Populist Influences On American Fascism

Abstract

HE DOCTRINAL roots of American fascist thought have long remained obscure for reasons inherent in recent American history itself. Essentially fascist popular movements grew up in America during the period 1929-41 at a time when American publicists and intellectuals were rediscovering America in their reaction to the growth of fascism and nazism abroad. Increased regard for American tradition among hitherto alienated intellectuals made them reluctant to admit that movements such as those led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Gerald L. K. Smith were not the result of temporary psychological aberrations on the part of the masses but were, instead, the culmination of an ideological development stemming from such generally revered movements as Populism and agrarian democracy. For them fascism was by definition un-American. The sentimental quasi-Marxism of many influential writers reinforced this refusal to search for the roots of American fascism in American political history. When not dismissed as exotic imports, fascist ideas were held to be hothouse plants carefully nurtured by domestic capitalists bent on cultivating their own financial gardens while Western civilization was at stake in a death struggle waged by the democratic masses against the new barbarism.