The United States and World Fascism: Teaching Human Rights through the Spanish Civil War Sebastiaan Faber They are, says Canute Frankson, “a small group of degenerates gone mad in their lust for power” (Nelson and Hendricks 33–35). According to Henry Wallace, they are “most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact”: “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity.” What is more, they “use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism” and “claim to be super-patriots, but . . . would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution” (Wallace 7). They are “our problem,” Hy Katz adds. What they represent “may come to us as it came in other countries” (Nelson and Hendricks 31–33). Current as they may sound, these warnings are more than seventy years old. Canute Frankson was born in Jamaica in 1890; he had emigrated to the United States when he was 27 and worked as a mechanic in an automobile plant in Detroit, Michigan. Hy Katz, born in 1914, was the son of Polish immigrants in Brooklyn, New York. Henry Wallace, the oldest of the three, was born in 1888. He served as the thirty-third Vice President of the United States (1941–45) and as Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40) and Commerce (1945–46). The three hailed from different generations, ethnicities, classes, and cultures. What they had in common was their aversion of fascism—and their conviction that it had to be stopped. Frankson and Katz volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War after the Second Republic was attacked by a Hitler- and Mussolini-backed military coup in 1936. The passages quoted above are from letters they wrote from Spain. Frankson’s letter, date-marked Albacete, July 6, 1937, is to a friend. Katz writes on November 25 of that same year, to his mother, who had only just found out what her son was doing in Europe. (“Claire writes me that you know I’m in Spain,” he tells her. “Of course, you know that the reason I didn’t tell you where I was is that I didn’t want to hurt you” [Nelson and Hendricks 31–33]) Wallace’s quotes are from a later and much more public text: a 1,800-word article published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944, in which the then-Vice President tried to define—and warn his readers against—what he called “American Fascism.” Why should we consider now, almost two decades into the twenty-first century, how these three men defined a political phenomenon they saw emerging around them in the 1930s and 40s? More to the point, why should middle- or high-school students care? Two years ago, on election night in November 2016, “fascism” was the most looked-up word on Merriam-Webster’s website. In that year’s overall ranking, it came in second. Since then, as we know, the concept has emerged with increasing urgency in public debate. In 2018, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—who in 1938 was forced to leave her native Prague in the wake of Nazi aggression—published her book Fascism: A Warning. In early 2017, the historian Timothy Snyder published On Tyranny, which, like Albright’s book, returns to the worst moments of twentieth-century history in search of lessons for the present. So what is fascism? And is it really making a comeback? Those who turned to the dictionary on election night found the following description: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime [End Page 9] (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” Definitions like these are useful, to be sure. Yet they are not necessarily productive from a pedagogical point of view. For young people today who want to learn about fascism, it’s one thing to read a dictionary or textbook definition—but it’s quite another to read first-hand how fascism was observed, experienced, and defined by people on the ground who translated their analysis of...
Read full abstract
Nov 11, 2024
Alba Iulia Catrinel Popescu 
Just Published
Open Access