The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
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 Germany in mind when they defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most predatory sections of the capitalist class.”3 In both cases, nationalist, racist, and terrorist mass movements rising primarily out of the lower middle class catapulted Mussolini and Hitler toward dictatorship—once they had secured the allegiance of the ruling classes in their respective countries. In the United States, however, embryonic fascism had emerged in a different form. Homegrown U.S. fascism lacked the visceral movements of its European counterparts, which in the case of Germany delivered the spectacle of Hitlerism. To dwell on analyzing American resemblances in relation to distinctive European forms was a mistake. “The national peculiarities of each country, its specific economic and social position, its historical traditions,” they wrote, “all play a part in shaping the form that fascist movements and fascism take.” Americans should not be looking for “a Man on Horseback riding down Pennsylvania Avenue, or a megalomaniac with a little mustache, making speeches in a big voice.” Rather than adhering to some “stereotyped formulae” to explain why fascism arose anywhere in the world, it was better to recognize its “diverse, and frequently subtle, forms” from one place to another.4 Still, to locate the germ of fascism in monopoly capitalism implied something common to all of them, and for communists like Magil and Stevens it could not be clearer what this meant. “Judged by its works, and not by its professions of faith, fascism stands forth as a form of rule by finance capital.”5 This was especially true for the United States. “The scattered streams and trickles of developing American fascism,” they wrote, “have a common source: Wall Street.” Big Business was the “fountainhead” of American fascism.6
A historic partnership between government and business during the First World War had created what Magil and Stevens called an “entire mechanism of repression” with an array of new agencies and legislation, including the War Industries Board in 1917 and passage of the Sedition Act a year later.7 All were designed to maximize cooperation between the two sectors in order to produce for the war and quash dissent or opposition to America’s involvement in it. This partnership, a leap in the advance of U.S. state monopoly capitalism, delivered profits never before seen to the largest capitalist enterprises during the war and in the decade that followed. As Magil and Stevens wrote:
The steady concentration of power in the hands of executive officials and the corresponding diminution in the power of legislative bodies … was encouraged by big business in the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations, which used their enhanced powers in the interest of the monopolies. Commissions, executive officials and judges, appointed by the President and by state governors, and not elected by the people, were vested with unprecedented authority.8
As they make clear, the difference between capitalist states and those that went fascist was not a matter of “class content,” but in their respective “methods of rule.” In fascist states such as Hitler’s dictatorship, fascism
still