The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto

      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 by the United States, the most democratic of all modern societies, made it immune from fascism.

      My ultimate objective in this book is to unmask those who so cleverly and deceitfully clothed themselves in true Americanism so they might conceal their own nefarious ends. From the 1920s, a time of unprecedented capitalist modernization heralded by an incessant ballyhoo of prosperity, the people most responsible for creating the embryo of American fascism stood atop the pyramid of capitalist wealth. Here among the rich and privileged few, whose fortunes were determined by the continued and necessary expansion of capitalist production and exchange, we can detect the germ of American fascism, not only in the mechanisms of repression the rich established to safeguard their interests, but also in the deeper capitalist imperatives that drove them to turn the United States into the world’s banker and rising imperial hegemon.

      To unveil this masquerade and grasp its more sophisticated