Onward and Outward to Fascism!
Fascism, then, begins as a radical movement. If one wishes to find evidence of growing fascism in America, one must look first among radical movements, compare their demagouges and their doctrines with the demaguges and doctrines of pre-fascist Europe. That at once rules out, as a real sign of growing fascism, the fascist conspiracy revealed by General Smedley Butler. That conspiracy is diverting, but it is of no great sociological significance. All it proves is what everyone has known all the time, that Wall Street is the asylum of many men utterly ignorant of popular movements, who believe they can organize people as easily as they can a monopoly or a pool. The Wall Street plot was a kind of Hollywood fascism, which was to culminate in a march on Washington, a general at the head of ex-servicemen and a happy Wall Street dictatorship ever after, all of it bought with money. Its authors are to be condoned only insofar as the dramatization of a similar scenario with Thyssen and other German industrialists pulling the strings and paying for the services of Hitler and his storm troopers. What they, and the fabricationsof the Hitler — Thyssen legend, fail to appreciate is that passions and prejudices are essential to revolutions, and passions and prejudices are not attributes to bought as commodities.
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I really can’t quite figure out who wrote this. As far as I can tell, Raymond Gram Swing — but what is this “Julian Messner” references I see — up to and including the copyright to “Julian Messner Inc.” Anyway, it comes from the book Forerunners of American Fascism, published in 1933 and re-published in 1936, and the indica suggests that it’s a reworking and expansion of several articles from The Nation, that venerable institutional magazine of the Left. I was looking for a biography of Father Coughlin. This popped up, it being mostly a selection of profiles of Father Coughlin, Huey Long, Theodore Gilmo Bilbo, Dr. Townsend, and William Hearst — ie: the figures in 1930s America that Left-wing America believed might carry our nation to Fascism… even though the general public, as Norman Thomas puts it:
Swing’s biases are fairly clear… somewhere in the rise of the proleteriat that is a good thing when it comes, the Fascists will come in and move the proleteriat to a different direction, striking while the iron is hot in siezing control. In consideration of the supposed cluelessness of the Wall Street Bankers in keeping control of the masses, I look around and figure either things have changed mightily, or he’s underestimating the Captains of Industry in shaping American attitudes. I will say that in ascertaining the top-down or bottom-up nature of the rise of fascism… (1) All politicians (and probably all people, come to think of it) are demogogues at some point or other. For instance, Jimmy Carter won his first Gubernatorial race — a primary run-off — by suggesting that his opponent had won the unsavory Black Vote, and by insisting that he would conference with George Wallace (“In Birmingham we have a governor” as the song goes). He has since said that was his great regret in his early political career, but if told that he would either take the principled stand and lose or win as he did, I’m guessing Jimmy Carter would take the latter. (2) Harry Truman attacked the Thomas Dewey campaign with the “Thyssen — Hitler myth” in mind. Hoover’s attack on FDR suggests nothing to do with the masses. (3) In the very next paragraph of this book/essay, Smith seems to say that the New Deal would be Fascist if FDR were fascist. (“I’ve often argured that the New Deal has fascist tendencies in it.”)
I am going to have to check into the New York Times Archives and see precisely how they wrote up Smedley Butler’s (and his foe’s) Congressional Testimony on this supposed coup attempt.