By Stephen Smoot
On February 20, 1939, the German-American Bund held what their flier called “GEORGE WASHINGTON BIRTHDAY EXERCISES: Mass Demonstration for True Americanism.”
The head of the German-American Bund was Fritz Kuhn, a strutting pudgy little man generally wearing a uniform and sporting a nearly disappearing chin. He predicted that 30,000 would pack Madison Square Garden, 3,000 of them uniformed men presenting a pale imitation of Adolf Hitler’s SA brownshirts who helped to push him into power.
Those holding the event had a singular issue in mind that reverberated over and over. One speaker railed against “the sons of Judah.” Others screamed against, as historian Robert E. Herzstein wrote, “the Jewish war conspiracy” and “the Jew-controlled Federal Reserve System,” as well as “kosher Hollywood movies” and “decadent Jewish culture.”
All called for “a Jew free America.” After the bizarre spectacle, as Herzstein wrote, “they wanted to drink and celebrate all night. They had beaten the Jews.”
This was the event that Leftists, who remain silent about violent pro-Hamas anti-Semitism marching through the streets of large cities and on the quads of elite college campuses, chose to disingenuously project as being cut from the same cloth as former President Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally prior to the election. Many prominent Leftists irresponsibly leapt to accuse him of holding a fascist or National Socialist style event.
The Left in America has muddied the waters of the word fascism. Like the boy who cried wolf, they have stripped away the power inherent in warning about them. Fascism now is simply yet another word from the past that carries baggage while most Americans have forgotten what it truly means.
Fascism was born in the mind of Benito Mussolini and, for a time, was seen as the ideal of a more efficient future. Mussolini edited the Socialist publication Avanti prior to the First World War. In his Autobiography, he claimed that he built the paper to having 100,000 subscribers and added “I then had a dominant position within the (Socialist) Party.”
World War I changed Mussolini’s perspective. Where he once stated while still a Socialist that the best place for the Italian flag was flying over a dunghill, the future dictator saw the efforts that patriotic men and women would make for a flag and country in which they took pride.
Within two months of the opening of war, Mussolini led disaffected Socialists who favored joining the war into creating the “Fascisti.”
The sibling ideologies of Fascism and Karl Marx inspired Communism come from the same rotten roots. One main difference is that Communism seeks to impose its totalitarianism by using the underclasses to destroy national governments and boundaries to elevate itself into power. Fascism sees the nation-state as a more realistic catalyst than class to achieve its goal of supreme authority.
Communism also eliminates private ownership of business and the means of production, preferring to run the economy directly. Fascism essentially offers big business a deal. It will preserve them as useful ciphers to impose its policy while aiding them in stamping out competition via the creation of a powerful regulatory state.
In both cases, the systems reject the notion of any natural rights or freedoms, insisting that the duty of the people lies in enthusiastic obedience.
Fascism, as created by Mussolini and copied by others, set itself against what it tended to call the failed liberal order. In this instance, the term liberal refers to what those today call “classical liberalism,” which extols the virtues of free markets, free societies, limited government, the importance of religious faith, and, above all, the dignity and natural rights of the individual.
Fascism finds fertile ground in failure. Italy’s joining of the Allied cause in World War I, left the economy dangerously distorted, the people suffering, and the Kingdom blocked from achieving its war aim, taking a coastal slice of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that once belonged to the Republic of Venice.
Desperate conditions spread to the United States in the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression. Fascist ideals attracted those who believed in efficiency and order; after all Musslini was revered in Europe as the man who made Italian trains run on time.
American Progressives of both parties admired and even tried to promote Fascism in the United States. As Herzstein wrote, “Press Lord William Randolph Hearst wished that America had a Mussolini (perhaps Hearst himself.)” Progressive Republican Governor Phillip LaFollette of Wisconsin kept an autographed picture of Mussolini on his wall.
Many of those attracted to Mussolini also favored economic planning, including Charles A. Beard, a Progressive historian. Others, such as Democratic Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, mimicked both the demagogue-like appeal of rallying the masses as one to his personal cause and also using the levers of state-sponsored force to intimidate and sometimes imprison opponents.
Fascism’s symbol describes its purpose neatly. Mussolini took imagery from Classical Rome of a group of sticks bundled together, explaining that hitting a man with one stick breaks the stick. Hitting a man with a group of sticks all tightly bound together breaks the man.
Mussolini invented the word “totalitarianism” to describe the system that he created. His police state eagerly punished dissenters. Castor oil was a common punishment inflicted on non-conformists, although more serious opponents of the regime received imprisonment on remote islands in the Mediterranean.
The allure of Fascist style unity and planning found its way into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, much of it through the National Industrial Recovery Act. This legislation was based on the assumption that economic growth was no longer possible and that the nation needed to protect what it had from what some at the time termed destructive competition.
Passage came with great fanfare as the federal government generated mass support. The flying eagle chosen for its symbol was attached to the new National Football League team in Philadelphia. The legislation called for the writing and enforcement of hundreds of “fair competition codes” governing nearly every aspect of economic life for corporations and effectively squeezing small business out. These codes harnessed the power of big business to the might of the federal government more tightly than ever before or since.
By 1935, the United States Supreme Court overturned the legislation as unconstitutional, leading the president to attempt a court packing plan to get his own way on the issue.
Fascism’s appeal in Italy came from more than simply social organization and the use of force. Fascist “Blackshirts” formed a civil militia of sorts that enforced social mores – even to the point of intimidating the families of schoolyard bullies.
Italy under Fascism also guaranteed one state provided vacation per year for all children – but not their parents. Children could choose a trip to the seashore or the mountains for their health, and likely also received a massive helping of propaganda as well while in the care of the State.
In essence, Fascism survived because it promised the people safety, security, efficiency, and special perquisites in exchange for their complete obedience in a nation with almost no tradition of natural rights or popular government. It failed when it demanded sacrifices that outweighed what people saw as the benefits of obeying the system.
Too many who throw the word around in modern politics either ignore, or never even learned, what it truly was.