Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 343 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Abstract

What is fascism? Was there ever a fascist movement in the United States? Philip Jenkins chooses to sidestep the more theoretical debate about the nature of fascism in order to employ a definition that uses a cluster of characteristics: right-wing authoritarianism, antidemocratic sentiment, the exaltation of military and paramilitary tactics, a sort of anticapitalism, a hostility to unions, and pursuit of the integration of social groups through a single party, a totalitarian central state, and corporatist economic structure.