When It Happened Here: Michigan and the Transnational Development of American Fascism, 1920-1945

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 46:1 (Spring 2020): 29-67©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved When It Happened Here: Michigan and the Transnational Development of American Fascism, 1920-1945 By Salaina Catalano In his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis urged readers to appreciate America’s susceptibility to the influence of fascism. In the novel, Bishop Prang, a clergyman with a national radio broadcast, throws the weight of his organization, the League of Forgotten Men, behind Buzz Windrip, guaranteeing Windrip’s presidential victory and eventually his fascist dictatorship. Lewis’s book was fiction, but he based his characters on real-life right-wing demagogues. The inspiration for Bishop Prang was Father Charles Coughlin, the “Radio Priest” from Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin’s power, according to Lewis, was potentially fatal for democracy. As one of many contemporary observers of the proliferation of American right-wing extremists in the 1930s, Lewis warned readers about the threat of an American brand of fascism. It would be neither an outgrowth of American “nativist” sentiment, nor a purely foreign import of European fascism, but rather a combination of the two that would spell the downfall of American democracy.1 While fascism pervaded Europe from the 1920s through the 1940s, hundreds of right-wing extremist groups operated in the United States, primarily in Midwestern states like Michigan. Was the simultaneous occurrence of these two phenomena purely coincidental? How did American right-wing extremists conceptualize themselves in relation to a global fascist ideology? In what ways did European fascist regimes support and view right-wing activities in the United States? How can the interwar apogee of nativism—defined as hostility to immigration—be explained? This essay argues that a distinct brand of fascism developed in the United States from the 1920s to the 1940s by means of a transnational ideological network embracing native-born Americans, immigrants from 1 Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1935). 30 The Michigan Historical Review European fascist countries, and officials of European fascist regimes. The network was based on the transnational movement of ideas, people, and resources. An analysis of this exchange reveals how right-wing extremists on both sides of the Atlantic combined traditional American nativism with European fascism, creating a hybrid ideology to propagate to the American public.2 In a time of mass unemployment and the apparent inefficiency of democracy, this American brand of fascism resonated with many people. Michigan was fertile ground for American fascists because of the state’s diverse immigrant population, advanced industrial economy, and active left-wing movements. Fascism did not operate in a national vacuum; instead, it was a global ideology that took different forms in the various countries where it existed. An analysis of the interaction between American right-wing extremism and European fascism could easily comprise the whole of twentieth-century history in both North and South America. However, some geographical and temporal limits are required. Here the geographical scope is confined to Michigan and Germany. Michigan was a hotbed of American fascist sentiment, hosting dozens of nationallyknown , extreme right-wing individuals and organizations. Together, these served as a representative sample of each “type” of American fascist; including industrialists (Henry Ford), anti-communist crusading clergymen (Father Coughlin and Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith), militarized secret societies (Black Legion), and immigrant veterans’ and fascist groups (Steel Helmet, Friends of New Germany, and German American Bund).3 While connections with Italian fascism were present, Nazi Germany was the ideal fascist type, as supported by the conclusions of leading scholars of fascism like Stanley G. Payne and Robert O. Paxton, 2 Historians of American right-wing extremism have attached the term “hybrid” to individual groups operating during the 1930s, particularly the Black Legion, but never to describe the transnational movement as a whole. See Peter H. Amann, “Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 3 (July 1983): 490-524 and David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 247-248. 3 For...