secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm. Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments; the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in managing the firm's domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and, accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders. (Peter Schweizer, 'Kevin Phillips's Politics of Deceit,' National Review Online, March 30, 2004, www.nationalreview.com/comment/schweizer200403300907.asp [accessed Jan. 23, 2007])
2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 'Crimes Against Nature,' Rolling Stone, Dec. 11, 2003; Rebecca Shoval, 'Al Franken Airs Show at Ithaca College,' Cornell Daily Sun, April 26, 2006, www.cornellsun.com/node/17563 (accessed Jan. 23, 2007); John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 120.
3. Jeffrey T. Schnapp writes, 'The notion that fascism represented a 'third way' with respect to capitalist and communist development was a key feature of the movement's self-definition. In contrast to the democratic leveling and standardization of life attributed to capitalism, and to the collectivism and materialism attributed to bolshevism, fascism claimed to be able to provide all of the advantages of accelerated modernization, without the disadvantages such as the loss of individuality and nationality, or of higher values such as the pursuit of heroism, art, tradition, and spiritual transcendence.' Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 'Fascinating Fascism,' in 'The Aesthetics of Fascism,' special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996), p. 240.
4. Over and over again, in popular articles about fascism, serious authors routinely assert that fascism constitutes 'the rejection of both liberalism and socialism,' as Alexander Stille wrote in the New York Times. Now, it is true that fascists opposed both socialism and liberalism. But these words had specific connotations during the era of classical fascism. Socialism in this context means Bolshevism, an internationalist ideology that called for the complete abrogation of private property and decried other socialist ideologies as 'fascist.' Liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s was defined as free-market laissez-faire. Translated into contemporary categories, fascism was a rejection of both free-market capitalism and totalitarian communism. That means something slightly different from 'the rejection of both liberalism and socialism.' Alexander Stille, 'The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters,' New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003, sec. B, p. 9.
5. A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 12; Robert S. Wistrich, 'Leon Trotsky's Theory of Fascism,' in 'Theories of Fascism,' special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), p. 161, citing Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), p. 5.
6. Peter Davies and Derek Lynch, eds., The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 52; Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 1-10; Martin Kitchen, Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 46; Henry Ashby Turner Jr., ed., Reappraisals of Fascism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. xi.
7. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 75.
8. Ibid., p. 347.
9. In the European tradition, one could quite easily make the case that these arrangements are right-wing, historically speaking, though that is not an open-and-shut case, since even in Europe today free-market economics is described as an ideology of the right. In mid-century Germany, things get even more confusing because, thanks to Bismarck, classical liberalism was extinguished in the 1870s, and what was called liberalism there was in fact statism. In other words, both left and right were left-wing as we understand the terms in America.
10. 'Packers Face Report Music,' Washington Post, June 7, 1906, p. 4; Timothy P. Carney, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons, 2006), pp. 37-38. See also Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 103, 107.
11. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 40; Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, pp. 39, 174.
12. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 202, 359.
13. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 42, citing Murray Rothbard, 'War Collectivism in World War I,' in A New History of Leviathan, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 70; Paul A. C. Kostinen, 'The 'Industrial-Military Complex' in Historical Perspective: World War I,' Business History Review (Winter 1967), p. 381.
14. Grosvenor Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 63; Robert Higgs, 'Crisis and Quasi-Corporatist Policy-Making: The U.S. Case in Historical Perspective,' The World & I, Nov. 1988, reprinted by the Independent Institute, www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=312 (accessed Jan. 24, 2007).
15. While in the 1920s, particularly under Calvin Coolidge, the state unraveled some — but by no means all — of the corporatist excess of Wilson's war socialism, many in the government continued to advance the cause. One of them was the secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928, Herbert Hoover. Contrary to the absurd propaganda that Hoover was some starry-eyed free marketeer, the director of the Food Administration in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet was committed to 'organizing' American business to cooperate with government hand in hand. Most economic historians see more continuity than 'revolution' in FDR's 1932 economic policies. It was FDR's politics that constituted the real break with the past. He militarized corporatism — just as his overseas counterparts had done — making the New Deal the 'moral equivalent of war.' The segue to real war was nearly as seamless for Americans as it was for Germans, though the economy was permanently transformed, much to the liking of liberals and business, even before the war began. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 41.
16. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 347, 348, 349; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 87.
17. Carney, Big Ripoff, p. 46; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 37.
18. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 164; William G. Welk, 'Fascist Economic Policy and the N.R.A.,' Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1933, pp. 98-109. I have refrained from recounting the literally numberless similar comments from communists and hard socialists in the United States because the view that New Dealism was fascist was so widespread. Also, thanks to the Stalinist doctrine of social fascism, it was official policy among Reds and other socialists in America to say it was so, even if they didn't think it was. But suffice it to say everyone from Norman Thomas on down repeatedly and cavalierly referred to Hoover and FDR as fascists at one point or another.
19. When Brockway visited the United States, he became even more convinced that Rooseveltism was fascism. He was particularly horrified by the Civilian Conservation Corps work camps, which 'remind one immediately of the Labour Service Camps in Fascist Germany. One has an uneasy feeling that the American camps, no less than the German, would be transferred from civilian to military purposes immediately war or a social uprising threatened, and that behind the mind of the military authorities in charge of them their potential military value is dominant.' Barbara C. Malament, 'British Labour and Roosevelt's New Deal: The Response of the Left and the Unions,' Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 1978), pp. 137, 144. See also Giuseppe Bottai, 'Corporate State and the N.R.A.,' Foreign Affairs, July 1935, pp. 612- 24.
20. Anne O'Hare McCormick, 'Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans,' New York Times, July 10, 1933, pp. 1, 6.
21. In his 1929 'state of the nation' address, Mussolini boasted of his success in implementing the corporate state:
