Sr.), as well as news media mogul, William Randolph Hearst, who publicized Hitler’s “conquest of the hearts and minds of all classes of Germans.”161 In tandem with the Hearst empire, the National Association of Manufacturers’ (NAM) propaganda arm also sang fascism’s praises.
Populist Fascism in the United States
In addition to industrial and financial elites, with their supporters in groups like the American Legion and NAM, a strong populist base of support for fascism also existed in the United States. The Louisiana politician Huey Long drew comparisons to fascism after insisting on redistributing oil profits to his poor white constituency, although he was more of a run-of-the-mill populist. Nevertheless, after Long’s assassination at the hands of the son of one of his numerous enemies, his Share the Wealth campaign was taken over by his associate, Gerald L. K. Smith, and brought into a coalition with fellow anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio audience reached some three million people during the height of the Depression. Smith and Coughlin both openly advocated for Nazi policies and against US intervention in World War II after the invasion of Poland in 1939.162 Another preacher named Reverend Gerald Winrod, nicknamed the “Jayhawk Nazi,” managed 100,000 subscriptions to his newspapers the Defender and the Revealer.163
By far the largest right-wing populist movement, the second assemblage of the Klan, organized around the slogan of “100 percent Americanism,” attracted millions of members before a rapid decline in the late 1920s. In its wake, a large fascist group called the Silver Shirts emerged, led by a mystical protestant named William Dudley Pelley, who believed in levitation, telepathy, and British Israelism, a bizarre faith that claims English people as the true Israelites and Jews as the spawn of Satan. Anti-Semitic preacher William Bell Riley, the instigator of the modern antievolution movement, encouraged his congregation not to “shiver at the sight of a silver shirt.”164
As Hitler’s militarism ramped up, Nazi sympathizers built a mass anti-intervention movement and enlisted aviator Charles Lindbergh as its spokesperson under the banner of “America First.” In 1936, the son of textile magnate William Henry Regnery returned to the US from university in Hitler’s Germany and joined the America First Committee. The next year, a different textile magnate named Wickliffe Draper founded the Pioneer Fund to promote eugenics in tandem with Nazi scientists, while encouraging the repatriation of nonwhites from the US. Between Regnery’s ensuing Regnery Publishing and Draper’s Pioneer Fund, the fabric of 1930s pro-eugenics “race realism” and academic racism would be woven into the later part of the twentieth century.
By the advent of World War II, however, unquestionably the most dominant, explicitly Nazi group in the United States was the German American Bund. In 1937, the American estimated the membership of the Bund at 250,000, noting that this included an unknown number of self-styled storm troopers, made up of “the combined remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, Gold Shirts, Silver Shirts, Black Legion, Silver Battalion, Pan-Aryan Alliance, and similar organizations.”165 These storm troopers wore the uniforms of the German SA and contained sections that trained youths in combat exercises at camp sites purchased by the Bund outside of major cities across the country, while their führer, Fritz Kühn, preached about the spiritual “rebirth of the German people.”166
The Fall of the Reich
Fascism, in this original, global form eventually fell. Yet it did not fall entirely due to external pressures. Even pragmatic policy choices of finance and trade stood in the way of greater fascist unity and led to the beginning of the end of fascism in Europe. The Greek “Third Hellenic Civilization” supported Italy until its leader Ioannis Metaxas realized that arms deals would be better conducted through German industry.167 Metaxas’s favoritism toward Germany contributed to Italian resentment, leading in part to Italy’s invasion of Greece in 1941. When Italy failed to gain the upper hand, the Nazis had to join the fight, bogging the Third Reich down in an intermovement war that forestalled Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which then had to face winter conditions. When the United States finally entered the war in December, the propaganda machine that had supported fascism retooled its rhetoric around anticommunism and pushed forward into the war effort. The policies of Japanese internment, not to mention using the nuclear bomb on civilian targets, would reveal the extent to which US rejection of fascism would not rule out employing similar methods.
The disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union and the entrance of the United States into the war sealed the fate of the Third Reich and the fascist epoch. The German war machine increasingly relied on slave labor to fuel Germany’s industrial productivity, which expanded inexorably as millions perished on the frontlines. The broad support enjoyed by the Nazi Party in 1940 diminished apace. Italy was invaded and its southern portion occupied in 1943. Hitler survived a conspiracy against his life in 1944 that sent the already paranoid dictator into a grotesque spiral of anxiety. As the processes that brought about the genocide of six million Jews and millions of other political dissidents, Slavs, Poles, Roma and Sinti, LGBQTI people, and disabled people were sped along by bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann, the Soviets and Allies converged on Berlin, and the Reich was officially defeated by May 10, 1945, at the cost of some twenty-one million military lives and thirty million civilians.168
Fascism, a political ideology that began through the fusion of left and right, had been an unmitigated disaster. Leftists drawn to the early flames of fascism either converted or were annihilated—usually both. Rightists too, like François de La Rocque of the paramilitary Croix de Feu, who flirted with fascism in the 1930s, often found themselves burned. Even Valois, among the initial producers of fascism, found himself fighting with the Resistance and perished in a concentration camp. Conservative authoritarian dictators like Francisco Franco, António de Oliveira Salazar, and Ion Antonescu used the violence of fascism for their personal ends but eventually had to suppress fascist groups or risk winding up—like Hitler’s enablers—dead. Following the conflagration, the ruin of Europe, embers still burned among the fascist faithful, who hoped to ignite them anew, this time in purer form, uncorrupted and more elitist, violent, and sacrificial than ever. It is to these embers and their devout guardians, defenders of the “spiritual empire,” that we will now turn.
40 History of this can be found in Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Oyster Bay, NY: Roosevelt Memorial Association, 1921).
41 See Theodore Roosevelt, Letters, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 92.
42 Theodore Roosevelt, Letter to Charles Davenport (New York, January 3, 1913).
43 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), xxxi.
44 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 15.
45 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
46 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 224.
47 In 2002, in an unsettling indication of continuity, US Attorney General John Yoo applied the legal identity of homo sacer to Guantánamo detainees citing the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion as precedent. Ibid.
