The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
recovery of the works of these earlier writers. Their contributions are seminal to our understanding of the fascist threat today. Regardless of their differences, all pointed to the ruling capitalist class, or at least most of it, as the driving force of American fascism while dismissing the overt and often over-the-top small-fry fascisti as fringe groups of little or no significance. Nor did these contemporary writers put much stock in populist demagogues like Senator Huey Long of Louisiana and the Catholic radio priest Charles Coughlin as anything more than forerunners of a full-blown American fascism. Also missing in writings about the political landscape of the United States was a distinctive feature of European fascism—the mass movement. Instead, it was Big Business, Big Finance, Big Industry, Big Ownership, and all the other big entities associated with monopoly and finance capital—with two critics calling Wall Street the “fountainhead” of American fascism. In simplest terms, what was uniquely fascist in their view was the desire of the ruling class to establish a capitalist dictatorship within the framework of liberal democracy.
By relying on these earlier works of the 1930s and early 1940s as core sources, I have attempted to capture their political verve in the hope that it will register in the present. In some chapters of the book, I give considerable space to their texts because the thinking and language is often more vivid and direct than the shades of gray we find in contemporary histories and commentaries. But the recovery of the content is my main concern, because it is crucial to our understanding of the current moment as citizens and students of history. For the public, it provides an alternative to mainstream historical accounts taught in our public schools—as required by the sanitized pedagogy of capitalist schooling. To historians, it beckons further inquiry that will weigh the evidence presented here as the basis for future studies that can contribute to a fuller understanding of the history of American fascism. To both, however, it is my hope that what they discover will enable them to recognize how fascism today is really nothing new, but only its latest and most dangerous manifestation.
I have many people to thank for their unswerving support for my work. Among them is Mark Solomon, who was enthusiastic and encouraging from the moment I began talking about this project. His knowledge and counsel were indispensable. I am also indebted to my editor at Monthly Review Press, Michael Yates, who saw the merit of my ideas from the start and provided valuable criticisms and suggestions at pivotal moments of the project. Paul Breines, Al Brilliant, Joseph Louzonis, Larry Morse, and my son, Nate Roberto, offered invaluable insight and advice. Nate also provided an illustration for the book cover. I also thank Gregory Meyerson: the earliest work for this book was done in collaborative scholarship, publication and friendship. I acknowledge as well the long-standing intellectual and political support of Barbara Foley, Bertell Ollman, James Wood, and Chester Dunning. There are many others whose intelligence and enduring friendship were instrumental to keeping me together when the task seemed too daunting, especially Frank Fasano, Robin Roberto Horgan, Joy Perkal, Stuart Hunt, Randall Harris, Justin Harmon, Claire Morse, and Gayle Nantz, as well as my daughter, Ana Roberto. Still others in a long line of family and friends who supported me include Ernest Hooker, Galen Foresman, Sarah Beale, Jeff Jones, Travis Byrd, Susan and Spencer Andrews, Dean Finocchi, Cathy Fasano, Ed and Delores Freda, Peter Khoury, Kevin Tringale, Bev and Mike Conter, Josie Kite, Keith Tager, Kent Tager, Mike Bowen, Ellie Alinaghi, Roger Webster, David Knoche, and Anthony Bono.
My mother, Ethel Roberto, still sharp as a tack at eighty-nine despite her frail health, always managed short but pithy remarks to my often exhaustive—and exhausting—explanation of the book’s contents.
Above all, I owe the greatest debt to my wife, Sharon Weber, whose intelligence, compassion, and keen eye for the written word constantly affirmed for me what I had tried to teach students for many years—that clear writing can only come from clear thinking.
Introduction: Fascism as the Dictatorship of Capital
THIS BOOK EXAMINES the origins of American fascism between the two world wars. My analysis is based on a consensus of writers—historians, political scientists, social critics, Marxists and non-Marxists alike—who saw its rise within the growing powers of monopoly and finance capital during the booming 1920s and the general crisis of the following decade, which we call the Great Depression. For these writers, Big Business, as it was commonly known, was the main source of embryonic fascism in the United States. On the basis of their findings and observations, I identify processes inherent in capitalist production and sociopolitical relations throughout the period as fascist because they extended and deepened the hold of capital over American political institutions and mass consciousness. Though these processes never merged to create a distinct fascist trajectory, all contributed to the totalizing powers of capital that made the United States the rising epicenter and hegemon of the world capitalist system—and the coming of the American Behemoth.
My argument is grounded in the principles of Marxist political economy set within the epoch of contemporary world history. Fascist processes inhered in production and exchange at a pivotal moment in the ascendance of U.S. capitalism after the First World War. America became the world’s industrial leader and banker during the 1920s, requiring ever-greater levels of capitalist accumulation necessary for the cycle of investment, production, and exchange—a cycle repeated exponentially for continued economic growth and profits. We see this during the Great Boom of the twenties. The drive to increase the productivity of social labor by means of technological innovation fueled the concentration of economic power—monopoly—and its centralization in Big Business, quickly becoming a system of power, one in which the government was a willing partner. But unprecedented economic growth and the centralization of economic and political power also heightened the contradictions always present in monopoly capitalism: each new cycle of production sharpened the divide between capital and labor. Why? The greater the drive to increase productivity with use of more machines, the more human labor was displaced from production, creating the paradox of growing poverty within an ever-rising sea of plenty. Then the bust! The Wall Street crash in 1929 ushered in a general crisis of American capitalism during the Depression decade of the 1930s.
It is within this historical framework that we find the efficient cause of American fascism: from the growth of state power in the service of the capitalist ruling class to the reactionary politics of the middle class, to the manipulation of the public by advertisers and public relations experts whose sole aim was to commodify everything. All were fascist processes because they aimed at the domination of capital over society. What emerges from this approach is a dynamic definition of fascism as an inherent function of monopoly-capitalist production and relations whose telos was and remains the totalitarian rule of capitalist dictatorship.
Of course, the intellectual and political origins of fascism predate its actual coming to power in Europe after the First World War. Fascist ideas had emerged from the turmoil of European political culture at the end of the nineteenth century and gradually became a force in sectarian politics. Some sects ultimately grew into movements; in Italy they coalesced rather quickly to become the world’s first fascist regime under Benito Mussolini and the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in 1922. The global capitalist crisis that commenced in 1929 and deepened the following decade fueled the growth of fascism worldwide and the seizure of power by Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany. No wonder, then, that the Italian and German examples are rarely absent in any study of fascism, since anything considered fascist must always pass the litmus test of both in some manner or degree. Writing in 1952 under a pseudonym, the Marxist political economist Paul Baran put it succinctly:
For a political system to “qualify” as fascist, it has to display the German or Italian characteristics of fascism. It must be based on a fascist mass movement anchored primarily in para-military formations of brown shirts or black shirts. It must be a one-party regime, with the party headed by a Führer or a Duce symbolizing the principle of authoritarian leadership. It must be violently nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic. It must be frankly illiberal, intolerant of opposition, hostile to civil liberties and human rights.1
Baran saw this approach as indicative of a sterile paradigm in the study of fascism. Taking his cue, I make a conscious effort to move in another direction