10—The Class Character of Embryonic American Fascism

IN HIS 1933 BOOK, Seeds of Revolt, Mauritz Hallgren became one of the first American writers to focus on the plausibility of fascism in America. “What is fascism?” asked Hallgren, a veteran journalist and regular contributor to The Nation magazine:

There has been much confusion of thought and opinion concerning the meaning of this term. Radical students have applied it to the growing economic power of the monopolists. Others, with Mussolini and Hitler in mind, identify fascism with dictatorship. Still others look upon fascism as a popular political movement, as revolutionary or even socialistic. The growth of monopoly capitalism is, of course, the principal element in the making of fascism. And there can be little doubt that the fascist State is a dictatorial State. Fascism may appear to be the outgrowth of a popular movement, for under some circumstances the support of the people is necessary to its proper development—it was so in Germany, for example, though not in Italy. Nor can fascism be considered either revolutionary or socialistic, though it apparently contains a few elements of both. For, accurately speaking, fascism is a political philosophy based upon the need of capitalism to employ the power of the State to protect the institution of production for private profit.1

Hallgren recognized the genesis of fascism in the workings of U.S. monopoly-finance capitalism. Long ignored by contemporary U.S. historians and political commentators, his analysis of the class character of embryonic fascism in America is striking for its pith and relevance. Writing in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933, Hallgren explained how the sequence of the booming 1920s and the Depression that followed had made the contradictions between the middle class and the ruling capitalist class irreconcilable. Historically, the middle class had always sought security from the rising power of monopoly by supporting progressive reforms that were taken up by presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Ironically, these efforts only strengthened the power of the state, which had become the domain of capitalist elites.

The contradiction between the middle class and Big Business had sharpened during the prosperous 1920s. With labor vanquished and middle-class progressives in disarray, small manufacturers, merchants, salaried employees, mid-level professionals, and artisans clung to the doctrine of economic liberalism trumpeted by capitalist elites and their political servants in the White House and Congress. Once the crisis hit in 1929 and the Depression deepened, the middle class looked to the federal government for relief and recovery but made no headway with Hoover and his circle of elites, who refused to “interfere with the operation of the laissez-faire economy upon which modern or monopoly capitalism was founded.”² Roosevelt managed to calm the storm with his promise of a new deal and indeed responded with pushing Congress toward dazzling innovations in government power during the first hundred days of his presidency. But they did little to quell grave concerns about the future. For one thing, the New Deal gave even greater power to monopolies and financial capitalists in the hope that they would work in good faith to establish equilibrium between capital and labor. But its hallmark creation, the National Recovery Administration, was quickly recognized as something other than what the people, especially the middle class, needed.

By spring 1934, there was clear evidence of a rising tide of public opinion about the prospects of America going fascist. Even committed New Dealers seemed to agree. Only two weeks into a national fact-finding tour of the nation for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), Lorena Hickok reported to her boss Harry Hopkins that she was greatly discouraged by what she had observed and was “almost forced to agree” with a businessman who told her he favored fascism as a solution to the economic crisis. “If I were 20 years younger and weighed 75 pounds less, I think I’d start out to be the Joan of Arc of the Fascist movement in the United States.” Hickok, who submitted a summary of her findings to Hopkins on January 1, 1935, after eighteen months on the road, described a “stranded generation” of middle-aged men with no jobs and half-grown families, a growing class of “unemployables” whose skills and mental aptitudes had declined and were kept alive thanks only to government relief. “And so they go on,” she wrote, “the gaunt, ragged legion of the industrially damned.”3

Hickok believed she had accurately taken America’s pulse and assumed that the country was moving toward fascism, though she offered no detailed assessment of what she meant by the term. What would a fascist solution mean for the “ragged legion” of “unemployables” other than an authoritarian political regime? Why did the Texas businessman favor fascism? Who were the fascists and what did they want for America? Would fascism mean the dictatorship of an American Duce or Fuehrer? These questions were central to the larger one. How did one define fascism in America? Would it look like Italy and Germany in the 1930s? If not, how would it differ? Based on what Hickok and many of her contemporaries described at the time, fascism was an alternative to constitutional democracy. But what did it mean in this particular context, and what form would it take in the United States?

During the next two years, a few astute observers addressed these questions and concluded that big business and financial capital were driving America toward fascism. Generally, their examinations were based on what Marxists call class analysis—in other words, determining which social class, or classes, were responsible for the genesis of fascism in the United States. Four studies from this period stand out, all written by Marxists or influenced by Marxism: Do We Want Fascism? by Carmen Haider, The Crisis of the Middle Class by Lewis Corey, Forerunners of American Fascism by Raymond Gram Swing, and an essay by Harry F. Ward in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science titled “The Development of Fascism in the United States.” All four works, long buried by liberal historiography, resonate in the current moment. Each argued that the United States would go fascist if the capitalist class continued to amass wealth and power over the rest of society. Their positions also accorded with that of the Communist International, as articulated in 1935 by General Secretary Georgi Dimitroff in his report to the Seventh Congress, defining fascism as “the power of finance capital itself.”4

CARMEN HAIDER: FASCISM EMERGING IN THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

Perhaps the most intriguing of these forgotten works is by Carmen Haider. A Columbia University–educated historian, Haider traveled to Italy in the 1920s to study the structure of Mussolini’s corporatist state, documenting her findings in one of the earliest academic studies of European fascism.⁵ On returning to the United States, she conducted a similarly rigorous investigation of the nascent fascism in her own country. In Do We Want Fascism? Haider argued that the rise of American fascism would not require a distinct party, as in Italy and Germany. Rather, fascism could penetrate the two-party system and lead to a fascist state, which Haider defined as “a dictatorial form of government exercised in the interests of capitalists.”6

Though not a Marxist, Haider drew on Marxian concepts to argue that the New Deal had saved the capitalist order, but only temporarily. She focused on the National Recovery Administration, established by Congress in June 1933, and charged with reviving American industry. Though it stabilized the economy for a time, the NRA’s attempts at economic planning only sharpened contradictions between capital and labor. Although the agency mandated production quotas and commodity price controls, it surrendered most of the power to set and implement these requirements to Big Business. At the same time, as a concession to labor, workers were guaranteed the right to collective bargaining and unionization. Designed to restore equilibrium between production and consumption, the NRA did little to reform the system of monopolies already in control of the productive sectors of the economy. Without a significant increase in mass purchasing power, recovery stalled in 1934 as anxiety spread across the class spectrum. Capitalists grew increasingly resentful of government intrusion and sought a return to laissez-faire policies. Meanwhile, millions of workers who had weathered the worst years of the Depression, only to be frustrated by a slow and uneven recovery, began to ponder political alternatives to the status quo.

This much Haider understood. Even if the NRA had restored prosperity, it would not last. Capitalists would demand a return to laissez-faire, which, for Haider, could only mean that “the forces which brought about the crisis of 1929 would continue to be at work in the future.”⁷ Either way, she foresaw an even greater crisis in the immediate future, one that would intensify the contradictions between capital and labor. The NRA had shown that the state could be used to reorganize industry in capital’s own interests, thus lessening the distaste among employers for permanent state intervention in the economy. As for labor, President Roosevelt’s decision to give power to industrial capitalists meant that the promise of collective bargaining and unionization, though not insubstantial victories, posed no immediate threat to capital. Roosevelt had pinned his hopes on cajoling capitalists into dealing with labor in good faith. But labor remained wholly subject to capital. These considerations prompted Haider to raise some key questions. Where was the NRA heading if it survived rising opposition from Big Business? Or, what would be different if it failed and some new iteration took its place?

As Haider explained, the NRA’s survival would depend on public works to increase employment and boost consumption. But these would require higher taxes on the rich, thus sharpening the contradiction between capital and labor. New industrial growth would be thwarted by attempts to restore purchasing power to workers. Although this was expected to counter rising unrest among the unemployed, more permanent public works would compel additional taxation on the middle class. As was evident in several states, new sales taxes had already taken the place of increased income taxes. But the whole arrangement “would substantially amount to a redistribution of funds among the masses rather than the creation of new purchasing power.”8 And though industry’s domination over government would ensure wage suppression, the expansion of public works could also bring greater hardship for workers in the form of inflation. Whatever the scenario, the end would be the same, a “system of outright self-control by industry” with only one plausible outcome:

Such a turn to the Right would essentially amount to Fascism, since it would be an attempt to introduce a collective form of capitalism in the place of individualism. Violence might accompany it only in the form of state force against the workers if they should rebel against what must become an oppressive system for them. While thus the essence of Fascism would be present, the secondary aspects, particularly the seizure of power through middle class support, would be missing.⁹

Here was a crucial point. The middle class would always play a subordinate role to Big Business and finance in the making of American fascism. To be sure, Haider did not dismiss the growing distress and increasing militancy among all sections of the middle class. Resentment and anger toward big capital among small business owners, as well as salaried white-collar employees, was already fueling a reactionary politics. She saw this in groups ranging from the grandiose aspirations of the Silver Shirts, Khaki Shirts, and other such exotic groups to the more grounded nativism and racism of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion. For Haider, however, no organization was more significant than the Farm-Labor Federation (FLF), with its contradictory petty-bourgeois politics. Vehemently opposed to socialism, the FLF also proclaimed that capitalism was dead. Opposed to monopoly and banking capital, it was nevertheless firmly committed to the principle of private ownership. Such contradictions only weakened the FLF’s political posture, making it easier for Big Business to gain control of the FLF and other middle-class movements.

Noting that leading U.S. capitalists were already aware that middle-class discontent had fueled fascist movements in Italy and Germany, Haider predicted that they might decide that the best course of action would be to take charge and redirect this discontent toward their own ends. To Haider, this would not in itself be a problem:

To grow, every movement needs financial assistance, and if such assistance should be forthcoming at the right moment from the industrial and banking group of this country, they would have a good chance of getting a hold on the situation. It is obvious that such an arrangement would take place behind the scenes, and that, for the purposes of popular appeal, pronouncements against the bankers would continue and the promises would be reiterated that, once the new party comes to power, their influence will be destroyed.

Such declarations might be expected to be instrumental in drawing other dissatisfied groups in the country into the movement, since they would be given a tangible enemy on whom to blame their troubles, but this by no means implies that these threats will ever find realization through party action.10

For these reasons, a coming American fascism did not require a third, fascist party. It could emerge from political realignments within the two-party system, transformed by a social, economic, and political crisis. Haider contended that with the Democrats in power, Republicans, who already included “several of our foremost financiers and industrial leaders,” knew what they had to do. “It would be an insult to their ability to think that they could not take care of a movement of discontent and direct it into party channels,” she wrote, “even though, possibly, this would imply a recasting of the party.”¹¹ In that sense the Republicans would also pull in reactionary Democratic elites and reshape their party to oppose Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition. Given this political realignment, fascism could take root without disturbing the two-party system.

Here again, the NRA played a major role. A new “conservative Right” led by bankers and big businessmen opposed to New Deal labor provisions “might be expected to give impetus to a Fascist movement directed against the present administration,” which Haider saw as the core of a “new Center group” that included progressive Republicans and even many socialists. In Haider’s predicted realignment, a third group would form, “an ultra-Left party,” made up primarily of communists, who were approaching the height of their influence in the United States. Under fascism, this party would be outlawed, “in accordance with the totalitarian idea of the Fascists.” At the same time, the fascists would also move to reduce the center party to impotency, if not destroy it outright.¹²

The main actors in this realignment were reactionary industrialists and bankers, whose drive for economic dominance pitted them against more reform-minded elements of the ruling class. Out of this political deadlock, Haider said, the reactionary wing of the capitalist class would take over the Republican Party and wage political warfare against Roosevelt and the New Deal. Then, if the latter failed,

Congress could be captured from within, since a powerful Fascist movement caught in Republican Party channels would send its own representatives to Congress. The opposition might be negligible.

Moreover, a national economic council might be established and the Fascist group, in endorsing economic planning, would probably also approve of occupational representation. Determination of the economic aspects of national life might be turned over to this council as was done in Italy, whereby the power of Congress would be substantially reduced.13

For Haider, the Roosevelt administration’s attempt to end the capitalist crisis on its own terms had only heightened class conflict within the ruling class, and the split between reactionaries and reformers could only be resolved at the expense of the rest of society.

LEWIS COREY: THE ROLE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

The following year, the Marxist economist Lewis Corey also argued that any middle-class movement toward fascism would in the end be absorbed by Big Business and finance capital. In his second major work, The Crisis of the Middle Class, Corey argued that the New Deal’s prioritization of big capital and monopolistic firms had deepened the distress of America’s petty bourgeoisie. By limiting abundance in order to raise prices and boost economic growth, New Deal reformers were compelled to destroy existing capital and curtail production. Aligned with the NRA’s effort to restrict production and achieve equilibrium in the supply and demand of industrial goods, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) limited farm production to reduce inventories, raise prices, and restore purchasing power to farmers and rural workers. Both hurt small business owners, who struggled to make a profit as prices rose. Limiting production also meant that salaried members of the “new” middle class—office clerks, managers, accountants, lawyers, teachers, engineers, public officials, and others—were thrown into chronic unemployment. This, Corey wrote, drove the middle class toward new ideas and forms of action:

What shall they be? If they are still conditioned by the illusion that the class crisis can be solved within the relations of capitalist property, the middle class completely abandons its old democratic ideals and mobilizes against labor, whose struggle for the new socialist order becomes ever more conscious and aggressive. By that act the middle class throws itself into the consuming fires of fascism.14

The middle class could not unite its economically antagonistic factions to form an independent political program. All of its elements, old and new, were committed to saving capitalism from the threat of socialism. But the consensus ended there. While the “old” middle class of small merchants and farmers sought to limit the power of monopoly, the new class of well-paid managers and supervisors, employed by large-scale industry and finance, wanted just the opposite. For Corey, this made both groups susceptible to reactionary demagoguery. Yet the independent strata would only go so far in opposing monopoly, fearing that the continued struggle would heighten existing instability and create an opening for the revolutionary aims of socialists and radical labor unions. As Corey noted:

Hence security and the crushing of labor become the new ideals. The old middle class of independent enterprisers gives up its fight against monopoly, limiting itself to a struggle for mere survival within the relations of monopoly capitalism, in a new set-up of caste and rigid class stratification enforced by the repressive might of the state. This meets the approval of the higher salaried employees, who are accustomed to the hierarchical relations of corporate industry and are not averse to imposing them on the whole social and political life of the nation.15

This ultimately turned the middle class, once the flagbearer for liberty, individualism, and bourgeois democratic ideals, toward the opposite extreme. Now, Corey wrote, “the struggle to save such property as still survives from the all-consuming maw of monopoly capitalism drives the class to reaction, to negation of the ideals for which it fought in its youth.”¹⁶ Its desperation only drove it into the willing arms of authoritarian state capitalism, which could be relied on to restrict labor radicalism.

The perceived threat of a left-labor alliance also drove the “new” middle class toward reaction. For example, managers and supervisors would become more authoritarian in their treatment of workers as dictated by their corporate owners and bosses. Thus, the reactionary consciousness of the middle class as a whole only strengthened as it clung desperately to any hope for a secure caste position in a declining capitalism, which only sharpened class conflict and political instability. Trapped in the vise between monopoly-finance capital and the specter of socialist revolution, the middle class embraced fascist politics just as it had in Europe. As Corey wrote, “out of the middle class leaps the monster of fascism: the class that once waged revolutionary war on authoritarianism now provides, in a final desperate struggle for survival, the ideology and mass support for a new authoritarianism determined to destroy all the remnants, and the very concepts, of liberty, equality and democracy.” Yet the middle class by itself could not bring about fascism:

The reaction of the middle class becomes fascism when it merges with the reaction of the big bourgeoisie, of the magnates of finance capital. A part, even if only a minor part, of all the capitalist relations of production, the middle class is incapable of independent class action: its apparently independent struggle for survival and caste privileges becomes an expression of the needs of dominant capitalism.17

RAYMOND GRAM SWING: THOSE WHO PAVED THE FASCIST ROAD

In his 1935 work, Forerunners of American Fascism, Raymond Gram Swing profiled several fascist demagogues in the making, among them Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and William Randolph Hearst. But Swing stood firm that American fascism would not rest primarily on their political influence. Instead, he defined fascism in systemic terms as a “reorganization of society to maintain an unequal distribution of economic power by undemocratic means.” The NRA had given power to the nation’s biggest employers without any real leverage by employees or consumers. There was much in the New Deal that Swing considered fascist despite its claim to bring about democratic reform. Though the United States differed from fascist Germany in its “democratic technique of operating the country,” the distinction was only temporary and superficial. America would go fascist when “enough people” in positions of power decided to prolong the maldistribution of economic power to the point that they would then “be willing to scrap democratic machinery and democratic privileges to maintain it.” When and if that occurred—Swing did not believe fascism in the United States was inevitable—America would move in the same direction as fascist countries by, among other things, suppressing personal liberties and oppressing minorities. The structure of the capitalist economic system remained, though democracy would be sacrificed.¹⁸

Swing discounted the reactionary character of fascism, seeing in it instead a radical attempt to maintain the maldistribution of economic labor that favored finance capital. Though Swing saw the structure of fascism in the New Deal, he was not willing to call it fascist per se. The New Deal could only be considered symptomatic of American fascism if Roosevelt had appealed “to passion and prejudice for his authority” and implemented it by force. While Roosevelt was “being pressed in a fascist direction by the consequences of economic maldistribution in America” his was not an example of “conscious fascist leadership.” All Roosevelt had shown was that he was “weaker than the forces of finance capitalism.”19 What Swing saw was a more complex process at work:

We have in America the organism of finance capitalism with its relentless expansion, stronger than the forces of democratic control. We have a social passion, too, rising to resist it. Fascism would be the combination of these dual forces into a single movement united in the determination to maintain the chief (the “best”) elements of capitalism. If this is a paradox it is none the less true. Fascism swallows up the social conflict and promises to digest it.²⁰

Swing recognized that the United States had its share of powerful demagogues. Whether they would ally with Big Business was still “a matter of prophecy.” Yet Swing felt certain this was the trajectory:

They are capitalist demagogues, and they are trying to establish no new economic order. They believe passionately in the rights of private property and in the profit system. So far they are radical, just as Hitler and Mussolini began as radicals. But when Hitler and Mussolini became threatening and strong, big business made friends with the future and poured funds into their coffers. And in this country, unless there is a recovery, I should expect to see our demagogues receiving funds from Wall Street just as soon as Wall Street sees that the future is theirs.²¹

In the end, fascism would emerge as a radical coalition between the popular movements shaped by the demagogues into a new nationalism but all serving Big Business. Such a recovery would not necessarily “avert fascism.” Big Business had already made the necessary adjustments to the Depression. Dividends were 50 percent higher than they were in 1926. The future of Big Business was not on the line, but rather the rest of American society struggling to survive the crisis. For Swing, increasing class conflict was more likely than a recovery, one Swing doubted democratic government could achieve, even one as progressive as the Roosevelt administration. “The limit of democratic salvation is the New Deal,” Swing wrote. But it had failed in two main areas: the redistribution of wealth based on “social taxation” and the whittling down of Section 7(a) in the NRA to the point where the commitment to collective bargaining was more about rhetoric than reality. Roosevelt’s record with labor proved “disheartening and ominous.” Instead of firming up the rights of organized labor to engage in collective bargaining, the NRA had “vastly increased the organized power of employers.”22 Suspension of the antitrust laws made it easier for monopolies to organize at even greater levels while labor languished amid provisions that were never enforced. In short, the New Deal did not accomplish what it promised and the result was growing popular unrest and dissatisfaction. This would necessarily give rise to the demagogues who in short order would be recognized by those who held economic power. At that point, Swing asserted, the United States would go down the same road as Germany and Italy in creating a “coalition between the radicals and the conservatives in the name of national unity.”²³ Once this happened, the American public would be told:

The trouble with America is that we have too much liberty, too much individualism, too much of everybody trying to outdo everybody else, and that our salvation lies in all pulling together, and particularly in bending our wills to the will of the leader. And a good many people will be ready to throw away their liberties as they toss up their hats. We shall be told then that it is un-American to oppose and to criticize. We shall be told that the unequal distribution of economic power is part of the American tradition, just as we already are told that it is against the spirit of the constitution to advocate economic democracy.24

HARRY F. WARD: ANTI-FASCIST CHRISTIAN AND “FELLOW TRAVELER”

Another contribution to class analysis of American fascism is found in the writings of Harry F. Ward, a Methodist minister who taught Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary, held a law degree from the University of Wisconsin, and was the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 1934, Ward became chairman of the American League Against War and Fascism, a mass organization created by the Communist Party later renamed the American League for Peace and Democracy. Ward remained chair in the new organization and served in that capacity until 1940, when he wrote one of the clearest expositions about the threat of American fascism, Democracy and Social Change. Ward had already staked out his position five years earlier in a succinct essay in which he argued that the policies of the Roosevelt administration had established the economic basis of fascism in the United States.

Like Haider and Corey, Ward saw the driving force of American fascism coming from the top of the economic and political order. He dismissed small fascist groups that imitated larger European movements, as well as “indigenous” types in the “pattern of the Ku Klux Klan,” as insignificant forces in the making of American fascism. Nor did he put stock in the “high-brow, dress-shirt type of fascism” of reactionary intellectuals who rejected democracy outright and saw the best form of government in the rule of “the allegedly efficient and cultivated few.” As a Christian socialist who understood the class character of fascism from a Marxist perspective, Ward criticized liberals for promoting various ideas of a “planned capitalism, controlled by experts” to replace “the economic chaos that uncontrolled profit seeking had produced.” In these ideas, Ward observed “one of the essential aspects of fascism—the attempt to preserve the present class-controlled society.” The only thing delaying the drive toward full-blown American fascism was the absence of a “popular base” similar to the European movements.25

Ward also minimized the role of conspiratorial politics that drew some media attention in 1934, specifically an alleged plot by Wall Street magnates to overthrow Roosevelt. According to retired Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, representatives of the DuPont financial empire and other reactionary Big Business leaders opposed to the New Deal had asked him to lead an army of 500,000 veterans on Washington to either assist Roosevelt in ending the Depression or replace him if necessary. While the plot was something of a sensation—Butler made the public aware of most of what he knew—Ward reduced its significance as nothing “but a juvenile parroting of European precedent” and “quite removed from present realities” in the United States. Americans needed to understand that the real fascist forces were already established and there was no groundswell of mass consciousness to oppose it. “The political form of American fascism had already been set in another direction by the present administration,” he argued. This explained why a congressional committee and most of the major newspapers reduced the so-called Wall Street plot to a non-story. Ward conceded that the allegations made by Butler revealed “the temper of these forces” and showed they were prepared to “act outside the limitations of constitutional procedure.” But the real significance of the alleged plot was its premature timing. The willingness of the plotters to even consider “unconstitutional action” was itself a clear sign of another “essential and universal” characteristic of an American fascism in the making. For the time being, no such actions were required. The “form” of an embryonic fascism in the United States was developing within a “supposedly democratic state” that continued to serve “the dominant economic forces,” as the Roosevelt administration had done. Make promises to the majority to end the Depression while protecting the “few who live by property.” For Ward, the Roosevelt administration had advanced the power of the state to preserve the existing economic order and protect the interests of the ruling capitalist class.26

Just as Lewis Corey had argued the year before in The Decline of American Capitalism, Ward interpreted the movement toward state capitalism as a symptom of a moribund economic system—parts had already turned fascist within the framework of traditional forms of authoritarian capitalist rule. Up until the twentieth century, capitalism had functioned within the liberal-democratic state to secure and protect capitalist interests on a national scale. But the rise of monopoly within the most advanced capitalist nations—especially the United States after the First World War—had fueled the need for expanding markets and opportunities for new productive investment. Simply put, the coming of the American Empire had required a corresponding advance in state power to manage it. Here, for Ward, was the turn from state capitalism toward fascism. “Since its own nature has become monopoly, not freedom,” Ward wrote, “capitalism finds democratic machinery unsuited to its purpose. It needs rigid and centralized controls. Above all, it needs repression of the forces that could resist its continued garnering of profits at the expense of lives.” The fundamental contradiction between monopoly capitalism and the democratic state was now exacerbated by the Great Depression that had begun in the United States and spread quickly to the world capitalist system. To survive the crisis required a powerful centralized state unprecedented in history. Such power could hold the working class in check by smashing trade unions and destroying revolutionary political parties. This was precisely what the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany had accomplished to preserve the profit system. Similar conditions, Ward said, were now developing in the United States but only more slowly. “In the countries where democratic procedure is more deeply rooted and democratic tradition longer established,” fascism “proceeds more gradually, by the whittling away of representative controls and guarantees of freedom. These aspects of fascism are steadily developing in the United States.”²⁷

Ward believed the United States had moved toward fascism before Roosevelt and the New Deal. The first turn had come in 1932 when President Hoover pushed Congress to create the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a government corporate entity empowered to provide financial assistance to banks, mortgage associations, railroads, and other businesses. The RFC also provided subsidies to state and local governments for direct relief and public works. Hoover’s halfhearted effort to extend state power to management of the economy was trumped by Roosevelt who, immediately upon entering the White House, unleashed a sweeping agenda for Congress that saved the economic system from collapse. Capitalist necessity catapulted the executive branch of government beyond the balance of powers afforded by the Constitution. The New Deal revealed as never before how “the consolidation of political power followed the concentration of economic power.” The Roosevelt administration had superseded Congress in wielding the power of the purse, and this ran counter to one of “the initial processes in the development of democracy.” Given its “vast powers over the lives and liberties of the American people,” the New Deal stood as “a serious abrogation of the principle of ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” The real power of the state lay in its service to “the most powerful monopolistic groups of financiers and industrialists.”28

For these reasons, Ward saw fascism developing in the United States without a Mussolini or a Hitler and their respective movements. “The economic aspect of fascism” had “clearly developed” but had not “yet taken the sharply repressive political form” as in Italy and Germany. Ward proposed two reasons for its delay in the United States. First, the strength of long-established democratic forms of government still enabled the purely economic purpose of fascism to preserve monopoly-capitalist development, at least in the short term. Second, there was an absence of any clear revolutionary threat to the established order. Yet, political fascism was plausible because the “inner necessities of a declining economic system” were moving in a fascist direction. This was clear in the intent of the “capitalist order … in its extremity … to attempt to abrogate all democratic rights” at the federal level and get the states to follow suit by passage of sedition laws that made it impossible for any political organization to seek radical change of the economic system through electoral politics. If such laws were passed, it would not be necessary “to spend any money in support of Nazi Storm Troops.” Such repression could be had by “due process of law, under the form of an allegedly democratic state.” Then again, the United States had its own tradition of “lawless violence.” The Depression made it clear that brutal, home-grown vigilantes had “nothing to learn from Mussolini’s Black Shirts or Hitler’s Storm Troops.”29

Ward’s analysis of fascism is significant. As a leftist Christian minister and anti-fascist activist, he shared common ground with Marxists who made the historical antagonism between capitalism and democracy central to their arguments. The concentration of capital and the centralization of economic and political power by the ruling capitalist class made it impossible to deliver what modern democracy had always promised. Ward tracked the genesis of American fascism on the basis of class analysis informed by his Christian values. In many ways, he was a harbinger of the Christian-Marxist dialogue that emerged among revolutionary-minded people in the 1960s and 1970s. His working relationship with the Communist Party to build a united front of all democratic forces in the United States against fascism at home and abroad made him the most prominent of “fellow travelers”—not official members of the Party but acting as though they were. His accord with the basic tenets of Marxist political economy in the mid-1930s only deepened his opposition to fascism as a Christian.

LIBERALISM AT THE CROSSROADS—AGAIN

Unlike Ward, the majority of left-liberals were staunchly anti-communist and incapable of asking as Marxists did why the germ of fascism inhered in monopoly capitalism. Instead, most believed the solution to the crisis required drastic reform of the existing capitalist order by means of a planned economy, which could extend the life of American democracy and save it from communism and fascism alike. Moreover, as the liberals believed, if fascism came to power in the United States, it would be primarily from a revolt of the middle class. Implicitly, their definition of fascism was a consequence of their abiding commitment to capitalism. Unlike Haider, Corey, Swing, and Ward, most left liberals worked themselves into deeper contradictions by failing to recognize that the very idea of a planned economy within capitalism was contradictory.

Frank A. Warren, a U.S. historian, gave full treatment to the matter in his 1966 book, Liberals and Communism. The Depression had shaken the faith of the majority of left-liberal intellectuals in capitalism and fueled “a type of anticapitalism among liberals that had not been present in earlier liberal reform movements.”30 On the other hand, they could not transcend their belief that capitalism could still work. As Warren tells us, the Great Depression had spurred the return of liberals to political life after their retreat during the 1920s. Their disappointments about the Progressive era and feelings of betrayal toward President Wilson for failing to extend reforms aimed at the greater democratization of American society had brought their despair and political withdrawal. For much of the 1920s, liberal intellectuals acted mainly as media and literary critics of the rampant political corruption during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years of Republican rule in the White House, as well as the general “vulgarity of the capitalist culture.”³¹ But the Depression ushered their return to the political arena as erstwhile reformers. Many saw real progress in the efforts of communist planning in the Soviet Union. Compared to the miseries of the capitalist crisis in the United States, the Soviets were meeting the basic needs of their people. Economic planning became the clarion call of American liberals. George Soule, a left-liberal and borderline socialist, captured this viewpoint in 1931 when he wrote that capitalism’s “chief fault” was its “lack of planning and control in the general interest.”³²

But a Gordian knot tied up all their proposals. Left liberals could not break with capitalism given their vision of what it still could be. Their revolt against the failures of capitalism became a mission still stamped with the “chief psychological effect” of their withdrawal from politics during the previous decade, namely, a deep sense of powerlessness. Now, once again moved to action by the Depression, left liberals were driven by “an image of the power they wished they had had during the twenties.” Rejecting the abuses of capitalist power made them more bent on seeking power themselves. “They clung to certain modes of thought characteristic of capitalist society; they had the American penchant for ‘getting things done’ regardless of the cost, and accepted the old argument that though the means involve hardship and suffering, the ends are necessary and worthwhile.”33 Meanwhile, their failure to make a clean break from the system they were taking to task brought mockery from those outside their ranks. Communists charged that liberals were simply wrong and delusional in trying to save a system that was already dead. Warren cites an article in the New Masses, the leading periodical of the Communist Party, castigating the editorial stance of The Nation, one of the most prominent of its left-liberal counterparts, for its dead-end politics. Liberals cared little how “the putrid corpse of capitalism … is perfumed and tidied up, so long as the cadaver is preserved.”³⁴

According to Warren, left liberals proposed various plans either aimed at a wholesale reform of the capitalist system or some intriguing though hazy alternative to it. Despite their differences, all shared common ground in believing that “collective planning” did not require “a sharp break with the past.” Planning held them together. Most left-liberal intellectuals wanted to extend the reformism of the earlier Progressive era on a larger national scale. Planning involved a pragmatic approach by government to apply science and technology toward a resolution of the crisis. As Warren put it, left liberals were convinced that “social engineering” could achieve “humane ends.” Any alternative to laissez-faire capitalism would have to deliver greater distribution of wealth in society and must be forged along democratic lines. To this end, planning would be more geared toward the economic rationale of production for use rather than the existing priorities of exchange. From Warren’s spirited perspective in the mid-1960s, this “reinterpretation of liberalism” by left liberals three decades earlier created a new problem. “Clearly left behind,” he wrote, “were the moral absolutes of the Progressive age.” Pragmatism had won out over idealism. “Liberalism in the 1930s clearly accepted historical relativity, the industrial complex, and was clearly associated with collectivism.” Though they differed in key respects on approach and method, all shared the belief in a planned economy designed “for communal ends.” The goal was a “socialized collectivism.”35

But it would not be a socialist or communist one! Apart from Ward who combined Christian faith and Marxist political economy, left-liberal intellectuals were anti-communist to the core. Among the most prominent were John Dewey, America’s leading philosopher of the interwar period; Stuart Chase, the labor economist and social critic whose 1932 book, A New Deal, was a seminal contribution to Roosevelt’s political orientation during his first presidential campaign; George Soule, longtime editor of the left-liberal periodical The New Republic; and Alfred Bingham, the well-educated and worldly son of a Yale historian who discovered the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911, and who became co-editor of the radical, independent journal Common Sense. Among them, Dewey and Bingham were the most hostile toward a socialist or communist alternative to capitalism in the mid-1930s. But both offered different versions of socialized planning.

For Dewey, corporate capitalism in the United States remained a given. Indeed, one had to recognize that it was the historic outcome of an earlier period when the “isolated individual” in the era of small production had succeeded in establishing the foundation of the American capitalist order. The challenge now lay in replacing the old individualism associated with laissez-faire economics and classical liberalism. Dewey had gone to the Soviet Union to observe its efforts to establish a planned economy while completely rejecting Karl Marx’s theory of the class struggle. Instead, Americans must cultivate a real spirit of mutual cooperation in building “a coöperative industrial order … consonant with the realities of production enforced by an era of machinery and power.” To do this required what he called in his 1935 book, Liberalism and Social Action, a “renascent liberalism” grounded in education, which, for Dewey, was constantly building its capacity to influence all walks of life by the growth of science and the application of its experimental method to solve social problems. The challenge for liberals was to recapture the classical liberal ideal to bring about “the habits of mind and character, the intellectual and moral patterns, that are somewhere near even with the actual movements of events.” To do this liberalism had to become “radical” and, as such, a guide for all who would attempt to generate this mental transformation. Dewey recognized the gulf between actually existing conditions and the possibilities that people could now ponder for the future. The necessary changes could be brought about by “gradual” reform with a “social goal based upon an inclusive plan” aimed not at piecemeal efforts to end abuse but to change “the institutional scheme of things.” Dewey called for harmony through cooperation to replace the violence of the past generated by the belief in class struggle and a communist alternative to capitalism.36 Even the “objective clash of interests between finance-capitalism that controls the means of production and whose profit is served by maintaining relative scarcity, and idle workers and hungry consumers” could be overcome by efforts to “bring the conflict into the light of intelligence where the conflicting interests can be adjudicated in behalf of the interest of the great majority.” For Dewey, renascent liberalism was the philosophic guide necessary for a radical turn toward the democratization of capitalism. But as gradual reform, Dewey did not seek a radical break with capitalism.³⁷

ALFRED BINGHAM’S COOPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH: MIDDLE-CLASS PHANTASMAGORIA

Going beyond Dewey’s ideal of an enlightened, democratic capitalism within the existing structure of capitalist concentration and centralization, Alfred M. Bingham called on the revolutionary middle class in America to form a third party to win power through the ballot and then begin constructing a “Cooperative Commonwealth” to replace capitalism.38 Bingham was staunchly anti-communist like Dewey but retained the Marxist theory of the class struggle, though with a decidedly anti-Marxist twist. Karl Marx was simply wrong to claim that the industrial working class was the only truly revolutionary class capable of liberating the whole society from capitalist exploitation and oppression. Instead, Bingham assigned this role to the middle class, specifically, in the United States. As he argued in his 1935 book, Insurgent America, Marxists had completely dismissed the middle class as a revolutionary force in its own right. As the subtitle of Bingham’s book made clear, the middle class was now in revolt: “A scientific revolutionist must recognize that there is a tremendous social force inherent in the middle-classes in every advanced capitalist country, but particularly in this country.” Marxist theorists had committed a “most egregious error” in “misunderstanding and under-rating this force,” which, he added, was “the chief reason for their failure” to make the revolution on their own historic terms.³⁹

The source of the problem was the communist misunderstanding of the middle class based on its narrow definition of the petty-bourgeois shopkeeper, artisan, and town dweller. It was far too narrow to encompass the totality and substance of the American middle class during the 1920s and 1930s. Bingham echoed other writers—the Marxist economist Lewis Corey among them—by identifying the middle class not as a class in itself but rather “innumerable social classifications and groupings, merging into each other with bewildering complexity.”⁴⁰ Generally, occupation helped to determine its composition, at least discernable in two large groups: the “old” middle class composed of small businessmen and farmers, skilled artisans, teachers, and low-level public officials; and the various business types, professionals, and salaried employees who made up the rising “new” middle classes. For Bingham, the latter constituted a dynamic force for change and progress in American society. Its “new and different psychology, a new and different class-consciousness” set it apart from the influence of the working class and control of the labor movement.41 Workers, whether “organized or unorganized,” had become thoroughly “bourgeoisified” in their outlook and behavior.⁴² Class lines had become so thoroughly blurred that one could not easily find any clear division between the middle and working classes. Bingham was sure that a middle-class consciousness in the broadest possible sense now pervaded U.S. society. A whole range of Americans who considered themselves middle class all tended to “wear similar clothes, drive the same kind of car, eat the same kind of food, have similar mental and physical habits—quite irrespective of vast differences in income.”⁴³ For Bingham, the psychology of the middle classes shaped the essence of its mass consciousness.

Precisely on this basis, Bingham attempted to explain where the wide swath of the middle classes stood in relation to capitalism itself, and it is here where he parted company with Dewey and other left liberals. As the driving force of potential progress in America, the middle class’s “craving for security” was “probably the best criterion for measuring the middle-class stake in capitalism.” In that sense security depended on several factors, among them a “stock of worldly goods” and “possessions, such as clothing and shelter and tools,” as well as “an assured income, to replenish these stocks as they are exhausted, and to supply the daily requirements of food, fuel and other necessities and comforts.”⁴⁴ Bingham could not be more sweeping in his assessment of middle-class consciousness under capitalism—but with a caveat. The middle class was not capitalist in its orientation, at least as defined by the system that now prevailed. Instead, it adhered to the principle of ownership in terms of “ordinary possessions” rather than its class relations with the “ownership of the means of production” as the communists claimed. Whether it was a home, piece of land, household goods, savings, or financial interests, property was understood mainly as possession.45

For Bingham, the middle-class attitude of property as possession was the linchpin in determining what it wanted and the political turn it would take when it reached “the point of desperation in the crisis of capitalism.” This was a decisive moment for the middle class. Either it moved toward an alternative to capitalism or resorted to creating fascism to save it. On this Bingham could not be clearer. Even when “capitalist interests” employ the ranks of the middle class in violent attacks on the labor movement, “the fact remains that in origin, in mass support, and in emotional and intellectual attitudes, Fascism is essentially a middle-class movement.”⁴⁶ This was something the Marxists could not grasp. Fascism was not the result of class struggle between capitalists and workers and, therefore, the “last stand of capitalism” by its ruling class in the form of a violent dictatorship. The Marxists were also wrong to deem the middle class as mere pawns of the capitalists and “incapable of playing an independent role” in pursuit of their own class interests, instead of falling prey to “the wiles of a demagogue, and use it as a bludgeon to beat back the threatening revolution of the proletariat.”⁴⁷ On the other hand, the middle class could indeed go down the fascist road unless its leaders recognized that a viable alternative was possible. As Bingham wrote:

Fascism may be “the last stand of capitalism”; but it would be more true to say that it is the last stand of the middle-classes for capitalism, than that it is the last stand of the capitalist class for capitalism.⁴⁸

Bingham had no doubt in 1935 that events in the United States were trending toward fascism. Like Haider, Swing, and Ward, he identified “certain features” of the New Deal as fascist, especially in the NRA as a “parallel” to the “corporative system” of Italian fascism that would result in a “rubber-stamp Congress.” Certainly, the success of the New Deal was sufficient to prevent a movement led by a fascist demagogue from getting off the ground. Nevertheless, the New Deal had “prepared the way for Fascism” and might even take it there if it could be done without “a disciplined party organization” like the ones that brought it to power in Italy and Germany. No, fascism in America would develop in its own particular, national form. Like most other serious observers, Bingham dismissed the “shirt-movements” as “too obvious imitations of European Fascism to be genuine.” As he wrote, “American Fascism will unquestionably be so indigenous as not even to call itself Fascist or recognize itself as Fascism.”49 What mattered to Bingham was that it would be a middle-class revolt. No matter how much the capitalists relied on middle-class vigilantes against labor to defend its own class interests, the mass movement would rely on its own agenda and not a defense of the status quo.

In 1935, Bingham recognized that “the only genuine threat of an American form of fascism” was coming from Senator Huey Long, the virtual dictator in Louisiana who was looking ahead at the presidency. Long’s program was not necessarily fascist. But the way he wrapped his attacks “against the status quo, against the power of Big Business and the Bankers” and his demands for “a sharing of the wealth” across the nation came close. His slogan of “Every Man a King” tapped into the mentality of the majority of Americans who wanted greater security, higher living standards, and more opportunities in education. Unlike Mussolini or Hitler, Long lacked a “shirted legion” behind him.⁵⁰ But he did have his own armed guard and use of the state militia at his will. Bingham claimed that Long may have benefited from the support of powerful business groups but wrote that “they do not appear to be well authenticated, and so far Long’s career to power seems to be financed in ways best known to himself.” Historically, we know this was far from the truth. Capitalist elites were just as “horrified” as the communists with Long’s dramatic rise to national prominence. For Bingham, this was critical. The point had not yet been reached for the capitalist class to use Long as “a counter-foil to a radical movement”; besides, the capitalists still did not recognize “the desperateness of their own position.” Thus, for the time being, there was only “a radical revolt of the un-class-conscious Americans” who were swept up by Long’s bold and thunderous attacks on the status quo. Bingham thought this situation could prevail indefinitely, in which case it would “serve only to perpetuate capitalism as Fascism [had] done in Europe.” This was precisely what made fascism a middle-class revolt against capital and labor that was not “sponsored or financed” by the capitalists. “It is not now, and it may never become so.” Rather, Bingham insisted, the road to fascism was being paved by an “untutored” middle class “committed to the perpetuation of the open-market system.”51

The only viable alternative to fascism for the middle class was to form a third political party and win power. Only then could it create what Bingham called a Cooperative Commonwealth in the United States. The time had come to do this, given the extraordinary capacity of modern production to create an ever-rising abundance of goods. This, in turn, infused a corresponding psychology of “abundance” into middle-class consciousness. Bingham cited the technocrats, whose ideas about making production more rational by putting engineers and scientists in charge of the economy supported his view that America was ready for a new economic system based on production for use and not for profit.⁵² People were learning about capitalism and its pitfalls firsthand, even if only in simplest terms. They were begging to understand that poverty and misery caused by a capitalist crisis was unnecessary:

It is a hopeful sign, perhaps as hopeful as any, because if the practical-minded American people ever become convinced that there is no shred of excuse for poverty and insecurity, nothing can force them so relentlessly to recognize that it is private ownership of the means of production which necessitates scarcity. And they may come to demand the abolition of capitalism before they have even begun to be truly class-conscious.53

Bingham called for immediate action. But it had to begin by recognizing what the middle class craved the most psychologically. At the top of the list, of course, was the constant desire for greater security and higher living standards. The architects of the Cooperative Commonwealth also needed to respect basic “American characteristics of optimism, sentimentality, patriotism, and Puritanism” based on a “constructive, practical plan for thorough-going change.” This required “ultimate” objectives instead of “immediate” demands. One could now demonstrate that “the capitalist system itself is at fault and that a new system based on a different principle must be built.” All efforts toward this end had to minimize disturbances during the transition. Americans would not leap blindly into possible chaos and just hope for the best. They were far too practical and needed to be shown how it could be done. In the process, “they may get into a revolution, and they may accept a dictatorship.” But they would do so “only in the name of peaceful, constitutional, democratic processes.”⁵⁴

The plan was published in Common Sense in May 1935 and included in Bingham’s book. It called for a “gradual and peaceful transition with a minimum of disruption” to maintain “law and order and the continued functioning of the capitalist system” until the new, planned economy replaced it. Still, it was likely that chaos would arise as the old system disintegrated, requiring the president to “declare a national emergency comparable to a state of war.” By law he could exercise executive power “to assure domestic tranquility” and possibly to gain “sufficient control of the organs of public opinion” to quell opposition. No matter. Members of the commonwealth would accept these measures if it meant building “democratic economic institutions to fulfill the promise of liberty contained in the Declaration of Independence.” Consistent with these values, membership would be “voluntary and open to all producers and consumers,” though the first admitted would be those millions of unemployed who would return to work on the farms and in the factories to produce goods that were deemed essential. The Industrial Authority would lease vacant plants or those operating below capacity from private corporations and transform them into cooperatives. Workers would be paid in scrip issued by the Commonwealth Bank for use in Cooperative stores. Most important in Bingham’s plan, production would be carefully calculated to make the total amount of purchasing power equal to the amount of goods available in the stores. To build a new economy based on large-scale cooperative farms and processing plants, the government would also buy land to build 750,000 homes, half of which would be made available to Commonwealth members.55 As for industry:

The properties of all corporations which operate public utilities and services, transportation and communication, extraction of minerals and other natural resources, and basic or monopolistic industries, may be acquired by the Federal Government, on payment of an annual rent of 5 percent of the assessed valuation, and declared a Public Enterprise. The corporations owning these properties would no longer operate them, but could continue to distribute the income received from rentals or otherwise to their stockholders, bondholders and officers.⁵⁶

The plan emphasized that Commonwealth membership was voluntary. Total freedom of choice extended to the consumer and to choice of occupation. Democratic control would be assured as well as principles of local and functioning autonomy. Genuine cooperative stores would be run by consumers and all cooperative enterprises self-governed and self-disciplined. The Cooperative Commonwealth would prove so efficient and successful that it would take no more than ten years for “the great bulk of economic activity in the United States” to be operating within it. All financing aimed at sustaining the capitalist system until replaced by the Commonwealth required “public ownership of the banking system; public control over the creation of currency and credit; high income and inheritance taxes; a graduated capital levy on all fortunes of over $100,000.” The whole banking system would be “acquired and unified,” with each bank functioning as a branch of the Commonwealth or National Bank.57 Ideally, the whole transition period would be smooth and tranquil:

Private enterprise will only be discontinued as cooperative public enterprise proves its superiority in terms of the welfare of those engaged in it. During the transition period it will be necessary to maintain production for profit, until production for use can take its place.⁵⁸

For Bingham, the main outlines of the plan were so clear that the new party could easily succeed if it took on the likes of “a crusade.”⁵⁹ Still, the plan itself was the main instrument of change and had to be “drawn in sufficient detail and made sufficiently foolproof.” Only then could the new party build a movement and win elections. As soon as it assumed power, the party had quickly to begin building the new Cooperative Commonwealth to ease the transition from a disintegrating capitalist economy. Bingham reasoned that disruptions would be minimal. But if the new regime faced chaos from any number of sources, it would take a hard line against all who opposed it. Conditions might even require “a certain measure of dictatorship.” This would only be temporary. The main outlines of the plan would remain, but “the tempo of its introduction might change, and whatever the degree of democratic procedure that could be maintained during the early stages of its introduction.”⁶⁰

AS LEFT LIBERALS, John Dewey and Alfred Bingham give us much to ponder about the role of the middle class in the making of American fascism. As the most independent-minded of its intellectual representatives, Bingham proposed a planned economy based on voluntary association and cooperation between all members of a Cooperative Commonwealth to replace the existing capitalist order. But to get there might also require them to accept some form of dictatorship in its early stages of development. Bingham did not blink at the apparent contradiction because he was quite sure the end justified the means. The proposed “Plan of Transition” originally published in Common Sense, a periodical well-known for contributions from social critics and theorists who tended toward liberalism and radicalism, offered a daring alternative between communism and capitalism powered by a revolutionary middle class. Yet left to its own “unconscious” state of thinking, Bingham was equally certain that the middle class also carried the potential as the ultimate force for counterrevolution and fascism as the product of a middle-class revolt. For Bingham, it was the psychological makeup and not the class structure that mattered.

Dewey, who was a psychologist, did not see the same thing occurring in the United States. Renascent liberalism, as opposed to socialism or fascism, offered what he considered a scientifically based radicalism that would enable the United States to emerge from the crisis of the Depression stronger than ever. Though he acknowledged that “our institutions, democratic in form, tend to favor in substance a privileged plutocracy,” he was certain that the cooperative intelligence of educated people who were engaged pragmatically and in the spirit of ongoing experimentation toward solving all social problems would prove decisive in preserving and strengthening democracy. For Dewey, it was “sheer defeatism to assume in advance of actual trial that democratic political institutions are incapable either of further development or of constructive social application.” He had no doubt that even in the midst of a profound crisis, “the forms of representative government” remained “potentially capable of expressing the public will when that assumes anything like unification.” Moreover, “there is nothing inherent in them” that would prevent further “supplementation by political agencies” designed to represent “definitely economic social interests, like those of producers and consumers.” Here was the ultimate philosophic justification, and for Dewey an utterly pragmatic one at that, for the idea of American exceptionalism in the world:

To profess democracy as an ultimate ideal and the suppression of democracy as a means to the ideal may be possible in a country that has never known even rudimentary democracy, but when professed in a country that has anything of a genuine democratic spirit in its traditions, it signifies desire for possession and retention of power by a class, whether that class be called Fascist or Proletarian.61

As events unfolded in the late 1930s, Dewey’s push for an enlightened democratic government corresponded to the logic of monopoly-finance capitalism. On the other hand, Bingham’s vision of a Cooperative Commonwealth to replace American capitalism, the epicenter of the world-capitalist system, was mere fantasy, though indicative of a deeper and complex phantasmagoria that glossed over irreconcilable contradictions of political economy. From a practical standpoint, however, there were obvious reasons why Bingham’s ideas failed to gain traction among the various strata of the middle class. For one thing, Roosevelt’s second New Deal in 1935 had delivered what was absent in the first—Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a far stronger commitment to labor for the right to organize and bargain collectively. Roosevelt had finally afforded some comfort to the middle class, which in Bingham’s own terms addressed its psychological needs. More to the point, all proposals for a planned economy by left-liberals to the right of Bingham were subsumed by the New Deal. This applied to Dewey more than to any of the others since his brand of pragmatism became even more fixed to the dictates of capital in its higher, corporate form.

By the end of 1935, left-liberal opposition to the New Deal and claims that it was in some way fascist had dissolved. Roosevelt’s campaign for reelection in 1936 turned into a landslide win as a result of the coalition of labor and progressive groups that had rallied behind his efforts to satisfy those left behind in the recovery. Just as Bingham had figured, the middle class was satisfied—at least for the moment.

The progressive character of the second New Deal and the easing of class tensions, if only temporary, also blunted efforts of analysts like Haider, Corey, Swing, and Ward to press for a greater understanding about what they deemed the real fascist threat still gaining force but even more disguised as capitalist reform. As the American Behemoth loomed on the horizon, all agreed that it was fed primarily by the power of capital. Big Business, not the middle class in rebellion against it, was the driving force of fascism in the United States in the 1930s. All agreed in principle that the fascist bent of the ruling capitalist class—considering parts of the New Deal as fascist or indicative of a transition to fascism—would only drive the middle class further toward reaction and plausibly into the hands of a waiting demagogue.

Even Alfred Bingham could agree with Lewis Corey that if Huey Long had lived and successfully challenged Roosevelt’s liberal coalition, he might have been the demagogue needed to facilitate the merger of middle-class reaction with the reactionary finance capitalists, thereby taking America into full-blown fascism—if the general crisis had deepened.