Star-spangled fascism: American interwar political extremism in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article demonstrates that American historiography has ignored the concept of Fascism as a category of analysis to help explain and understand the American interwar period. It makes the case that incorporating this concept can help us understand American history in transnational and comparative terms, as part of a larger global history of interwar politics. It is a propaedeutic analysis of existing scholarship – one that does not survey a recent trend in American historiography so much as suggest a new one. Through a textual reading of historical scholarship on American political extremism, and a parallel reading of comparative fascism scholarship from non-American contexts, the article sheds light on the usefulness of a comparative approach. It concludes that Fascism as a category of analysis, when applied to a national-historical context that has long overlooked it (except as a symptom of particularist German-American or Italian-American immigrant identities), will help us recognize that there was a discernibly ‘native’, ‘all American’ fascism in the United States between the wars – one that clearly failed, but was still a real force in American politics and society.