Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Fascism was one name given to one form of 'experimentation' in the 1920s. These experiments were part of the great utopian aspirations of the 'world-wide movement' Jane Addams spoke of at the Progressive Party Convention. There was a religious awakening afoot in the West as progressives of all stripes saw man snatching the reins of history from God's hands. Science — or what they believed to be science — was the new scripture, and one could only perform science by 'experimenting.' And, just as important, only scientists know how to conduct a proper experiment. 'Who will be the prophets and pilots of the Good Society?' Herbert Croly asked in 1925. He noted that for a generation progressive liberals believed that a 'better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover and ingenuity could devise.' Five years earlier, Croly noted in the New Republic that the practitioners of the 'scientific method' would need to join with the 'ideologists' of Christ, in order to 'plan and effect a redeeming transformation' of society whereby men would look for 'deliverance from choice between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation.'³⁶

To better understand the spirit of this fascist moment, we need to examine how progressives looked to two other great 'experiments' of the age, Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism. Some of this was touched upon in Chapter 1, but it's worth repeating: liberals often saw Mussolini's project and Lenin's as linked efforts. Lincoln Steffens referred to the 'Russian-Italian' method as if the two things constituted a single enterprise.

The New Republic in particular was at times decidedly optimistic about both experiments. Some seemed more excited about the Italian effort. Charles Beard, for example, wrote of Mussolini's efforts:

This is far from the frozen dictatorship of the Russian Tsardom; it is more like the American check and balance system; and it may work out in a new democratic direction...Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made here, an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism, politics and technology. It would be a mistake to allow feeling aroused by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the Fascist process (as all other immense historical changes) to obscure the potentialities and the lessons of the adventure — no, not adventure, but destiny riding without any saddle and bridle across the historic peninsula that bridges the world of antiquity and our modern world.³⁷

Such enthusiasm paled in comparison to the way progressives greeted the 'experiment' in the Soviet Union. Indeed, many of the remaining left-wing footdraggers on the war became enthusiastic supporters when they learned of the Bolshevik Revolution. Suddenly Wilson's revolutionary rhetoric seemed to be confirmed by the forces of history (indeed, Wilson himself saw the earlier fall of the tsar to the Kerensky government as the last obstacle to U.S. entry into the war, since he would no longer have a despotic regime as an ally). A wave of crusading journalists went to Moscow to chronicle the revolution and convince American liberals that history was on the march in Russia.

John Reed led the charge with his Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed was an unreconstructed admirer of the Bolsheviks. He dismissed complaints about the Red Terror and the mass murder of non-Bolshevist socialist revolutionaries easily: 'I don't give a damn for their past. I'm concerned only with what this treacherous gang has been doing during the past three years. To the wall with them! I say I have learned one mighty expressive word: 'raztrellyat' [sic] (execute by shooting).' The progressive public intellectual E. A. Ross — who will reappear in our story later — took a common tack and argued that the Bolsheviks had killed relatively few members of the opposition, so it really wasn't a big deal.³⁸ Reed and Ross at least acknowledged that the Bolsheviks were killing people. Many pro- Bolshevik liberals simply refused to concede that the Red Terror even transpired. This was the beginning of nearly a century of deliberate lies and useful idiocy on the American left.

When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government, Wilson's refusal to recognize them — and his subsequent intervention in Siberia and Murmansk — were denounced as 'Wilson's stab in Russia's back' because most liberals saw the Bolsheviks as a popular and progressive movement. One British journalist writing in the New Republic proclaimed the Bolsheviks 'stand for rationalism, for an intelligent system of cultivation, for education, for an active ideal of cooperation and social service against superstition, waste, illiteracy, and passive obedience.' As the historian Eugene Lyons noted, these crusaders 'wrote as inspired prophets of an embattled revolution...they were dazzled by a vision of things to come.'³⁹

To be sure, not all left-leaning observers were fooled by the Bolsheviks. Bertrand Russell famously saw through the charade, as did the American socialist Charles E. Russell. But most progressives believed that the Bolsheviks had stumbled on the passage out of the old world and that we should follow their lead. When the war ended and Progressivism had been discredited with the American people, the intellectuals looked increasingly to the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy as exemplars of the new path that America had foolishly abandoned after its brilliant experiment with war socialism.

Nearly the entire liberal elite, including much of FDR's Brain Trust, had made the pilgrimage to Moscow to take admiring notes on the Soviet experiment. Their language was both religiously prophetic and arrogantly scientific. Stuart Chase reported after visiting Russia in 1927 that unlike in America, where 'hungry stockholders' were making the economic decisions, in the Soviet Union the all-caring state was in the saddle, 'informed by battalions of statistics' and heroically aided by Communist Party officials who need 'no further incentive than the burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth which flames in the breast of every good Communist.'⁴⁰

That same year two of America's leading New Deal economists, Rexford Guy Tugwell and Paul Douglas, pronounced themselves awed by the Soviet 'experiment.' 'There is a new life beginning there,' Tugwell wrote in his report. Lillian Wald visited Russia's 'experimental schools' and reported that John Dewey's ideas were being implemented 'not less than 150 per cent.' Indeed, the whole country was, for liberals, a giant 'Laboratory School.' Dewey himself visited the Soviet Union and was much impressed. Jane Addams declared the Bolshevik endeavor 'the greatest social experiment in history.' Sidney Hillman, John L. Lewis, and most of the other leaders of the American labor movement were effusive in their praise of 'Soviet pragmatism,' Stalin's 'experiment,' and the 'heroism' of the Bolsheviks.⁴¹

W. E. B. DuBois was thunderstruck. 'I am writing this in Russia,' he wrote back to his readers in the Crisis. 'I am sitting in Revolution Square...I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.'⁴²

DuBois offers a good illustration of how fascism and communism appealed to the same progressive impulses and aspirations. Like many progressives, he'd studied in Germany in the 1890s and retained a fondness for the Prussian model. An anti-Semite early in his career — in 1924 his magazines started carrying a swastika on the cover, despite complaints from Jewish progressives — DuBois applied for a grant in 1935 from an organization with known ties to the Nazis that was run by a well-known Jew hater who'd dined with Joseph Goebbels. He truly believed the Nazis had a lot of great ideas and that America had much to learn from Germany's experiment in National Socialism (though later, DuBois denounced Nazi anti-Semitism).

And so it was with other pro-Soviet liberal icons. Recall how a year before Lincoln Steffens announced he'd seen the future in the Soviet Union, he'd said much the same thing about Fascist Italy. The heroic success of fascism, according to Steffens, made Western democracy — run by 'petty persons with petty purposes' — look pathetic by comparison. For Steffens and countless other liberals, Mussolini, Lenin, and Stalin were all doing the same thing: transforming corrupt, outdated societies. Tugwell praised Lenin as a pragmatist who was merely running an 'experiment.' The same was true of Mussolini, he explained.

The New Republic defended both fascism and communism on similar grounds throughout the 1920s. How, a correspondent asked, could the magazine think Mussolini's brutality was a 'good thing'? Croly answered that it was not, 'any more than it was a 'good thing' for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.'⁴³

Charles Beard summed up the fascination well. Il Duce's hostility to democracy was no big deal, he explained. After all, the 'fathers of the American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could desire.' Mussolini's dictatorial style was likewise perfectly consistent with the 'American gospel of action, action, action.' But what really captured Beard's imagination was the economic system inherent to fascism, namely corporatism. According to Beard, Mussolini had