It should not be surprising to learn that General Johnson was an ardent disciple of Fascism. As head of the NRA. he distributed copies of The Corporate State by Raffaello Viglione—an unapologetic Fascist tract by one of Mussolini’s favorite economists. He even gave one to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, imploring her to hand out copies to the cabinet.
By 1934 Johnson’s fascist methods and, more important, his unstable personality had led to his downfall. And while he was undoubtedly the most unrelentingly fascistic and pro-Fascist member of the Roosevelt administration, his ideas and methods were not at all out of the mainstream. When Alexander Sachs, a respected economist who’d grown up in Europe, was invited to consult on the formation of the NRA. he warned that it could only be administered “by a bureaucracy operating by fiat and such bureaucracy would be far more akin to the incipient Fascist or Nazi state than to a liberal republic “ No one followed his advice, and he joined the administration anyway. In late 1934 Rexford Tugwell visited Italy and found the Fascist project familiar. “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary...Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has. But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily.” The Research and Planning Division of the NRA commissioned a study. Capitalism, and Labor Under Fascism, which concluded, “The fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”
It’s ironic that in the 1930s it was far from out-of-bounds to call the New Deal or FDR fascist. Yet for the two generations after World War Il it was simply unacceptable to associate the New Deal with fascism in any way. This cultural and political taboo has skewed American politics in profound ways. In order to assert that the New Deal was the opposite of fascism—rather than a kindred phenomenon—liberal intellectuals had to create an enormous straw man out of the modern conservative movement. This was surprisingly easy. Since “right-wing” was already defined as anti-Roosevelt, it did not take much effort to conflate the American right with Nazism and fascism. Thus, for example, liberals portray American “isolationism” as a distinctly conservative tradition, even though most of the leading isolationists associated with America First and similar causes in the 1930s and 1940s were in fact liberals and progressives, including Joe Kennedy, John Dewey, Amos Pinchot, Charles Beard, J. T. Flynn and Norman Thomas.
The myth of right-wing fascism only began to unravel decades later thanks to an unlikely figure: Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former Roosevelt Democrat. In both 1976 and 1980 Reagan refused to retract his opinion that the early New Dealers looked favorably on the policies of Fascist Italy. In 1981 the controversy was renewed when then-President Reagan stuck to his guns. “Reagan Still Sure Some in New Deal Espoused Fascism,” read the headline of a Washington Post article.54 Reagan’s refusal to back off this claim was a watershed moment, though the taboo remains largely intact.
But why was the taboo there in the first place? One answer is both obvious and entirely understandable: the Holocaust. As one of the signature evils of human history, the extermination of European Jewry colors everything it touches. But this is terribly inaccurate, in that various other fascist regimes don’t deserve to be blamed for the Holocaust, including Fascist Italy. Nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust. But fascism was already fascism before the Holocaust. The Holocaust chronologically and to a certain extent philosophically was the death rattle of fascism in Germany. To use the last chapter of German fascism to explain away the earlier fascisms of Italy, America, and elsewhere is akin to reading the wrong book backward. And to say that the New Deal had nothing in common with fascism because the later New Dealers stood opposed to the Holocaust is to say that there is nothing distinct or significant to fascism save the Holocaust—a position no serious person holds.
Indeed, it seems impossible to deny that the New Deal was objectively fascistic. Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into wan and undermined Congress’s war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway. He questioned the patriotism of anybody who opposed his economic programs, never mind the war itself. He created the military-industrial complex so many on the left decry as fascist today.
In 1936 Roosevelt told Congress, “We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.” As Al Smith noted, the upshot of this statement is that Roosevelt didn’t mind an authoritarian government, so long as representatives of “the people”—that is, liberals—ran the government. But if anybody “we” dislike gets control of the government, it would constitute tyranny.
This kind of skewed rationale gets to the heart of liberal fascism. Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the right people is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent by the wrong people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action. “I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”
Today, particularly under Bush, it is precisely this attitude that liberals call fascist. But that yardstick is too short to get the full measure of what made the New Deal fascistie. We render fascism and Nazism into cartoons when we simply say that they were evil. The seduction of Nazism was its appeal to community, its attempt to restore via an all-powerful state a sense of belonging to those lost in modern society. Modernization, industrialization, and secularization sowed doubt and alienation among the masses. The Nazis promised to make people feel they belonged to something larger than themselves. The spirit of “all for one, one for all” suffused every Nazi pageant and parade.
This was the fundamental public philosophy shared by all of FDR’s Brain Trust, and they inherited it wholesale from Herbert Croly and his comrades. “At the heart of the New Deal,” writes William Schambra, “was the resurrection of the national idea, the renewal of the vision of national community. Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level.” Roosevelt himself observed that “we have been extending to our national life the old principle of the local community” in response to the “drastic changes” working their way through American life. Militarism in America, as in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, was a means to this end. not the end itself.
This has been the liberal enterprise ever since: to transform a democratic republic into an enormous tribal community, to give every member of society from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks. Alaska, that same sense of belonging—”we’re all in it together!”—that we allegedly feel in a close-knit community. The yearning for community is deep and human and decent. But these yearni
ngs are often misplaced when channeled through the federal government and imposed across a diverse nation with a republican constitution. This was the debate at the heart of the Constitutional Convention and one that the progressives sought to settle permanently in their favor. The government cannot love you. and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.
We should close this discussion by once again reiterating that whatever the similarities between the three New Deals, the differences between America, Germany, and Italy are more important. FDR’s sins were nowhere near those of Hitler or Mussolini. Some of this has to do with the man. FDR believed in America and the American way of life—or at least he firmly believed that he believed in them. He still stood for election, though he did violate the tradition that presidents only serve two terms. He respected the system, though he did try to castrate the Supreme Court. He was not a tyrant, though he did put over a hundred thousand citizens into camps on the theory that their race could not be trusted. There are good arguments to be had on all sides of these and other events. But one thing is clear: the American people could never be expected to countenance tyranny for too long. During wartime this country has historically done whatever it takes to see things through. But in peacetime the American character is not inclined to look to the state for meaning and direction. Liberals have responded to this by constantly searching for new crises, new moral equivalents of war.
The former New Republic journalist J. T. Flynn was perhaps the most famous anti-Roosevelt muckraker of the 1930s. He loathed Roosevelt and was convinced that the New Deal was a fascist enterprise. He predicted that proponents of the New Deal and its successors would become addicted to crises to maintain power and implement their agendas. He wrote of the New Deal: “It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to continue, fresh crises from year to year. Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis and became himself a crisis in Italian life...Hitler’s story is the same. And our future is charted out upon the same turbulent road of a permanent crisis.”
But Flynn understood that while America might go down a similar road, it needn’t be as bumpy a ride. He predicted that American fascism might manifest itself as “a very genteel and dainty and pleasant form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all because it will be so virtuous and polite.” Waldo Frank made a similar observation in 1934:
The NRA is the beginning of American Fascism. But unlike Italy and Germany, democratic parliamentarianism has for generations been strong in the Anglo-Saxon world; it is a tribal institution. Therefore, a Fascism that disposes of it, rather than sharpens and exploits it, is not to be expected in North America or Britain. Fascism may be so gradual in the United States that most voters will not be aware of its existence. The true Fascist leaders will not be present imitators of German Fuhrer and Italian condottieri, prancing in silver shirts. They will be judicious, black-tracked gentlemen; graduates of the best universities; disciples of Nicholas Murray Butler and Walter Lippmann.
I think it is clear that to the extent there’s any validity to my argument at all—that fascism, shorn of the word, endures in the liberal mind—this analysis is true. We have been on the road to serfdom, we may still be on that road but it doesn’t feel that way.
The question is why. Why “nice” fascism here and not the nastier variety? My own answer is: American exceptionalism. This is what Frank is referring to when he says democracy in America is a “tribal institution.” American culture supersedes our legal and constitutional framework. It is our greatest bulwark against fascism.
Werner Sombart famously asked: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” The answer for historians and political theorists has always been: because America has no feudal past, no class problems of the European sort. This, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, is also largely the answer to the question: “Why is there no Fascism in the United States?” But this is the case only if we mean the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism. Nationalism and fascism can only bring out traits that are already in a society’s genetic code. In Germany the blackest parts of the German soul were unleashed, in Italy the insecurities of a faded star of Western civilization. In America, fascism hit at the beginning of the American century, which meant, among other things, that it was not nearly so dark a vision. We had no bitter resentments to vindicate, no grievances to avenge. Instead, fascism in America was a more hopeful affair (though let us recall that fascism succeeded at first in Italy and Germany because it offered hope as well).
That doesn’t mean we didn’t have bleak moments. But these moments could not be sustained. The progressives and liberals had two shots at maintaining real fascistic war crises—during World War I and again during the New Deal and World War II. They couldn’t keep it going, because the American system, the American character, and the American experience made such “’experiments” unsustainable. As for the genteel fascism Flynn referred to, that’s a different story—one that begins in the chapters that follow.
While the cultural left has long seen the outlines of fascism in the alleged conformity of the 1950s, the third fascist moment in the United States actually began in the 1960s. It differed dramatically from the first two fascist moments—those that followed the Progressive Era and the New Deal—largely by virtue of the fact it came after the hard collectivist era in Western civilization. But as with the previous eras, the 1960s represented an international movement. Students launched radical uprisings around the world, in France, Indonesia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Senegal, South Korea, Mexico, and the United States. Meanwhile, working from within the establishment, a new cohort of liberal activists sought to re-create the social and political dynamics of their parents’ generation, to further the legacies and fulfill the promises of the Progressive Era. This two-pronged assault, from above and below, ultimately succeeded in seizing the commanding heights of the government and the culture. The next two chapters will consider each in turn.
5
The 1960s: Fascism Takes to the Streets
THE SELF-STYLED revolutionaries had grown increasingly brazen in their campaign to force concessions from the university. Students and professors who were labeled race traitors received death threats. Enemies of the racial nation were savagely beaten by roaming thugs. Guns were brought onto the campus, and the students dressed up in military uniforms. Professors were held hostage, badgered, intimidated, and threatened whenever their teaching contradicted racial orthodoxy. But the university administration, out of a mixture of cowardice and sympathy for the rebels, refused to punish the revolutionaries, even when the president was manhandled by a fascist goon in front of an audience made up of the campus community.
The radicals and their student sympathizers believed themselves to be revolutionaries of the left—the opposite of fascists in their minds—yet when one of their professors read them the speeches of Benito Mussolini, the students reacted with enthusiasm. Events came to a climax when students took over the student union and the local radio station. Armed with rifles and shotguns, they demanded an ethnically pure educational institution staffed and run by members of their own race. At first the faculty and administration were understandably reluctant; but when it was suggested that those who opposed their agenda might be killed, most of the “moderates” quickly reversed course and supported the militants. In a mass rally reminiscent of Nuremberg, the professors recanted their reactionary ways and swore fidelity to the new revolutionary order. One professor later recalled how easily “pompous teachers who catechized about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”
Eventually, the fascist thugs got everything they wanted. The authorities caved in to their demands. The few who remain
ed opposed quietly left the university and, in some cases, the country, once it was clear that their safety could not be guaranteed.
The University of Berlin in 1932? Milan in 1922? Good guesses. But this all happened at Cornell in the spring of 1969. Paramilitary Black Nationalists under the banner of the Afro-American Society seized control of the university after waging an increasingly aggressive campaign of intimidation and violence.
The public excuse for the armed seizure of the Cornell student union was a cross burning outside a black dorm. This was later revealed to be a hoax orchestrated by the black radicals themselves in order to provide a pretext for their violence—and to overshadow the administration’s fainthearted and toothless “reprimands” of six black radicals who’d broken campus rules and state laws. This Reichstag-fire-style tactic worked perfectly, as the gun-toting fascist squadristi stormed Straight Hall in the predawn hours, rousting bleary-eyed parents who were staying there for Parents Weekend. These bewildered souls who had the misfortune to bankroll the educations of the very gun-toting scholarship students now calling them “pigs” were forced to jump from a three-foot-high cargo deck into the freezing Ithaca rain. “This is Nazism in its worst form,” declared a mother with breathless, if understandable, exaggeration. The university president, James A. Perkins, was required to cancel his morning convocation address, sublimely titled “The Stability of the University.”
In popular myth the 1960s was a gentle Utopian movement that opposed the colonialist Vietnam War abroad and sought greater social equality and harmony at home. And it is true that the vast majority of those young people who were drawn to what they called the movement were starry-eyed idealists who thought they were ushering in the Age of Aquarius. Still, in its strictly political dimension, there is no denying that the movement’s activist core was little more than a fascist youth cult. Indeed the “movement” of the 1960s may be considered the third great fascist moment of the twentieth century. The radicals of the New Left may have spoken about “power to the people” and the “authentic voice of a new generation,” but they really favored neither. They were an avant-garde movement that sought to redefine not only politics but human nature itself.