The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
works during the interwar period, though the record shows that all attempts to create a distinct fascist movement never got very far. Still, these same observers provided palpable evidence of other fascist processes that indicated characteristics of a generic fascism in the United States, the most advanced of all capitalist core countries. This was revelatory. For one thing, Paul Sweezy’s assessment in 1942 that “every capitalist nation, in the period of imperialism, carries within it the seeds of fascism,” seemed to make even greater sense. This didn’t make fascism inevitable. But Sweezy made clear that it “arises only out of a situation in which the structure of capitalism has been severely injured and yet not overthrown.”10
THE FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE 1930s AND EARLY 1940s
Much of my work stems from the recovery of what I consider a “lost” discourse on fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s. Recognizing fascism’s embryonic forms in the interwar period provides a foundation and perspective for understanding American fascism in the present, now more fully developed with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency in 2016.
Two communist writers in 1938, A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, in writing the only comprehensive treatment of U.S. fascism to date, argued that “the germ 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.”11 Their view echoed that of leftist journalist Mauritz Hallgren, who five years earlier asserted that the growth of monopoly capitalism is “the principal element in the making of fascism.” Hallgren viewed fascism as “a political philosophy based upon the need of capitalism to employ the power of the State to protect the institution of production for private profit.”12 Both works substantiated what Georgi Dimitroff said when he defined fascism as “the power of finance capital itself” in his report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935.13
In this study, I use these and other writers to identify and analyze a wide range of fascist processes that inhered in U.S. monopoly-finance capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s. As such, they are not archival sources but rather written accounts—secondary sources, as historians call them—that have been buried, marginalized, or trivialized, a story itself that needs telling. Among the most significant are the works already mentioned, as well as those by Lewis Corey, Carmen Haider, Robert Brady, and others. Indeed, much of my understanding of conditions that led to the emergence and intensification of fascist processes is derived from the extraordinary analysis by Lewis Corey in his indispensable 1934 work, The Decline of American Capitalism. Despite their differences, all these writers shared common ground in viewing monopoly-finance capitalism as the seedbed for American fascism. All of their writings have become the basis for deeper inquiry. Although they emphasized the coercive and often violent practices that capitalists used to extend and secure their hold over the mass of working people, we must also consider how they shaped mass consciousness through manipulation and persuasion. Along with the terrorism came a politics of acquiescence and accommodation to capitalist imperatives essentially non-terrorist in character. To develop this position, I borrow and modify a theoretical tenet from Herbert Marcuse who, in the opening pages of One-Dimensional Man, views contemporary industrial society as essentially totalitarian in two forms: “a terroristic political coordination of society, but also non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”14
PLAN OF THE BOOK AND ITS MAIN ARGUMENTS
The book is divided into two parts. In the first six chapters that make up Part 1, I discuss how the seeds of American fascism were sown in the Great Boom of the 1920s, a time of unprecedented capitalist growth and a dazzling spectacle of prosperity that concealed its contradictions and ultimately resulted in the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism. This may strike the reader as counterintuitive since fascism is generally associated with crisis rather than prosperity. Nevertheless, I argue that this is precisely how fascism develops in the epicenter of the world capitalist system. When understood properly, American fascism is the product of capitalist modernization, which inevitably leads to the domination of finance capital over the rest of society.
In chapter 1, I introduce the reader to the sweeping changes in American economic, political, and cultural life brought by the capitalist ruling class in the 1920s, which transformed the means of production and social relations and widened the gap between wealth and poverty. Chapter 2 builds on what Magil and Stevens meant when they stated that the “germ” of fascism was inherent in American monopoly capitalism. I explain how the contradictions in capitalist accumulation displaced labor and made it increasingly subject to capital. To support their claim and for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with political economy, I examine Karl Marx’s analysis of the processes of capitalist accumulation as explained in his great work, Capital. I then discuss how Lewis Corey applied Marx’s analysis to the U.S. economy in the 1920s and 1930s. By doing so, the reader comes to an understanding of how the Great Depression was the result of contradictions in the so-called Great Boom of the previous decade.
In chapter 3, I describe the material abundance achieved between 1922 and 1929 that created a spectacle of prosperity, which could only be sustained by a corresponding rise in the rate of consumption. Here I introduce the reader to non-terrorist fascist processes in the form of advertising, public relations, and propaganda, all aimed at the increasing commodification of society. In chapter 4 I offer a detailed description of an evolving ideology within the business system as it developed its political arm. In chapter 5, I discuss how the spectacle and ballyhoo of material abundance and its attendant New Era ideology masked the growing divide between those who enjoyed some level of prosperity and the majority of Americans who were left behind. This general condition in U.S. society of growing poverty in a sea of plenty generated a political reaction that fueled the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan during the early and mid-1920s. I close the chapter with a discussion of how the ruling class intensified fascist processes by strengthening their hold over American society as well as other nations and peoples by its expanding global reach—Pax Americana on the rise.
I begin chapter 6 with Corey’s detailed and still unrivaled analysis of the origins of the era’s general crisis. More than any other economist of the 1930s, he brilliantly explains how overproduction in capital goods caused a halt to further productive investment throughout the entire economy, resulting in rampant speculation, culminating in the Wall Street crash. I summarize Corey’s explanation of the “bust in the boom” that set in motion the intensification of fascist processes during the Great Depression.
Part 2 focuses on the general crisis of the 1930s and the extent to which many believed that fascist rule was possible in the United States. These six chapters cover the period from the stock market crash to 1940 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his third term in the White House.
Chapter 7 describes the worst years of the crisis between 1929 and 1932 and the toll it took on millions of people. I focus on the rising political instability of the federal government and its failure under President Herbert Hoover to end the crisis. The increasing paralysis caused many business leaders and politicians to call for the suspension of the Constitution and agree to emergency measures that amounted to an American counterpart to Mussolini. Chapter 8 recovers a remarkable discussion of 1934 and 1935, virtually absent in recent historiography and political commentary, about whether the New Deal was fascist or a transition to fascism. It is here where we grasp the vital connection between liberalism and fascism in the transition to state monopoly capitalism in the United States,