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

sentence for referring to Lenin as 'one of the brainiest' leaders in the world. Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes was arrested, tried, and convicted for telling a women's group, 'I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers.' The Republican antiwar progressive Robert La Follette spent a year fighting an effort to have him expelled from the Senate for disloyalty because he'd given a speech opposing the war to the Non-Partisan League. The Providence Journal carried a banner — every day! — warning readers that any German or Austrian 'unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy.' The Illinois Bar Association ruled that members who defended draft resisters were not only 'unprofessional' but 'unpatriotic.'⁶⁹

German authors were purged from libraries, families of German extraction were harassed and taunted, sauerkraut became 'liberty cabbage,' and — as Sinclair Lewis half-jokingly recalled — there was talk of renaming German measles 'liberty measles.' Socialists and other leftists who agitated against the war were brutalized. Mobs in Arizona packed Wobblies in cattle cars and left them in the desert without food or water. In Oklahoma, opponents of the war were tarred and feathered, and a crippled leader of the Industrial Workers of the World was hung from a railway trestle. At Columbia University the president, Nicholas Murray Butler, fired three professors for criticizing the war, on the grounds that 'what had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason.' Richard Ely, enthroned at the University of Wisconsin, organized professors and others to crush internal dissent via the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion. Anybody who offered 'opinions which hinder us in this awful struggle,' he explained, should be 'fired' if not indeed 'shot.' Chief on his list was Robert La Follette, whom Ely attempted to hound from Wisconsin politics as a 'traitor' who 'has been of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops.'⁷⁰

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that some 175,000 Americans were arrested for failing to demonstrate their patriotism in one way or another. All were punished, many went to jail.

For the most part, the progressives looked upon what they had created and said, 'This is good.' The 'great European war...is striking down individualism and building up collectivism,' rejoiced the Progressive financier and J. P. Morgan partner George Perkins. Grosvenor Clarkson saw things similarly. The war effort 'is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.' The regimentation of society, the social worker Felix Adler believed, was bringing us closer to creating the 'perfect man...a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any...that has yet existed.' The Washington Post was more modest. 'In spite of excesses such as lynching,' it editorialized, 'it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.'⁷¹

Perhaps some added context is in order. At pretty much the exact moment when John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and so many others were gushing about the 'moral tonic' the war would provide and how it was the highest, best cause for all people dedicated to liberal, progressive values, Benito Mussolini was making nearly identical arguments. Mussolini had been the brains of the Italian Socialist Party. He was influenced by many of the same thinkers as the American progressives — Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, James, and others — and he wanted Italy to fight on the Allied side, that is, the eventual American side. And yet Mussolini's support for the war automatically rendered him and his Fascist movement 'objectively' right-wing according to communist propaganda.

So does this mean that the editors of the New Republic, the progressives in Wilson's government, John Dewey, and the vast majority of self-described American Socialists were all suddenly right-wingers? Of course not. Only in Italy — home of the most radical socialist party in Europe after Russia — did support for the war automatically transform left-wingers into right-wingers. In Germany the socialists in the Reichstag voted in favor of the war. In Britain the socialists voted in favor of the war. In America the socialists and progressives voted in favor of the war. This didn't make them right-wingers; it made them shockingly bloodthirsty and jingoistic left-wingers. This is just one attribute of the progressives that has been airbrushed from popular history. 'Perhaps I was as much opposed to the war as anyone in the nation,' declared none other than Mother Jones, a champion of 'Americanist' socialism, 'but when we get into a fight I am one of those who intend to clean hell out of the other fellow, and we have to clean the kaiser up...the grafter, the thief, the murderer.' She was hardly alone. The pro-war socialist Charles E. Russell declared that his former colleagues should be 'driven from the country.' Another insisted that antiwar socialists should be 'shot at once without an hour's delay.'⁷²

In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and 'America' writ large. progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged 'conservative' misdeeds — say, McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight 'hard enough' for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

War socialism under Wilson was an entirely progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal. To this day liberals instinctively and automatically see war as an excuse to expand governmental control of vast swaths of the economy. If we are to believe that 'classic' fascism is first and foremost the elevation of martial values and the militarization of government and society under the banner of nationalism, it is very difficult to understand why the Progressive Era was not also the Fascist Era.

Indeed, it is very difficult not to notice how the progressives fit the objective criteria for a fascist movement set forth by so many students of the field. Progressivism was largely a middle-class movement equally opposed to runaway capitalism above and Marxist radicalism below. Progressives hoped to find a middle course between the two, what the fascists called the 'Third Way' or what Richard Ely, mentor to both Wilson and Roosevelt, called the 'golden mean' between laissez-faire individualism and Marxist socialism. Their chief desire was to impose a unifying, totalitarian moral order that regulated the individual inside his home and out. The progressives also shared with the fascists and Nazis a burning desire to transcend class differences within the national community and create a new order. George Creel declared this aim succinctly: 'No dividing line between the rich and poor, and no class distinctions to breed mean envies.'⁷³

This was precisely the social mission and appeal of fascism and Nazism. In speech after speech, Hitler made it clear that his goal was to have no dividing lines between rich and poor. 'What a difference compared with a certain other country,' he declared, referring to war-torn Spain. 'There it is class against class, brother against brother. We have chosen the other route: rather than to wrench you apart, we have brought you together.' Robert Ley, the head of the Nazis' German Labor Front, proclaimed flatly, 'We are the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle.' Whether the rhetoric matched the reality is beside the point; the appeal of such a goal was profound and the intent sincere. A young and ambitious German lawyer who wanted to study abroad was persuaded by his friends to stay home so he wouldn't miss the excitement. 'The [Nazi] party was intending to change the whole concept of labour relations, based on the principle of co-determination and shared responsibility between management and workers. I knew it was Utopian but I believed in it with all my heart...Hitler's promises of a caring but disciplined socialism fell on very receptive ears.'⁷⁴

Of course, such utopian dreams would have to come at the price of personal liberty. But progressives and fascists alike were glad to pay it. 'Individualism,' proclaimed Lyman Abbott, the editor of the Outlook, 'is the characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization.'⁷⁵ The Wilsonian-Crolyite progressive conception of the individual's role in society would and should strike any fair-minded person of any true liberal sensibility today as at least disturbing and somewhat fascistic. Wilson, Croly, and the vast bulk of progressives would have no principled objection to the Nazi conception of the Volksgemeinschaft — 'people's community,' or national community — or to the Nazi slogan about placing 'the common good before the private good.' Progressives and fascists alike were explicitly indebted to Darwinism, Hegelianism, and Pragmatism to justify their worldviews. Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony is that according to most of the criteria we use to locate people and policies on the ideological spectrum in the American context — social bases, demographics, economic policies, social welfare provisions — Adolf Hitler was indisputably to Wilson's left.