Post, Dec. 24, 1981, p. A7. Reagan was even more straightforward the previous August: 'Anyone who wants to look at the writings of the Brain Trust of the New Deal will find that President Roosevelt's advisers admired the fascist system...They thought that private ownership with government management and control a la the Italian system was the way to go, and that has been evident in all their writings.' See Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (Roseville, Calif.: Prima, 2001), p. 681; Robert G. Kaiser, 'Those Old Reaganisms,' Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1980, p. A2.
55. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to U.S. Congress, Jan. 3, 1936, quoted in James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 17.
56. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 340.
57. William A. Schambra, 'The Quest for Community, and the Quest for a New Public Philosophy,' paper presented at the American Enterprise Institute's Public Policy Week, Washington, D.C., Dec. 5-8, 1983, quoted in Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 51; text of President Roosevelt's Speech to His Neighbors, New York Times, Aug. 27, 1933, p. 28.
58. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, p. 186.
59. Ibid., p. 37. Emphasis mine.
5. THE 1960s: FASCISM TAKES TO THE STREETS
1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 315.
2. Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 172. I am aware that responsibility for the Reichstag fire is a subject of considerable debate among historians. But the Nazis did not care who was actually responsible for the fire. Rather, they exploited the fire for their own purposes. Some of the Black Nationalists at Cornell surely believed the cross was burned by white racists, but the leadership knew this was not the case and seized on the opportunity.
3. Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 478.
4. John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), p. 75.
5. Ibid.
6. Miriam Beard, 'The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany,' New York Times, June 7, 1931.
7. Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933- 1945 (New York: Da Capo, 1995), p. 306.
8. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 200.
9. Walter Schultze, 'The Nature of Academic Freedom,' in Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, ed. George L. Mosse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 316.
10. Downs, Cornell '69, p. 9; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, ''New Order' at Cornell and the Academic Future,' Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1969, p. C11.
11. Walter Berns, 'The Assault on the Universities: Then and Now,' in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 158- 59.
12. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 339.
13. Paul Farhi, 'Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s,' Washington Post, Dec. 28, 2003, p. A05.
14. Kerry denies attending the session when the issue was debated. Some claim he was there but voted against the idea. Nobody credibly alleges that he supported such a policy.
15. Farhi, 'Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s,' p. A05.
16. Richard J. Ellis, 'Romancing the Oppressed: The New Left and the Left Out,' Review of Politics 58, no. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 109-10; James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 30-31; Tom Hayden, 'Letter to the New (Young) Left,' in The New Student Left: An Anthology, ed. Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, rev. and expanded ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 5-6. The article originally appeared in the Activist (Winter 1961).
17. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 159.
18. Peggy Kamuf, an American translator of many of Derrida's books, recalls that reading his work in 1970, while a graduate student at Yale, offered a way of finding solidarity with radicals in the streets. Deconstruction, she said, offered a way to do academic work while maintaining 'that urgency of response to the abuses of power' that fed political engagement. In short, it let radical academics keep their jobs while turning the universities into incubators for radicalism. Quoted in Scott McLemee, 'Derrida, a Pioneer of Literary Theory, Dies,' Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 22, 2004, p. A1, chronicle.com/free/v51/i09/09a00101.htm (accessed Jan. 4, 2007).
19. Downs, Cornell '69, p. 232. See also 'The Agony of Cornell,' Time, May 2, 1969; Homer Bigart, 'Cornell Faculty Reverses Itself on Negroes,' New York Times, April 24, 1969. The trauma over the climate of betrayal and bitterness Rossiter both endured and fostered — academic, professional, and personal — doubtless contributed to his tragic decision to kill himself the following year. Caleb Rossiter, Clinton's son, discounts this view in two vivid chapters in his autobiography. However, it is difficult to read his account without concluding that the stress of these events — particularly the extreme radicalism of his own sons — played some role.
20. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 6.
21. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 6-7.
22. The relationship between Pragmatism and conservatism is a bit more complicated. William James was a great American philosopher, and there is much in his work that conservatives admire. And if by Pragmatism you simply mean realism or practicality, then there are a great many conservative pragmatists. But if by Pragmatism one means the constellation of theories swirling among the progressives or the work of John Dewey, then conservatives have been at the forefront of a century-long critique of Pragmatism. However, it should be said that both James and Dewey are thoroughly American philosophers whose influence in a wide range of matters defies neat categorization along the left-right axis.
23. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 60.
24. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 311.
25. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 16, 17; R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 39.
26. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 61; Beard, 'The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany.'
27. See Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 169. The SDS itself started as an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, an anti-communist socialist organization briefly headed by John Dewey. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 232.
28. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 337.
