In search of American Fascism

In the December 2018 Journal of American History Princeton University scholar Joseph Fronczak observes that recent writing on the emergence of modern American conservatism rarely looks further back than the start of the Cold War in the 1940s. Fronczak wants to go back a decade or more and reconsider the extent to which fascism influenced American conservatives. He believes this question can be asked again in light of European scholarship that has repackaged fascism as "practice" rather than ideology. In other words, some scholars today contend that "fascist tactics" rather than any theory of the state advanced by Mussolini, Hitler or others are the essence of fascism. It's easier to find "fascist tactics" than fascist ideology in 1930s America if only, as Fronczak explains, because mass media offered images of fascism on display or in action that inspired diverse groups around the world. The most obvious examples are the different-colored "shirt" movements that emulated Italy's black shirts and Germany's brown shirts. Fronczak, however, focuses on a specific fascist influence on conflicts between capital and labor. In the past, employers hired private detective agencies like the Pinkertons to disrupt strikes, but under the influence of fascist examples in Europe, so Fronczak contends, American capitalists preferred to recruit grass-root vigilante organizations to go after unions and their allies or facilitators in the Communist movement. Some of the men who developed and promoted this strategy turned up later in Cold War conservatism, and in a final flourish Fronczak has one of his subjects singing the praises of one of the Koch dynasty in the 1960s.

Hostility to organized labor seems to be an irreducible element in fascism, however you define it, even among a working-class rank and file. As you'd expect, Fronczak makes much of capital's divide-and-conquer tactics. Anti-union or anti-communist vigilantism seems to have been driven by anti-semitism, provoked by the perceivedly disproportionate Jewish element in communist organizations, and plain old racism, in reaction to union efforts to unite all races against capital as the common enemy. But there seems to be more to the cultural aspect of this proto or crypto-fascism than that, as Fronczak points out. Guided by a hostile contemporary observer, Reinhold Niebuhr, he notes that the communistic tinge of Depression-era union organizing alarmed the vigilante constituency because of its challenge to property rights. Niebuhr saw the anti-union reaction as self-consciously "petty bourgeois" rather than "working class," defined by their commitment to an individualism ultimately validated by property ownership and thus obviously threatened by Marxism. Leaving the concept of individualism out of it, since that doesn't exactly gel with any degree of fascism, it's probably worth mentioning that a belief that property ownership is always within reach through hard work seems like a defining characteristic of any culture hostile to "collectivism" or class-based politics, while proletarian pessimism on that score may be a precondition for mass Marxism. Whether that antipathy to communism alone makes anyone a potential fascist remains unclear, especially since fascism, seen either as idea or practice, is little concerned with the private lives of individuals. What makes those vigilante bands fascistic in Fronczak's analysis is their willingness to band together and, implicitly above all, to accept leadership.

If we're looking for American fascism in some larval state, we should listen for an echo of a Frenchman cited by Fronczak who accepts the "fascist" label if that means "wanting to be commanded firmly by men deserving of leadership." Some people claim to hear that in the Trump movement today, but I'm not sure if many Americans are that desperate to be commanded firmly by anybody yet. Let's make a possibly important distinction, however. You don't expect to hear someone say, "I need a leader," though when you do it usually means that person is ripe for a cult guru rather than a dictator. Other people might never say "I need a leader" in those exact words, but if they say "we need a leader" in a way that implies that you need a leader, both individually and collectively, that might be the beginning of something for scholars to study.