‘“America First!” How many times have we heard it in the years since the war,’ sighed a syndicated columnist named Prudence Bradish on 2 July 1923. It reminded her of what ‘we used to hear the Germans say – what no doubt they are still saying: “Deutschland über Alles!” That old “my country, right or wrong” tone, which is just the tone we want to get out of the whole world, as we get, or try to get, weeds out of a garden. It’s a bad tone, and a bad thought.’
On the other hand, the whole point of the Fourth of July was to celebrate patriotic loyalty, which created a conundrum. Perhaps the solution, Bradish mused, was for everyone to say ‘America first! … First before myself.’1
Later that year a letter signed ‘America First’ was sent to the Chicago Tribune by a citizen demanding that all Americans with ‘foreign names’ Americanise them. Even second-generation immigrants, the writer alleged, ‘cannot free themselves from the badge of foreign allegiance as long as they retain their old names. They herd as foreigners, vote as foreigners, and talk as foreigners. In my opinion they never become 100 per cent Americans and never can until they drop their foreign names for American names that harmonize with our language.’2
The letter prompted a blistering response from another reader, accusing ‘America First’ of a ‘pitiful exhibition of ignorant bigotry’. The writer began by pointing out that ‘unless “America First” is a native Indian, he is not such an “American” as he believes’. Wondering ‘what “America First” considers a strictly “American” name’, he remarked that even the name of America itself is not American, but Italian, courtesy of Amerigo Vespucci.3
An irate reader in Baltimore similarly objected to a recent correspondent who ‘speaks of the patriotic zeal of the Ku Klux Klan and makes the assertion that “They put America first and all other nations second”’. How could anyone urging the ‘persecution of Jews, negroes and Catholics truthfully say that he is 100 per cent American?’4 ‘America first’ was never far from the idea of ‘one hundred per cent Americanism’, and wherever those two mottos were to be found, the Klan had a nasty habit of popping up as well.
In October 1923, Hiram W. Evans, the Klan’s ‘Imperial Wizard’ from 1922 to 1939, gave a speech in Texas called ‘The Menace of Modern Immigration’, in which he adduced the Klan’s ideas about the ‘polluting streams of population from abroad’, immigrants threatening the ‘native Anglo-Saxon stock’ (‘no mercenary motives brought them to our shores’, he added, with awe-inspiring inaccuracy). ‘Eugenics entered into it, not here and there, but everywhere,’ Evans made clear, because intermarriage with ‘bad results’ was imperilling ‘real Americanism’.5
By 1923, the KKK had achieved a frightening degree of political influence. That November, the New York Times ran a big article with a striking graphic, showing the states whose elections were being determined by the Klan, with headlines reprinted from Klan papers around the country.6
The journalist had travelled throughout the Klan-dominated states, investigating the rise of ‘the forces of so-called “pure Americanism”’. The Klan was in control of local governments in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Indiana and Oregon, with even non-Klansmen in Indiana conceding a state membership of around 500,000, and the Klan claiming 700,000. No candidate in Indiana was likely to win local elections without Klan support that year, while Oregon, ‘the first state to bend to the Klan yoke’, had been in its control since 1922.
Meanwhile Ohio appeared ‘ready to join the masked parade, and California is said to be coming fast’. After that, the Klan – which campaigned for state control in stages – was targeting Michigan, Kansas and West Virginia, followed by Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri. Their goal was to make each state ‘safe for the hooded and pure Americans’ who live there, the journalist added acidly; they sought political control by dictating nominations, and otherwise made their influence felt, so that ‘the Klan is no longer a thing to joke about.’7 It may once have struck some Americans as absurd, but fears that the Klan might gain control of government, even of the White House, were growing.
‘Senators, Representatives, Governors, legislators, State officials, county and local officers in these States are silent’ in the face of the Klan’s onslaught, the reporter added. In the upcoming Democratic National Convention, eyes were on William G. McAdoo, whom the Klan was said to support. McAdoo was resisting pressure to repudiate the endorsement, trying to remain ‘a noncommittal recipient of the Klan’s good-will’.8
Such silence, whether craven or complicit, would prove endemic, the Times reporter predicted. Anyone who doubted the Klan’s power in the upcoming elections ‘should try to get an old-line politician to denounce the Klan in any of these States. To denounce it, that is to say, for publication.’9
Part of the reason that attentions were fixed unusually on elections a whole year away, was that the summer of 1923 had brought an abrupt end to the easy promises of President Warren G. Harding, who died suddenly that August under the pressure of a mounting bribery scandal known as the Teapot Dome Affair, in which it was revealed that Harding and his cabinet had most certainly not been putting America first before themselves. In fact, Harding’s cabinet was about to prove the most crassly corrupt in American history (although it may be worth noting that American history isn’t over yet).
The Teapot Dome scandal erupted when Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, was revealed by the Wall Street Journal to have leased federal oil reserves (including Teapot Dome, Wyoming) to private oil companies without competitive bidding. It was done with the assistance of the Secretary of the Navy, Edwin Denby. In return Fall received over $400,000 – well over $4 million today – in ‘personal loans’. Fall was the first US cabinet member in history to go to jail, but he wasn’t the last. Harding’s Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, was later forced to resign for receiving bribes, but managed to escape a jail sentence. A year after Harding’s death, the government was suing to retrieve over a million dollars that had been appropriated, demanding back the ‘stolen property, and its emoluments’.10
The Harding administration was defined by crony capitalism and corruption on an epic scale: it wasn’t merely the Ohio Gang, old pals of Harding’s, who were involved in myriad kinds of graft (and flagrant flouting of the Volstead Act, the law that enacted Prohibition). As a senator, Harding had met a man named Colonel Charles Forbes on vacation in Hawaii, and in 1921 decided to hand the newly created Veterans Administration Bureau over to him. Forbes engaged in mass fraud at the Bureau, taking bribes from contractors and selling off medical supplies for personal profit while leaving soldiers without proper medical care. Senate testimony subsequently revealed that he had left 200,000 unopened pieces of mail from veterans at the Bureau. Forbes went to jail, too.
‘America first’, however, emerged from Teapot Dome relatively unscathed, as did the Republicans in general, in part because of the famous probity of Calvin Coolidge, who pursued the corrupt members of Harding’s administration when he became president, instead of pardoning them. Coolidge was widely admired as a frugal, modest, unpretentious businessman who espoused old-fashioned Puritan values. But it is also true that no one seemed concerned enough by the corruption that had been disclosed to blame the Republicans for it: they would return to the White House with formidable majorities in the next two elections.
When Coolidge ran for re-election in 1924, one of his slogans was ‘America First’; thousands of ‘placards’ were printed with his name and that of his running mate, Charles G. Dawes, and both of their biographies, along with ‘America First’. The placards were ‘designed for framing’.11 (Coolidge had another, more surprising, slogan: ‘Keep Cool with Coolidge’.)
The keynote at the 1924 Republican National Convention continued to emphasise ‘America first’, proclaiming the Republicans as the party that ‘are yet frank and unashamed, yes, proudly insistent, to put America first, and who decline to merge into a weak and precarious internationalism the loyalty and enthusiasm which they cherish for America alone’.12
That year the industrialist Henry Ford was also urged to run for president. A survey in the mid-1920s asked Americans to rank the greatest people in history; Ford came in third, after Jesus and Napoleon. He was the epitome of the self-made man, the quintessential American success story, and by the early 1920s he was immensely popular; he was also intensely anti-Semitic. In the end, he didn’t run.
Seeking his party’s nomination at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, McAdoo suggested that ‘America first’ was beginning to be tainted by its association with the corruptions of the Republican Party. When a supporter shouted, ‘Don’t forget Teapot Dome,’ McAdoo promised, ‘we won’t let the Republicans forget that dirty scandal from now until election day … We all hope that the deliberations of this convention will result for the benefit of the American Republic, for there can be no success unless democracy survives America first.’13
But McAdoo’s candidacy had created a bitter struggle within the Democratic Party, after he was accused by a Chicago politician of depending on the support of the Klan. The story rapidly spread around the country, prompting a proposal for an ‘anti-Klan’ plank in the Democrats’ national platform, seeking to force the entire party of the Southern Democrats to officially repudiate the KKK.
That year, the Klan succeeded in engineering the elections of officials from coast to coast, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. In some states, such as Colorado and Indiana, they placed enough Klansmen in positions of power to effectively control the state government. Some 25 per cent of the Klan’s national membership in 1924 was located in Indiana and Ohio.14 The Klan’s version of ‘one hundred per cent Americanism’ was clearly defined by an interest in wealth as well as power – an interest not lost on contemporary observers.
Colonel Simmons, whose lighting of a bonfire in 1915 on Stone Mountain had launched the Second Klan, resigned that year as ‘Emperor’ ‘in consideration of receiving $20,000 in cash’. Then he launched a new organisation, called ‘Knights of the Flaming Sword’. A reporter predicted ‘that the Knights and the Ku Klux Klan may later dispute supremacy for the leadership of the American Fascisti’.15
A Colorado judge fought a bitter campaign against a Klan-supported opponent in the 1924 election, and wrote a letter shared in the press about his experience, which included a woman who
screamed in my face, ‘You are not one hundred per cent American, you are against the Klan.’ It was utterly useless to reason with such people. They had paid $10 a head to hate somebody and they were getting their money’s worth … In no campaign have I ever seen such stark madness, such bitterness, such hatred … They are the ready victims of that inferiority complex which gives them the feeling of exaltation with its accompanying delusions of grandeur when they read the Klan literature and are called ‘men of the most sublime lineage the world has ever seen,’ – the only Simon pure one hundred per cent Americans … That enabled the charlatans to capitalize their ignorance into money and political offices.16
‘Klan Plank is Big Party Issue,’ reported an upstate New York paper with marked understatement, adding, ‘So fierce has become the battle between the forces contending for and against an anti-Klan plank’ that it had overwhelmed all other aspects of the Democratic platform, including their stand on the League of Nations, Prohibition, ‘and other controversial issues’.17 Later known as the ‘Klanbake’ because temperatures soared as high as tempers, the convention was so acrimonious that reports noted many of the 13,000 gallery spectators spitting on the screaming delegates.18 The attempt to add a plank condemning the Klan was ultimately defeated by just one vote.
‘McAdoo is Silent on Klan,’ announced a New York Times headline as the convention began, reporting that his campaign manager refused to put questions to McAdoo regarding his position on the KKK.19 Having denounced one of his primary opponents as the ‘Jew, Jug and Jesuit’ candidate, the Klan endorsed McAdoo at the convention. Repeatedly pressed on where he stood, McAdoo stayed silent or offered weak evasions, to widespread criticism.
In the end, McAdoo declined to disavow the Klan’s endorsement. It was widely held to have cost him the presidential nomination.
* * *
A month before the conventions, Coolidge had signed the largest, and farthest reaching, anti-immigration act in American history. The Johnson–Reed Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, introduced a quota system based on the nation of an immigrant’s origin. It cut immigration by over 90 per cent, allowing visas to just 2 per cent of the total number of each nationality in the United States according to the 1890 census – a deliberate choice to skip the censuses of 1920, 1910 and 1900, to return the American population to a demographic before the ‘Great Wave’ of largely unrestricted immigration.
Republican Senator David Reed (not to be confused with Democrat James Reed, although there wasn’t always much to choose between them), one of the authors of the act, told the Senate that earlier legislation was insufficient because it ‘disregards those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard – that is, the people who were born here’.
Lawmakers were seeking actively to return to a nativist, ‘whiter’ past, when more immigrants were ‘Nordic’, establishing quotas based on earlier numbers to encourage migrants from Northern Europe and discourage or prevent migrants from anywhere else. They excluded Asian immigrants altogether, based on the geographically defined ‘Asiatic Barred Zone’ from a 1917 immigration act.
This effectively created categories of racial superiority, in which the percentage of visas available to those from Western and Northern Europe increased, while Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia were sharply restricted or fully barred from entry – a decision that severely strained America’s diplomatic relationship with Japan. Altogether, the Johnson–Reed Act was a clear effort to create a definable American identity by controlling the racial composition of the United States, advocating an ideal of homogeneity that was fundamentally eugenicist in its ethos.
That this was no coincidence, if it were in doubt, was clear from the national conversation leading up to the passage of the Johnson–Reed Act. Throughout the 1920s, the nation’s most popular magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, ran a series of prominent articles promoting Nordicism. In January 1922, for example, an article called ‘Shutting the Sea Gates’ had informed its readers of ‘certain biological laws which govern the crossing of different breeds, whether the breeds be dogs or horses or men. These laws should be of considerable interest to a great many citizens of the United States for so many millions of non-Nordic aliens have poured into this country since 1880 that in several of America’s largest cities these foreign born and their children far outnumber the native Americans.’20
A few months later, in response to a Minnesota mayor proclaiming 2 July 1922 ‘America First Day’, a local minister called for ‘The Americanization of America’. Spelling out what Americanisation meant in eugenicist terms lifted straight from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, he similarly specified 1880 as a watershed (as Grant had also done), after which America had begun to racially degenerate.
‘Before 1880,’ the minister told his congregation, ‘most of our immigration came from the great Nordic race, that is from the northern countries of Europe – Sweden, Norway and Denmark; from England and Scotland and Ireland; from Germany, Belgium, France and Holland. These people possessed to a remarkable degree the power to govern themselves and others.’ They were the world’s aristocrats, the ‘voluntary explorers, pioneers, soldiers, sailors and adventurers’, he added, quoting Grant’s description of Nordics almost verbatim. These superior Nordic types were the early settlers of America, he claimed; they were the framers who ‘shaped the nation’.
‘Since 1880’, however, things had gone rapidly downhill. ‘The bulk of immigration to the United States has been composed of people from the other two main races of Europe – the Alpine and the Mediterranean groups.’ The Alpine were (all) ‘the Slav peoples’. The Mediterranean were Southern Europeans (Italy, Greece and Spain were named) as well as North Africans. These people had never succeeded at ‘governing themselves or anybody else’, he pronounced, apparently unfamiliar with Alexander the Great, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Such people’s ‘low standard of living’ forced out higher types of people whenever they came among them. ‘It is no wonder that Americans all over Europe who are familiar with this type of immigrant are sounding the alarm.’21
And then there were the socialists, who augured nothing less than ‘the rule of the underman’.22
America was not ‘a dumping-ground for criminals and paupers and incompetents’, the minister railed, echoing Coolidge’s language from ‘Whose Country Is This?’ The great majority coming to the US in recent years were, he complained, ‘the weakest and poorest man materials of Europe – the defeated, the incompetent and unsuccessful, the very lowest layer of European society’. America should not be ‘the melting-pot for elements that will not melt’. The nation had finally learned that you cannot ‘make Americans out of any sort of racial scrap-heap’.23
This kind of social Darwinism espoused in honour of ‘America First Day’ reflected the widespread sentiments behind the Johnson–Reed Act. The effort to turn the racial and ethnic clock back – as if in 1879 everyone in the United States had been ‘pure’ – was no less consequential for being sheer fantasy. Arguably it was more so, for the futility of trying to restore a mythic phase in American history, and return to a moment before the original sin of racial affront, led not to reconsidering the myth, but instead to violent efforts to make the impossible come true.
Purity remained, much of the time, little more than a pious code for vicious ideas. In 1923 former Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, popularly known as ‘the Great White Chief’ (his campaign slogan was ‘A vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy’), edited his own newspaper, Vardaman’s Weekly, in effect an early version of social media. That May Vardaman’s Weekly proclaimed its editor a man who had ‘fought the battle to make America pure, free and safe’.24 That may sound unobjectionable, but in practice, the battle to make America pure had included Vardaman’s notorious declaration, ‘If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched in order to maintain white supremacy.’25
The National Origins Act, codifying the idea that a person’s ethnic and racial ‘origins’ measured their potential value to American society, was associated with ‘America first’ throughout the political debates surrounding it. When objections were made to the exclusion of the Japanese, a Republican congressman announced on the House floor that ‘the party does not want the support of those who do not believe in the doctrine of America first for Americans’.26 In an October 1924 speech, Coolidge defended the immigration curb by telling ‘voters of foreign birth’ to serve America first. ‘Those who cast in their lot with this country can be true to the land of their origin only by first being true to America.’27 ‘America must be kept American,’ Coolidge proclaimed on 26 May 1924, as he signed the Johnson–Reed Act into law.
In other words, they wanted to make America great again.
* * *
In the autumn of 1924, a correspondent wrote in to the Detroit Free Press to ridicule the idea that the Klan represented ‘one hundred per cent Americanism’. ‘Join the Ku Klux Klan and be one hundred per cent American,’ the letter began – but what did that mean in practice? First, ‘you must be native born’, although ‘that’s an accident’. Second, you must be Protestant, although most people follow the religion they were raised in.
After accidents of birth came the Klan’s self-contradictory definitions. ‘You must be loyal to the Constitution, and in the next breath you must hate Catholics, Jews and Negroes. Loyalty to the constitution and breathe hate for your fellow citizens can’t be done. Once you are a klansman you violate the first amendment.’ Next, ‘You must be a Christian! How can you and subscribe to the klan doctrine?’
Finally, the correspondent prophesied that if America ever did need defending in battle, Klansmen would be nowhere to be seen until the fight was over. But once ‘the days of peace and plenty are restored, then the cohorts of intolerance’ would rise again ‘with their cry of one hundred per cent Americanism and down with Catholic, Jew and Negro’.28
Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech before the American Legion in 1925 that was widely reported throughout the country, assuring listeners that ‘America first’ was still the nation’s goal.
The generally expressed desire of ‘America first’ cannot be criticized. It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first. It cannot be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness … We can only make America first in the true sense which that means by cultivating a spirit of friendship and good will, thru [sic] progress at home and helpfulness abroad standing as an example of real service to humanity. It is for these reasons that it seems clear that the results of the war will be lost and we shall only be entering a period of preparation for another conflict unless we can demobilize the racial antagonisms, fears, hatreds, and suspicions, and create an attitude of toleration in the public mind of the peoples of the earth.29
It was a laudable ambition, but ‘America first’ may not have been the best way of going about it, not least because ‘America first’ continued to be associated with groups entirely driven by national bigotry, arrogance, selfishness, racial antagonisms, fears, hatreds and suspicions – including the American Legion itself, which had formally adopted a guarantee ‘to foster and perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism’ into its constitution, and was regularly accused of being a fascist organisation.30
By 1925, national membership of the Klan was estimated at anywhere between three million and eight million; most historians assume it was around five million, in a nation of 115 million, or about 4 per cent of the entire population of the United States.
The African-American Buffalo American was losing hope by 1925 that Republicans would use ‘America first’ for the betterment of all Americans, not just the white ones. ‘To awaken interest in “America First” there should be a colored contact officer appointed in each of the federal departments to interpret the government to the people, and them to the government. That these things have not been done is regarded by the Negro as indifference of a party to which he has long been loyal.’31 But the party of Lincoln’s indifference to the cause of civil rights would only harden as the twentieth century wore on.
* * *
As the Klan began to face electoral failures and scandals in 1926, Hiram Evans promoted the organisation again, in a pamphlet called ‘The Klan’s Fight for Americanism’. It sought to explain ‘the character and present mind of the mass of old-stock Americans. The mass, it must be remembered, as distinguished from the intellectually mongrelized “Liberals.”… Liberalism is today charged in the mind of most Americans with nothing less than national, racial, and spiritual treason.’
Having called liberals traitors (and by definition not ‘old-stock Americans’, although plenty of liberals could, of course, trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, some of them just chose not to), Evans went on to enumerate the grievances of ‘Nordic Americans’ like himself.
Nordic Americans for the last generation have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable, and finally deeply distressed … We are a movement of plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock. Our members and leaders are all of this class – the opposition of the intellectuals and liberals who held the leadership, betrayed Americanism, and from whom we expect to wrest control, is almost automatic.
What Evans cast as their anti-elite populism was also motivated, he insisted, by economic anxiety – or, as he called it, ‘economic distress’: ‘the assurance for the future of our children dwindled. We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us.’ Evans reiterated their allegiance to ‘the basic idea of white supremacy’, encompassed in ‘the Klan slogan: “Native, white, Protestant supremacy”’.32
The problem, if it needs stating, was that the Klan felt ‘uncomfortable and deeply distressed’ because their old sureties of power and dominance were, indeed, being eroded – by the progress of the people they sought domination over, the ‘strangers’ who took over the commercial power they believed was theirs by entitlement. And they responded by terrorising those people – blacks, Jews, labour unionists, radicals, the foreign-born and uppity women – who were considerably more ‘uncomfortable and deeply distressed’ than the Klansmen.
Threats against their once unquestioned political and economic hegemony made the Klan cast themselves as victims, as they offered any number of justifications for their violent reassertion of a diminishing privilege. Increasingly, the Klan viewed any government intervention on behalf of the citizens whose equality they denied as an act of oppression. Before long they would cast themselves as freedom fighters against a fascist state.
That year a new word entered the English language: ‘totalitarianism’, coined by the writer Luigi Sturzo to describe Mussolini’s Fascism.33 Within two years, American lecturers were debating the consequences of totalitarianism, defined for local audiences as the ‘theory which holds that the dominant party is the state and can do no wrong’, and that anything critical of the state ‘is rank treason’.34
But at the same time ‘America first’ was also beginning to be pushed beyond what such a vacuous slogan could bear. In 1927 Chicago Mayor ‘Big Bill’ Thompson created an ‘America First’ movement as part of an anti-British campaign that was treated with much derision by the national press. Thompson promised he’d ‘crack King George one in the snoot’ if he ever came to Chicago, and began a campaign to root out pro-British literature from the public library, insisting that the British were spreading colonialist propaganda. To some extent, his anti-British pronouncements were doubtless calculated to curry favour with Chicago’s large Irish-American population.
Papers around the country ridiculed these preposterous claims. In ‘Big Bill’s Superpatriot Society’ the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted the relationship between Thompson’s club and the KKK. Like the Klan, the America First Foundation cost $10 to join, it observed. ‘Its platform resembles that of the Klan in that it professes high purposes – better citizenship, loyalty’ and other civic virtues. But its true purpose appeared to be ‘appeals to ignorance and prejudice to stir up racial and national hatreds for political purposes’.
The editorial proposed that Thompson’s America First should adopt as its anthem a verse recently written by the satirist Alec Woollcott.
Thompson had ‘aroused some interest and much amusement by his cry of “America First” and his book-burning, British-baiting campaign in the city of gang shootings, street murders, and corrupt elections’, the New York Times agreed, while also noting the campaign’s implicit association with the Klan. The America First Foundation had appealed to Klansmen in Georgia, who were ‘hot for Mayor Thompson and his anti-English slogan’.
But soon this had set all their bigotries into conflict, when ‘some literate Klansman made the discovery that the Klan was backing the Nordic against all comers, and that it was the Nordic English who settled Georgia; and here was the Mayor of a city full of hated immigrants trying to shoot up the Nordic cradle’.
So how could they know which Nordics to support, when the America First Foundation was attacking the English? Klansmen were happy to be anti-British until someone told them that the British were ‘Nordic’, and that the people attacking the British were immigrants in Chicago. Suddenly they had to be on the side of the ‘Nordic English’ and against Thompson’s ‘America First’, which instead of being a wholesome group for ‘real Americans’ was allied with the hated ‘unreal’ cities. It was all very confusing – which is what comes of trying to take seriously anything as asinine as scientific racism.
‘The disillusionment was instantaneous,’ the New York Times correspondent mockingly wrote, ‘but it would have come along sooner or later. For when Mayor Thompson selected $10 as the fee for joining his hate society, this struck at the heart and soul of the Klan – their purse.’36
‘America first’ organisations, whether Thompson’s foundation or the Klan, were all in the business of selling hate, as the Colorado judge had noted. They even priced it the same.
In addition, the association of the increasingly discredited Klan with ‘America first’ was beginning to cause trouble for its followers. In 1928 the Chicago Tribune reported that the Republican governor of Illinois had been forced to deny ‘affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan’, rumours which had created a new slogan: ‘One Hundred Per Cent Americans First’.37
The Democrats, meanwhile, continued to be troubled by infighting and charges that they were failing to unite around a single issue that voters could believe in.
‘Irresistibly the question presents itself,’ wrote an irate Missouri editorial. ‘Must the Democratic party be an ass?’38
McAdoo was still on the scene, urging Democrats to define themselves around support of Prohibition, a platform favoured by many of the Southern Democrats whose religious fundamentalism aligned them with the ideas of America first. Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, by contrast, wanted to appeal to the urban, ethnic voter who hated Prohibition, and saw in it the ideas of a rural evangelical minority being allowed to dictate the laws governing the populations of America’s big cities.
The Missouri editorial was unimpressed by both arguments, suggesting that, as it was now law, the Prohibition ship had sailed; Democrats should move on and unite against Republicans. ‘The United States still needs government by the people and for the people,’ and it needed a party to stand up for ordinary Americans against the big-business oligarchs and crony capitalism that controlled the Republican agenda in the 1920s.39
‘No observing citizen can fail to see how hard and fast the lines are being drawn between a democratic government of the United States and an oligarchical government,’ it added, ‘between government by the people and government by a small and powerful and privileged class. The future not alone of this republic but of the whole of civilization depends upon whether American democracy or American fascism wins this war.’40
‘For the Democratic party to refuse to unite,’ the editorial concluded, ‘to fight a great battle for the Jeffersonian theory and to challenge the rule of Mellon and Morgan; for it to insist rather upon an internal feud … to which all the beneficiaries and organs of special privilege are urging it,’ would be ‘not only recreancy to a great trust; it would be fat-headed stupidity – which is even worse’.41
Although this editorial may well be the earliest use of ‘American fascism’ to describe corporate oligarchy and the risks Wall Street could pose to democratic government, it was far from the nation’s only confrontation with the spectre of American fascism that year. It appeared six months after the Memorial Day parade riots in New York, when the Ku Klux Klan and self-proclaimed American fascists clashed with onlookers in Manhattan and Queens, and seven men were arrested, one of whom was twenty-year-old hyphenate German-American Fred C. Trump. The ‘C’ stood for Christ.