of Italy. Among many: the Dante Alighieri Society, the Fascist League of North America, the Italian-­American Society, the Sons of Italy, and the upscale Casa Italiana of Columbia University.8 Yet the squabbles of bureaucrats in Italy and the problems of figuring out what was going on in America hindered efforts in Rome. Mussolini exploited some US groups and kept others at arms’ length. This strategy nonetheless did not matter much, for fascists in the United States browbeat one another. They overestimated the pull of their ideas and could not conceal ineptitude. Then, once entrenched, Mussolini distanced himself from rogue institutions and made clear to his diplomatic corps that Italians in the United States should behave as obedient Americans. Finally, US authorities spied on individuals and clubs, and periodically clamped down on them when they did not follow Mussolini’s lead. Over time, however, fascist propaganda, internal bickering, and accusations of untrustworthiness did not alter the belief that Italy did not threaten America as a military power overseas or with undercover agents in the United States. A stereotype of Italians as incapable and foolish would soon materialize—­and became enduring. Herbert Schneider and William Yandell Elliott In a book of 1928, Herbert Schneider typified Americans who wished Mussolini well but did not have Herbert Croly’s baggage. Schneider had studied at Columbia University with John Dewey, a nationally famous thinker who today would count as a public intellectual. Dewey’s philosophy built on that of William James, who had died in 1910, but his instrumentalism was a much weightier endeavor of the ivory tower than the views James expressed in readable and stylish writing. The prose was less romantic and religious than James’s, but Dewey defined as true what succeeded for applied and practical scientists, a sophisticated variant of the notion that the truth was what worked. Professionals in the academy gave us the justifiably fruitful. Knowledge still hung on human needs, as it did for James, but the practices

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of university scholars reflected these needs. The new research into the human order defined truth, according to Dewey, and society should harness collegiate expertise to advance opportunity for the masses; his views were a progressive variant. The student Schneider gravitated to Dewey’s instrumentalism and political involvement, and went on to a long career at Columbia, where he was regarded as an expert on American thought and Dewey’s ideas. Initially, however, Schneider theorized about Italy, after a stay in that country. His well-­ regarded volume, Making the Fascist State of 1928, did not laud Mussolini but did appraise Italy positively. He noted “many fascisms,” many dimensions to fascist rule including the doubtful use of state violence. But what he took to be the Dewey-­ite “experiment” in Italy mesmerized Schneider. With Mussolini, Schneider brooked no absolutes and criticized standard politics. He borrowed from Dewey the belief that the only criterion of the upright state was performance; we had no other yardstick than working, executing, accomplishing—­notions repeated in his text. He might believe that the jury was still out on Mussolini in 1928, but formal notions of political theory could not measure the regime.9 A different analysis of progressivism and fascism came in William Yandell Elliott’s The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. In the Department of Government at Harvard, Elliott had begun a brilliant career that would make him a policy advisor to Washington into the 1990s. This first book did much to secure his repute. Published in 1928, it originated in a dissertation that the rise of fascism in Italy had motivated. Elliott believed that wisdom adjudicating public disputes produced proper governance. Reason, a crucial though never overriding aspect of politics, battled against the interests and the passions. The flourishing polity was a constitutional one that maintained an equilibrium in a dangerous world, and Elliott defended such a polity against two immoderate sets of opponents. The first were those who saw the state simply as the artifact of competing factions. This vision had emerged most prominently—­for Elliott—­in the scholarship of the great American historian and sometime faculty member at Columbia, Charles Beard, and the political economists and historians around him. Beard had written, in 1913, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which applied notions of financial advantage to a grasp of the US Constitution. He relied on the interest group theory in the new discipline of political science. Elliott was an old-­school theorist even during the 1920s, because he rejected Beard’s new discipline. Its name suggested that politics could reduce itself to the measurable and quantitative—­Harvard had a Department of Government, not of Political Science. For Elliott, interest group

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theory shrank politics to the merely calculating, and gave rise to a social science tendency that he ran down as positivism. Beard had a progressive ally in John Dewey. Dewey’s instrumentalism—­ according to Elliott—­purportedly outlined how social science could manipulate critical economic goods to produce a better America. Literate New Yorkers routinely identified Beard and Dewey as pragmatists who would improve the nation by reforming the ascendant factions. For Elliott, Dewey and Beard overlooked the role of ideas that transcended circumstance in a well-­ structured nation and that, imperfectly and only with persistent effort, could influence how human beings might flourish. The second immoderate opponent, for Elliott, pursued a different kind of pragmatism, not the mechanical sort like Dewey’s but the dreamy, irrational sort like that of William James. This was a pragmatism of the passions. Students who followed this line of thought—­again according to Elliott—­denied that reason could play a part in politics. Dewey’s pragmatism exaggerated what technological science could accomplish; James’s pragmatism deprived intelligence of any role at all. For James, only results mattered; actions enslaved ideas. He concentrated if not on the irrational, at least on the nonrational. Elliott cited James’s “The Will to Believe” in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. James’s kind of pragmatism had influenced Mussolini and his compatriots. Elliott told his readers that Italian politics was “pragmatic Fascism” or “Machiavellian pragmatism.” James’s values “actually aimed at . . . syndicalism and Fascism.”10 We need to make a few points about Elliott’s reading of texts. His favored liberal constitutionalism navigated between the calculations of political science (often identified as progressivism) and illogical romanticism (fascism). He committed himself to regionalism and limitations on a powerful state that had hovered around before Woodrow Wilson. The previously mentioned Randolph Bourne and Harold Stearns had expressed the same commitment earlier in journalistic ruminations about progressivism’s deficiencies. Yet while Elliott had anxieties about fascism, he treated it with respect. He tied Mussolini to the pragmatism of William James and perceived fascism as no worse than the politics of Charles Beard and John Dewey. For years, both men—­Beard and Dewey—­would participate in argument that would label someone else as fascist, or they would be labeled fascists themselves. Fascism and the Depression In 1929 and more clearly in 1930 and 1931, the problematic nature of fascism and its potential residence in America took on more importance when the

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US stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression. During one period, one-­quarter to one-­third of the workforce numbered as jobless, and insecurity defined the decade. With the Depression, observers did not just speak fashionably of fascism as attractive for America but presented it as a real option and, for some, a real threat. After an only mildly curious childhood during the 1920s, the linguistic career of fascism took off. Many writers condemned American capitalism and proposed various solutions—­among them Italian-­style politics—­to assist economic recovery. Simultaneously, fascism had trouble retaining its glow in the United States. The suppression of opposition in Italy increasingly drew American attention. The Depression robbed Mussolini of a portion of his positive public relations in the United States. The danger of repression and violence in America pushed some of those identified as pragmatists to condemn in Italy what they previously thought as acceptable. A different sort of fascism entered the lists among American revolutionaries. By 1928, after Lenin’s death in the new Russia, Joseph Stalin had taken over the government and delivered orders to the main faction of communists in the United States. Moscow could thereafter count on the Communist Party of the United States of America (the group’s official name as of 1929) to follow directives about foreign policy. During what became famous among cognoscenti as “the third period” of Soviet rule, from 1928 to 1935, Stalin snubbed the assistance of any other anticapitalist groups. All those who did not follow his “line” were “social fascists.” The CPUSA did espouse Stalin’s line. The trifling Stalinists in the United States invoked social fascist and placed it on non-­Stalinist communists; on American Socialists, led by their soon-­to-­be perennial presidential candidate, Norman Thomas; and on various milder critics of the economic system. Although only an in-­group of radicals understood or accepted this definition, the branding early illustrated fascism’s use as an all-­purpose curse that had an international flavor. Stalin and his supporters in the United States were singling out Mussolini’s response to communism as the ultimate threat to the forward movement of history that the Soviets represented. But fascism was not yet a profanity. In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover, the incumbent Republican president, in his attempt at reelection. A Democrat and a distant relation of TR’s, Roosevelt was soon known as FDR. The new president had a record as a progressive—­he had signed on as assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913 under Wilson, and he had lost the vice presidency in 1920 running as a Wilsonian. In office in early 1933, FDR initiated nationalizing programs that could have come from the tool kit of Herbert Croly and the New Republic and that had aspects of syndicalism. Roosevelt put forward

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plans with a government-­business alliance. In 1932 and 1933, some were calling the new president a fascist. The writers of the New Republic did not much contribute to this new and more sensational debate. The magazine had had less of a high profile even before Croly’s death in 1930. Yet as American capitalism went into crisis, a new journal of opinion, Common Sense, rose in prominence. Although John Dewey had not participated in the New Republic’s earlier liaison with fascism, he had had a connection to that publication. Now he had a large role in the editorial stance of Common Sense and used some speculative artillery against fascism and Franklin Roosevelt. A straw in the wind, Dewey again and again told readers in the early 1930s that America was going fascist. His warnings about a police state relied on the “ominous analogies to fascism abroad” in Roosevelt’s policies. Simultaneously, the CPUSA was urging that Roosevelt exemplified social fascism. It reviled his relation to big business, which would subdue ordinary people. Norman Thomas also repeatedly condemned Roosevelt. Roosevelt the candidate and then the president, according to Thomas, was taking the country to a Mussolini-­like regime, and that upshot was to be avoided. Thomas, Dewey, and the CPUSA contributed to a spiraling negative valence of Italy’s polity. All three marked Roosevelt as a fascist, although the Stalinists additionally lumped Thomas and Dewey with the president.11 Still, all was not lost for fascism. An October 1933 essay in Foreign Affairs, the flagship magazine of the foreign policy–­making elite, argued that state-­business cooperation might replace laissez-­faire. FDR and Italian fascism overlapped, but the overlap might have something to offer. The author, William L. Welk, questioned whether either of them would work but did not censure.12 More cautious was Carmen Haider, a Columbia student of Charles Beard and Herbert Schneider. Haider had researched in Italy, and her Capital and Labor under Fascism (1930) had made her an expert on Mussolini. In 1934 she wrote a second book on the topic, Do We Want Fascism? This volume did not give an upbeat assessment, yet for Haider the worldwide economic dislocation made nationalism and “labor cooperatives” an option. Roosevelt’s early programs had seized on these elements, and Haider acknowledged their persuasiveness. Thus, while intimating that the answer to her question was No, she understood that it was an open question, and that a Yes might not mean the end of the United States.13 Movies The Hollywood motion picture introduced another element into the back-­ and-­forth about fascism. Movies gave a visual treatment to what might happen

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with a new and consequently unpredictable president. As the Roosevelt administration gained its footing, cinema depicted how the country might react to a dose of Mussolini as politicians and observers worried about the relevance of Europe to America’s troubles. Like officials and pundits, moviemakers showed ambivalence in a variety of productions. In 1933 Columbia Pictures produced a compilation of news clips about Italian fascism, which a commentator explained. Mussolini Speaks was a kind of documentary, and the studio put it in theaters the same week Franklin Roosevelt took office as president. The movie advertised fascism as what “might be the answer to America’s needs.” The film brought to light, one critic argued, “the role that talking pictures are destined to play as education.” The cinemagoing public saw Mussolini as an efficient leader with a disciplined paramilitary.14 The most potent commercial success was Gabriel over the White House. In 1933 Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer (MGM) distributed Gabriel. It had been made by Cosmopolitan Pictures owner William Randolph Hearst, a fabulously wealthy American newspaperman who regarded himself a connoisseur of politicians and their educator. Hearst knew that movies packed a wallop, and Gabriel gave him a way to act as tutor. Yet we also have evidence that the president-­elect fashioned suggestions for editing the picture after he had seen a prerelease screening. Hearst made changes, and Roosevelt apparently liked the film.15 Gabriel over the White House showcased President Judson Hammond, a hack leading a debased America. Then, after a car accident, he sank into a coma. But with some sort of intervention—­the angel Gabriel in the title—­ Hammond awoke as capable if dictatorial, widely thought of at the time as fascistic. To cure the country of its many ills, he abrogated the Constitution, cleaned up crime and graft, and even brought about world peace before suffering a fatal stroke. Critics found the film bizarre and described Hammond as a Mussolini. The Nation, another periodical of political opinion that sat between Wilson’s progressivism and Franklin Roosevelt’s nationalism, sermonized that the movie advocated “a policy of fascist dictatorship in this country.” While cinema exalted images, the new radio and the sound film had made the broadcast of human speech a striking innovation that also held mass allure. Film critics wrote about Roosevelt’s voice, which Americans heard over the radio at the same time, as “almost” as resonant as that of Hollywood’s comely Walter Huston, who starred as President Hammond in Gabriel over the White House.16 Over a year later, another movie in the mold of Gabriel put the dangers of fascism onscreen. In the hurly-­burly after FDR took office during the emergency of the Depression, a House of Representatives committee had voiced

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concerns about fascism in America. Figures involved in the committee’s deliberations had talked to the novelist Rex Stout, later the celebrated writer of the series of detective novels featuring Nero Wolfe. In 1934 Stout anonymously authored a novel, The President Vanishes, which speculated about what might happen if an antidemocratic cabal arranged a coup. Then, Walter Wanger, who had produced Gabriel over the White House in 1933, followed up with a cinematic version. The end of 1934 saw the movie in theaters several months after its completion. Both Gabriel and The President Vanishes made graphic how unemployment would challenge constitutional politics. Yet the latter film explicitly attended to treason. At loggerheads with militarists in his cabinet, President Craig Stanley inexplicably disappeared, and rumors of abduction abounded. He had perhaps been facing impeachment over his vacillating response to war from Europe, and the abduction had delayed the plotting of a coterie of industrialists. The movie even had fascist “Gray Shirts,” a miniscule American group that had gained the limelight aping Mussolini’s Blackshirts. At the end, President Stanley was victorious: he had staged his own disappearance to give the plot time to unravel. One critic called this “Hollywood fascism” that culminated in a “happy Wall Street dictatorship.”17 Hitler Contaminates Mussolini Few Americans saw much that was positive in the ascent of National Socialism and its leader in Germany, Adolf Hitler. With his anti-­Semitic rants and uniformed security forces, he made the swastika, the ancient symbol of an equilateral cross with each arm continued at a right angle, a durable emblem. Hitler had first come to US attention in 1923, when he attempted to overthrow the postwar German government. He went to prison, where he composed most of his book of plans and memories, Mein Kampf. In America he was still regarded as something of a fool. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby of 1925, the Jewish mobster group that promoted Jay Gatsby’s wealth through various illegal activities was called the Swastika Holding Company.18 Matters were more serious eight years later, when Hitler came to power at about the same time as Roosevelt’s inauguration. The Third Reich replaced the unsteady administrations of Weimar Germany, named for the town in which the Germans had put a new basic government into place after their defeat in 1918. But upon Hitler’s rise to his nation’s chancellorship in Berlin, he looked not to Weimar but to Rome for inspiration. Commentators regarded the German and Italian regimes as different instances of the same form of government, with a German Führer instead of an Italian Duce. Both regimes had

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The Swastika of National Socialism. Adapted from a poster for a 1932 election, Germany Awake! (Library of Congress, Prints and Pho­tographs)

wild support in part because of the striking iconography in uniforms, badges, flags, salutes, and the precise goose step of their military.19 Now the swastika was no joke. In time, journalists observed more competence and ruthlessness in the Germans than in the less effectual Italians. Sober observers now monitored a dangerous and well-­organized Hitler and began to see Mussolini supreme over a more bumbling one-­party state. The rulers in Berlin eliminated the supposed rights of speech and a free press. Inhabitants had no way to protect themselves from the violence of the regime. Hitler signified fascism’s cruelty, and a meanness foreign to Italy. The noun Gestapo, an abbreviation for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), at once connoted the malicious character of German authority, while “storm troopers” designated another

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vicious element. In English, Hitler led the National Socialist German Workers Party, but as I have indicated, the party was pejoratively the Nazis. Rulers in Germany as well as Italy were also considered fascists. Germany’s trademark and pitiless racial policies, initially absent in Italy, eventually purposed to eliminate the Jews, all outside the Völk, those of true “Aryan blood.” In addition to other people thought of as Untermenschen—­ the handicapped and the homosexual—­Jews would die by the millions in the ghastly concentration camps of the Holocaust. By the 1940s, German policies had acquired a gruesome name, genocide, that meant the ultimate in political iniquity. This demonic anti-­Semitism connected to the subhuman communists in Russia. Hitler wanted to do away with these “Slavs,” and his loathing was congruent with an aggressive foreign policy directed against the USSR. Once the Reich had settled into power, its racism defined public concern in the United States. Something sinister now despoiled Mussolini, as Hitler both tainted Il Duce and made the Italian look like a bozo. The German regime was persuasively testified to as a metaphysical evil. Al Smith, a friend of Roosevelt’s and the Democrat who had been defeated for the presidency by Herbert Hoover in 1928, joined several other leaders in denouncing National Socialism within a few months of Hitler’s ascent. More cautious, the Roosevelt administration itself at first dealt with Germany as a “friendly” power, although privately the president and those around him shared Smith’s feelings.20 By 1935–­36 Mussolini had come under Hitler’s sway, and fascism lost its ambiguous promise. During the 1920s and early 1930s, fascism did not have the same meaning in American English that it later had. It possessed, in Mussolini’s first ten years in office, an optimistic connotation as a constructive entrant into global affairs along with a hint of the darkly ludicrous. But fascism then became the foul noun of preference and encompassed the Nazis, while simultaneously Nazism ceased to be exclusively German. Many studies of fascism in the United States wrongly presume that what positively intrigued 1920s Americans was the fascism of the late 1930s and 1940s. World War Two has deprived us of a full understanding of fascism, and we engage in the impossible in trying to capture emotionally the more complicated meaning that fascism had up until the Depression. In simply calling its defenders naïve or unintelligent or authoritarian, we do a disservice to the politics of that era. Another movie, Duck Soup, signaled the change in the United States. With four of the Marx Brothers, the comedy film played in theaters at the end of 1933, some four months after its production and some nine months after Hitler took office. More important, the movie marked more than ten years of Italian fascism and began the portrayal of Mussolini-­type leaders as clownish.

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Groucho Marx as Rufus Firefly, Leader of Freedonia, preparing for war in the 1933 comedy film Duck Soup. (Paramount Pictures, courtesy of the Everett Collection)

Groucho Marx had the lead as a half-­lunatic leader of a country with a revolutionary past identical to that of the United States. “Pre-­Code” Hollywood had little censorship, and Marx incorporated sexual innuendo into his film, which centered on the jealousy of “the Leader” about his girlfriend as the motive for an unnecessary war. Groucho made crazy jokes and saw combat as a sort of stunt—­a dazzling Broadway musical scene heralded going off to fight with singing and dancing. Italy banned Duck Soup.21 Duck Soup was the last of a series of the Marx Brothers’ offerings at Paramount Pictures and only a modest success. It is valuable, however, as a marker of the growing distrust of fascism. But it is my marker, and not everyone shared Groucho’s fantasies. One who did not was the composer and songwriter Cole Porter. An early version of his 1934 hit tune, “You’re the Top,” in the Broadway musical Anything Goes went: “You’re the top! You’re Mussolini.” It was not until the next year that the lyrics changed: “You’re the top! You’re the Coliseum.”22 Another who rejected the view of Duck Soup was the gifted propagandist, writer, and poet Ezra Pound. Born in Idaho before it became a state, he grew up sympathetic to those exploited in the great American West. Yet the talented Pound migrated to London before World War One,

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formative in the movement of literary modernism and an inspiration to its heavyweights like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Disturbed by the outcome of the war, Pound blamed it on Jewish capitalism and made his way to Italy, where he lived as an expatriate. Self-­identified as a fascist, he published some collected ruminations in 1935, Jefferson and/or Mussolini: Fascism as I have Seen It. These essays elaborated on Pound’s faith in William Jennings Bryan’s populism, which Pound traced to Thomas Jefferson in the past and forward to Mussolini. Praise for self-­reliant farmers, a program of economic equality, and dislike of bankers, according to Pound, defined Mussolini. Pound was one of the earliest members of the literati who saw an alliance between populism and fascism. Moreover, for him fascism was positively linked to Jefferson and not to Jefferson’s rival Hamilton, Herbert Croly’s hero. Many argued, then and later, that Pound exhibited mental instability, but Jefferson and/or Mussolini did underscore the labile nature of fascism.23

2

Franklin Roosevelt and Political Culture, 1932–­36

The Great Depression disgraced Herbert Hoover and the Republicans, and began an age of political slandering. With millions of families without a weekly paycheck, Hoover had worsened matters by a civic persona that made his administration and the man himself appear uncaring and careless. The paradigmatic example was his treatment of the Bonus Army, a series of events that furnished grist for accelerated name-­calling. After the world war, Congress had promised veterans a bonus for their service. In the summer of 1932, the old soldiers marched in Washington for early payment. Calling them communists, Hoover had the army under General Douglas MacArthur drive them off and collected a permanent black eye as someone indifferent to economic suffering yet unable to cure it. As a candidate, Franklin Roosevelt described General MacArthur as “a potential Mussolini.” Yet the Republican senator David Reed had declared a few months earlier that if the United States “ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” Soon after the election, Giuseppe Zangara, a self-­declared antifascist Italian living in the United States, tried to kill Roosevelt before he took office. Zangara took the incoming president for a bourgeois capitalist politician, and thus—­so far as authorities could make out from his disjointed diatribes—­a fascist. The American Communist Party, in the grips of the 1928 dictum of Stalin, did not distinguish between the social fascism of Hoover and Roosevelt. Escalating disparagement continued for years. The 1930s put on view censorious and chaotic rhetoric during what FDR called the New Deal. An agreed-­on set of political categories that lent overall coherence to the political dialogue did not take hold until 1941.

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Fascism in Arts and Letters Entertainment, as we have already seen in some films of the early 1930s, reflected its creators’ musings about fascism—­for or against. Even more outside politics proper, artists, architects, dramatists, and authors easily designated as bearers of high culture made American fascism a central element of their efforts. Men and women writers of fiction from all parts of the country—­many participants in the regionalist movement—­helped tinge everything with fascism.1 Nathaniel West was a Jewish New Yorker who made his way west to write for Hollywood. He satirized conventional politics in his novel of 1934, A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. An innocent Vermont farm boy, Pitkin sought his fortune after consulting with a former US president, Shagpole Whipple. A sort of believer in the best of all possible worlds like Voltaire’s Candide, Pitkin traveled the country and confronted an array of heavies, shysters, and scallywags. He lost an eye, teeth, a thumb, his scalp, and a leg before his life. After he died, the National Revolutionary Party of former president Whipple made Pitkin’s birthday a holiday that heckled foreigners, Marxism, and international capitalism.2 Although this book initially tanked, it was a harbinger of like-­minded fiction to come, and it led the way to the literary success stories of writers based mainly, but not exclusively, outside Manhattan and the Northeast. These men and women called attention to the varied American cultures that in some measure opposed the national culture as New York City defined it. Superior writers complimented genuine if provincial customs that contrasted with cosmopolitan fakery. At the time, political questions of a certain sort naturally arose for these artists: Was northeastern culture fascist? Was southern or western culture antifascist? Could the city save the province, or the province save the city? The urbanist Lewis Mumford made theory for the regionalists. A New Yorker, Mumford looked around his city and did not like what he saw. His views harked back to the earlier prophetic ones of the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. The crucial first volume of Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes was published in 1918, and its two volumes were available in En­ glish by the late 1920s—­The Decline of the West. The book foresaw inevitable decay in the West as it degenerated into societies defined by machines producing needless gadgets and appliances. In Technics and Civilization (1934), Mumford copied Spengler and warned of the coarsening consequences of the great northeastern cities. In the later 1930s, he was more pessimistic, but even in the early 1930s he stirred literary figures, usually in the South, to condemn the US city because it spawned fascism.3

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The most important collection of regionalists, the Nashville Agrarians, had a connection to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. In 1930 poets and critics like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren had contributed to a manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. But the southern authors who worried about risky politics additionally encompassed the journalist W. J. Cash and other writers of extraordinary endowment—­William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, and Thomas Wolfe. Their works illustrated regionalist ideas and testified that literati in the United States, no less than the politicians, had inhaled the fascism of the time. These men and women had different and complex friendships and rivalries as well as peculiar political affiliations. But their upbringing in the South and their calling directed them all to the heritage of slavery and what it meant for understanding contemporary international life. Mussolini titillated many of them during the 1920s, and others traveled and lived in Germany during the 1930s. Most fixated on fascism’s connection to the South. Their solicitude or lack of solicitude for their region influenced their ideas about the European continent and—­fascism in America. Liberal industrialism in the North, according to the Agrarians, tolerated no alternative opinions. Pragmatic instrumentalism and the positivism of social science—­linked to Manhattan, John Dewey, and Charles Beard—­blended for these southerners with an alienated metropolitan life. New York promoted ideological conformity on a continuum with fascism. The South represented “true” democracy that could save Americans from technology. In their part of the world, the Nashville group believed, a bastion against fascism existed. The Agrarians, however, glamorized the Jim Crow South. They also could not ignore the Ku Klux Klan, the secret terrorist organization in the South in the late nineteenth century; its revival during the 1920s; and the lynching still occurring during the 1930s. National Socialism had been defined as a kind of ethnocentrism that purveyed irrational violence against those outside “the race.” In uncovering fascism in the North, Nashville was itself yoked to fascism. Decriers tagged the Agrarians, with their vibrant idea of blood and soil that bound people together, as protofascist. Nashville made an unhappy move in its own discussions by using folk culture at a time when many people had soaked up the Völkisch as National Socialist.4 The Agrarians moreover could not get around the link between the South and fascism because of a brief alliance with Seward Collins, an eccentric New York City publisher who identified himself as an American (Mussolini) fascist in the early 1930s. From Syracuse, New York, Collins had gone to Prince­ ton University and unveiled a monthly, the American Review, to express his

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Detail from Thomas Hart Benton’s mural series A Social History of the State of Indiana (1932–­33). Note the Ku Klux Klan rally and the military planes. (© 2021 T. H. and R. P. Benton Trusts / Licensed by Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York, and owned by the University of Indiana)

anti-­Semitic and pro-­Mussolini fancies. Wanting a northern exposure, the Agrarians wrote some essays for Collins’s magazine and never recovered from their dalliance.5 Finally, the New York art world bracketed Nashville with “fascistic” regionalist painters, Thomas Hart Benton chief among them. Reared in Missouri, Benton produced art that, it was argued, glorified the white race in its celebration of true bound-­to-­the-­earth Americanism.6 Robert Penn Warren was the most thoughtful of the Nashville group. Even in his early twenties as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, he was a singular talent and received great educational benefits because of his potential. The benefits included a fellowship in Mussolini’s Italy. Warren responded to the faith others had in him with an illustrious career as a novelist, poet, and critic. For him, democracy contradicted itself. It flaunted the irregular and the kinked. In the South, its nonrational aspect was paternalism toward African-­Americans, which might only slowly diminish. Warren thought of a politics that allied the national government with business—­this was how he envisioned the early New Deal or European fascists—­as logical. Such a politics had a unifying sense of how the social order should function. On the contrary, democracy encompassed the unfinished and imperfect. While the

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white South denied humanity to Blacks, a tormented Warren concluded that his region sustained democracy, as opposed to a North that leaned toward fascism. Among the regionalists, Katherine Anne Porter had perhaps the most interesting Continental tie. Raised among Germans in rural Texas, she migrated to New York, where she slowly acquired an enviable reputation as a critic and writer of fiction. Porter nonetheless never lost her connection to the Southwest and often could be found across the Texas border in Mexico. In 1931, living there for some time among German expatriates, she joined some of them to steam across the Atlantic from Mexico to Germany, where she stayed for several months. In the letters she wrote on the boat, Porter ruminated at length on her revolting German companions, and how the society on board illuminated Euro-­American mores writ small. Her experiences on this cruise and her experiences in Germany itself, scholars have testified, marinated for some thirty years, until in 1962 she produced her “classic” work, Ship of Fools. The novel was about how the values of the German travelers, representing “evil as such,” permeated everyone, including some hapless Americans.7 FDR and the Early New Deal Just as the writerly elite came across the fascists in all places, any politician might find himself pursuing policies that someone else noted as fascist. In the presidential election of 1932, a dicey collection of public men had adhered to Franklin Roosevelt. They had varied and unconventional views about how health might return to the United States, and FDR represented the realistic expectation to get rid of the heartless Herbert Hoover. As we have seen, fascist was thrown at the new president—­but additionally at his friends, though they might retaliate with the same ambiguous condemnation. Voters in Louisiana elected the most important politician on the fringe, the Democrat Huey Long, to its governorship in 1928. He served until the beginning of 1932 and chose his replacement as governor when voters put him in the US Senate just before FDR’s inauguration. Long followed William Jennings Bryan and took over Bryan’s potent “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” Sometimes Long called himself a progressive, while opponents called him another Mussolini. A talent, he built a political machine in Louisiana by deal-­making, strong-­arm tactics, and not least by speech-­ making and policy favoring the state’s many poor. By the time he got to Washington, he was clamoring for the confiscation of big money and its redistribution to those with minimal resources. Into 1933, he looked to FDR as the national leader of Long’s Democratic Party.8

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Three others deserve mention. A Protestant cleric and dynamic speaker, Gerald L. K. Smith zealously supported Long in Louisiana as his second-­in-­ command. Father Charles Coughlin, “the radio priest,” defended FDR from the allegation that the president was “Hitlerizing” the nation and offered up his own social communitarianism to save the nation. More composed and elderly, Francis Townsend also agitated politics but came on the national scene a little later. A California physician, Townsend proposed an old-­age pension that would give the retired two hundred dollars a month and that a 2-­percent national sales tax would fund. He elaborated this Townsend Plan in the fall of 1933, after the New Dealers had set their course. Initially, he believed that the administration would adopt his idea, momentarily all the rage. These men and many others rallied around Roosevelt in the months after his swearing-­in. The nation was in desperate shape, the Republicans in disarray, and the new president dedicated to programs that might alleviate distress. What became known as the First New Deal included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Harry Hopkins, a one-­time social worker and a valued assistant of the president, ran FERA. The Civilian Conservation Corps aided idle young men by having them work for the United States on environmental projects. The First New Deal, however, chiefly departed from convention with the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It supervised a program for the self-­regulation of industry. Groups of businessmen drafted codes of fair competition that laws enforced. Guidelines set prices, wages, hours worked, and conditions on the job. Fair competition would occur, companies would somehow rehire men, and consumption would increase. One part of the program gave unions the right to organize. Roosevelt put in place similar policies for agriculture. FDR’s congressional opponents in 1933 sometimes allowed that the NRA was dictatorial or imitated Moscow. As we have seen, John Dewey, Norman Thomas, and the Communist Party of the United States of America censured the policies as fascistic. Senator Carter Glass, an elegant Virginia Democrat who would never seek out Dewey, Thomas, or the communists, also wrote that the NRA was bringing “Hitlerism” to the United States.9 A collective business spirit flavored the First New Deal, as Roosevelt fastened on national renewal, increased power for Washington, and a unified approach to ending the Depression. He also welcomed symbolism. The NRA had a slogan: We Do Our Part. And it had a logo: a blue eagle with a gear in one claw denoted Industry, and lightning bolts in the other denoted Power. Several scholars have held that such corporatism—­already apparent in Italy—­ defined the politics of the time.10 Long, Smith, Coughlin, and Townsend soon gave up on the president. They continued to indulge in the decade’s harangues, though now not in

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The perched eagle clutching fasces was an insignia on Italian fascist uniforms. The NRA poster was displayed by firms participating in the program. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs)

service to the administration. Under the NRA, industry would cooperate with government. Roosevelt’s inaugural bark—­to throw the money changers from the temple and rid the nation of those who would speculate with other people’s money—­exceeded his bite. While FDR had implemented ideas that chiefly benefited the wealthy, erstwhile enthusiasts lamented, he tossed crumbs to the dispossessed in the way of relief.11 In February of 1934, Long more or less launched his Share Our Wealth movement and announced specifics on how he would minister to the helpless. The NRA connected too cozily to business, so, breaking with FDR, Long now called the early New Deal an example of Italian fascism and Hitlerism. As one historian has noted, Long (and Coughlin) yelled fascism at opponents when “want[ing] to deliver a particularly forceful indictment”; here the word meant industrial preeminence.12 Roosevelt’s followers rewarded Long by denouncing him as a “Fascist demagogue” and a “Hitler” himself; here they implied that fascism favored agitation. Long more or less denied that he accepted European imports like fascism. He briefly shared political space with Herbert Hoover, who continued to liken Roosevelt to the European dictators and who urged over time that New Deal America had elements of Weimar Germany; here fascism responded to the absence of resolute constitutional leadership, such as Hoover’s own.13 Father Coughlin went back and forth, shielding the New Deal or scolding it as fascist. He incriminated Harry Hopkins as a bearer of fascism because

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of Hopkins’s role in the relief efforts of 1933–­34. In turn, early New Dealers retorted that Coughlin’s ideas for the impoverished had fascist potential, and that his words did not distinguish him from Hitler. Overseeing the NRA for Roosevelt, General Hugh Johnson noted that Americans should call Coughlin Reichsführer. Coughlin and Hitler were “as alike as peas in a pod.” But the NRA had faltered, in part due to Johnson’s administrative style, and Roose­ velt fired Johnson in September 1934. Not, however, before other New Dealers had alleged Johnson’s fascist tendencies.14 In 1934, as the politically engaged shook their heads about a deficient NRA, proponents of the executive branch as well as its foes swapped allegations of fascism. The most serious of the enemies, Long, felt his own ability, whispering that he would replace the president. Did he want to run in 1940? He might unseat FDR in 1936. Or, in a third party, he might throw the presidency to the Republicans. The 1934 congressional elections might also measure Long’s troublemaking ability, though by the summer of that year Roosevelt had other opponents that got under his skin. We grasp with more difficulty why the president early on lost the benefaction of some of the businessmen whom his early agenda had cultivated. In the summer, he was still promoting the virtues of the NRA. It emboldened big enterprise and favored the well-­to-­do more than it did the Share Our Wealth movement. Nonetheless, a coalition of Republican businessmen and old progressive Democrats announced the formation of the American Liberty League. The league’s stated goal was to protect the Constitution and limited rule. Wanting less interference by government in business and protection against a powerful Washington, its members initially tried to hide their anti–­New Deal prejudices but with little success. Al Smith, the four-­time governor of New York who had been allied with Roosevelt, was chief among disloyal Democrats. Personal hurt and animosity partially motivated Smith, though he also worried that New Deal activism fatally demeaned the tradition of Democrats’ reverence for states’ rights. FDR’s NRA undermined olden-­time Democratic liberalism even more than Woodrow Wilson had. No antiquated liberal, Roosevelt was not even a Wilsonian liberal. Anticipating that an anti-­administration legislature in 1935 would thwart the president, Smith joined forces with the Liberty League. It would increasingly point to ominous European dimensions to the New Deal, but like many other groups was confused. American politics, Liberty Leaguers sometimes alleged, were leaning toward socialism and communism. But there was also a “trend toward a Fascist control” in FDR, and his administration could be described as “Mercantilism and Fascism.”15

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The Depression and the responses to it were upsetting the political categories that a TR-­Wilson progressivism had defined. But whatever his policies, FDR simply worried that the party in power traditionally lost seats in Congress in the off-­year voting. Before the votes were cast in November of 1934, it was tempting to argue that adversaries would thrash the New Deal. Roosevelt’s program would lose Democrats who liked the Liberty League and Democrats who liked Huey Long. The Congressional Election The imperatives of governing in a protracted time of economic dislocation were shoving New Dealers one way and other elements of the Democratic Party another. In California, the congressional election disclosed the complexity of events that Roosevelt was managing. Upton Sinclair, a prolific and famous novelist, had first come to national attention in 1906, when he wrote The Jungle, an exposé of the meatpacking industry. A socialist, Sinclair changed his party affiliation in 1934, won a Democratic primary election in California, and ran for governor against a Republican incumbent. Sinclair had a program, EPIC—­End Poverty in California. It proposed production for use and the bartering and sharing of goods and services. EPIC spoke—­as did all the suitors for attention—­to the massive problem of joblessness. The Roosevelt administration shilly-­shallied about Sinclair, at first hoping that he would take California from the Republicans but then deciding that championing a recent member of the Socialist Party risked too much. Father Charles Coughlin, wavering but still respecting the New Deal, opposed Sinclair. The Republicans in California railed at him as a communist, although the American Communist Party deemed him a fascist. Francis Townsend, whose pension scheme centered in California and whose ideas certainly seemed like Sinclair’s, dismissed the candidate, while the governor, mediocrity Frank Merriam, took up the Townsend Plan and was called a fascist. Roosevelt stealthily withdrew sponsorship, Sinclair lost, and New Dealers relaxed that he did not burden them.16 At the same time, while losing the California governorship, FDR Democrats made breathtaking gains in Congress. The party had a historic victory, increasing its majorities in the House and Senate. The victory momentarily threw Liberty Leaguers and personalities like Long into disarray. Citizens approved the New Deal more than its competitors. Another revealing example of how the financial misery, four years of Herbert Hoover, and the accession of FDR had jumbled politics came in the case

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of General Smedley Butler. A much-­decorated marine, Butler started out as a sixteen-­year-­old in the Spanish-­American War. His father, Thomas Butler, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, undoubtedly assisted his son’s rise in the military. Although in some ways problematic, Smedley impeccably commanded his men. He distinguished himself in the early part of the twentieth century, when the US Marines forged an informal empire in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico; extended Western power in Asia; and made a success of the American entry into World War One. Always a more than capable soldier, Butler nevertheless gained the reputation of being a self-­promoting nonconformist, intruding himself into civic life, often with oddball opinions. In 1931 the Hoover administration forced his retirement after the Italian government had protested when Butler made public his lashing out at Mussolini after a minor incident in Italy. But retirement only gave the ex-­general, freed from curbs on his activity, the chance for more involvement in the public arena. He thrashed around in politics, and on the lecture circuit took up the cause of the noncommissioned soldier. Butler excoriated the premier veterans’ organization formed after the world war, the American Legion, whose membership was an elite of officers. He also quirkily pronounced on foreign policy, which was on the back burner during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Becoming well known as an anticapitalist, he denounced the interventions that had been part of overseas policy. In addition, Butler visited the Bonus Marchers in Washington in the summer of 1932. Despite making a losing run for a seat representing Pennsylvania in the US Senate in the GOP primary, he went for Roosevelt in November, notwithstanding his family’s Republicanism. In New Orleans, shortly before Roosevelt’s inauguration, he shared a stage with Huey Long. While Butler deplored the big money that financed the American Legion, Long urged the redistribution of wealth. Each man sided with Roosevelt. By 1934 Butler—­like Long—­had changed his tune and discarded FDR as a pawn of business, but witnessed the administration’s triumph in the election. Yet in another turnabout, he came to widespread attention by renewing his attack on the American Legion. At the end of the year, just after the congressional voting, Butler testified before a newly established Special Committee on Un-­American Activities of the House of Representatives, later reconstituted into the famous House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC). The House formed the committee to delve into fascism in the United States. It started years of probes in which the search for fascists and later the accusations of fascism against the committee itself would be front and center.

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Samuel Dickstein, a Jewish New York congressman who despised the Hitler regime, energized the inquiries. Butler came forward as a witness concerning rascality in the American Legion, although the waywardness remained nebulous. Some troubling activities might have occurred, however, and were described as fascist. In the summer of 1933, Butler related, an agent of the legion and some Wall Street bankers had approached him and maintained contact for over a year. During the frenzied period of FDR’s initial time in office, they dreamed up a putsch against the government and longed for the general to lead an American Legion army of half a million. Butler enticed the schemers, he said, and imprecisely implicated some of the gentlemen in the American Liberty League. Whoever the conspirators were, they had engaged in a Keystone Kops operation even as Butler upheld the US Constitution. In New York City, where he gave the evidence to the Special Committee, a headline from a daily newspaper read: gen. butler charges fascist plot. Butler had also gossiped with Rex Stout, who fleshed out the story in an anonymous novel, The President Vanishes. From it came the previously discussed film by the same title, in which a fascist plot was foiled. Moviegoers could see the picture just after the congressional election of 1934, when Butler made the news and New Dealers crowed over their victory at the polls.17 The Aftermath of the 1934 Elections President Roosevelt adjusted his policies in 1935, and he gained momentum after the Supreme Court announced the unconstitutionality of the NRA in April of that year—­it accorded too much power to the chief executive. This fateful decision scandalized the administration, but because the NRA was not working. Roosevelt was in any event looking for different policy, so he departed from the NRA’s overall planning. As the president was eager to speak to the less well off, the Second New Deal aimed at securing FDR’s reelection in 1936. Four initiatives defined what Roosevelt was about and supplied more fodder for altercations over fascism. Through the Wealth Tax Act, the Internal Revenue Service would place a confiscatory levy on the salaries of the most well-­to-­do Americans when their earnings passed into the highest “brackets.” The Works Progress Administration received funding to hire some eight million people in various work-­relief projects from 1935 until 1943. The Social Security Act began the national provision of social insurance for dependent children, the disabled, the unemployed, and the retired. Finally, the National Labor Relations Act

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toughened a section of the now-­defunct NRA and gave labor unions the right to organize. Although FDR did not like NLRA, he got on its bandwagon. Roosevelt was trying to co-­opt the less respectable politicians. But if he wanted to win back Long, Gerald L. K. Smith, Coughlin, and Townsend, it did not work. They attacked him in the spring of 1935, despite his new advocacy for the underprivileged. Then, in September, an assassin killed Long in Louisiana. Washington evinced silent relief while the shooting disordered Long’s well-­wishers. Now a national figure in the free-­for-­all to refashion America, Gerald L. K. Smith took up the leadership of Long’s Share Our Wealth movement. Coughlin, who had come to hate the president, joined Smith. Yet Smith had difficulty in finding common ground with Coughlin (and Townsend) or in establishing himself as Long had done. These men floundered in planning how to sink Roosevelt in his bid for a second term. The editor of Common Sense, which two years before thought that FDR was leading the United States to fascism, now argued that these opponents of his, following in the steps of the first fascist state, Greek Sparta, might become a wicked movement that must be stopped.18 Smedley Butler added to the ruckus as he continued to stir things up with antifascist critiques of US imperialism. He prominently spoke on behalf of the League against War and Fascism—­usually considered dominated by communists—­and in June of 1935 Reader’s Digest condensed his largish pamphlet, War Is a Racket. When critics chastised Butler as a mouthpiece for communism, he responded, “So who the hell cares?” To him, George Washington was “an extremist—­a goddam revolutionist.”19 Then, in late 1935, Huey Long’s posthumous book, My First Days in the White House, came out. From his grave, Long tipped his hat to Butler’s role in uncovering the fascist coup of 1933–­34 and announced that he would appoint Butler as secretary of war in his presidential cabinet. On the other side of the grave, Butler wrote friends that with Long’s death he had lost all interest in politics. Simultaneously, the Liberty League went on an explicit anti–­New Deal offensive as the goal of derailing FDR in the 1936 presidential election gained clarity. Leaguers’ opposition made more sense than did that of Long’s successors and centered on the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court when it invalidated the NRA: the verdict warned that the president was defying constitutional limits. In 1935 league members usually thought of FDR as communistic but also permitted a fascistic view. As the Second New Deal took shape, Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here speculated on fascism in the United States. During the first half of the twentieth century, Lewis was perhaps the most famous American novelist. During the 1920s, he wrote a series of novels debunking midwestern

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culture, and in 1930 the Nobel Prize in Literature honored him, the first US national to win. In 1928 he had made a disastrous second marriage to Dorothy Thompson, a politically active and high-­profile journalist who had done some astute reporting from Germany before Hitler took over. The Reich expelled her after National Socialism’s triumph because of her enmity toward the regime. Not only did she have a distaste for Continental politics but, in her journalism, she styled many people as fascists. Thompson worried about FDR’s early “fascistic” policies. She then allowed that the policies of the Second New Deal were the “sine qua non . . . of the modern fascist state” and that other policies might “lead to fascism.” Wall Street executives, she wrote, discovered that “Hitler is a good Republican,” and she declared the possibility of a “Republican-­fascist dictatorship by 1940.” Thompson talked about the “fascist impulses of the American male,” and she wondered whether the swastika “symbol[ized] the whole of western civilization.” “I happen,” she said, “to dislike intensely ‘liberal’ fascists, reactionary fascists, labor fascists, industrial fascists, Jewish fascists, Catholic fascists and personal fascists.”20 Lewis was less committed to politics than his wife, but in 1934–­35—­at Thompson’s urging and in part to keep the marriage together (it failed)—­he wrote It Can’t Happen Here. Thompson had a friend, George Seldes, a daring journalist whom Italy had expelled during the 1920s. His 1935 Sawdust Caesar gave English-­language readers an important contemporary critique of Mussolini, and Lewis had early access to the biography because of the Seldes-­ Thompson connection. Lewis based some of It Can’t Happen Here on Seldes’s nonfiction and on an interview of Huey Long by Thompson, which had taken place earlier that year. The novel, about the near future, was in readers’ hands by September of 1935 and just about the time of Long’s death. In it, Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip has defeated Franklin Roosevelt’s renomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in 1936 and has gone on to win the presidency. Windrip orated on his populism and paraded authoritarianism. A further turn of the plot overshadowed this unpleasantness when a murderous general exiled Windrip himself. These scoundrels, while horrific, displayed the traits of a foolish Mussolini more than those of a fiendish Hitler. The story—­replete with romantic interest, a ferocious militia, and ultimately an ongoing attempt at a counterrevolution—­proceeded from the perspective of a crusading journalist, Doremus Jessup. Reviewers at the time as well as subsequent critics have thought It Can’t Happen Here deficient in literary merit. But the novel, with Windrip modeled after Long and Mussolini, has had an extended life, periodically returning to public attention with its striking title, variations on which have been used by countless writers. Readers have

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thought that it embodied the tenor of the mid-­1930s or the politics of whatever era in which the fiction was revived.21 The 1936 Presidential Election Since fascists had defeated FDR in the fictional electioneering of 1936 in It Can’t Happen Here, it looked as if Roosevelt was not a fascist. Yet in the real politics of that year, both the Liberty Leaguers and the forces that swirled around Long even after his death found the sitting president to be a Mussolini. Once again, each group set out to stop him. Liberty Leaguers, with Al Smith, gambled on the Republican Alf Landon, the colorless governor of Kansas, to defeat Roosevelt. The people who were paying tribute to Long placed an equally dumb wager on William Lemke. This congressman from North Dakota ran a puny canvass as the candidate of a short-­lived Union Party. Divisiveness beneath the Union umbrella did not help. In breaking with the New Deal, Francis Townsend had called it “Mussolini Fascism,” but—­with Father Coughlin—­also called Gerald L. K. Smith a fascist just before Smith joined Townsend and Coughlin in the Union Party. Coughlin, whom the New Dealers were calling a fascist, defended himself as an American democrat, angry at capitalism but “a hater of fascism and Nazism.” The Union Party, however, according to socialists like Norman Thomas, bowed to the “fascistic.” It had, he said, “a platform which reminds me of the early efforts of Hitler.” Thomas—­like Dorothy Thompson, who had similar thoughts—­found fascism in any politician he did not favor.22 In contrast, the Union candidate Lemke described himself as a progressive. A Republican or Democratic victory, Coughlin urged, would tell Americans that “Fascism will be here and Communism will be making a bid for power”; and if the Union Party carried the day, a communist would be dispatched from the White House. Gerald L. K. Smith said he, too, wished to fight the communism of the New Deal, but also lectured that members of the Civilian Conservation Corps performed as Roosevelt’s storm troops. Some of FDR’s people denounced Lemke as a “fascist Republican.”23 On the other side, a final voice professed Roosevelt’s antifascism. From 1928 to 1935, Moscow denominated all those opposed to its ideas as social fascists. Then Stalin gave novel orders to American communists. The Communist Party of the United States of America lauded what was called the Popular Front and pushed the Democratic Party as a vehicle through which the United States might move to communism. Communists should uphold all those groups not antipathic to movements for greater income equality. The CPUSA might infiltrate these groups and favorably dispose them to the USSR. It now backed

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Democrats. Some New Dealers in fact believed that America would more easily realize its social justice goals if it followed the communists. The communists might snicker in private that these Democrats were “pinks” or “fellow travelers” buoyed up by Roosevelt. Championing a second term for FDR, the CPUSA called his adversaries carriers of fascism and Hitlerism, and attempted to beguile “advanced” New Dealers to an American communism. While small, the Popular Front was a temptation in an era that had given capitalism an injurious name for many sober citizens and that had thrown up the USSR as an “experimental” polity, a socialist utopia-­to-­be that promoted pragmatic government. Indeed, the Popular Front liberals played a role in defining the fascistic over the years, and the descendants of these liberals have had a part in the chronicle of US fascism. Although many individuals called the president a fascist in 1936, the sponsorship of the CPUSA sometimes marked him as a communist. Indeed, in 1935 Smedley Butler had often been thought to be in league with the communists and had favored Long. After abandoning politics with Long’s demise, he got back in the fray of the presidential campaign in 1936, but now without the Roosevelt-­supporting CPUSA. Instead, Butler taunted FDR and harangued veterans that the president had let them down and was in bed with the plutocrats. He voted for Norman Thomas, the socialist who got less than one-­half of 1 percent of the vote. The American Liberty League collapsed in the wake of the balloting, its members creeping back into a debilitated Republican Party, which had received under 37 percent. The Union Party, with under 2 percent, was wiped out, its bigwigs rebuffed. The 1936 election had given Roosevelt one of the great victories of presidential politics, with 60 percent of the ballots. Lawrence Dennis Among the many original political writers of the 1930s, none fascinates so much as Lawrence Dennis. Born in Atlanta of an African-­American mother and a white father, he made a European tour at the end of the nineteenth century as a child evangelist. According to the racial compartmentalizing of the times, he was “Negro,” “colored,” a “high yellow.” At some moment, he transformed himself and “passed” for white. Indeed, he did not just pass but matriculated at an exclusive New England prep school, Phillips Andover Academy, and moved on to Harvard. But in the middle of his Cambridge career, he went off to serve in World War One—­commanding military police—­ and returned to complete his Harvard BA in 1920. The details of Dennis’s earlier years are lost. Our knowledge depends, first, on a collection of interviews that the Federal Bureau of Investigation

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accumulated in the early 1940s, when the US government tried Dennis for sedition—­it came to nothing. The bureau quizzed people who were prejudiced against Dennis, and who in any case were speaking about events perhaps forty years old. Moreover, it recorded the interrogations in its standard uncorroborated style. Second, our knowledge depends on Dennis’s own recollections as recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s by investigators who were talking to him for posterity. These more benign cross-­examinations often contradicted one another, with the vagaries and romance of Dennis’s memory on display. They also laid bare, again and again, his need to drop names, puff up his own importance, and who knows what other conscious or unconscious whitewashings of the record. My best guess is that his father was a white southerner of resources, “a successful businessman,” as Dennis once put it.24 While the biological father would not recognize his illegitimate offspring, I believe he funded the boy’s transition into the upper reaches of northern society. In any event, Dennis joined the select and WASP-­y State Department after the war and served in eastern Europe and Central America. In Central America he came to appreciate Smedley Butler—­Dennis felt the same dismay for US tactics in Honduras, Haiti, and Nicaragua that the general had felt twenty years before. Dennis was increasingly unable to get behind his nation’s colonialism. By the late 1920s, Wall Street brokers hired him because of his skills in international finance. He had a deserved reputation as a capable diplomat and now as a shrewd banker. With connections in the precincts of Andover, Harvard, Washington, and New York City, Dennis left the business world with an intact standing just as the stock market crashed. A cogent expounder of ideas, he began yet another upward-­bound career as a writer and lecturer on political economy. He startled many readers with his Is Capitalism Doomed? in 1932. He secured notoriety and puzzled respect in 1936 with his key book, The Coming American Fascism. Dennis constantly said that he did not advocate or praise fascism. Rather, he predicted based on facts and his scientific grasp of the forces inevitably—­he regularly drew on the word—­at work in the cosmos. From the onset of the Great Depression—­now seven years old as he was writing in 1936—­“democratic capitalism” had failed the people, and a revolution to set matters aright would necessarily occur. In the crisis, to survive, the state would grow into fascism. Regimes were obliged to overcome competing and paralyzing factions and to secure prosperity. Other writers were taking the same tack—­for example in 1934, Scott Nearing in Fascism and Raymond Gram Swing in Forerunners of American Fascism; and in 1935 Alfred Bingham in Insurgent America. Nearing, however, anticipated that communism could spoil fascism in the United States, and Swing and Bingham had faith that the current system could save

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itself from fascism.25 Only Dennis cheered for fascism, though he called it observing the fated. The NRA suggested how the New Deal was moving toward fascism. But for Dennis, only Hitler’s Germany had done this well—­and in a way that would leave the New Deal far behind. National Socialism unified the government and ended the German depression. Part of Hitler’s program suppressed the strife of ethnic groups within his nation, for such age-­old struggles unavoidably debilitated polities. Instituted on a wrong set of ideals, the United States attempted a rule in which basic “racial” differences did not matter. Fortunately for the nation, such ideals had made no difference for the Teutonic elements dominant in the New World. If the United States were to overcome its economic misfortune, Roosevelt would have to jettison the ideals. Whatever the oratory of the New Deal, the president would be driven “toward fascism.” Several years later, by the time of World War Two—­in 1942—­Dennis thought Stalinism, Hitlerism, and Rooseveltism to be “interchangeable.” Each ideology forwarded a unique ethnicity. FDR identified with an English-­speaking Christian civilization, its racial aspect delineated in the conflict with Japan, which had precipitated the US entry into the war. Called a fascist himself, Dennis argued for Roosevelt as “America’s Number 1 fascist.” Dennis wrote fluently, although he intended to provoke. But he also made realistic appraisals, without the rose-­colored glasses that the administration’s upright spokesmen wore. He later described them as “the social scientists of capitalism, . . . commercialized, intellectual prostitutes who pander to the tastes of their patrons.”26 We must psychologize to comprehend The Coming American Fascism. How did Hitler overcome the cultural fragmentation endemic to America? For Dennis, Germany’s explicit anti-­Semitism and racism made National Socialism go. He allowed his readers to infer that were the United States to survive—­were fascism to advance to America—­Roosevelt would need to rid himself of the hypocrisy of racial tolerance. Americans would build their own racial state, and unambiguously assert white supremacy as part of the scuffle for primacy among the great powers. The author’s pain over having passed and his contempt for white pretense and duplicity on racial issues, I believe, generated Dennis’s critique. Sophisticated New Dealers read him and admitted the man’s perverse genius. They regularly talked about him as the leading fascist philosopher, the brain of American fascism and its most dangerous and articulate defender. Roosevelt’s spokespersons were, however, in some measure unwilling to attack Dennis, I believe again, because of the racial politics of the era and the rumors of his negritude. A handsome and athletic six-­footer, Dennis dressed impeccably and spoke with a cultivated New England accent. But his short-­cropped hair was called

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“bristly.” His white friends noted his “bronzed” appearance, while enemies saw him as “swarthy,” “saturnine,” or of Italian, Greek, or Middle Eastern “blood.”27 Why didn’t any New Dealer out Dennis? Such a job would easily fall to someone like Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior and the New Deal’s most pugnacious servant, a sort of street fighter for FDR. Why didn’t the administration demean Dennis with the revelation of his Blackness? The New Dealers prided themselves on their broad-­mindedness. Arguing against Dennis ad hominem would be a low blow. Moreover, and I think more significantly, disclosing the place of Dennis’s color in his indictment of the New Deal would somehow confirm his hint of the parallels between Hitler and Roose­ velt. These issues mark for me the most problematic exercises of fascism. After the 1936 Election By 1936 Al Smith had fought FDR and would never again speak favorably of the president. Yet just before the presidential election, Smith frankly declaimed about the transformation that was occurring in politics and the inability of standard modes of thought to harness it. Roosevelt, he said, was not a communist or a socialist. But, he added, a “foreign ‘ism’ [is] crawling over this country.” “What its name will be when it is christened,” Smith could not guess, although Roosevelt’s “sin” was not knowing what it was.28 The president’s opponents nonetheless fell by the wayside after his winning a second term in office. Around this time, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, later known as the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, were perfecting a routine titled “Who’s on First?” Ostensibly about baseball, this skit delighted audiences listening to the two humorists talking past each other and making no sense. In 1934–­36, this burlesque smacked of the talk among various civic authorities. Where could one look for understanding? Interested Americans cogitated about fascism in Italy and Germany, and communism in Russia, as opposed but somehow similar regimes. Yet citizens could not answer the question, Where did America—­and particularly America under FDR—­fit into this European framework? In the wake of November 1936, the New Dealers took a series of unpredictable turns, obscuring matters even more, mystifying FDR’s own people, and making it easy for his foes to accuse him of the dictatorial. Then, foreign policy—­or at least the dictators in Europe—­emerged as a different key to understanding US political commitments. There was now an ongoing diplomatic struggle between Hitler and Mussolini, on the one hand, and the democracies of Britain and France, on the other. As the president upheld the English and the French, his friends could argue that he could not be a tyrant.

3

Perplexity at Home and Abroad, 1934–­38

Political debate took place against an unsettled cultural background. Across the United States, a myriad of groups that could be fascist had been vivified. Some were inclined toward Germany, muttered about anti-­Semitism, and called for tougher authority in the United States. Others, sometimes but not always of Italian origin, simply wanted to recognize Mussolini. Some were social clubs. Crafty individuals—­both pro-­and antifascist—­took money from innocents. Several groups mixed outré versions of Christian belief with European ideologies. Still others afforded the unemployed or the psychologically stressed a sense of belonging, but not much more in the way of a program of action. A family resemblance among these many responses to the Great Depression and to events in Europe is hard to find, although they were all interested in salutes, costuming, and emblems. Creators of mass entertainment frequently based their offerings on caricatures of these many socie­ ties; just as frequently, these societies guaranteed an audience for commercial pastimes that nodded to public abnormalities. Moreover, these organizations responded to developments in American politics and to intensified events overseas. Finally, as we have already seen, high culture interpreted all these matters, contributing to but also reflecting the fluctuations of fascism. Resident Fascists In 1933 President Roosevelt had transformed the Bureau of Investigation, an agency that had first come to public attention in the era of World War One, into a new Division of Investigation. It would later be named the Federal Bureau of Investigation—­the FBI. Roosevelt’s upgrade did much to secure its growing reputation and that of its long-­serving executive, J. Edgar Hoover. In

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1934 FDR had asked “Edgar” to look over what were thought to be malicious entities. This directive had stemmed from the issues surrounding General Smedley Butler’s accusations, and the Bureau focused on a number of persons in a limited action. The FBI went after Joe McWilliams, known as Joe McNazi and head of the Christian Mobilizers. Gerald Winrod from Kansas was deemed “a fascist, raw and unashamed.” This “Jayhawk Nazi” led the Defenders of the Christian Faith. William Dudley Pelley had formed the Silver Legion of America, which caricatured the security forces in Germany.1 We have already met Lawrence Dennis, who was always on J. Edgar Hoover’s ra­dar. He would receive extended surveilllance, but even early on the New Deal cognescenti deemed Dennis to be the IQ behind these groups. This initial FBI assignment, however, did not go very far, although it did establish a precedent for the president’s reliance on Hoover, and the New Deal’s intent to watch these associations.2 Also for the FBI, some fascists (like Lawrence Dennis) revealed more fascism than others (like Herbert Hoover). In the mid-­1930s, more domestic fascists were vexing Americans than those whom FDR and J. Edgar Hoover singled out. In 1934, according to the weekly newsmagazine Time, the nation could verify who the fascists were because they named themselves by a shirt color—­one of six shades. That same year, the American Civil Liberties Union commissioned a pamphlet called Shirts!: A Survey of the New “Shirt” Organizations in the United States Seeking a Fascist Dictatorship. A later book on American lodges and clubs had a chapter subtitled “The Fascist Shirts.” The United States never enacted “blouse laws” that banned the uniforms central to these bands, as had some European countries. Yet in America, the colors of the shirts gave the name to groups sometimes also self-­identifying as fascist, and the hues covered the rainbow. Time had underestimated the number. We had Gold Shirts, Silver Shirts, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts (the American Fascisti), and Khaki Shirts (the US Fascists); Gray Jackets and Gray Shirts; a Black Legion; and a Knights of the White Camellia, a White Legion, a White Guard, and Crusader White Shirts. In 1937 the congressman Samuel Dickstein, who had propelled General Butler to fame, brought up fascist “Blue Shirts” in the Congressional Record. A 1940 movie, I Wanted Wings, had a performer commenting on an ordinary American, “You’ll never catch this guy goose-­stepping in a yellow shirt.” The German-­American Bund (or Federation) in the United States chose uniforms of brown to match National Socialists in Germany, and “Bundists” wore shirts of silver-­gray. One platoon of dissidents prescribed a special salute to distinguish it from the conventional palms-­up version of German and would-­be American Nazis: whereas National Socialism “extend[ed] the whole hand,” the spokesman explained, Christian Fronters held out “only the index and

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middle fingers [for] Christ and country.” The third and little fingers were held down by the thumb, because “they represent[ed] Communism and atheism.”3 One excited patriot-­journalist wrote of “five hundred or more Fascist organizations” in the United States. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a scholarly body at Columbia University, put the estimate at eight hundred societies “avowedly or inferentially committed to Fascism.”4 According to a later academic assessment, there were “hundreds” of such fellowships. A more sober count put the number at about 150, hateful but trivial. Another student reported on hundreds of groups during the 1930s in the Los Angeles area alone.5 Despite the periodic uproar in the press and activity in the United States from the 1920s by the Italian-­American Blackshirts, Washington paid little attention to the followers of Mussolini. Early on, one of Mussolini’s diplomats in America worried that for the US public,“the Black Shirt and the Brown Shirt are easily confused.” He need not have fretted. An Italian hazard never caught on.6 Instead, security forces concentrated almost exclusively on the fascism linked to Germany. The United States may well have had much to fear in the rise of an aggressive Reich during the 1930s. In America, some German-­ Americans did call themselves fascists or National Socialists. Nonetheless, most of them—­citizens and immigrants—­were devoted to their adopted country. Most with mixed commitments buttoned up. The situation did not much differ from that of Italian-­Americans a decade or so before. Yet the German-­Americans, and their connection to what was called Deutschtum during the 1930s, drew more negative attention than had Italianità during the 1920s. Scholars have agreed that in the United States, enemy agents, dupes, accomplices of National Socialism, and German-­Americans could all engage in agitation. But the engagement never amounted to much. On its side, the Hitler government did not effectively propagate its views in the United States. Like the Italians earlier, the Reich had many outfits in America, formally or casually connected to Berlin—­the Carl Schurz Union, the America Institute, the Foreign Organization of the National Socialist Party, the League of Germans Abroad, the Transocean News Service, the German Railroads Information Office. They wanted to make Germany likeable, to promote sabotage in its behalf, to discourage Americans from hearkening to Europe’s troubles, and to accept Nazi expansion. Yet difficulties of intelligence gathering and infighting within the National Socialist bureaucracies hindered undercover exertions, just as such troubles had plagued Italy. Sponsored and unsponsored German agencies in the United States bickered among themselves. All these organizations had unrealistic notions of how they might spread their ideas.

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Numerous abominable proponents proliferated. Heavy-­handed propaganda outraged US officials. As one scholar has written, the hostile Germans on the Continent or in the United States showed a “blind ignorance” of realities in America, and their planning had “an almost dream-­like quality.”7 Some historians have reasoned that the United States faced a grievous threat from subversion. Others have argued that in its snooping on German-­ Americans and its harassment of them, the FBI disregarded rights of free speech and comradeship that the Constitution guaranteed.8 My judgment differs from each of these. The FBI’s work was occasionally less than competent and more lax than we might expect. The multitude of National Socialist offshoots, usually populated by cranks, should not have envisaged the application of federal kid gloves in the heated 1930s, and in any event hounding them rarely resulted in victorious prosecution. In my estimation, if US security agents sometimes exhibited a lack of skill, the absence of the cutthroat was not a critical failure. In purveying the ideas of a foreign power, usually Germany, the dissidents isolated themselves and were not an earth-­ shattering risk. New Dealers did think that depicting an all-­powerful conspiracy would arouse public opinion in behalf of their agenda and would constrain those unfriendly to FDR, just as J. Edgar Hoover manipulated anxieties to increase his bureaucratic pull. Popular Front journalists joined officials from time to time: communists wanted the fascists berated. Nonetheless, all the individual fascists and the groups that succored them held a minor urgency for Roosevelt after his victory at the polls in 1936. Instead, the president retaliated against far more moderate enemies who stood in his path. The Second Term Students of the era have argued that FDR in some ways lost himself following his reelection and, at the least, that miscalculations brought on a series of defeats—­and accusations of fascism. In early January 1937, the administration introduced into Congress a bill for the reorganization of the executive branch of government. Under the new law, the president would take a forward role in formulating legislation and in circumventing delays in bringing bills to the House and the Senate. Critics charged that the reorganization would delegate too many prerogatives to FDR. Congress defeated the proposal, and when a weaker successor bill passed in 1939, it lapsed in early 1941. In February of 1937, Roosevelt urged a “reform” of the Supreme Court. The “nine old men” had angered him since April of 1935. At that time, the court had voided the National Recovery Administration in a reprimand to

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the New Deal. FDR’s plan increased the number of justices to a maximum of fifteen, adding a new justice for every man over the age of seventy who was “overworked.” The bill would have given the New Deal a green light for its legislation, and opponents called it court packing. The Constitution did not mandate the number of justices, but it had been nine since the time of the Civil War, a constitutional custom. When Roosevelt gave up on this bill in the summer of 1937, he endured a major reversal, and indeed the prospect of court packing had given a stench to executive reorganization: did FDR purpose dictatorship? In 1937 and 1938, some industrial unions struck their companies, and violence and minor skirmishes occurred between employees, on the one hand, and cops and strikebreakers, on the other. Newspapers blamed the actions on the carte blanche of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, though Roosevelt had only tepidly championed this legislation. Despite the president’s dislike of union militancy, when journalists wrote about the brawling, they reported that FDR—­consistent with his undemocratic attempts to pack the Supreme Court—­sanctioned labor goons. During the same period, the economy went into a tailspin. By the end of 1936, the United States was recovering. Demonstrating an incomplete commitment to deficit expenditures to restore prosperity, Roosevelt sliced the federal budget and then witnessed a recession within a depression. By 1938 spending had increased, and the economy had improved. But Roosevelt looked as if he could not deliver on the basic practical issue. Whatever people thought of the New Deal, its proponents argued that it had been working. Now it seemed as if it was not. In mid-­1938, with the state of the economy front and center, and with the national off-­ year vote looming, FDR bid to expel from the party Democrats unfriendly to him—­people opposed to restructuring the executive and the court. What was going on? The president could not fix the economy. He was trying to streamline the presidency to give himself more power, stuff the judiciary with his own favorites, and get rid of congressional Democrats he did not like, all the while consorting with violent workers. In a notable use of language, his campaign to eject his enemies from the legislature was titled a purge. Just at that time, Old Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union who had run afoul of Stalin received a show trial. Judged guilty of treason, they were put to death. These murderous events in the USSR were also known as purges. In the voting of 1938, the insurgent Democrats by and large held on, while some New Dealers lost their congressional seats. For the first time in six years, the electorate had set back Roosevelt. According to his detractors, the president’s ambition was temporarily blocked. Yet in the wake of the balloting,

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FDR—­again disregarding tradition—­hinted about running again, for an unprecedented third term. Was a dictatorship looming? Was FDR a fascist or a communist? Europe Complicates American Politics The tribunals in the USSR were only one of many overseas issues impinging on the dialogue at home. Overall, however, European politics and the administration’s diplomacy did not hurt Roosevelt and even allayed some of the disquiet about a despotic New Deal. By 1937 a series of events on the Continent—­increasing in their tempo—­had demonstrated to politically aware Americans that shameful times had come to the Old World and that the president had little respect for antidemocratic rulers in foreign lands. When the National Socialists had taken over in Germany in 1933, they had sponsored mass burnings of books—­many by Jewish authors. A year later, in 1934, Hitler had engaged in a killing spree against some of his colleagues. This Night of the Long Knives had given many Americans an altered insight into what was transpiring in Europe. National Socialism was not just another kind of wacky European government but a genuine nasty regime, perhaps the default version of fascism. In 1935 and 1936, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in eastern Africa. The invasion, which expressed Il Duce’s desire to have Hitler’s reputation for the mailed fist, resulted in an ugly victory that expanded Italy’s colonial possessions. The war convinced many critics that one could not divide Italy from Germany, and in March of 1936 the Germans had followed Italy by their own kind of expansion. They marched into the Rhineland, territory on the western border of Germany and of Holland, Belgium, and France on the eastern. The post–­World War One settlement had stripped the area from the Reich; now it was reclaimed. In October of 1936, Germans and Italians announced an alliance, the Rome-­Berlin Axis. Mussolini invented the “Axis”—­from the Latin for “pivot”—­as he took up an anti-­Jewish conception of racial Italianness. As originally identified with the Italian regime, fascism had been neither völkisch nor anti-­Semitic. Now it was becoming both. When fascism was used to speak of European politics, it was a word of hard but indistinct criticism. At home, by the mid-­to late 1930s, Americans increasingly deployed fascist against anyone with whom they disagreed politically. Thus, the noun was given contradictory elements, while the label itself became even darker. The fortunes of fascism had gone irrevocably downhill, and any allegation of it was damning. Moreover, fascism absorbed other formulas of disapprobation. It was now a brush that covered much geographic and mental territory. It might have little to do with Italy proper

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or its sometimes bumptious leader—­Mussolini-­ism was a rare bird. Fascism blended all the evils of Western Europe, its Mediterranean origins giving way to connotations of the Teutonic. By 1937, when we hear or see fascism in action, it is difficult to discriminate it from Nazism, Hitlerism, and even less strident designations like National Socialism. Even more portentous than the development of the Axis was the conflict that had broken out in Spain in the middle of 1936. What soon became known as the Spanish Civil War turned into a major issue illustrating international tensions. It pitted a weak and newly elected but legitimate social democratic government in Madrid against the Spanish Catholic Church and more militaristic conservative revolutionaries led by General Francisco Franco. A Loyalist or Republican regime, secular in bearing, fought Nationalist rebels whom the Vatican reassured. Franco was soon called a fascist, interjecting a Spanish flavor into the notion. Where did Americans interested in foreign policy line up? What were their choices? During World War One, Woodrow Wilson had “associated” England and France with the United States. In the late 1930s, New Dealers empathized with these two imperfect democracies dealing with Germany and the USSR. In any dispute among the great European powers, Roosevelt would support the English and the French, and especially the English. Did not favoring Great Britain and France deflect charges of the authoritarian? Abroad, New Dealers did more than tilt toward democracies and away from fascists or communists. Even if at home FDR was behaving like an autocrat, in foreign affairs people often hailed the president as an enemy of the persecutors. Nonetheless, it seemed that democracy was not an option in Spain. There the intervention of Hitler and Stalin defined the debate. There was a forced choice between Germans for the Nationalists and Russians for the Republicans. The war was a difficult test of one’s fidelity to the forces vying for control of Europe. By 1937 Spain had not just illustrated Continental troubles. The feelings of Americans about Spain illuminated their domestic loyalties and their characterizations of their president. On one hand, US supporters of the Republican government thought of it as Jeffersonian and formed an Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight on its side. On the other hand, many Americans feared that the legitimate regime was communist and ought to be toppled. Catholic leadership was an outstanding example. New Dealers had called Father Charles Coughlin a fascist from 1933–­34 onward—­Dorothy Thompson also scoffed at him. Yet he was also referred to as a democrat, a radical, a conservative, a Nazi, and a communist. In any event, his social activism typified a Catholicism suspicious of capitalist individualism. Like many Roman Catholic clerics and laypeople in the United States, Coughlin followed Rerum novarum, the

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encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1892 that told the Church to endorse the rights of labor. Coughlin’s radio ministry expressed these ideas. But churchmen also could not abide atheistic communism, especially fearsome after the success of the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s. Catholic priests in the United States who reflected on the plight of workers walked a narrow line between a concern for social justice and their rejection of communism. Stalin’s prominence on the side of the legitimate Spanish government and the Catholic Church’s alliance with the Nationalists produced a horrible dilemma.9 In the Union Party electioneering of 1936, the Spanish Civil War had pushed Coughlin over the line. He believed himself at the crossroads between communism and fascism. On the eve of the US presidential election, he would “take the road to fascism.” Most prominent Catholic laypeople decided for “Spanish fascism” as the protector of the church and the enemy of Moscow. The presidents of Fordham and Catholic Universities, and other leaders in Catholic higher education, steered this laity. Al Smith, himself a Roman Catholic who a few years earlier had condemned Hitler, defended these Catholic intellectuals bracketed with the Nazis. As the leading historian of these events has written, Catholic leaders in the United States—­although not Smith—­had expressed “pro-­fascist and roundabout Anti-­Semitic ramblings” by the late 1930s. They became the Reich’s “fellow travelers”—­as this phrase now was extended not to reprimand New Dealers for consorting with communism but to Roman Catholics associating with fascism. All this flowed from the Spanish Civil War. Except for his more extreme anti-­Semitism, Coughlin did not stand out among fellow Catholics in his profascist hostility to the legitimate Spanish government. Coughlin’s anger at FDR’s reelection blended with his commiseration with Spain’s rebel Nationalists.10 Spain marked the puzzlement informed Americans felt about the US connection to Europe. They worried about what this civil war meant to the New World. They were coming to have a fair idea about the extreme polities abroad, but nonetheless argued about where Roosevelt and his Democrats should be positioned. If the Spanish-­obsessed Coughlin were a fascist and hated the president, Roosevelt could not be all that wayward. In the United States, FDR may have been acting like a dictator. Yet in the international field, critics of the New Deal found little ammunition in their feud about the president’s supposedly oppressive behavior. Foreign policy undermined the claims that the president harbored fascist or communist inclinations. In his receptiveness to the troubles of the French and the English, FDR distanced himself from the ideologies that, his foes charged, he fomented in the United States. When Britain and France turned their backs on the predicament in Spain, Roosevelt awkwardly followed suit. Complicated responses straggled out in

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the United States. A Moral Embargo on military supplies preceded a Neutrality Act of May 1937, which was one of several open-­ended arrangements trying to contain the scope of belligerency during the Spanish war. The act, however, could be seen as depriving Spain’s legitimate government from getting needed materiel, and while many loopholes were found, FDR dithered about the legislation. Then, in October of 1937, the president took the initiative with a Quarantine Speech. He implied more US involvement in the containment of Germany and Italy as well as greater patronage of the democracies abroad. Nonetheless, he failed to galvanize his people, and indeed evoked ire: FDR was unwilling to isolate the United States from the never-­ ending contests among the Europeans. By 1938 Republican Spain was clearly dying, and while Roosevelt grew more sympathetic to its cause and mulled over ideas for assisting it, he was unwilling to operate in advance of public opinion. In any event, the off-­year election of November had preoccupied him. When the results that weakened Roosevelt were in, Franco was about to broad­ cast victory.11 New Deal Thinkers Confound Issues There was much uncertainty, and in his own entourage, Roosevelt did not get any help from several clever men who were intrigued by the linguistic hijinks of fascism. To understand their contribution to the charges and countercharges of the late 1930s, we must undertake a brief review of the theories of language that burgeoned in universities in both Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.12 The thinkers behind these philosophies tried to fashion a crystal-­clear medium of communication based in mathematics so we would see the world as it was, without irrational, spiritual, political, or cultural commitments. They separated the descriptive from the normative, reason from attitude, science from emotion. This quest for a perfect language stemmed from the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel. Historians of thought, however, have located the core of this recent chapter of the quest in the writings of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent his career at Cambridge University in England, and a group in Vienna whose logical positivism made the language of biology, chemistry, and physics the only real kind of language. Some of these cogitations also occurred in seminar rooms in American colleges at the time. But the interest in see-­through statements leached into the culture of the interwar period, perhaps as a reaction against the increasingly high-­flown nature of political speech. The grandiose orations that Woodrow Wilson had dispensed during World War One called attention to the

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exploitation of the verbal. In writing about that war, Ernest Hemingway, in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, had his protagonist say that he “was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.” “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene.”13 The same ideas occurred to fashionable and politically inclined writers, who were about to have a field day with the rhetoric of fascism. From the 1920s on, arbiters of culture interested themselves in what they christened as semantics. These authors gave to America the term semantic disagreement, which denotes an unfortunate and, in some manner, petty argument about the meaning of words. Nonetheless, this sort of argument—­about what things were called—­ might bewilder our intelligences and stoke up our feelings. In time, fascism crucially illustrated how the vocabulary of politics could befuddle us. A volume of 1923, The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards—­two Englishmen—­began the dissemination of this public philosophy. The more exotic Count Alfred Korzybski, a Polish scholar who took US citizenship after World War One, joined this team of thinkers. Critics heralded Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (1933) as the progenitor of the semantics movement. At the end of the decade came S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Action (1941), later retitled Language in Thought and Action. Assigned in freshman English courses in colleges in many editions for over twenty-­five years, this spectacular best seller propelled Hayakawa to the presidency of San Francisco State College and then to a seat in the US Senate. For these men and others, language confounded, and we misconstrued words for the things they represented. We needed to get in touch with things and not mistake them for verbal constructs. Troubles arose as soon as we had coupled things with words and left (feasible) specifics before moving to (impractical) generalities. Statements lifted us from realities, and a web of utterances set us adrift. Korzybski most famously wrote, “The map is not the territory.” His followers repeated examples like “Voter1, voter2, voter3, . . . they are what is definite. We must not mix up unique voters with voting or the voter or the vote.” The words in italics, in the favorite tag of the philosophers, abstracted. Thus, individual Black people might not vote in a precinct in South Carolina in 1936, and we expounded on democracy and racism, caught up in the potent implications of language. Other scholars, with related views, talked about the problems of “symbol words” like fascism. They served only to manipulate feelings, and serious writers should abandon them and substitute language that more accurately reflected the world, not our subjective responses toward it. The semanticists frequently regurgitated the same illustration. Think of an indivisible whole of experiences comprising “the transit of a negro over a

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rail fence with a melon under his arm while the moon is just passing behind a cloud.” We single out this blend of phenomena as a wousin, a noun. Then, we can imagine people disputing whether a wousin necessarily involved a rail fence, or whether we could apply the word when a white man climbed over a stone wall, or whether wousining pertained if someone stole a cantaloupe in broad daylight. Using a word to cover a complex whole and then to generalize led us astray.14 Thus, political conversation or commentary was suspect. Neither appealed to the cognitive, for when we leapt from things to immaterial verbiage, we easily entered the realm of passion. Yet the semanticists also presumed that an idea, if only concrete, did pick out something. They valued speech and writing close to externalities, substantial and informative, and practically designed to bring about approved goals. Hayakawa and many before and after him jeered at political lingo but also thought they could cleanse it and get down to the nitty-­gritty of it. Then, using the objective methods of social science, they and shrewd officials might tidy up social messes. One can see in the semantics movement an application of the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey to language: we wanted speech and writing that worked, that helped us reach joint goals, and that avoided hot-­air disputes that no one could resolve. The views of the semanticists comprised the inconsistent and even the incoherent. They favored an innocent eye that immediately saw the world as it was. So, these wordsmiths found most comfort at a prelinguistic level in which we at once grasped realities. Yet somehow, we had to do this via the idiom. The thinkers ridiculed the double-­talk of language but also thought that it did refer to things or could be reformed to do so. At least in theory, careful definitions could accurately mirror a world out there. Nonetheless, pitfalls could easily take us off track. The vituperative 1930s gave the semanticists plenty of ammunition. The logical positivists in Vienna uncovered a prime example of the emotive in National Socialist talk. In the United States, the wrangles over fascism were made for the semanticists, who wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Politics consisted of disputable attitudes, but a pure language could settle the real issues at stake. Pure language, implied the semanticists, would benefit their own politics—­usually one opposed to Italy, Germany, and Spain. Following the example of wousin, we might name a complex whole of experience, such as the course of the Italian state during the 1920s—­fascism. Such a procedure had a point, for precision could help us escape linguistic fog. But we would become disoriented if we applied this name to other complex wholes. In the United States, the ideas of the semanticists—­and certainly their implications for political talk—­trickled down to New Dealers who wrote

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nonfiction. Jerome Frank was a well-­known lawyer, legal theorist, and Roosevelt bureaucrat. Broadly read, he devoted himself to the new ideas of the university that would unmask myths and put human civilization on a better path. Frank and other right-­thinking men of mind could breach the fundamentals, and on a practical basis reorder the polity more sensibly. In 1930 he authored Law and the Modern Mind, which brushed aside “social fictions” and harnessed the novelties about language. Frank ridiculed the ancient Greeks for their trust that “intellections” could resolve problems. Locutions like democracy were “phantoms,” “symbols,” and “bogus entities.” He wrote of “verbomania”; of “emotive and non-­descriptive” treatments of matters; “word-­Magic”; and “the proclivity to infer existence from a name.” Discourse fostered “a belief in the independent reality of . . . merely verbal contrivances.” Frank tentatively titled a later book on similar topics “The Overthrow of the Dictatorship of the Vocabulary.”15 Raymond Gram Swing, the famous radio broadcaster of the 1930s with ties to the New Deal, wrote the previously touched-­on Forerunners of American Fascism in 1934. He marked some usual and unusual suspects as fascists—­ Huey Long, Francis Townsend, and the publisher William Randolph Hearst, among others. But Swing also said fascism was “used . . . as a taunt.” When Mussolini was less prominent, fascism had “merely meant castor oil.”16 Thurman Arnold taught law at Yale and then worked as an assistant attorney general in the US Department of Justice. Two of his books, The Symbols of Government (1935) and The Folklore of Capitalism (1937), exemplified the tendency among members of the Roosevelt administration to argue for the reality of fascism when used against enemies and for its maligning function when used against FDR. The most formidable effort of the late 1930s could be purchased in bookstores in 1938: Stuart Chase’s The Tyranny of Words. Chase had earned a technical degree at Harvard and then had educated himself on the many topics on which he wrote as a freelance author and critic. New Dealers held him in high esteem when he published The Tyranny of Words. In part the book pled for judicious thinking that would advance Democrats, because they wanted admirable things like full employment, business responsibility, and decent wages. The adversaries of the administration had mastered the illogical, based on speech about freedom, despotism, democracy, oppression, and fascism—­buzzwords that led the electorate astray. Fascism played tricks on us. Chase reported on the trickery in The Tyranny of Words. What was fascism? He asked this question of almost one hundred people from all walks of life during the summer of 1937. Respondents wildly diverged over what it referred to, with multiple contradictory definitions. Chase counted at least

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fifteen, and he wrote that there was “dislike” of fascism but “little agreement as to what it meant.” This “aggregate mental chaos” mingled with the fakery of a “sober . . . treat[ment of fascism] as a definite thing by newspapers, authors, orators, statesmen, talkers, the world around.” We had a “windy clash of rival metaphysical notions,” “semantic confusion.” But then Chase ended the book with a paean to “good language”: “Good language alone will not save mankind. But seeing the things behind the names will help us to understand the structure of the world we live in. Good language will help us to communicate with one another about the realities of our environment, where now we speak darkly, in alien tongues.”17 Lawrence Dennis read The Tyranny of Words and took Chase’s ideas in another direction in his own book, in which he proclaimed fascism’s coming to America: The Dynamics of War and Revolution of 1940. In this effort, Dennis cast his notions about world politics linguistically. New Dealers talked in emotive language to move the United States to their doubtful credo. Steeped in the arts of persuasion, they promoted words like socialism, democracy, and fascism to commend or denounce but not to understand. Yet like his New Deal opponents, Dennis also thought he could lay down “true” definitions of these words—­including a favorable one of fascism—­to which he regularly contrasted the various sham definitions of academics and partisan Democrats.18 In 1939 the country would face the coming presidential election without accord concerning who were fascists at home, what Americans should do about fascism overseas, or what the word even designated.

4

Foreign and Domestic Contradictions, 1938–­40

While less than robust, the sustenance of the New Deal for England barely faltered, although opinion makers in the United States suspected the British commitment to democracy. Great Britain’s imperialism kept millions from self-­determination in India, Asia, and Africa, and discussion of its craftiness and colonialism matched talk of its anti-­tyrannical history. Russia complicated matters. The USSR was not expansionist as Germany was, but its 1938 purges paraded the brutality of the Soviets as did its help, though unsuccessful, to Spain’s Republicans. A Germany that projected its wrath toward Russia would please Great Britain. The English desire to put communists head to head with fascists had merit: if Hitler and Stalin fought, many of the problems of the democracies would be solved. Finally, while none of these complexities diminished the dislike and foreboding that attached to Hitler and his minions in the United States, a mild American anti-­Semitism debilitated the New Deal’s attempts to frustrate Germany and assist Britain: some US nationals believed that thwarting Hitler would foster illegitimate Jewish interests. Meanwhile, marketable amusements and intellectual formulations concerning fascism continued to baffle and contribute to the vocal and written cacophony. Anti-­Semitism and Fascism Hitler was going too far, but according to many of FDR’s critics, one did not sin by keeping the Jews in their place, and one should not sneer at racial homogeneity. In his fascism, Lawrence Dennis was only an extreme proponent of such a message. Scholars regularly single out Madison Grant, who attended Yale and the Columbia Law School, and Lothrop Stoddard, with a history

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PhD from Harvard, as exemplifying repellent eugenicist theories in the first part of the twentieth century. But their writings were a taste of the thinking of more mainstream Protestant Americans. Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color against White World-­ Supremacy (1920). The supposed decline of Caucasian ascendancy agitated both authors, but the ideas were in the air. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a chief character, who is Yale educated, obsessed about these issues: “Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’?” “It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved. . . . It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”1 Grant and Stoddard smiled on Mussolini during the 1920s, and they extolled Italian nationalism. During the 1930s, Hitler gave them confidence that “the rising tide” would not flood the United States. Fascism might save America.2 More highly regarded and effective learned Protestants also harbored an easygoing resentment toward Jews. Sharing the values of the less acceptable intellectual Catholics who were anti-­Semitic, some of these Protestants oversaw the elite universities. One was the long-­serving Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, but James Conant, president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, most strikingly exemplified these men. Conant and other captains of erudition usually dismissed the protests on their campuses against the Hitler government, refused to reckon with the effect of anti-­Semitism on German institutions of higher learning, and gave cover to National Socialism by promoting scholarly exchanges and celebrations that endorsed the German universities. Until 1938 or so, Conant and others also protected academics in their schools who favored National Socialism and who sometimes promulgated its virtues for America. These professors populated German departments. Often German nationals or German-­Americans, they also had expertise in fields in which Germany had an outsize reputation for excellence, such as studies of the ancient Near East. These educators assisted in dismissing the complaints of Jews in the United States on behalf of those in Europe, although by the late 1930s Germany had crossed a line.3 In March of 1938, the Germans’ expansion efforts picked up steam when they declared the Anschluss of Austria, their union with another völkisch land; and in September Hitler arranged to take over districts of Czechoslovakia at an international conference held in Munich. There the British and the French agreed to the carving up of this state that the Treaty of Versailles had brought into existence after World War One—­the Sudetenland, its predominantly German western portion, would become part of the Reich. Hitler declared that he had no more territorial demands. The cession would “appease” Germany, as the British had it. Realists declared that the Germans looked to

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their destiny in eastern Europe in opposition to communism and that the English should not protest this policy. A Europe tipped against Russia might contain Hitler, and a Sphinx-­like FDR, even though he did not ratify the Munich Agreement, comforted the British. Believing that the West was directing Germany against it, the USSR urged “collective security,” a combination of all nonfascists. It went nowhere, although no one thought that Russia was flexing its muscles like Germany. Just less than six weeks after the Munich Conference, the National Socialists instigated a nationwide rampage against the Jews in Germany in what was at once called Kristallnacht—­the Night of Broken Glass. Mobs smashed the windows of businesses that Jews owned, and the government did not inhibit the beatings and murders of Jewish citizens. Even for the dainty anti-­Semite in the United States, Kristallnacht went far beyond the acceptable and enabled New Dealers to be more forceful in their diplomacy. This important inflection point convinced many that a dreadful cataclysm was coming. The new year of 1939 brought no respite. Hitler accelerated his measures against the Jews. In addition, from September of 1938 on, he had been pecking away at the Munich settlement despite his promise to cease expansion of the Reich, and in March of 1939 the remains of Czechoslovakia devolved into a German “protectorate.” At the end of the month, the British and the French—­in despair—­guaranteed the integrity of Poland to the north of Czech­ oslovakia, deemed next on Hitler’s list. On the following day, April 1, the legitimate and communist-­populated government in Spain ceased to exist, officially ending its war with the pro-­German revolutionaries that Francisco Franco led. This event was perhaps more significant for observers of international politics in the United States than the end of Czechoslovakia. Mussolini was now in the thrall of Hitler, and the negative connotation of fascism had become irrevocably blurred: while the Italians hardly counted, Hitler was routinely and haphazardly counted as fascist. Throughout these trying times, Roosevelt’s opponents had censured the president for his dictatorial inclinations at home. At the end of 1938, as the European peace unraveled, Roosevelt listened to commentators suggesting that New Deal losses in the just-­decided congressional election had spoiled his illicit bid for executive hegemony. However, the New Deal’s diplomacy belied charges of Roosevelt’s penchant for communism or fascism. FDR was tacking every which way to help England and France. His decisions about what took place beyond the water’s edge might offset criticism about what he was doing in his native land. A Roosevelt who abetted democracy abroad was likely to be . . . a democratic Roosevelt. In December of 1940 he would laud the United States as “the great arsenal of democracy.” Yet we face the ironic.

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Roosevelt’s favoring of democracy in Europe gave him credit. Then, as he leaned into European troubles, he aroused even more hatred in America. Was he fighting autocrats using autocratic means? Would not assertive diplomacy in favor of the English and the French—­and, at worst, war against fascism—­ push the US constitutional state to fascism? Accusations against a fascist FDR increased, and talk of fascism in America accelerated. More Claims of Fascism Magazines of every sort—­American Mercury, American Scholar, Christian Century, Harper’s, Life, the Nation, the New Republic, the Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s—­saw fascism all over the United States, from cities on the East Coast to hamlets in rural areas. We have endless reports: “American Fascism in Embryo,” “Will America Go Fascist?,” “Must America Go Fascist?,” “America Drifts toward Fascism,” “Fascism for America,” “Hollywood Plays with Fascism,” “Pawns for Fascism—­Our Lower Middle Class,” “Fascist Terrorism in U.S. Revealed,” “The American Fascists,” “Hitlerism in America,” “Proto-­ fascism in American Literature,” “Star-­Spangled Fascists.” Anti-­Roose­velt news­ papers like the Washington Star and the Wall Street Journal continued to locate fascism in the New Deal. The American Civil Liberties Union diagnosed the disease in the American Legion and tiny Chambers of Commerce. One antifascist argued that “A Fascist is anyone who hates the common man.”4 In early 1937, the Columbia Broadcasting System aired the performance of a “radio verse play.” The Fall of the City was a kind of epic rhyme written by an able poet and Roosevelt Democrat, Archibald MacLeish. In the late 1930s, FDR engaged MacLeish as Librarian of Congress, where he wrote propaganda for the administration. He then worked for the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), and the State Department as a high-­ranking official. Radio, which made sound king, was thought to be the best medium in which to deliver verse; and in 1937 MacLeish’s presentation drew from his anticipation that Austria would disappear into a greater Germany, the Anschluss that did occur the following year. MacLeish believed fascism on the move, and that human beings had to guard against secret impulses for intellectual slavery. Perhaps unsurprisingly at this stage in its linguistice existence, fascism as a contemporary threat was linked by MacLeish to the mortal peril the Spanish posed to the Aztecs of prehistoric South America. In 1521, Hernán Cortés had conquered the capital Tenochtitlan. In the style of radio journalism, MacLeish in his play likened the collapse of the ancient city to what was happening as Germany expanded and independent states disappeared.5 A twenty-­one-­year-­old named Orson

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Welles began his career as the Announcer in The Fall of the City. His vocal ability made the hurdle between AD 1500 and the present seem credible. An even more imaginative examination saw fascists coming to America from, of all places, outer space. At the beginning of 1938, the radio show The Shadow—­of the oft-­repeated “The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men”—­had one half-­hour episode, “Sabotage,” in which the intrepid Shadow checked some German intrigue in the United States.6 The voice of the Shadow and his alter ego, Lamont Cranston, was that of Welles, continuing his extraordinary way in the entertainment business. Welles also spoke in another program, The March of Time, which mutated into a movie newsreel featuring marginally studious, if laborious, documentary-­style stories about the current scene, including European and American fascists.7 In October 1938—­some nine months after “Sabotage” and soon after the Munich Conference—­Welles had charge of his own sixty-­minute dramatic radio program, Mercury Theatre on the Air. He leapt into public consciousness with a simulated news broadcast in which he narrated a seemingly actual attack from Mars lightly based on a version of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novella, The War of the Worlds. Welles succeeded beyond his dreams when his broadcast panicked many people in northern New Jersey, where the Martians had supposedly established their foothold. Welles later “apologized” for the performance, which had provoked nationwide hysteria, but he explained his serious moral behind it. German forces had just moved into the parts of Czechoslovakia ceded to Hitler, and at the beginning of the broadcast hour, Welles noted that “the war scare” had just ended. He wanted to demonstrate that an assault from overseas could occur or that propaganda could threaten the United States. In Germany and Italy, officials argued that US leaders were stirring up the people against their regimes with the dramatic presentation. The high-­profile journalist Dorothy Thompson defended Welles by saying that he was warning how the mass medium of radio could bring to American shores “the terrorism of our times”—­“Hitlerism, Mussolini-­ism, Stalinism, Anti-­ Semitism.” So now aggression from another planet served as a metaphor for fascism—­a precursor of metaphors to come.8 The Bund By the late 1930s, with concerns stoked by journalism and entertainment, the executive branch had accelerated its activities against “the Shirts,” proof positive for the New Dealers of their own democratic inclinations. Both the White House and the FBI bought into the widely held belief that countries could fall easily to the Germans, because National Socialists had early on so

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Celebration promoted by the German-­American Bund in the late 1930s at Camp Sigfried on Long Island. (Licensed through Alamy, Inc.)

cunningly schemed to weaken these nations from within. A genuine if exaggerated fright about subversion had combined with opportunistic if patriotic attempts to demonstrate steadfast Americanism, and the government now tracked down and broke up suspect organizations. The most important society promoting ideas described as fascist, and in some instances a Hitler-­like regime in the United States, was the German-­ American Bund. In 1933 the National Socialists had established a precursor of the Bund in the United States, but it did not emerge until 1936 with its recognizable spokesmen and in the form that Americans knew it. The organizers at first wanted to carry America to National Socialism. Soon realizing that this was a dangerous stance, Bundists announced their devotion to America. They did not favor nazism or fascism, they said, but promoted anticommunism and the superiority of a white Christian race. Yet members dressed in brown uniforms and eagerly gave the straight-­arm, palms-­up salute of the Third Reich. The Bund typified all those malformed entities—­German or otherwise—­that wanted to mimic Italy or Germany during the 1930s. German-­Americans overall had loyalties as divided as Italian-­Americans. Yet the Bund’s activities and the all-­important typecasting about the seriousness of Berlin and the

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foolishness of Rome meant that the US counterespionage effort concentrated on the Germans. Hitler’s officials did sensibly disengage from the likes of the Bund and tried to minimize its activities.9 This detachment often counted for little with American authorities, and one issue that German officialdom could not escape was the translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf into English and its distribution in the United States, another example of the transfer of fascism to the New World. An American edition was subject to unending fights during the 1930s. Some wanted the book suppressed and hated the thought that profit might be made from it. Others, like Dorothy Thompson, who wrote a nasty blurb for one edition—­“I deprecate every idea in this book”—­believed that the exposure of Hitler’s ideas would discredit National Socialism in America.10 Leon Turrou led an FBI investigation into German spying in the United States in 1937 and 1938, and had almost bungled it. The bureau fired Turrou after he published some articles about his work, but he turned his ineptitude and essays into some fictional nonfiction. In 1939 his book, The Nazi Spy Conspiracy in America, described a gigantic Nazi spy ring. A conspiracy that was a deliberate plot of the Nazi “government” involved the “machinations of the Bund.” Yet the German government had long since cut itself off from the more or less demented Germans and German-­Americans in the United States who promoted their locally brewed form of National Socialism.11 This detachment did not relieve the opprobrium that clung to Germany in the face of the Bund’s huge rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in February of 1939, just before Hitler’s reneging on the Munich Agreement got into the newspapers. Bundists numbering twenty thousand strutted at the Garden, and Dorothy Thompson was thrown out for loud and boisterous heckling. These activists, many in uniform, thought they might convert America. More perspicacious than the Geman-­Americans, Fiorella La Guardia, New York City’s flamboyant New Deal mayor, reasoned that giving the Bund coverage and publicity would go a way toward destroying its effectiveness. The event was also a godsend to Roosevelt administration Democrats and to FBI agents, both looking for a confrontation to convince Americans of the danger of treason. These antics of the Bund destroyed it. In 2019—­on the eightieth anniversary of the gathering—­a short documentary film, A Night at the Garden, was nominated for an Academy Award. The movie illustrated why Americans could not stomach the Bund in 1939 but also how the dread of fascism persisted. In 2019 the publisher of Harper’s, still a high-­end periodical of commentary, brought up the long-­ago Bund rally to predict that “history is repeating itself.”12 Back in 1939 and 1940, the New York World’s Fair revealed how much damage had been done to German fascism as opposed to that of Italy. Hitler

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refused to participate, fearing embarrassment. Visitors to the fair might display the indignant wrath of America if the Nazis should try to advertise their culture through a pavilion that would exhibit “the world of tomorrow” according to National Socialism. On the other hand, Mussolini was able to promote Italy as a nation that now combined the grandeur of ancient Rome with twentieth-­century collectivism.13 Simultaneously, a number of journalists followed Turrou’s The Nazi Spy Conspiracy in America and wrote tell-­all books that dramatized the secret gov­ ernmental investigations taking place. According to these authors, the United States had slept at the switch, allowing Hitler a treacherous entrée, yet again amalgamating Hitlerism and fascism. A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens published The Peril of Fascism, and Max Ascoli and Arthur Feiler, Fascism for Whom?, both in 1938. Later, in 1942, Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn wrote Sabotage! The Secret War against America, and announced that 750 profascist or fascist organizations had been undermining America: “Could it happen here? It did happen here.” George Seldes, who had produced Sawdust Caesar in 1935 condemning Mussolini, turned from his commitment to the Popular Front to the front’s enemies in his 1943 Facts and Fascism. Among fascists in the United States, this book named the American Legion, “the Ford Empire,” members of the press, the National Association of Manufacturers, and Reader’s Digest. But John Roy Carlson, the pen name of Arthur Derounian, topped all these literary efforts. A naturalized US citizen born in Armenia, Derounian hyperbolically exposed conspiracies. His best seller put on paper his spying since 1939: Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America.14 The New Deal took on other foreign organizations and would step up its exertions into 1940 and 1941, although the resident fascists were increasingly less Italian in nature. During this period, Father Coughlin had been instrumental in founding a Christian Front that laymen dominated. Just as the Popular Front might lead confused Democrats to Moscow, the Christian Front would lead savvier American Catholics to a European-­style fascism, directed by Catholic laity. Yet the front’s small group of principals inclined to violence were brought to trial in 1940. Although these leaders got off, the front was disrupted. After lengthy deliberations, the government also decided to indict some other radicals more conspicuously identified as both American Nazis or fascists, but the accused only went to trial after much delay.15 The Regionalists Get More Scared In the later 1930s the regionalist writers, the southerners of whom we met previously when they were starting out in the early 1930s, reinforced unease

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about fascism. They added another layer to the pile of horrors, especially for readers of the best sorts of books.16 In his 1938 The Culture of Cities, the urban theorist Lewis Mumford feared mythic cities like the “Tyrannopolis” and the “Nekropolis.” In Faith for Living (1940), Roosevelt’s modernizing forces indicated that “the fascist specter” was “stalking the American landscape.”17 But no one was clear whether the provincial outlook and its more equal balance between the city and the farm safeguarded the United States from fascism or took the nation to it, and authors were frantic as the decade came to a close. Once again, Nathaniel West, a nonregionalist, led the way. His 1934 A Cool Million, about the naïve Lemuel Pitkin, had received little notice. Then, in 1939, West wrote Day of the Locust, a jaundiced look at Hollywood that was, in the frenzy of the late 1930s, rightly decoded as a tale about America’s impulse to fascism. Pitkin’s saga was revisited and seen to portend what could occur in the United States—­it could “go fascist.” West’s fears were now more grandiloquently shared and put on paper by writers who did not inhabit either the East or the West Coasts. An accomplished chronicler of Nebraska, where her Swiss immigrant parents had brought her up in a village, Mari Sandoz gained esteem as a regionalist. In two much-­admired novels, Slogum House (1937) and Capital City (1939), she ruminated about fascism in her native state. She wrote about how, in Nebraska, “an organized society let[s] itself slip into fascism.” In 1940 Walter T. V. Clark, another impressive regionalist, wrote The Ox-­Bow Incident, which concerned “a kind of American Nazism.” He situated the fiction, about a lynch-­style murder, in nineteenth-­century Nevada, the state where Clark himself was born.18 From a Jewish family in New Orleans, Lillian Hellman located fascism in the racial order of the South. She looked on it as America writ small, so that the United States had an on-­the-­verge fascist quality. In April of 1941, her play Watch on the Rhine began a run of almost a year on Broadway. This compelling drama put on the stage a German-­born antifascist who had come to the United States with his American family, but who faced the moral problem of returning to Europe to carry on the fight. A foe of both Franco and Hitler, the protagonist believed that their regimes put the United States in jeopardy. For writers who had roots in the South, dark notions of race were dominant in their work. Most differed from Hellman, and their center of attention was a kind of primitive ethnic particularism. Thomas Wolfe was perhaps the most famous southern writer. The anti-­Semitic Wolfe spent much time in Germany. His posthumous novel of 1940, You Can’t Go Home Again, was one of the most highly regarded pieces of fiction by the Nashville Agrarians. The US national George Webber, Wolfe’s protagonist, made many trips

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to Germany and repeatedly excused the National Socialist regime. Finally, the testimony of his German friends forced him to the realization of both the vices of National Socialism and their connection to his own country. One companion told him: “In New York [ze Nazis]  .  .  . call zemselves by some fine name”—­Salon communists, DAR, American Legion, Chamber of Commerce—­but “zey are all ze same.” Of fascism: “America had it, too, in various forms.”19 Another southerner, W. J. Cash, published The Mind of the South in early 1941, famous as a portrait of his province. Cash urged that the systemic restraints on thought and behavior in the United States did not differ from those in Italy and Germany (and the USSR) and thus “paralyzed southern culture at the root.” A sensitive critic and journalist, Cash committed suicide less than five months after the volume appeared, apparently convinced that Nazi agents were trailing him.20 Philip Johnson—­born in New London, Ohio—­took another direction. After receiving a cosmopolitan and privileged education, he went on to become one of America’s leading architects. He was attracted to Mussolini in the late 1920s and, through Mussolini, to Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Lawrence Dennis, and the dislike of Jews. Johnson wished to shape an American fascism. By the late 1930s, he had gone to Germany on a sponsored trip. Nazi anti-­Semitism and pageantry lifted him past Mussolini to Hitler. When the FBI caught up with him and investigated his proclivities after the United States entered World War Two, Johnson came to his senses, although he later succeeded for a time in erasing his doubtful past.21 John Corbin The complexities of making a case about arguing about fascism in the United States were unveiled in an unusual book published in the middle of 1940, Two Frontiers of Freedom by John Corbin.22 Corbin had gone to Harvard in the 1890s and then to Oxford. After his return, he briefly taught English at Harvard, and remained a Shakespeare scholar for the rest of his life. An old progressive, Corbin committed himself to TR, and from 1900 to 1920 he made a name for himself as a New York literary and dramatic critic while writing novels. In the early 1920s, he studied American history for five years. A well-­researched and well-­regarded George Washington (1930) came out of his study, and Two Frontiers expatiated on the ideas of the biography. The two frontiers were foreign and domestic policy in the United States in the spring of 1940, nine months after the “official” start of World War Two in Europe in September of 1939. Corbin, however, located his political theory in the 1780s, the decade that began with the American victory in the Revolutionary War

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and concluded with the creation of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. George Washington stood out. As the revolution ended, the new United States could not meet even its minimal financial obligations pertaining to the war and had an insubstantial form of organization, the Articles of Confederation. The officers who had led the Continental Army to victory gave up on their attempts to be paid or even honored for their patriotism. In 1783, six months before a peace treaty was signed, they participated in what Corbin described as fascist intrigue, analogous to Mussolini’s overthrow of the Italian state. Aided by some politicians anxious for a stronger regime, the military planned a coup that would empower a more effective elite. The feelings of General Benedict Arnold, the notorious earlier traitor to Washington’s Revolution, animated the officers’ tactics. Their plotting climaxed in Newburgh, New York, where the schemers trusted that Washington would join them. With him on their side, they could not fail. Instead, in a dramatic address, Washington turned away from the conniving of an influential merchant-­warrior class and forced the officers to look to their rectitude. The general spoke for constitutional governance, for the restraint in politics that such governance promoted, and for the liberties it protected. The officers might be justifiably dissatisfied with the Articles of Confederation, but then they had at hand duly authorized methods for correcting the deficiencies. Deliberations among the soldiers, the politicians, and the people should occur to alter matters for the better. The fascist conspiracy fell apart. In contrast to this trickery, Corbin then depicted a communist uprising three years later, in 1786. Called at the time and thereafter Shays’s Rebellion, it threatened the legitimate government in Massachusetts. This disturbance involved indebted and sometimes landless farmers escaping the clutches of bankers and an unfriendly legal system. The state legislature wavered between acquiescence and feeble remonstrance. Tradesmen, the politicians charged with upholding the Articles of Confederation, and Massachusetts officeholders eventually threw together a force that crushed the insurrection or saw it disintegrate. According to Corbin, Washington deprecated the unrest of proletarians as much as he had the earlier fascism. The general wanted the civil disobedience quashed. Moreover, the crisis motivated him to come out of retirement in 1787. He helped create the Constitutional Convention that would forge a more energetic framing of laws. Washington, Corbin reasoned, contributed to building not a democratic but a “republican” government “between” fascism and communism. The men who congregated in Philadelphia in 1787 worried about the monarchical as much as they worried about democratic agitators who accepted only the weak

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Articles of Confederation. The Founders had to devise a way to avert the autocratic while simultaneously to ration the mandate of the people, who had too much say under the articles. Corbin and Washington proscribed hierarchical rule based on birth. But its opposite—­democracy—­also had basic flaws, uplifting the unworthy and allowing them to remain in power through quackery. Between autocracy and democracy—­fascism and communism—­ the Founders fashioned a republic. Though always in jeopardy, this kind of state had its source in the will of the people, but only in the will of the virtuous and intelligent among them. Most important, laws and traditions gave leaders incentives for discretion and self-­discipline. For Corbin, the executive—­read: Washington—­always acted under limits but could also act with decision. Washington had secured a constitutional regime that had rescued eighteenth-­ century America from twentieth-­century European extremes. Corbin belittled Jefferson with his abstract ideas of human equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence, arguing that Jefferson’s words came nowhere close to his actual policies. Yet, wrote Corbin, his election in 1800 began the erosion of republican for democratic sentiments. US history told of the erosion, which continued into the twentieth century. Thus, Two Frontiers of Freedom fast-­forwarded to the New Deal and to its policies overseas. Corbin offered no alternatives to the Roosevelt administration’s commitments, although he did give an inkling that the Democrats of the 1930s epitomized small-­d democracy and its weaknesses. So, for example, FDR, a charismatic leader, benefited from the demagogic medium of radio. To increase his personal hold, from the start of his second four years Roosevelt had tried executive reorganization; the restructuring of the Supreme Court; and the expulsion of his Democratic opponents in the Senate in 1938. Now he was talking of 1940—­to be president for a unique third time. FDR was disregarding the Constitution and drew “the multitudes of underprivileged and unemployed as against the brains and character of the nation.”23 For Corbin, however, this did not mean tyranny. It meant, rather, an administration that could not solve the economic problems of the Great Depression. Roosevelt additionally could not proceed resolutely overseas, except perhaps to use dilemmas abroad to gain domestic advantage. Corbin saw the New Deal, at home and in Europe, as futile. Democrats had compromised the republicanism that had enabled America to withstand the onslaught of an early version of fascism and communism.

5

The Coming of the War, 1939–­42

With the Munich Agreement, Hitler had gulled Britain and France. By the spring of 1939, appeasement, the prudential English policy to restore the pride of Germany and to integrate National Socialism into a peaceful Europe, had disgraced itself. Before the Munich Conference, appeasement reflected an astute way of adjusting international affairs so that Hitler’s Germany might expand to the east, although permitting the National Socialists to pick up property in Western Europe as well. After March of 1939, the penumbra of meaning of appeasement altered. It suddenly expressed the unjustifiable giving-­in to a bully, feeding the appetite of an aggressor. The cerebral differences between appeasement before and after 1938 can be explicated. Yet the feeling accompanying appeasement during the earlier period can only doubtfully be conveyed, and the word cannot now be used without the distaste that it has brought from the lips since 1939. The word and its cognates were at once imprinted with a chilling undertone from which—­like “a Munich”—­they would never recover. Under pressure, the British and the French had then allied with Poland, but the British still tried to entice the Poles to make some peaceful plan that would allow the continued expansion of Germany toward Russia. More cautious, however, the Nazis would not move against Poland unless they had some assurance that they would not immediately also engage with the Soviet Union. Both Germany and England looked to arrange matters with the USSR. Great Britain had been grappling with an intimidating Reich. The English wished for help from Russia, although this wish merged with a hankering that Hitler would solely target Stalin. Should Hitler strike Poland, in fact, Britain could do little to help. The Germans wanted a way to take the country more easily. The British might deter them at the expense of the Reds. England did not see much to choose from between Russia and Germany.

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Only the communists had urged unity against Germany, and in the early part of August 1939, four hundred pro-­USSR intellectuals in the United States—­many of them Popular Front liberals—­signed an open letter congratulating Russia on its antifascism and distinguishing between Hitler and Stalin, much to the benefit of the latter.1 Two weeks later, on August 23, Stalin and Hitler reached an agreement, the Russo-­German pact. It freed Hitler to invade Poland from the west, which he did just over a week later, while Stalin took eastern Poland. Again shamed, the English honored their undertaking to Poland, and declared war on Germany. For people in the West, September 3, 1939, began World War Two. But the war initially called neither England nor France to sacrifices, and during this period of—­for them—­a “phony war,” Germany focused on Poland. Meanwhile, the pact discredited the Popular Fronters and the CPUSA, which swiftly approved the bargain between Hitler and Stalin. Previously antifascist, American communists initiated an unappetizing defense of National Socialism but could not ignore the stench now attached to them. Against this frightening background, US nationals screamed at one another about local fascism, as it was revealed that Roosevelt would take an unprecedented third run for the presidency. After he won, the screaming con­ tinued, because it became plain that the new administration was edging the nation into the war. Americans did not retreat from their verbal brinksmanship until surprising and startling events, which the administration did not foresee, ushered the United States into the conflict. The Third Term By the end of 1939, more than ever, Roosevelt had wanted to outfit Britain and France. Simultaneously, his adversaries continued to assail him with the vocabulary of the tyrannical. What the president was doing in the United States meant that he could not shake attacks about his antidemocratic attitudes. From the time he had won his victory at the polls at the end of 1936, he let many people infer that he wanted another nomination. In 1937, 1938, and 1939, FDR tormented leading Democrats who craved to run instead of him in 1940—­Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Postmaster General Jim Farley, Vice President John Nance Garner, and even Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. We can easily conclude that by early 1939, the president had ideas about campaigning again and was looking to rationalize his decision. The collapse of peace of Europe in September, critics said, gave him the rationalization. More extreme critics implied that he pressed US entry into the conflict to bolster a run in 1940.

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None other than George Washington had set the standard for two four-­ year presidential terms. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe had confirmed the pattern. The Constitution did not mandate a maximum of eight years, but like nine justices on the Supreme Court, the limit represented a significant tradition. Who did Roosevelt think he was in inching toward more? Even his advocates wondered about the realm into which he was leading the nation. And a miscellany of enemies left over from 1936, and new ones who dreaded involvement in Europe, were attacking the president. With the Hitler-­Stalin settlement, American communists joined the critics of their power-­grabbing chief executive: the CPUSA believed that FDR might intervene on behalf of England and France to the detriment of Russia’s ally, Hitler. Foreign policy, the melee to control domestic politics, and questions about “the third term” all interacted as commentators heatedly speculated over whether Roosevelt would ask for and receive the nomination at the July 1940 Democratic National Convention. The accord between Russia and Germany had put all the unscrupulous countries on the same side. The alliance also showed the degradation of the cultures and ideologies of Europe. Should not the United States just keep as far away as possible? US nationals overall disliked the Russians and scorned the Nazis, and few could fault Roosevelt for boosting the English. Nonetheless, battling the Germans again did not interest Americans. Isolationist sentiment from journalists, citizens, and opinion makers urged that Europe’s troubles did not require a US thumb on the scale. So far as this debate had rational content, the interventionists believed it more important for Great Britain to defeat Germany than for the United States to keep out of the war. The noninterventionists held that it was more important to stay out than to secure a triumph for Great Britain. Furious name-­calling took place as rebukes of fascism were yet again traded all around. Burton Wheeler, a difficult Democratic senator from Montana who had broken with FDR over the Supreme Court issue and had then opposed the administration’s leaning to the British, trembled at the possibility of another Roosevelt administration. He identified Roosevelt as a “greater threat to American democracy than Hitler or . . . Mussolini.”2 More restrained detractors of the president worried that a third term would affront hallowed precedents. FDR was fighting dictators by becoming dictatorial. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of 1913 had made Charles Beard America’s most eminent historian. A Wilsonian in 1917–­19, Beard had flirted with Mussolini during the 1920s, and then had worried that both Hoover and FDR were profascist in the early 1930s. In the fall of 1939 and in early 1940—­in another of his appearances in discussions of fascism—­he

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quoted from William Shakespeare’s Henry IV in an essay, “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels.” Beard said that Roosevelt sought to retain power by creating a crisis abroad that only he could settle. Beard would take the same position as the political writer Lawrence Dennis—­that Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt were similar. He then became a particular target of the urban theorist Lewis Mumford, whose views of the danger of US fascism altered once the war started. Mumford, who had had anxieties about an American urban fascism, now found that Beard’s opposition to FDR’s interventionism was an “objective” ally of fascists, Nazis, and the Gestapo.3 At the Republican National Convention in June of 1940, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, broadcast that FDR stood for “Führer, Duce, Roosevelt.” The Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie. A wealthy businessman with a down-­home kind of charm, Willkie was convincing in his view that he could defeat the president. Yet he also espoused internationalism, perhaps even more assertively than FDR: among Republicans, hatred of Roosevelt and the desire to beat him outdistanced aversion to intervention. Willkie, however, offered a path out of the despotic and gave the lie to the Democratic argument that the nation needed Roosevelt were the United States to be entrapped in the war. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president before the anti-­Roosevelt James Conant, opined that the president’s reelection would take “a long step toward Nazifying American institutions.” The Washington Post added that another four years of Roosevelt would compromise democracy “in behalf of dictatorship.” Predictably, the socialist Norman Thomas prophesied that if Roosevelt should drag the United States into the conflict, “fascism [would be] here”; a racist and violent country such as America could not resist such a metamorphosis in time of war.4 In addition to believing that twelve years of FDR would lead to political dictatorship, prominent Republicans invoked the totalitarian. This new word derived from the Italian. It had had a checkered history, although Mussolini had made it a positive signifier in speaking about his Italy during the 1920s. By the late 1930s, in English, it had become a term of debasement that has its own history and that we will later be looking at as a sidebar to fascism. In 1940 Republicans said that more than eight years of FDR would lead to totalitarianism and that the New Deal administration had “the odor of totalitarian government.”5 The CPUSA, supporting the Hitler-­Stalin alliance, enlisted with Republicans in lamenting Roosevelt and his interventionist tendencies. Yet some Republicans who had said no to the anticapitalist and radical New Deal of 1935–­36 swung behind the president. Frank Knox, the GOP vice-­presidential candidate in 1936, accepted the secretaryship of the navy in July of 1940, just

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after the Republicans nominated Willkie. Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state and another globally minded Republican, Henry Stimson, came with Knox as the new secretary of war in what was called FDR’s war Cabinet. Hitler’s attacks on France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in the spring of 1940 had propelled these appointments. The attacks commenced the barbarity of World War Two in Western Europe. In June France had surrendered, and the British were left without major allies. Should not experienced hands steer the United States? Roosevelt had made his two Republican appointments less than a week before the Democratic National Convention in mid-­July, where the president extracted a demand from his party that he again be a candidate. FDR at once agreed, confirming the fears of those who resisted the unprecedented third term. For the Democrats, Willkie stood in for big-­business Republicans who planned a “fascist-­style” takeover. FDR’s followers argued that a “fascist coup” would follow a Willkie victory. Roosevelt’s vice-­presidential pick, Henry Wallace, wrote that his boss thought Willkie to be a “totalitarian,” and during the campaign Wallace implied that voting for Willkie was “vot[ing] for Hitler.” Harold Ickes, the long-­standing secretary of the interior, worried that from Willkie, “we should expect an American . . . fascism as soon as it could be set up.”6 Roosevelt won his party’s nomination and the 1940 election. More Vitriol At the end of 1940 and into 1941, as England’s plight grew more desperate, a jubilant third administration made clear that its New Deal would help Britain. Isolationists rightly worried more and more about an FDR intervention. Roosevelt wanted to knock down European dictators “so that one may be firmly implanted in America.” His answer to Hitler would give rise to “Hitlerism in the US.”7 More topsy-­turvy commitments came into being. As soon as he had beaten Willkie, Roosevelt welcomed his would-­be fascist adversary as an interventionist. In contrast, midwesterners who had previously been reliable New Dealers emerged as some of Roosevelt’s fiercest opponents. Philip La Follette, Wisconsin’s governor for six years during the 1930s, had presided over a “Little New Deal” under the auspices of the Wisconsin Progressive Party. He had had staunchly drummed for FDR in 1936. Then in 1938 he had fallen away from Roosevelt because of the president’s executive initiatives, foreign policy, and hints of a third term. La Follette formed a new party, the National Progressives of America. The NPA had a vague corporatist ideology, with a flag that various mainstream publications mocked as a circumscribed

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Governor Philip La Follette addressing the National Progressives of America at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison in 1938. The cross represents the ballot, equality, and the multiplication of wealth; the circle, unity. (Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society)

swastika. FDR thought that the NPA might prefigure a political group with some “new form of arm salute” and “a feeble imitation of the Swastika.” Despite the heritage of his family in Wisconsin, La Follette was defeated in his reelection bid. Nonetheless, after he left office in 1939, he put his teeth into Roosevelt’s leg and would not let go.8 America First By October of 1940, various groups and important personages had congealed into something called the America First Committee.9 The organization enlisted people with differing negative views of FDR. Some of its patrons believed that the president was cozying up with communists. Others thought the Nazis were “German New Dealers.” After Roosevelt won a third term, America First emerged as the most formidable enemy of the new

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administration, determined to keep the United States out of Europe. FDR, America First elaborated, “wants a blank check . . . to write away your manpower, our laws, and our liberties.”10 Charles Beard adhered to America First principles,11 but the most active of reflective writers in America First’s leadership was John T. Flynn, an influential and careful journalist. Earlier, Flynn had endorsed Roosevelt in preference to the Republicanism of Herbert Hoover. Nonetheless, like the remnant of old-­fashioned liberals in the American Liberty League, he turned from the New Deal. From the mid-­1930s to the mid-­1940s, Flynn amplified his critique of FDR’s administrations and their international loyalties. After the United States entered the war, he could no longer restrain himself. In analyzing sickness in regimes, he fixed on fascism and defined it as “a parasitic disease that went with a weakened society.” State borrowing and low taxes incapacitated a country. Over and over, Flynn urged that government debt intruded politics into the free market, corroded liberties, and stifled enterprise with the overriding need to service such a debt. The New Deal he called a “prelude to fascism.” War would produce “the perfect climate for some promising Hitler in the American model” and would make fascism “inevitable.” In this scenario, fascism—­essentially connected to deficit spending—­caused dictatorship.12 America First had serious arguments about US belligerency, although in return its enemies deemed it “a Nazi front” and its young adherents “Hitler Youth.”13 An interventionist group, Friends of Democracy, titled an effective pamphlet of 1941 America First: The Nazi Transmission Belt. John Dewey, a member of the Friends’ board of directors, specifically valued the publication.14 The most knowledgeable historian of America First has written that interventionists succeeded in depicting it as “a rallying point for fascists and a channel for Nazi propaganda.” “A bunch of traitors,” internationalists asserted, America Firsters were “the first fascist party in the history of the United States” and “should be in a Concentration Camp.”15 Though credible early on, the America First Committee had the misfortune of drafting Charles Lindbergh among its fans. Americans loved Lindbergh, a world celebrity after having flown the Atlantic by himself in 1927. After his firstborn son was kidnapped and murdered in 1931, their hearts went out to him and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.16 By the late 1930s, Charles spoke eloquently and rationally about maintaining a hands-­off policy in Europe. Unhappily, National Socialism, whose grandees he had met, also enthralled him. He believed in Nordic or Teutonic superiority and had in him a quota of anti-­Semitism. At a time when others prejudiced against Jews had the calculation to keep silent, Lindbergh spoke his piece. His public engagements both blessed and cursed America First.

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Air Marshal Hermann Goering, with Charles Lindbergh to his left and Anne Morrow Lindbergh to his right, Berlin 1936. (Licensed through Alamy, Inc.)

When he talked on its behalf, crowds gathered, and headlines multiplied. The people who said they wanted “to defend democracy and freedom abroad,” said Lindbergh, demanded that “we kill democracy and freedom at home.”17 Roosevelt’s speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, thought that Lindbergh represented “Hitler in our own midst. . . . Will he one day be our Führer?”18 With the fall of France, FDR told his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”19 For public consumption, Harold Ickes announced Lindbergh as “the #1 Nazi fellow traveler” and later excoriated him as “a ruthless and conscious fascist.”20 Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, thought Lindbergh’s words “the outpourings of Berlin.” Others chimed in: Lindbergh voiced the speeches, but “the words [were those] of Hitler.” The “pro-­Nazi” Lindbergh looked toward “a new party along Nazi lines.” Dorothy Thompson, the prominent broadcast and print journalist, unsurprisingly thought him a fascist.21 According to Ickes, Lindbergh’s wife was as mischievous as Lindbergh himself. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s primer, Wave of the Future (1940), derived from Lawrence Dennis’s The Coming American Fascism of 1936. She saw fascism as destined in the United States, its iniquities “the scum” on the wave. Anne Morrow was surely confused, but she was nonplussed by world politics no more than most. Her essay, from which one can infer that she wanted the

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United States to take on distasteful racial policies, seriously reflected on ideologies, and one wonders what she made of Dennis’s ethnicity or would have made of it had she been acquainted with it. Ickes regarded the book as the “bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist, and appeaser.”22 After the fall of France, Germany subjected England to bombing—­the Blitz—­from September 1940 through May 1941. America First hoped that England and Germany might work out a compromise peace, and thus that America could avoid intervention. New Dealers looked at the worst scenario: Britain would collapse, and Germany would endanger the United States. The conversation, if it can be called that, shrieked that “we” must stay out or get in. But each coalition concluded that if the other prevailed, fascism would come to America. In December of 1940, the president condemned the Germans publicly for the first time in a radio address in which he uttered the name Nazis.23 Fivers The rebuff Copperhead—­the name of a venomous snake—­had originated during the Civil War to discomfit “peace Democrats,” Northerners who wanted negotiations with the Confederacy to undermine the Union from within or pull off an outright Rebel victory. FDR employed the defamation against those who subverted interventionists and, in April of 1941, against Lindbergh. But despite Roosevelt’s use, Copperhead went by the boards. Instead, three European watchwords of opprobrium linked up to insidious behavior on the part of fascist sympathizers. Their use became conventional for directing attention to the saboteurs increasingly on the minds of alarmed citizens. First, a warning from ancient times—­Beware the Trojan Horse—­called up images of foes within the gates: the walled city of Troy had fallen when it unsuspectingly accepted a gift of a huge wooden horse containing enemy Greek troops. By 1940 the House of Representatives Committee on Un-­American Activities had graduated, in a new guise, from agonizing over US vulnerability to fascism to the nation’s vulnerability to communism. This change occurred in the context of the Hitler-­Stalin agreement, but further events did not make the committee alter its course. The anti-­Soviet Texas congressman Martin Dies took the chair, although the antifascist Samuel Dickstein still served. Dies compiled a lengthy volume, The Trojan Horse in America. Most concerned with communists, the compendium in any event paid little attention to fascists from Italy. Dies noted that for his generation, “the enemies within a country constitute a peril as great as any foreign foe. Treason from within, aided by invasion from without, has been responsible for the speed

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with which modern governments have collapsed. . . . Stalin and Hitler have pushed their Trojan Horse tactics to . . . perfection.”24 Next were Quislings. Vidkum Quisling of Norway led his conquered nation’s government and worked with the German rulers of 1940–­45; he was—­in another word of disrepute—­a “collaborator.” Quislings at once designated people who would betray their own. Dorothy Thompson, for example, joined with many in asserting that the America First Committee looked like Quislingism, “the most grotesque form of fascism.”25 Finally, and most powerfully, fifth columnist had sprung into speech. In 1936 one of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s rebel generals—­pro-­ German—­had marched on the Republicans in Madrid with four columns of soldiers. He had said: we have a fifth column, our agents in the city itself. In 1938 Ernest Hemingway, well known for his communist sympathies, wrote his only play, The Fifth Column. It dealt with an American during the Spanish Civil War in the Comintern, the international espionage organization of the Soviet Union. The protagonist went after the fifth columnist traitors to the Republicans. In a speech during the spring of 1940 explaining the Germans’ takeover of the Continent, FDR cited “the treacherous use of a Fifth Column”—­Dutch traitors to Holland, French traitors to France, and so on. John T. Flynn called Wendell Willkie—­after he entered the presidential race—­a fifth columnist.26 An extraordinary number of books referred to American fifth columnists. George Britt’s The Fifth Column Is Here (1940) estimated it as being “one million strong,” “more than a million.” In a rare reproach to the usually overlooked Mussolini, Britt wrote of two hundred thousand “camouflaged” Italians “strategically occupy[ing] vital points” of US territory and “gather[ing] strength.”27 The fifth column engrossed other authors: Harold Lavine, Fifth Column in America (1940); William J. Donovan, Fifth Column Lessons for America (1940); Joseph Kamp, The Fifth Column in Washington (1940), and his The Fifth Column Stops Defense (1941). Later came Dan Gilbert, The Real Fifth Column and How It Is Undermining America (1942), and in 1943 Claude Watson’s The Fifth Column in America. Perhaps the most fanciful use occurred in 1942 by the historian George Fort Milton in Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column. Roosevelt had dredged up Copperhead from the Civil War to describe his opposition in 1940 and 1941. Now Milton told readers that the Copperheads were fifth columnists.28 What made America susceptible to overthrow? Even if citizens desired democracy, it seemed always at risk, at first from outsiders but also from turncoats in the United States. The fascists in our midst came in Trojan horses and might disguise themselves as Quislings. They would not usually be Copperheads, but most of all they were fifth columnists—­“Fivers.” In the film All

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The fiver: one of the worst sorts of Benedict Arnolds. (Author’s collection)

through the Night of 1942, a dying man holds up his hand and gives a crucial tip to the male lead—­Humphrey Bogart is dealing with traitors. The United States Befriends Stalin In June of 1941, Adolf Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin and the British prime minister Winston Churchill immediately affiliated, and the United States cheered on Russia. The US-­USSR cooperation may have quickened America First. The organization’s enthusiasts now argued that Britain did not need help and that the United States should surely not make war, even against Hitler, to assist the despicable Soviets. If Britain sided with the USSR in containing Germany, did that not somehow tarnish the English? If Hitler wanted to go after Stalin, should the West dissuade the Germans? The CPUSA flipped back to interventionism and disparaged the treason of FDR’s opponents. The communists’ uncomfortable alliance with Lindbergh ended: he was now a Hitlerite enemy, and isolationists were conscious Fascists. A leading interventionist group, the Committee to Defend Democracy by Aiding the Allies, distributed a short movie à la Sinclair Lewis, It Could Happen

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Here, on the exposure of the United States to attack from Germany. Simultaneously, another interventionist committee, Fight for Freedom, set out to “pin upon each of the major isolationist figures the image of a Nazi, a fascist sympathizer, or a dupe of the Axis,” as one expert has written.29 America First responded by speculating on the connection between interventionists and communists. By the second part of 1941, a more strident Charles Lindbergh aided Roosevelt, lucky to get imprudent help. In September Lindbergh gave a plain-­ spoken address in Des Moines, Iowa, intimating that Jews, Hollywood, and the British wanted the United States at war, and that favoring them would bring disaster to America. The allegation that Lindbergh promoted the Nazis offset the contention that agreements with the Soviets sullied American democracy. Commentators regaled Americans with the possibility that the Russians could not hold out if left on their own. What if they collapsed in a matter of months? Hitler would have more power than ever, in command of territory dwarfing Western Europe. The United States, said New Dealers, must not just continue to assist Great Britain and wheel and deal with the USSR. America must now get into the fight. How could this happen in a country at odds with itself? The administration availed itself of everything in its bag of tricks to yoke people like Lindbergh to various Shirts and Fivers. Only fascists would contravene Roosevelt. So, hollering and counterhollering continued. Who was not a fascist wanting to destroy the American system? Herbert Hoover said that war would mean the United States turning “into practically a Fascist state.” Phil La Follette lectured that Roosevelt’s response to Hitler would, with “the same fraudulent methods practiced by the European dictators,” “create Hitlerism in the United States.”30 Citizen Kane In September of 1941, RKO Pictures—­one of the lesser production com­pan­ ies—­put Citizen Kane in movie theaters. After going from triumph to triumph with his political commentary, Orson Welles produced, directed, and starred in this film. Welles soon incensed William Randolph Hearst, the fictionalized subject of Citizen Kane. We have already met the peculiar but unusually rich and powerful Hearst sponsoring Gabriel over the White House when FDR took office. During the early 1920s, his papers had condemned Mussolini. By the late 1930s, his reporters had promulgated isolationism and deplored the president’s fascism. Welles’s protagonist, the newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, complexly made fun of Hearst. The moviemaker believed that cinema about a Hearst-­like figure would be a box-­office bonanza, but he was wrong. The hostility Citizen Kane directed to Hearst stirred up controversy

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Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane meeting Hitler. William Randolph Hearst had met him in 1934. (RKO Pictures)

but few ticket sales. It got critical respect but not popularity, and only later did the respect generate rereleases and the movie’s elevation to greatness. In the film, Kane had died in 1941 (ten years before Hearst!), and Welles presented his biography in the style of a semidocumentary. At the time of the film’s release, RKO had been issuing monthly visual journalism, The March of Time, for years. Sponsored by Time, Inc., these brief feature films were weightier than the usual five-­to eight-­minute -­newsreels that opened theater programs during the 1930s and 1940s. Such fluff reporting could not compete with the fifteen to twenty minutes of The March of Time. Each film usually contained three political segments, with actors sometimes taking the parts of international statesmen. As I have noted, March of Time had started as a radio broadcast, with Welles as one of the performers. In the mid-­to late 1930s, the movie version had depicted the rise of Hitler, Stalin’s state planning, and the personalities of Huey Long, the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, and Francis Townsend. In the wake of FDR’s victory in the 1936 presidential election, a full quarter-­hour of the latest March of Time film took up the significance of the election. Given free rein from RKO in undertaking Citizen Kane, Welles parodied the pretensions and ultimately the conventional ideas of The March of Time. News on the March—­the RKO burlesque of its own The March of

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Time—­portentously told Kane’s story. The newsreel parody attested to Welles’s ability to satirize how Hollywood informed the American public. But his talents went even beyond what was later called his postmodernism. In the opening minutes of the extended obituary of Kane in News on the March, the man is described as a “sponsor of democracy”; then as a communist; then as a fascist; and finally as an American—­“citizen” Kane. In Citizen Kane, Welles lifted Hollywood’s interest in the politics of the 1930s to high art. He also added to the verbal jousting over fascism.31 America Goes to War Abruptly in early December of 1941, the debates ended. Although the United States asserted itself in Asia as much as it did in Europe, the American public and commentators on foreign affairs had Japan and China far less in mind. From the mid-­1930s, Japan had been constructing a sphere of influence in the Pacific. Many parts of Asia came under the grip of the Japanese Empire, while the United States struggled to maintain a presence. The vast country of China—­weak and riven—­was to crown the empire’s glory, and from the late 1930s Japan had been fighting there, trying to bring it to heel. While the United States did not want war with the Japanese and did not much expect it, it was unwilling to concede China to Japan to the exclusion of US interests. It imposed economic sanctions on Japan, with the goal of forcing it to retreat. The Roosevelt administration intensified tensions by exclaiming about Japanese militarism and then, predictably, Japanese fascism—­extending the reach of this deadly noun even more. Military promises made among Italy, Germany, and Japan—­the Tripartite Pact of 1940—­gave respectability to this denunciation of the Japanese. An enlarged Rome-­Berlin-­Tokyo Axis joined the major fascists together. By the fall of 1941, Japan believed that unless it surrendered to the United States and agreed to a subsidiary role in Asia, it had no honorable alternative to war. It planned an attack on American bastions, the most easterly being Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Here in a US possession, America had stationed its Pacific fleet. The Japanese prayed that if they destroyed the bulk of the US Navy’s vessels, they could thereafter maintain a defensive perimeter to protect their colonial properties and continue to subjugate China. Because the American elite could not quite grasp that “Orientals” would go to war against the United States, both isolationists and interventionists concentrated on Europe. Indeed, in the fall of 1941, Roosevelt Democrats were provoking skirmishes between US ships and the German navy in the North Atlantic, just the sorts of events that had embroiled the United States against

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Germany in 1917. But Hitler did not take the bait. Then on December 7, 1941, in a masterstroke of violence, the Japanese unleashed their attack, including a devastating air raid on Pearl Harbor. The next day, after Roosevelt’s address to the nation, Congress voted to approve the president’s request that it declare war on Japan. On December 11, in perhaps excessive zeal after the coup of the Japanese, Hitler declared war on the United States (and Mussolini joined him). Hitler possibly believed that US fighting on two fronts—­the Atlantic and the Pacific—­would lead to America’s defeat. But Pearl Harbor enabled FDR to take a unified nation into the conflicts. In its own way, the December 7 attack aided the interventionists and the administration; it ended isolationism. Thomas Hart Benton, the regional artist who had been accused of fascism in the early 1930s because of his gory depictions of violence, had made himself more distasteful among certain groups in the later 1930s because of his distrust of internationalism. With the Japanese onslaught, he reconsidered his understanding of patriotism and turned from isolationism. Back in his native Missouri, he painted Extermination, a panel for his series The Year of Peril, urging the annihilation of America’s enemies.32 Other opponents of FDR were not convinced, but the surprise attack and the German proclamation of belligerence forced them to hold their tongues. Lindbergh and company were overwhelmed. They had no alternative to vowing loyalty to the nation.33 The malicious heckling on both sides about involvement in the war was now background noise, although Roosevelt haters soon concluded that he had conceived the troubles in Asia and that “a back-­ door to war” had trapped the United States.34 In May of 1942, on the anniversary of the 1933 Nazi book burning in Germany, the National Broadcasting Company in New York City presented They Burned the Books. The poet Stephen Vincent Benét scripted the half-­hour radio piece, which commentators often compared to Archibald MacLeish’s Fall of the City, the highbrow presentation of five years before. Like MacLeish, Benét connected to the New Deal. He wrote the drama in concert with the Writers’ War Board, literary people whose propaganda the Roosevelt administration subsidized. Judged the “finest effort at using radio to underscore the importance of books,” the presentation fixed on the excision of the poetry of the German Heinrich Heine from National Socialist consciousness. But the narrator also “suppose[d] . . . it happened here,” yet another of the many uses of Sinclair Lewis’s phrasing in his political novel It Can’t Happen Here. If it did happen, textbooks would be “burned in the school-­yard.” “Take the children of a country / and teach them nothing but lies”: it could happen “if our schoolbooks wore swastikas” and students “a brown shirt.” Americans

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Extermination, a panel from a series of paintings by Tho­mas Hart Benton in 1942, The Year of Peril. (© 2021 T. H. and R. P. Benton Trusts / Licensed by Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York, and owned by the University of Missouri Historical Society)

would celebrate Benedict Arnold as an “honorary Aryan.” “That’s how they work. / That’s the way they’d like to work here.” NBC repeated the program and then made it available for use in schools and amateur theater groups, to the distress—­even in wartime—­of the now-­muted isolationists.35 Another sign of the changing times was the demise of what had been known as the Bellamy salute. In 1892 Francis Bellamy had written the Pledge of Allegiance, whose recital had become part of the daily routine of schoolchildren. As it was declaimed—­“I pledge allegiance to the flag . . .”—­the kids were ostensibly looking up at the flag while raising their right arm above their head, with the palm facing downward and the fingers pointing straight ahead. This was called the Bellamy salute or the flag salute. It was unusually respected by folks like the Lindberghs, because it reminded them of the nationalism of

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Pledging allegiance, May 1942. (Photo by Fenno Jacobs, Library of Congress, OWI Collection)

the fascists . By the late 1930s, however, the salute had its troubles—­just because it uncomfortably resembled the expression of patriotism used by the fascists. Congress debated the symbolism in its arguments over a national flag code—­with the same tussles over fascism occurring between isolationists and interventionists that were intrinsic to the politics of the time. Then, in December 1942, Congress legislated a change that signaled the end of one sort of division, about which the Lindberghs and their supporters had to remain silent. Thereafter, people pledged their loyalty to the flag and the republic by placing their right hand over their heart.36 In the arena of popular culture, a similar defeat for Lindbergh’s isolationism came when folksingers joined the internationalists. A famous group of balladeers during the 1930s had movingly entertained their American audiences with tunes about the harm, for ordinary folks, of capitalism and the

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Depression. Among these entertainers, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie followed the line of the CPUSA. When the Hitler-­Stalin Pact was signed, they wrote “peace songs,” unseemly allies of Lindbergh and the noninterventionists. Then, after June of 1941, Seeger, Guthrie, and other folksingers leapt to fervent interventionism. Guthrie ostentatiously pasted a sign on his guitar, this machine kills fascists. The message went along with some anti-­ peace music that became identified with the Guthrie of World War Two. “Tear the Fascists Down,” “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” and “Talking Hitler’s Head off Blues” were not only bloodthirsty in respect to Hitler but also genuflected to Stalin. Forced to adopt conventional patriotism, people like Lindbergh had no alternative to remaining silent as Guthrie sang: “Round and round old Hitler’s grave, round and round we’ll go. . . . Best way to kill a rattlesnake is to pop his head off. . . . Brickbats, pocketknives, poison in a glass, lots of ways to get them. . . . Lay fascism in a 6-­5-­5.”37

Woody Guthrie with his guitar. (Photo by Al Almuller, 1943, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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The Political Order Crystallizes The surprise onslaught at Pearl Harbor codified political categories and gave the American people an accepted understanding of the role of the New Deal at home and abroad. It also led to the use of fascism as a common putdown. From 1933 to 1941, everyone called anyone a fascist. When the United States aided the USSR in the second half of 1941, the loud voices on all sides continued. Then at last, Pearl Harbor, Hitler, and Mussolini ended the debate on who was a fascist. America battled Germany, Italy, and Japan—­countries all specified as fascist. In squaring off against the three, the United States made the Soviet Union a confederate of convenience. While Americans would never welcome Russia as they did Britain, fascists stank more than communists. After some ten years of dispute, name-­calling, and head-­scratching, matters got tidied up. By the end of 1941, Americans had embraced the once “foreign ‘ism’ crawling over this country” that the politician Al Smith had worried about five years before. The United States later sanctified its new political ideology as welfare liberalism. FDR embodied it, and it promoted democracy around the world, in opposition to fascism on the right and communism on the left. At home, moderate Republicans, some Democrats, conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists arranged themselves to the far right of welfare liberals; socialists, radicals, and communists stood to the nearer left. To understand this vision of the US political realm more comprehensively, we must examine how it fit into, but altered, existing classifications.38 Right-­ and left-­wing politics had their origins in the eighteenth-­century French Revolution. Delegates to France’s Assembly would seat themselves from right to left—­those with an affinity for monarchical authority contending with those committed to parliaments. This dichotomy lasted into the twentieth century. Then during the 1930s, a different European left and right arose. The hunger for concentrated power hardly separated Germany and Italy on the right from Russia on the left. Each side favored muscled central regimes. The differences concerned far-­off goals—­ethnonational solidarity versus an international humanistic order. In any event, up into the twentieth century, US political discourse rarely drew from right and left. America had its own political divisions that sat apart from those of Europe. The classifications that had defined politics in the United States from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1930s were unique. As we have seen, progressives decisive in both the Republican and the Democratic Parties advocated for a more forceful executive. We can count among these progressives not just the Republican TR and the Democrat Woodrow

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Wilson before World War One but exemplary men from both parties after the war as well—­Herbert Hoover, Phil La Follette, Franklin Roosevelt, and Al Smith. From time to time, this bipartisan movement dominated affairs. Republican rivals of the progressives often got called, as we have seen, the standpatters or the regulars or the Old Guard. Some Democratic rivals of the progressives followed William Jennings Bryan, while others asserted a traditional liberalism that, as I have noted, stressed small government and individual freedom for white men. Part of this liberalism reflected the power of the South in the Democratic Party and the preservation of Jim Crow there. Part of it, however, prized freedom of thought, disliked the state, and opened itself to white ethnic newcomers. A Republican sliver of this sort of liberalism wished for decency and reformism in politics. Wilson had chipped away at this old-­style liberalism with his nationalistic progressivism, but not entirely. Into the 1930s, some Democrats still cherished a liberalism connected not with the national but with constitutional limits and the flourishing of the provincial. This liberalism defined much of the Liberty League. The politics that gained acceptance as the United States entered World War Two transformed progressivism and the liberalism from the earlier period of US history. FDR’s welfare liberalism had its opponents—­conservatives and radicals—­so that the administration’s policies followed a middle path, shortly to be called the vital center. Moreover, welfare liberalism accepted the federal government’s intervention in economic and social issues but additionally fought for democracy—­curbs on the supremacy of government—­at home and overseas. The New Deal generated this vision, as Americans now borrowed the political concepts of left and right from Europe. The United States had had some conception of a European left from the late nineteenth century. Although only the politically engaged knew about communism, many average citizens knew enough to despise socialists. Now in America an extreme right of fascism balanced a left, and the right wing carried more opprobrium. The country had had no immoderate right. World War Two gave the United States fascism, a right to go with a left. The novel welfare liberalism only awkwardly put robust or weak government at issue. Politics concerned both national power and its virtuous exercise. Two different themes were combined—­the vigor of rulers and their character reflected an aversion to total power as well as duty to the democratic. We also need to note a subsidiary aspect of the novel ideological construction: from left to right or from radical to conservative at home, and from communism to democracy to fascism overseas. By the late 1930s, and for persuasive reasons, many had brought totalitarianism into play as a dirty word to describe both the Soviet Union and Germany. According to a nascent theory,

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each polity strangled dissent, and society revolved around the political regime and its ambitions. The state crushed the disloyal and those who would not wholeheartedly surrender their individuality. Americans who thought about these matters might tell you that the Hitler-­Stalin treaty had confirmed the pairing of fascism and communism. Nevertheless, the US-­USSR cooperation against Germany after June 1941 made the mirror image of the totalitarian doubtful and embarrassing. It did not get much purchase on political thought until after the end of World War Two into 1947, where we will examine it more fully. Totalitarianism implied a circular politics in which the extremes met. The dominant linear view during the war allowed commentators to regard communists as extremists, surely in the United States, but avoid unseemly parallels to fascists. We had two noncomparable end points. Fascism smelled of iniquity. Communism had a better scent and, according to New Dealers, would in time take up American ways. Stalin was moving toward democracy, just as the US New Deal was moving toward greater planning and organization. The political scale now had a comprehensible place for communists and welfare liberals and for conservatives and fascists. Nevertheless, many and varied politicians yearned for party ideological transparency and integrity that did not come into sight. FDR had sometimes ruminated about “conservatism” as opposed to his version of Wilson’s liberalism. His contrast recalled Hamilton and Jefferson, where Hamilton’s nationalism advantaged the well-­to-­do proponents of heavy-­duty government in Washington. But FDR’s sometime-­ division was ill suited to his agenda. Roosevelt was building a big-­spending regime that promoted the national. Did he then identify as a conservative? These reflections of the president did not go very far or cut very deep. In more perceptive ruminations after the election of 1940, Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, each of whom had called the other a fascist, gossiped about a new system. The two made friends because of their shared interventionism. In addition, both men thought about a party based on internationalism and forceful government contesting with those less interested in globalism or the authoritative at home. Harold Ickes and New Dealers like him believed that such a realignment would remake the Democrats as the party of TR’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom. During the time that American communists furthered Popular Front liberalism, the CPUSA joined Ickes, hoping to boot those who disagreed with FDR from the Democratic Party. This eviction would be a step toward creating a socialist versus a nonsocialist political realm. From the other side, the Liberty League had similar thoughts. It aspired to a Constitution Party, or a reformed Republican Party that would shed TR nationalists and pick up traditional Democrats. This new

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party would oppose a Socialist Party, or a Democratic Party composed of Roosevelt, Huey Long types, and GOP progressives. In the middle of 1941, America Firsters, echoing the ideas of the Liberty League, also wished for alteration. Phil La Follette described what should happen as an American Party versus a War Party.39 These views went nowhere. Some believers in more government—­like La Follette—­did not want intervention abroad, and some believers in less government—­like Republican Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox—­wanted to defend democracy overseas. Divided and without a consistent ideological approach, the two parties remained the same. A long commitment to states’ rights had defined Democrats in the South. That commitment had held in check progressive Democrats like Wilson, Al Smith, and the young Franklin Roosevelt. On the side of Republicans, the failure of many of them to follow Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 had portended that many of the business-­minded did not want the expansion of the executive. Party opaqueness persisted after 1941. The Democrats split between their northern, East Coast, New York, New Deal wing and southerners (and westerners) far less interested in consolidation. The Republican Party allied conservatives, mainly in the Midwest, with moderates from the Northeast who were more comfortable with an enlarged government. Democrats like Al Smith spurned FDR. Significant Republicans declined the anti-­statist politics of the 1936 presidential candidate Alf Landon. Any transformation was only a gleam in the eyes of people like Roosevelt, Al Smith, Ickes, Phil LaFollette, or Earl Browder (head of the Communist Party of the United States of America). The structure of the parties resisted change as the United States entered the war, and continued to do so into the foreseeable future.

6

Fascism Penetrates Popular Life, 1936–­49

Notions of the state result from lots of things in addition to the day-­to-­day machinations of politicians. The interactions among officials, commentators in the media, and the academics who study the contemporary world yield politics. Amusements contribute as well. At sporting events, audiences sing “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” and athletes may speak out on public issues. Politicians take part in television comedies. Hollywood dramatizes war, slavery, and women’s rights. Celebrity scandals add a dimension. We are drenched with experiences that go beyond politics but that have a political aspect. An intricate and disordered process gives rise to electoral victories, the implementation of laws, and decisions on courses of action. The regime is not sealed off from culture. Fabricators of entertainment, especially of the Hollywood film, did not exist to win elections or congressional seats. During the 1930s and 1940s, however, to earn money and to get attention, they did illustrate the horrors that might befall Americans if war broke out or if European tribulations came to the United States. A large grab bag of novels, poems, radio programs, movies, and journalism took up the subject of fascism. I have already considered significant examples like the public intellectual Lawrence Dennis’s The Coming American Fascism, Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. All together, these works both heightened and shaped American views of European tendencies and what they might mean in the United States. But, as one historian has remarked about the cinema, it is “uncommonly difficult” “to link the films to their times”—­“the relationship between the contents of the screen and the contexts of the culture.”1 Mass amusements told Americans about not only the battles across the oceans but also the menace from the wicked already in America, or from

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the wicked trying to reach US shores. Commercial pastimes—­and especially the movie—­competed with politicians to put Americans on their mettle. The alarm that had sounded in the late 1930s continued at an even higher volume after the United States entered the war, then throughout the conflict from 1942 to 1945, and even after the end of the war into the late 1940s. Moneymaking leisure activities educated, propagandized, terrified, and patronized consumers. But to gauge how the chant about fascism built to a cresendo after the declarations of war in December of 1941, we must give ourselves a running start earlier in the century. The Entertainment Industry Confronts Fascism The anxious political amusements of the New Deal era did not just spring up. Novelists and then filmmakers participated in a tradition of the dystopian that had had its recent origins at the turn of the twentieth century. Historians conventionally treat as exemplary two pieces of fiction, both Marxist-­ populist accounts of America’s descent into “oligarchical” rule: Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890) and Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). In 1912 Edward House, who was to become a close confidante of President Wilson’s, wrote a dreadful anonymous novel, Philip Dru: Administrator; A Story of Tomorrow, 1920–­1935, about a benign tyranny. At this time, feature-­length movies were surfacing as a powerful force, and Hollywood magnified American distress just as the Europeans went off to World War One. In The Battle Cry of Peace of 1915, the United States did not plan for a threat from overseas. Then, a savage and licentious but unnamed adversary attacked the US mainland. The soldiers, in black uniforms, ruthlessly destroyed New York and Washington. A discerning viewer relished the film as “a gory piece of incomparable propanganda,” and it had an impact on Woodrow Wilson’s policies of wartime preparedness in 1916.2 We can thus see fright over fascism’s migration to the United States as one of a series of trials about the corruption of the republic that gripped the nation from time to time. During the 1930s, radio and Broadway perhaps had priority as prestige diversions, but Hollywood most effectively sold tickets to movies about what kind of destructive civics might be in the offing. From the time of Hitler’s ascent, the predominantly Jewish movie capitalists in Los Angeles had a low opinion of fascism. They remained skittish, however, of riling the cautious (Roman Catholic) Christian authorities who administered the era’s cinema code of standards. Hollywood also worried about pressure from Washington that might ensue if European rulers took offense at its productions. The filmmakers moreover thought about their profits and how a regime might disrupt

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commerce in retaliation. Hollywood only cautiously inserted into its wares the theme of fascism or its danger to the United States. Antifascist topics only slowly came to the fore and paralleled the growth of internationalism in the country’s politics.3 Finally, the movie moguls did not want to arouse anti-­ Semitic sentiment—­this played a part in MGM’s nixing a screen adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here. Even in the mid-­to late 1930s, studio executives, and Hollywood’s own censors, repeatedly refused to sign off on what looked to be an incendiary film. Instead, in the late 1930s, under the auspices of the New Deal’s Federal Theater Project, It Can’t Happen Here had runs with various casts in cities across the country, a minor feat for a book with a tremendous enduring influence.4 At the same time, from the mid-­1930s on, no creator of entertainment treated fascism kindly, and other warnings, less explosive, made it to movie houses. Films derived from the “true” tell-­all books about dangerous mischief, or they supposedly told about incidents that had occurred. Yet even on a generous construal of the factual, Hollywood only lightly constructed these confections from what had really happened. Based on a short story that an actual lynching had stimulated, Fury came to theaters in 1936. Spencer Tracy performed as an innocent gas station owner who barely outwitted a mob of vigilantes after he was falsely alleged to be a kidnapper. Critics assured that the movie backhandedly registered fascist impulses within American culture.5 A year later, in 1937, Humphrey Bogart delivered a breakout performance as a villain in Black Legion. Active in Michigan in 1935, the Black Legion consisted of carelessly organized, mean-­spirited associations containing elements of Ku-­Klux-­Klanism and fascist-­variety malevolence. In May of 1935, members of one cell murdered a New Deal official in the Works Progress Administration. The arrest, prosecution, and sentencing of the men involved led to other trials in Michigan, and the legion fell apart. Dorothy Thompson had written a column, “It Can Happen Here,” about these developments. Two movies came out of the legal proceedings: Legion of Terror in 1936 and the much more successful Black Legion of the following year, with Bogart playing an ordinary man named Frank Taylor. Taylor joined the Legion afterlosing his job. The movie then narrated his moral decline and the organization’s descent into terrorism. At the end, a partial rehabilitation occurred when Taylor testified in court, confessing his and the legion’s crimes, which sent his comrades to prison.6 At the end of 1936, several literary figures formed Contemporary Historians, Inc., to produce The Spanish Earth, a propaganda film to glorify the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. The group brought in Lillian Hellman, with her antifascist regionalist credentials, and Archibald MacLeish, with his

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political connections and repute as a poet; at just that time he was composing his radio drama The Fall of the City. Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway contributed narration to the endeavor. As one authority has written, Hemingway thought that “if fascism were not stopped in Spain, the domino effect would propel aggression toward Paris, London, and Washington.” But when The Spanish Earth appeared in 1937, it gained no audience, and Hollywood delayed conveying the danger of fascism in upcoming movies. Love Under Fire and The Last Train from Madrid, both from 1937, refused to take sides in the Spanish Civil War. A year later, in Blockade, screenwriters found the pluck to have a Spanish farmer support the Republican side. Idiot’s Delight of 1939 put on the screen a hit Broadway play set in Italy that had chastised the Mussolini regime, but the film version erased the connection to Italy.7 Just over three months later, however, Warner Bros. Pictures—­Warner Brothers—­ took off the gloves about Germany in May of 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. It was now some eight months after the Munich Agreement. As the first film to imply that Hollywood had the confidence to identify and publicize the Germans as America’s enemy, Confessions of a Nazi Spy alluded to the necessity of intervention. It became quintessential internationalist cinema. The thriller showcased Edgar G. Robinson and embellished on the extravagant book of former FBI agent Leon Turrou, The Nazi Spy Conspiracy, from earlier that year. At the film’s end, an average citizen learned that American Nazis had been brought to justice in the courts and told his audience, “This ain’t Europe.” The hero, Robinson, gave the amen by commenting, “The voice of the people.”8 Then, from the start of the conflict in Europe in September 1939, Hollywood overwhelmed its audiences in screening the dreadfulness on the Continent and the threats to the home front. Groups like the America First Committee—­ furiously fighting to keep the nation out of the war—­condemned the moviemakers as “the true pioneers” of fascism’s passage to the United States. America First believed that the film capital’s antifascist pictures were stimulating a Rooseveltian dictatorship. Toward the end of 1941, FDR’s foes held congressional hearings that accused Hollywood of lusting for battle with Germany. One prominent politician called the Hollywood leadership “the most potent and dangerous ‘fifth column’ in our country,” though the possibility of legislation ended with the enemy declaration of belligerency at the close of the year.9 Across the country in Los Angeles, Hollywood now contributed to the war effort without restraint. Why did its films give the message that traitors might undercut democratic government when it had the blessing of the people? This question can easily be answered for 1942 and 1943—­when, for example, on the East and West Coasts, Germany and Japan landed saboteurs

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who for a time lived among Americans: a danger existed. The question is less easy to answer for 1944 and 1945, after the tide turned against the Axis powers and the policy of defeating “Germany first” was effectuated. The government instituted tight security measures at home and put the enemy on the ropes abroad. Italy had surrendered in 1943, and in 1944 Britain and the United States from the west and the Soviet Union from the east closed in on Hitler’s Germany, which collapsed in rubble in the spring of 1945. The same question—­Why worry?—­becomes even harder to answer after US victory, not just in Europe that spring but also in Asia in September, after Japan was obliterated by atomic bombing. Even into the postwar period, vanquishing fascism seemed to yield more reasons to foster vigilant citizenship. Nonetheless, in its handling of movie censorship and propaganda, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, part of the Office of War Information, was criticizing Hollywood for its “exaggerated” idea of the threat as early as 1942.10 The Reel War The massive outpouring of movies during this period is difficult to come to grips with. Hollywood almost delighted in fascism’s arrival in the United States and in treasonous fifth columnists. A number of movies, well made and otherwise, noted a vestige of fascism in everyone, or a special potential for fascism in America. Leading stars like Bogart, Bruce Cabot, Robert Cummings, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Frederic March, Joel McCrea, and Pat O’Brien could be either thugs or heroes. Notable directors were involved in these productions.11 In 1941 Frank Capra, a genius of a filmmaker, made the last of a famous run of films thought to embody sunny and hopeful American values during the 1930s. Critics reserved judgment about the glum experiment of Meet John Doe. It starred Gary Cooper as a drab fellow who started a political movement. Scholars have remarked that in this picture, moviegoers experienced the fascistic nature of an American scoundrel. Outstanding in performing as a heavy, Edward Arnold portrayed the newspaper owner D. B. Norton. Norton had “fascist ideas,” as some of the movie characters explained. This “native American fascist” drew from “the fascism” in the people.12 Jules Dassin, who went on to an impressive directorial career, made his first film for MGM in 1942—­Nazi Agent. In it, the Nazis got exposed in their attempts to steal US secrets before Germany was actually at war with the United States. In his overcomplicated Saboteur of that year featuring Robert Cummings, Alfred Hitchcock, on his way to becoming one of the most lauded makers of cinema, pictured the America First Committee as “American Fascists.”13

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In 1943 Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy offered Keeper of the Flame, about a recently deceased man of wealth who had a secret fascist life. Lillian Hellman’s complex antifascist play, Watch on the Rhine, had succeeded on Broadway in 1941.14 Shortly after it closed in 1942, Warner Bros. made a movie version by the same title. Released in 1943, the film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category. In the protagonist’s role, Paul Lucas won the Oscar for Best Actor. In 1944, Hitchcock released Lifeboat, a drama set in the Atlantic. A Nazi proved the most resilient and intelligent of those aboard the vessel until his fellows killed him. The movie brought front and center issues concerning the humanitarianism of democrats in dealing with the enemy as well as the competence of those committed to democracy, as opposed to the more ruthless authoritarians. Diferent genres exhibited the menace. Capra joined the military in 1941, and with the assistance of the War Department managed a string of films—­I would call them docudramas—­between 1942 and 1945. The seven movies of the Why We Fight series were the most significant cinema sponsored by the Roosevelt administration. Capra designed them to educate American troops and often modeled what he did after the German director Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the National Socialist movie propaganda of 1935. Capra assembled newsreel footage, clips from old enemy films, animated maps, patriotic music, and reenanctments to tell a compelling story. The films were also seen in civilian movie houses. Again and again, Capra’s movies affirmed that fascists would be on the ground in the United States if Americans did not unite and successfully make war. Otherwise, we would see “the Jap army down Pennsylvania Avenue,” as announced in Prelude to War, the earliest.15 Westerns of this period were striking.16 In Young Bill Hickok of 1940, the famed gunslinger dealt with a fifth column of European villains who were resolved to wrest California from the North in the Civil War. Hickok, played by Roy Rogers and assisted by Sally Payne and Gabby Hayes, foiled them. Gangsters of the Frontier (1944), forgettable and cut-­rate, found fascism in traditional old-­time-­western bad guys of the 1880s. I have already remarked on critics’ praise for Walter T. V. C’ark’s novel of 1939 about a lynching, The Ox-­Bow Incident. In 1943 a movie by the same title adapted from the book put late nineteenth-­century Nevada-­style fascism on the screen, with Henry Fonda and an A-­movie cast. But there were also films set in the contemporary West—­like John Wayne’s Three Faces West (1940) and Wild Horse Rustlers (1943)—­in which heroes vanquished modern cowboys in black hats who “looked like” fascists. In Cowboy Commandos of 1943, a singing cowboy croons, “I’m gonna get der Fuhrer sure as shootin’. ” Two films had Roy Rogers as himself with his horse, Trigger—­King of the Cowboys (1943) and

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Lake Placid Serenade (1944). Overall, westerns opened the possibilities to the B-movie for denigrating fascism.17 Another collection of movies, costume and adventure pictures about distant eras, real or imagined, elicited questions about how debauched politicians might debilitate America. This cinema illustrated Hollywood’s vision of a usable past. The Prisoner of Zenda came out in 1937; The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938; Juarez and Gunga Din in 1939; Mark of Zorro and The Sea Hawk in 1940; and That Hamilton Woman in 1941. All starred matinee idols—­Ronald Coleman as a royal look-­alike; Paul Muni as a principled Mexican democrat; Cary Grant as an intrepid English soldier; Tyrone Power as Zorro; Errol Flynn, first as Robin Hood and then as an English sea captain fighting against the Spanish Armada (its king an “allegorical Hitler”); and Laurence Olivier as Admiral Horatio Nelson. Each leading man battled systems that, under outlaw leaders, oppressed the people. These escapist movies exposed figures from long ago who ignored or trampled on human dignity, and who threatened liberty-­loving communities. As the head of Warner Bros. trumpeted about Juarez, “every child must be able to realize” that the movie’s antiheroes were “none other than Mussolini plus Hitler.”18 Did audiences need to worry about what might be coming America’s way? The Farce of Fascism The most interesting films—­and novels—­initiated the genre that I call the farce of fascism. They usually depicted the revolting politics of fascism but also expressed its stupid antics. The movies sometimes had little directly to do with the migration of fascism to the United States. They could insinuate that audiences should laugh at Mussolini or Hitler, even if neither one threatened America. Many of the films, nevertheless, did hint that “they” were coming “here,” even if “they” were mugs. Some of these creations embarrassed their makers. The best meditated on America’s susceptibility to malevolent nitwits. Humor does not just joke. As many have stated, the comic expresses a complex set of public attitudes, a coming to grips with otherwise unapproachable diabolical spirits. The oldest movie of this genre, Duck Soup, was seen in 1933, and not much followed it. But once Europe went to war, Hollywood declared open season on fools in uniforms. In 1940 came Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. In it, Chaplin played two roles, one a Jewish barber, the other the ruthless but ridiculous Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, who has a henchman, the buffoon Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. To some extent, The Great

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Dictator came to be famous because of Chaplin. More impressive, in 1942 To Be or Not to Be had one performer playing an actor impersonating Hitler, and the comedian Jack Benny taking two roles—­as had Chaplin—­as a fascist and an antifascist. But while To Be did not initially draw moviegoers, it gained in stature over eighty years, and has been regularly recalled as a classic. In the year of its release, however, it competed for forgettability with three dreadful examples of the farce genre. The awful Hitler: Dead or Alive portrayed three paroled convicts trying to carry out a murder contract on the tyrant. Once upon a Honeymoon had Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant at the top of the bill. Rogers married a Nazi agent but eventually wound up with Grant. Rio Rita was a comedy with the famous duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The year 1943 brought to theaters They Got Me Covered with Dorothy Lamour and the comedian Bob Hope. Characterized as a spy mystery, it fell between a silly treatment and one in which locally sourced fascism endangered America. Many short subjects, often shaky in their production quality, lampooned Hitler, including two slapsticks from 1940 and 1941 from the Three Stooges. You Nazty Spy took off on Confessions of a Nazi Spy of 1939. The second was titled I’ll Never Heil Again. In the early 1940s, Hal Roach of United Artists produced cheap and brief full-­length “streamliners,” the much lower half of a double feature. In 1942 he made The Devil with Hitler, forty-­four minutes long, and followed it up in 1943 with the forty-­three-­minute That Nazty Nuisance. Cartoons proliferated as well. Seventeen Superman shorts had the man from Krypton tackling Nazis. There were also Walt Disney’s The Thrifty Pig (1941); Looney Tunes’ Confusions of a Nutzy Spy with Porky Pig (1943)—­another burlesque of Confessions; and Herr Meets Hare with Bugs Bunny (1945). Six animations, with heroes like Donald Duck, Gandy Goose, and Porky Pig, ridiculed fifth columnists, as did The Fifth Column Mouse of 1943.19 Of all the cartoons, two deserve special mention. Warner Bros.’ The Ducktators of 1942 caricatured Mussolini, always rendered as a fool and a groveler to Hitler. It featured a huge and moronic Italian dictator wearing a swastika armband, who looked directly into the movie audience and said that Hitler is “a smart-­a fellow with brain, like-­a me.” The next year, 1943, the song “Der Fuehrer’s Face” was part of the soundtrack for Walt Disney’s Donald Duck in Nutzi-­Land. Earlier, the previously unknown musician Spike Jones and his City Slickers had made the music a hit with its antifascist lyrics: “Ven der Fuehrer says: Ve iss der Master Race, Ve Heil! [sound of fart] Heil! [sound of fart] right in der Fuehrer’s face.” The name of the cartoon, dominated by the music, was changed to Der Fuehrer’s Face. In it, Donald has had a traumatic

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In Hal Roach’s That Nazty Nuisance (1943), Bobby Watson portrayed Hitler, Joe Devlin was Mussolini, and Johnny Arthur was General Suki Yaki. (United Artists, Hal Roach Studios, courtesy of the Everett Collection)

dream about living in Nutzi-­Land and about what could happen in the United States. The force of the film was enhanced visually because the parading Nutzis had slightly wonky swastika patches on the seat of their pants. While the production won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the song went to number three on the pop charts and, with the compositions of Woody Guthrie, strikingly exemplified the fascism-­comes-­to-­America theme in music.20

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How They Looked and Sounded Warner Bros. led other movie studios in the representation of fascists visually and aurally.21 In its productions, a minute number of fascists hailed from Italy. Some of the offenders came from Japan; odious “Japs” were depicted torturing friendly Chinese in Asia, sabotaging California, and manipulating futuristic weapons in the underground laboratories of science fiction. Movie stars portrayed many of the vicious specimens as out-­and-­out Nazis, or at least they acted like stereotypical Germans. Some scoundrels just bowed to a vague foreign power. Most of these wicked men and a few women unfailingly spoke English, usually with an accent not clearly German but harshly grating if clearly understandable. They might blindly obey orders, no matter how repulsive. As one scholar has mentioned, however, the enemies could have varying traits—­polite and cultured or rude and sadistic, intelligent but also foolish. The actor Conrad Veidt, a German national who in reality opposed National Socialism and had left his native country for California, exemplified one kind of tyrant, most prominently as Major Heinrich Strasser of the Third Reich in Warner Bros.’ Casablanca (1942). But Warner Bros. did not have a monopoly on exhibiting fascists. Among the most famous was the actor Robert “Bobby” Watson, who performed as Hitler in many different low-­budget farces produced by Roach.22 Postwar Arts and Letters against Fascism Even as the Allies defeated Italy, Germany, and Japan, creators of entertainment continued to worry about fascism.23 The Germans had already capitulated when in September of 1945 Twentieth Century-­Fox released The House on 92nd Street, supposededly based on the work of an FBI double agent. Edgar G. Robinson, who was favored as a Hollywood Nazi-­hunter, starred as a crack investigator who broke up German plots of five years before. In Strange Holiday, on movie theater screens in October of that year, Claude Rains returned from a fishing trip to learn that fascists had taken over America. By 1946 Hollywood fascists had a less certain grip on the United States but were infiltrating via Latin America. In some of this infiltration-­style cinema they were only indirectly interested in doing away with the United States. The fascists were the MacGuffins, in Alfred Hitchcock’s vernacular: the objects necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant in themselves because the story centered on some other theme. For example, Gilda from February of 1946 depicted a love triangle, with the secondary plot concerning fascists in Argentina purposing movement north. That August,

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Conrad Veidt played Major Strasser of the Third Reich in Casablanca (1942). He is here with Claude Rains on the right. (Warner Bros., courtesy of the Everett Collection)

Hitchcock directed Notorious with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. The action took place in Brazil, where fascist leader Claude Rains has married Bergman’s character, but this film took the possibility of fascists in America more seriously. In The Stranger, also out in the summer, the fascists have had a resurgence in North America and have commandeered a beachhead in Connecticut, where they planned a future coup. Orson Welles directed the movie, in which Edgar G. Robinson, once more on the lookout for wrongdoers, tailed a Nazi fugitive. By now Welles had a longtime reputation as an antifascist, and with yet another remarkable imaginative leap, he named his criminal, whom he played, Charles Rankin. In 1945 the Mississippi congressman John Rankin became the new head of the Committee on Un-­American Actitivities of the House of Representatives and was gearing up to snoop into people’s personal lives. In melding the two Rankins, Welles intended to show “the real menace of renascent fascism” just a year after the war ended.24 Among many writers for the page and the screen, fascism persisted as a singular iniquity that might slink into the United States. Postwar fiction regularly characterized some US Army officers, soon to be shipped stateside, as fascists because of their vindictive bearing toward Jews and African-­ Americans.25 Exemplary novels had US nationals, perhaps with medals on their chests, carrying fascism to the western Atlantic. In A Bell for Adano

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(1944), John Hersey modeled the unappetizing personality General Marvin on George Patton, the authoritarian American general whose allegiances did not differ from those of the enemy. John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947) presented a range of soldiers, mainly in Italy. Some of these men wanted to return to the United States, where they could kill African-­Americans and Jews. In The Naked and the Dead (1948), about the fighting in the Pacific, Norman Mailer depicted some quasi-­fascist American infantrymen like Roy Gallagher and Sam Croft. The year before, in 1947, Hollywood envisioned the repatriation of such men in Crossfire, a film about anti-­Semitic ex-­soldiers involved in murdering a Jew. The movie has a cult following, and its most scholarly critic has argued that it presented “protofascism,” “native fascism,” “embryo fascism,” or “American fascism,” charges corroborated by contemporary reviews.26 Unlike many others during the 1920s and early 1930s who flirted with fascism but then gave up on it, the creative genius Ezra Pound never abandoned Mussolini or Italy. He continued to underwrite the regime, and in fact became an even more strident advocate. During the war, he broadcast propaganda from Italy, lambasting the United States. As the conflict drew to a close, US forces arrested him for treason, and he was at first confined in an American military camp in Pisa, Italy. As Pound was considered a lunatic, authorities then detained him in a psychiatric facility in Washington, DC, for twelve years, supposedly a mild punishment for his political sins. During this time, he worked on an epic poem, The Cantos. In 1948 he published a part of this effort, The Pisan Cantos, which was openly worshipful of Mussolini and written in the mid-­1940s during an extended period of his breakdown. In 1949 the Library of Congress awarded Pound the Bollingen Prize, which became America’s premier poetry award, for these Pisan Cantos. A significant contingent of Nashville Agrarians was on the selection committee. At that time, the Agrarians’ New Criticism held that the situation, the social meaning, or the personality of the author was irrelevant to aesthetic merit, housed solely in the work of art. Their adversaries had complained of their being profascist during the 1930s for just this proclivity for ignoring context. Now the Nashville people disregarded Pound’s obvious deficiencies. The learned tempest over the Bollingen committee’s decision went on for well over a year, and hostile commentators saw it as indicating that fascism was yet again coming to the United States—­not just in the person of Pound but in his racist southern supporters who had breached the Library of Congress.27

pa r t i i

1942–­2020

Performing Words

The World War Two period had established fascism as a nasty slight but a slight that had a spot on the political spectrum. In acknowledging the ideo­ logical categories that their nation’s entry into the conflict had produced, Americans usually put fascism to the far right of conservatism, and contin­ ued to do so for almost thirty years after the war. Fascist, and not Nazi or Nationalist Socialist, won this linguistic lottery. Not some transcription of invective from the Japanese. Or even fifth columnist or Quisling, popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s for depicting the treacherous. During that time of tensions, Americans trashed fascism in Italy, though they were seldom bothered by Italian politics migrating to the United States. Nor did they fear that Italian-­Americans, often despised and relegated to their own ghettos, would subvert the nation, even though they numbered in the millions. Americans had more pronounced views about German-­American disloyalty, at least partly attributable to the ideas of Hollywood central casting about the bumpkin Mussolini and the superefficient Germans. The movies had German and Japanese foes. Yet Hollywood, historians tell us, portrayed Italians as pathetic fools, never as a primary enemy. There are some outstand­ ing examples of this stereotyping. When Roosevelt consulted with his attor­ ney general, Francis Biddle, about measures of repression to take against the Japanese and the Germans in 1942, the president told Biddle not to stew about the Italians: “They are a lot of opera singers.”1 Several months later in the Warner Bros. film Casablanca, the Italian accomplices to the Germans are jokingly lampooned. It is still astonishing that the “Oriental” Japanese were depicted as intellectually more prepossessing than the European Italians. During the war, African-­American troops fought the Italian fascists, while white US soldiers engaged Japan.

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Part 2 of this book surveys the period after Italy, Germany, and Japan de­ clined in threat to the United States but fascism remained, regularly used to castigate later and different regimes and people. Initially, those on the right remained the subjects of chastisement. For over twenty-­five years after World War Two, fascism derogated with some consis­ tency. Then, during the era of Vietnam, it lost its home. In the late twentieth century and in the early part of the twenty-­first, fascism became a dizzying word of disapprobation, applied to anyone, anywhere—­just as had occurred in the late 1930s. By the late twentieth century, the word had no evidentiary nucleus that could be explicated to secure a consensus. Attempting to pick out a legitimate referent had set the learned off in a mistaken direction. Fascism was not an object. No one could unearth its kernel, or much empirical matter. Fascism did not work like a real estate agent’s description of a house, which details so many bedrooms, an outdoor terrace, a full basement. Nor was fascism even like a sequence of such descriptions made over the years as the neighborhood changed, and the property fell into neglect and then was patched up or even completely renovated. Fascism functioned rather more like deriding the residence’s décor or neighborhood—­or even vandal­ izing the house or burning it down. But the derision or vandalizing did not reflect doubtfully on the persons committing the act. Taking up fascism was a mode of making something disreputable. Or better, using the expletive did not characterize but cried out: unclean! A fighting word, fascism helped us reject, or execute disdain. Words such as fascism in the political concordance are cousins of what some thinkers on linguistics have called performatives, and a dimension of our discourse that sits aslant the cognitive. So, in a religious ritual, “I re­ nounce the devil and all his ways” does not describe the renunciation but accomplishes it. If I say “I do” at the altar, I am not explaining anything but bringing about the doing. In a fashion akin to this use, putting fascism into play carries out a certain adverse purpose. Talking about fascism condemns by saying. Writing with it despises. It is a way of responding to something that one does not approve of and that cannot be approved. Note three other aspects of the puzzlement of fascism. First, individuals cannot debase others using any old words. Words are intersubjective; an ex­ pression of intent is mutual. If I yell “Fire!” I cannot revile anyone but in the usual case will be warning about a fire. I can slur using fascism only because fellow speakers apprehend the word as slurring. Second, I can only realize certain matters in a fitting context. If the parson asks the groom, “Do you take this woman . . . ,” the groom’s saying “I do” gets him married. If I say “I do” at the movies, nobody gets married, no matter what my intent. Similarly, I can

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only name-­call in an appropriate setting. If I am sitting alone in a wide-­open space and scream “Fascist!” I have not put down anyone. “Fascist!” will not defame a five-­year-­old learning to ride a bicycle. If I read an essay on current problems in European and American politics, to run across someone being disgraced as a fascist would not surprise me. If I read an essay on pediatric anesthesiology or on New York City ballet, I would not expect someone to be attacked as a fascist in those pages. Third, even if the word expresses preju­ dice, that does not prove the partiality baseless. Adequate reasons might at­ tach to the partiality, even if the speaker or writer does not state them lucidly or is ignorant of them. The abuse of fascism is curtailed. The individual speaker or writer does not control the oomph of the word. Rather, a community of recipients con­ strues the energy. Fascism is also put into service as a way of characterizing behavior in public life. It is much less appropriate in condemning personal faults. Finally, we cannot presume that the castigating is unprovoked or unwarranted. My positive elucidation of these topics is limited. I have surveyed a range of standard instances of fascist invective that, by the end of the book, cover al­ most nine decades. The circumstances in which the invective predictably oc­ curs are illustrated, and regularities noted where fascism assaults someone’s political dignity. But there is no account of the structure of the circumstances or the rules that might order the regularities.2 Fascism resembles appeasement, a notion I have already examined. Adopt­ ing concepts makes us liable to certain entailments. If I call someone an ap­ peaser, we can deduce cowardice or weakness. If a regime is fascistic, no one wants to live under it, and citizens shrink from it. If people are fascists, they could harm you, and you should stay away from them. Only refusing to utter or write the word, withdrawing it from our inventory, precludes the infer­ ences that can be drawn from it.3 We have done this, for example, with the N-­word. Language can be retired.

7

Fascism on the Right, 1942–­70

From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, fascism performed with some predictability on the right. The story of its quarter-­century existence in this territory started with Soviet-­American collegiality during World War Two, and continued through the first twenty years of the Cold War. Moreover, fascism was assisted in remaining alive via another construct, totalitarianism. Finally, mainstream American scholars contributed in subtle ways to thinking about fascists and the nature of fascist regimes. And then, the disruptive politics of the 1960s tore fascism away from the right. Even throughout this era—­and well beyond—­we need to hold in mind the peculiar nature of the staying power of the word itself and its imprecision. Fascism and Communism, 1942–­46 From 1939 to 1941, fascism balanced communism as something heinous. Yet once Hitler declared war on the United States in December of 1941 and the nation allied with the Soviet Union, communism did not have the same malodor as fascism. If the Soviets fought with America, they could not be all debauched, and the economic collapse of 1929–­33 had, for some, given a positive shine to communism. For Popular Front liberals, or for those who broke bread with them, the USSR had a forward thrust. The Soviet Union persuaded some persons to believe that it would move closer to the United States, and that America would have more collectivism and greater equality of income. Prominent from 1935 to 1939, this view got a severe knock during the period of the Nazi-­Soviet Nonaggression Pact, and then rose again when Americans and Russians were cordial from 1942 through 1946.

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Cover of Archibald MacLeish’s pamphlet Divide and Conquer, illustrated by D. R. Fitzgerald of the St. Louis Post-­Dispatch and reprinted in its entirety in the Saturday Evening Post of May 9, 1942. (Office of Facts and Figures, later the Office of War Information, USGPO, 1942)

Still, a number of more than distrustful commentators and statesmen disliked the USSR. For them, the cooperation was a matter of convenience only, on the premise that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Simulta­ neously, we can fairly argue that during the war the conventional position in respect to the Soviet Union was on a par with thinking about Italy in the 1920s. Unlike America, the USSR had a primitive economy and a large regressive class. What worked in the USSR would not work in the United States. Yet communism might fit the Soviets—­just as fascism was tailored for Italy during the 1920s but would not accommodate the United States. Mussolini, the thinking went, might take his nation to where progressives like Herbert Croly thought America should go. Now many mainstream fans of FDR imagined that Stalin wanted to get to a place not far from where the New Deal was

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also traveling—­a welfare state that increasingly protected the rights of all. In April of 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures, which the capable Archibald MacLeish directed, produced the pamphlet Divide and Conquer. Only the disloyal would stir up phobias about communism to disrupt the war effort; only Hitler would benefit. So World War Two ended with a left-­to-­right range of opinions but one tilted favorably toward communism. The only ideological enemy, fascism, was far off on the right. 1942–­46 F——————————————————D———————­—­C

Even defeated, fascism was still a threat. In 1945 Frank Capra, still working for the military, oversaw the creation of Your Job in Germany, a short film for American occupation troops. At the end of the year, after revision and new narration, it was released in the United States as Hitler Lives. The first part contained graphic and horrific scenes of Nazi atrocities. The last few minutes told citizens of how German, Italian, and Japanese fascism jeopardized the United States. In 1946 the movie won an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary. John Rogge, one of the US Justice Department’s high-­profile prosecutors, had procured the sedition indictments in the 1942 trial of Axis sympathizers. But Rogge had seen the discharge of people like Lawrence Dennis when they had actually gone to trial in 1944. Troublemakers had gotten off. Then, even after the United States crushed the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, the dread of fascist resurgence upset Rogge. In February of 1946, he reported on his work. “International fascism, though defeated in battle, is not dead,” he wrote, and victory had “not brought an end to the fascist threat to democracy.” “The old familiar Fascist faces are once again spouting the old familiar Fascist lies.”1 Rogge represented the views of Popular Front liberals, but through 1947 the situation was changing, evidencing the superficiality of the sweetheart affair with Russia. The camaraderie between the United States and the Soviet Union dissipated as World War Two at once was transfigured into the Cold War. This confrontation pitted the United States against the USSR until the surprising collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–­92. The Cold War lasted for some forty-­five years, the centerpiece of the usually antagonistic relationship with Russia that had begun under Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and was alive over a century later. In 1945 and 1946, Russia and America began to contend for Eastern Europe, which Stalin had taken from Hitler. Would that part of the world be open to democratic capitalists, primarily speaking for the United States? Or were the states from Germany to the east to form a security zone under the thumb of the USSR and its secret police? Over the next forty years the countries at issue altered, but the enmity continued as various client states

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were prompted into fighting proxy wars for America or Russia. In the first big round, Germany was split between the victors, and the United States and its partners governed the western portions of the former Third Reich. Communism soon came to have the same undesirable purport on the left as fascism had on the right. In 1947 the Texas congressman Wright Patman instructed the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress to produce Fascism in Action: A Documented Study and Analysis of Fascism in Europe, a two-­hundred-­page report. Like Rogge, Patman intended to inform Americans that fascism was “an ever-­present danger of our democracy.” Understanding the nature of the European fascisms defeated in the war would enable citizens to see fascist tendencies “prevalent in society today.” Answerable for the actual book and in league with other politicians and prestigious diplomats, Ernest Griffith, the director of the Reference Service, nudged Patman’s ideas into a more acceptable direction. The study was “appropriate because of the many similarities between fascism and communism.”2 Americans were now seeing their political system defined in contrast to twin iniquities. Surely this notion did not just leap into existence at the start of the Cold War, but the focus on the identity of fascism and communism did represent a new chapter in the unsettled worries about Germany and Russia that, by the late 1940s, had perplexed US nationals for three decades. 1947 F———————­D———————­C

Red Fascism During the 1930s, some commentators had already amalgamated Hitler and Stalin (and Mussolini) together as dictators, as “totalitarian.”3 As early as 1935, one can stumble on examinations of “red fascism,” “brown bolshevism,” or “brown communism.” Dorothy Thompson (among others) employed “fascintern.”4 But the ideas metamorphosed. Mussolini conceived of his regime as totalitarian, but not everyone applied that concept to Italy, while both Hitler and Stalin illustrated it. Yet perhaps different kinds of totalitarianism existed. Such regimes might have the same methods, and the government’s monopoly of the military or the paramilitary might bend people to the regime. But the goals of the regimes—­their ideologies—­could differ. Specifically during the 1930s for many Popular Fronters, the USSR strove for a kind of “experimentalist” egalitarianism, while the fascists only coveted power for an aggressive foreign policy. Of course, from the time of Hitler-­Stalin cooperation from 1939 until the German invasion of Russia in 1941—­almost two years—­ Americans stopped thinking about differences in totalitarian goals. Then the

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goals became overriding during the US wartime cooperation with the USSR. The view of 1939–­41 revived in 1947. In the mid-­to late 1940s, politicians kept fascism on the right. Somehow at the same time, however, they located fascism and communism together as wicked governments that expanded beyond their borders, elevated a homogeneous mass, gave the state supremacy, suppressed the right of the individual, and had repugnant security forces. America had vanquished the fascists. Yet in language, they might rise from the dead to assist in the Cold War against the USSR. If fascists and Bolsheviks were the same, Americans knew why they had to fight Russia. A line had two endpoints, but Americans could take the line and put the ends together, so that politics had the aspect of a circle, and the extremes would meet: ^C. . . . . . . . D. . . . . . . . F^

After the totalitarian became popular in the mid-­to late 1940s, it would have an up-­and-­down existence for politicians, journalists, and scholars as a way of framing international affairs. One version of this framework, Red Fascism, deserves attention because of its salience in the very early years of the Cold War among writers and officials. The cliché had a particular significance. This sort of debased government could not straightforwardly have originated in Germany, for fascism was of Italian lineage. The adjectival communist dimension, red, directed us to a mode of fascism in the USSR. A generic malevolence lay on the right of a spectrum but had a left-­wing variant. In conjecturing about Red Fascism, some thinking Americans believed that the United States must not appease Stalin, and that every crisis abroad heralded a possible Munich by naïve diplomats. Red Fascism animated citizens not just to detest Russia but to attach to that country Hitler’s sort of aggressiveness in the late 1930s, with genocidal intent and ranting megolomania. Just as the United States fought an all-­out war against Hitler, maybe it would have to do the same thing with the Soviets. The rise of Red Fasacism attached the toxic quality of the communistic to the obnoxiousness of fascism. Such language removed Mussolini as exemplary of fascism. Russians were fascists, the Italians ignored. Red Fascism further divested fascism of whatever substantive content it had, since fascism now had subtracted from it what went on in Italy (and Japan) but added elements of what went on in the USSR. The Republican congressman Everett Dirksen defined Red Fascism in a speech of 1947: “That is just another term for communism but I think it is a little more impressive and accurate.”5 American English, however, did not own these notions, and not just US politicians employed them, for many Western luminaries elided the Soviet

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Union to National Socialism. A version of these commitments stands out in the writing of one of the most astute writers on the language of politics, the Englishman George Orwell. In 1943 Orwell had written “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” recalling his time on the Loyalist side. He saw an enemy soldier carrying an order to an officer but also relieving himself. The man was half dressed and holding up his trousers. Orwell had come to Spain to kill “Fascists,” but, he wrote, a man holding up his pants was not a “Fascist” but “visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself,” who was not to be shot at. In his famous essay of 1946, “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell had said that “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Now, three years later, in 1949, critics rightly saw his dystopian novel 1984 as attesting to the danger of Red Fascism.6 Roman Catholics and Fascism In the run-­up to World War Two, Roman Catholics in the United States had identified with Francisco Franco’s Spain. The Spanish Civil War had made matters impossible for those Catholics aching to support Rerum novarum without bowing to communism. As we have seen, when Stalin assisted the Republicans, or when they killed priests and assailed the church, American Catholics—­even those receptive to social justice issues—­were berated by protofascism. The radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, who had begun his ministry concerned with issues of social justice, did not go off the deep end till after the Spanish Civil War started. Individualistic Protestantism in America allowed little room for the communitarian concerns that the papacy had enjoined thoughtful Catholics to take up, and the Spanish Civil War tormented them.7 Roosevelt had appointed one Catholic, the Columbia University historian Carlton Hayes, as ambassador to Spain during the war. Diplomats often credited Hayes with fostering Spain’s nonalignment. Americans more than suspected Franco’s refusal to take sides, but it was better than a Spanish alliance with Germany. Simultaneously, people like Hayes were often relegated to the profascist side, and thinkers like him in the United States kept quiet.8 Then, in 1946 and 1947, vocal Catholics renewed their worries about communism and made Catholics part of the consensus as they joined an anti-­Soviet chorus. They nonetheless also wanted to promulgate a more social gospel. The Protestant United States still lacked the corporate empathy that had made Catholics engage with Father Coughlin’s broadcasts during the 1930s. By the late 1940s, prejudices against Catholics had made them targets for those who still wanted to name fascism as a disorder that might prove fatal to America’s

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constitutional regime. Could Catholics be fascists? Were they going to subvert democracy? In 1949 Paul Blanshard, a well-­known journalist for the Nation and a promoter of Democratic internationalism, published American Freedom and Catholic Power. A huge best seller, the book prompted literate Catholics to indignation, while Protestant spokesmen mentioned Catholic disloyalty under their breath. Blanshard’s notion of the “Catholic Plan for America” was either denounced as trash or praised as a prescient warning. Blanshard remarked that the Catholic leadership had defended Franco and other “quasi fascist” regimes around the world. The Catholic Church wanted to move America in the direction of authoritarianism, downgrade the First Amendment, make the pope the president’s superior, and effect restrictions on marriage and procreation. Perhaps Catholics embodied “clerical fascism.”9 These arguments went back and forth as part of a larger cultural shouting match. In the late 1940s, the accusation of fascism hurt Catholics, but their opponents—­many Democratic inheritors of the New Deal—­were also hurt. Vice President Harry Truman had gained the presidency after the death of Roosevelt in 1945 and successfully ran for election himself in 1948. Yet he had far lower polling numbers than FDR, and the men around Truman often resorted to risky methods to establish their policies. To mobilize the public against the Soviet Union, Truman’s bully pulpit urged that communist dangers circled the globe. In hyperbolic speech-­making, the United States would combat totalitarianism everywhere. But Democrats soon discovered the pricey aspects of the exaggerations. Everywhere included at home. Republicans now outed the Popular Front liberals of the New Deal, including some spies for Russia, in a way that embarrassed the White House and compromised its ability to govern. Republicans styled their competitors as pandering to the Reds. Coming after the Red Scare of 1919–­21, a Second Red Scare of 1948–­54 saw Democrats deplored as not anticommunist enough. Incipient fascist Roman Catholics might trouble America, but for the moment, procommunist Democrats troubled the country even more. Pundits often titled the second set of events “McCarthyism,” after the Republican senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin who led the hunt for left-­ inclined Democrats. Men preening their anticommunists qualifications—­like Everett Dirksen—­assisted McCarthy’s rise during a period that saw the erosion of civil liberties, complaints of disloyalty and treason, and unreflective demands for war against Russia or other red regimes. Doggedly wanting Democrats out of the executive branch, the Republicans rallied by making allegations of communism against Democrats. In 1952, McCarthy profitably lambasted Truman.

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“How can we account for our present situation,” McCarthy asked, “unless we believe that men high in the government [today] are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” He would drive from government “the prancing mimics of the Moscow party line.”10 With reason he gave the impression of defending free inquiry against White House high-­handedness and Ivy-­League expertise that had covered up the careless Democratic security procedures of the 1930s and 1940s. McCarthy’s resources were the old noninterventionists, often from the Midwest, who did not want Europe to pollute the United States. McCarthy, advocates thought, stood for average people and in his rough way fought against Northeastern snobs perhaps involved in betrayal. He and the young congressman Richard Nixon—­active in another iteration of the House Un-­American Activities Committee—­detected “security risks” in many areas, humiliating their victims in public hearings. McCarthy targeted elite universities, and bureaucrats fired teachers who had engaged in suspect politics or who would not sign “loyalty oaths.” Zealots scrutinized Hollywood, and investigations ended the careers of some entertainers and screenwriters who had made “procommunist” movies during World War Two. McCarthy’s rise mixed with partisan politics. The senator lost his clout when in 1952 the Republicans elected their presidential candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, the former general who had led US forces in Europe during the war. McCarthy self-­destructed during televised hearings on communism in 1954, and thereafter the Senate condemned him. He died in 1957, alcoholic and uninfluential.11 Historians have discredited McCarthy and McCarthyism. Nonetheless, his rise should be seen in the context of the senator’s Roman Catholicism, and of the lingering impact on Catholics of the dilemmas of the Spanish Civil War. A decade after the end of that war, Carlton Hayes, in retirement, was only touched on as fascistic. But younger worthies with similar religious commitments—­men like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and later Brent Bozell—­looked for an alternative to communism and to anticommunitarian Protestantism. The most famous, Buckley, went to Yale, and in 1951 published God and Man at Yale, an exposé of the school’s secularism. In 1955, along with Kirk, he founded National Review to stimulate conservatism. For years, his public affairs television program, Firing Line, vigorously put forward his views. Catholic intellectuals like Buckley condemned Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power, supported McCarthy, and were often branded. A brush of fascism incriminated these defenders of McCarthy—­Buckley was a “pro-­or crypto-­Nazi.” Democrats of the time quoted fascism or its near equivalents to describe domestic foes. President Truman argued for “no difference between Hitlerism and McCarthyism.” Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of

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the late president and a Democratic elder, regretted that “McCarthy’s methods, to me, look like Hitler’s.” Subsequent commentators have happily called McCarthy an American-­style fascist, a home-­grown fascist, a dangerous fascist jester.12 But before his fall from prominence, embellishment on all sides left the electorate with few realistic ideas to figure out the challenge of the USSR. Ordinary Americans doubted their leaders’ patriotism, dreaded villains in their midst, and wondered about the country’s stability. Totalitarianism In the late 1930s, the US academic community had noted that to describe his fascism, Mussolini approvingly used the alternative term totalitarian. In the United States, it rather meant the unacceptable. Moreover, scholars made exact classification and definition central to their undestanding of these movements. A political scientist writing in the 1930s on the possibility of fascism in America cited six characteristics that would nail down “pure,” “genuine,” or “classical” fascism. Yet treacherous indigenous groups never had all six characteristics, and so fascism had not transported itself to the New World. During the 1950s, with forebodings that fascism was hastening to the shores of the western Atlantic, a left historian urged a Marxist notion—­fascism’s “essence” lay in communist methods to save capitalism.13 There were many such studies, yet scholarship really came into its own in the postwar era, when learned works on totalitarianism came to the fore, largely replacing the more journalistic concept of Red Fascism. The university community looked on similar regimes that the notion of totalitarianism encompassed, and two important venues recorded the interest in the concept. First, American and European makers of ideas founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The opening summit in Berlin in June of 1950 exhibited a concern for totalitarianism. Second, a gathering of luminaries in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the sponsorship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences occurred in 1953. This conference was more substantial, and Carl J. Friedrich, a political theorist from Harvard, edited a volume of its addresses, Totalitarianism.14 Fortifying politicians, these scholars often had European training or backgrounds. The most incandescent was Hannah Arendt. A Jew, Arendt had left Germany in 1933 and had come to the United States in 1941. Although returning frequently to the Continent, she took US citizenship in 1950 and resided in America, where she made a career. By the 1950s and 1960s, Arendt’s abilities had allowed her to move from varied low-­level positions in organizations aiding Jewish refugees to distinguished university lectureships. A powerful woman, she had impeccable testimonials, formally

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trained in the German philosophies of the previous fifty years. She had been an advanced student of Martin Heidegger, a famous German thinker of the first part of the twentieth century, still esteemed during the 1950s despite his compromised past under Hitler. Arendt’s reconnection with the man—­at a time when Europeans were publicizing his National Socialism—­gave her writing a special twist. In 1950, at the height of scholarly interest in totalitarianism, Arendt completed a study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. It became for many years the definitive treatment of the topic and even ensured early on that she would have an invitation to Friedrich’s conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Arendt did not so much define totalitarianism so much as she assumed it in the regimes of Stalin and Hitler. She examined its historical sources, mainly in the rise of anti-­Semitism and mass political movements. The case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew who was wrongly accused of treason at the end of nineteenth century, was for Arendt not only a paradigmatic case of the totalitarian impulse at work; it was also a forerunner of the injustice that Hitler and Stalin systemically brought into world history. While the USSR was one of her two totalitarian states, Arendt did not avoid a focus on the dreadfulness of Nazi Germany, and one crucial aspect of her treatment was to extract fascism from the totalitarian. Despite the equality of fascist and totalitarian for Mussolini, for Arendt his regime was authoritarian, not totalitarian. In her argument, communism and National Socialism were equivalent vices that differed from Mussolini’s fascism. Totalitarian regimes drew intense support from “the masses”—­people who ordinarily cared little for politics and civic engagement. Anomic, and with little sense of self, the masses were happy to sacrifice their individuality to a leader. Arendt implied that this subordination of self, or the lack of self, made the totalitarian follower. The totalitarian was defined over and against the Jews, just because they had a permanent cultural sense of who they were. Totalitarian leadership was not, however, concerned essentially with doctrine or ideology—­for example, anti-­Semitism. Rather, totalitarianism aimed at wiping out individual differences, at obliterating the uniqueness of the human personality to serve the whims of the state. Estimations of Arendt’s book would fluctuate over the years along with hesitation over the value of the concept itself. But the impact of The Origins of Totalitarianism was far-­reaching because it provided a template that hundreds of scholars would scrutinize for decades. Her belief that Italy was not totalitarian despite Mussolini’s acceptance of the term contributed to confusing moves on what would become a huge scholarly chessboard.15 Students widely regarded Arendt’s examination as far better than most accounts justifying America’s decision during the Cold War to call out Stalin as

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Hitler. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s totalitarianism had reached its apex as a concept bonding the similar disorders of Soviet communism and National Socialism. In staining the USSR with Hitler, foreign policy makers had apprised Americans of the continuity between World War Two and the Cold War, the transition from one foe to another. Yet within a decade after World War Two, while totalitarianism did not disappear from the glossary of diplomats, it turned up less frequently. Once the Cold War defined American life, the management of the conflict demanded something different from Red Fascism or totalitarianism. Italy, Germany, and Japan—­the three crucial fascist states of World War Two—­had allied with the United States by the early 1950s. Continuing the language of totalitarianism might remind people of the past fascism of these new democratic confederates. According to an expert, the Germans were being “de-­totalitarianized.”16 When the period of unfortunate Japanese allegiance was mentioned, it was referred to as Imperial Japan. As the Cold War enveloped world politics, other countries with doubtful rulers might not cooperate with the United States, but America should not push them into the arms of the USSR by categorizing them as totalitarian. Franco’s Spain, which Truman had castigated as fascist off the record, was one such nation. Another was communist Yugoslavia, which had charted a course independent of Stalin. The same sort of case existed with Argentina and certain other South American nations that had cooperated with Germany during World War Two and afterward had infamously taken in Nazis who had dodged the downfall of the Reich. Hollywood had alluded to these regimes in Notorious and Gilda. By the early fifties, statesmen were shifting to delineating such governments as authoritarian—­not ideologically criminal, not fascist or totalitarian. The United States could negotiate with them. University thinkers eventually followed the political leadership in relegating totalitarianism to a less central place in their theories. Arendt’s book went into an eclipse. Although specialists chewed over totalitarianism for a longer time than public figures did, it became “tainted as a rhetorical symbol,” as one historian has written.17 The scholarship that replaced it turned out to be uniquely important in the long run in shaping debates over fascism in American culture. This political science and history written by academics during the 1950s has long drawn attention. Academics One of the most important expositions of totalitarianism reached bookstores in 1949 in The Vital Center, a work by the prominent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. A popular tract on contemporary politics published with the

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idea of endorsing the new Truman administration, The Vital Center proposed a liberalism (the vital center) between extremes that met. Schlesinger denounced the Popular Front liberals of the 1930s who deferred to the Soviet Union; in fact, critics complained that he was participating in the Second Red Scare. But on the other hand, Schlesinger contended that thoughtful Americans should avoid Joseph McCarthy’s politics at all costs. An anticommunist liberalism was the order of the day, and the latest prudent followers of the New Deal—­Truman Democrats—­ought to be heeded. This was, nonetheless, Schlesinger’s only explicit defense of the 1939–­41 version of the parallels of communism and fascism, and the only time he concentrated on totalitarianism. Instead, more as a professional historian, he went back to the 1930s and produced an original synthesis that made sense of the kaleidoscopic politics of the Great Depression. He articulated for Americans of the 1950s how the political grid that had manifested itself at the end of 1941 had come into existence. A dazzling undertaking, his three-­volume tour de force, The Age of Roosevelt (1957–­60), offered a coherent vision of the 1930s written from the perspective of New Dealers. Yet the framework that The Age of Roosevelt and other historical works constructed for professional academics was far more than a chronicle. For Schlesinger, the victory of welfare liberalism was more built in, ordained. It was, moreover, desirable and an ideology to be projected into the future.18 Quickly recognized as a big-­D Democratic historian, often despised by scholars whose politics differed from his, Schlesinger became an advisor to President John F. Kennedy, who succeeded Eisenhower in 1961. More important than Schlesinger’s politics was his success in making the keywords of real politics the categories through which the learned understood politics. Scholars took current classifications—­from the right to the left—­as modes for exploring history. The dictionary of politicians became the dominant research scheme at the university. The political ideas daily contested, bitterly disputed and steamy with passionate beliefs, were sufficient for political analysis. Ideas that had failed in getting an objective grip on public life in interchanges with colleagues, friends, and relatives would now serve as scholarship. Both politics and Schlesinger-­like elucidations of politics drew from language that revealed commitment as much as understanding. Schlesinger continued politics by other methods. As one critic of the period has urged, the professoriate became “custodians” of the verbiage of the 1930s.19 Schlesinger, however, was not the only academic who commanded respect. At the same time that the study of totalitarianism waned as a professorial specialty in the study of challenges beyond the borders, McCarthy animated a number of social scientists and particularly one historian oriented to social

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science—­Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. What kind of cultural life had produced McCarthy? Educators like Hofstadter, and social scientist contemporaries like Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset who answered this question, both reinforced and undermined Schlesinger. As a group, these men made a lasting impression and had cross-­generational standing in academic circles. Hofstadter would have a long and complex inheritance. The tumult of politics during the postwar period, particularly the antagonists of Roosevelt and Truman, gripped Hofstadter and his peers. Their writings began with an examination of McCarthy. Yet they were publishing over a long period, from the late 1940s through the 1950s and finally into the 1964 presidential race of the Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater opposed communism and the big-­government policies of the Roosevelt era. The scholars reckoned him the real face of the Republican Party. In the twenty years after World War Two, the line of the GOP went through McCarthy to Goldwater; the moderate Eisenhower was a distraction. Indeed, in the two decades from the late 1940s to the mid-­1960s, a New Right had effloresced. Influenced by social psychology, the social scientists and historians of the 1950s almost reduced this political movement to the pathological. They looked to unfortunate child-­rearing practices and psychic deficits to explain the positions some people elaborated in public life. They also, however, abjured writing about fascism in the United States. Hofstadter thought outside the box even in the early 1950s. He contrasted the conservative politics of this era with the real politics of, say, the 1930s. Real politics looked to the clash of interest groups, and the struggle for financial advantage or for greater economic equality. Hofstadter had briefly joined the CPUSA during the 1930s and naturally enough understood issues as forged by the collapse of capitalism. By the 1950s, he wrote of conservatives in two connected senses. Genuine conservatives—­the Old Right—­doubted culture’s progress and wanted to preserve what already existed. These conservatives would protect their own place in a society’s hierarchy. The successsors to these 1930s conservatives, the pseudoconservatives, differed from real conservatives. The New Right exhibited a style, or a disorder in relation to authority. Irrational anxieties, alarm about loss of standing, and distress about conspiracies that threatened the nation—­and not a rational desire to uphold a social and economic position—­grounded the convictions of the New Right. Hofstadter’s notion of “status anxiety” had given McCarthy success.20 As Hofstadter fleshed out his views over the next decade, he argued that pseudopolitics had more genuine dimensions and had long been around.21 He repeatedly argued for a fundamental distinction between interest and status politics, but now the latter was just as real and had a history. It encompassed

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not just the irrational well-­to-­do but also the have-­nots with equally disturbed psyches. The idea of status politics gave us “an analytic instrument” to avoid the “excessive rationalism” of scholars such as Charles Beard, who thought only about economics—­and perhaps Hofstadter himself as a younger man.22 Hofstadter struggled to interpret the United States so as to transcend a left-­to-­right continuum based on socioeconomic groups. Schlesinger was articulating a variant of this now-­conventional spectrum. Part of that continuum placed the poor on the left, the rich on the right. That scale existed, but—­for Hofstadter—­it existed alongside a scale that was not chained to interests. Part of elections and voting involved projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives. Regarding money, civics additionally expressed restless suspicion. We could not define an important aspect of politics logically. A public life of feeling was extant, and so, too, were collective emotional configurations. Hofstadter used the idea of populistic democracy to write about movements in the United States that, he believed, were propelled by motives other than calculating reason. In 1955 in The Age of Reform, he took aim at the populists themselves, who had had a heroic reputation among many historians. Instead, they had irrationally stood against the modernizing world, victims of unconscious fears and worries.23 In 1963 Hofstadter coined his most famous phrase to discuss these matters. A “paranoid style” had a locus in the West, but it regularly surfaced in America. Meant as a pejorative, it applied not necessarily to paranoid individuals but to more or less normal people. For Hofstadter, it was colloquial and not clinical. Moreover, we could not identify the style with the right. In a controversial exploration, Hofstadter held that the populists evidenced the style in the conspiracy theories they promulgated about their rural ordeals. The agrarian radicals of the late nineteenth century became the most cited examples of the paranoid style on the left. Because they were not economic reformers, the populists did not foreshadow the social democratic interests of the 1930s. The displaced and slightly lost populists could not adjust to an industrial civilization. Earlier populism shared with the later right a deficient mentality.24 A careful Hofstadter nevertheless refrained from calling the populists fascists. The paranoid style showed up everywhere in modern history. We wrongly classified McCarthy or later Goldwater as fascist. To name US troublemakers as fascists denied that America had its own history. “It would be a great mistake,” Hofstadter said in 1959, “to think of them as being fascists.” A “false conception” made US politics “purely or simply fascist or totalitarian.” Observers who made allegations of fascism during the 1950s and early 1960s had erred, as did those observers (like John Dewey) critical of the early New

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Deal. These mistaken critics had seen “the close parallels” between the National Recovery Administration and Mussolini’s corporate state and reasoned that the NRA began American fascism. Instead, wrote Hofstadter, the United States had a “populistic culture” that lacked a dominant responsible elite and that permitted the exploitation of the wildest currents of public sentiment. In this sort of culture, some group “at least conceivabl[y]” could “create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well being and safety would become impossible.” Fascism nevertheless failed to mark “American developments in terms of our peculiar American constellation of political realities.”25 Seeking examples of status politics, other scholars took up Hofstadter and were also chary of locating fascism in America. Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, discovered an irrational right wing in the Anti-­Masonic movement of the early nineteenth century, in the later Know-­Nothings, and in the revived Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. Lipset’s Political Man, a fêted set of essays, examined threats to democracy that a repressed working class with familial problems generated. One chapter argued that the intensity of belief, and not a point on a line, defined extremist movements. So “Fascism: Left, Right, and Center” explored the “classic” fascism of Italy and Germany as an intolerant centrist protest—­against capitalism on the right and socialism on the left. Another chapter on fascism took up the problem in two additional nations, Austria and France. Nonetheless, Lipset told his readers that the trouble of “populist extremism” in the United States differed from fascism. In The Politics of Mass Society (1959), the political scientist William Korn­ hauser beheld McCarthyism, “with certain anti-­democratic overtones,” as one of a variety of rightist movements, of which fascism was another. Clinton Rossiter, another eminent theorist of government, wrote that “fascist tendencies” did not make any American a fascist. “In any precise sense of this word, which must be used with unfailing precision,” said Rossiter, few fascists existed.Without worrying about a left-­to-­right scale, other prestigious academics looked for the paranoid style. For example, the Founding Fathers exaggerated the deficits of Great Britain, and in the American Revolution exhibited an extravagant panic about change. The creation of the republic had sown the seeds for a conversational paranoia.26 Two exceptions tested the rule. The sociologist Morris Janowitz repeated that at least the 1930s situated “native,” “true,” “nationalist,” and “potential” fascism. “Latent insecurities . . . [were] mobilized on behalf of a politics of irrationality.” Janowitz examined the Black Legion, which Humphrey Bo­ gart had made famous in the movies, as a “native fascist” organization, prototypical of such groups during the Depression. Then, in 1980, Alan Crawford, who said he was a traditional conservative, wrote a book criticizing the New

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Right that Hofstadter had brought to the attention of scholars. Crawford’s Thunder on the Right worried that this right “border[ed] on fascism” or was “neofascist.”27 In the end, Hofstadter promoted inquiry into a number of movements to which the word populism could refer. Fifty years after he wrote, it covered any deplorable agglomeration that might be a voting bloc. The old-­time farmers who had been seen now and again as articulating a quest for justice became one variety of unpromising “populist” movements that could reside all over the political map—­left, right, and anywhere in between.28 Populism now often replaced fascism as a word of condemnation. Just as statesmen had retreated from using totalitarianism in talking about threats from abroad, so, too, in judging politics at home, scholars were retreating from fascism. Although communism had about it the maliciousness of fascist foreign policy, by the 1950s communism and not Hitler was on the minds of politicians. People like Hofstadter writing about domestic predicaments acknowledged fascism as a legitimate historical label for Europe but resisted invoking fascist threats at home. Looking to the End of Cold War Liberalism Historians have given the name Cold War liberals to those officials who orchestrated US policy in the twenty-­five years or so after World War Two. The group, of course, meant Democrats like Harry Truman and—­during the 1960s—­John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had replaced the assassinated Kennedy. But it also consisted of Eisenhower Republicans who “contained” not only the USSR but also the GOP New Right. These men had a record of success exceeding two decades, ratifying the political categories that had come into being in the mid-­1940s. Joseph McCarthy had mugged the Democrats among them, but with the help of Republicans such as Eisenhower the Democrats had carried on and grown. As public commentators, the dominant historians of these years like Schlesinger and Hofstadter—­often themselves named Cold War liberals—­cheered on the successes of the politicians in fighting the Cold War. The fight had several rounds. First, minor quarrels over Greece and Turkey in the mid-­1940s; then, arguments over the division of Germany in the late 1940s; next, in the early 1950s in North Asia, disputes concerning the partition of Korea between communist North and noncommunist South; then disputes concerning the arms race of the 1950s; in the early 1960s, disagreements over communist Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba; and finally in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, tensions when the United States tried to

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prevent the fall of South Vietnam to communism. Truman had given birth to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to impede the Russians in Western Europe and Germany in the late 1940s. He had additionally battled the Chinese communist henchmen of the USSR in Korea. Eisenhower kept the peace during the 1950s by threatening the Russians with atomic war if they infringed on the free world. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Eisenhower’s successor, Kennedy, chose the middle road, facing down the Russians in the Caribbean while avoiding a nuclear response. And finally, Cold War liberalism evidenced the common understanding with the decison to continue US miltary support to South Vietnam in the final years of the Eisenhower administration, through the presidency of Kennedy, to the early part of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Nonetheless, by the mid-­to late 1960s, the doctrines of Cold War liberalism had run their course. After Johnson had defeated Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964, the Democrat had escalated the war in Vietnam. Widespread disillusionment followed as the conflict expanded in the late 1960s. The tribulations of the following Republican administration of Richard Nixon, especially the Watergate scandal, in which Nixon covered up a burglary he had masterminded at the hotel of that name, increased the disillusionment. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, fascism came back, not just as a name but as a viable impulse. Moreover, it was now disconnected from the right edge of the political spectrum. Not just Americans had been involved in this disconnection. Over a long period, Europeans in the United States had participated in the dialogue about fascism in America. By the era of Vietnam, these thinkers had contributed to unsecuring fascism from the right. When the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the word once again had the free-­floating usage that had distinquished it as verbal blaming in the 1930s.

8

Europeans Bring Fascism to the States

After the National Socialists took over Germany in 1933, refugees streamed into the United States, although a number had made their way to America before the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Hitler forced German, French, Austrian, and Swiss people of intellect as well as eastern Europeans, to depart Europe. The exodus increased as the expansion and degradation of the Reich became clearer in the mid-­and late thirties. These migrants, mainly German speaking, defined European culture in the United States for some thirty years. Then, a segment of the American highbrow community turned its attention to the French, who did not have as significant an attachment to the New World but did have views just as definite as the Germans. Both constellations of thinkers drew from the recent history of their nations, Continental theories, and their own experience to voice the view that fascism was on the march in the United States. A Host of Germans Left-­leaning but even traditional academics wound up in or around New York City, though they might stray from teaching or research positions in Manhattan to move to Princeton, New Jersey, Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Chicago. Some earned permanent posts at universities and colleges even farther from the East Coast, and famous German literary types and authors established a colony around Los Angeles, near the Hollywood that employed them. Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, Bertolt Brecht, Rudolph Carnap, Albert Einstein, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Paul Tillich all reached the United States. The New School for Social Research in Lower Manhattan domiciled almost two hundred in the University in Exile, figures like Karl Löwith and

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Wilhelm Reich but also many lesser-­known people. Uptown, affiliated with Columbia University, the German Institute for Social Research—­institutional home of the Frankfurt school—­had settled after removing to the United States, where it stayed for some fifteen years. The relocation allowed men like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to continue their scholarship. A collection of individuals more oriented to psychology—­ such as Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm—­insecurely affiliated with the Frankfurt school. These itinerant minds were mainly, though not exclusively, Jewish. Almost all of them had soaked up the precepts of the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century universities in Europe. These precepts underscored that critics and scholars preserved a civilized polity, a limited democracy with an electorate constrained by aristocratic norms. As the guardians of this sort of governance, the writerly professoriate had claims to public respect. Simultaneously, these thinkers had forebodings that the contemporary industrial order threatened this way of life. The vision of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West moved these émigrés. In a similar way, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom we have met as the mentor of Hannah Arendt, expanded on the same thoughts. His 1927 Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) implied that mechanistic forces were ripping man up from the racial and cultural loci giving meaning to existence. Sigmund Freud, a final influence and a Jew who had fled Austria for England, had founded psychoanalysis. His ideas of repressed sexuality, the unconscious, and the power of the irrational threaded their way through the treatises of the immigrants and colored their worries about how the bestial might overwhelm culture.1 When these expounders of Spengler, Heidegger, and Freud disembarked in the United States, they worried that their fears were being realized. American mass culture and popular politics troubled them. Qualms about the possibility of an American fascism filled their books, letters, memoirs, and ephemeral writings. Ludwig Marcuse—­no relative of Herbert’s but also a philosopher of Jewish origin—­saw no difference between the cultural level of the United States and that of Africa, an extraordinary view, since Africa meant “barbarism” to these refugees.2 The rights and privileges extended to tradespeople, laborers, and craftsmen had produced the US problem. America empowered the ordinary and undistinguished who did not defer to intelligence and expertise. Without guides derived from tradition, the nation treasured the tawdry and could hardly make wise choices about leadership. The US attraction to fascism had anti-­elitism at its core. In addition to agonizing about Nazis in their home country, then, the migrants agonized about fascists in the

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United States. Later, their French counterparts would worry about these same kinds of fascists. Before Franklin Roosevelt evinced his hostility toward German expansion, some of the educated foreigners viewed the president as leading his country to fascism. Carl Gustav Jung, the therapist and sometime disciple of Freud, visited the United States from his native Switzerland in 1936. “I saw Roosevelt. Make no mistake, he has the most amazing power complex, the Mussolini substance, the stuff of a dictator absolutely,” he declared.3 But soon, resident Germans took Roosevelt for the only figure who might save the nation from itself. Paul Tillich, a German theologian, now preached to American audiences. In the late 1930s, he endorsed FDR as a one-­of-­a-­kind hero whose critics one could not trust. Tillich repeatedly called the New Deal’s detractors “half-­fascist.” They were working for “an American . . . fascism” and expressed “the American type of fascism.”4 Erich Fromm was one of a string of thinkers who perceived that all human beings had within them the potential for fascism. His 1941 Escape from Freedom, a text for many students of social psychology, stated that the United States had the “fertile soil for the rise of Fascism everywhere.” Even as Roosevelt stood for democracy, he faced “foreign and internal threats of fifth columnists.” Nonetheless, for Fromm, “no graver danger” existed than the unescapable longing to avoid “the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual.”5 By 1941, the communist genius Bertolt Brecht had escaped Germany and reached the United States, where he wrote the drama The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. While it never had the success of other Brecht plays and did not have a performance until 1958, it analogized Hitler to a Chicago gangster.6 Once the United States entered the war, the conflict produced two contrasting special cases. The Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal spent much time in America in the late 1930s and early 1940s while preparing a study that would become famous. His An American Dilemma (1944) examined the Jim Crow South. Myrdal would not identify fascism with the South, or America with a fascist state. He did not see fascism coming to America. Instead, he laid out a road map in which the United States might fulfill its color-­blind ideals.7 Indeed, Myrdal’s extensive survey of the racial history of the United States denied all the things that many southerners writing at the time were asserting about a quasi-­fascist South. The Austrian-­born and -­trained Friedrich Hayek, another but different unusual case, brooded not about Roosevelt’s opponents but rather the New Dealers themselves. Hayek lived and taught in England during the 1930s and 1940s, and participated in a movement among political economists who

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believed that with the collapse of the free market, everything had gone wrong. In 1944 he published The Road to Serfdom. The next year, in the United States, the Book of the Month Club made it one of the club’s selections; its strong sales were a precursor to Hayek’s moving to the University of Chicago in 1950. The Saturday Evening Post summarized The Road to Serfdom, and Reader’s Digest condensed it. Hayek’s beliefs paralleled those of his near contemporary John T. Flynn, the sober US journalist who identified all the political turmoil in the world with deficit spending by a central government. Flynn had seen fascism coming in his much-­read but regularly deprecated work, As We Go Marching, published the same year as The Road to Serfdom. Hayek, however, had university legitimacy and became the North Star for academics opposed to Roosevelt’s deficit spending and Truman’s extension of the New Deal. To these educators and scholars, Roosevelt had not been fending off fascism; he had been breeding it. These two anomalous European perspectives signified the malleability of fascism even during the war. For Myrdal, the US democratic creed prevented the rise of fascism in America, even in the face of Southern racism. For Hayek, fascism was “the necessary outcome” of trends in the US (and English) welfare state. The “road to serfdom” upon which liberals were setting out led to fascism.8 Most other Europeans saw it coming on the right. When FDR passed from the scene and anticommunism gripped the United States, the Americanized Germans deplored what they regarded as the nation’s fascism. A premier German literary figure, Alfred Döblin, resided in the United States from 1940 to 1945, sometimes in the pay of Hollywood. America’s politics, “hostile and despicable” according to Döblin, were journeying to Hitlerism.9 The composer Hanns Eisler fled the Reich in 1938, but the United States deported him in 1948 because of his communist background. He parted ways by writing that in the United States, he had seen “fascism in its most direct form.”10 More prominent than Döblin and Eisler, Thomas Mann spent a much longer time in the United States and had more success, but he shared both men’s views. Mann and a group around him lived in Southern California and were often employed by Hollywood.11 In 1946 he wrote of his dread that authorities would send him to a prison camp. With the rise of Joseph McCarthy, Mann said in 1951 that a “constant further development into a fascist dictatorship” seemed probable. Mann’s famous literary children echoed these ideas. The war would result, one reported, in “the Americans . . . kill[ing] us all, all the intellectuals who were against Hitler and for Roosevelt.”12 Even more conspicuous than Mann, Albert Einstein had his own problems with American officialdom, despite becoming a US citizen. An otherworldly gentleman ensconced at the Princeton Institute for Advanced

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Study, he was hurt by McCarthyism. Fearing the movement away from FDR’s liberalism, he wrote that in the United States, “the German calamity of years ago repeats itself.”13 Among these many people, Hannah Arendt, who had published her exemplary Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, achieved special recognition. Arendt had a sense of a golden age that had been centered in Germany before World War One and that respected humanism. Her teacher Martin Heidegger had additionally nurtured in her an awareness of the nonrational and mysterious aspects of human society. According to Arendt, Heidegger understood how provincial environments sheltered human beings and how specific geographical settings furnished the bases for restrained and ideal states. In 1963 Arendt celebrated the American Founding in On Revolution, a volume relevant to how the émigrés had explained the lure of fascism for Americans. The book offered a theory of US political history. Arendt compared the revolutions in America and France in ways favorable to the new United States. The Founding Fathers evidenced prudence, and their statesmanship had resulted in emphases on the rights of citizens, constraints on the state, and checks on democracy. For Arendt, the Founders were struggling to realize the sort of civics that the true Heidegger privileged. Engaged with both ancient and modern political thought, they believed in government confined by curbs on its power and by a respect for norms outside politics. But revealing the centrality of Continental Europe to her outlook, Arendt thought that the unfortunate French Revolution and extreme French notions of ungrounded human freedom had “made world history.” The American Revolution, which had resulted in modest constitutionalism, turned out to be “an event of little more than local importance.” The next part of her story occurred in the nineteenth century. With the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, no real thought or leadership existed in America. In Europe, however, the French Revolution had brought in its wake men like Karl Marx. Arendt did not like Marx or Marxism, but in America the loss of the bookishness of the late eighteenth century and the growing crudeness in outlook led to US “steril[ity] in  .  .  . world politics.” Materialism steered Americans to counterfeit practical philosophies—­pragmatism and, worse, positivism. “The aversion from conceptual thought” meant that America “succumb[ed] to and magnif[ied] almost every fad and humbug.” “Grotesque notions” of social science opposed the latter-­day speculation of Heidegger and had taken Americans down the wrong path. During the 1780s, the United States was being conveyed to Arendt’s version of Heidegger’s ideas, but in the democratic contests of the early nineteenth century, US nationals had been waylaid and never got back to the proper road.14

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Arendt has had many defenders, although perhaps an equal number of detractors: she ranked with the great political theorists but was also an overbearing scholar who did not listen to others. The concern here is how she exemplified the refugees’ vision of a fascist-­inclined country. Much of On Revolution sited America on a downhill trajectory. Its technological civilization had some of the same traits as Hitler’s Germany. An oligarchy ruled a dumbed-­down welfare state that had few opportunities for those of intelligence to shape society. During the time she was writing about the era of the American Revolution and the US Constitution, one respected critic has pronounced, she engaged in a “jeremiad of decline.” The decline had brought the nation to “neofascism.” Nonetheless, Arendt’s pessimism must be balanced against her view in her earlier Origins of Totalitarianism that fascism may have meant not Hitler and totalitarianism but Mussolini and authoritarianism.15 If Arendt was singular, the men of the Frankfurt school made the greatest impact on the history of both the United States and Continental Europe. Underwritten by an endowment in both Frankfurt-­am-­Main and New York City, the Institute for Social Research was irregularly given office space by Columbia University and uneasily assimilated to America. The Frankfurt school mixed Freud with a “soft” Marxism derived from the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel to look at world and national politics. This perspective did not give a priority to the survey research favored by the sociologists at Columbia, the positivist successors of the earlier Charles Beard. Like Arendt, the Frankfurt school distanced itself from empiricism in the United States. But Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and their colleagues felt they could not directly dismiss their scientific hosts at Columbia, even if the Germans had their own resources. They paid others to acquire data. Then, the leaders at the institute at least stressed a priori reasoning in sifting through the facts that had been collected. As soon as they had emigrated to the United States during the 1930s, the members of the school worried about US fascism. Indeed, they compared the work of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to Hollywood’s degradation of taste in the United States—­though Goebbels operated at a higher level. Adorno thought that Charlie Chaplin’s satirical film The Great Dictator of 1940 did not denounce fascism but exemplified how a decadent United States could trivialize its menace. This interpretation became more explicit in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1947. In 1950, with Adorno as its lead author, the institute published one of its most famous and consequential pieces of writing, The Authoritarian Personality. This study of the social psychology of Americans became a famous text during the McCarthy period.

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In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his fellow authors studied an important US type. Certain kinds of child rearing and education produced this standard personality, and Freudianism assisted in understanding it and the social class it bred. The book’s conclusions rested on a test that had been administered to interviewees. The questionnaire could also be taken by the reader or given to someone outside the original database. It allowed ranking a subject on “the F scale,” measuring social attitudes and locating the class of those who possessed them. The Frankfurt school believed that America had created a welfare state for problematic workers. The nation was drifting toward “state capitalism,” the defining trait of fascism. But more was at stake. Not just a defective sort of governance, US fascism cultivated a peculiar sort of citizen, a polluted people. In some ways one of a kind, America’s popular arts and free and easy democracy gave a peculiarly ill-­mannered flavor to its fascism. McCarthy had confirmed the existence of American fascism for Arendt, and the rise of the right similarly accentuated the frequency of “F types” in the United States for the Frankfurt school.16 What did US scholars make of The Authoritarian Personality? It is unclear how much social scientists of the 1950s took on board from this study. Richard Hofstadter taught right around the corner from the relocated Institute for Social Research, home of the Frankfurt school. His signature idea avoided an imputation of fascism in America. Nonetheless, the survey convinced a number of Hofstadter’s colleagues in the social sciences, and they often cited the book. Indeed, Hofstadter complemented his “paranoid style” by borrowing “authoritarian personality” from Adorno. The political scientist Gabriel Almond typified one consensus. Almond was wary of saying that a fascist personality existed in the United States. He did note that the Germans would have done better by distinguishing among various strains of fascist natures—­ cognitive, conformist, or projective.17 More influential than the Frankfurt academics was a German middlebrow writer resident in California. Eric Hoffer was known as “the Longshoreman philosopher.” An immigrant like the rest of these people but with a more doubtful past, Hoffer authored a best seller in 1951, The True Believer. His book took up, in a fluent and readable style, the same themes as The Authoritarian Personality and Hofstadter’s later “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and Hofstadter also availed himself of the term true believer. The believers in Hoffer’s title were the leaders of movements. They were all “the same types of humanity,” “the same types of minds,” “ruthless” “extremist” fanatics. Such men had a “will to anarchy,” even if they purposed a future order that abolished freedoms. Deliberately taking language from abnormal psychology, Hoffer said they were “frustrated” individuals, but the adjective

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was not employed “as a clinical term”—­he mimicked Hofstadter, who used paranoid informally. Hoffer put forth a simple version of The Authoritarian Personality. The True Believer was also rooted in the conception of the totalitarian that had been associated with the Nazi-­Soviet Pact of 1939–­41 and focused on the persons in charge, messianic ideologues convinced they had the truth. The point was simple and successful. Over the years, politicians who wanted to give themselves some polish—­Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton—­assigned the brief book to their staffs and made Hoffer a go-­to author.18 Although Adorno and Horkheimer initially dominated the Frankfurt school in the United States, their one-­time colleague Herbert Marcuse went on to a wider recognition, absorbed with American fascism for more than thirty years. He arrived in the United States during the 1930s and authored some erudite tomes, the most important being (in English) Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941). Marcuse shared some views of German émigré communists—­for example, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann’s older brother Heinrich, who had fled National Socialist Germany and entered the United States, where he then wrote that he was inhabiting another fascist regime. For these people, FDR’s adherents during the New Deal were fascists, promoting a despotic government through handouts to the impoverished.19 When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, Marcuse explicitly took up these ideas and argued that the USSR struggled against “neofascism” in the United States. While most of his fellows in the Institute for Social Research migrated back to Germany during the 1950s, Marcuse stayed on. During the 1960s, with One Dimensional Man (1964) and with a paper, “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), he stepped outside the realm of scholarship; gained notoriety among the young radicals of the Vietnam era; and revealed the flexibility of fascism. It was becoming unglued from the usage established for it at the start of World War Two. Marcuse, like the earlier Friedrich Hayek, was a straw in the wind.20 The “repressive tolerance” in the essay of that name deserves mention since Marcuse expressed an unusual cultural version of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The separately printed pamphlet was a paperback gospel for many critics of the United States. During Lyndon Johnson’s elected presidency and the Republican Richard Nixon’s five years in office from 1965 to 1974, cynics could summon up plenty of details to make the case for American fascism by referring to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. But Marcuse built his case on different grounds. For him, the broad-­minded acceptance of the viewpoints of others, often asserted as distinctive of American democracy and antifascism, defined a fascist state and culture. The hallmark of a novel

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kind of fascism, “pure” tolerance suffocated the nonestablishment without violence.21 Marcuse wrote in the tradition of the American followers of Stalin of the late 1920s who had called all those who opposed them social fascists, even if the opposition was on the revolutionary left. In the mid-­1960s, people who had studied with Marcuse and thought themselves conservatives followed the maestro and attacked mainstream leaders as fascists. Kennedy-­Johnson Democrats were “liberal fascists.”22 This still-­infrequent usage entailed that fascism might stifle opposing views but not through physical coercion. Marcuse participated in destroying the ideological spectrum that had been set in 1941, when fascism was reserved for those on the extreme right. During the 1960s, some refugee opponents of Marcuse returned fire. They blasted his anti-­Vietnam politics, intimating that critics of the war might be fascists. This role fell, for example, to Hans Speier, who landed at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research in 1933 and had a career as a “defense intellectual” at the celebrated think tank RAND Corporation, which conducted contract research for the US military. Agitated about America during the Vietnam era, Speier believed—­with students marching in the streets—­that the United States would fall into fascism. Peter Fröhlich (later Peter Gay), a leading European historian in the United States, came to America as a young man. Accepting that Freud saw into the savage nature of man, Gay, too, urged that campus rebels at Yale University during the 1960s and 1970s resembled the Hitler Youth. He had grown up in Weimar Germany, and like many of those who fled, he identified with that period in the history of Central Europe. Observers often looked on Thomas Mann and his group in California as living in “Weimar on the Pacific.” Like these people too, Gay put much stock in “the Weimar analogy”: the unsettledness of Germany during the 1920s bred the Nazis. Gay, like Speier, would draw lessons from his own experience. The United States in the late 1960s was cruising toward fascism, at the same stage of its history that Germany had been in the years preceding 1933.23 Enter the French The exiles during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s who were apprehensive about an American fascism turned out to be the first group of Europeans uneasy about the United States. A second group came from France, mainly exemplified by writers who may have visited but who did not live in the country for any extended period. Perhaps more ferocious in their attacks on America, the French made their allegations later, mainly from the 1970s into the

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twenty-­first century. Just as the anxiety of the German arrivals added force to the ruminations of American thinkers like Hofstadter about a paranoid style, so, too, the French complaints stirred up a later generation of US professors who would wax eloquent over new instances of fascism. Jean-­Paul Sartre, the earliest French figure, had a reputation as an exponent of existentialism, a version of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. More of a littérateur, however, Sartre wrote politically engaged novels as well as philosophical tracts. He participated in the French Resistance during World War Two. In 1946, based on his fame as a philosopher, he lectured in the United States. Existentialism Is a Humanism, an English-­language summary of his ideas in pamphlet form, captivated audiences and guaranteed his celebrity, although even in these early visits Sartre evinced dislike, as had the Germans, of the technological fanaticism he thought definitive of America. His dislike morphed into hostility during the 1960s, when he compared US expansion in Asia to that of the Germans in Europe during the 1930s, calling the expansion fascist. The Vietnam War stoked his antipathy to the United States, which billeted a post-­Nazi form of fascism. The rage peaked in an important War Crimes Tribunal of 1967 in which he and other Europeans condemned the fascist war-­making of the United States. They thought of their efforts as akin to the post–­World War Two trials of the Nazi big shots at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. In the United States, war criminal would become a synonym for fascist.24 More onslaughts came later, as younger thinkers augmented Sartre. These latter-­day French also complained of many of the same things that their German predecessors had. They reproved American decadence, which they linked to the assembly lines and collectivization that a love for machines had brought about. American modernity marginalized high culture and churned out conformism. As the United States erupted as a world power, it had imposed its hegemonic capitalism wherever it could, by economic intimidation if possible, by violence if necessary. In other parts of the world, the imprint of America coarsened the locals and further diminished the sensitivity of the conqueror. For these French, the United States was intrinsically fascist. These ideas were voiced before the first US war against Iraq, which began in 1991 and ushered in a period of even greater hostility among thoughtful people in France, many of whom commented on fascism in the United States. Thus, observers of Franco-­American relations after the 1990s would note how fertile the soil was in France for germinating beliefs about a fascist America. The French estimations derived from semiotic theories formulated in France after the high tide of Heidegger and Sartre. These developments had kept pace with the parallel ideas expounded by the Anglophone semanticists.

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The learned in France like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and lesser figures put forward a program of linguistic idealism. What others took as an external reality, these philosophers reduced to linguistic elucidation. Not the world but words about it became primary—­ strung together in sentences, these words were discourse, “intertextuality.” Saying and writing were fundamental to being. In examining forms of speech—­in novels, in relating the experience of art, in expressions of popular culture, or in articulations of foreign policy—­the French uncovered a “code.” The code disclosed the core and often tormented values that shaped America. A focus on texts, broadly defined, replaced conventional observational research and produced something called an “intertext.” Repeated complementary descriptions cannibalized one another and exhibited similar structures in the depiction of the United States. The result was a complex “signifier.” This set of shared categories, political commitments, and collective musings bore the name America. These representations also intended their object—­ the American nation. The intertext or signifier or representation generalized from varied communicative domains, but the intertext and its equivalents also highlighted social reality in the United States. Intertext and social reality intertwined: in a sense, America was its representations.25 The French exemplified philosophizing about the discursive, which was at the heart of their analyses. In converging on the examples of the United States, I might be putting the secondary into a place that it did not have for these French experts. The examples, however, demonstrated that the United States incubated fascism. For Americans apprehensive about this chronic ill, investigation pointed to specific social movements, political events, or cultural problems. Or commentators might sweat about how the political disease might get to the United States. Hollywood homed in on the modality of disaster—­an underground cell; frustrated statesmen; aberrant celebrities; apostate advisors to the president. The Europeans—­both French and German—­differed. Fault lay in a communal personality or the socialization of Americans. The ideas of US nationals exhibited a pathology. The culture was sick. For the Germans, a loose Marxism, leavened with Freud, validated these opinions. Among the French, America exemplified an epistemology of speech and writing. German and French Victories The French theorists succeeded in getting at least a foot in the door in the US academic world of literature. In New Haven, Connecticut, a Yale School of Criticism was supreme in the study of comparative literature during the

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1970s and 1980s. Much of its effort applied or extended the theories of people like Derrida to a variety of documents. That is, the Yale school promulgated a Marxism oriented to language, and the Americans, like their French associates, put forward their political views about the United States. The school concluded, similarly to the French, that America embodied a “late capitalism” on its way to fascism. This was just at the time when Peter Gay, the European historian at Yale, was urging the opposite: it was the left that was bringing fascism to the United States. In the late 1980s, a scandal erupted about Paul De Man, a leader of the Yale school who had died in 1983, when he was a Sterling Professor and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. De Man had been born in Belgium, had come to maturity there, but had long since entrenched himself in the United States. While most professors of the Yale school were US nationals and had trained in America, De Man was a “naturalized” member. Europeans discovered that as a young man in the era of World War Two, De Man had kept company with fascists in Belgium. He had spoken for the collaborationist regime that had surfaced in that country after it had surrendered to Germany, and he then falsified his past. These revelations arose in addition to allegations that Heidegger, who was having his Nazism heatedly discussed, had influenced De Man’s ruminations in the United States. Following the lead of European philosophers and especially the French, American scholars—­many Jewish—­had implied the existence of domestic fascism. Then, their adversaries implicated the Jewish scholars themselves as fascists.26 Who knew whom to indict? Fascism was now uncoupled from any perceptible characteristics; it had the aspect of the verbal loose cannon that it had been from 1934 to 1941, before World War Two tied it to denunciation of the right. By the 1970s, the memories about the origin of the concept had faded, and it might be drafted into the present for demeaning even opponents who were not on the right. Because the marker might be applied to anyone, its nonfactual status became plainer.

9

Fascism Triumphs over Communism

Professors made what they would of totalitarianism. Fascism and communism, however, diverged in ways only tangentially related to their positions on an ideological continuum, linear or circular. Communism might always reference a suitable kind of politics. Foreign purveyors of communism accepted the creed. Even after the end of the Cold War, which saw the ruin of the USSR during the 1990s, communists acknowledged the word in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea. On the contrary, no country willingly deemed itself fascist. Later academic analyses of fascism extended the brand beyond the Italy and Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, for example, to Latin American or African or Middle Eastern nations during the last half of the twentieth century. This sort of cataloguing has gone on for a long time in generalizing about regimes. Nonetheless, the leadership under scrutiny spurned the classification. The refusal of a polity to designate itself by the codifications of political scientists or historians—­or the polity’s denial of the jargon—­may be unusual but does not prove anything. One must still reflect on how scholars or pundits have reacted when the United States is categorized as a capitalist plutocracy or a bourgeois dictatorship or a popular authoritarianism. Scholars and pundits usually dismiss the labelers. One way to get at these issues is to examine the contrasting ways entertainment treated fascists and communists. During the Cold War and after, we can see differences between the number and persistence of anticommunist and antifascist productions, mainly in film.1 These differences tell us indirectly about the power of fascism for Americans, but only indirectly because of the complex connection of entertainment to politics.

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Fascism and Communism in the Movies The conflict from 1942 to 1945 brought to audiences propaganda movies that favored the USSR and that were later defiled—­in particular three films: in 1943 Mission to Moscow and The North Star, and in 1944 Song of Russia.2 But once the Cold War enveloped the United States and the parameters of conflict were established, hostility to the Russians knew no bounds from the late 1940s to the mid-­1960s. Movies like I Married a Communist (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), and My Son John (1952) all proposed that Bolsheviks might hijack the United States. Film critics have analyzed a number of science-­fiction or horror movies from the 1950s to suggest that they illuminated Americans’ fear of communism and their related fear of the nuclear arms race: The Thing from Another World (1951)—­a bloodsucking monster rose from Arctic ice; The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)—­a creepy man with gills from the Amazon was defeated but might still live; Them (1954)—­giant radioactive ants in California were destroyed; Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—­duplicate zombie-­like people hatched in pods, again in California; and The Blob (1958)—­an alien amoeba in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, engorged the town’s residents. The short Red Nightmare of 1957, an Armed Forces Information Film, was an “educational” basis for these fantasies. Yet after the heyday of movies like The Manchurian Candidate of 1962, the mainstream films in which the Russians tried to take over America were few: Red Dawn (1984) (unsuccessfully remade in 2012 with the North Koreans as the antiheroes), Invasion USA (1985), and the related Avenging Force (1986). They all failed at the box office and with critics. Once the Cold War settled down to geopolitics, hit movies downplayed the communists’ ability to infect the United States. Instead, their plots echoed the US competition with the USSR, which the Americans would win. For example, the second of the James Bond movies, From Russia with Love (1963), although the Americans only assisted the English in these Hollywood productions; Rocky IV (1985), the most lucrative of these boxing films, with Sylvester Stallone battling a huge communist; and The Hunt for Red October (1990), about a wayward Soviet submarine. Failsafe (1964) and War Games (1983) told of nuclear competition gone awry, and the extraordinary television film of 1983, The Day After, reinforced ideas about the dreadfulness of the arms race. Crimson Tide (1995), Thirteen Days (2000), and Bridge of Spies (2015), three films that bothered with the USSR after it had left the world stage, laid bare strategic face-­offs yet not the seditious. But then look at how Hollywood treated the fascists. In the run-­up to the US entry into World War Two as well as during the war, the studios produced

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any number of patriotic films hostile to the Germans, as we have seen. Many more movies with European locales made fascism an indirect threat to the United States: in Hitler—­Beast of Berlin (1939), the nonstop sadism was graphic; The Mortal Storm (1940) was a window on the Nazi takeover of a small German town; Casablanca (1942) had America asleep to fascism in Europe; and in Notorious (1946), as we saw, South American fascists looked north. Long after the surrender of the Axis powers of Italy, Germany, and Japan, Hollywood continued to make successful cinema about fascism’s coming to America. The horror and science-­fiction movies that critics have often ascribed to the communist phobia have with equal plausibility been ascribed to fascism. Some authorities have argued that the fantasies reflected not the wicked USSR during the 1950s but the hateful Joseph McCarthy. Movies like Them and The Blob put on the screen the psychic concern of many individuals that the American right wing would topple the US Constitution. For a time, movies thus spread Red Fascism: films could equally represent commies or fascists, and the two evoked an equal dread. During the postwar period, more serious productions directly exhorted citizens about fascism at home. Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in the late 1920s and then senator from that state in the early 1930s, most frightened conventional thinkers. When Long was assassinated in 1935, orthodox Republicans and Democrats were not unhappy. They had often called him a fascist, a title Long himself had occasionally indicated might apply to himself before the word was demeaning. During World War Two, novels fictionalized his rise to power and murder. The well-­known Hamilton Basso delivered Sun in Capricorn in 1942. John Dos Passos, the author of the U.S.A. triology from the 1920s, published Number One in 1943 as part of a much less memorable triology, District of Columbia. Adria Locke Langley’s A Lion Is in the Streets went to the top of the best-­seller list in 1945. Robert Penn Warren, whom we have already met weighing the South’s connection to fascism, won the Pulitizer Prize for his All the King’s Men of 1946. These novels, set in the twenties and thirties, were supposed to capture Long’s complexity. Yet we cant’t say how much the later 1930s and the war framed the Long of the novelists—­as a populist, a progressive, or a fascist. In 1949 Hollywood released the screen adaptation of All the King’s Men. Warren’s Willie Stark galvanized the “hick” voters through rabble-­rousing speeches. For his rendering of the character, Broderick Crawford won an Academy Award, and movie buffs still regularly screen the film. Four years later, in 1953, Jimmy Cagney played the Huey Long figure in a much ballyhooed A Lion Is in the Streets, which was a financial and artistic fiasco.

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Both films tipped the audience off to Long’s fascism. In addition, according to critics, these movies commented on the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and on the American people’s courting of fascism and Joe McCarthy. In A Face in the Crowd, a lesser-­known film of 1957, a television celebrity leveraged his ratings into notoriety. Andy Griffith performed as a countrified personality in a variety show of talk and music. Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes saw that his unwashed viewers could make him nationally prominent. His unpolished and humorous but also sharp remarks about America recruited ordinary folks willing to finance him. Then, Rhodes began a frightening attempt to get power. Seven Days in May of 1964 unmasked the attempt of the renegade chief of staff of the US military at a “fascist” coup. Frederic March played Jordan Lyman, the irresolute US president who had made a suspect treaty with the Soviet Union, but at the last minue he outwitted General James Mattoon Scott, played by Burt Lancaster.3 A short but much-­watched scene in the 1972 The Godfather intricately pondered fascism in America. In this tale of the Mafia in the United States in the late 1940s, a loyalist of the Corleone Family, Pete Clemenza, explained to a young Michael Corleone why one should stand up to other Mafiosi in the late 1940s, the time in which the film was set. Their bid for primacy represented the worst sort of threat by other “families.” The Munich Agreement had taught that their demands should be resisted to maintain order. Taps (1981) exposed a high-­school military academy in which the cadets decided to defend their own martial society after the announcement of the school’s closing. Critics regularly depict the movie as “true fascism.” Betrayed (1988) had a Vietnam veteran leading a neo-­Nazi group in the Midwest. The House on Carroll Street, of the same year, took place in 1951 and revealed that anticommunists were secret Nazis. The persistence of fascism in the movies forces us to confront differences in how Hollywood perceived the ability of communism and fascism to seep into American life. It will not do to argue that an actual war against Italy, Germany, and Japan had vivified fascism over Russian communism, with which the United States fought only a “cold” war. This Cold War had its high moments, as in the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Americans also fought hot wars against communism, most notably in Korea and Vietnam, and in these no sure victory occurred as happened with Germany, although the USSR eventually disintegrated. These Cold War emergencies received much attention from Hollywood.4 But the iniquities of fascism lingered in American minds, even though the Axis powers had been a threat to the United States for only five years. It may be that fascism remained because Americans had only militarily defeated it. It did not self-­destruct, as did Soviet communism.

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The Farce Contemplate again this genre. Communism has been the subject of a few farces. There were a couple of minor films during the 1930s and then the famed Ninotchka of 1939, with Greta Garbo playing a Soviet functionary whom capitalism despoiled. The less-­known Comrade X was on screens in 1940. From the Cold War period, we have No Time for Flowers (1953); The Iron Petticoat (1956); Silk Stockings (1957) (an unsuccessful musical remake of Ninotchka); and The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966), a comedy about the misadventures of a Soviet submarine that wound up off the coast of New England, with Alan Arkin as the crew’s lieutenant. At the end of the Cold War we note Red Heat (1988), an action comedy in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Belushi teamed up as two buddy-­cops, one from the USSR and the other from the United States, to solve a case. Schwarzenegger studied Ninotchka to learn how to act his part. The farce of communism existed, but it had a single gag—­that consumer items unavailable in Russia interested commies in America. The red farce vanished when the Cold War ended. How about the farce of fascism? Duck Soup (1933), The Great Dictator (1940), and To Be or Not to Be (1942) were only the first entrants. Thereafter, the farce of fascism was never absent from theaters. A Foreign Affair, directed by the famous Billy Wilder, was released in 1948. Marlene Dietrich’s character, a former mistress of high-­ranking Nazis, now lived in occupied Berlin with an American GI lover. The film hinted at the bizarre erotic possibilities that National Socialist women might have for American men, although these possibilities would come to fruition only later, in underground pornographic cinema. At the end of A Foreign Affair, Dietrich was sentenced to a labor camp after her latest boyfriend gave her up for a visiting congresswoman from his native Iowa. The scenario would not seem promising for the ridicule of National Socialism, but the movie had some bleak humor, despite being shoddily acted.5 In Born Yesterday (1951), Judy Holliday did a better job and won an Academy Award playing a dizzy blonde whose brutish boyfriend wanted her tutored into respectability. Broderick Crawford again played the fascist-­like heavy, though this time a funny one—­a wealthy junk dealer. Outside the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, Holliday’s mentor (and husband by the end of the movie) lectured her on democracy and explained fascism to her. She later called Crawford a fascist, but he complained that he could not be a fascist—­he was born in New Jersey. Stalag 17 (1953) made Nazi soldiers into the central fools in this POW camp. The film was father to the hit television comedy Hogan’s Heroes, which aired from 1965 to 1971. Colonel

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Sergeant Schultz and Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes. (CBS Television)

Klink, the incompetent German commandant, and his bungling sergeant, Hans Schultz, dominated the camp. Dr. Strangelove (1964), which I cited in the introduction, had Peter Sellers playing both the title role of a mad Nazi assistant to an American president and the president himself. With the acclamation for Strangelove, the burlesquing of fascism gained a regular place in American imaginations. The Producers, directed by Mel Brooks in late 1967, told of a zany and hilarious effort to mount a musical that is sure to fail, Springtime for Hitler. Woody Allen’s Bananas followed in 1971. Brooks remade To Be or Not to Be in 1983, and a new Born Yesterday came along in 1993 with a scarier heavy. Without the fascist motif, however, it had less success and interest than the original. The end of the Cold War brought no respite. In 2004 the Germans produced a serious and sobering movie, Der Untergang, about the last days of Hitler in his bunker under Berlin. When the movie reached the United States, it received English subtitles and a new name, Downfall. In one segment roughly three minutes long, Hitler rants to his sycophants about those responsible for taking Germany to ruin. Soon ripped from their context and posted on the internet, these scenes of Hitler’s tirades were given new American English subtitles in which Hitler might complain about not getting into graduate school or about the traffic on the Long Island Expressway. But the main character could also be Richard Nixon, yelling at his staff about the unfairness of the Democrats. These “Hitler Rants Parodies” videos burgeoned over the years and have more recently come to tie the Nazi regime to Donald

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Trump. In the summer of 2016, Hitler shouted in subtitles about the possible Trump presidency. In 2017 a Trump/Hitler shrieked about attacks on himself, and in 2020 he lamented contracting the Covid virus. A complex website dedicates itself to the “semiotics” of the parodies and answers questions about the deep meaning of the humor: What does it tell us about the normalization of Hitler? The debasement of the German language “translated” into American English? Fascism in the world today? In one of these clips, Hitler says about the parodies themselves, “I am not a funny man. Yet somehow they have made me funny.”6 During the period of their captivation with the Hitler parodies, audiences saw other examples of the farce of fascism on the screen. In 2010 we had the low-­budget and low-­grade Swedish-­American One Hundred Years of Evil, and in 2012 Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator. In The Interview, a film from 2014, two journalists signed up to assassinate communist North Korean leader Kim Jong-­un. Some reviewers found The Interview to be more about fascism than communism.7 Another genre, huge and subterranean, was given the name Nazi exploitation cinema. It had gotten under way in 1974 with the Canadian-­American film Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, and morphed into the wildest sorts of soft-­and hard-­core pornography. These films probably had more viewers than most mainstream efforts, and engaged purportedly ordinary Americans in bizarre sexual escapades with dominatrices scantily dressed in outrageous brown, black, and red outfits with varied insignia.8 There was nothing comparable starring communist women. Erotic fascism was omnipresent, while erotic bolshevism was entirely absent. Many scholars have equated fascism with communism; popular culture categorically denied this. Alternative History and Science Fiction Like no other book, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here illustrated what­if narratives about fascism in America. This kind of alternative history—­a companion of the farcical—­bloomed in the United States and blended with pulp novels and even comic books and comic strips.9 Like the farce of fascism, alternative history fascism barely took note of the end of the Cold War. Writers of fiction, dramatists, actors, and television programs continued to tell of the consequences for America—­usually dire—­of an Axis victory. Books or films or television programs envisioned fascists ensconced across the nation.10 Some writings invoked time travel and speculated on the dilemmas of changing the now-­past to improve the present-­future. Some efforts

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Hitler appears on Mount Rushmore in DC Comics, Jus­tice League of America (1973).

responded to the power politics of the period in which they were being ground out—­Soviet-­American competition in the Cold War, or the hot wars of Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. A minute number of anticommunist endeavors postulated a better world if profascist ideas had dominated America instead of the procommunist ones of liberals. The overwhelming number of efforts, however, told us of the tumor of fascism. Scores of these compositions exist.11 Moreover, we have many inferiorly written and little-­known short stories and novellas. Nonetheless, fascists outnumbered Reds, and fascist victories in fiction were accompanied by striking visual representations that conjured up what might have been—­such as Hitler at the Lincoln Memorial, á la Hitler in Paris at the Eiffel Tower in June of 1940; or Hitler carved on the face of Mount Rushmore.12 From the 1950s to the first decades of the twenty-­first century, screen adaptations of books presented unusual issues. Scholars only laxly define science fiction, and some of it has counted as counterfactual fascism. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) exemplified such a work. Its title is the temperature at which books incinerate. The acclaimed novel—­“a fascist critique”—­depicted a futuristic “fireman” whose job was burning volumes. But a movie of 1966, based on the novel and repeating its lesson of the iniquity of fascism, was a flop.13 Screen adaptations of other books had great, sometimes ironic success, however.14 Robert Heinlein published his science-­fiction novel Starship Troopers in 1959. Heinlein telegraphed the need for a strong military during the 1950s by

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describing a future interstellar war between human beings and alien “Arachnids.” Critics at the time advised that the conservative Heinlein, or his ideal society, promoted fascism. The 1997 movie by the same title was adapted from the book but committed itself to antifascism. In this film, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven pulled off a satire of Heinlein’s “fascist” conflict against the “Bugs.” For visual effects, Verhoeven had versions of German and Italian uniforms of the 1930s, along with symbols explicitly reminiscent of Continental imagery. This cult movie translated words into the exact opposite of their author’s original intent.15 Many readers testify to Philip Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) as a classic of what-­if history. It takes place in the early 1960s: Germany and Japan have won World War Two, and the two countries have colonized the East and West Coasts of the United States. Some fifty years later, various production companies collaborated on a television series for a digital video streaming service, transforming this piece of fiction into a number-­one hit in 2015. They crafted an extended riff on the novel—­some forty hours over four years. Now the victors of the war have set up a neutral zone in the Far West, where they intrigued against each other. In a lawless district around Canon City, Colorado, American nationals who were not collaborating with the Japanese or the Germans schemed at deposing the invaders and pitting them against each other. Moreover, the series augmented Dick’s hint that the

Map of the United States according to the 2015 television series The Man in the High Castle, based on the 1962 Philip Dick novel of the same title. (© Rosemarie D’Alba)

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A still from the television series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–­), based on the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel of the same title. (Hulu streaming service)

takeover might be a cultural illusion. The presentation was intensified by stun­ ning actual newsreel footage. The most literary contribution to this dual genre of fiction and film in the new century, Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004), reminded readers and book reviewers of Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. In Roth’s substitute history, an appendix documented how his novel was something other than a novel. The book was about how a Jewish family—­Roth’s own—­was devastated when Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940. In the first decade of the twenty-­first century, Roth, the premier writer in America, saw his novel assigned in college courses, some in the history of the United States. Then, in 2020 HBO did a six-­part rendering of the novel for a far wider television audience. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story of 2010 was a popular and applauded novel, set in a futuristic but recognizable New York. In the context of a romance, the Bipartisan regime—­regularly described as fascist by its critics in the fiction—­sponsored mindless consumerism, eradicated dissent, and stemmed its own collapse. The art of Shteyngart’s fiction lay in the book’s focus on fascism, with the love story merely being the device to catch readers’ attention. This ingenuity reversed the usual mechanics of amusements.

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Naturally enough, a television series based on the book was promised, but it was delayed for over a decade from the original book publication date. The adaptation to television of Margaret Atwood’s book of 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale, did not occur until 2017 and 2018. The novel then energized a cycle that competed with The Man in the High Castle for TV viewing preeminence. The Handmaid’s Tale occurred one hundred years in the future. After another Civil War, the polity in the United States has degenerated into a ruthless, vicious, antisexual society. A Canadian, Atwood took the original American Puritans as a model for fascists, and the book went on best-­seller lists after its television debut, over thirty years from its first publication. The sensation of The Handmaid’s Tale led to a sequel novel, The Testaments, in 2019. Serious critics reasoned that the presidency of Donald Trump had given birth to this and other mass-­visual productions: there was an uptick in worry about fascism, and the worry was reflected in television producers’ calculation that fascist-­themed drama would draw viewers.16 Fascism and the Abyss Fascism won hands down over communism for those in show business. How do we account for this conquest? How do movies about strange politics relate to real politics? Both questions take us onto shaky ground. First, why did fascism bury communism in the entertainment industry? The Soviet Union had a far longer history as a threat to Americans. Revulsion for the Reds loomed large in the United States from 1919 to 1989, and for some fifteen years in the mid-­twentieth century “the communist menace” had a real presence for Americans. During that period, the disapproving force of communism in America at least equaled that of fascism. The monstrous growth of either might extinguish the United States. For most of the Cold War, however, Hollywood treated communism as a geopolitical criminal, dangerous but one that could be overcome. Somehow, a rational struggle was taking place in which the United States would win, and the angst went missing in Hollywood soon after the USSR caved in. Germany and Italy (and Japan) drove world politics from 1939 to 1945, perhaps 15 percent of the duration of the Cold War of 1947–­89. The United States routed the fascists militarily but not the communists. Yet fascism has remained alive in American imaginations long after its eclipse in 1945. Europe had exported communism, and its achievements in the United States depended on malicious foreigners or maladjusted citizens or the mighty power of the Soviets. Europe might exemplify fascism, and the malicious,

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maladjusted, and mighty could assist its spread in America. But the fascism that has alarmed US nationals for so many years has not much to do with Mussolini and only a roundabout connection to Hitler. Only the Italian-­ American Fascist Leagues in the 1920s exemplified a fascism in the United States that had some attachment to Il Duce, and in the sweep of US history, the microscopic bands of various avowed American Nazis have had an insubstantial impact. Living, breathing Nazis—­the German-­American Bundists and William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of the 1930s; George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party of the 1960s; or the neo-­Nazis of the twenty-­first century—­were not of primary import. Fascism was not so much an invasive species in America but a native plant, something in the soil of the United States. It might propagate at any moment, or delinquents might assist its germination. Or fascism might spread in the community like a latent virus or a deadly cancer in the American DNA, a potentiality ever ready to be realized. From the late 1930s, thinking about American fascism conjured up a hazy evil that mixed various poisonous ideas in a mental sorcerer’s brew. Fascism in the United States might have occupied only agitated fancy, yet it still existed. As a political creed, it was allied to a shadowy order ready for power. It would eat away at constitutional democracy by limiting the freedoms of speech, the press, and public gatherings, and it had unbridled guerrilla forces preying on citizens. As observers put it, fascists represented the fundamental threat to American democracy. The worst thing imaginable was that the United States would “go fascist.” In depicting doubtful current regimes abroad, commentators have seldom availed themselves of the name fascism, often substituting authoritarianism, or rule by strongman, or rule by populists. The only leadership Americans confidently identify as fascistic is in their own backyard. Fascism lurked more within than without. It represented the deepest fears of US nationals of what they might be. For close to a century, fascism has been The Other. The popularity of contrary-­to-­fact history constantly reminded Americans of the possible. The farce of fascism garnered attention as a way for citizens to dismiss or to render bearable what might give them nightmares at bedtime. The comic wards off a sense of peril, like whistling past the graveyard. Entertainment and Politics Answering the second question—­How does entertainment connect to politics?—­ takes us further into guesswork. According to many students of culture, the McCarthy era, say from 1948 to 1958, evidenced an easily teachable link between politics and popular diversions. Communism, as an insurrectionary

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force and as an international foe, frightened Americans, and many movies evoked this fright. Americans also had to face a right wing that was protofascist, and the movies presented scenarios about how a flower even more unsightly than McCarthyism might blossom. According to many specialists, Hollywood eerily imitated or inflated high politics. As a range of experts has put it, real politics caused reel politics. Yet the following period of the high 1960s and Watergate—­1965 to 1974—­must cast doubts on the ability to couple cause and effect, politics and public recreation. We have two periods of national stress to examine. In the era of the Second Red Scare, Hollywood worried about a coming fascism or a Red Fascism. The second period, of Vietnam, African-­American struggle, and Watergate, also unsettled Americans, and cries of fascism arose in the land. In November of 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara traveled to Harvard University to explain the Vietnam War to the academics at the Kennedy School of Politics. The Johnson administration had been arguing that in Vietnam, it was fighting communists who were analogous to Hitler. Students accosted McNamara and derided him as a fascist. Later, his Harvard host, the political scientist Richard Neustadt, wrote the secretary an apology. Student behavior, Neustadt asserted, evidenced that fascism “was coming to America”—­or at least to Cambridge, Massachusetts. When McNamara’s friend and ally, Senator Robert Kennedy, decided to run against President Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy explained matters to students: “Don’t you understand that what we are doing to the Vietnamese is not very different than what Hitler did to the Jews?” Demonstrators for civil rights and advocates of Black Power during the 1960s agreed. As one of them put it, “fascism is already here.” After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968, George McGovern, a Democratic senator from South Dakota, decided on a run for the presidency, picking up Kennedy’s policies and some of his enthusiasts. McGovern wanted “to end this fruitless genocide” in Vietnam. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August, Senator Abraham Ribicoff from Connecticut nominated McGovern to be the party’s candidate and tormented Mayor Richard Daley, who presided over the city’s security arrangements. Activists against war and racism unnerved the Democrats for a raucous, violent week. National television interspersed convention drama with scenes of police brutality against the demonstrators. In his speech, Ribicoff denounced Daley for calling the National Guard to end the protests and for permitting “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” On camera, Daley screamed at Ribicoff: “Fuck you, you Jew son-­of-­a-­bitch, you lousy motherfucker. Go home.”17 The people repudiated the party of Johnson, McNamara, Kennedy, McGovern, Ribicoff, and Daley. In the election of  November 1968, the Republican

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Police storming Grant Park, Chicago, August 28, 1968, during the Democratic National Convention, which the city hosted that year. (Photo by Dennis Brack, licensed through Alamy, Inc.)

candidate for the presidency, Richard Nixon, won. In the White House, he loved to watch Patton (1970)—­a film about the World War Two American general George Patton, often reproached for his quasi-­fascist notions, as indicated earlier. Analysts ridiculed Nixon when he briefly dressed his Secret Service detail in vibrant imperial costumes. Finally, the Watergate scandal dishonored the president and his assistants, and he resigned in disgrace in 1974 to avoid an impeachment trial that surely would have forced him from office. Over all these shenanigans hovered the conflict in Southeast Asia, which left-­leaning citizens continued to denounce as fascist during the Nixon presidency. These events perhaps debilitated the American people more than had the Cold War tensions from 1948 to 1958. How did the entertainment industry respond to the nation’s anxiety about the constitutional future of the United States in the late 1960s and in the aftershock of that decade? I have already commented on the most well-­known and important movie that took up fascism in the United States in these years: the comic musical The Producers. This astonishing and flabbergasting film of 1967 depicted white-­ collar crooks—­performed by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder—­who staged an assumed Broadway disaster, Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden. The two lovable felons have sold 25,000 percent of the play to investors, so they planned for it to fail. Instead, it scored a huge box office success, and Mostel and Wilder went to jail. In some ways, the movie epitomized regrettable lapses in taste, including the sexist treatment of

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women and the lampooning of homosexuals and transvestites, among many other politically incorrect scenes. But The Producers also reduced Hitler and National Socialism to some amazing and dumbfounding one-­liners. Rather than treating fears about fascism, The Producers presented the Hitler regime as a ninety-­minute farce. In the musical, a Nazi-­themed ensemble sang a show-­stopping number, “Springtime for Hitler.” Viewers have watched this scene again and again on YouTube. The movie, like the theatrical world it portrayed, was critically damned as vulgar, but it had great success. Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and the film was translated into real Broadway theater in the late 1960s. This version had an impressive run again at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, after which the movie was remade in 2005. What are we to make of the later 1960s and the political alarm over fascism? Can we find an explanation about how problems of the regime unite with professionally created amusements? Would we not expect a lot of appalling fascism from Hollywood to be in evidence from the mid-­1960s to the mid-­1970s? Many philosophers of film have argued that just this happened during the postwar period: a Red Scare gave us All the King’s Men, The Thing,

A song-­ and-­ dance number in The Producers (1967). (Embassy Pictures, courtesy of the Everett Collection)

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and A Face in the Crowd. However, the most distinctive entertainment of the two periods—­of the McCarthy era and of the high 1960s—­conflicted. In the second period, instead of distress we have absurdity. Instead of an orator energizing the ignorant, or a frozen fiend coming to life, or Andy Griffith lusting for power, we have—­in The Producers—­the then-­unknown American actor Kenneth Mars as Franz Liebkind, the author of Springtime for Hitler. This deranged former Nazi exclaimed that Hitler was a far better dancer than Winston Churchill. Instead of a fascist coup, then, we have a song and dance, with lyrics that include “Springtime for Hitler and Germany / Winter for Poland and France.” The sensation of The Producers intimates that civic life and popular culture do not connect in an easily comprehensible fashion. The age of Vietnam and Watergate teaches that we are limited in figuring out how fascism has persisted on the rim of the consciousness of Americans. And during the later period, fascism was springing up everywhere.

10

Scholars Approach Fascism

The period of Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s presidencies untethered fascism from the right. Competing academic analyses of fascism and related political terminology thrived among different coteries of scholars, many of whom nonetheless continued to search for an empirical ground for the concept. The 1970s first begat—­by historians of the United States—­a look back at the past that subjected the totalitarian to critique as a legitimate category, but this intellectual history was itself soon disputed. Moreover, although discarding the totalitarian, students of the United States employed fascism as a novel way to grasp the sweep of the nation’s earlier developments. Finally, historians who did not concentrate on America and social scientists more interested in problems than narrative went in a different direction. A Line or a Circle? The political spectrum, which had been briefly conceived as a straight line from the late 1930s to the mid-­1940s that ended to the right of fascism and to the left of communism, looked inadequate at the start of the Cold War. American authorities saw that the poles of fascism and communism had somehow melded—­the Red Fascism of totalitarianism. But bending the continuum of political positions and drawing the opposites together created problems for those given to scratching their heads about these matters. Were communism and fascism at the same spot on the circumference? How was democracy situated between them? If right and left looked much alike from the perspective of Cold War liberalism, how did the Stalinist decipher fascism and democracy? And how did communism and democracy make sense to the National

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Socialist? These questions hardly arose during the high tide of totalitarianism, but they deserved answers. For the fascist, both communists and democrats had believed in the supreme importance of financial well-­being. The goal of a polity was prosperity. A full dinner pail would meet a people’s deepest aspirations, and the fundamental problems of human existence could be solved through reason. According to fascism, disagreement between the communist and the democrat over whether the government or private citizens should engineer economic progress was not basic. The fascists asserted the foolishness of their enemies’ shared assumption about the primacy of human well-­being grounded in sane trade and industry. The deep issues of human well-­being went beyond the bounds of economic wisdom, to the religious and the mythical. The issues encompassed if not the illogical, then at least the non-­logical. The social might embody economics and the rational, but the essentials involved blood and soil. For the communist, these mumbo-­jumbo fascist commitments covered the persecuter’s coercion of the weak, with monetary power defining the persecuter. Moreover, fascism realized the oppressive militarism of the bourgeois. The United States would in time get to Hitler’s Germany. The froth of liberal democracy would give way to the greedy drive of capitalism—­fascism. From this communist angle, fascism and democracy accepted the same exploitive values. Just as democrats saw identity in communists and fascists, fascists saw it in democrats and communists, and communists in democrats and fascists. Once it had been posited that the extremes met, these conundrums of the circular nature of political concepts hung in the air. Fascism no longer came to the right of liberals, nor did communism come to the left. Nonetheless, from the mid-­to late 1940s to the late 1960s, politicians avoided the puzzles of a circle. Then, during the years when tempestuous debates occurred about Vietnam, students of the United States broke ranks with the politicians who supported the war as well as with the men and women of letters who comforted the politicians. Vietnam and Watergate influenced the PhD’s who came after Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Hofstadter. During the heated 1960s, a new breed of historians of the republic, whom I call left liberals, assailed Cold War liberals—­both politicians and scholars—­for their support of the status quo. The censure of the scholars was implicit, for fascism had had a diminished role in the influential Hofstadter circle. Nonetheless, younger academics went back to look at the 1930s and 1940s and explored the invention of the totalitarian. These historians came of age by arguing for it as a political expletive and not as an investigative concept. It had tainted the US

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foreign policy that Schlesinger and Hofstadter suppported. Hofstadter had worried about the paranoid even if it did not shade into the fascist, but he had nonetheless given an academic imprimatur to the Cold War. Now that imprimatur would be denounced as part of Hofstadter’s complicated legacy.1 Political Critiques The fighting in Southeast Asia was flawed, damaging, and aggressive. But the continuing contest against communism, the Democratic administration argued, justified this war. Thus, if policy in Vietnam followed from the earlier decisions that had defined Cold War liberalism, then—­according to left liberals—­ the earlier ones had faults. Left liberals, as the latest generation of professional historians is likely to do, wrote about the recent American past. The notion of totalitarianism had validated American hatred of the USSR, and allowed policy makers to whip up the public for pushy—­and now indeed disastrous—­ diplomacy. In battling over Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson and his advisors had reemphasized that communism was a form of National Socialism. Southeast Asia presented “the same challenges that Hitler posed to the West,” and President Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam was a Nazi-­like figure. Analogizing the Reds to fascists had mired the United States on the rimlands of Asia.2 The same illicit comparisons, said the left liberals, had made for unfortunate policy before Vietnam. National security managers had told citizens that Americans faced a Munich if they did not challenge the USSR in Germany; that North Korea was a Red Fascist state; that the United States could not appease Fidel Castro in Cuba. These beliefs all illustrated how a false lumping together of fascism and communism had led the United States astray after World War Two. More than two decades after politicians had welcomed totalitarianism to mobilize opinion against communism in the mid-­to late 1940s, young students of history informed their audiences of totalitarianism’s flaws. Scholars like Hoftstadter were collateral damage, for while they had worried about the language of extremism, they had patronized the politicians during the Cold War and gotten too close to those in power. As a questionable tool of study, totalitarianism had two variants, fascism and communism, that did not match. The communists had not tried to take over the world but governed in conservative regimes that preserved the status quo, or opposed colonialism or imperialism. The Soviet Union’s leaders might have gone wrong but wished for a more just social order. Fascism was a different can of worms—­a racist and genocidal system with no redeeming attributes. With Vietnam, a new generation of historians “unmasked” as “an ideological construct” the American view of the world during the recent past

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of the Cold War. An erroneous idea had been designed not to understand Germany or Italy but, for twenty-­five years, to condemn Russia. Red Fascism and totalitarianism were “deconstructed.” During the era of Vietnam and Watergate, left liberal historians shared something with the Popular Front liberals of the 1930s. Left liberals would not go so far as to say that the USSR of the 1970s was democratic, or that politics in America should in any way emulate the state-­run planning of Russia. Nonetheless, left liberals approved of the USSR more than did Cold War liberals, and they wanted a foreign policy that would provoke less condemnation from the Soviet leadership. The scholars whom the tumult of the Vietnam era educated did not fully grasp that their critique of Red Fascism was a function of their own anti-­ Vietnam politics. In the United States during the 1970s, rather than just exhibiting scholarship, the historical review of the totalitarian elided the politics of left liberals with objective research. An old political perspective got renewed when discovered as a kind of erudite truth. The critique functioned just as politically as had the older promotion of totalitarianism during the 1940s and 1950s. The Cold War liberals could defame anyone with whom they disagreed as being tempted by the totalitarian. Red Fascism could depreciate anyone not a Cold War liberal. Now, during the 1970s, propelled by Vietnam, left liberals might snipe at Cold War liberals as fascist-­like. This debate did not go much beyond written history in colleges. But, in turn, university competitors who still believed that Hitler and Stalin had presided over essentially similar regimes attacked left liberals. Cold warriors among the professoriate held that the merits of communism and fascism and not scare tactics had decided foreign policy. Justice, even if imperfect, warranted US military commitments, even in Vietnam. Jousting scholars in history and related disciplines, supporters or opponents of Vietnam, hardly realized that their own politics were at stake as well as an open-­minded examination of the recent past. The debunking of totalitarianism during the 1970s both comprehended the history of US foreign policy and took a position on Johnson and Nixon. A political category from World War Two to the early 1950s, the totalitarian remained political when it emerged from hibernation to be defamed in the late 1960s and 1970s. In attempting to iron out the political spectrum so that it resembled what it was like from 1942 to 1946, left liberals were trying to make anticommunism suspect, as it had been during World War Two. Yet this reconstruction had come into sight earlier during the 1960s but on the fringe, in the writings of someone like the more or less communist Herbert Marcuse. From his perspective, fascism had trangressed on the democratic center. Vietnam

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gave guardianship of views similar to Marcuse’s to a broader array of more ordinary scholars.3 At the heart of the left liberal critique was the shape of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Other scholars—­usually not historians of the United States—­were simply more interested in the fascism of Italy and Germany and in theories about this political malady. In 1966 the Journal of Contemporary History devoted its first issue to fascism. The Europeanist George Mosse searched for the “essence of the fascist revolution” that started in the late nineteenth century, “although the word was not used at the time.” In the late 1960s, the historian Wolfgang Sauer “define[d] clearly the concepts and theories used in interpreting Nazism and . . . evaluate[d] them . . . [by way of] the available evidence.” Academics might investigate fascism with then-­new university techniques, and the best hope lay in a “non-­Marxist” model of fascism, which would give fascism’s “image.” But this scholar of a non-­Marxist model also granted that different accounts made it difficult to tell if authors were “talking about the same subject.” In 1974 A. James Gregor, who penned an endless stream of books on the topic, alleged “generic fascism” in many putative Marxists: Fidel Castro, Black radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the German thinker Herbert Marcuse, whose Marxism itself avowed the fascism of American liberals. In the early 1980s, the respected historian Saul Friedländer reflected on the “phenomenon that has escaped us.” He argued for the inadequacy of Marxist and liberal notions of fascism, especially attending to the limitations of totalitarianism as a useful concept. The “mountain of monographs” could not hide “the theoretical desert.”4 All these ruminations went by the boards at the end of the 1980s, when suddenly, the Soviet Union broke up and communism in Russia disintegrated. In the American triumphalism that followed, totalitarianism was reinstated as a satisfactory description of US enemies. A famous study from 1995 pushed aside the focus on fascism and refreshed totalitarianism for those interested in the Cold War. Abbott Gleason, a historian and international relations specialist, published Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. As a young man, Gleason had participated in the student revolts of the 1960s that had led to the undermining of the accepted political categories. As a mature academic, however, he revisited these Cold War categories with more respect. Gleason argued that totalitarianism could be employed normatively or descriptively, depending on the individual’s intent either to understand or to praise or blame. He presumed that intent was personal and not communal. He also thought that a speaker or writer deploying totalitarian could escape its expressive force. Thus, the “popular usage” of politicians and journalists was “without much precision.” They might throw around the prose trivially

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and irresponsibly and in a partisan way, and more liberal people might oppose the concept while conservatives might respect it. All this was normative. But serious students could give the totalitarian “greater precision,” defining it “more rigorously” and making it “more analytical.” Academics could inspect totalitarianism for scholarly benefit. Gleason’s book thus reviewed the intricate scholarly history of totalitarianism, ultimately defending the juxtaposition of National Socialism to Soviet communism. Gleason dissected various models, deferring to the “theologians” of totalitarianism. There could be fifteen points of similarity, or five generalizations, or five points, or six traits. All these nuanced discussions helped us refine our thinking. For Gleason, scholars could employ totalitarianism to analyze and describe but not to arouse or provoke. When they chose the former approach over the latter, they would conclude that US policy during the Cold War had not been perfect but was warranted because the USSR resembled Nazi Germany in relevant respects. Gleason’s favored academic experts had played a positive role in their explication of the totalitarian and contributed to public understanding of the dangers faced by the United States from 1947 to 1989.5 Fascism Infiltrates the American Past Gleason had his greatest impact during the vainglorious period after the collapse of the USSR, when Americans congratulated themselves on their virtue. But the left liberals of the 1970s continued to be a presence. Once the euphoria dissipated, the totalitarian faded while a new and growing concentration on fascism occurred. In reading it into the nation’s deeper past, the community of left liberals culminated the earlier fits and starts that earlier had seen fascism’s entry into the American story. In 1940 John Corbin’s Two Frontiers of Freedom had fascists opposed to George Washington, and two years later George Fort Milton had written Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column. Yet the reasoning in these atypical works did not take hold. In the mid-­1950s, social scientists and historians basically worried about the irrationality of the American extreme right and its connection to European fascism. Richard Hofstadter had nevertheless extended his agenda about the paranoid style into the late nineteenth century and condemned the populists. He thus contributed an ancestry for Joseph McCarthy that led back to earlier agrarian discontent. But although Hofstadter and his kin repudiated fascism in their exploration of their present and of the American past, the projection of their views back into the late nineteenth century had consequences. It might be inferred from Hofstadter’s meditations that some sort of prefascism had led to the populists themselves.

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But historians had so far not systematically contended that the populists or their McCarthyite successors were fascists.6 Victor Ferkiss, a historically minded political scientist, did visit this problem in the mid-­1950s. Fascism was “an indigenous growth” in the United States—­as Ezra Pound had demonstrated. Although Ferkiss shifted his ground, elements of the fascism of the 1930s lurked around during the 1950s. These elements originally “arose logically” from populism, although some time would pass for the American variety to corrupt constitutional institutions in the way the European variety had corrupted Italy and Germany.7 A more significant event occurred in 1959 with the publication of a brilliantly imaginative book, Slavery. Its author, Stanley Elkins, had studied with Hofstadter at Columbia. A series of connected studies, Slavery had one section that decisively illuminated US history as fascistic. In “Slavery and Personality,” Elkins argued that the slave-­owning South operated like the Nazi death camps and produced a submissive personality type, “the Sambo.”8 Historians, Black and white, did not deny Elkins’s innovative genius but did condemn “the concentration camp analogy.”9 One of the more important and successful books of PhD historians, Slavery still had few defenders among professionals, who censured it as willful and extravagant. For some, the volume implied racism on the part of Elkins himself. He rejected autonomy for the slaves and denied them a culture eked out in difficult and demeaning circumstances. Elkins particularly incensed the Marxist inclined. For them, he neglected to see that the master-­slave relationship involved a dialectic of freedom. The masters held the whip hand, but their power degraded them, while an unquenchable desire for liberty defined the slaves. Cautious Cold War liberal historians would also not condemn their country. Skittish about using the word fascist, those in Hofstadter’s orbit rather opted for notions about “forces of the right,” much less fighting and frightening language. Hofstadter’s influence would have a permanent effect on the reputation of populism. But though the issue of a southern agrarian fascist movement had been rumored during the 1950s, in the end historians rejected Elkins’s link of the American past to fascism. Enter the left liberals a decade later. To them, fascism bloomed in the American past. European historians had ascertained the precursors to fascism on the Continent in the theories of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau and the practice of the Jacobins and Maximilien Robespierre during the worst days of the French Revolution. Now, during the 1970s and long after, historians of the United States disagreed and urged that the impulse to fascism antedated the French Revolution. Their own New World cultivated it. The reasoning initially found fascism there in the late nineteenth century, where Hofstadter had set up a beachhead. Again,

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the rebuff to Hofstadter was oblique, for while he had promoted paranoia in the American past, he had avoided fascism. Now a later cohort of scholars found it everywhere. Many historians of slavery now urged that at least the American South had a “Herrenvölk democracy.” This German-­English phrase meant a democracy, but one limited to a master race. A growing unanimity can be traced from the publication in 1967 of Pierre L. van den Berghe’s Race and Racism. Some of these ideas were taken up by the more than distinguished historian of the American South, C. Vann Woodward, who had a connection to the Nashville Agrarians and was a bearer of their complex ideas about the possibilities of southern fascism. Agreement grew into the twenty-­first century.10 In the present-­day world, historians argued, Germany had learned from its racism and Holocaust, whereas the United States, in respect to African-­Americans, had not.11 Fascist tentacles now extended back into the seventeenth century—­ long before the European starting date of the French Revolution. Historians began not merely with the introduction of slavery but also with the grinding down of Native America.12 They explored the settlement of the great West and the “exterminationist” impulses evident in the wars against the Indians. Hitler himself had brought this to the attention of historians. In his sometimes loony monologues later compiled as “the table talks,” he had spoken of the National Socialist expansion into eastern Europe. For him, the removal of the peoples there and the planting of Aryans in their place recalled American policy in relation to the “redskins.” Historians of the Third Reich first disclosed these meandering ideas, as well as many others, as evidence of a maddened Hitler’s grip on his toadies.13 Rather than regarding Hitler’s ideas as exhibiting psychosis, however, US historians were now refining them. The ethnic cleansing of Native Americans became a theme of the learned, and books about American genocide grew into a small industry. The narrative did not just cover the European populating of the American West but dawned with the first bloody contacts of the Euro-­Americans and the Native peoples. Europeans might stipulate Robespierre as the first fascist. The story of the American Holocaust had Christopher Columbus at the onset. The policies, according to one journal, easily meet “current [2017] definitions of ‘genocide.’ ”14 Killing off the Native Americans continued through the eighteenth century. As one scholar maintained, “Today we would consider this [early war-­making on the Indians] a form of genocide.” During the American Revolution itself, George Washington conducted a “genocidal campaign.” What was called settler colonialism had matured in America from the eighteenth century on. While the destruction of the Native American communities across the continent differed in scale, intensity, and duration from

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what the Nazis had done on the eastern front from 1941 to 1945, the comparison was justified. With the opening of the trans-­Mississippi West from the 1830s, the annihilation of the Indians grew as a fascist enterprise. The cases of America and Germany were “remarkably similar national projects . . . with genocidal consequences for allegedly ‘inferior’ peoples.” America in its expansion and the Nazis in World War Two “bear an unsettling and disturbing resemblance to each other.”15 Defined in line with the United Nations’ elaboration of the idea in 1948, the genocide, another scholar told us, “was drawing to a close” by around 1900. It had been “economic, cultural, legal, political, and religious—­and involved armed force, including massacres.”16 George Washington, whom John Corbin had written about as a destroyer of fascism in America, was now seen as an instigator of it.17 At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most well-­known American historians, had declared the pioneers’ march to California as indispensable to American democracy. The Turner thesis was a magnet for historians of the United States for three generations. By 2000, however, Turnerian democracy had turned into fascism. Ironically, American historians shared Hitler’s idea about US growth. Were they fascists themselves, or was an imputation of fascism guilt by association? By the early twenty-­first century, fascism, which historians were using to talk about the antebellum South and westward expansion, enlarged to incorporate national and presidential history and crept up to 1900 and beyond. One admired book argued that the northern politics of the Jacksonian period and those of pre–­Civil War America evidenced “völkisch” democracy. Fascism “fluttered at the edges” of the sacrificial heroism that pervaded the triumphal ideas after the Civil War. In a widely distributed textbook, a Pulitzer Prize winner wrote that Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism had imperial ambitions in foreign policy, and “it potentially edged toward fascism.”18 Of course, such a calculation had antedated the twenty-­first century. Herbert Croly had first made it when fascism looked more benign. Now Ku Klux Klansmen of the 1870s, according to scholars, had personified American fascists, and when these scholars scrutinized the revived Klan of the 1920s, they found “characteristically fascist” aspects. Simultaneously, African-­American literary figures, mainly based in the North during the same interwar period, proclaimed “Black fascisms” in wanting to craft their own dominant culture.19 Historians were sketching a history of how fascism had contaminated America. Moreover, in an ingenious complement to these developments, some historians took the political spectrum from communist left to fascist right that had arisen at the end of the New Deal and read it further into the American past. Onto this construct they stapled a version of Richard

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Hofstadter’s idea that a disordered politics of mood and temper might appear anywhere but typically jumped up on the right. Thus, some scholars regurgitated all American history as if it reprised the 1930s, writ large. A four-­hundred-­year battle ensued among fascistically inclined forces. From 1600 on, in the New World, a “repressive” or “right-­wing” populism, a “hard right,” and fascism interacted. We had a political genus that had these three species. The first two had elements of fascism, “a particularly deadly form of right-­wing populism.” Then historians with this set of concepts asked, Whose politics dominated in America? The answer: those crusading for right-­wing populism always had a significant and enduring impact; they got “too close for comfort” to supreme power and to the ideas of ordinary Americans. As soon as the Euro-­Americans had come to the New World, they enslaved Blacks, wiped out Indians, and spread white supremacist ideas outward from North America. An early set of incidents in the Virginia of the 1670s—­known as Bacon’s Rebellion—­became a marker of fascism, and the Revolutionary War was judged to be “a repressive populist movement.” Jacksonian democracy, anti-­Masonry, and anti-­Catholicism were all rightist movements. In the 1860s, the new Republican Party continued the Jacksonian program of “anti-­Indian genocide.” The KKK in the post-­Reconstruction South spread “fascist doctrines.” Teddy Roosevelt’s progressivism spun off from an offensive populism and paralleled unpleasant movements in Europe. The new Klan during the 1920s, like TR, had in it the rudiments of fascism but also functioned within “a pluralist political system built on deeply undemocratic foundations.” During the 1930s, Black southerners were especially aware of the similarities between Germany and Klan-­like dealings with African-­Americans. In the Midwest, fascism formed the mass-­based populism that tried to destroy the New Deal, which itself was the primary force behind the growth of a repressive state apparatus.20 Perhaps three exceptions existed to unraveling the main facets of American history as fascist. The experts, mostly though not entirely, did not touch the politics of the late eighteenth century. Lincoln, though not his party, also got off the hook, except for a few minor attempts by historians in the South to identify him with Hitler. Excused, finally, were some, though not all, elements of the New Deal. The chronicle of America to the period of World War Two set the stage for the postwar era. In general, to recent professional historians, the United States in the modern world struggled with various conservative movements that in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries were muddied by fascism.21 These re-­visions exemplify two competing ideas in the philosophy of history. The first is the supposed fallacy of presentism: the failure to appreciate

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the past for its own sake, and the temptation to impose on it the values or truths of the present. In the case of fascism, for some antipresentists, historians were inflicting on earlier periods a notion that was misplaced. With the condescension of the contemporary, they were measuring the past by their own limited morality. In truth, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The second idea, at variance with the first, is a view about problems of conceptual change, and how it functions in history. From the perspective of those who might be called narrativists, the present threw light on the past. In this understanding, the passage of time, the transformation of the present into the past, equips us with the apparatus to grasp the past in maxims unavailable before today. It is wrong to suggest that if there is no name, there is nothing to be named. Fascism could exist avant la lettre and may have been at work in America in 1500. Yet we could not identify it properly until hundreds of years later, when issues became codified during the 1930s.22 These contrasting discernments are connected to rival ideas of historical learning. For the enemies of presentism, each long-­ago period is unique and might only remind us that we are on our own. Or history might be only a “higher entertainment,” invaluable for providing us with an aesthetic sense of our place in the world; we find in history a discipline of reason that can make us celebrate, or weep, akin to poetry or the novel. On the other hand, other philosophers more at ease with presentism—­from Marx to George Santayana—­have urged that the past is a teacher, a distant mirror.23 There are echoes of the present in olden times. History repeats itself or can repeat itself if we are too ignorant to gain useful knowledge from it. More Theorists While American historians who were US nationals condemned their own past, perhaps more detached academics continued to worry about the theoretical concerns of definition. After celebrations of the end of the Cold War diminished, Abbott Gleason’s certainty about the legitimacy of totalitarianism changed into an extended and complicated debate about the constitution of fascism.24 In 2000 one scholar constructed a “multivariate ranking” of 1930s fascist groups.25 In 2002 an international group of thirty-­one experts debated the nature of fascism, neofascism, postfascism, or too many fascisms.26 In a 2016 survey of varieties of fascism, the author wrote of an “intuitive grasp” of it, but of a system that “mutates.” We had a range of fascisms, various forms, phases, styles, or relatives. We might build an “ideal type” in the manner of Max Weber or conceive fascism as a “psychic condition.” Yet the analyst

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could “misuse” fascism or assess it “arbitrarily,” since studying it had “polemical functions.” However, despite the “verbal looseness,” the researcher could honestly hunt for the meaning of this political item, and pinpoint “generic fascism” “identified with Hitler and Stalin,” because fascism had “an essential character.”27 A global and historical report of 2017 alleged that “few scholars actually agree on what fascism and populism actually are” but still claimed that populism stood “between democracy and dictatorship.”28 That same year, 2017, the World Policy Journal dedicated an issue to the topic, “Fascism Rising,” with articles on the fascism of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.29 Another historian in 2018 reminded us that Nietzsche and Heidegger lurked behind the rise of neofascism, “a new Fascist international.”30 With a chair in political theory at Yale, Jason Stanley wrote How Fascism Works in 2018. “Fascist politics,” which did not need to lead to a “fascist state,” interested him. His investigation concerned “the roots of fascist thought,” “pre-­fascist” sentiment in America, and “the centrality of US history to fascism.”31 In 2019, another scholar sought a “new” fascism that “reloads the old problematics of mimetic contagion, community, and myth via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.”32 Two widely cited scholars, Robert Paxton of Columbia and Timothy Snyder of Yale, stood out in this chaos of voices. In 1998 Paxton, a distinguished Europeanist, wrote “The Five Stages of Fascism,” which for a brief time was definitive and carved out a separate sphere for fascism. Paxton was leery of totalitarianism, for to him fascism was not so much a doctrine or ideology but a complex set of doings in the political realm that might not match what had gone on in the Soviet Union. His much-­discussed essay, in which he interpreted certain phases of political behavior, led to an even more important book of 2004, The Anatomy of Fascism. Snyder, a younger academic, was more attracted to the totalitarian. Especially in his volume Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), he pointed out the similar and grotesque actions that characterized the National Socialist and Soviet regimes. Taking issue with Paxton at an angle, Snyder saw the ugly and murderous use of state violence as binding the two states together.33 Snyder later found himself perplexed about fascist variants—­“schizo-­ fascism” and “not-­even fascism”—­amok in the contemporary world.34 Then, in early 2021, in the wake of a riot in the US capital that many believed the outgoing president, Donald Trump, had caused, both Paxton and Snyder joined forces. They wrote complementary essays on the connection of Trump and fascism.35

11

Fascism Everywhere, 1970–­2020

In 1964 in a standard ploy, the would-­be Republican presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller, a Northeastern moderate, called Barry Goldwater, the further-­right GOP contender who ultimately got the nod, a Nazi. Cold War liberals owned the fascist-­cognate affronts and attached them to rightists like Goldwater. Then, as I have indicated earlier, by the late 1960s the left was calling Cold War liberals like Rockefeller fascistic. Fascism and similar political swear words lost the ballast that had kept them at the right end of the spectrum, and soon they were everyone’s playthings. By the twenty-­first century, fascism had transformed into the more free-­floating signifer of its late-­1930s youth. In 2009 Fox News compared the new president, Barack Obama, to Mussolini.1 Here the right might finger the fascism of the left. In addition, according to one expert, not only were a lot of people charged with fascism. Now actual fascists mushroomed. In the early days of the internet—­ the 1990s—­as online discussions grew longer, the probability that someone would compare someone to Hitler approached 100 percent. By Obama’s time, “fascists . . . [were] a lot less hypothetical.”2 World War Two was no longer a living memory for most people, and fascism was not front and center in the minds of Americans as it was during the 1930s and 1940s. But when it did occupy thought, it had become extricated from the place it had held from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. Unmoored Fascism? Perhaps, however, the notion of unmooring is too clear-­cut. Fascism confounded people as a sign of disrespect through the 1930s, and while World War Two tacked it down, modest dissent from the right always existed on

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Dr. Seuss, Waiting for the Signal from Home, 1942 cartoon in the magazine PM. (Image courtesy of its owner, University of California, San Diego)

its use by the left. We may cite events as early as 1942. To impose ideological consistency on its enemies, US officials during the war put the Japanese on a par with the Germans and the Italians by denoting them all as fascists, but the enemies differed. No one worried about the Italians; Nazis alarmed everyone; Americans hated the Japanese the most. After Pearl Harbor, non-­ Asian Americans on the West Coast panicked about the Japanese-­American citizens whom they disliked in any event. Soon, after several decisions in Washington, law enforcement rounded up US nationals of Japanese descent and placed them in what were called internment camps. Less charitable commentators used detention or concentration. Unsurprisingly, some observers agreed that these communities in the far West—­and other such facilities for POWs and would-­be security risks—­confirmed that fascism was coming to America. As one comment went: the United States was “entering a period of fascism . . . the end of democracy as we know it.”3 Although the critics of the incarceration did not expatiate on isolationism, they elaborated what the America First Committee had stressed: a war supposed to fight fascism might bring fascism to the United States. The internment camps directed attention

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to the fascism perhaps latent in the New Deal. One astounding illustration of this belief could be found in some of the wartime cartoons of the beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss.4 Toward the end of the war, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom took the same line of reasoning—­atypical for the Europeans, who almost exclusively used fascism to excoriate the right in the United States. Hayek saw fascism in the economic policies of New Dealers. In 1964 in the film Dr. Strangelove, the liberal president Merkin Muffley had several fascist-­inclined advisors in addition to his ex-­Nazi Dr. Strangelove. But these hints that liberalism cloaked fascism did not drift to the mainstream until the era of Vietnam removed fascism as a sour word that liberals might bring to bear on those to their right. Cold War politicians lost their trademark slander, and had it stuck on them because the left saw them pursuing a tyrannical and aggressive policy against a small and backward country. For a moment, the centrist politicians returned fire when Watergate sullied the Republican administration of Richard Nixon. His Democratic opponents briefly rescued fascism as invective that again might blemish only men like Nixon on the right. But fascism, like a plague, now infected all politics. One scholar argued that fascism was making a global comeback by the late 1960s. The rally had begun in 1964 with Goldwater, who duplicated the early methods of Mussolini and Hitler, and who could be linked “to the rise of the Nazi and fascist regimes.” But fascism could also pillory Cold Warriors as well as strident opponents of the Vietnam War and the American social order. Indeed, “the modern fascist . . . of the 1960s” could also take in the Black Muslim, “close in spirit and behavior to the storm-­trooper . . . of Hitler.”5 Who was not a fascist? Bertram Gross, an old FDR supporter, became a noted apostate. In Friendly Fascism of 1980, Gross wrote in the tradition of the journalist John T. Flynn. This wayward Democrat had identified an American fascism with the deficit spending that the 1930s and 1940s had normalized in the United States. Now, some forty years later, Gross—­a former New Deal planner—­linked fascism to “corporate capitalism.” In 1980 he uncovered a fascist tradition that contained FDR, Cold War Democrats, and their moderate Republican allies. While he deprecated those “who quibble[d] about labels,” he believed that “the propensity toward friendly fascism” ran “deep in American society.” “A little bit of neofascism” might even exist in those who had “antifascist credentials.” Gross moreover worried about “incipient fascism,” “parafascism,” and “creeping fascism,” although the chart of fascist species he produced only compared “classic” with “friendly” fascists.6

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Reagan-­Era Fascism In 1981 Ronald Reagan, heralded as a great conservative, began an unusually popular and effective presidency. He officiated over the crucial period of 1987–­88 that anticipated the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. Among liberals, he was regularly chastised in a standard way. Possibly the most elegant slap occurred in 1985, in the first rendition of Tony Kushner’s play A Bright Room Called Day. Kushner was an author, screenwriter, and of course playwright, eventually receiving a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for one of his works. In various versions, which were staged in different venues over thirty-­five years, the complex theater of A Bright Room Called Day compared the Republican president to Hitler by moving back and forth between Germany in 1932–­33 and the United States during the 1980s. In 2013 President Barack Obama placed the National Medal of Arts around Kushner’s neck.7 Kushner, however, was a minority voice during the 1980s, for the GOP dominated the conversation; and during the new period of an unchained melody of fascism, Republicans applied it to their left liberal opponents. The left liberals had recently dishonored the Cold War liberals as fascists. In a novel turn, the right under Reagan used the totalitarian circle to spatter the left liberals. If one had conservative opinions, to the left lay liberalism, to the right fascism; if these two extremes met on a loop, the liberals reminded one of fascists: ^L. . . . . . . . Con. . . . . . . . F^

Among conservatives during the 1980s, the identification hinged on the penchant of the fascistically inclined liberals to induce people to believe what some authority thought appropriate for them. The left liberals had repressive, “politically correct” views at a time when Republicans had a language of individualism and free enterprise. Everywhere one looked, fascists sprung up. In 1980, for example, the lawyer and Harvard Law School faculty member Alan Dershowitz told some “radical feminists” who wanted a ban on pornography that they were fascists. He was quoted: “Feminist fascists are no better than any other kinds of fascists.”8 Dershowitz was concerned with a group of female intellectuals who threat­ ened him, but fascism among women of mind was more complex. Susan Sontag, a spectacularly famous New York City writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, was specially noted for her interest in photography. In 1975 she wrote “Fascinating Fascism,” an essay-­review for the New York Review of Books. In it, Sontag argued that fascism had a visual aesthetic that continued to entrance popular culture. This observation corroborated what had been

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apparent in American political symbols during the 1930s and in movies and even cartoons from the 1940s. After receiving much praise for her essay, Sontag began a long interest in political ideology. In 1982 in a Manhattan speech, she started another controversy by saying that communism was “in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face.” Here she conceived of fascism by way of the similar iconography in Italy, Germany, and the USSR, together with the regimes’ stressing their far-­off goals.9 But not everyone still clearly included Mussolini’s regime as fascist. Another important expounder of fascism was Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a political scientist who taught at Georgetown University. She influenced both academic and governmental circles during the 1980s. Kirkpatrick formulated a critique of Democratic statesmen. She thought they had misconceived the mentality of the Soviets, falsely assuming that the United States could constructively engage with communism. Kirkpatrick targeted former president Jimmy Carter, whom Reagan defeated in 1980, although she exaggerated the difference between the Democrats’ approach and hers. While Carter did not stray far from animosity toward Russia, he urged that the United States get over its fear of the USSR. This “inordinate” terror had prompted despots to announce their anticommunism to obtain US assistance. Kirkpatrick’s work, particularly a 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” got the attention of people around Reagan, and she then served in his administration as ambassador to the United Nations. There Kirkpatrick became known for distinguishing between autocratic and revolutionary regimes. The latter were communist and implacably resisted America. The United States could stomach and engage with the former. Kirkpatrick’s status during the 1980s as a Reagan celebrity helped revitalize totalitarianism. While it might be out of fashion, it still had the power to mobilize. Indeed, she published in the earlier tradition that sorted out how political scientists might correctly construe totalitarianism to point to a nation overseen by ideological zealots rather than by more compromising and run-­of-­the-­mill dictators. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s reasoning in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Kirkpatrick also foreshadowed in university circles Abbott Gleason’s Totalitarianism. Nonetheless, writing before the USSR became history, Kirkpatrick emphaszied the contemporary communists as the only totalitarian states of interest. Earlier Cold War liberals, Democrats and Republicans, had deemed some regimes authoritarian but not totalitarian. Kirkpatrick made this her mantra. Preferring “autocratic,” she pronounced on regimes “neither democratic nor totalitarian”—­they did not have the fanatic desire to perfect or to clease human nature that Kirkpatrick saw in communism. Her scholarly expertise was Argentina, a favored spot for

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ex-­National Socialists. For her, Argentina typified the despotic, a flawed government but not one that the United States should treat as life-­threatening or like the USSR. At the same time, Kirkpatrick made one’s head spin. Argentinian politics might have lacked rudiments of fascism, but she also argued that the regime might be “made in fascist Italy,” “with Nazi or fascist sympathies” and “with frank admiration for Mussolini.” Argentina also could exemplify “left fascism.”10 It is hard for me not to conclude that Kirkpatrick’s Reagan-­era waffling was swayed by the stupefying success of Evita, a muscial by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the English composer and producer of theatrical sensations in the last part of the century. On Broadway in 1979, Evita—­in show tunes—­told the story of Eva Perón, the prostitute with a heart of gold. She married Juan Perón, the Argentinian leader whose reign was the subject of Kirkpatrick’s scholarship. In the musical, Eva was credited with making her husband’s regime friendly and compassionate. On her European trip in act 2, performers likened her husband to Mussolini at a time when the latter’s repute was at a nadir in his native land. Shocked, Eva successfully proved Juan’s detractors wrong. Upon returning to Argentina, she humanized its government. Whatever the influences, Kirkpatrick’s Argentina resembled Webber’s and Evita’s—­it was not a liberal democracy, but it was only unfairly described as fascist.11 In impressing these ideas onto early twentieth-­century Europe, I believe that Kirkpatrick perceived matters as had Arendt but, I think, differently from Sontag. Mussolini, who had invented fascism and took up the totalitarian to designate his rule, might not be totalitarian or fascist in any true sense. For Kirkpatrick, the Italian Mussolini who was called fascist and totalitarian was only autocratic. Pervasive and Confounding Fascisms Toward the end of the twentieth century, the floodgates opened. Left liberal scholars continued to see fascism’s growth in fringe political groups on the right, just as similar intellectuals had done during the 1930s. But more important, radio, television, and internet sages easily located the birth of many of these minor and strange entities in the failed attempts of Goldwater Republicans to obtain power. Barry Goldwater was regularly named as the ancestor of protofascism. Underground fiction nourished this new fascism. William L. Pierce, writing as Andrew Macdonald, authored a hateful novel, The Turner Diaries (1978), in which the covert “Organization” killed Jews and African-­ Americans to establish a “White Race” government and to overcome “the

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System.” The Organization was a much-­inflated caracature of real entities in the last part of the twentieth century: the John Birch Society, inaugurated during the 1950s by the wealthy anticommunist businessman Robert W. Welch; the American Nazi Party of the less savory George Lincoln Rockwell, shot by one of his own supporters in 1967; and various cliques of Lyndon LaRouche, who founded a movement named after himself during the 1970s and ran for president in every election from 1976 to 2004.12 All three of these men had erratic callings, but all managed to gain adherents whose views were cited as evidencing a now-­conventional American danger. The noteworthy aspect of these groups—­as well as their predecessors in the 1930s—­is that they sometimes actually called themselves American Nazis or neo-­Nazis.13 Why would they so identify? They evidently were not engaging in the same linguistic enterprise in which most speakers of American English were participating. I am inclined to see this as a mark of cultural disability or isolation in respect to the social surroundings in which language is learned. The peculiar language of the self-­proclaimed fascists may be a whiff of invincible ignorance or may have a mental health component. Yet grasping matters this way is obviously biased and is entangled with many other complex issues concerning the nature of rationality. I do not have a better understanding but at least alert the reader to the problem. An example of how this problem was manifested occurs in the movie Falling Down from 1993. In the film, Michael Douglas performed as a down-­on-­ his-­luck, divorced, and unemployed engineer formerly working in defense production. Douglas considered himself a respectable middle-­of-­the-­road and middle-­class citizen, but in attempting to get to the birthday party of his daughter living with her mother, Douglas flipped out and went on a rampage. He visited a gun shop, and after a conversation with its owner, an American neo-­Nazi, Douglas shot the right-­winger. The murdered owner was a standard Welch-­Rockwell-­LaRouche type, and Douglas found the man’s politics repellent. At the same time, as many critics had it, the United States had a fascist flavor that the Douglas character exhibited, although he would never think of himself as a fascist.14 Learned commentators had no such hesitantcy. Fascism could package itself as “maverick conservatism” or “progressive anti-­elitism,” and could influence “moderate right-­wing forces.” Yet for these observers, many Americans also embodied “traditional fascism” and might participate in “fascist internationalism.” European “neofascists” toured the United States to greet American neo-­Nazis, who could exhibit “clerical fascism,” “neofascism,” or “crypto-­fascism.” In a usage that defeats even me, one observer assigned some Americans to “gonzo” fascism.15

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Populism, which had been co-­opted by left liberals as imitating fascism, took on an even darker meaning when fascists themselves got hold of it. According to one interpretation, populists did not complain when they were referred to by this word that now had an off-­putting aura, for it covered up their more depraved “quasifascist” politics. Populism “blurred” the distinction between “ultraconservatives” and fascists.16 But these fascist-­like populists got defined in erratic ways. The true America, for this new brand of fascist, was built on individualism, small business, and small agriculture. For Mussolini, the original fascist, governance was corporate if nothing else. The later populist-­fascists dreaded the managerial and the collective.17 On the other side, some Protestant evangelicals who had voted for Ronald Reagan—­Christian nationalists—­flung the mud of fascism at their opponents. These evangelicals found secularism and anti-­Protestant sexuality at fascism’s heart. They urged that in Germany, it was homosexuals who had given birth to Nazism. In turn, critics examined and squelched these evangelicals. Uneducated Protestants exhibited one segment of fascist America. In 2006 Chris Hedges wrote American Fascists. That same year, Michelle Goldberg was more measured in Kingdom Coming and made academic references. She quoted Robert Paxton, who in his Anatomy of Fascism of 2005 had refined his celebrated 1998 essay, “The Five Stages of Fascism.” An American fascism would come in such a way as not to panic most people, its rise “gradual and subtle,” said Paxton. In her analysis, Goldberg mingled Christians, traditionalists, and fascists. “Social conservatism is not in itself fascistic,” she wrote, but it had “frightening echoes” of fascism. These writings came out just in time for the 2008 presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. Democrats painted McCain’s vice-­presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, with a fascist tint when she held hands with “fascist Christian fundamentalists,” just as the outgoing Republican vice president, Dick Cheney, had been colored fascist, along with the succeeding president, Obama.18 The opponents of working-­class Protestants surely did not have it their own way. In a substantial book of 2007, Jonah Goldberg took the ideas of the renegade New Deal liberal Bertram Gross and Reagan-­era Republicans and extended them. His Liberal Fascism made a case for conservatives that fascism was a disease of the left, and indeed a sickness of all American liberals. We could find “the first fascist movement” in the French Revolution. This left movement began the hunt for a politics that would go beyond politics to an earthly paradise, led by experts who believed in the perfectability of man. Such politics soon allied with a strong and communitarian state, and World War One energized its ideas. Surely Mussolini explicated these ideas, but in

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the United States Herbert Croly most presciently propounded a “pre-­fascist” worldview, and then the people elected Woodrow Wilson, the twentieth century’s “first fascist dictator.” Wilson’s ideology came to fruition in Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, whose signature programs aimed at a “Fascist Utopia.”19 Glen Yeadon, in The Nazi Hydra in America (2008), disagreed, calling fascism a right-­wing and not a left-­wing phenomenon. But in Yeadon’s scenario, the danger did not come from the religious, and fascism had just reached US shores. The nation had titantically struggled with industrial capitalists. For decades, the government under Republicans had been “edging toward fascism by placing the interests of corporations above the interests of the people.” Nonetheless, fascism conquered only when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. In response, the Republican administration of George W. Bush completed war-­making plans that had been in the making for decades and in 2003 declared hostilities against Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein. At the time, Bush had told Americans that the terrorism was like “fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism,” and spoke of a new “Axis of evil”—­not Germany, Italy, and Japan but Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. After all, his father, former president George H. W. Bush, had called Hussein an “Arab Hitler.” Yeadon argued that this language had hidden the junior Bush’s own aim to install fascism in America under the pretext of war with Iraq. Now in 2008, when Yeadon published The Nazi Hydra at the close of the Bush presidency, America had a “fascist character” over which Obama would preside.20 Another book of the same year, The Rise of the Fourth Reich, was less certain. “A fascist Fourth Reich” in the United States was defined as a state with massive surveillance carried out by secret societies and bureaus ensconced in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The author, Jim Marrs, wrote that “by most criteria, the once-­free constitutional republic of the United States had become a National Socialist nation.” Yet Americans still had a chance: “The philosophies of fascism are alive and active in modern America,” but citizens might still resist becoming “cowed and subservient members of an increasingly National Socialist system.”21 Following Jonah Goldberg, Dinesh D’Souza a decade later damned Democrats as fascists. The producer of many strident books and independent movies, D’Souza nonetheless made problems for the study of “left [= liberal] fascism.” Even many who shared his views criticized his 2017 The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left as too extreme. For some left liberal historians, as we have seen, the American Revolution was a repressive

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movement of genocidal white Protestants that saddled the New World with fascism. For D’Souza, the revolution preserved the antifascist virtues of the ancient world—­moral standards that were undebatable but ever under siege because of human imperfection.22 Meanwhile, Real Fascists Thrive in America In the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first, fascism had reverted to its Depression-­era usage as a multipurpose negative word with which people of one political breed could brand another. Fascism’s contradictory or opposed empirical components continued to bewilder the student. Simultaneously, ruling politicians of the two dominant parties in the United States had ignored real fascists—­German National Socialists—­in their midst, and indeed had secreted them into the country and then covered up their existence. Only the second decade of the twentieth-­first century fully revealed this history, finally made the subject of a clutch of academic monographs. After World War Two, Americans may have had more to panic about from the intelligence services of their government than from fascist foreign statesmen, disgruntled or crazed citizens, or outlandish eggheads. The FBI, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, and various security services in Democratic Washington engaged in fighting the communists were also smuggling Nazis into the United States. The Republican James Conant, Harvard’s former president, assisted them. He had gone on to high positions in US-­occupied Germany after leaving his job in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As officials mobilized resources for the Cold War, the confrontation with Russia overwhelmed the attempt to destroy National Socialism. The victors worked in the western zones of Germany to recruit scientific, technical, or security personnel for help against communism. Americans cleared Germany of its doubtful bureaucrats by introducing them into the United States. Many of these Germans were out-­and-­out Nazis of some import in the Third Reich. Under a program called Project Paperclip, researchers and engineers came to the United States, and various US agencies sponsored them. America also protected these technocrats from Nazi hunters. Sometimes the former National Socialists acquired citizenship and peaceful, prosperous, and prestigious careers in the West. Big fish like the high-­level scientist Wernher von Braun, the premier physicist behind the German attempt to build nuclear weapons, were suspect but not investigated. Some of the worst of the Hitlerites circumvented prosecution when authorities spirited them to countries in Latin America that had fraternized with fascism. The US government sent Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” to Bolivia. Josef Mengele, the warped medical man who had

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Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele in the 1978 movie The Boys from Brazil. (Twentieth Century-­Fox, courtesy of the Everett Collection) 

carried out horrific experiments on human beings, settled in South America, bolting to Paraguay and then Brazil until his death in 1979. During the 1970s, Hollywood gave voice to public misgivings about these people. In the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man of 1976, an ex-­Nazi oral surgeon went on a murderous rampage in Manhattan; and the character reminded many of Mengele. Terrified moviegoers reported being afraid to visit their dentists after the war criminal, living secretly in New York, tortured Hoffman using the tools of his trade. Then, in 1978, Gregory Peck played a fictionalized Mengele in The Boys from Brazil; he cloned Hitlers in a secret Brazilian clinic after the war. This film had an all-­star cast and acquired three Academy Award nominations.23 In 1979 the US Department of Justice set up an Office of Special Investigation (OSI) that tried to expose the nation’s dubious pro-­Nazi practices of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In some cases, reformers denaturalized and deported Germans whom authorities had not punished earlier. Active for some twenty years, the OSI battled with other governmental instrumentalities, its work usually unpublicized. In 2006, after the OSI’s disbandment, the Justice Department produced a confidential report on the office. But not until 2010, with the issuance of the report, was the story told of the ingress of National Socialists to the United States. Later scholars produced several books on the cover-­ups of ranking members of the Reich in America.24

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These were the Hitler VIPs. According to the Associated Press, ten thousand assumed Nazi war criminals, all told, had immigrated to the United States after World War Two. But since the 1970s, the government had initiated legal proceedings to expel just 137. Other sources reported that America had deported the last known alleged fascists, death-­camp guards in their nineties.25

12

Democracy and Fascism

Flowering in Italy, fascism did not take root in an American (or even an Anglo-­American) social order. Yet many US citizens have not resisted the temptation to understand their country by using the term. Two intertwined but distinct considerations—­the ancient controversy between the Old World and the New, and the American love affair with democracy—­help explain fascism as a way of explaining American ills. Europe and America The guiding lights for American political belief have often been Europeans. Thomas Jefferson’s affection for France in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s respect for England steered the early republic. The impact continued into the twentieth century—­witness the “advanced” New Dealers’ interest in Russia in contrast to Charles Lindbergh’s captivation by Germany. Or the administration of George W. Bush affirming a “New” Eastern Europe and denying the “Old” Western Europe. Nevertheless, despite seeking directions from the Old World, Americans looking across the Atlantic also had “a deeply felt sense of conflict with Europe,” “resentful, servile, or ambivalent,” as one historian put it. Hostility arose early, since the time of Euro-­American interactions from 1600 to 1750. Despite luxuriating in France in the late eighteenth century, Jefferson wrote of the “malignant darkness of life in Europe,” “a menacing Old World.” Reflective US nationals during the nineteenth century self-­consciously noted the uprightness of their own country and the unwholesomeness of Europe. On the “democratic scales of judgment,” Mark Twain “perpetually weighed and found [Europe] wanting.”1 During World War One, Woodrow Wilson would only “associate” with England and France

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and refused to be a full “ally.” “They” involved us in World War Two, and “their” spawn of communism forced us to enter the Cold War. The reverse has been true for the European intelligentsias. During the twentieth century, they had difficulty with their countries’ romance with US culture and, after World War Two, their leaders’ junior status in an American world. Everyday Europeans often welcomed the loutish and popular US politics that for centuries had distinguished sophisticated Europe from the United States. After World War Two, thinkers on the Continent, especially, picked up the dirtiest brush in their paint box and slapped it on the United States. German and French authors had a natural predisposition to view events within a familiar framework—­the tumult of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe—­that had implicated their scholarly ancestors or mentors. They believed that the shameful regimes in Europe had quickened in America, perhaps the mother of such regimes. In the early decades of the twenty-­first century, a new generation of academics with German-­American ties argued that the United States was “like Weimar,” echoing claims made in the early 1930s, the late 1940s, the high 1960s and the 1980s.2 In discussions about fascism, both Europeans and US nationals were continuing an argument about purity and impurity that was four centuries old. Americans blamed the troubles of the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and more recent public figures on fascist bacteria that had spread from the Old World to the New. Fascism was one way Americans had to castigate Europe for grievances about US provincialism. For the Europeans, fascism was undergirded by the crude disrespect and overbearing lack of manners paraded in the United States. Relearning US History The second, related consideration that illuminates the addiction to fascism may be what I have termed the US love affair with democracy. Americans have a complicated but fanciful version of their country’s beginnings that highlights decent constitutional restrictions. When a problem arises, many people feel that it could not originate in the comfortable and familiar, but rather arose in the faraway. The notion of fascism distances US citizens from their own past. Dangerous challenges did not come from America but must have migrated from overseas. “We” are all taught fairy tales about “our” history with our mother’s milk. It may not be possible for Americans to divest themselves of the mythology about a special land that they have soaked up in feeling, observation, and instruction, beginning before they were self-­aware. If a more grown-­up understanding of US history prevailed in the nation itself,

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equivocal politics might be as acceptable as apple pie. The Founders especially need to be rethought.3 The reigning political class in the British colonies consisted of well-­to-­do lawyers, successful colonial officials, some military figures, land speculators, plantation owners, businessmen, and gentry. Hamilton, one of those with the bleakest view of human nature, did not go far wrong when he spoke of his peers on whom organized society must rely as “the rich, the well born, and the able.” More generous, Jefferson spoke of “a natural aristocracy . . . of virtue and talent.” Hamilton, Jefferson, and their colleagues had many motives for fighting the American Revolution. High among these was anxiety—­ historians have estimated it as exaggerated if not baseless—­that Britain was moving to displace the locally dominant class with a new English crème de la crème, or at least to alter dramatically the regime in America in favor of British ideas. As one account of the revolutionary period has long held, the war was not about home rule, but who should rule at home. During the revolution, the Founders wanted to preserve what they had but also to avoid democracy, which they had learned about from the Greeks of two thousand years before. Not an everyday word during the eighteenth century, at least in newspapers, pamphlets, and public broadsides, democracy was doubtful. Such government, the Founders believed, favored the expedient over a prudent calculation of lasting economic realities. It might easily rely on affect instead of more colorless intellect, passion over rational dialogue. Worst of all, the direct management by a mass of men might lead to a tyranny, the arbitrary jurisdiction of a licentious leader who commanded frenzied mobs. Momentary majority appetites could easily sacrifice a minority. Euro-­American leaders worried about how to regulate a tendency to the democratic, and they believed that this issue had puzzled thinkers since the ancient Greeks. Historians have enumerated factors, absent in North America, that had constrained democracy in England.4 The thirteen colonies had no suppressive religion—­Roman Catholicism was anathema to hegemonic Protestants. Less traditional weight emanated from crown or aristocracy, formal or vernacular. Extended wealthy families—­socially prestigious and in proximity—­ held less sway. Americans never had the trustworthy communal authority of Europe but eternally searched for a substitute. England had moreover contained the democratic by making citizenship depend on the acquisition of property. Such acquisition, so the thinking went, set a high bar and limited participation in public to a group that would shun democratic vices. Because the Euro-­Americans could take land so easily from the Native peoples, property ownership became more routine—­and less a guarantee of correct thinking in a polity. Colonists had fretted over uprisings, from Bacon’s Rebellion in

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Virginia during the seventeenth century to the Paxton Boys in Pennsylvania during the mid-­eighteenth. Shays’s Rebellion in late eighteenth-­century Massachusetts is often persuasively alleged as the event that sparked the Constitutional Convention. All these fracases involved rampages by poorer, indebted folks who had no property, or who might be able to wrest it from the Indians yet could not be trusted to behave responsibly. The American higher classes balanced their notions about the tyranny they had defeated with an uncertain appreciation of the possibilities of ruling in their own new and upright nation. Lack of intelligence, education, or wealth inflated inborn human flaws, and leaders took disparities in status and position as inescapable and welcome. A regime might strive for the just, but order and necessary inequality had their role. Leaders brooded that the successful rebellion would empower the ordinary beneath them. The “democratical,” on whom the American Revolution depended, made claims and asserted prerogatives in its aftermath. The unscrupulous and unfit might endanger the new country. Leaders also granted, however, that a government must somehow base itself in “the people.” But the implications of Jefferson’s opening in the Declaration of Independence went far beyond the agreeable. Jefferson himself, whose writing acceded his real commitments, never thought that women or Indians or Blacks or the propertyless were to be accorded the egalitarian rights of “all men.” Even Founders more cynical than Jefferson, however, had to give a voice to the multitude, whatever the failings of democracy. Although Jefferson’s document had not acquired its remarkable place among American sacred texts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leaders believed any viable regime should encompass the “popular.” Citizens could and should make claims on the government, exercise the franchise, and select their rulers. The riddle was how to provide for the input of the vulgar while preventing the excesses that accompanied democracy. When the Founders agonized over democracy, they often additionally had in mind representative democracy, in which the people chose leaders to represent them. The unprivileged placed power into the hands of someone whom they selected to decide in their behalf. Yet we cannot assert that for the Founders, representative democracy cured democracy. In a representative democracy, the people might expect the representative to represent—­in the sense of duplicate or mirror—­the views of the ordinary. This was fallacious—­he only owed the people his best judgment. The electorate that gave the mandate should have an indirect connection to the elevation of its betters, and the independent action of the representative should be protected. The US Constitution evidences these assumptions. For well over one hundred years now, realistic explanations of the Founding era have occupied scholars,

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and an overwhelming majority of interpreters have essayed the Constitution as a cautious antidote to the tendencies of the two decades after 1763. An old story tells us about Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, in the summer of 1787, when he and others drafted the Constitution. When Franklin was leaving at the end of the meetings, a woman asked him: “Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?” He replied, “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.” This story, wrongly retold many times in the twenty-­first century, requires some explication. Historians have an artful phrase, “American republicanism,” for the ideology that the Constitution expressed, and that Franklin announced. This belief system had three components: reliance on virtue in the leaders; reverence for the leaders; and dilution of the power of those designated as the people. Corruption might debase governors—­appointed, elected, or chosen by birth. Americans looked to the vice they saw in England as exemplary of what they had to circumvent. Only vigilance in selecting leaders would combat endemic public immorality. A polity had to seek out worthy men, convince them to serve, and instill them with honor. Exhortation to avert venality helped define republicanism. Worried over the degeneracy of leaders, the makers of republicanism also presumed that ordinary Americans ought to admire the civic elite. Higher-­ ups must rule and were entitled to respect. Those with no claim to govern must esteem those who did. The Founders were saturated in a culture of deference that they wanted to perpetuate. Although power rested with the people, those in charge thought that they must strictly define “the people” and the entitlements of the people. The key to American republicanism in the Constitution is how the document tempered—­“filtrated”—­the power. “Leveling” concerned the Framers. The voice of the people resided not in a numerical majority but in a diminished collectivity that excluded most adults. Many white men with property counted, although this was a shaky base, since property was so widely distributed in the New World. The foundation of oversight should rest among a limited group with a stake in society. These stakeholders would have a critical but modulated input. Hamilton thought of an extended people as “the great beast.” Even Jefferson, in speech the friendliest to the people, wanted his favored white small-­propertied farmers educated for inhibited participation in affairs: the people would be tutored in matters of state to have them realize the complexities of ruling. Citizens should recognize the vulnerability of civilization and leave its arrangement to superior individuals. In referring to the people, the Founders meant a shrunken society. A republican polity rested on the worthy to whom this society ought voluntarily to submit. The polity hinged on a tortuous role for a narrowly defined citizenry.

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In looking at the Constitution, we must distinguish the checks and balances that permeate the document from the various attempts to water down the rule of the people. The checks and balances tell us that the Framers wanted to forestall agglutinations of “interest,” as they called it, and anticipated having influential communities pitted against one another. The dilution of the rule of the people speaks not to the Founders’ anxieties about competing groups, but about individuals acting without regard to the economic differences that produced incessant conflict for advantage. Interests were reasonable. A mob was not. Sensible statesmen wanted to circumvent the convergence of factions based mainly on calculation of financial gain, but they also wanted to preclude the irrational focus of the hoi polloi on some momentary gratification. Consequently, the voters in each state elect their state’s membership in the House of Representatives to serve for two years; the number of representatives from each state is fixed by its total number of inhabitants. Slaves were calculated as three-­fifths of an inhabitant, and Native Americans not at all. This was the most interesting example of the priorities of republicanism. The number of white residents and three-­fifths of the Black reckoned the number of representatives each state would have. But only some white males with property voted and thus had the rights of citizenship. State legislators (whom the voters of each state selected) empowered the two senators from each state, each chosen for a six-­year term. This is the paradigmatic example of what the Founders thought appropriate in governing a polity. The Senate distanced itself from the governed, and independent dignitaries composed it. The nation’s choice of its chief executive is the most complex example of republicanism and its detachment from democracy. Votes of the states picked the executive, and state population only loosely regulated the number of votes allocated to it. A state received two votes (for each senator) plus a vote for each member of its delegation in the House of Representatives. When someone “votes for the president,” then, that individual votes for a group of electors (or one elector, in states where polling is not statewide) pledged to that voter’s choice, although at times electors have disregarded their pledges. Moreover, the electors do not divide proportionately in accord with the percentage of the vote for each candidate in a state. Winner takes all, and a candidate who gets even a plurality of votes in a state obtains all that state’s electors. Something later called the Electoral College convenes after a presidential election. The electors from the states cast their ballots in the college. Finally, the Founders originally intended that this Electoral College would produce only a short list of candidates for the nation’s highest position. In the usual case, no candidate would win in the College, and the House of

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Representatives—­with each state having one vote—­would decide on a winner from the short list generated. After a president takes office, that politician designates for life the federal judges—­the members of the third branch of government. The president does so with the advice and consent of the Senate—­a very indirect form of popular rule in respect to the judiciary. The Framers themselves knew the imperfections of their deferential republic and contended with followers who often aspired to have more of a say. Validated by the first Congress, the Bill of Rights evidenced the compromised nature of the Constitution. These first ten amendments were not just an afterthought; entitlements were more widely shared. Despite the Founders’ unease and the subsidiary role of Jefferson’s ideas, republicanism had in it prescribed “rights” often sympathetic to the more democratic. Indeed, the nonparty state and rule by agreed-­on men of virtue shortly disclosed itself to be a fantasy. By the 1790s, rival notables had fought for respect and slandered their opponents to win even the temporary loyalty of the electorate. That is, in their behavior the Founders undermined both their republic and American republicanism. Deference at once came under attack, and the elite cultivated even the momentary favor of the people. Still, the avowedly democratic or the opportunistic had little appeal to leadership. It did not want to promote the active involvement of the ignorant, the illiterate, and those whose concern for the public had not been awakened; and so this first generation of US politicians kept a republican structure intact for thirty to forty years. They aimed not at democracy but something opposed to it. With the disputed election of John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson in 1824, and the election of Jackson in 1828, historians have recorded a significant change. The 1820s ushered in Jacksonian democracy. More generally available, suffrage opened even to white men without property, and Jackson himself gave confidence to the rude to believe they had legitimate opinions. Historians still write about the famous “levee” that succeeded Jackson’s inauguration. The uncouth attended en masse, and not ladies and gents. People of no rank shook the hand of the president. Yet Jackson’s enemies anointed him King Andrew when, as they saw it, he used his appeal to increase arbitrary power. Jackson and the movement he energized made ordinary white men think they were as worthy as those they elected. As the most important politician from 1816 to 1860, Jackson upended the submissive order of the Founders for a more improper democracy. In his own criticism of the Electoral College and the House of Representatives in choosing the president, Jackson allowed, “Experience proves that in proportion as agents to execute the will of the people are multiplied, there is danger of their wishes being frustrated.”5 During

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this period, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, in his Democracy in America, of the core difficulty of “the tyranny of the majority.” The 1830s initiated an era that some thirty years later would uplift the Declaration of Independence as a seminal document. The Foreign Founders So how should we construe Franklin’s characterization of the new regime? A republic, Franklin says to the woman, “if you can keep it.” For him, the people may not respect republican reticence and may demand more. Simultaneously, the story illustrates that anyone—­even someone without the right to vote—­ can accost the select few and probably will. We would, however, wrongly draw as the moral to this story that calamities accompanied the undoing of the Constitution’s republicanism and its transformation into democracy. Rather, we need to see that first, the Founders knew well the sort of governance they wanted and how it might be undermined. Second, the politics that later defined the United States differed from what was intended. Those who established the regime wanted to block what came to pass, thinking that it would result in charlatans that an unbridled citizenry would support. Heralding democracy as an untouchable and perfect political system not only takes us away from those we venerate. It also blinds us from comprehending what the Founders had in their heads: democracy had predictable weaknesses that they thought disqualified it as a favored regime. An unthinking dedication to democracy prevents us from examining some aspects of our public commitments. Civic respect for everyone necessitates respect for people whom the framing body thought should have no civic respect because they did not deserve such respect. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison were not traveling to our world. We might still look up to them, but we need to accept how far away their politics remain from ours. The Founders and their universe are remote. We can canonize them, but we should realize that they cannot reliably advise the present. We are estranged from them, and they ought to be strange to us. Simultaneously, if we had a better sense of our own practices and their imperfections, we might learn that any political system is likely to have standard predicaments. In part, the concern for fascism carries on a long quarrel between the United States and Europe. In a connected fashion, the worries about fascism indicate Americans’ not wanting to confront democracy’s quandaries. Such problems are dispelled by blaming them on some overseas monster.

conclusion

Fascism without Fascism

Political talk is puzzling, artful distortion. Much of politics is linguistic the­ ater, the showy and indiscriminate ejaculation of words. The evaluations of officials, entertainers, and pundits have a crooked relation to reality, and the scholarly analysis of politics is conducted with these evaluations. Falsehoods, exaggerations, and silly pleas are conveyed. Yet what is uttered is understood. Moreover, speechifying about civics seems to require the paradoxical and a kind of misdirection. We crave so much to have the authoritative that we wel­ come the nonrational to get it. The dictionary for governing has a softer or a harder vocabulary than accuracy demands; a romancing or a denouncing of what lies out there or is awaiting us. This dictionary is more directive than de­ scriptive. Fascism Comes to America has examined one small aspect of public communication to illuminate how the communication works, how it accounts for what is going on but simultaneously misapprehends what is going on. In the dissection of fascism, other terminology has been held constant. The exploration of democracy illustrates the limits of simultaneously decom­ posing other items in the word list of governance. Unlike the treatment of fascism, the handling of democracy has not urged the obscurity of its infor­ mational meaning. With even less worry than about democracy, the book has put into play other shock words of the twentieth century—­dictators, tyrants, authoritarians, demagogues, autocrats, despots, corporatists, strongmen, gang­ sters, extremists, statists. In grasping res publica, we are like sailors on the open sea, repairing our leaky boat while clinging to those parts of it that per­ haps need fixing but that we cannot fix if we are mending something else.1 We cannot do everything at once. Academics were lured into participating in politics, or into shaping it, when they examined fascism. They presented a wide array of  fascisms—­three-­factor,

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seven-­element, and accounts with more than one variable; all-­purpose, fun­ damentalist, but also nonessentialist expositions; personal, social, and struc­ tural variations. Scholars canvassed empirical, conceptual, and regulative con­ cerns. Yet the fascism of politicians and popular writers may have molded the thought of the researchers. More than academics, people not in the ivory tower conjured up what was felt about fascism and what it conveyed. In the world of entertainment, fascists might resemble the Spanish con­ quistador Hernán Cortés, or be Puritans, or come from outer space (as close as Mars or from a more distant galaxy), or be a Chicago gangster or a New Jersey junk dealer, or star in a television variety show, or serve as a mad advi­ sor to the president. Fascism imparted a bewildering variety of things to the literate American in the street. It might exclude an indispensable connection to what went on in Italy during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, so that (Italian) fascism was not (real) fascism. It might accentuate the national and corpo­ rate, in the manner of Mussolini, but also could focus on small businesses, farmers, and the hometown, which were all enemies of the corporate. It could signify a lack of steady constitutional restraint or large-­scale government deficit spending. Fascists might be those who used coercion to get others to behave, or fascists might be those who tolerated all behavior, diluting dissent by smothering it with kindness. Fascists might be lower-­class thugs or the well-­to-­do and condescending, those who thought they knew it all or those who knew nothing. Fascism might be the twin of communism or of another family entirely. Fascists could be bumptious jesters or malevolent intellects. People who did not like someone else’s politics could always find in that politics enough to label the other fellow a fascist. Stalinists in the United States thought everyone a fascist who did not follow their views on the ref­ ormation of the political universe. Other citizens on the left would look for fascism in capitalism. Welfare liberals were called fascists because they ad­ mitted to welfare liberalism. Liberals who were tolerationist were specified as fascists because they nodded to toleration. Anticommunists were called fascists, but so also were anti-­anticommunists. Literalist Christians were de­ nominated fascists, but for entirely different reasons so, too, were American Roman Catholics. People who thought of themselves as conservatives were identified as fascists for believing in a laissez-­faire nationalism or in strict law enforcement or in a rigid construal of the Bill of Rights. On and on. The business of amusement quickened the words of journalism and the deeds of leaders. Dramatists, movie producers and directors, novelists, and celebrities delineated to citizens what fascism meant. Americans heard about it on the radio, read about it in written whimsies, clapped for it on the stage, or most of all took it in seated before a movie or TV screen. From the mid-­

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1930s on, we have had no letup. Fascism has been barraging us—­from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, to the Huey Long industry of the 1940s and 1950s, to The Producers of Hollywood and Evita on Broadway in the last third of the twentieth century. Can scholars do better in undertaking to grasp politics? Historians have rejected the categories of believers as the basis for studies of the spiritual. If academics wrote about religion, for example, with the glossaries of Vatican Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism, colleagues would rightly question and probably dismiss the results. They would relegate the authors to a group of proselytizers or cultists. Or the culprits might be pressed to seek a less interested set of assumptions. As the apparatus of scholarship, these sacred frameworks are seen to affirm the partiality and favoritism of the researcher. Similarly, in using the vocabulary of fascism, experts cannot escape funda­ mental values no matter what evidence is considered: fascist talk and writ­ ing incarnate the debatable. Can we dislodge the political frameworks that students of history use, as we have extricated ourselves from the theological? The lessons applicable to fascism are muffled just because political ideas have replaced those of the holy as the ultimate presuppositions of culture. We have delegitimated the supernatural or see that alternatives to our supernatu­ ralism are acceptable. But we do not have a way of giving up political ideas, and we see alternatives to our own ideas as disastrous. Common political classifications of thought and action may be untrustworthy, but if we try a set of concepts that are less parti pris, we risk falling into euphemism or for­ malism. Euphemism describes much talk by social thinkers: during the 1930s and 1940s, America had “the Negro problem”; during the 2000s, servants of the state deployed “enhanced interrogation techniques” or “fostered regime change” or engaged in the “rendition” of political enemies. Political scientists own the formalisms: modern industrial societies operate similarly without regard to the manner in which leadership is chosen; globalism privileges a multinational trend to nonstate actors; a new technological world order must reintegrate the socioeconomic classes left behind. Euphemisms and formalisms encompass generalizations that are likely empty. The opposite penchant of the historian, for the particular and even the unique, has its own troubles. Why should the form of governance in which a small group of men made decisions twenty-­five hundred years ago in Athens have much to do with elections in the United States of the twenty-­first cen­ tury? Perhaps we should ascribe conceptions like democracy only to certain distinctive eras and modes of life. Democracy, now carrying positive vibra­ tions as fascism carries adverse, may equally vie for deletion with fascism. Yet if we focus on a polity in one time and place—­say, Italy during the 1920s—­we

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lose the ability to take a broad view about different polities, or to compare them. Moreover, we do not guarantee that we elude the connotations of such words as fascism and democracy, even if they refer only to a specific period. We may be stuck with ordinary ideas and all their downsides. Finally, my own attempt to understand the language of politics may work against an understanding that suggests some policies are better or worse than others, some regimes more benign than others. Should we not avoid the con­ clusion that rationality has no purchase on our civic life, that just plain dumb luck governs matters? A compelling example of these problems came in the second decade of the new century, when New York real estate speculator Donald Trump be­ came prominent in politics. Trump had a complex reputation as a dynamic billionaire, as a philanderer, and as a not-­too-­bright and insecure man-­about-­ town with outlandish and ill-­formed social and political views. In the early twenty-­first century, the Donald, as he was known, extended his interests to beauty pageants and the booming genre of television programming known as “reality” television. In Trump’s own TV show, The Apprentice, contestants strove to become his assistant. In 2015 Trump announced that he would run for the presidency the following year as a Republican, and he won the party’s nomination in the summer of 2016. The electioneering followed in the tradi­ tion of the malicious that dated from the 1790s. Trump made up policy as he went along and infuriated his opponents. They credibly censured his own moral and political failures, although he often sidestepped blame by ignoring what he had previously said. Accusations of fascism, which had been on the rise, now skyrocketed. Soon he was accused of fascism while his adherents flung the term of reproach at his detractors. In August of 2016, just after Trump got his party’s nod and as if on cue, a new adult board game, Secret Hitler, was released. It was especially popu­ lar among VIP Democrats at Washington, DC, dinner parties. Two teams of players assume the roles of liberals or fascists in the Weimar Republic’s parliament. One player in the fascist group becomes Hitler, although the lib­ erals do not know who. To win the game, each party must enact several of its own policies, assassinate Hitler, or have him elected chancellor.2 A dif­ ferent kind of disdain came from the other side. American English had bor­ rowed antifa from the German, a shortened form of Antifaschistische from the first part of the name of the organization Antifaschistische Aktion, which opposed fascism in Weimar-­era Germany. The US antifa was pronounced “ann-­TEEF-­a” and supposedly referenced anti-­Trump activists who fought against American fascism. Oxford Languages stated that the word “emerged from relative obscurity to become an established part of the English lexicon.”3

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But the pronunciation meant that many of the word’s users did not know that fascism was buried in it. With some regularity, Trump’s supporters, whether they knew it or not, called the antifa militants fascist. Trump won the election, and at once analogies to the 1930s became a growth industry.4 He received encouragement from groups that, in the past, schol­ ars like Richard Hofstadter and later commentators had named as populists during the nineteenth century and perhaps as pseudoconservatives during the mid-­twentieth. Hofstadter had never singled out these new populists—­ mainly marginally schooled and less affluent white voters—­as fascists. But whereas the social scientists and historians of the 1950s were circumspect and had not called Joseph McCarthy a fascist, pundits of the 2010s had no such circumspection during Trump’s four years in office. Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning (2018) was an outstanding ex­ ample. Albright was a scholar of international relations, and a former Demo­ cratic secretary of state. Many members of her Jewish family from Central Europe did not escape the Holocaust, so that her “warning” had special meaning. The book also exhibited many of the issues that had arisen over the preceding seventy-­five years in the commentary over fascism. Albright believed that every age had its own fascism but conceded the difficulty of pinning down the phenomenon. She gestured at President Trump and wished to rescue fascism for liberals, and for Democrats generally. Yet Albright—­no different from anyone else—­only unclearly contained the nomenclature.5 The notion of a fascist Trump verified how fascists could transmute. Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka had converted to Judaism, and one of  his most trusted advisors was born a Jew, her husband Jared Kushner. President Trump ac­ knowledged Jewish grandchildren. Moreover, during his presidency the ex­ ercise of First Amendment privileges of speech and media freedom exploded. The Second Amendment right to own weapons was cherished—­in part to en­ able citizens to protect themselves against the state. During Trump’s years in office, the practices of something called the LGBTQ community also became normalized. When he ran for the presidency for a second time in 2020, im­ portant opponents among the Democrats were gays and African-­Americans, and they were more vocal and more acceptable than ever before. In foreign policy, the president vehemently defended the Jewish state of Israel against its Middle Eastern enemies. Like Popular Front liberals, Trump attempted to reconcile Americans to a less adversarial relation with the autocratic re­ gime of Russia. Contrary to the expansionist fascists of the 1930s, Trump was reproached for isolationism or a limited internationalism, and for shrink­ ing US influence. At home, his policies often sponsored federalism, local op­ tions versus the national. All the while, he had only modest electoral support,

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disliked by well over half the voting public. All these items contradicted what fascism in Germany had originally stood for. However, while fascist exhibits no consistent descriptions, and unfailingly achieves contempt, those facts do not allow us to presume the contempt base­ less. People may be warranted in their contempt, even if they cannot articu­ late the reasons for it or are ignorant of them.

Notes, Sources, and Methods

Writing this book has reminded me of an extended visit to the Grand Canyon. I have seen a lot and can make my way around like a guide, but I would only foolishly claim to know the whole terrain in detail. While original sources have formed the basis of the study, I have relied on the writing of historians (including my own) in laying out the political history necessary to the tale. The notes provide a bibliographic resource and reflect on method so that readers can examine matters on their own. The repeated use of fascism has occasionally led me deliberately not to elaborate full citations for derisive accusations that became ecumenical. Examples occur in the chapters on the 1930s where the slandering in which politicians engaged is depicted. To access this “debate,” I have sometimes mentioned standard books, all of which attend to the exemplary besmirching. Material that is sufficiently identified in the text has not been given a note. On many noncontentious matters where I have not deviated from convention, I have not offered a reference and would direct the reader to the relevant and often exhaustive Wikipedia articles. At the same time, the bibliographic portions of this Notes, Sources, and Methods section do attempt to illustrate how fascism has had an appeal in all nooks and crannies of the social order, and how scholars have been drawn to fascism’s study. Moreover, elaborate remarks have been set down here for more outré and specific details that the established literature does not quote; and this section sometimes points out items that would otherwise be part of a catalogue in the text. This has been especially true with the discussion of mass entertainment, and the roster of examples in chapters 6 and 9. I begin with short surveys of literature relevant to the overall themes of the book and proceed to chapter-­by-­chapter citations.

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Political Language Scholars of cultural studies, those in schools of communication, and like-­ minded academics have pronounced on topics of language. For one recent example, which has an extended inventory of theoretical efforts, see Mary E. Stuckey, Political Vocabularies: FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018). David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), covers some of the same ground as Fascism Comes to America. Yuen Foong Khong in Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) uses cognitive social psychology and focuses on the Munich analogy. We have refreshing but rare books on terminology: Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–­1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); David A. Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Andrew W. Robertson, The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Great Britain, 1790–­1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987). To David Green, Shaping Political Consciousness: The Language of Politics in America from McKinley to Reagan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), I owe the insight that we suffer when the expressions of politicians serve as investigative tools and make scholars the caretakers of orthodox politics. George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson in All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–­39 (New York: Macmillan, 1969) have a virtuosic few pages on 1930s name-­calling, pp. 15–­18; and the volume itself contains much data on the political pigeonholing of the decade. American Messiahs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935) by the Unofficial Observer (the pen name of John Franklin Carter) is an unusual attempt to sort out the labels of the time. A more recent perspective is Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). My own understanding of how this language works depends on diverse insights. I am not presenting a theory of political language but examining practices in which particular language has been employed. I have roughly generalized from the practices, pointing to the prescriptive aspects of the words while noting how the prescription is reined in. In characterizing my

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views, I am reminded of J. L. Austin’s comment in “Performative Utterances,” in his Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 241: there’s the part where you say it, and the part where you take it back. Crucial writings in respect to the “noncognitivism” that I have found illuminating are the early work of Charles L. Stevenson, particularly “Persuasive Definitions” from 1938, in Facts and Values: Studies in Ethical Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 32–­54; R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940); T. D. Weldon, States and Morals: A Study in Political Conflicts (London: J. Murray, 1946) and The Vocabulary of Politics (London: Penguin Books, 1953); R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962); John R. Searle, “Meaning and Speech Acts,” Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 423–­32; Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–­53. An overview can be found in Stephen Satris, Ethical Emotivism (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). Two more recent contributions are Alan Gibbard, Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Meaning and Normativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Robert B. Brandom’s “inferentialism” sets the standard in professional philosophy of language in the twenty-­first century. See his Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and David L. Marshall, “The Implications of Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism for Intellectual History,” History and Theory 52 (2013): 1–­31. A mini literature on inferentialism and slurs has been generated. Helpful examples of this literature are Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lepore, “Slurring Words,” Noûs 47 (2013): 25–­48; the Symposium on Slurs in Analytic Philosophy 54 (2013); Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, “The Pragmatics of Slur,” Noûs 51 (2017): 439–­62; Elisabeth Camp, “Why Metaphors Make Good Insults: Perspectives, Presupposition, and Pragmatics,” Philosophical Studies 174 (2017): 47–­64; Pasi Valtonen, “Generic Inferential Rules for Slurs: Dummett and Williamson on Ethnic Pejoratives,” Synthese 196 (2019): 1–­19; and Jesse Rappaport, “Communicating with Slurs,” Philosophical Quarterly 69 (2019): 795–­816. For complex and professional nuances, Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss, eds., New Work on Speech Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Different perspectives are taken in Yael Peled and Daniel M. Weinstock, eds., Language Ethics (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2020); Karen Stollznow, On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and (on Europeans) David L. Marshall,

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The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). New Deal Politics and Foreign Policy On the 1930s, readers should begin with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s three-­ volume masterwork, The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957–­ 60). Schlesinger shaped any number of distinguished histories, and other historians shared his vision. Some examples: James Macgregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 5 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952–­90); Otis Graham, An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Alan Lawson, The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–­1941 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1971); William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–­32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–­1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Donald R. McCoy, Angry Voices: Left of Center Politics in the New Deal Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958); James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–­1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967); and Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Wider studies relevant to the themes of political culture of this book include Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Susan Herbst, A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Fascists in America, 1935–­46 Most important are Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Sander A.

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Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–­1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–­1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); and Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II, rev. ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1973, 1992). A survey of Great Britain is Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–­1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). According to Thurlow, fascism in England meant Mussolini. The presidency of Donald Trump energized the production of several books that revisited many anti-­Roosevelt and anti-­interventionist politicians of the 1930s from the perspective of the early twenty-­first century. Some of these works appear in the text, and a survey of the sensibility can be found in Sarah Churchwell, “The Plot Writes Itself,” Times Literary Supplement, August 21–­28, 2020, pp. 22–­24. Readers might also ponder the title of Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), which focuses on 1940–­45. The Hollywood Movie A place to start is Beverly Merrill Kelley’s three volumes, which treat a substantial number of political films as fascist, and which reflect ideas about the political spectrum: Reelpolitik: Political Ideologies in ’30s and ’40s Films (with other authors) (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); Reelpolitik II: Political Ideologies in ’50s and ’60s Films (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); and Reelpolitik Ideologies in American Political Films (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012). Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., have a comprehensive listing of films in Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003); a fair share of the listings is about the executive’s fascist inclinations. Another survey is Terry Christenson, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from “Birth of a Nation” to “Platoon” (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1987). For World War Two there is Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry, We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006). Especially to be recommended, with important references to fascism in America that were part of the thinking of famous Hollywood directors of the era: Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).

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notes, sources, and methods

YouTube has clips of some of the most dramatic and significant visual and mainly Hollywood expressions of the fascist menace over the century of my concern. A selection, accessed on February 2, 2022: The Great Dictator, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqyQfjDScjU To Be or Not to Be, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSYktuz7sV0 Casablanca, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkM6HegRk3A A Foreign Affair, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI8xAxCd1Ic All the King’s Men, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgJC4Pu_tbo A Face in the Crowd, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm8Nde9fi6k Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzddAYYDZkk Seven Days in May, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGo3zMSVLcQ The Producers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxL3A4ln58o The Godfather, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4eu0b5 Field of Dreams, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur7pHRRKhV4 The Man in the High Castle, season 2 trailer (2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=A1plFJD4RtU Hitler parodies of  Trump, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Jcx23mF5Q; https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZCc90nfGQ&feature=youtu.be; and https://youtube .com/watch?v=ajqWJEVKMLc

Notes

Introduction 1. John P. Spencer, In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 220–­22. Part One 1. For readers interested in modern word-­counting techniques, an English-­language Google NGram charts a surge in discussions of fascism around 1930, and a decline beginning in the late 1940s. Comparisons of fascism to other language—­e.g., Nazism, totalitarianism, Red Fascism—­ are less revealing, although some comparisons have fascism more widespread over the period 1920–­2020. 2. In Austria, the Fatherland Front, a coalition that presided over affairs with the military during the 1930s, was dubbed “Austrofascism,” but it never took this title itself. The front opposed the (fascist?) Austrian National Socialists, but in 1938 Austria was transformed into a federal state in Germany, so these Austrian National Socialists never governed. The Falange Party supported General Francisco Franco in Spain’s Civil War of the 1930s and was often identified as fascist. But with his victory, the Falange was merged with other more strictly nationalist groupings. Before and after, enemies denounced Franco as a fascist. Although he never rejected the expression, he navigated with a pragmatic nationalism and not an ideology. Later, while Franco still held power, the United States never officially regarded him as a fascist. The neighboring regime in Portugal, the National Union under António Salazar, was criticized as fascist but rejected the label. During the 1930s, political analysts allowed that some south-­central European regions—­like the Ustashe in Croatia—­and some Latin American nations had fascist administrations, though none took that name for themselves. Various groups in the Western world struggled for power in their nations and self-­identified as fascist during the 1930s, but these parties never ruled. Minor fascists owned up to it in England. In France significant “collaborationists” rose up after the French military defeat in June of 1940, and indeed they ran unoccupied France from the town of Vichy in the south. But Germany installed these pro-­Nazi French in “Vichy France,” and they never empowered themselves. In Belgium and the Netherlands, more significant fascists jockeyed for leadership. Switzerland was an interesting case with its three different languages and an array of minor groups that have been identified as fascist. Only one, however,

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the Faschistischer Bewegung der Schweiz—­the movement of a follower of Mussolini—­had fascist in its title, while the others had variations on National Socialism or the Folk. In any case, none of these outfits, in Switzerland or the other European nations, ever assumed sovereign responsibility, although politicians everywhere credited fascist societies or individual fascists with undermining legitimate authorities to make way for Western military defeats. Chapter One 1. On American politics during this period, see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and two volumes by Robert E. Hannigan, The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898–­1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) and The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914–­24 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Still unusually useful for foreign policy is Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–­1919 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). 2. Easily the best book on Croly is Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era 1900–­1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). Also relevant is James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900–­1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). 3. Bourne’s essays are reprinted in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915–­1919 (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1964). Harold Stearns’s book is Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919). A later notable treatment was John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (New York: John Day, 1932). 4. On the early fascism of Mussolini in the United States among the literate, several excellent secondary sources incorporate the retrospective view of what fascism had become by 1941. Suggested are Alan Cassels, “Fascism for Export: Italy and the United States in the Twenties,” American Historical Review 69 (1964): 707–­12; John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Jordan Laylon, “America’s Mussolini: The United States and Italy, 1919–­1936” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1972); David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–­1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and Gian Giacomo Migone, The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The last book is a translation from an Italian publication of 1980, but this edition has an outstanding preface that judges more recent publications. 5. Steffens, McClure, and Tarbell are quoted from Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 28–­29. 6. Giorgio Bertellini, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). On the dispute at Valentino’s death, Philip V. Cannistraro, Black Shirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism 1921–­1929 (West Lafayette, IN: Bordigher Press, 1999), p. 76. 7. See Cannistraro, Black Shirts in Little Italy, esp. pp. 68–­69, 73–­74, 82, 84, 116, and Pellegrino Nazzaro, Fascist and Antifascist Propaganda in America: The Dispatches of Italian Ambassador Gelasio Caetani (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), pp. 1–­138 and the conclusion on p. 182.

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8. The Casa Italiana is covered in Stephen H. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 80–­91. 9. Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 42, 77–­78, 83, 213, 235. Among other efforts, a revised and more negative version of Italian fascism was issued in 1936: Herbert W. Schneider, The Fascist Government of Italy (New York: D. Van Nostrand). The section on Schneider in Katy Hull, The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), is essential. 10. W. Y. Elliott published The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional State in 1928 (New York: Macmillan). A 1968 edition has a new preface along with some appendices, the most important of which is “Twenty Years in Retrospect,” written in 1940 for the Review of Politics. Elliott explained that the ideas were originally conceived in the early 1920s when, as a Rhodes Scholar, he completed an Oxford DPhil, which became his book of 1928. Thus, the almost twenty years in 1940—­1922 to 1940. I have quoted Elliott from this later edition: pp. 10, 32–­33, 316, 348. Peter Vogt, “Herbert Schneider and the Ideal of an Intelligent Society,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 38 (2002): 393–­41, also takes up Elliott (and Beard). 11. For Dewey’s politics, see Alan Lawson, The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–­1941 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1971). Dewey’s contributions to Common Sense are quoted from Alfred M. Bingham and Selden Rodman, eds. (editors of Common Sense), Challenge to the New Deal (New York: Falcon Press, 1934), pp. vi, 270–­7 1. A selection of Thomas’s denunciations of Roosevelt is in George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–­39 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 128–­33. 12. William L. Welk, “Fascist Economic Policy and the NRA,” Foreign Affairs 12 (1933): 98–­109. 13. Carmen Haider, Capital and Labor under Fascism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), and Do We Want Fascism (New York: John Day, 1934), which has a brief biography. Another voice was the negative one of George Sabine in the less accessible International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1934) with his entry, “State,” vol. 14, p. 330. A fuller examination occurs in Sabine’s widely assigned college textbook, A History of Political Theory (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), pp. 747–­75, but by the time of the later treatment his view was far more common. 14. Mussolini Speaks and its context are discussed in Thomas Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–­1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 76–­79. 15. Terry Golway covers Hearst’s mixing in politics in Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance That Created the Modern Democratic Party (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2018), pp. 97–­99, 117–­30. See http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/dictatorship.pdf (accessed February 2, 2022) for what we know of FDR’s involvement in the film. 16. The movie was based on a book of the same name by Englishman Thomas J. Tweed, published by Farrar and Rinehart in New York in February 1933. For a compendium of views of the movie, see Sally Denton, The Plots against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), pp. 2, 151–­53.The Nation is quoted from Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 15. On the context in which this movie and others were released, see Lawrence W. Levine, “Hollywood’s Washington: Film Images of  National Politics during the Great Depression,” Prospects 10 (1985): 169–­95. The film has engendered much intelligent

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commentary: Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood, pp. 73–­76; Robert L. McConnell, “The Genesis and Ideology of Gabriel over the White House,” in Cinema Examined: Selections from Cinema Journal, ed. Richard Dyer McCann and Jack C. Ellis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), pp. 202–­21; and John J. Pitney Jr., “Fascism in Gabriel over the White House,” in Reelpolitik: Political Ideologies in ’30s and ’40s Films, ed. Beverly Merrill Kelley (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 45–­60. 17. Fraser A. Sherman, Screen Enemies of the American Way: Political Paranoia about Nazis, Communists, Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching Aliens in Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), pp. 163–­64, has a brief discussion of The President Vanishes. The comment on the film’s fascism comes from Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York: Julian Messner, 1934), pp. 16–­17. 18. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 130. Fitzgerald’s intent was murky, but his Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim, was head of the company. He had fixed the 1919 World Series, and later used Gatsby because of his comely appearance to make money in junk-­bond trading, bootlegging, and other vague but shady operations. 19. Tim Blackmore’s Gorgeous War: The Branding War between the Third Reich and the United States (Waterloo, ONT: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019) notes any number of fascist-­comes-­to-­America apprehensions, with special attention to the pictorial and with a cover blurb stating the “affinity between Nazi Germany and aspects of modern America.” See also the essays in Julia Adeny Thomas and Geof Eley, eds., Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-­Century Rise of the Global Right (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 20. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, pp. 10, 199. 21. See Roy Blount Jr., Hail, Hail, Euphoria: Presenting the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup,” the Greatest War Movie Ever Made (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). Believing that Duck Soup is not a superior film, I differ from Blount and others. To fill up even the sixty-­nine minutes of this production, Groucho Marx lengthened many scenes beyond what the humor would bear. He also added extraneous scenes, most based on sight gags more appropriate to vaudeville. Finally, the editing was sloppy: some scenes, or parts of them, did not fit into the film. The movie was flawed, although its contribution to the stereotyping of Mussolini was unique. For the trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CEdb0sGfaI (accessed February 2, 2022). 22. William McBrien, Cole Porter: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 169–­7 1. Better still, listen to the lyrics on YouTube. 23. For Ezra Pound, who turns up again in this study, and in addition to the individual writings, see Ira Nadel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For an excellent historiographical discussion of the large literature on Pound and Italian fascism, see Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016), pp. 1–­18. Chapter Two 1. An overview that covers much of the period is Michael Butter, The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–­2002 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. I have relied on Marion Meade, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathaniel West and Eileen McKenney (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). 3. Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp. 304, 395–­96, and Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement, 1920–­ 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 226–­31.

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4. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces; Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–­1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); and George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Johnpeter Horst Grill has written interesting essays on the topic—­“The American South and Nazi Racism,” in The Impact of  Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy, ed. Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 19–­38, and (with Robert L. Jenkins) “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image,” Journal of Social History 58 (1992): 667–­94. 5. Albert Stone Jr., “Seward Collins and the American Review: Experiment in Pro-­Fascism, 1933–­1937,” American Quarterly 12 (1960): 3–­19, and Michael J. Tucker, And Then They Loved Him: Seward Collins and the Chimera of an American Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), an excellent book about the scholarship on Collins and on his (online) FBI file. 6. See Cécile Whiting, “American Heroes and Invading Barbarians: The Regionalist Response to Fascism,” Prospects 13 (1988): 295–­324, and her Antifascism in American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 7. Thomas Carl Austenfeld, American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), pp. 33–­ 43, 136–­48. “Evil as such” is quoted from p. 140. Austenfeld, who also discusses Hellman, contrasts Porter negatively with Kay Boyle and reviews the scholarship on both. 8. For the name-­calling of Huey Long and others, see Richard D. White Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 39, 63, 75–­76, 122, 230, 254–­55. 9. Glass is quoted in James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–­1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 31. 10. See William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal 1932–­1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), e.g., pp. 65–­67, 102, 339–­41, and John Garraty, “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 907–­44. 11. For other examples of the defaming by FDR’s adversaries going into the 1934 election, see Congressional Record, 73rd Congress, 1st Session, pp. S4188, 4210–­11, 4217–­18 (May 25, 1933). 12. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 274. 13. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 64. 14. Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Donald I. Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio (New York: Free Press, 1996); and, for the quotes, Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965), pp. 52, 87–­88. 15. George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–­1940 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). For another treatment of the league, a creature of the Du Pont financial interests, see Robert F. Burk, The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925–­1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 134–­281, and for the group’s stigmatizing of FDR, pp. 178–­96; quotations are from pp. 178, 196. 16. Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 396, 404, 457, 509, 568.

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17. A biography of Butler is Eric Dennis Myers, “A Soldier at Heart: The Life of Smedley Butler, 1881–­1940” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2013). Also: Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), pp. 144–­60, 218–­46. On other specifics, Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II, rev. ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), pp. 66–­69, and Burk, Corporate State, pp. 159–­62. The made-­for-­TV movie The November Plan came out in 1977 from Universal Television Studios and flopped. Set in 1934, the film was based on the testimony of Butler to the House of Representatives about the American Legion scheme to overthrow the new administation. Lloyd Nolan played the general in a cameo role. 18. On Common Sense’s change of mind, see Alfred M. Bingham, Insurgent America: Revolt of the Middle-­Classes (New York: Harper, 1935), pp. ix, 115. 19. Quoted in Schmidt, Maverick Marine, p. 231. 20. For Thompson, who came up many times in the discussions of fascism, I have relied on the biography by Peter Kurth, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), quotations respectively at pp. 207, 224, 229–­30, 44, 288, 311, 345. 21. Thompson’s marriage to Sinclair Lewis brought together two difficult and outsize individuals. For their connection: Vincent Sheehan, Dorothy and Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), and Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1961). See also John P. Diggins’s comments in Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 37–­39, 53–­55. An excellent survey of the journalists of this era—­with substantial sections on Thompson—­can be found in Nancy Cott, Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home between the Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 22. For Townsend on fascism, Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 59; for Coughlin, David H. Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932–­1936 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969), pp. 211, 227–­31, 245–­53; for Thomas, Bennett, pp. 203–­4; for Thompson, Bradley W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), p.79. 23. Coughlin and Smith are quoted in Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression, pp. 211, 227–­ 28. For Lemke as a fascist Republican, Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 251. For other remarks, see Geoffrey Smith, To Save a Nation, pp. 34–­36, 40. David H. Bennett’s The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) is an overview. 24. Matthew Josephson, Infidel in the Temple: A Memoir of the Nineteen-­Thirties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 320, recalled Dennis’s description of his father. 25. Scott Nearing, Fascism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934), pp. 53–­58; Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York: Julian Messner, 1934), pp. 14, 23, 32; and Bingham, Insurgent America, pp. 103–­4, 115, 124, 158–­59. 26. Gerald Horne, The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-­Wing Extremism in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2006), has the citations to Dennis’s The Coming American Fascism (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), pp. 77, 118; and for the wartime quotes, p. 137. Another excellent discussion is David Spitz in Patterns of Anti-­Democratic Thought: An Analysis and a Criticism, with Special Reference to the American Political Mind in Recent Times, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 93ff.

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27. Horne, The Color of Fascism, quoted on pp. vii, 42, 43. 28. Al Smith quoted from Wolfskill, Revolt of the Conservatives, pp. 133, 209, 217. Chapter Three 1. For McWilliams and Winrod, see Francis MacDonnell, Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 38–­39. Many writers have cited William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts as exemplary, though I do not think of him as important. See Scott Beekman, William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-­Wing Ex­­ tremism and the Occult (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). 2. On J. Edgar Hoover, there is Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States 1919–­1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000). Raymond J. Batvinis has written two books on Hoover’s interest in counterespionage: The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007) and Hoover’s Secret War against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage during World War II (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2014). 3. The Time essay is in its issue of May 7, 1934: “Shirt Business,” pp. 16–­17. The pamphlet Shirts! (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, June 1934) was written by Travis Hoke. The other book: Charles W. Ferguson, Fifty Million Brothers: A Panorama of American Lodges and Clubs (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), pp. 108–­29. On the blouse laws, I have borrowed language from Peter Fritzsche, Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (New York: Basic Books, 2020), pp. 331–­32. For Blue Shirts, see Congressional Record, 75th Congress, 1st Session, pp. S107, S216 (January 1937). The salute illustration is from Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), p. 55. 4. Compare Harold Lavine, Fifth Column in America (New York: Doubleday, 1940), p. 191, and Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1940), p.137. Finally, see Propaganda Analysis for 1939, cited in George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–­39 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 61. 5. MacDonnell, Insidious Foes, p. 47; Robert A. Rosenbaum, Waking to Danger: Americans and Nazi Germany (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 62–­63; and Laura B. Rosenzweig, Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles (New York: New York Uni­­ versity Press, 2017), pp. 3, 8, 114–­15, 233. 6. Balanced treatments of Italian-­Americans are Fiorello B. Ventresco, “Italian-­Americans and the Ethiopian Crisis,” Italian Americana 6 (1980): 4–­27, and Philip V. Cannistraro, introduction to Gaetano Salvemini, Italian Fascist Activities in the United States, ed. with an introduction by Philip V. Cannistraro (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977), pp. vi–­xli, from which the Italian diplomat is quoted, pp. xxxi–­xxxii. An overview is Peter R. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 7. On German-­American fascists, see Louis De Jong, The German Fifth Column in the Second World War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Morris Schonbach, “Native American Fascism during the 1930s and 1940s: A Study of Its Roots, Its Growth, and Its Decline” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1958; New York: Garland Press, 1985); Leland V. Bell, In Hitler’s Shadow: The Anatomy of American Nazism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973); Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–­1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); Donald

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M. McKale, The Swastika outside Germany (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977); Magda Lauers-­Rech, Nazi Germany and the American Germanists: A Study of Periodicals, 1930–­1946 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Michael Cikraji, The History of the Cleveland Nazis, 1933–­1945 (MA thesis, Cleveland State University, 1999; Cleveland: Erfindung Co., LLC, 2014); Stephen H. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–­1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and the excellent précis of her views, “American Interpretations of National Socialism, 1933–­ 1945,” in The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy, ed. Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 1–­18. The quotes are from Arthur L. Smith Jr., The Deutschtum of Nazi Germany and the United States (The Hague: Martinis Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 152, 161. The English also engaged in the same sort of intrigue in America: Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939–­1944 (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1999), and Henry Hemming, Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into the World War (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2019). 8. Rhodri Jeffreys-­Jones treats the serious nature of threat in The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI, and the Case That Stirred the Nation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020); and Leo Ribuffo the failure of constitutional guarantees in The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 178–­224. 9. Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal and the Coming of World War II, rev. ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), pp. 4–­5, 34, 47–­48, 196. 10. Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), and Robert L. Frank, “Prelude to Cold War: American Catholics and Communism,” Journal of Church and State 34 (1992): 39–­56. For the quotes, Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), pp. 291, 356–­68, 372, 392. Contemporary European History 25 (2016) has a special issue, “Transnational Antifascism: Agents, Networks, Circulations.” 11. Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle That Divided America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), has a detailed historiographical discussion, pp. 1–­14 and passim. 12. In addition to the works cited in the text and the references below, I would call attention to Garet Garrett in his use of “symbol words” in “The Revolution Was” (1938), reprinted in his The People’s Pottage (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953), pp. 43–­44, depending on Harold D. Lasswell and Dorothy Blumenstock, World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939). 13. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), p. 196. 14. According to Allen Abel in The Short Life of Hughie McLoon: A True Story of Baseball, Magic, and Murder (Toronto: Sutherland House, 2020), p. 39, the Louisville Courier noted in 1889: “Probably the most popular mascot in America today is the rabbit’s foot. To be a genuine mascot the foot must be of the left hind leg of a graveyard rabbit caught in the dark of the moon by a cross-­eyed colored man who first crawled into the graveyard backwards.” We then find wousin defined as in my text in Andrew Ingraham, Swain School Lectures (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1903), pp. 136–­37; then by Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923), pp. 130–­33; and thereafter in popular writers.

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15. Robert Jerome Glennon, The Iconoclast as Reformer: Jerome Frank’s Impact on American Law (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), is a biography. Jerome Frank’s Law and the Modern Mind (New York: Tudor, 1930) is quoted from pp. 57–­64. Information on the change of the book title comes from Frank’s Save America First: How to Make Our Democracy Work (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), pp. x, 13–­16. His Fate and Freedom: A Philosophy for Free Americans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945) is less stimulating but still concerned with fascism, pp. 54–­55, 217–­18. 16. Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York: Julian Messner, 1934), pp. 13–­14, 32. 17. Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), pp. 20, 186–­94, 361. 18. Lawrence Dennis, The Dynamics of War and Revolution (New York: The Weekly Foreign Letter, 1940), p. 137, but see the earlier The Coming American Fascism (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), pp. vii, ix. Chapter Four 1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), pp. 12–­13. 2. See Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), especially his concluding paragraph on p. 106. 3. Stephen H. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 36–­74, and Magda Lauers-­Rech, Nazi Germany and the American Germanists: A Study of Periodicals, 1930–­1946 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). Laurel Leff, Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-­and-­ Death Decision on Refugees from Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), has an excellent chapter, particularly on Harvard and Columbia, pp. 52–­65. For the ancient Near East, Bruce Kuklick, Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880–­1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 171–­74. 4. Some of my examples have been taken from Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal and the Coming of World War II, rev. ed. (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), pp. 66–­69, and Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–­ 1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 39. The examples are a few from hundreds in the periodical literature. Also relevant is Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1986). Brett Gary treats Life in “The Pitiless Spotlight of Publicity: life Magazine and the Pre-­war Surveillance of American Extremists,” in Looking at life: Framing the American Century in the Pages of life Magazine, 1936–­1972, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), pp. 77–­99. The common-­man quote is from Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), pp. 193–­94. 5. Archibald MacLeish published his script for the radio program: The Fall of the City: A Verse Play for Radio (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937). 6. “Sabotage,” an episode of The Shadow, can be purchased on Amazon Music. 7. For Orson Welles, another recurring figure, see Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles (London: Phoenix, 1993). 8. On Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds, Robert J. Brown, Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998); John Gosling,

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Waging “The War of the Worlds”: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic, including the Original Script (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); and A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” and the Art of Fake News (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015). You can listen to The War of the Worlds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzC3Fg _rRJM (accessed February 2, 2022). 9. Susan Canedy, America’s Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma; A History of the German American Bund (Menlo Park, CA: Markgrap Publications Group, 1990), and Robert A. Rosenbaum, Waking to Danger: Americans and Nazi Germany (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). 10. Donald Lankiewicz, “Mein Kampf in America: How Adolf Hitler Came to be Published in the United States,” Printing History 20 (July 2016): 3+, and Aaron Brouwer, “Translating Hitler: Towards a Global Translation History of Mein Kampf, 1925–­1945” (MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2019). For Thompson, see James J. and Patience P. Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History 1930–­39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 78–­81, quotation at pp. 78–­79. 11. On Turrou, see Rhodri Jeffreys-­Jones, The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI, and the Case That Stirred the Nation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020). 12. A Night at the Garden is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =NC1MNGFHR58 (accessed February 2, 2022), and the Harper’s Magazine worry was part of a promotion to possible new subscribers. 13. See James J. Fortuna, “Fascism, National Socialism, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair,” Fascism 8 (2019): 179–­218. 14. A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1938); Max Ascoli and Arthur Feiler, Fascism for Whom? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938); Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn, Sabotage! The Secret War against America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), pp. 21, 141; George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (New York: In Fact, 1943), e.g., pp. 46, 106–­19, 159, 184; and John Roy Carlson [Arthur Derounian], Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America—­the Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Plotting to Destroy the United States (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943). 15. Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 178–­224. On the Christian Front, there is Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square, which makes many analogies to the present about serious threats to the United States. On security agencies and Catholics, there is Steve Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935 to 1962 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). 16. For the regionalists, see the citations for chapter 2. Also of interest is Michael C. Steiner, ed., Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). For the South in general in the late 1930s, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), pp. 281–­91. 17. According to Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement, 1920–­ 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 229–­30. 18. The descriptions of Sandoz and Clark are quoted from Dorman, pp. 242, 244, 19. Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Harper and Bros., 1940), pp. 652–­ 53, 704. 20. Quotation is from George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 134. Among many studies of

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Cash, there is Bruce Clayton, W. J. Cash: A Life (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). 21. Consult Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (New York: Little, Brown, 2018). 22. Corbin’s archives are located at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the shelf list to the papers has the best biography of him. 23. John Corbin, Two Frontiers of Freedom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), esp. pp. 180–­81 and 267; quotation at p. 353. Chapter Five 1. Robert A. Rosenbaum, Waking to Danger: Americans and Nazi Germany (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 82–­83. Donna T. Haverty-­Stacke, Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR (New York: New York University Press, 2015), has some interesting material on the interstices of the name-­calling among communists, pp. 104, 108, 142. 2. Burton Wheeler is quoted from David A. Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 171. 3. On Beard’s inclinations in favor of Wilson and Mussolini, see John P. Diggins, “Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy,” American Historical Review 71 (1966), esp. p. 494; and Ellen Nore, Charles Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), pp. 73–­77. Beard first published “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels: An Estimate of American Foreign Policy” in Harper’s Magazine for September 1939. It was reprinted as a small book in 1940. On Beard’s later positions and Mumford’s change of heart, see Richard Drake, Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 103–­8, 213, 261, 266 (for the quote). The most-­ sustained effort that takes up Beard’s changing views on foreign policy is Thomas C. Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1975). 4. Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II, 1939–­1941 (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 235 (for the Longworth quote); Susan Dunn, 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—­the Election amid the Storm (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 129 (for the quotations from Lowell and the Washington Post), and see also pp. 151, 313; and Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 52 (for the Thomas quote). 5. See Gleason, Totalitarianism, pp. 14–­20, and Jeffrey Isaac, “Critics of Totalitarianism,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 183–­84. The quotation is from Dunn, 1940, p. 313. 6. Olson, Those Angry Days, pp. 254–­55. 7. Olson, pp. 65, 276. 8. See John E. Miller, Governor Phillip F. La Follette, the Wisconsin Progressives, and the New Deal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), who sees less an early affinity than I do between FDR and La Follette; and Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right, pp. 155–­58, 355. Roosevelt is quoted from Donald R. McCoy, Angry Voices: Left of Center Politics in the New Deal Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), p. 176. 9. For the discussion of America First in this section, see Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940–­1941 (New York: Octagon Books, 1971).

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10. Michelle Flynn Stenhjem, An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), pp. 49–­50 (on German New Dealers); Cole, America First, p. 43 (on the blank check). See also Cole, pp. 104–­10, and Olson, Those Angry Days, pp. 312, 324. 11. Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy, pp. 99–­102. 12. Flynn’s views are quoted in Michelle Flynn Stenhjem, An American First, pp. 37, 166, 25, and 165, respectively. John E. Moser, John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005), is also an illuminating treatment. John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), especially pp. 153–­54, 250–­53, is helpful, as well as his testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., Hearing on Modifications of the Neutrality Act of 1939, October 23, 1941, pp. 201–­ 16. Finally, cogent remarks about Flynn occur in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (New York: Viking Press, 2017), p. 388; David Green, Shaping Political Consciousness: The Language of Politics in America from McKinley to Reagan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 158–­161; Bradley W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), pp. 5, 10; and Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right, p. 212. 13. Olson, Those Angry Days, pp. 312, 324. 14. With the signing of the Nazi-­Soviet pact, John Dewey had embraced totalitarianism as a legitimate concept, and the embrace made it hard for him to swallow the US-­Russia affiliation after June of 1941. See his brief Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939). 15. For this invective Cole, America First, quotes on pp.106, 108; see also Olson, Those Angry Days, p. 86, and Albert Fried, FDR and His Enemies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 28, 197, 214. 16. The Lindberghs were an extraordinary pair with a complex tale; biographies record their denunciations and how they were denounced: A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: Putnam, 1998), and Susan Hertog, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1999). Neither one of these authors was able to examine Charles’s secret later existence with three German women who bore him seven other children, though it is touched on in Christopher Gehrz, Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021). Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle against American Intervention in World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), sympathetically takes up the issue of Lindbergh and internationalism. 17. Quoted in Cole, America First, p. 54. 18. Quoted in Olson, Those Angry Days, p. 86. 19. FDR is quoted from Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh, p. 131. 20. Quoted in Albert Fried, FDR and His Enemies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 197, 214. 21. Early is quoted from Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 14, 1941, at https://www.jta .org/archive/washington-sees-similarity-between-lindberghs-and-berlins-anti-jewish-propa ganda (accessed February 2, 2022). For the others, see Dunn, 1940, pp. 51, 293, 302. 22. I have quoted Anne Morrow Lindbergh from her Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), pp. 18–­19; Ickes comment is from Fried, FDR and His Enemies, p. 197. 23. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 225–­26.

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24. Martin Dies, The Trojan Horse in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940), p. 348, italics in original, but see in general pp. 346–­66. His committee at this time is discussed in Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–­1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 226–­36. 25. Quoted from Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 156. 26. Stenhjem, An American First, pp. 25, 229. 27. George Britt, The Fifth Column Is Here (New York: Willard Funk, 1940), pp. 2, 118. 28. George Fort Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (New York: Vanguard Press, 1942). 29. For the short movie, see Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers, p. 156. For the expert on Fight for Freedom, Mark Lincoln Chadwin, The Hawks of World War Two (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 208. See also Richard W. Steele, Propaganda in an Open Society: The Roosevelt Administration and the Media, 1933–­1941 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 72, 77–­78, and Cole, America First, pp. 107, 116. 30. Hoover and La Follette are quoted from Dunn, 1940, p. 63, and Cole, America First, p. 55. 31. On Welles and Citizen Kane, a selection from a large literature: Raymond Fielding, “The March of Time,” 1935–­1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, pp. 237–­92. For an example of how March of Time worked, Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 185–­86. On Citizen Kane, Robert L. Carringer, The Making of “Citizen Kane” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane (London: British Film Institute, 1992); Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); and John J. Pitney Jr., “Antifascism in Citizen Kane,” in Reelpolitik: Political Ideologies in ’30s and ’40s Films, ed. Beverly Merrill Kelley (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 61–­76. 32. See Erica Doss, “The Year of Peril: Thomas Hart Benton and World War II,” in Thomas Hart Benton: Artist, Writer, and Intellectual, ed. Douglas Hurt and Mary K. Dains (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1989), pp. 35–­63. 33. The America First Committee never recovered, but its supporters went underground, and a febrile fascism had a role in maintaining the underground movement. See for example two works: Justus D. Doenecke, ed., In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-­interventionist Movement of 1940–­1941 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990), and Bill Kauffman, America First: Its History, Culture, and Politics (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995) (with Gore Vidal’s riotous and apposite foreword). 34. The phrase, popular among Roosevelt’s haters of the time, later appeared as the title of a book: Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–­1941 (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1952). Tracy Campbell’s The Year of Peril: America in 1942 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020) follows the back-­and-­forth. 35. The appraisal comes from John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 49. The quotes from the radio presentation appear on pp. 12–­19 of Stephen Vincent Benét, They Burned the Books (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942). 36. Richard Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005).

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37. There is a large literature on Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, et al. The book I have found most pertinent is Aaron J. Leonard, The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA—­1939–­1956 (London: Repeater Books, 2020); Guthrie’s antifascist compositions are available on YouTube: see, for example, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=-3xUPpkxAco (accessed February 2, 2022). For an overall look at the music, see John Bush Jones, The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939–­ 1945 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006). 38. See Frits Bienfait, Political Left and Right since Antigone (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2019). 39. On conversations about a new party structure, see Robert F. Burk, The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925–­1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 134, 146; Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 48; and Cole, America First, pp. 179, 182. Chapter Six 1. Thomas Doherty’s excellent Pre-­Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–­1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) comments on this problem, p. 16. Another one of Doherty’s books is invaluable: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–­1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Also Todd Bennett, “The Celluloid War: State and Studio in Anglo-­American Propaganda Film-­Making, 1939–­1941,” International History Review 24 (2002): 64–­102, and Markus Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreutz: Der amerikanische Spielfilm in dritten Reich (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999). 2. The 1915 film Battle Cry of Peace derived from Hudson Maxim’s novel, Defenseless America (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915). The book depicts—­exaggeratedly but cleverly—­ the need for a stronger military in the United States because of the uncertainties of the European war that had just begun. It also has imaginative descriptions of a foreign invasion, and these formed the basis of the film. However, we have very little footage from the movie, though some commentary on it is extant. Walter Millis, Road to War: America 1914–­1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), pp. 216–­18, affords the quotation. A similar movie of 1915 is The Nation’s Peril. 3. David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Laura B. Rosenzweig, Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles (New York: New York University Press, 2017); and Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Plots against Hollywood and America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Against the grain is Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 4. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 22–­29, and Leo Ribuffo, “It Can’t Happen Here: Novel, Federal Theatre Production, and (Almost) Movie,” in Right, Center, Left: Essays in American History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 168, 183. 5. Jennifer Lynde Barker discusses Fury in The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 65–­75. 6. In addition to the movie, see Peter H. Amann, “Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25 (1983): 490–­524, and Tom

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Stanton, Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society That Shocked Depression-­Era Detroit (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). On Dorothy Thompson’s column, Nancy Cott, Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home between the Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2020), p. 234. 7. Marjorie A. Valleau, The Spanish Civil War in American and European Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 9–­78. The quote about Hemingway is from Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle That Divided America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 60. 8. See Rosenzweig, Hollywood’s Spies, p. 1, and her bibliographic references; Eric Sandeen, “Anti-­Nazi Sentiment in Film: Confessions of a Nazi Spy and the German American Bund,” American Studies 20 (1979): 69–­81, and Steven J. Ross, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy: Warner Bros., Antifascism and the Politicization of Hollywood,” in Warners’ War: Politics, Pop Culture and Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood, ed. Martin Kaplan and Johanna Blakley (Los Angeles: Annenberg School, University of Southern California, 2004), pp. 48–­59. 9. Michelle Flynn Stenhjem quotes America First in An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 150. The fifth-­ column quote comes from Propaganda in Motion Pictures: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce, United States Senate, Seventy-­Seventh Congress First Session . . . September 9–­26, 1941 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1942), p. 48. For scholarship on the hearings, see two essays in Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008): John Whiteclay Chambers II, “The Peace, Isolationist, and Anti-­interventionist Movements and Interwar Hollywood,” pp. 196–­225, and Cynthia J. Miller, “The B Movie Goes to War in Hitler, Beast of Berlin,” pp. 226–­41. Finally, Chris Yogerst, Hollywood Hates Hitler: Jew-­Baiting, Anti-­Nazism, and the Senate Investigations into Warmongering in Motion Pictures (Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2020). 10. Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, p. 110. 11. Fascism-­comes-­to-­America films overwhelmed this period. Help comes from the internet and from Ken D. Jones and Arthur F. McClure, Hollywood at War: The American Motion Picture and World War II (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973); Russell Earl Shain, “An Analysis of Motion Pictures about War Released by the American Film Industry 1930–­1970” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1971; New York: Arno Press, 1976); Larry Langman and David Ebner, Encyclopedia of American Spy Films (New York: Garland Press, 1990); and (the overwhelming) Michael S. Shull and David Edward Wilt, Hollywood War Films, 1937–­1945: An Exhaustive Filmography of American Feature-­Length Motion Pictures Relating to World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland., 1996). I have not been able to view all the films, or even clips from some of them. Especially after the formal start of the conflict in Europe in September 1939, and after the government of Winston Churchill took office in May of 1940, America imported British films about master spies. Although these movies are not part of the landscape in this book, they, too, contributed to the climate in the United States. Several essays in K. R. M. Short, ed., Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), pertain to this topic. 12. Commentary of the film appears in Charles Wolfe, ed., Meet John Doe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Thomas Doherty discusses this film and others in Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 122–­48.

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13. Alfred Hitchcock made any number of films about fascists or fascist tendencies in America. For the World War Two cinema, including Saboteur, see Sam P. Simone, Hitchcock as Activist: Politics and the War Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), and pp. 67, 83–­84 for the characterizations of America First as fascist. Perhaps the most interesting film, North by Northwest, is from 1959. 14. Hellman is discussed in Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement, 1920–­1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 234–­44. 15. The most helpful to me of many essays on Capra’s Why We Fight is Kathleen German, “Frank Capra’s Why We Fight Series and the American Audience,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 237–­48. But the best thing to do is to watch. All are available on YouTube beginning with Prelude to War at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm3GsSWKyso (accessed February 2, 2022). 16. Worth examining is Jacqueline Vansant, “Austrian and Dustbowl Refugees Unite in Three Faces West (1940),” Journal of Austrian-­American History 1 (2017): 98–­116. This John Wayne movie contrasted with his Westward Ho of 1935, which critics singled out as fascist. 17. A long list of B-movies frightened US nationals. In 1939’s Espionage Agent, an American diplomat lost sleep believing that his wife spied for the Nazis, but she redeemed herself by helping him uncover a plot to impair industries in the United States. The Man I Married (1940) worried about our closest fellow creatures. The forgotten Hitler’s Children, one of the largest-­ grossing movies of 1943, portrayed American-­Germans in the Reich. Some of the pictures singling out the sordiness of Japan were noteworthy because they made bizarre contributions to popular culture. A disregarded 1942 film, Foreign Agent, featured a female performer singing a new song, “Taps for the Japs.” Little Tokyo, USA, also from 1942, had a (white) American hero telling the audience that Japanese-­Americans just around Los Angeles had twenty-­five thousand members in an “Oriental Bund.” The usage was striking in analogizing home-­grown Japanese saboteurs to the German ones in the East and Midwest. The B-­movie heroes in popular series of films confronted the disloyal in at least one of their pictures. Examples are The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939), Calling Philo Vance (1940), and Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen and Falcon’s Brother (both from 1942). In Junior G-­Men (1940), the Bowery Boys or Dead End Kids first did battle with terrorists, a battle that this lovable gang renewed many times. That same year Murder in the Air, one of Ronald Reagan’s Secret Service Mysteries, concerned an indefinite foreign peril. Meet Boston Blackie (1941), the first of fourteen of the celebrated pictures with Chester Morris as an honorable jewel thief, had Blackie defying fascists. A Universal Studios’ item in the Invisible Man series, Invisible Agent (1942), updated events that had vaguely been the subject of H. G. Wells’s science-­fiction novella, The Invisible Man from 1897. Two of Bob Steele’s Three Mesquiteers movies of 1942 had spies—­The Phantom Plainsman and The Valley of Hunted Men. Charlie Chan, the Hawaiian detective, helped out America in Murder over New York in 1942. The Sherlock Holmes movies, starring Basil Rathbone as the detective, left London in 1943: Sherlock Holmes in Washington hunted down enemy agents in the United States. Every Saturday, to pack their seats with kids, theaters would screen fifteen minutes of a film that might have ten or twelve installments. In 1943 at least three of these serials went after treason: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Don Winslow of the Coast Guard, and most notably The Batman. In this last production of fifteen chapters, the Japanese attempted various schemes to destroy the United States, including turning citizens into zombies. Many of these efforts are available on YouTube. 18. I have quoted from Richard W. Steele, Propaganda in an Open Society: The Roosevelt Administration and the Media, 1933–­1941 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 153. Erroll Flynn,

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an anti-fascist movie hero, was later portrayed as bringing fascism to America, most notably in Rocketeer, a 1991 movie that showed Hollywood’s complicity in subverting the United States. 19. Michael S. Shull and David Edward Wilt, Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films, 1939–­1945 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987), pp. 79, 80, 96, 107, 110, 116. 20. Shull and Wilt, Doing Their Bit, explores how cartoons took up the bad dream of fascism getting to the United States. I have also consulted Elizabeth Dalton, “Bugs and Daffy Go to War: Some Warner’s Cartoons of World War II,” Velvet Light Trap 4 (1972): 44–­46, and Jason Michael Lapeyre, “Mickey Mouse and the Nazis: The Use of Animated Cartoons as Propaganda during World War II” (PhD diss., York University [Canada], 2000). The Ducktators and Der Fuehrer’s Face are worth watching. On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCpDFEjJbUY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L90smU0SOcQ (both accessed February 2, 2022). Ducktators is discussed in John Bush Jones, The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939–­1945 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006), pp. 135–­36. 21. See the discussion in Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999), whose language I have borrowed, p. 178; and Ross, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” pp. 48–­59. 22. Shain, “An Analysis of Motion Pictures,” p. 232, talks about their looks and voices. An outstanding essay is Geoffrey Cocks, “Hollywood uber Alles: Seeing the Nazis in American Movies,” Film and History 45 (2015): 38–­53. In addition to Bobby Watson as Hitler (in, e.g., Hal Roach’s The Devil with Hitler and That Nazty Nuisance), Martin Kosleck often played his look-­ alike, Joseph Goebbels. 23. A discussion of postwar antifascist movies, including German and English ones, is in Gavriel David Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Rosenfeld is an assiduous and exhaustive researcher, covering this topic in several books. 24. The Stranger is discussed in Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich, quoted from pp. 90–­91. See also Jennifer Lynde Barker, “Documenting the Holocaust in Orson Welles’s The Stranger,” in Film and Genocide, ed. Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-­Taraborrelli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), pp. 55–­58. 25. Roy Scranton, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), indirectly takes up some of these issues. 26. Crossfire has a byzantine history. See Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), quoted from pp. 125, 140, 289, 343. The playwright Arthur Miller also began his career pursuing these themes of anti-­Semitism and protofascism in America with a 1945 novella, Focus. 27. On this controversy, Lucy McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Part Two 1. Many scholars have discussed the plight of the Italians. See Russell Earl Shain, “An Analysis of Motion Pictures about War Released by the American Film Industry 1930–­1970” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1971; New York: Arno Press, 1976), pp. 230, 236. The opera singer story has many variants. Mine is taken from Elizabeth Basile Chopas, Searching for Subversives: The Story of Italian Internment in Wartime America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), p. 2.

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2. On the linguistic theory, see the citations at the beginning of the Notes, Sources, and Methods section. 3. On withdrawing a word, Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 69–­72. Chapter Seven 1. O. John Rogge, The Official German Report: Nazi Penetration, 1924–­1942; Pan-­Arabism, 1939–­Today (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961), p. 408. 2. Wright Patman, Fascism in Action (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1947), pp. v, vi, ix. For Griffith on “totalitarianism,” see particularly p. x. 3. In academic circles, a Yale conference in 1931 bruited about the idea, and a 1939 meeting of the American Philosophical Society emphasized it. See Calvin Hoover, Bolshevism, Fascism and Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), and Seminar on the Totalitarian State: From the Standpoints of History, Political Science, Economics and Sociology, November 17, 1939, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82, no. 1 (February 23, 1940) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1940). The political scientist Harold Lasswell introduced the related notion of a “garrison state” in an essay of 1937, “Sino-­Japanese Crisis: The Garrison State versus the Civilian State,” reprinted in Lasswell, Essays on the Garrison State (Milton Park, England: Taylor and Francis, 1997), pp. 43–­54. 4. Frank Hanighen’s essay titled “Brown Bolshevism” is in the Atlantic Monthly, April 1939, pp. 478–­85. Thompson uses fascintern in her column “On the Record” of May 28, 1938, printed in the San Bernadino (California) Sun, p. 20. Peter F. Drucker introduced “totalitarian fascism” in The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (New York: John Day, 1939), p. 268. Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, in “Let Me Call You Comrade,” a multipart short story in Collier’s 105 (1940), has “communazi,” pp. 6ff., pp. 47ff., and pp. 110ff. William L. Schlamm, in Hitler’s Conquest of America (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940), managed “communazi Fifth Column,” p. 25. We also had “Japanazis,” as noted by Jan Jarboe Russell, The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp during World War II (New York: Scribner, 2015), p. 4. I am most indebted to Thomas E. Lifka, The Concept “Totalitarianism” and American Foreign Policy 1933–­1949, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, Press, 1988). This work is a reprint of an exhaustive PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 1973) that is outstanding in its descriptive endeavor. Benjamin J. Alpers’s Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–­1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) is detailed and learned. Also learned, but ambiguous in its prescriptions, is Enzo Traverso, “Totalitarianism between History and Theory,” History and Theory 56 (2017): 97–­118. 5. Congressional Record, 80th Congress, 1st Session, p. H545 (January 23, 1947). 6. Both Orwell essays are available on the internet, from where I have quoted them: https://orwell .ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw and https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell -foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language (both accessed February 2, 2022). In Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), Duncan White focuses on Orwell’s worries about the totalitarian. 7. Stephen H. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 208–­16. 8. Emmet Kennedy, “Ambassador Carlton J. H. Hayes’s Wartime Diplomacy: Making Spain a Haven from Hitler,” Diplomatic History 36 (2012): 237–­60. See also George Q. Flynn, Roosevelt

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and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937–­45 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). 9. I rely on the unpublished 2015 essay by David A. Hollinger, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Paul Blanshard and American Catholicism,” and D. G. Hart, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), pp. 35–­38. The discussion of K. Healan Gaston, Imaging Judeo-­Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), also uses the term clerical fascism, p. 149. John P. Enyeart, Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic’s Fight for Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), takes up another aspect of the era’s vilifications, pp. 105–­61; and William Imboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–­1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), has a survey. 10. Bruce Kuklick, A Political History of the USA: One Nation Under God, 2nd ed. (London: Red Globe Press, 2020), quoted at pp. 244, 246. 11. My typical treatment depends on books written about McCarthy during the “era,” e.g., Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959). A more up-­to-­date discussion is Larry Tye, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), which makes analogies to the presidency of Donald Trump. 12. A survey with a focus on Buckley comes in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “The Ghetto and the Mansion,” Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 2020, 9–­11, from which I have quoted. See also George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 13. H. Arthur Steiner, “Fascism for America?,” American Political Science Review 29 (1935): 821–­30, and D. F. Fleming, “Are We Moving toward Fascism?,” Journal of Politics 16 (1954): 39–­75. 14. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had CIA funding and a notorious career, is described in (the American edition of) Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). Friedrich’s project is taken up in the book he edited, Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1954). 15. In addition to Arendt’s text, see the essays in Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-­Schmidt, eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought after World War Two (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Richard H. King, Arendt and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). A discussion of the issues at the time is Wolfgang Sauer, “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?,” American Historical Review 73 (1967): 404–­24. 16. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 62. 17. Lifka, The Concept “Totalitarianism,” p. 746. 18. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 143–­44. His The Age of Roosevelt takes a running start during the 1920s and goes up to the end of 1936. It deserves reading on its own but is discussed, along with Schlesinger’s own politics, in the excellent biography of Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). 19. David Green, Shaping Political Consciousness: The Language of Politics in America from McKinley to Reagan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), makes the custodial point, pp. 158–­61. 20. For a detailed treatment of Hofstadter and bibliography, see David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). An

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illuminating discussion of Hofstadter’s wider concern for anti-­intellectualism is in Michael J. Brown, Hope and Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 17–­50. 21. Hofstadter wrote “Democracy and Anti-­Intellectualism in America” for the Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Summer 1953, and a 1954 lecture was published in the American Scholar as “The Pseudo-­Conservative Revolt.” The Age of Reform, which had ruminations on these issues in respect to the populists, followed in 1955. In 1963 he produced the most famous piece, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” He revisited pseudoconservatism in two essays of 1965 and in an introduction to his important collection, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), which put in one place his most significant writings on the topic. 22. Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-­Conservative Revolt,” American Scholar 24 (1954–­55): 9–­27, quoting at p. 18. 23. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955). 24. These quotations are drawn from the online version of the essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-pol itics (accessed February 2, 2022). The best treatment of the paranoid style is that of Leo Ribuffo, “Donald Trump and the ‘Paranoid Style’ in American (Intellectual) Politics,” in the H-­Diplo /ISSF Policy Series: America and the World—­2017 and Beyond: https://networks.h-net.org/node /28443/discussions/183026/issf-policy-series-donald-trump-and-%E2%80%9Cparanoid-style %E2%80%9D-american (accessed February 2, 2022). 25. Sean Wilentz’s edition of Hofstadter’s writings—­Hofstadter: “Anti-­Intellectualism in Amer­ ican Life,” “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Uncollected Essays 1956–­1965 (New York: Library of America, 2020)—­has the quotes about the great mistake, p. 961. The other quotes are from Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-­Conservative Revolt,” p. 27. 26. Among Hofstadter’s followers: Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 127–­48, 167–­70; William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), pp. 194–­211, quote at p. 206; Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 167–­ 68; and Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) (1965 lectures on the Founders). 27. Morris Janowitz’s “Black Legions on the March,” in America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in American History, ed. Daniel Aaron (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 305–­25, was fixated on native fascists, and pp. 314, 315, 317, 318, and 320 are the only ones in which identical quotes do not appear. Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), is cited from p. xiv. In The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–­1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), Lipset and Earl Raab suggested that some American politics might be incipiently fascist or allied to fascism (pp. 4, 185, 199, 157–­91, 194–­95). See also Joseph R. Gusfield, Protest, Reform, and Revolt: A Reader in Social Movements (New York: John Wiley, 1970), and Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Two other works: Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972) (an anthology), and Alex Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

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28. Populism and “anti-­populism” are covered in Thomas Frank, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-­Populism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020). In July of 2020, History and Theory called for papers for a special issue entitled “Populist Historicities: Populist Engagements with the Past and the Challenges to Historical Thinking,” for publication in 2022; and the Jewish Quarterly Review relaunched its publication in May 2021 with the issue “The Return of History: New Populism, Old Hatreds.” Vibeke Schou Tjalve edited Geopolitical Amnesia: The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory (Toronto: McGill-­Queens’s University Press, 2020), which had essays on both US and world politics and again illustrated the lasting effects of Hofstadter’s thinking. The enduring character of Hofstadter’s vision was evident in an interesting fashion in Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), and Brandon Wolfe-­Hunnicutt, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). Chapter Eight 1. An excellent source on the European antifascist immigrants is a 1946 volume, Refugees in America: Report of the Committee for the Study of Recent Immigration from Europe by Maurice Davie et al. (New York: Harper and Brothers). This report intimated that the professorial and literary humanists comprised only a small portion of the articulate groups that came to the United States. The well-­known thinkers ambivalent about America may not have been representative. At the same time, Refugees in America did conclude that US racial prejudice “shocked” many of the émigrés. The refugees thought this prejudice resembled that in Germany before Hitler and might produce the same results (pp. 63–­69). Jean-­Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (New York: Verso, 2006), is comprehensive, translated from the original French edition of 1987. Also outstanding: Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). A recent and intelligent discussion is Terence Renaud, “Insider Intellectuals and the Crisis of Democracy,” German History 37 (2019): 392–­404, and a somewhat different view occurs in Laurel Leff, Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-­and-­Death Decision on Refugees from Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 2. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, pp. 477–­78, 493, 539, 541. 3. Quoted from George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roo­ sevelt and His Critics, 1933–­39 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 254. 4. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 241, 250. 5. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941), p. 240. 6. Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, ed. John Willett (New York: Arcade, 1981). 7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), has a 1962 Twentieth Anniversary Edition; see esp. pp. 441, 458–­62, 709, 1311. 8. Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 88, and Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, pp. 6, 15, 48 (from the 1994 Fiftieth Anniversary Edition produced by University of Chicago Press). 9. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, pp. 477–­78, 493, 539, 541.

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10. Albrecht Betz, Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 107. 11. The Europeans in Hollywood and their movies (only a few of which had fascist themes) are covered in John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés 1933–­1950 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983); Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983); Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Larissa Schütze, William Dieterle und die deutschsprachige Emigration in Hollywood: Antifaschistische Filmarbeit bei Warner Bros. Pictures, 1930–­1940 (Kornwestheim, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015); and Donna Rifkind, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Voertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood (New York: Other Press, 2020). 12. Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas Mann: Der Amerikaner, Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil, 1938–­1952 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011), and Tobias Boes, Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). Quote is from Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 519. 13. Jamie Sayer, Einstein in America (New York: Crown, 1985), p. 256. 14. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), quoted respectively on pp. 49, 218–­19, 239, 273. 15. The expert quoted is Richard H. King, Arendt and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 61, 87, 98–­99, 107, 271, 290. 16. Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–­1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) is still useful, as is his Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). More recent is Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Theodor Adorno gave a romanticized view of his US stay in “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” originally a talk delivered in 1968 and later published in its English translation in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). James Schmidt has a detached version of the stay in “The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,” New German Critique 34 (2007): pp. 47–­76. For a discussion of the school’s ideas on movies, see Jennifer Lynde Barker, The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 91–­92, or David Bathrick, “Cinematic Remaskings of Hitler: From Riefenstahl to Chaplin,” in Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 165–­66. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, originally published in 1944 in German as Dialektik der Aufklarung, was revised in 1947 but published in English only in 1972. For a discussion, see Stuart Jeffries, The Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2016), pp. 220–­25. 17. Gabriel Almond’s “The Appeals of Communism and Fascism,” an unpublished paper of 1962, is quoted in John H. Bunzel, Anti-­Politics in America: Reflections on the Anti-­Political Temper and Its Distortions of the Democratic Process (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967), pp. 216, 219. 18. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), quotes from pp. xi–­xii, 16–­17, 129–­30, 67; and Thomas Bethell, Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2012).

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19. David Gross, The Writer and Society: Heinrich Mann and Literary Politics in Germany, 1890–­1940 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), pp. 262–­65. 20. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society came out in 1964 (Boston: Beacon Press). His “Repressive Tolerance” was published in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert Paul Wolff et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 21. See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 247–­48, 388. 22. See Paul E. Gottfried, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2009), p. 297. 23. Daniel Bessner, “The Ghosts of Weimar: The Weimar Analogy in American Thought,” Social Research 84 (2017): 831–­55, and Bessner, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). I am also indebted to correspondence with Bessner. 24. To access the huge literature on Sartre, a place to start is Christina Howells, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 25. Two books by Jean-­Philippe Mathy have extensive details: Extrême-­Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and French Resistance: The French-­American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 26. For an account, see Rochelle Duford, “ ‘Who Is a Negator of History?’ Revisiting the Debate over Left Fascism 50 Years after 1968,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2019): 59–­77. Moreover, if Duford is to be believed, the French and the Germans were more certain in their conviction of the coming of fascism than I have made out. For Duford’s own sense of contemporary instances of fascism, see esp. p. 60. Chapter Nine 1. Here, as in chapter 6, there is an embarrassment of riches. Exhaustive filmographies are Mick Broderick, Nuclear Movies: A Critical Analysis and Filmography of International Feature-­ Length Films Dealing with Experimentation, Aliens, Terrorism, Holocaust, and Other Disaster Scenarios, 1914–­1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991), and Fraser A. Sherman, Screen Enemies of the American Way: Political Paranoia about Nazis, Communists, Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching Aliens in Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypical Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), stresses psychology but also premises a causal connection between film and culture. Bernard F. Dick, The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), substantively surveys its topic, as does Barna William Donovan, Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). 2. There is a 1957 recut of the 1943 The North Star, infamous for its kid-­gloves treatment of the USSR. 3. Seven Days in May was reimagined in 1994 as an HBO television movie, Seven Days in May: The Enemy Within. And there are several cinematic antifascist failures: They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1963); The Quiller Memorandum (1966); The Salzburg Connection (1972); and, later, movies like Hitler’s Daughter (1990)—­made for TV—­and Iron Sky (2012). 4. Anticommunist war movies include The Big Lift (1950), about the airborne operation in Germany; Pork Chop Hill (1959), about a grim Korean War battle; Thirteen Days (2000), about

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the Cuban Missile Crisis; and The Green Berets (1968), about Vietnam. On the anticommunist cinema as fascist, J. Hoberman, “The Fascist Guns in the West,” American Film 11 (1986): 42–­47, is compelling. 5. See Andrea Slane, A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). The 1973 film The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, evoked some of these same themes in a complex fashion. 6. The website Hitler Rants Parodies had 234,000 subscribers. My quote is taken from a link that is now defunct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSYk80fhYFY. 7. The best example is Ben Urwand, “The Interview Is Not the First Time Hollywood Bowed to a Dictator,” Time, December 22, 2014, https://time.com/3644539/the-interview-is-not-the-first -time-hollywood-bowed-to-a-dictator/ (accessed February 2, 2022). 8. The pornographic phenomenon can be explored on the internet. There is also a scholarly literature. Lynn Rapaport, “Holocaust Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in ‘Ilsa, She-­Wolf of the SS,’ ” Shofar 22 (2003): 53–­59, explores the initial film. 9. The text discusses alternative histories in which fascism comes to America by way of a Hitlerite takeover. Gavriel David Rosenfeld writes on the wider project of all what-­ifs pertinent to Hitler in The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). His book examines fictional fascist worlds in the culture of many countries in addition to the United States. But the volume also has a unity in the author’s belief that the Third Reich has been “normalized” by books, films, dramas, etc. A listing of the popular culture items consulted is on p. 512. Rosenfeld’s Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) has the same focus. A review appears in Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “Notes on Camp, or Counterfactual Führers and the Structure of the Joke,” History and Theory 56 (2017): 433–­41. Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst, MA: Amherst Press, 2014), also has exhaustive references. The Wikipedia article “Hypothetical Axis Victory in World War Two” is a trot through this subject and a summary of the underground novels and movies that make it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_Axis _victory_in_World_War_II (accessed February 2, 2022). For another discussion of these issues, see Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), although it only touches on the alternative histories of fascism in the United States. Rosenfeld’s The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019) also catalogues these efforts whether or not as alternative history. Dick, The Screen is Red, comprehensively explores the communists. These authors note that movies like the Star Wars franchise or television series like Game of Thrones, in their plots about the future or about substitute worlds, have also prompted viewers and experts to discourse on varied forms of fascism. There are additionally comics, which came of age in the late 1930s. The superheroes Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Wonder Woman all battled communists and fascists over the years. So, too, in daily newspapers, did more ordinary heroes like Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon, and Terry Lee (of Terry and the Pirates). On the comics there is Jeremy Dauber, American Comics: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021). 10. Fascism’s migration to the United States after its supposed defeat appeared in television’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, and Wonder Woman. Rod Serling, the producer of the television series The Twilight Zone (1959–­64), wrote “He’s Alive” in 1963, and a 1967 Star

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Trek episode—­“The City on the Edge of Forever”—­worried over make-­believe fascism. In 1979 Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radner staged a Saturday Night Live sketch about “Uberman.” Al Franken, who had a minor role, wrote the skit and went on to the Senate of the United States. 11. Not all these publications were ephemeral. Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s Invasion (1940) gained recognition because the author was a prominent Democrat and a friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s; Erwin Lessner’s Phantom Victory: The Fourth Reich 1945–­1960 (1944) had Hitler victorious in New York in 1960 (Rosenfeld’s The Fourth Reich, pp. 52–­53, credited the novel with influencing initial US policies for a defeated Germany); Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) was suggested for a National Book Award in 1973; Eric Norden’s The Ultimate Solution (1973) was a dark mirror of America’s experience in Vietnam, and it recounted a fascist victory in World War Two and its ramifications in 1964, when the narrative took place. Ben Stein’s The Croesus Conspiracy (1978) described an American Nazi group that caused Kennedy’s assassination and the Watergate scandal, and was attempting to get its sort of president elected; Newt Gingrich’s 1945 (1995) was a dreadful tale about fascism’s victories by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives; Harry Turtledove’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies (2003) was by an author celebrated for his alternative fiction, and told of fascism’s coming to America in the wake of a German victory during World War Two. 12. Hitler at the Lincoln Memorial appeared in Liberty Magazine’s serialization of Fred Allhoff ’s Lightning in the Night (1940). Hitler’s sculpture on Mount Rushmore was drawn for DC Comics, Justice League of America (1973), and was subsequently published in Justice League of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus, vol. 1 (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2017). 13. For the quotation, I am indebted to the Wikipedia article on the book https://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 (accessed February 2, 2022), despite the template warning about the subjectivity of the essay. 14. In addition to the examples in the text, mention may be made of two other book-­to-­movie adaptations. Robert Ludlum’s potboiler of 1978, The Holcroft Covenant, pitted a New York City architect trying to deliver reparation for the Holocaust against conspirators working for fascist renewal. An international best seller, it sank without a trace as a later mainstream movie starring Michael Caine. The Robert Harris novel Fatherland (1992) unmasked the Nazis, victorious in Europe and attempting to establish better relations in the United States. The book has sold over three million copies in twenty-­five languages but was made into an unsuccessful HBO movie in 1994. 15. The Wikipedia entry on Starship Troopers is excellent in accounting for the status of that cinema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film) (accessed February 2, 2022). 16. In The Americans, which premiered in 2015, Soviets spied in the United States for an indefinite time during the 1980s. Although not a winner, it suggested that anticommunism still lived. But The Americans competed with more successful antifascist television. Designated Survivor aired on ABC TV in 2016 and 2017, and then on Netflix in 2019. The story began with a strange attack that nearly wiped out the government when Washington was bombed. The secretary of housing and urban development became president after everyone ahead of him in the line of succession was killed. This honorable politician then fought a titanic battle against unknown right-­wing foes. In 2020 Amazon Prime debuted Hunters, set in 1977 as anti-­Nazis in New York City sought hundreds of fascist agents conspiring to start a Fourth Reich. This series was not to be confused with the movie The Hunt, which was released just about when Hunters came to living rooms. The Hunt was about how liberal elitists would murder working-­class conservatives.

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17. On the name-­calling in high politics of the high 1960s, see Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 438; Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 160; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 885; George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (New York: Random House, 1972), p. xviii; and Thomas J. Knock, The Life and Times of George McGovern: The Rise of a Prairie Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 399. The relevant parts of the 1968 convention on YouTube: “Ribicoff vs. Daley at Democratic Convention 1968,” video, 1:41, posted by historycomestolife June 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj9TkjL87Rk (accessed February 2, 2022). Chapter Ten 1. For one discussion of these issues of left liberals and Red Fascism, see Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s–­1950’s,” American Historical Review 75 (1970): 1046–­ 64. This comprehensive essay both covered this comparison and exhibited the later critique of the anti-­Soviet policy of the United States and of the origins of the Cold War. Thomas E. Lifka, The Concept “Totalitarianism” and American Foreign Policy 1933–­1949, 2 vols. (New York: Garland Press, 1988), is also excellent. For more criticisms and discussion, see Thomas R. Maddux, “Red Fascism, Brown Bolshevism: The American Image of Totalitarianism in the 1930s,” Historian 40 (1977): 85–­103, and the forum “What Fascism Is Not,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 367–­98. 2. Thomas J. Knock, The Life and Times of George McGovern: The Rise of a Prairie Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), takes on Lyndon Johnson’s advisors, quoting McGovern on p. 428. 3. See for example Paul E. Gottfried, Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2009). 4. A cautious overview of the premier scholarly literature is Stanley Payne, “Fascism and Racism,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 123–­50. George L. Mosse is cited from “Introduction: The Genesis of Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (1966): 14 (much later, Paul Griffin wrote “A Mosse-­Centric Meta-­narrative” of fascism in Rethinking the Nature of Fascism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Antonio Costa Pinta [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], p. 85). Also: Wolfgang Sauer, “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?,” American Historical Review 73 (1967): 404–­24, quoted at p. 404; A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), e.g., pp. 261, 283, 339, 342, 360; and Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) (originally published in French, 1982), pp. 13–­14, 22. 5. For Gleason’s autobiographical account, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–­12; his overall conclusions, pp. 209–­10; and for the rendering of his arguments and the quotes, pp. 11–­12, 51, 64, 80–­81, 88, 124, 134, 166, 217. 6. A discussion of this aspect of Hofstadter’s position is Morris Schonbach, “Native American Fascism during the 1930s and 1940s: A Study of Its Roots, Its Growth, and Its Decline” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1958; New York: Garland Press, 1985), pp. 42–­43.

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7. See Victor Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism,” Journal of Politics 17 (1955): 173–­ 97, and “Populist Influences on American Fascism,” Western Political Quarterly 10 (1957): 350–­57. 8. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 81–­139. 9. See Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), and August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–­1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 10. A Belgian national who taught at the University of Washington, Pierre L. van den Berghe wrote Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Wiley, 1967). C. Vann Woodward wrote “Our Own Herrenvolk,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1971, pp. 11–­12. See also Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–­1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 242–­77, and John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997). 11. See Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). 12. A general work is David Livingston Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2011), particularly p. 73. For specialized studies of the Native Americans, see Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), and Tai S. Edwards and Paul Kelton, “Germs, Genocides, and America’s Indigenous Peoples,” Journal of American History 107 (2020): 52–­76. A review of some of the literature is Peter Nabokov, “The Intent was Genocide,” New York Review of Books, July 2, 2020, pp. 51–­52. 13. On the Hitler precedent, see James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 14. This quotation is taken from the Nation’s blurb for Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–­1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 15. Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), quotations from pp. 1–­2, 213–­14. 16. Victor Bulmer-­Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), quotations from pp. 28, 36–­37. 17. Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017), pp. 281, 291. Less condemnatory of  Washington is Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (New York: Ox­­ ford University Press, 2018). 18. The books are, respectively, James Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-­Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), e.g., pp. 594, 610; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–­1920 (New York: Harper and Row, 2009), pp. 29–­30; and Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–­1910 (New York: Viking Press, 2016), p. 467. 19. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–­1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), has a careful discussion. Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York:

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Liveright, 2017), is ambivalent, pp. 7–­8, 199–­208. Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), is out of the ordinary. 20. The examples are taken from the survey by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford, 2000), quoted from pp. 40–­51, 60, 84–­87, 103, 148, 155, 269, 276, 284–­86. Brenda Wineapple reviews many of these impulses in “Dress Rehearsal for the Revolution,” New York Review of Books, March 12, 2020, pp. 26–­28. 21. See the discussion in Paul M. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 232–­ 33, 245–­46 for the comparison of Lincoln to Hitler. A response to the professional historians is Jarrett Stepman, The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past (Washington, DC: Regnery-­Gateway, 2019). 22. The quote is from L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-­Between (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 5. The classic antipresentist statement is Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931). On the narrativists, see Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 23. “Higher entertainment” is from Lee Benson, in conversation long ago, but resonances of this view may be found in Benedetto Croce and David Hume. “A distant mirror” echoes the title of a book by Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). Marx’s views are found in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and Santayana’s in his Reason in Common Sense (1905). 24. Selections in this section of the chapter again come from hundreds of contributions. A survey from work up to 2020 occurs in Simona Aimar’s review of Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works in the Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 2019, pp. 13–­15. The Radical History Review 138 (2020) is devoted to the topic: “Fascism and Antifascism since 1945”; and the International Association of Comparative Fascism Studies publishes the magazine Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. On the revival of fascism during the 1980s and 1990s in American literary-­critical circles, see Richard J. Golsan, Fascism’s Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), with a bibliography, pp. 301–­10. 25. Donald I. Warren, “Depression Era Fascism and Nazism in the United States and Canada: Threat to Democracy or Theater of the Absurd,” in Fascism outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001), pp. 635–­701; at p. 680, an essay with an excellent bibliography. 26. Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, and Andreas Umland, eds., discuss the 2002 meeting in Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right (Stuttgart, Germany: ibidem-­Verlag, 2006). Another meeting, similar to the one from 2002, had its results published in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27. Paul E. Gottfried, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), locates fascism on the right; see pp. vii, 1–­18, 23–­39, 59–­63. 28. The 2017 book is Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 3, 175. 29. “Fascism Rising” is volume 34, issue 1 of the 2017 World Policy Journal. 30. Ronald Beiner’s Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 1–­2, 5, takes up the new international.

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31. Citations from Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (New York: Random House, 2018), are pp. xii, xiv, xviii, 196. 32. I have quoted the advertisement for Nidesh Lawtoo’s (New) Fascism (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019). Lawtoo teaches in Europe but was educated in the United States and is connected to Johns Hopkins University. 33. Robert Paxton’s essay “The Five Stages of Fascism” is from Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 1–­23. Timothy Snyder was more deeply involved with European controversies, particularly those arising from the much-­debated work of the German scholar Ernst Nolte. A forum on Bloodlands appears in Central European History 21 (2012): 115–­68. 34. Snyder’s “schizo-­fascism” comes in an interview: John Connelly, “Public Thinker: Timothy Snyder  .  .  .  ,” Public Books, December 7, 2018, https://www.publicbooks.org/public -thinker-timothy-snyder-on-russia-and-dark-globalization (accessed February 2, 2022), and a talk to the American Academy in Berlin, “The Road to Unfreedom: Democracy, Neofascism, and the Importance of Language,” January 14, 2019, reports on “not-­even fascism”: https://www .americanacademy.de/videoaudio/the-road-to-unfreedom-democracy-neofascism-and-the-im portance-of-language (accessed February 2, 2022). 35. Paxton’s post-­riot essay is “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now,” Newsweek, January 11, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/robert-paxton-trump-fascist-1560652 (accessed February 2, 2022); Snyder’s is “The American Abyss,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html (accessed February, 2, 2022). Chapter Eleven 1. Both Goldwater and Obama are cited in Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), pp. 615, 754. 2. Quoted from Nitsuh Abebe, “Necessary Evil,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 2018, pp. 11ff. 3. Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Un-­American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II; Images by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Other Government Photographers (Chicago: CityFiles Press, 2016), quoting Lange’s assistant Christina Gardner, p. 24. And see the editors’ Note to the Reader, p. 1. 4. Richard H. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: New Press, 1999), reprints Geisel’s wartime cartoons with helpful commentary. 5. Dennis Eisenberg, The Re-­Emergence of Fascism (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1967), pp. 7, 29, 115, 139. 6. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (New York: M. Evans, 1980), pp. 2–­5, 169–­70, 335. 7. I have relied on James Fisher, ed., Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of His Plays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), and for the Arts Medal, the Wikipedia article on him. 8. Quoted from Connie Bruck, “Devil’s Advocate,” New Yorker, August 5 and 12, 2019, pp. 35–­36. 9. See Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), and Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019). The quotation is from A. O. Scott, “How Susan Sontag Taught Me

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to Think,” New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive /2019/10/08/magazine/susan-sontag.html (accessed February 2, 2022). 10. Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s most famous piece is “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in Commentary, November 1979 (now online at https://www.commentary.org/articles/jeane-kirk patrick/dictatorships-double-standards [accessed February 2, 2022]), and reprinted in Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). The quotes, however, come from Kirkpatrick’s most extensive and scholarly study, Leader and Vanguard in Mass Society: A Study of Peronist Argentina (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. xi, 4, 30–­31, 40–­41, 214. For a different perspective on Kirkpatrick’s ideas: Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), pp. 55–­56, 180–­81, 205–­6. 11. For some details, see the Wikipedia essays on the musical and Webber. 12. Information on one of the more interesting cases, that of Lyndon LaRouche, can be found at https://www.larouchepac.com (accessed February 2, 2022). There is also Edward H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 13. Covering the self-­identifying neo-­Nazis or fringe fascist groups in the late twentieth century is Jerry Bornstein, The Neo-­Nazis: The Threat of the Hitler Cult (New York: Julian Messner, 1986). For more recent groups, see Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), and Seyward Darby, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (Boston: Little, Brown, 2020). 14. For movie critics’ responses to Falling Down, see the Wikipedia entry on the film. 15. Quotes are from Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford, 2000), pp. 249, 266–­69, 275–­76; and Thomas Meaney, “The Dark European Stain: How the Far Right Rose Again,” in the New Statesman’s special issue “The Return of Fascism,” September 14, 2018, which offers gonzo fascism: https://www.newstatesman .com/uncategorized/2018/09/dark-european-stain-how-far-right-rose-again (accessed February 2, 2022). See also Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right, pp. 212–­17, and Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 16. Berlet and Lyons, Right Wing Populism in America, pp. 284–­86. 17. Surveys of the spread of fascism include Christopher Vials, Haunted By Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst, MA: Amherst Press, 2014); Gavriel David Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Bob Hertzberg, The Third Reich on Screen, 1929–­2015 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). 18. Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006); Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), quoted at pp. 54–­55, 179, 188–­89. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005) is cited from Goldberg, pp. 202, 220. Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, The New Right, and the Republican Party (Boston: South End Press, 1988, 1989,1991), attached the German National Socialists to the American neo-­Nazis and then to the mainstream Republican Party. 19. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 12–­15, 98, 245, 253–­54, 295, 391. 20. Glen Yeadon, The Nazi Hydra: Suppressed History of a Century; Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2008), pp. 8–­9. A less inflamed

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discussion of Bush’s language is in Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), pp. 35, 48, 51. 21. Jim Marrs, The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America (New York: William Morrow, 2008), pp. 5, 15, 361, 376. 22. Dinesh D’Souza is best investigated through his website: https://dineshdsouza.com (accessed February 2, 2022). 23. I have relied on David G. Marwell, Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death” (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), and the Wikipedia entry on The Boys from Brazil. 24. Stephen H. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 243–­50; Allan A. Ryan Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1983); Mary Kathryn Barbier, Spies, Lies, and Citizenship: The Hunt for Nazi Criminals (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), pp. vii–­ix, 1–­2, 66–­67, 98, 101, 116–­17; Brian Crim, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); and Douglas M. O’Reagan, Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 25. See https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-germany-world-war-ii-immig ration-0eac6bce76dc4877a989d53b274a785f and https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/us/us -deports-former-nazi-guard.html (both accessed February 2, 2022). Chapter Twelve 1. The quotations come from Cushing Strout’s stylish book, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. xiii, 1, 27–­33, 113. 2. For the latest generation of German-­American academics, see for example Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); the website of Anne Berg of the University of Pennsylvania : https://live-sas-www-history .pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/node/13114 (accessed February 2, 2022); and the scholarship of Norman Domeier of the University of Stuttgart. 3. On the Founders’ ideas, standard texts include Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-­Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932); Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–­1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1964); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) and The Origins of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992) and The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–­1787, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). More recent publications are George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Michael J. Faber, An Anti-­Federalist Constitution: The Development of Dissent in the Ratification Debates (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019).

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 8 – 1 9 8

236

4. A summary is David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 1–­14. 5. The quote is taken from Jackson’s first annual message to Congress, December 8, 1829. Conclusion 1. The boat repair comparison is from Otto Neurath but was popularized by W. V. Quine in World and Object of 1960 (Cambridge: MIT Press). See Thomas E. Uebel, “On Neurath’s Boat,” in Nancy Cartwright et al., Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 89–­94. 2. The game’s website is https://www.secrethitler.com (accessed February 2, 2022). 3. Oxford Languages is an online product of Oxford University Press and its dictionaries. Its website is https://languages.oup.com, and the quote is from the 2017 short list (accessed February 2, 2022). 4. Exemplary analogies to the 1930s occur in Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Rhodri Jeffreys-­Jones, The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI, and the Case That Stirred the Nation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020); and Chris Yogerst, Hollywood Hates Hitler: Jew-­Baiting, Anti-­Nazism, and the Senate Investigations into Warmongering in Motion Pictures (Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2020). Ariel Dorfman’s essay, “A Taxonomy of Tyrants,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2021, pp. 25–­27, reflected on these issues from 1916 through 1920; and the German Historical Institute in London hosted a roundtable, “Historians and the Challenge of Right-­Wing Populism,” May 4, 2021. 5. Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), pp. iii, 7–­12, 89, 258.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank friends and colleagues at Radboud University and the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands for encouraging this project when I was first developing it in 2016 and 2017. Charles Myers has constantly supported my interests, and he was no less committed at the University of Chicago Press. Three anonymous readers from the press were unusually helpful, as was its entire staff during a difficult period of online-­only communication. I would especially like to mention Erika Barrios, Sandra Hazel, and Adriana Smith. Near the conclusion of my work, Rosemarie D’Alba was a lifesaver. Several other scholars contributed in ways they may not be entirely aware of, and I want to mention them, even if they will disapprove of what I have written: Kathy Brown, Angus Corbin, Brett Gary, Darryl Hart, David Hollinger, Joel Isaac, Benjamin Nathans, Mark Noll, Kathy Peiss, Robert Pippin, Jennifer Ratner-­Rosenhagen, Marc Trachtenberg, and Frits Van Holthoon.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abbott and Costello, 50, 105 Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (Milton), 85, 166 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 52, 67 Adorno, Theodore, 134, 138–­40, 226n16 Adventures of Robin Hood (film), 104 African-­Americans, 1, 35–­36, 95, 135, 157, 169 Age of Roosevelt, The (Schlesinger), 127, 202, 223n18 Albright, Madeleine, 197 All the King’s Men (Warren), 147, 159, 204 All through the Night, 85–­86 Almond, Gabriel, 139, 226n17 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 124 American Fascists (Hedges), 67, 102, 180 American Freedom and Catholic Power (Blanshard), 122–­23 American Legion, 42–­43, 67, 71, 73, 210n17 American Party, 97 American Review (journal), 35–­36 Anatomy of Fascism, The (Paxton), 172, 180 anticommunism, 69, 122, 127, 136, 164, 177, 179, 229n16; in film, 145, 152, 227n4, 228n9, 229n16 anti-­Semitism: in Germany, 39, 49, 51, 73; and Lindbergh, 82; and Arendt, 125; in US, 58, 64–­ 65, 68, 221n26 Anything Goes (musical), 31 appeasement, 76, 115 Arendt, Hannah, 124–­25, 133, 134, 137–­39, 178 Argentina, 107, 126, 177–­78, 234n10 Arnold, Benedict, 74, 91 Arnold, Edward, 102 Arnold, Thurman, 62 As We Go Marching (Flynn), 136 Aztecs, 67, 194

Bacon’s Rebellion, 179, 167–­68 Barbie, Klaus, 182 Battle Cry of Peace, The (film), 99, 218n2 Beard, Charles: and America First, 82; and developing views, 26, 78, 138, 215n3; and economics, 78–­79, 129, 23–­24; and pragmatism, 24, 35 Bellamy, Francis, 91–­92 Bell for Adano, A (Hersey), 108–­9 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 90–­91 Benton, Thomas, 36, 90–­91 Betrayed (film), 148 Big Lie, The (D’Souza), 181–­82 Black Legion, 100, 130 Black Power, 157 Blackshirts, 17, 19, 21, 28, 53–­53 Blanshard, Paul, 122 Blockade (film), 101 Bloodlands (Snyder), 172 B-­movies, 104, 220n17 Bonus Army, 33 Born Yesterday (film), 149, 150 Bourne, Randolph, 19, 24 Boys from Brazil, The (film), 183, 183 Bradbury, Ray, 152 Brecht, Bertolt, 135 Bright Room Called Day, A (Kushner), 176 Broadway, 72, 99, 101, 103, 135, 159, 176, 178 Browder, Earl, 97 Bryan, William Jennings, 11, 32, 37, 95 Buckley, William, 123 Bund, German, 52, 68–­70, 220n17 Bureau of Motion Pictures, 102 Burns, John Horne, 109 Butler, Smedley, 42–­44, 47–­48, 52, 210n17

240 Capital City (Sandoz), 72 cartoons, 105–­6, 221 Casablanca (film), 107, 108, 113, 147, 204 Cash, W. J., 34, 73 Catholics, 65, 71, 99, 187, 214n15; and Mussolini, 17; in US, 57–­58, 121–­23 Chaplin, Charles, 104–­5 Chase, Stuart, 62–­63 Christian Front, 71 Christian Mobilizers, 52 Christian Nationalists, 180 circular nature of politics, 127–­29, 161–­66, 169, 173 Citizen Kane (film), 87–­89, 98 Clark, Walter, 72 Cold War liberals, 131–­32, 162–­65, 173, 176, 177 Collins, Seward, 35–­36, 209n5 Colonel Klink, 150, 150 comic books, 151, 228n9, 229n12 Coming American Fascism, The (Dennis), 48–­49, 83, 98, 210 Committee to Defend Democracy by Aiding the Allies, 96 Common Sense (journal), 25, 44 communism, 25, 40, 50, 84, 166, 186; and Bingham, 48; and Butler, 44; in Cold War, 119–­32, 149, 163–­65, 177–­78, 182; after collapse of USSR, 146, 149, 165; and collective security, 66; and Corbin, 74–­75; and Coughlin, 46; as distinct from fascism in culture, 144, 151, 155, 194; and films about, 146–­47, 149, 151, 156–­57, 227n1; and Gleason, 165–­66; and Kirkpatrick, 177–­78; in 1928–­34, 25, 46; and pact with Hitler, 77–­78, 116, 140, 216n14; and political spectrum, 94–­97, 160–­62; and popular front, 46–­47; and revolution in Russia, 16; and Roman Catholics, 57–­58, 121–­24; in World War Two, 86–­87, 116–­19 concentration camp analogy, 167 Confessions of a Nazi Spy (film), 101, 105 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 124, 222n14 constitutionalism, 24, 137 Constitution of the United States, 27, 40, 43, 54, 74; analyzed, 25, 78, 137–­38, 188–­92; overturned, 147; and traditions of, 55, 75, 78 Constitution Party, 96 Cool Million, A (West), 34, 72 Copperhead, 84, 85 Corbin, John, 73–­75, 166, 169 Coughlin, Charles, 38–­41, 44–­46, 57–­58, 71, 73, 88, 121 counterfactual history, 151–­56, 228n9 CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America), 25–­26, 46–­47, 77–­79, 86, 93, 96, 128 Crawford, Alan, 130–­31

index Crawford, Broderick, 147, 149 Croly, Herbert: and career, 18–­21; and Mussolini, 1, 20, 21, 117, 169, 18; and Franklin Roosevelt, 25; and Theodore Roosevelt, 18–­21 Crossfire (film), 109, 221n26 Day of the Locust (West), 72 Declaration of Independence, 75, 188, 192 Defenders of the Christian Faith, 52 De Man, Paul, 144 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 192 Dennis, Lawrence, 47–­50, 62–­63, 64, 118 Depression, 27, 39, 32, 38, 41, 48, 51, 182; and Corbin, 75; and folksingers, 93; in Germany, 49; and Janowitz, 130; and Schlesinger, 127; in US, 24–­25, 55 Derrida, Jacques, 143–­44 Dershowitz, Alan, 176 Des Moines, Iowa, 87 De Tocqueville, Alexis, 192 Dewey, John, 129; and fascism, 26, 35, 38; as philosopher, 22–­23, 35, 61; and progressivism, 24, 35; and totalitarianism, 82, 216n14 Dick, Philip, 153–­54 Dickstein, Samuel, 42–­43, 52, 84 “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (Kirkpatrick), 177, 234n10 Dies, Martin, 84 Dietrich, Marlene, 149 Dirksen, Everett, 120, 122 Döblin, Alfred, 136 Donald Duck, 105, 221n20 Douglas, Michael, 179 Dr. Seuss, 174, 233n4 Dr. Strangelove (film), 2, 150, 175, 204 D’Souza, Dinesh, 181, 235n22 Duce, 17, 21, 28, 30, 79, 156 Duck Soup (film), 30–­31, 104, 208n21 dystopian fiction, 99, 121, 152–­55 Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An (Beard), 22–­23, 78 Einstein, Albert, 132, 136–­37 Eisenhower, Dwight, 123, 127–­28, 131–­32, 140 Eisler, Hanns, 136 Elkins, Stanley, 167 Elliott, William, 22–­24, 207n10 EPIC (End Poverty in California), 41 Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 135 Evita (musical), 178 Existentialism Is a Humanism (pamphlet), 142 extremism, 130, 163 Face in the Crowd, A (film), 148, 160, 204 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 152, 229n13 Falling Down (film), 179

index farce: of communism, 149; of fascism, 30–­31, 104–­ 6, 149–­51, 156, 158–­60 Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, 17 “Fascinating Fascism” (Sontag), 176 Fascism, books so titled, 62, 67, 71–­73 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 51–­52, 54, 68–­70, 73, 101, 107, 146, 182 Ferkiss, Victor, 167 Field of Dreams (film), 2, 204 fifth column, 85–­86, 101, 103, 105, 166, 211n1, 211n4, 211n7, 222n4 Fitzgerald, Scott, 28, 65, 208n18 Flynn, Errol, 104, 220n18 Flynn, John T., 82, 85, 136, 175 Forerunners of American Fascism (Swing), 48, 62, 208n17 Foucault, Michel, 143 Founding Fathers, 73–­75, 137, 185–­92 Franco, Francisco, 57, 59, 66, 72, 122, 142, 205n2 Frank, Jerome, 62, 213n15 Frankfurt School, 134, 138–­40 French Revolution, 94, 137, 167–­68, 180 Freud, Sigmund, 134–­35, 138, 141, 143 Friedrich, Carl, 124 Friendly Fascism (Gross), 175 Fromm, Erich, 134, 135 From Russia with Love (film), 146 F scale, 139 Fuehrer’s Face, Der (cartoon), 105, 221n20 Führer, 28, 79, 83, 103, 105, 121 Fury (film), 100 Gabriel over the White House (film), 27–­28, 87 Gallery, The (Burns), 109 Gay, Peter, 141, 144 German-­Americans, 53–­54, 65, 69–­7 1, 182–­84 Gestapo, 29, 79, 157 “Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels” (Beard), 79, 215n3 Gilda (film), 107–­26 Glass, Carter, 38 Gleason, Abbott, 165–­66, 171, 177 God and Man at Yale (Buckley), 123 Goebbels, Joseph, 138, 221n22 Goldberg, Jonah, 180–­81 Goldberg, Michelle, 180 Goldwater, Barry, 128–­32, 173, 175, 178 Grant, Cary, 102, 104, 105, 108 Grant, Madison, 64–­65 Great Dictator, The (Chaplin), 104–­5, 138, 149, 204 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 28, 65, 208 Griffith, Andy, 148, 160 Gross, Bertram, 175, 189 Gunga Din (film), 104 Guthrie, Woody, 92–­93, 93, 106

241 Haider, Carmen, 26, 207 Hamilton, Alexander, 18–­19, 32, 96, 187–­89, 192 Handmaid’s Tale, The (television series), 4, 154, 155 Hayakawa, S. I., 60–­61 Hayek, Friedrich, 135–­36 Hayes, Carlton, 121, 123 Hedges, Chris, 180 Hegel, G. W. F., 138, 140 Heidegger, Martin, 124, 134, 137, 142, 144, 172 Heinlein, Robert, 152–­53 Hellman, Lilian, 35, 72, 100 Hemingway, Ernest, 60, 85, 101 Herrenvölk, 168 Hersey, John, 109 Hoffer, Eric, 139–­40 Hoffman, Dustin, 183 Hofstadter, Richard, 128–­31, 139–­42, 162–­63, 166–­ 67, 197, 223n20, 224nn21–­26, 230n6 Hogan’s Heroes (television series), 149, 150 Holliday, Judy, 149 Holocaust, 30, 168, 197 Hoover, Edgar, 51–­52, 54, 70 Hoover, Herbert, 41, 82, 95; and fascism, 35, 39, 52, 87; political contests of, 25, 30, 33, 37 Hopkins, Harry, 38, 39 Horkheimer, Max, 134, 138, 140 House, Edward, 99 House on Carroll Street, The (film), 148 House on 92nd Street (film), 107 How Fascism Works (Stanley), 172, 232n24 HUAC (House Un-­American Activities Committee), 42–­43, 84–­85, 108, 123 Hunt for Red October, The (film), 146 Ickes, Harold, 50, 77, 80, 83–­84, 96–­97 Idiot’s Delight (film), 101 I’ll Take My Stand (manifesto), 35 Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (film), 150, 228n8 insignia, 153, 176–­77 Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 52 Institute for Social Research, 134, 138–­40 instrumentalism, 22–­24, 35 Insurgent America (Bingham), 48 Interview, The (film), 151, 228n7 Is Capitalism Doomed? (Dennis), 48 Italian-­Americans, 21–­22, 53, 69 Italianità, 21, 53 It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis), 4, 44–­46, 90, 100, 151, 154, 195; and uses of, 71, 90, 100, 154, 157 James, William, 18, 20, 22, 24, 61 Janowitz, Morris, 130 Japan, 2, 113; and concentration camps, 174; and Dick, 153–­54; and fascism, 10, 89, 118, 220n17, 222n4; and imperialism, 89–­90, 125 Japanese-­Americans, 174, 220n17

242 Jefferson, Thomas, 78, 137, 149, 185, 192; and Corbin, 75; and liberalism, 11–­13, 96, 187–­89; and Pound, 31 Jefferson and/or Mussolini (Pound), 32 Jim Crow, 1, 35–­36, 95, 135 John Birch Society, 179 Johnson, Hugh, 40 Johnson, Lyndon, 131–­32, 140, 157, 161, 163, 181 Johnson, Philip, 72 Juarez (film), 104 Keeper of the Flame (film), 103 Kirkpatrick, Jean, 177–­78 Knox, Frank, 79–­80, 97 Korea, 132, 145, 148, 152, 163, 181 Kornhauser, William, 130 Kristeva, Julia, 143 Ku Klux Klan, 35–­36, 100, 130, 169, 231n19 Kushner, Tony, 176 La Follette, Philip, 80–­81, 87, 95, 215n8 La Guardia, Fiorella, 70 Landon, Alf, 46, 97 language, 3, 5, 114–­15, 200–­202 LaRouche, Lyndon, 179 Last Train from Madrid, The (film), 101 League of Nations, 11, 15–­16, 19 left liberals, 162–­64, 166–­67, 176–­77, 180, 230n1 Lemke, William, 46 Lenin, Vladimir, 16 Lewis, Sinclair, 44–­46, 86, 210n21 Liberal Fascism (Goldberg), 180–­81 liberalism: of Cold War, 131–­32, 161–­62, 163–­64; and FDR, 40, 94–­96; and Jefferson, 11–­13, 18–­19; of the popular front, 47, 77, 96, 116, 118, 122, 164, 197; and Schlesinger, 127; of left, 162–­ 64, 166–­67, 176–­77, 180, 230n1; and Wilson, 13, 96 Liberalism in America (Stearns), 19 Liberty League, 40–­47, 82, 95–­97 Lifeboat (film), 103 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 82–­84 Lindbergh, Charles, 82–­87, 90, 93, 154, 185, 216n16 Lion Is in the Streets, A (film), 147 Lion Is in the Streets, A (Langley), 147 Lipset, Seymour, 128, 130, 224n26–­27 Long, Huey, 41, 42, 45, 62, 73, 88, 97, 186; career of, 37; in fiction, 147–­48, 195; My First Days in the White House, 44 “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (Orwell), 121 Love Under Fire (film), 101 MacArthur, Douglas, 33 Macdonald, Andrew, 178–­79 Mailer, Norman, 109

index Making the Fascist State (Schneider), 22, 207n9 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 153–­54 Man in the High Castle, The (television series), 2, 153, 153, 155 Mann, Heinrich, 140 Mann, Thomas, 133, 136, 141 Marathon Man (film), 183 March of Time, The (film), 68, 88–­89 Marcuse, Herbert, 134, 140–­41, 164–­65 Marcuse, Ludwig, 134 Mark of Zorro, The (film), 104 Marrs, Jim, 181 Mars, Kenneth, 160 Marx, Groucho, 31, 31, 208n21 Marx, Karl, 16, 99, 124, 136, 165, 167, 170 McCain, John, 1, 180 McClure, S. S., 20 McWilliams, Joe, 52 Meet John Doe (film), 102 Merriam, Frank, 41 Milton, George, 86, 166 Mind of the South, The (South), 72 Mostel, Zero, 158 movies, 114, 123, 177, 181; during Cold War, 146–­51, 157–­60; during the early New Deal, 26–­28; listed, 203, 204, 219n11, 220n17, 226n11, 227nn3–­ 4, 228n9; and Nazi exploitation cinema, 151, 228n8; during 1930s, 26–­28, 100–­102, 130; during postwar period, 109, 146; during World War One, 99; during World War Two, 102–­108, 113 Mumford, Louis, 34, 72, 79 Munich Conference, 4, 65–­66, 68, 70, 76, 101; as a slur, 76, 120, 148, 163, 200 music, 92–­93, 105–­6 Mussolini Speaks (film), 27 My First Days in the White House (Long), 44 Myrdal, Gunnar, 135–­36 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 109 Nashville Agrarians, 35–­36, 72–­73, 109, 168 Nation (magazine), 27, 67, 122 National Review (magazine), 122 Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, 9 Native America, 168–­69 Nazi, linguistic meaning of, 9–­10, 112 Nazi Hydra in America, The (Yeadon and Hawkins), 181 Nazi Spy Conspiracy, The (Turrou), 70–­7 1, 101 Nearing, Scott, 48 New Republic (magazine), 1, 19–­21, 25–­26, 67 New Right, 128–­31 News on the March (newsreel), 88–­89 Night at the Garden, A (film), 70, 214n12 1984 (Orwell), 121 Ninotchka (film), 149

index Nixon, Richard, 123, 132, 150, 158, 164, 175 NLRA (National Labor Relations Act), 43–­44, 55 noncognitivism, 3, 5, 114–­15, 200–­202 Notorious (film), 108, 126, 147 NRA (National Recovery Act), 38–­40, 43–­44, 49, 130 Office of Special Investigation, 183 Once Upon a Honeymoon (film), 104 On Revolution (Arendt), 137–­38 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 125–­26, 138, 177 Orwell, George, 120, 222n6 Ox-­Bow Incident, The (Clark), 72, 103 Palin, Sarah, 180 Papini, Giovanni, 20 paranoid style, 129–­30, 139–­40, 142, 163, 166, 224n24, 225n28 parodies of Hitler, 150–­51 Partito Nazionale Fascista, 17 Patton, George, 109, 158 Paxton, Robert, 172, 233n33 Pearl Harbor, 89, 90, 174 Peck, Gregory, 182 Pelley, William, 52, 211n1 Perón, Evita, 178 Perón, Juan, 178 philosophy of history, 170–­7 1, 232n22 Pierce, William, 178–­79 Plot against America (Roth), 2, 154 Political Man (Lipset), 139 “Politics and the English Language” (Orwell), 121 Politics of Mass Society, The (Kornhauser), 130 Popular Front: in 1930s, 46–­47, 54, 71, 77, 96, 116, 118; in 1940s, 122, 127; in 1960s and 1970s, 164; and Trump, 197 populism, 45, 225n28; and Bryan, 11–­12, 32; and Hofstadter, 129, 131, 167; and Mussolini, 32, 167, 172, 180; as pejorative in US history, 170, 180 pornography, 149, 151, 176, 228n8 Porter, Cole, 31 Porter, Katherine, 35, 37 Pound, Ezra, 31–­32, 109 Pragmatic Revolt in Politics, The (Elliott), 23–­24, 207n10 pragmatism, 18, 21–­24, 61, 137 Prelude to War (film), 103, 220n15 preparedness, 14, 99 President Vanishes, The (Stout), 28, 43 Prisoner of Zenda, The (film), 104 Producers, The (film), 150, 158–­60 progressivism,14, 27, 41, 170; and Croly, 18–­20; and Elliott, 23–­24; as fascism, 18, 20, 22, 23, 170; and original meaning, 12–­13, 95

243 Project Paperclip, 182–­83 Protestants, 13, 38, 65, 121–­22, 180 Putin, Vladimir, 172 Quisling, Vidkum, 85, 113 Race and Racism (Van den Berghe), 168, 231n10 radio, 67–­68, 75, 99 Rains, Claude, 107–­8, 108 Rankin, John, 108 Reagan, Ronald, 1, 176–­78, 180 Red Fascism, 119–­21, 124, 126, 147, 157, 164, 205n1 Red Heat (film), 149 regionalists, 34–­36, 71–­73, 100 regulars, 13, 20, 95 “Repressive Tolerance” (Marcuse), 140, 227n20 Rerum novarum (Pope Leo XIII), 57–­58, 121 Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The (Brecht), 135 Rio Rita (film), 105 Rise of the Fourth Reich, The (Marrs), 181 RKO Pictures, 87–­89 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 136, 175 Robinson, Edgar, 4, 101, 107, 108 Rockefeller, Nelson, 173 Rocketeer (film), 221n18 Rockwell, George, 179 Rocky IV (film), 146 Rogers, Roy, 103–­4 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 123–­24 Roosevelt, Franklin, 2, 70, 95, 113, 181, 186; and Europe, 57–­59, 66–­67; and European intellec­ tuals, 135–­36; and first term, 25–­30, 33, 37–­55; and Hofstadter, 128; and Edgar Hoover, 51–­52, 54, 70; and intellectuals, 26, 49–­50, 59–­62, 67, 75, 90, 103; and isolationism, 80–­87, 89–­90; and political categories, 96–­97; and Schlesinger, 27; and second term, 46–­47, 54–­56; and third term, 77–­78 Roosevelt, Theodore, 11–­14, 18–­19, 97 Rossiter, Clinton, 130 Roth, Philip, 2, 154 Royce, Josiah, 18 Russians Are Coming!, The (film), 149 Saboteur (film), 102 Saddam Hussein, 181 salutes, 29, 51–­52, 69, 69, 81, 91–­92 Sambo personality, 167 Sandoz, Mari, 72 Santayana, George, 171 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 142 Sawdust Caesar (Seldes), 45, 71 Schlesinger, Arthur, 126–­31, 162–­63, 202, 223n18 Schneider, Herbert, 22–­23, 26, 207 Schultz, Hans, 150, 150 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 149

244 science fiction, 107, 146–­47, 151–­54, 220n17 Sea Hawk, The (film), 104 security services in US, 163; in Chicago, 157–­58; during Cold War, 123, 182–­83; in 1930s and 1940s, 52–­54, 102, 123 Seldes, George, 45, 71 Sellers, Peter, 150 semantics, 60–­63, 142–­43 Shadow, The (radio show), 68 Share Our Wealth movement, 39–­40, 44 Shays’s Rebellion, 74, 188 Ship of Fools (Porter), 36 shirts: are counted, 52, 211n3; in movies, 28, 52; and Pelley, 211n1; and Roosevelt administration, 68, 87 Shteyngart, Gary, 154 Silver Legion, 52, 156 Sinclair, Upton, 41 Slavery (Elkins), 167 Slogum House (Sandoz), 72 Smith, Al, 30, 40, 46, 50, 58, 94, 95, 97 Smith, Gerald, 38–­39, 44, 46 Snyder, Timothy, 72, 133 social fascism, 1, 25–­25, 32, 46, 141 Sontag, Susan, 176–­77 Spanish Civil War, 57–­59, 85, 100–­101, 121–­23 Spanish Earth, The (film), 100–­101 spectrum of politics, 132, 201; and circle, 161–­64, 169; and Hofstadter, 129; and the left, 120, 173; and the right, 113, 120, 141, 173; and Schlesinger, 127–­29 Speier, Hans, 141 Spengler, Oswald, 34, 134 Stalag 17 (film), 149 Stalin, Joseph, 1, 49, 55, 68, 88, 120, 126, 161; and Arendt, 125; and Hitler, 57, 64, 76–­79, 84–­85, 93, 119, 164, 172; and Marcuse, 141; and popular front, 46–­47; and Snyder, 172; and social fascism, 25–­26, 33, 194; and Spain, 57–­58, 121; as US ally, 86, 96, 118 standpatters, 13, 95 Stanley, Jason, 172, 232n24 Starship Troopers (Heinlein), 152, 229n15 Stearns, Harold, 19, 24 Steffens, Lincoln, 20 Stimson, Henry, 80 Stoddard, Lothrop, 64–­65 Stout, Rex, 28, 43 Strange Holiday (film), 107 Stranger, The (film), 108 streamliners, 105 Superman, 105, 228 Super Sad True Love Story (Shteyngart), 154–­55 swastika, 28–­29, 45, 80–­81, 105–­6 Swing, Raymond, 48, 62, 208n17 syndicalism, 17, 24–­26

index Taps (film), 148 Tarbell, Ida, 20 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 34 That Hamilton Woman (film), 104 theatrical productions on fascism, 72, 99, 100–­101, 103, 135, 159, 176, 178 They Burned the Books (Benét), 90 They Got Me Covered (film), 104 Thomas, Norman, 25–­26, 38, 46–­47, 79 Thompson, Dorothy, 45–­46, 57, 68, 70, 83, 85, 100, 119 Three Stooges, 105 Tillich, Paul, 133, 135 To Be or Not to Be (film), 105, 149, 150, 204 Tojo, Hideki, 10 totalitarianism: and Arendt, 125; as circular, 96, 119–­20, 176; declines in use, 126, 161, 166; first invoked, 79, 124, 162, 178; and Gleason, 165–­ 66; and Hoffer, 139–­40; and Hofstadter, 129; and Kirkpatrick, 177–­78; and Orwell, 222n6; and Reagan, 176; as slur, 80, 164–­65, 222; and Snyder, 172 Totalitarianism (Friedrich), 124 Totalitarianism (Gleason), 165–­66 Townsend, Francis, 38, 41, 44, 46, 62, 88 Tracy, Spencer, 100, 103 Trojan Horse, 84–­85, 217n24 True Believer, The (Hoffer), 139–­40 Turner, Frederick, 169 Turner Diaries, The (Pierce [pseud. Macdonald]), 178–­79 Twain, Mark, 185 Two Frontiers of Freedom (Corbin), 73–­75 Tyranny of Words, The (Chase), 62–­63 United Nations, 169, 177 Untergang, Der (Film), 150 Valentino, Rudolph, 21 Van den Berghe, Pierre, 168, 231n10 Veidt, Conrad, 107, 108 Verhoeven, Paul, 153 Versailles Conference, 15–­16, 20, 65 veterans, 33, 42–­43, 47, 67, 71, 73, 210 Vietnam, 4, 114, 142, 145, 148, 152, 160; and war, 131–­32, 140–­41, 157, 160, 162–­64, 175 Vital Center, The (Schlesinger), 95, 126–­27 völkisch, 30, 35, 56, 65, 168–­69 War Crimes Tribunal, 142 War Is a Racket (Butler), 44 Warner Bros., 101, 103–­5, 107–­8, 113 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 68 Warren, Robert Penn, 147 Washington, George, 12, 44, 78, 192; and Corbin, 73–­75, 166; and genocide, 168–­69

index Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 72, 103 Watson, Bobby, 106–­7, 106, 221n22 We Do Our Part, 38–­39 Weimar, 28, 132, 141, 196; analogy, 39, 141, 186; on the Pacific, 141 Welch, Robert, 178 welfare liberalism, 94–­95, 127, 194 Welk, William, 26 Welles, Orson, 67–­68, 87–­89, 191, 108 Wells, H. G., 68, 220n17 West, Nathaniel, 34, 72 western movies, 103–­4, 220n16 Why We Fight, (film series) 103 Wilder, Gene, 158 Willkie, Wendell, 79–­80, 85, 96

245 “Will to Believe, The” (James) 20, 24 Wilson, Woodrow, 24, 25, 27, 59, 97, 118, 181, 185; and important career of, 12–­16, 40–­41, 95; and Croly, 18–­20 Winrod, Gerald, 52 Wolfe, Thomas, 35, 72–­73 Woodward, Vann, 168 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 42, 100 Yale School of Criticism, 143–­44 Yeadon, Glen, 189 Young Bill Hickok (film), 103 “You’re the Top” (Porter), 31 Zangara, Giuseppe, 33