LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING

by Jonah Goldberg

  One of the only things the layman still remembers about this period is a vague sense that something bad called the Palmer Raids occurred—a series of unconstitutional crackdowns, approved by Wilson, of “subversive” groups and individuals. What is usually ignored is that the raids were immensely popular, particularly with the middle-class base of the Democratic Party. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was a canny progressive who defeated the Republican machine in Pennsylvania by forming a tight bond with labor. He had hoped to ride the popularity of the raids straight into the Oval Office, and might have succeeded had he not been sidelined by a heart attack.

  It’s also necessary to note that the American Legion was born under inauspicious circumstances during the hysteria of World War I in 1919. Although it is today a fine organization with a proud history, one cannot ignore the fact that it was founded as an essentially fascist organization. In 1923 the national commander of the legion declared, “If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy.” FDR would later try to use the legion as a newfangled American Protective League to spy on domestic dissidents and harass potential foreign agents.

  Vigilantism was often encouraged and rarely dissuaded under Wilson’s 100 percent Americanism. How could it be otherwise, given Wilson’s own warnings about the enemy within? In 1915, in his third annual message to Congress, he declared, “The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags...who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.” Four years later the president was still convinced that perhaps America’s greatest threat came from “hyphenated” Americans. “I cannot say too often—any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready. If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic.”

  This was the America Woodrow Wilson and his allies sought. And they got what they wanted. In 1919, at a Victory Loan pageant, a man refused to stand for the national anthem. When “The Star-Spangled Banner” ended, a furious sailor shot the “disloyal” man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, “the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping.” Another man who refused to rise for the national anthem at a baseball game was beaten by the fans in the bleachers. In February 1919 a jury in Hammond, Indiana, took two minutes to acquit a man who had murdered an immigrant for yelling, “To Hell with the United States.” In 1920 a salesman at a clothing store in Waterbury, Connecticut, received a six-month prison sentence for referring to Lenin as “one of the brainiest” leaders in the world. Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes was arrested, tried, and convicted for telling a women’s group. “I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers.” The Republican antiwar progressive Robert La Follette spent a year lighting an effort to have him expelled from the Senate for disloyalty because he’d given a speech opposing the war to the Non-Partisan League. The Providence Journal carried a banner—ever}’ day!—warning readers that any German or Austrian “unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy” The Illinois Bar Association ruled that members who defended draft resisters were not only “unprofessional” but “unpatriotic.”

  German authors were purged from libraries, families of German extraction were harassed and taunted, sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage,” and—as Sinclair Lewis half-jokingly recalled—there was talk of renaming German measles “liberty measles.” Socialists and other leftists who agitated against the war were brutalized. Mobs in Arizona packed Wobblies in cattle cars and left them in the desert without food or water. In Oklahoma, opponents of the war were tarred and feathered, and a crippled leader of the Industrial Workers of the World was hung from a railway trestle. At Columbia University the president. Nicholas Murray Butler, fired three professors for criticizing the war, on the grounds that “what had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason” Richard Ely, enthroned at the University of Wisconsin, organized professors and others to crush internal dissent via the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion. Anybody who offered “opinions which hinder us in this awful struggle,” he explained, should be “tired” if not indeed “shot.” Chief on his list was Robert La Follette, whom Ely attempted to hound from Wisconsin politics as a “traitor” who “has been of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops.”

  Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that some 175,000 Americans were arrested for failing to demonstrate their patriotism in one way or another. All were punished, many went to jail.

  For the most part, the progressives looked upon what they had created and said, “This is good.” The “great European war...is striking down individualism and building up collectivism,” rejoiced the Progressive financier and J. P. Morgan partner George Perkins. Grosvenor Clarkson saw things similarly. The war effort “is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole “ The regimentation of society, the social worker Felix Adler believed, was bringing us closer to creating the “perfect man...a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any...that has yet existed.” The Washington Post was more modest. “In spite of excesses such as lynching,” it editorialized, “it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”

  Perhaps some added context is in order. At pretty much the exact moment when John Dewey. Herbert Croly. Walter Lippmann, and so many others were gushing about the “moral tonic” the war would provide and how it was the highest, best cause for all people dedicated to liberal progressive values, Benito Mussolini was making nearly identical arguments. Mussolini had been the brains of the Italian Socialist Party. He was influenced by many of the same thinkers as the American progressives—Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, James, and others—and he wanted Italy to fight on the Allied side, that is, the eventual American side. And yet Mussolini’s support for the war automatically rendered him and his Fascist movement objectively right-wing according to communist propaganda.

  So does this mean that the editors of the New Republic, the progressives in Wilson’s government, John Dewey, and the vast majority of self-described American Socialists were all suddenly right-wingers? Of course not. Only in Italy—home of the most radical socialist party in Europe after Russia—did support for the war automatically transform left-wingers into right-wingers. In Germany the socialists in the Reichstag voted in favor of the war. In Britain the socialists voted in favor of the war. In America the socialists and progressives voted in favor of the wan This didn’t make them right-wingers; it made them shockingly bloodthirsty and jingoistic left-wingers. This is just one attribute of the progressives that has been airbrushed from popular history. “Perhaps I was as much opposed to the war as anyone in the nation,” declared none other than Mother Jones, a champion of “Americanist” socialism, “but when we get into a fight I am one of Those who intend to clean hell out of the other fellow, and we have to clean the kaiser up...the grafter, the thief, the murderer” She was hardly alone. The pro-war socialist Charles E. Russell declared that his former colleagues should be “driven from the country.” Another insisted that antiwar socialists should be “shot at once without an hour’s delay”

  In the liberal telling of America’s story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and “America” writ large, progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are.
For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged “conservative” misdeeds—say, McCarthyism—are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight “hard enough” for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

  War socialism under Wilson was an entirely progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal To this day liberals instinctively and automatically see war as an excuse to expand governmental control of vast swaths of the economy. If we are to believe that “classic” fascism is first and foremost the elevation of martial values and the militarization of government and society under the banner of nationalism, it is very difficult to understand why the Progressive Era was not also the Fascist Era.

  Indeed, it is very difficult not to notice how the progressives fit the objective criteria for a fascist movement set forth by so many students of the field. Progressivism was largely a middle-class movement equally opposed to runaway capitalism above and Marxist radicalism below. Progressives hoped to find a middle course between the two, what the fascists called the “Third Way” or what Richard Ely, mentor to both Wilson and Roosevelt, called the “golden mean” between laissez-faire individualism and Marxist socialism. Their chief desire was to impose a unifying, totalitarian moral order that regulated the individual inside his home and out. The progressives also shared with the fascists and Nazis a burning desire to transcend class differences within the national community and create a new order. George Creel declared this aim succinctly: “No dividing line between the rich and poor, and no class distinctions to breed mean envies.”

  This was precisely the social mission and appeal of fascism and Nazism. In speech after speech, Hitler made it clear that his goal was to have no dividing lines between rich and poor. “What a difference compared with a certain other country,” he declared, referring to war-torn Spain. “There it is class against class, brother against brother. We have chosen the other route: rather than to wrench you apart, we have brought you together.” Robert Ley, the head of the Nazis’ German Labor Front, proclaimed flatly, “We are the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle.” Whether the rhetoric matched the reality is beside the point; the appeal of such a goal was profound and the intent sincere. A young and ambitious German lawyer who wanted to study abroad was persuaded by his friends to stay home so he wouldn’t miss the excitement. “The [Nazi] party was intending to change the whole concept of labour relations, based on the principle of co-determination and shared responsibility between management and workers. I knew it was Utopian but I believed in it with all my heart...Hitler’s promises of a caring but disciplined socialism fell on very receptive ears.”

  Of course, such Utopian dreams would have to come at the price of personal liberty. But progressives and fascists alike were glad to pay it. “Individualism,” proclaimed Lyman Abbott, the editor of the Outlook, “is the characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization.” The Wilsonian-Crolyite progressive conception of the individual’s role in society would and should strike any fair-minded person of any true liberal sensibility today as at least disturbing and somewhat fascistic. Wilson, Croly, and the vast bulk of progressives would have no principled objection to the Nazi conception of the Volksgeme’tnschaft—”people’s community,” or national community—or to the Nazi slogan about placing “the common good before the private good.” Progressives and fascists alike were explicitly indebted to Darwinism, Hegelianism, and Pragmatism to justify their worldviews. Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony is that according to most of the criteria we use to locate people and policies on the ideological spectrum in the American context—social bases, demographics, economic policies, social welfare provisions—Adolf Hitler was indisputably to Wilson’s left.

  This is the elephant in the corner that the American left has never been able to admit, explain, or comprehend. Their inability and/or refusal to deal squarely with this fact has distorted our understanding of our politics, our history, and ourselves. Liberals keep saying “it can’t happen here” with a clever wink or an ironic smile to insinuate that the right is constantly plotting fascist schemes. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight is this simple fact: it did happen here, and it might very well happen again. To see the threat, however, you must look over your left shoulder, not your right.

  4

  Franklin Roosevelt’s Fascist New Deal

  THE NATION WAS caught up in a war fever, fomented by the government, even though there was no war. Striking union members were provoked into a riot by government forces. Sixty-seven workers were killed, some shot in the back. A young correspondent reported, “I understood deep in my bones and blood what fascism was.” A leading intellectual who’d signed on with the government declared in a lecture to students, “The ordeal of war brings out the magnificent resources of youth”

  The British ambassador cabled London to alert his superiors to the spreading hysteria fomented by the nation’s new leader. The “starved loyalties and repressed hero-worship of the country have found in him an outlet and a symbol.” Visiting the rural hinterlands, an aide reported back on the brewing cult of personality: “Every house I visited—mill worker or unemployed—had a picture of the President...He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down. … leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.”

  Presumably some readers already know that the country I’m talking about is America, and the leader FDR. The labor riots took place in Chicago. The wide-eyed young reporter was Eric Sevareid, one of the titans of CBS news. The intellectual who harangued Dartmouth students about the virtues of war was Rexford Tugwell, one of the most prominent of the New Deal’s Brain Trusters. And of course the last quotations were from Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself in his first inaugural address.

  As liberalism in recent years has fallen into ideological and intellectual disarray, American liberals have crouched into a fetal position around Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “legacy.” Liberal legal theorists have made the New Deal into a second American founding. Leading journalists have descended into abject idolatry. Indeed, it sometimes seems that all one needs to know about the merits of a policy is whether Roosevelt himself would have favored it. It is a given that Republicans are wrong, even fascistic, whenever they want to “dismantle” FDR’s policies.

  One of the most poignant ironies here is that a modern-day Hitler or Mussolini would never dismantle the New Deal. To the contrary, he’d redouble the effort. This is not to say that the New Deal was evil or Hitlerian. But the New Deal was a product of the impulses and ideas of its era. And those ideas and impulses are impossible to separate from the fascist moment in Western civilization. According to Harold Ickes, FDR’s interior secretary and one of the most important architects of the New Deal, Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.” It’s hard to see how orderliness absolves a policy from the charge of fascism or totalitarianism. Eventually, the similarities had become so transparent that Ickes had to warn Roosevelt that the public was increasingly inclined to unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Roosevelt.

  The notion that FDR harbored fa
scists tendencies is vastly more controversial today than it was in the 1930’s, primarily because fascism has come to mean Nazism and Nazism means simply evil. Saying, for example, that FDR had a Hitlerite fiscal policy just confuses people. But the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed; it was often cited as evidence in Roosevelt’s favor. There was an enormous bipartisan consensus that the Depression required dictatorial and fascistic policies to defeat it. Walter Lippmann, serving as an ambassador for America’s liberal elite, told FDR in a private meeting at Warm Springs, “The situation is critical. Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” Eleanor Roosevelt, too, believed that a “benevolent dictator” might be the only answer for America. And it was hardly lost on the liberal intellectuals swirling around the Roosevelt administration that the enormously popular Benito Mussolini had used the same methods to whip the unruly Italians into shape. After all, the New Republic—the intellectual home of the New Deal—had covered the goings-on in Italy with fascination and, often, admiration.