AUTHOR PHOTO: JOY PERKAL
MICHAEL JOSEPH ROBERTO retired in 2016 from the faculty of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the largest historically black educational institution in the United States, where he taught contemporary world history. A longtime political activist in Greensboro, NC, he has worked as a journalist and published essays in Monthly Review, Socialism and Democracy, and other scholarly journals. Roberto is also a percussionist who has performed with leading jazz and R&B musicians.
The Coming of the
American
Behemoth
The Origins of Fascism in
the United States, 1920 – 1940
MICHAEL JOSEPH ROBERTO
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Joseph Roberto
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher
ISBN paper: 978-1-58367-731-5
ISBN cloth: 978-1-58367-732-2
Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Fascism as the Dictatorship of Capital
PART 1. THE GERM OF FASCISM IN THE PROSPEROUS 1920s
1. The Wonders of American Capitalism in the New Era
2. Fascist Processes in Capitalist Accumulation
3. The Spectacle of Prosperity and Necessity of Spin
4. Every Man a Capitalist? Fascist Ideology of Businessmen in 1920s America
5. The Paradox of Capitalist Progress, 1922–1929
6. Onset of the 1929 Crisis and the Pivot toward Fascism
PART 2. THE GENERAL CRISIS AND EMBRYONIC FASCISM IN THE 1930s
7. “Years of the Locust” and the Call for a Mussolini
8. The New Deal as a Transition to Fascism?
9. “A Smokescreen over America”
10. The Class Character of Embryonic American Fascism
11. Roosevelt on Fascism and the False Dichotomy of Good vs. Bad Capitalism
12. The Seminal Work of Robert A. Brady on Fascism in the Business System
Conclusion: Fascism and the Problem of American Exceptionalism
To the People of Greensboro, North Carolina
and to the late Sarah Regis Jeffus whose encouragement and material support made this work possible
Preface
SINCE THE ELECTION of Donald J. Trump to the presidency in November 2016, many people have told me how timely it is to be writing a book about fascism in the United States. Trump’s presence in the White House has become a nightmare for millions of Americans who cannot understand how someone who thinks and acts like a Mussolini or a Hitler could have been elected to the nation’s highest office. Whenever I mentioned that my work was focused on the origins of American fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, many would say they wished I were writing about the current fascist threat. Yet when I provided examples from my research, they immediately recognized how familiar it all sounded in these times of Trump.
This is unsettling because it reveals how little most Americans know about fascism. What is most familiar to them is its infamous European legacy, specifically, that Mussolini took over Italy in the early 1920s and then a decade later in Germany Hitler catapulted to power. Absent is a vital piece of history recorded by American writers—either Marxists of some type or those influenced by Marxism—who in the 1930s and early 1940s believed that fascism was also possible in the United States but warned that it would not look the same as it did in Europe. Their astute observations revealed the peril of a distinct U.S. form of fascism, which was often proclaimed in the name of anti-fascism. For these observers, the real American fascists were those who wrapped themselves in the Stars and Stripes, pronounced themselves as guardians of the Constitution and democracy, and promoted the ideology of 100 percent Americanism. More important, much of it was peddled by reactionaries from the middling ranks of society but propagated by ruling-class elites who gained the most from it. Here was the masquerade these writers believed was the great peril of fascism in the United States. For reasons I hope will become evident in this book, the discourse that emerged during an earlier moment of crisis—the Great Depression—was omitted or marginalized by later historians whose fundamental assumptions about the exceptional role played
