Notes

Introduction: Fascism as the Dictatorship of Capital

1.    Historicus, “Fascism in America,” Monthly Review 4/6 (October 1952): 181.

2.    Daniel Guerin, Fascism & Big Business, trans. Frances and Mason Merrill (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), introduction by Dwight McDonald, xi.

3.    Mathew Feldman, ed., A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 49.

4.    Walter L. Goldfrank, “Fascism and World Economy,” in Social Change in the Capitalist World Economy, ed. Barbara Hockey Kaplan (Beverly Hills, CA, and London: Sage Publications, 1978), 75–120.

5.    R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution: How and Why Fascism Came to Power in Europe (Chicago: Proletarian Publishers, 1974), 47.

6.    Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 124.

7.    Goldfrank, “Fascism and World Economy,” 101.

8.    Gregory Meyerson and Michael Joseph Roberto, “Fascism and the Crisis of Pax Americana,” Socialism and Democracy 22/2 (July 2008): 157–91.

9.    I am indebted to Joel Kovel, who has brilliantly demonstrated that the efficient cause of the global ecological crisis that threatens our very existence in these times is the constant necessity of capital to reproduce itself for the sake of profit. See Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007).

10.  Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 346.

11.  A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 60.

12.  Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People during the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 264.

13.  Georgi Dimitroff, The United Front: Problems of Working-Class Unity and the People’s Front in the Struggle Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 11.

14.  Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 3.

15.  George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (New York: In Fact, Inc., 1943), 69.

16.  Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 459.

17.  Ibid., 463.

18.  Ibid., 464.

19.  Ibid., 465.

20.  Ibid., 470–71.

1. The Wonders of American Capitalism in the New Era

1.    Ronald Allen Goldberg, America in the Twenties (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 26–27.

2.    Lucia Pradella, “Crisis, Revolution and Hegemonic Transition: The American Civil War and Emancipation in Marx’s Capital,” Science & Society 80/4 (October 2016): 460. Pradella also cites a letter from Marx to Nokolai Danielson in 1879, in which Marx wrote that the United States had “much overtaken England in the rapidity of economical progress, though they lag still behind in the extent of acquired wealth.”

3.    Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 425–26.

4.    Engels to August Bebel, December 22, 1882, Collected Works, vol. 46 (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 415.

5.    Anna Rochester, Rulers of America: A Study of Finance Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1936), 26–28. Rochester was also a labor activist and advocate for the rights of children and longtime companion of Grace Hutchins, whose political activism and journalism was done as a lifelong member of the Communist Party USA.

6.    Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Collected Works, vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 197, 202–3, 227, 229, 236–37.

7.    Rochester, Rulers of America, 29–30.

8.    George Soule, Prosperity Decade, From War to Depression: 1917–1929 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 7. Soule’s book appeared originally as volume 8 of The Economic History of the United States published in 1947 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

9.    Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 14. Originally published by Harcourt, Brace, and World in 1932.

10.  Bruce Minton and John Stuart, The Fat Years and the Lean (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 7. With very few exceptions, this valuable study of the interwar period is not found in recent U.S. historiography and commentary, primarily because it is the only sweeping but credible history of the 1920s and 1930s written from a communist point of view and aimed at the public.

11.  Ibid., 20–21.

12.  Stephen C. Mason, “Revitalize the Nation’s Industries!,” American Industries 20 (March 1920): 8, quoted in James Warren Prothro, The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), 102.

13.  Elbert H. Gary, “The Menace of the Closed Shop,” American Industries 20 (January 1920): 31–32, quoted in Prothro, Dollar Decade, 101–2.

14.  Minton and Stuart. Fat Years and the Lean, 18–19.

15.  Ronald Radosh, “The Corporate Ideology of American Labor Leaders,” in The Twenties: The Critical Issues, ed. Joan Hoff (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 75–77.

16.  William Pencak, For God & Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 3–23. Pencak provides surprising and disturbing examples of its members in their commitment to “Americanism.”

17.  Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9–10.

18.  Niall Palmer, The Twenties in America: Politics and History ((Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 44.

19.  Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 12–13.

20.  Goldberg, America in the Twenties, 22.

21.  Robert K. Murray, The Politics of Normalcy: Governmental Theory and Practice in the Harding-Coolidge Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 15.

22.  Goldberg, America in the Twenties, 26.

23.  Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties: The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York and London: New York University Press, 1989), 84, 87.

24.  David Burner, “1919: Prelude to Normalcy,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s, ed. John Braeman, Richard H. Bremmer, David Brody (Ohio State University Press, 1968), 13.

25.  Address of Warren G. Harding, President of the United States to the Joint Session of Congress, April 21, 1921, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044032157059;view=1up;seq=3.

26.  Goldberg, America in the Twenties, 24.

27.  Richard Frankin Pettigrew, Imperial Washington: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1922), 399–400. Pettigrew is an amazing source who is not recognized for his role in making history. According to a 1949 report by George Novack to the Fourth International, Pettigrew was one of the many anti-monopolists apart from Marxists who deemed plutocracy as the deadliest enemy of the rights of the people and, as such, of American democracy. One will find no mention of Pettigrew in the best-known liberal histories of the period. Though he lacked insight into the laws of capitalist development, he had learned much from his decades-long struggle against his own bourgeoisie and considered capital to be “stolen labor,” and its only function “to steal more labor.” Novack also recalls how Lenin knew of Pettigrew’s book. A year before it was reprinted by Charles Kerr, Pettigrew had published the book under a different title, Triumphant Plutocracy. When Lenin sat for the American artist Oscar Cesare in October 1922, Cesare saw Lenin reading a “red-bound copy” of the earlier version, who then told the artist, “It’s a very fine book.” See Novack, under the pseudonym William F. Warde, “A Forgotten Fighter Against Plutocracy,” Fourth International 10/2 (February 1949): 53–57.

28.  Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s 60 Families (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 218–19. Even Harding’s cronies in the cabinet contributed to this formula, unless they dragged him into scandals. The worst of them was his old poker-playing and drinking buddy, Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who went to prison for accepting payoffs in return for signing over leases of government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private companies. Harding appointed another one of his buddies, D. R. Crissinger, as governor of the Federal Reserve. The ignorant and “impressionable” Crissinger, a small businessman with no expertise in finance capital, was manipulated by Benjamin Strong, then a member of the House of Morgan, to turn the Fed toward buying up government securities in large quantities. The result was that banks were flooded with liquid capital that required profitable investment.

29.  Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties, 89.

30.  Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 78. The book was first published by Harper & Row in 1931.

31.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works, vol 6. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 487.

32.  Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 297–98.

33.  Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992), 39.

34.  Perrett, America in the Twenties, 254–60, 297–99.

35.  My use of the two forms of capital’s totalizing powers as terrorist and non-terrorist is derived from Herbert Marcuse’s critique of advanced industrial society. In One–Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 3, Marcuse states: “By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a ‘pluralism’ of parties, newspapers, ‘countervailing powers’, etc.” Marcuse’s critique of industrial society also included the Soviet Union. This leads to many questions regarding Marcuse’s view of existing socialism at the time, though it does not preclude an implicit understanding that Marcuse is still describing what he understands to be the totalizing power of capital.

36.  Silas Bent, Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 223.

37.  Ibid., 199.

38.  Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 147. I am indebted to Ewen for his tremendously important study of the many works of the 1920s and 1930s.

39.  Bent, Ballyhoo, 223.

40.  Ewen, PR!, 183–86.

41.  Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works, 6; 483.

42.  Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties, 46–47.

43.  Gerald Horne, Blows Against the Empire: U.S. Imperialism in Crisis (New York: International Publishers, 2008), 66. For Horne, the concept of white supremacy is integral to U.S. imperialism.

44.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 189.

2. Fascist Processes in Capitalist Accumulation

1.    A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 60. Magil was a seasoned journalist who wrote extensively for the Party. My search for information on Stevens came up empty, as did my attempt to find his name on Party rolls, suggesting that Stevens was most likely a nom de plume.

2.    Ibid., 60.

3.    Ibid., 36.

4.    Ibid., 36–37.

5.    Ibid., 22.

6.    Ibid., 118.

7.    Ibid., 56.

8.    Ibid.

9.    Ibid., 23.

10.  Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 419–20. In this recent and quite revealing biography of Hitler, Ullrich recounts a critical moment just after Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933. Hitler still needed new elections for the Reichstag, counting on the National Socialists to claim a clear majority, who would then call for passage of what became known as the Enabling Act, giving Hitler complete control of the state. With the Nazi Party coffers empty, Herman Göring hosted a reception on February 20 of twenty-seven leading industrialists and Germany’s preeminent banker Hjalmar Schacht, who listened to Hitler affirm his belief in private property and also declare that the National Socialists alone offered “salvation from the Communist danger.” As a result, Göring reported the next day that the desired donation in the amount of 3 million reichsmarks had been delivered to the party.

11.  Magil and Stevens, Peril of Fascism, 29.

12.  Ibid., 30.

13.  Ibid., 32.

14.  Ibid., 56.

15.  David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London & New York: Verso, 2010), 7.

16.  Ibid., 8.

17.  For a historical context to Marx’s writing of Capital, see the acclaimed overview by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage, 1996). Originally published in 1975, Hobsbawm’s book remains central for those who wish to reap benefits from a compelling work of modern world history.

18.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 574.

19.  Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 377.

20.  Marx, Capital, 575. “If we suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same, the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e., that a definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour-power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour and the subsistence-fund of the labourers clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and the more rapidly, the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital produces yearly a surplus-value, of which one part is yearly added to the original capital; since this increment itself grows yearly along with the augmentation of the capital already functioning; since lastly, under special stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening of new markets, or of new spheres for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social wants … the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended … the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the increase of labour-power or of the number of labourers.”

21.  Ibid., 575–76. As Marx states: “As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one hand, and wage-workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage-workers at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour-power, which must incessantly re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction of labour-power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.”

22.  Ibid., 580.

23.  Ibid., 582.

24.  Ibid., 587–88. Marx observed this in England in the 1860s as he was writing Capital. The magnitude of total social capital amassed by the winners had brought centralization to new heights. All the surviving and larger capitalist enterprises were driven toward more organized production and greater productiveness. As he concluded: “Centralisation completes the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. … Everywhere the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting-point for a more comprehensive organisation of the collective work of many, for a wider development of their material motive forces—in other words, for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by customary methods, into processes of production socially combined and scientifically arranged.”

25.  Ibid., 588.

26.  Ibid., 590–93.

27.  Ibid., 591–92.

28.  Ibid., 592–93.

29.  Ibid., 595.

30.  Ibid., 600–2.

31.  Ibid., 602–3.

32.  Ibid., 603.

33.  Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1934), 113. Corey was originally Louis C. Fraina, an Italian immigrant intellectual who was one of the founders of the communist movement in the United States. Accused of spying by the Communist International, Fraina disappeared from sight to live a quiet and impoverished life of study in New York City. He reemerged as Lewis Corey, a serious writer in the Marxist tradition, in the early years of the Depression. Still an outsider to the Communist Party in the United States, he remained a committed Marxist. In a note in The Decline of American Capitalism, Corey wrote: “It is one of the tasks of this book, using the American statistical material, the most abundant in the world, to make a quantitative, as well as qualitative, demonstration of the Marxist conception of the fundamental aspects of capitalism—and this despite the tendency, on the part of bourgeois economists, to sneer at ‘Das Kapital’ as an ‘outworn economic textbook.’ Marx, in fundamental theory and analysis, is more contemporary than contemporary bourgeois economists.”

34.  Ibid., 114–16.

35.  Ibid., 116–17.

36.  Ibid., 117.

37.  Ibid., 223.

38.  Ibid., 225.

39.  Ibid., 225–26.

40.  Ibid., 226–28.

41.  Ibid., 228–32.

42.  Michael Roberts, The Long Depression: How It Happened, Why It Happened, and What Happens Next (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 53–54.

43.  Marx, Capital, 555.

44.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 44–45.

45.  Ibid., 45.

46.  Ibid., 46.

3.  The Spectacle of Prosperity and the Necessity of Spin

1.    Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 6:489.

2.    Jonathan Norton Leonard, Three Years Down (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1939), 18.

3.    Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Political and Social History (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), 757.

4.    William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 108. The book was first published in 1958.

5.    Ibid., 15.

6.    Richard B. DuBoff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 72.

7.    George Soule, Prosperity Decade, From War to Depression: 1917–1929 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 78.

8.    Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism, 1500–2000. trans. Tom Dickman and Anny Lefebre (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 177.

9.    Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1934) 63.

10.  Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 108.

11.  Ibid., 104.

12.  Ronald Radosh, “The Corporate Ideology of American Labor Leaders,” in The Twenties: The Critical Issues, ed. Joan Hoff (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 75–77.

13.  Warren I. Cohen, Empire Without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations, 1921–1933 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 3–4.

14.  Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 70–84.

15.  Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 145.

16.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 63–64.

17.  Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 10.

18.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 146.

19.  Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 179.

20.  DuBoff, Accumulation and Power, 83–84.

21.  Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties: The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York and London: New York University Press, 1989), 42.

22.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 318.

23.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 65–66.

24.  Tom Kemp, The Climax of Capitalism: The U.S. Economy in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Longman, 1990), 49–50.

25.  Beaud, History of Capitalism, 180–82.

26.  Kemp, Climax of Capitalism, 49–50. The term “Taylorism” is derived from its founder, Frederick W. Taylor, who sought to challenge and mitigate workers’ control over the workplace, as well as to blunt the power of unions.

27.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 325, 327.

28.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, 10.

29.  Donald R. McCoy, Coming of Age: The United States during the 1920s and 1930s (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 63.

30.  Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 145–46.

31.  Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: New American Library, 1980), 7, 37. The book was first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1922.

32.  Ibid., 38.

33.  Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 221.

34.  Lewis, Babbitt, 80–81.

35.  Allen, Only Yesterday, 153–54.

36.  Ibid., 145.

37.  Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 4, 44. The book was first published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1925.

38.  Ibid., 50–51.

39.  Ibid., 52.

40.  Ibid., 4.

41.  Ibid., 77–78, 83.

42.  Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), 8.

43.  Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 101–2.

44.  Ibid., 98.

45.  Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 66–67.

46.  John M. Blair, Seeds of Destruction: A Study in the Functional Weaknesses of Capitalism (New York: Covici Freide Publishers, 1938), 214–17.

47.  Ibid., 214.

48.  Ewen, PR!, 174–75.

49.  Ibid., 182.

50.  Ibid., 190.

51.  Blair, Seeds of Destruction, 215.

52.  George Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 128. This is a reprint of the 1931 edition originally published by Houghton Mifflin. I am indebted to Stuart Ewen who in PR! brings Duhamel’s compelling but forgotten text to light.

53.  Ibid., 128, 133.

54.  Ibid., 24–27.

55.  Ibid., 210–11.

56.  Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 206–7.

57.  Ibid., 165–66, 217.

58.  Ibid., 218.

59.  Ibid.

60.  Ibid., 220–22.

61.  Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, 47; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 8–9.

62.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 15–17.

63.  Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992), 8.

64.  Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s 60 Families (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 150.

65.  Parrish, Anxious Decades, 48–49.

66.  McCoy, Coming of Age, 100.

67.  Silas Bent, Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 224.

68.  Ewen, PR!, 224–25.

69.  Parrish, Anxious Decades, 48–50.

70.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, 11.

71.  Keith L. Bryant Jr. and Henry C. Dethloff, A History of American Business, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 193.

4. Every Man a Capitalist? Fascist Ideology of Businessmen in 1920s America

1.    Thomas Nixon Carver, The Present Economic Revolution in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1925), 9–10.

2.  Ibid., 10–11.

3.    Ibid., 12.

4.    Ibid., 28.

5.    Ibid., 88.

6.    Ibid., 89.

7.    Ibid., 90–92.

8.    Ibid., 113–18.

9.    Ibid., 209. Carver also believed that the capitalist revolution in America was proving itself as a great victory in the struggle over ideas. For Carver, Marx and his followers were simply wrong when they promulgated a materialist interpretation of history—this was simply rubbish. Idealism liberated men and women, not a materialist worldview.

10.  Ibid., 233–35.

11.  Ibid., 209.

12.  Ibid., 210–11.

13.  Ibid., 211–12.

14.  Ibid., 218.

15.  Ibid., 220.

16.  Ibid., 165–66.

17.  James Warren Prothro, The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), xiii.

18.  Charles Norman Fay, Business in Politics: Suggestions for Leaders in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Cosmos Press, 1926), vii–x.

19.  Ibid., x.

20.  Ibid., xi.

21.  Ibid., 10–11.

22.  Ibid., 11–12.

23.  Ibid., 12.

24.  Ibid., 13–14.

25.  Ibid., 14.

26.  Ibid., 166–67.

27.  Ibid., 23–24.

28.  Ibid., 26.

29.  Ibid., 26–27.

30.  Ibid., 29–30.

31.  Ibid., 32.

32.  Ibid., 39.

33.  Ibid., 47.

34.  Ibid., 48.

35.  Ibid., 49.

36.  Ibid., 55.

37.  Ibid., 56.

38.  Ibid., 56–58.

39.  Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller (Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2005), 37. The book was first published in 1928.

40.  Ibid., 37–38.

41.  Ibid., 47–48.

42.  Ibid., 48.

43.  Ibid., 52.

44.  Ibid., 54–55.

45.  Ibid., 60.

46.  Ibid., 63.

47.  Ibid., 84.

48.  Ibid., 85–87.

49.  Ibid., 110–11.

50.  Ibid., 112–15.

51.  Marx used the word phantasmagoria in 1847 to describe the worldview of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who attempted to establish a new political economy to guide producers acting in harmony toward the creation of a balanced and just system. Marx considered it sheer fantasy that Proudhon wanted a true capitalist world without capitalist contradictions. Michael Joseph Roberto, “Crisis, Revolution, and the Meaning of Progress: The Poverty of Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance,” Cultural Logic (2010) http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/roberto.pdf.

5. The Paradox of Capitalist Progress, 1922–1929

1.    Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1934), 18–19.

2.    Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1960), 47.

3.    Ibid., 48.

4.    Louis M. Hacker, American Problems of Today (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1939), 115–16. Hacker was one of the few writers of the 1930s who recognized the crucial role played by the agricultural depression of the 1920s in the making of the general crisis that followed. It was one of “four outstanding problems” that had threatened the well-being of the nation. Full treatment of the four outstanding problems can be found on pages 99–145.

5.    Bernstein, Lean Years, 51–55, 58–59.

6.    Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People during the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 15, 26–27. Hallgren cites an earlier 1929 study by Paul H. Nystrom, Economic Principles of Consumption, which revealed that about 47 million of the 119 million people in the United States in 1929 were living at a level of “Comfort” or above. There were 20 million at the Comfort level itself; 15 million Moderately Well-to-Do; 10 million Well-to-Do; and 2 million who enjoyed “Liberal Standards of Living.”

7.    Ibid., 16–17.

8.    Ibid., 19–20.

9.    Ibid., 23.

10.  Ibid., 23–24.

11.  Ibid., 24–25.

12.  Ibid., 21–23.

13.  Ibid., 27–28.

14.  The paradox of capitalist progress had always been integral to world capitalist development. From its genesis in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, the Atlantic economy was built on the horrors of slavery and wage labor. From that time capitalist contradictions intensified quantitatively and qualitatively as industrialization developed in the core capitalist countries of the world system. By 1850, England ushered in what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Capital.” Once again, Marx saw these developments more clearly than others, if only in their embryonic stages. In his inaugural address to the International Working Men’s Association in London in 1864, which came from material he would include in the publication of Capital three years later, Marx established the paradox of capitalist progress as a theoretical tenet of his materialist interpretation of history and his contributions to political economy: capitalist accumulation necessarily widened the gap between wealth and poverty which, in turn, intensified existing contradictions that if not resolved would produce a crisis of the whole system, a general crisis. Michael Joseph Roberto, “Capitalist Crisis, Cooperative Labor, and the Conquest of Political Power: Marx’s ‘Inaugural Address’ (1864) and Its Relevance in the Current Moment,” Socialism and Democracy 28/2 (July 2014): 82–106.

15.  Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt, 30–31.

16.  Ibid., 229–30.

17.  Ibid., 95.

18.  Ibid., 30.

19.  Robert Moats Miller, “The Ku Klux Klan,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s (Modern America), ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 216

20.  The oath is taken from a booklet titled Ku Klux Klan Secrets Exposed: Attitudes Toward Jews, Catholics, Foreigners and Masons. Fraudulent Methods Used. Atrocities Committed in Name and Order (Chicago: Ezra A. Cook, 1922), 58.

21.  Miller, “The Ku Klux Klan,” 216.

22.  Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 111.

23.  Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8.

24.  Ibid., xiii.

25.  Ibid., 4–5.

26.  Miller, “The Ku Klux Klan,” 240.

27.  Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Twenties and Thirties: The Olympian Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York and London: New York University Press, 1989), 75.

28.  MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 5, 7–8.

29.  Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt, “Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan,” February 2011, 3–4, 11. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/hatred_and_profits_under_the_hood_of_the_ku_klux_klan.pdf.

30.  MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 65.

31.  Ibid., 67.

32.  Ibid., 78.

33.  Ibid., 65.

34.  Ibid., 65–66.

35.  Ibid., 66.

36.  Ibid., 66–67.

37.  Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 10–11.

38.  V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 218.

39.  Donald R. McCoy, Coming of Age: The United States during the 1920s and 1930s (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 63.

40.  Kiernan, New Imperialism, 218.

41.  Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1971), 269.

42.  McCoy, Coming of Age, 53.

43.  Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 124.

44.  Lens, Forging of the American Empire, 269–70.

45.  Hacker, American Problems of Today, 127.

46.  Ibid., 127–35.

47.  Ibid., 135.

48.  Bruce Minton and John Stuart, The Fat Years and The Lean (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 78.

49.  Ibid., 79–80.

50.  James A. Emery, “Address of Mr. James A. Emery,” Proceedings, N.A.M. (1923), 289, quoted in James Warren Prothro, The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), 204.

51.  John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 144–45.

52.  Ibid., 146–47.

53.  Ibid., 147.

54.  Ibid., 146–48.

55.  Ibid., 60.

56.  Merle Thorpe, “That Man Mussolini!,” Nation’s Business 15 (December 1927): 62, quoted in Prothro, Dollar Decade, 205.

57.  Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 24–27.

58.  Gian Giacomo Migone, The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe, trans. Molly Tambor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 56.

59.  Ibid., 47–48.

6. Onset of the 1929 Crisis and the Pivot toward Fascism

1.    Jonathan Norton Leonard, Three Years Down (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1939), 16–17

2.    George Soule, Prosperity Decade, From War to Depression: 1917–1929 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 290–91.

3.    Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 144.

4.    Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1934), 163.

5.    Ronald E. Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States: From 1607 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 280.

6.    Donald R. McCoy, Coming of Age: The United States during the 1920s and 1930s (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 170.

7.    Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 429.

8.    William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 109; Seavoy, Economic History of the United States, 280.

9.    David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16–17.

10.  Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 17.

11.  Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 100.

12.  Ibid., 101.

13.  Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 22.

14.  Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 101.

15.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 154.

16.  Richard B. Duboff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (Armonk, NY, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 89.

17.  Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 35.

18.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 286.

19.  Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 41.

20.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 172.

21.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 163.

22.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 287.

23.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 65–72.

24.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, 21.

25.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 38.

26.  DuBoff, Accumulation and Power, 87.

27.  Ibid., 88.

28.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 67.

29.  A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 62.

30.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, 10.

31.  Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 300.

32.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, 21.

33.  McCoy, Coming of Age, 120.

34.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 72–73.

35.  Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 189.

36.  DuBoff, Accumulation of Power, 80.

37.  Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 190–92.

38.  Soule, Prosperity Decade, 279–80, 284.

39.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 43–44.

40.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 114.

41.  Ibid., 116.

42.  Ibid., 73.

43.  Ibid., 170–71.

44.  Historicus, “Fascism in America,” Monthly Review 4/6 (October 1952): 181–82.

45.  Ibid., 182.

46.  Magil and Stevens, Peril of Fascism, 60.

47.  Ibid., 56.

48.  Ibid., 11, 148.

7. “Years of the Locust” and the Call for a Mussolini

1.    Gilbert Seldes, The Years of the Locust: America, 1929–1932 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), 3, 256.

2.    Jonathan Norton Leonard, Three Years Down (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1939), 113.

3.    Ibid., 113–14.

4.    Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (Freeport, NY: Books For Libraries Press, 1932), 1–3.

5.    Edward Robb Ellis, A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929–1939 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), 230.

6.    David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89.

7.    Matthew Josephson, Infidel in the Temple: A Memoir of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 95–96.

8.    Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 88.

9.    Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 91.

10.  Leonard, Three Years Down, 188.

11.  Seldes, Years of the Locust, 294–95.

12.  Ibid., 281–82.

13.  Wilson, American Jitters, 298.

14.  Ibid., 302–3.

15.  Ibid., 303–4.

16.  Ibid., 304.

17.  Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 35. A good local example of much of this evidence appears in a recent study of the Communist Party in North Carolina by Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).

18.  Wilson, American Jitters, 11–12.

19.  Richard B. Duboff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (Armonk, NY, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 89.

20.  Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 148.

21.  Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, 1947), 59–60.

22.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 74–75.

23.  Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986), 112.

24.  Mitchell, Depression Decade, 68.

25.  Ibid., 357.

26.  Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1971), 288.

27.  Kindleberger, World in Depression, 114–16.

28.  Mitchell, Depression Decade, 60–62.

29.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 75.

30.  Mitchell, Depression Decade, 91–92.

31.  Ibid., 98.

32.  Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 86–87.

33.  Ibid., 87–88.

34.  Mitchell, Depression Decade, 104.

35.  Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People during the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 232.

36.  Ibid., 233.

37.  Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 20–22.

38.  Brendon, Dark Valley, 69.

39.  Stein, Fiscal Revolution, 8–9.

40.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 77.

41.  Mitchell, Depression Decade, 64; McElvaine, Great Depression, 77.

42.  Ronald E. Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States: From 1607 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 276.

43.  John A. Garraty, The Great Depression (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1987), 34–35; Albert U. Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 93–94.

44.  Stein, Fiscal Revolution, 28.

45.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 89.

46.  Elliot A. Rosen, Roosevelt, The Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 8.

47.  Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 27.

48.  Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 79.

49.  Stein, Fiscal Revolution, 20–27.

50.  Leonard, Three Years Down, 243–44.

51.  Ibid., 245–51.

52.  Ibid., 250–55.

53.  Ibid., 255–57.

54.  A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 76–78.

55.  Ibid., 78–79.

56.  Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt, 226.

57.  Ibid., 231–33.

58.  Ibid., 233–35.

59.  Ibid., 240–41.

60.  Ibid., 244–45.

61.  Ibid., 245.

62.  Ibid., 278–79.

63.  Ibid., 280.

8. The New Deal as a Transition to Fascism

1.    Bruce Minton and John Stuart, The Fat Years and the Lean (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 291.

2.    Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York and London: Liveright, 2013), 118–19.

3.    Ibid., 121–22.

4.    The highly regarded historian Willian Leuchtenburg describes how the Brain Trust came together in 1932 as Roosevelt positioned himself for the presidential race. As governor of New York, Roosevelt “consulted frequently with college professors on legislative policy.” One of them, Raymond Moley, quickly became the leader of an impressive group of academics whose concerted effort and planning materialized in the New Deal legislation immediately after Roosevelt stepped into the White House as president on March 4, 1933. Leuchtenburg says that the Brain Trust, as it had become known, actually disbanded after the election. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 32–33.

5.    The term “state capitalism” is a loaded and highly debated term and, in my view, applies here. That fascism became a distinct feature of the world capitalist system in the 1920s and 1930s, primarily in Italy and Germany, occurred in the general framework of state control over the economy, though the latter meant a profitable if not entirely free hand for big monopoly-finance capital in both fascist states. Thus Lenin’s statement in his seminal work of 1917, The State and Revolution: “Imperialism—the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist monopolies, of the development of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism—has clearly shown an extraordinary strengthening of the ‘state machine’ and an unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and military apparatus in connection with the intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat both in the monarchical and in the freest republican countries.” V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 410.

6.    David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 132–33.

7.    Ronald E. Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States: From 1607 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 283–84.

8.    Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, 1947), 135–36.

9.    Ibid., 180.

10.  Alan Lawson, A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 84–85.

11.  Katznelson, Fear Itself, 229.

12.  For the earliest and most comprehensive treatment of the NRA, see Leverett S. Lyon, Paul T. Homan, Lewis Lorwin, George Terbough, Charles L. Dearing, and Leon C. Marshall, The National Recovery Administration: An Analysis and Appraisal (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1935). The fine work of Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), is extremely thorough for its detailed assessment of the motives and major issues surrounding discussions and implementation of the NRA. There is also the more critical assessment by Bernard Bellush, The Failure of the NRA (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

13.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, 87.

14.  Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 160.

15.  Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1934), 96.

16.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 160.

17.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 96–97, 463.

18.  Ibid., 61.

19.  McElvaine, Great Depression, 161.

20.  Mitchell, Depression Decade, 180–185.

21.  Benjamin Stolberg and Warren Jay Vinton, The Economic Consequences of the New Deal (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 4–5, 8.

22.  Ibid., 6–8.

23.  Ibid., 81.

24.  Ibid., 24–26.

25.  Ibid., 35–36.

26.  Ibid., 37–38.

27.  Ibid., 41.

28.  Ibid., 43–45.

29.  Ibid., 48.

30.  Ibid., 49–52.

31.  Ibid., 52.

32.  Ibid., 64–65.

33.  Ibid., 66.

34.  Ibid., 85.

35.  E. Francis Brown, “The American Road to Fascism,” Current History 38 (July 1, 1933): 398.

36.  John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 279.

37.  J. B. Matthews and R. E. Shallcross, “Must America Go Fascist?,” Harper’s Magazine 169 (June 1934): 2.

38.  Ibid., 4.

39.  Ibid., 4–5.

40.  Ibid., 5.

41.  Ibid.

42.  Ibid., 6.

43.  Ibid.

44.  Ibid., 9.

45.  Ibid., 10.

46.  Ibid.

47.  Ibid., 10–11.

48.  Ibid., 11.

49.  Ibid.

50.  Ibid., 12.

51.  Ibid.

52.  Ibid., 12–13.

53.  George E. Sokolsky, “America Drifts toward Fascism,” American Mercury 32/127 (July 1934): 259.

54.  Ibid., 258.

55.  Ibid., 259.

56.  Ibid.

57.  Ibid., 262.

58.  Ibid.

59.  V. F. Calverton, “Will Fascism Come to America? A Symposium,” Modern Monthly 8/8 (September 1934): 469. Other contributors included Stuart Chase, Charles A. Beard, Theodore Dreiser, Norman Thomas, Waldo Frank, and Horace M. Kallen.

60.  Ibid., 471–72.

61.  Corey, Decline of American Capitalism, 494, 498.

62.  Ibid., 502, 505.

63.  Ibid., 511.

64.  R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution: How and Why Fascism Came to Power in Europe (Chicago: Proletarian Publishers, 1974), 271.

65.  Georgi Dimitroff, The United Front: Problems of Working–Class Unity and the People’s Front in the Struggle Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 9.

66.  Ibid., 10–11.

67.  Ibid., 41–42.

68.  Richard B. DuBoff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 91.

9. “A Smokescreen over America”

1.    George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (New York: In Fact, Inc., 1943), 69.

2.    H. Arthur Steiner, “Fascism in America?,” American Political Science Review 29/5 (October 1935): 821–30.

3.    A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 11, 60.

4.    Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). For Pelley and Winrod, I rely on Ribuffo’s stellar framework and analysis; his interpretation of these two early Christian fascists remains unsurpassed. Many of his major findings are salient to the making of American fascism as presented in this book.

5.    Ibid., 25, 27, 29.

6.    Ibid., 32–35.

7.    Ibid., 36.

8.    Ibid., 43.

9.    Ibid., 43–44.

10.  Ibid., 44–49.

11.  Ibid., 49.

12.  Ibid., 52–54.

13.  Ibid., 57.

14.  Ibid.

15.  Ibid., 59.

16.  Ibid., 59–60.

17.  Ibid., 63–65.

18.  Victor Ferkiss, “The Political and Economic Philosophy of American Fascism” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, June 1954), 273–74.

19.  Ribuffo, Old Christian Right, 91.

20.  Ibid., 81.

21.  Ibid., 83.

22.  Ibid., 89–92.

23.  Ibid., 99–100.

24.  Ibid., 102.

25.  Ibid., 103.

26.  Ibid., 104–5.

27.  Ibid., 109–10.

28.  Ibid., 118.

29.  Ibid., 119–27.

30.  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), 78–80.

31.  Peter H. Amaan, “Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25/3 (July 1983): 493–94.

32.  Ibid., 494–95.

33.  Ibid., 495.

34.  Ibid., 496–97.

35.  Ibid., 497.

36.  Ibid., 505–6.

37.  Ibid., 499, 501.

38.  Ibid., 508.

39.  Ibid., 522–23.

40.  Morris Janowitz, “Black Legions on the March,” in America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in American History, ed. Daniel Aaron (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 305–8.

41.  Carleton Beals, The Story of Huey P. Long (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1935), 12.

42.  Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973), 21–27.

43.  Ibid., 29–30.

44.  Ibid., 31–34.

45.  Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 119.

46.  Charles E. Coughlin, Father Coughlin’s Radio Discourses (Royal Oak, MI: Radio League of the Little Flower, 1932), 27.

47.  Marcus, Father Coughlin, 38–40.

48.  Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 107–9.

49.  Ferkiss, “Philosophy of American Fascism,” 171–73, 178.

50.  Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 112.

51.  Ibid., 126, 133–34. In 1937, Ferdinand Lundberg was among the first writers to draw attention to the support that Hearst gave to Coughlin and how the latter willingly followed his lead. See Lundberg, Imperial Hearst: A Social Biography (New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 277–78.

52.  Marcus, Father Coughlin, 71–73.

53.  Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 126.

54.  Ferkiss, “Philosophy of American Fascism,” 166–68.

55.  Ibid., 171.

56.  Marcus, Father Coughlin, 37.

57.  Ferkiss, “Philosophy of American Fascism,” 195.

58.  Ibid., 208.

59.  Ibid., 215.

60.  Ibid., 223.

61.  Ibid., 229.

62.  Ibid., 242.

63.  Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 42–47.

64.  Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 11–14.

65.  Beals, Story of Huey Long, 364, 366.

66.  Ibid., 14–15.

67.  Ibid., 15.

68.  Ibid., 366.

69.  Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (Montauk, NY: Julian Messner, Inc., 1935), 104–5.

70.  Richard D. White, Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York: Random House, 2006), 61–63.

71.  Ibid., 235.

72.  Swing, Forerunners of Fascism, 75–77.

73.  Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 26–27.

74.  Beals, Story of Huey Long, 340.

75.  Ibid., 340–43.

76.  Ibid., 350–51.

77.  Ibid., 351–53.

78.  Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 62–64.

79.  William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 99.

80.  Beals, Story of Huey Long, 18–19.

81.  Ferkiss, “Philosophy of American Fascism,” 132, 156.

82.  Ibid., 133.

83.  Ibid., 151.

84.  Ibid., 126.

85.  Ibid., 133.

86.  Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 273–74.

87.  Ibid., 276–77.

88.  Ibid., 281–82.

10. The Class Character of Embryonic American Fascism

1.    Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt: A Study of American Life and the Temper of the American People during the Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 264.

2.    Ibid., 265.

3.    David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 214–15.

4.    Georgi Dimitroff, The United Front: Problems of Working–Class Unity and the People’s Front in the Struggle Against Fascism and War (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 9–11. Dimitroff reported that “in a more or less developed form, fascist tendencies and the germs of a fascist movement are to be found almost everywhere.” At the same time, he carefully defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” a designation he applied only to those capitalist states where fascism had come to power. For Dimitroff, the “German type” set the benchmark: Hitler’s regime exhibited “bestial chauvinism” and “a government system of political gangsterism,” making it “the spearhead of international counter-revolution” and the “chief instigator of imperialist war.” Thus fascism should be considered neither a form of state power “standing above” the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, nor “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state.”

5.    Haider’s book, Capital and Labor Under Fascism, was published by Columbia University Press in 1930.

6.    Carmen Haider, Do We Want Fascism? (New York: John Jay Company, 1934), 123.

7.    Ibid., 222.

8.    Ibid., 227.

9.    Ibid., 228.

10.  Ibid., 243.

11.  Ibid., 244–45.

12.  Ibid., 245–46.

13.  Ibid., 247.

14.  Lewis Corey, The Crisis of the Middle Class (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1935), 279–80.

15.  Ibid., 281.

16.  Ibid., 282.

17.  Ibid., 283.

18.  Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (Montauk, NY: Julian Messner, Inc., 1935), 14.

19.  Ibid., 17.

20.  Ibid., 18.

21.  Ibid., 21–22.

22.  Ibid., 24–25

23.  Ibid., 28–29.

24.  Ibid., 29.

25.  Harry F. Ward, “The Development of Fascism in the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 180 (July 1935): 55.

26.  Ibid., 56.

27.  Ibid., 57.

28.  Ibid.

29.  Ibid., 59–60.

30.  Frank A. Warren III, Liberals and Communism: The “Red Decade” Revisited (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966), 8.

31.  Ibid., 9.

32.  Ibid., 8.

33.  Ibid., 9.

34.  Ibid., 12.

35.  Ibid., 32–33.

36.  John Dewey, “Renascent Liberalism,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey: The Lived Experience, vol. 2, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 647.

37.  Ibid., 657.

38.  Alfred M. Bingham, Insurgent America: Revolt of the Middle-Classes (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935), 238.

39.  Ibid., 47.

40.  Ibid., 48.

41.  Ibid., 51.

42.  Ibid., 63.

43.  Ibid., 65.

44.  Ibid., 78–79.

45.  Ibid., 79.

46.  Ibid., 104.

47.  Ibid., 104–5.

48.  Ibid., 111.

49.  Ibid., 185–86.

50.  Ibid., 187.

51.  Ibid., 188.

52.  Ibid., 191.

53.  Ibid., 192.

54.  Ibid., 197.

55.  Ibid., 237–40.

56.  Ibid., 241.

57.  Ibid., 243.

58.  Ibid., 244.

59.  Ibid., 200.

60.  Ibid., 210.

61.  Dewey, “Renascent Liberalism,” 661.

11. Roosevelt on Fascism and the False Dichotomy of Good vs. Bad Capitalism

1.    New York Times, February 5, 1933, cited in A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 79.

2.    “We Have Only Just Begun to Fight,” Campaign Address at Madison Square Garden, New York City, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936, vol. 5: The People Approve, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1938), 568.

3.    David Lynch, The Concentration of Economic Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 18–19.

4.    Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 98. “A series of public opinion polls conducted in March 1938 showed a steady rise in the number of respondents who blamed the ‘present decline in business’ on the administration, and agreed that it deserved the label the ‘Roosevelt recession.’” One of Roosevelt’s most vocal critics at the time, John T. Flynn, called it the “Roosevelt Depression.” See Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1948), 116.

5.    Albert E. Kahn, High Treason: The Plot Against the People (New York: Hour Publishers, 1950), 129.

6.    Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York and London: Liveright, 2013), 257–60.

7.    “I See One-Third of the Nation Ill-Housed, Ill-Clad, Ill-Nourished,” Second Inaugural Address. January 20, 1937, in Rosenman, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937 Volume: The Constitution Prevails (London: Macmillan and Co., 1941), 5. The papers in this volume will be hereinafter referred to as Public Papers and Addresses, 1937.

8.    “A Recommendation for the Appropriation for Work Relief for 1938, and for Curtailment of Certain Other Expenditures, April 20, 1937,” Public Papers and Addresses, 1937, 165.

9.    Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era through New Deal, 1929–1941 (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, 1947), 42–43.

10.  Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 388.

11.  Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm, 1937–1940 (New York: Random House, 1993), 158.

12.  Ibid., 159.

13.  A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 197–232.

14.  Alvin Harvey Hansen, Full Recovery or Stagnation? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), 7–8.

15.  Ibid., 273–74.

16.  Ibid., 282.

17.  Ibid., 268–70.

18.  Ibid., 274.

19.  Ibid., 280–81.

20.  Ibid., 282.

21.  Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: Free Press, 2011), 380.

22.  Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections, ed. Sidney Hyman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 393.

23.  Ibid., 294.

24.  Ibid., 294–95.

25.  Ibid., 296, 301.

26.  Sumner H. Slichter, “The Downturn of 1937,” Review of Economic Statistics 30/3 (August 1938): 107–10. As Slichter wrote: “An unwillingness of enterprises to put more working capital into industrial equipment, consumer resistance to higher prices, decline in the government’s contribution to incomes, all coming at a time when inventories were large, profits were dangerously low, and when the demand for goods based upon long-term planning was small.”

27.  William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 249.

28.  Davis, FDR, 200.

29.  “Annual Message to the Congress, January 3, 1938,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 Volume: The Continuing Struggle of Liberalism, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (London: Macmillan and Co., 1941), 12. The papers in this volume will be hereinafter referred to as Public Papers and Addresses, 1938.

30.  Davis, FDR, 200–201.

31.  Annual Message to the Congress, January 3, 1938, Public Papers and Addresses, 1938, 9–10.

32.  Ibid., 10–11.

33.  Ibid., 12.

34.  Kahn, High Treason, 192–93.

35.  Jeanne Nienaber Clarke, Roosevelt’s Warrior: Harold L. Ickes and the New Deal (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 250.

36.  See http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/thecenter/files/bibliography/the–menace–to–free–enterprise.pdf.

37.  Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, vol. 2: The Inside Struggle, 1936–1939 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 282–83.

38.  Davis, FDR, 205–6.

39.  Sidney Hyman, Marriner S. Eccles: Private Entrepreneur and Public Servant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Graduate School of Business, 1976), 245.

40.  Davis, FDR, 215.

41.  Ibid., 219–22.

42.  Brinkley, End of Reform, 99–100.

43.  “Recommendations to the Congress Designed to Stimulate Further Recovery, April 14, 1938,” Public Papers and Addresses, 1938, 226–30.

44.  “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power, April 29, 1938,” Public Papers and Addresses, 1938, 315.

45.  Ibid., 305–6.

46.  Ibid., 306–8.

47.  Ibid., 308–9.

48.  Master Speech Files (Microfilm), Series 2, File no. 1133, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.

49.  Brinkley, End of Reform, 101–2.

50.  A Special Press Conference with Members of the Associated Church Press, Washington, D.C., April 20, 1938. Public Papers and Addresses, 1938, 254–55.

51.  A summary of its findings and recommendations appears in the Final Report and Recommendations of the Temporary National Economic Committee, Public Resolution No. 113 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941).

52.  “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power,” Public Papers and Addresses, 1938, 320.

53.  Final Report and Recommendations of the Temporary National Economic Committee, 4.

54.  Richard Moe, Roosevelt’s Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 171, 218.

55.  Ibid., 238.

12. The Seminal Work of Robert A. Brady on Fascism in the Business System

1.    “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 Volume: The Continuing Struggle of Liberalism, ed. Sameul I. Rosenman (London: Macmillan and Co., 1941), 305-6.

2.    A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism: The Crisis of American Democracy (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 118, 148.

3.    Robert A. Brady, “The Fascist Threat to Democracy,” Science & Society 2/2 (Spring 1938): 147–48.

4.    Ibid., 164.

5.    Ibid., 151–52.

6.    Ibid., 152.

7.    Ibid., 154–56.

8.    Ibid., 156–57.

9.    Ibid., 157–60.

10.  Ibid., 162.

11.  Robert A. Brady, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 361. The book was first published in 1937 by the Citadel Press.

12.  Ibid., 362.

13.  Ibid., 363.

14.  Ibid., 363–64.

15.  Ibid., 366.

16.  Ibid., 367.

17.  Ibid., 368.

18.  Ibid., 368–69.

19.  Ibid., 369–70.

20.  Ibid., 371.

21.  Ibid., 371–72.

22.  Ibid., 372.

23.  Ibid., 373–74.

24.  Ibid., 374–75.

25.  Ibid., 375.

26.  Ibid., 375–76.

27.  Ibid., 376.

28.  Ibid.

29.  Ibid., 377.

30.  Ibid., 377–78.

31.  Ibid., 378–79.

32.  Ibid., 379–80.

33.  Ibid., 380.

34.  Ibid., 380–81.

35.  Ibid., 382.

36.  Ibid., 382–84.

37.  Ibid., 384.

38.  Robert A. Brady, Business as a System of Power (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 1. Brady’s book was originally published by Columbia University Press in 1943.

39.  Ibid., 1–2.

40.  Ibid., 3–5.

41.  Ibid., 5–6.

42.  Ibid., 8.

43.  Ibid., 193.

44.  Ibid., 194–95.

45.  Ibid., 196.

46.  Ibid., 217.

47.  Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, eds., The Age of Monopoly Capital: The Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 93.

Conclusion: Fascism and the Problem of American Exceptionalism

1.    Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1934.

2.    William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8.

3.    Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1960), 167–70.

4.    Paul M. Buhle, A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost: Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey (1892–1953) and the Decline of Radicalism in the United States (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 118.

5.    Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 336, 342; Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 146–47. Harman emphasized Corey’s analysis on the role of “luxury consumption, unproductive expenditures and credit” in the 1920s that helped to sow the seeds of the coming crisis, perhaps at the expense of Corey’s larger analytical framework.

6.    The position taken here reflects a world-system approach based on the Marxist definition of fascism as the power of finance capital—the dictatorship of capital—over society and its institutions. It differs, but is not antagonistic to, the approach taken by Roger Griffin, who defines fascism as an “an alternative modernity” to the decadence of the contemporary world. Griffin’s studies of European fascism do much to bring out what he calls the “modernist dynamics” of European fascist movements and their leaders. But he chooses not to view fascism as a functional property of monopoly-capitalism in crisis. For Griffin, capitalist crisis is a necessary condition but not a main cause of fascism. On this basis, he defines fascism as “a revolutionary species of political modernism originating in the early twentieth century whose mission is to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history (decadence) by bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth, or palingenesis, of the nation.” For Griffin fascism emerges from “acute crisis conditions” as a nationalist movement led by a charismatic leader “performing the role of a modern prophet” who offers his followers “a new ‘mazeway’ (worldview) to redeem the nation from chaos and lead it into a new era, one that drew on a mythicized past to regenerate the future.” Thus, “fascism is a form of programmatic modernism that seeks to conquer political power in order to realize a totalizing vision of national or ethnic rebirth. Its ultimate end is to overcome the decadence that has destroyed a sense of communal belonging and drained modernity of meaning and transcendence and usher in a new era of cultural homogeneity and health.” None of this really applies to the genesis of American fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and it ironically gives more weight to those writers at the time who said that it would not look anything like Italy or Germany. See Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 181–82.

7.    Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), li.

8.    Ibid., 18–30.

9.    Final Report and Recommendations of the Temporary National Economic Committee, Public Resolution No. 113 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), 3–4.

10.  Ibid., 4.

11.  “Economic Power and Political Pressures,” Investigation of Concentration of Economic Power, Monograph No. 26 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941), 2.

12.  Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” American Historical Review 56/1 (October 1950): 19–20.

13.  Ibid., 20–21.

14.  Ibid., 21–22.

15.  Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 10.

16.  Grace Hutchins, “The Truth About the Liberty League,” International Pamphlets No. 50 (1936): 6.

17.  Ibid., 5–13.

18.  Ibid., 14.

19.  For the best summary of the Butler plot, see Sally Denton, The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012).

20.  Albram Lipsky, Man the Puppet: The Art of Controlling Minds (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2014), 58. The book was first published in 1925 by Frank-Maurice, Inc.

21.  Ibid., 122–23.

22.  Stephen Raushenbush, The March of Fascism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 2–3.

23.  Ibid., 24.

24.  Ibid., 314.

25.  Ibid., 317.

26.  Ibid., 339.

27.  Ibid., 340–41.

28.  Ibid., 341.

29.  Ibid., 341–42.

30.  Ibid., 345.

31.  Ibid., 346.

32.  Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York and London: Liveright, 2013), 126.

33.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 170.

34.  “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 Volume: The Continuing Struggle Against Liberalism, ed., Samuel I. Rosenman (London: Macmillan and Co., 1941), 320.

35.  Final Report and Recommendations of the Temporary National Economic Committee, 3.