of commodity production and exchange, in accordance with the explosive growth of the market and demands to maintain it. Mass production on a level never before attained now required mass consumption to follow.
Clearly, the spectacle of abundance created in the boom helped to make this possible. The appearance of so many new and tantalizing consumer goods, and the belief that they could be acquired and enjoyed by everyone, constituted the material basis for an ideological justification that was crucial to the success of the boom. A revolution was occurring in capitalism, its ideological proponents declared, but only in the United States where they convinced millions of Americans to believe that the great promise of universal prosperity was at hand because the boom-bust cycles were a thing of the past. This went along with the creed of 100 percent Americanism whereby everyone who worked hard to fulfill his God-ordained mission on earth could become a capitalist. The main task of the capitalist class and their able assistants was to convince enough Americans that the New Era would eventually create universal wealth. All their efforts had one thing in common: to remove all resistance to the drive for capitalist accumulation. This made their objective the total domination of capital over society and the individual.
For these reasons, American capitalists turned to advertising, “the sword arm of business,” as it became known in the 1920s. “Thanks to advertising,” wrote the journalist and author Silas Bent in 1927, “a penny’s worth of germicidal value in a nationally known antiseptic is marketed for $95; flimsy wood is sold as good furniture; and six-dollar shoes are sold at twelve dollars.” But the sword itself was double-edged, especially in newspapers where there were two kinds of news, one that disseminated useful information about events or circumstances on the basis of a “natural demand” for it, the other the result of sheer salesmanship.36 For Bent, the gathering and packaging of 90 percent of the news by the ever-growing centralized ownership of newspapers and magazines was based on its “pecuniary advantage” in some form or another.37 Thus the mission of the newspaper business was above all to advance readership on the basis of understanding how to package and sell news. Moreover, it relied on public opinion experts like Walter Lippmann, who argued that it was necessary for elites to “manufacture consent” for a public that could neither see nor understand the world clearly.38 As a result, news stories increasingly came to depend on ways to hold the reader’s attention. The need to captivate, entertain, sensationalize, and titillate the reader was similar to the approach used by advertisers to promote their commodities. As Bent explained, “The merchandiser of manufactured commodities uses methods quite similar to the merchandiser of news.”39 Here was one kind of ballyhoo that made capitalism functional and kept the Great Boom alive, at least for now.
Soon enough, psychologists plumbed the minds of what it considered the “irrational public” to determine ways to assemble and manage public opinion in the service of Big Business. The most notable among them, Henry C. Link, manufactured popularized versions of Freudian psychology that were delivered to order to Big Business. In 1923, Link helped to organize other academics to create and then direct the American Psychological Corporation, whose objective was to provide businessmen with the knowledge of how to use methods of behavioral psychology to the advance of marketing. The “new psychology” of the 1920s served the needs of capitalists in their efforts to sustain the Great Boom and was a crucial means in recognizing social impulses that triggered desire and want, especially if the commodity in question was not needed.40
CAPITALIST PROGRESS AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS
Such were the efforts by America’s rulers who played a pivotal role in transforming the class struggle at home and abroad in the 1920s. Marx and Engels had grasped its dynamic throughout world-historical development: “uninterrupted” but always a “hidden” or “open fight” from one epoch or era to another depending on the material conditions of society and their ideological products.41 In 1920s America, the owners and managers of capital were playing out their revolutionary role at a pivotal moment in the transition to the hegemonic rule of American finance capital in the world capitalist system. As its epicenter, the United States was reconfiguring the international order and transforming the social relations of production toward greater abundance. Warren Harding, the compromise Republican Party candidate from Ohio who saw beyond his petty-bourgeois midwestern roots, had recognized that the United States needed a foreign policy to empower its businessmen to rebuild Europe and reap enormous profits. In the process, the United States quickly recognized that support for Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime in Italy was the basis upon which to establish American hegemony in Europe.
At the same time, the very processes that created Pax Americana carried the seeds of a future crisis. The expansion of U.S. imperial interests, secured at times by the use of military force in Central America and the Caribbean, exacerbated existing contradictions of class and race. This was also true in the Philippines where U.S. imperial rule had been brutal. At home, the ruling class and its state apparatus had crushed the alleged Bolshevik conspiracy in 1920 and quickly moved to quell other forms of opposition. Their defeat of alien forces then made it possible to claim that it was all the work of good, old-stock people who stood for the ideas, images, and proper behaviors of True Americanism. Fearing that white America would be overrun, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, limiting immigration from countries in Europe, the Near East, Africa, and even Australia and New Zealand, though committed white supremacists were disappointed that too many immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were entering the country to poison the ranks of Anglo Saxons. The draconian National Origins Act of 1924 cut quotas even more and was designed to keep out East Asians, especially the Japanese.42 The “adhesive” of white supremacy at home and abroad was the glue that held together the rising American imperium.43 And all the while, the gurus of advertising, public relations, and propaganda advanced new and more sophisticated means of capitalist power to propagate a politics of accommodation in society, at times doing so in the most surreptitious and manipulative ways. The class struggle in the United States during the years of the Great Boom remained hidden, though the contradictions operating within it would intensify quickly when the crisis came in 1929.
It is within all of these developments that we find the genesis of fascist processes, terrorist and non-terrorist alike, in the expansion and euphoria of unprecedented capitalist expansion. In the United States, the objective to totalize the powers of capital over all aspects of material life and consciousness marked the onset of fascism—the terrorist and non-terrorist rule of Big Business—in its particular American form. Simply put, these processes fueled the coming of the American Behemoth, a living example of what Marx saw in Capital—“a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.”44
2—Fascist Processes in Capitalist Accumulation
“THE GERM OF FASCISM,” wrote A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens in 1938, in The Peril of Fascism, “was inherent within American monopoly capitalism; but it was not until the economic crisis of 1929 that it developed into a definite political force of ominous proportions.”1
Today, their long-forgotten book remains the only comprehensive account of the rise of U.S. fascism in its specific, national form. Readers will find great resonance in the warning issued by Magil and Stevens. Fascism already had destroyed democratic governments in Italy and Germany, and a similar outcome was plausible in the United States. A decade earlier, the Wall Street crash had ushered in what they called a general crisis of U.S. capitalism that “provided the conditions necessary for the speedy growth of embryonic fascism.”2 There was no time to lose in creating a united front against fascism at home and abroad.
Magil and Stevens were American communists who understood how fascism had come to power in Italy and Germany and how the road to fascism in the United States looked different. In line with the position of the Communist International, they certainly had Italy and
