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

of the state-made-flesh at uncommitted citizens.

Almost alone among progressives, the brilliant, bizarre, disfigured genius Randolph Bourne seemed to understand precisely what was going on. The war revealed that a generation of young intellectuals, trained in pragmatic philosophy, were ill equipped to prevent means from becoming ends. The 'peculiar congeniality between the war and these men' was simply baked into the cake, Bourne lamented. 'It is,' he sadly concluded, 'as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.'⁵³

Wilson the great centralizer and would-be leader of men moved overnight to empower these would-be social engineers, creating a vast array of wartime boards, commissions, and committees. Overseeing it all was the War Industries Board, or WIB, chaired by Bernard Baruch, which whipped, cajoled, and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state long before Mussolini or Hitler contemplated their corporatist doctrines. The progressives running the WIB had no illusions about what they were up to. 'It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel — a dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent which step by step at last encompassed the Nation and united it into a coordinated and mobile whole,' declared Grosvenor Clarkson, a member and subsequent historian of the WIB.⁵⁴

More important than socializing industry was nationalizing the people for the war effort. 'Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way,' Wilson threatened in June 1917. Harking back to his belief that 'leaders of men' must manipulate the passions of the masses, he approved and supervised one of the first truly Orwellian propaganda efforts in Western history. He set the tone himself when he defended the first military draft since the Civil War. 'It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling: it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.'⁵⁵

A week after the war started, Walter Lippmann — no doubt eager to set about the work of unleashing a transvaluation of values — sent a memo to Wilson imploring him to commence with a sweeping propaganda effort. Lippmann, as he argued later, believed that most citizens were 'mentally children or barbarians' and therefore needed to be directed by experts like himself. Individual liberty, while nice, needed to be subordinated to, among other things, 'order.'⁵⁶

Wilson tapped the progressive journalist George Creel to head the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, the West's first modern ministry for propaganda. Creel was a former muckraking liberal journalist and police commissioner in Denver who had gone so far as to forbid his cops from carrying nightsticks or guns. He took to the propaganda portfolio immediately, determined to inflame the American public into 'one white-hot mass' under the banner of '100 percent Americanism.' 'It was a fight for the minds of men, for the 'conquest of their convictions,' and the battle line ran through every home in every country,' Creel recalled. Fear was a vital tool, he argued, 'an important element to be bred into the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation.'⁵⁷

Countless other liberal and leftist intellectuals lent their talents and energies to the propaganda effort. Edward Bernays, who would be credited with creating the field of public relations, cut his teeth on the Creel Committee, learning the art of 'the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.' The CPI printed millions of posters, buttons, pamphlets, and the like in eleven languages not counting English. The committee eventually had more than twenty subdivisions with offices in America and around the world. The Division of News alone issued more than six thousand releases. Just under one hundred pamphlets were printed with an estimated circulation of seventy-five million. A typical poster for Liberty Bonds cautioned, 'I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!...[I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man's Land for you!' A CPI poster asked, 'Have you met the Kaiserite?...You find him in hotel lobbies, smoking compartments, clubs, offices, even homes...He is a scandal-monger of the most dangerous type. He repeats all the rumors, criticism, he hears about our country's part in the war. He's very plausible...People like that...through their vanity or curiosity or treason they are helping German propagandists sow the seeds of discontent.'⁵⁸

One of Creel's greatest ideas — an instance of 'viral marketing' before its time — was the creation of an army of nearly a hundred thousand 'Four Minute Men.' Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four-minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters — anyplace they could get an audience — to spread the word that the 'very future of democracy' was at stake. In 1917-18 alone, some 7,555,190 speeches were delivered in fifty-two hundred communities. These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human Huns. Invariably, the horrors of German war crimes expanded as the Four Minute Men plied their trade. The CPI released a string of propaganda films with such titles as The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin, and The Prussian Cur. The schools, of course, were drenched in nationalist propaganda. Secondary schools and colleges quickly added 'war studies courses' to the curriculum. And always and everywhere the progressives questioned the patriotism of anybody who didn't act '100 percent American.'

Another Wilson appointee, the socialist muckraker Arthur Bullard — a former writer for the radical journal the Masses and an acquaintance of Lenin's — was also convinced that the state must whip the people up into a patriotic fervor if America was to achieve the 'transvaluation' the progressives craved. In 1917 he published Mobilising America, in which he argued that the state must 'electrify public opinion' because 'the effectiveness of our warfare will depend on the ardour we throw into it.' Any citizen who did not put the needs of the state ahead of his own was merely 'dead weight.' Bullard's ideas were eerily similar to the Sorelian doctrines of the 'vital lie.' 'Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms...there are lifeless truths and vital lies...The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it's true or false.'⁵⁹

The radical lawyer and supposed civil libertarian Clarence Darrow — today a hero to the left for his defense of evolution in the Scopes 'Monkey' trial — both stumped for the CPI and defended the government's censorship efforts. 'When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace,' Darrow wrote in a government-backed book, 'I know he is working for Germany.' In a speech at Madison Square Garden he said that Wilson would have been a traitor not to defy Germany, and added, 'Any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor.' Darrow's expert legal opinion, it may surprise modern liberals to know, was that once Congress had decided on war, the right to question that decision evaporated entirely (an interesting standard given the tendency of many to assert that the Bush administration has behaved without precedent in its comparatively tepid criticism of dissent). Once the bullets fly, citizens lose the right even to discuss the issue, publicly or privately; 'acquiescence on the part of the citizen becomes a duty.'⁶⁰ (It's ironic that the ACLU made its name supporting Darrow at the Scopes trial.)

The rationing and price-fixing of the 'economic dictatorship' required Americans to make great sacrifices, including the various 'meatless' and 'wheatless' days common to all of the industrialized war economies in the first half of the twentieth century. But the tactics used to impose these sacrifices dramatically advanced the science of totalitarian propaganda. Americans were deluged with patriotic volunteers knocking on their doors to sign this pledge or that oath not only to be patriotic but to abstain from this or that 'luxury.' Herbert Hoover, the head of the national Food Administration, made his reputation as a public servant in the battle to get Americans to tighten their belts, dispatching over half a million door knockers for his efforts alone. No one could dispute his gusto for the job. 'Supper,' he complained, 'is one of the worst pieces of extravagance that we have in this country.'⁶¹

Children were a special concern of the government's, as is always the case in totalitarian systems. They were asked to sign a pledge card, 'A Little American's Promise':

At table I'll not leave a scrap

Of food upon my plate.

And I'll not eat between meals but

For supper time I'll wait.

I make that promise that I'll do

My honest, earnest part

In helping my America

With all my loyal heart.

For toddlers who couldn't sign a pledge card, let alone read, the Progressive war planners offered a rewritten nursery rhyme: