Tag: facism

Peekskill Blues: Sounds of Fascism

1949 was the “last postwar year,” the year America came apart.

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Source:portside

Author: Jennifer Young

Emphasis Mine

The protesters gathered outside the concert grounds as evening fell. It had been a humid, hot day in Peekskill, New York, but as the afternoon waned, light breezes wafted in from the Hudson River. The crowd was waiting for Black folk singer and political activist Paul Robeson, who was scheduled to perform as the concert headliner at the picnic grounds that night. The protesters kept themselves occupied, waving American flags and singing patriotic songs. Some of them held signs that had been recently spotted around the neighborhood, reading “Wake up America, Peekskill did.”

But the mood changed rapidly as the sun sank. As would-be audience members drove up the road and attempted to enter the grounds to attend the concert, they found their path blocked by several large trucks and piles of rocks. Soon the traffic jam stretched for two miles. Those in the back of the line couldn’t tell what was going on. Tensions rose. Concert organizers assembled their own guard, forming three lines stretching across the road. They crossed their arms, stared their antagonists in the face, and waited. At 7:30, the violence began. Protestors broke off pieces of a nearby fence and swung them at the men facing them, screaming, “Kill the Niggers, kill the kikes, kill the Communists.”

“No one of you leaves here alive.”

A young Black girl just arriving on the scene with her parents looked up to see plumes of smoke rising from the hillside. A twelve-foot wooden cross burned brightly against the darkening sky.

Tommy Tomkins, a local white high schooler, only tagged along to the protest because his friend with a car wanted to go. He was seventeen, “the gung-ho age where John Wayne makes you feel happy.” He couldn’t see much when the violence broke out on the road. Men were standing around with bats and then suddenly, a voice yelled that somebody had been knifed. Everyone began pushing and punching. He watched his friends as they threw rocks into the crowd. He saw a group of men pull a nicely dressed woman from her car and punch her, over and over. He felt scared, excited, frightened, sick. The men surrounding him were in their thirties and forties, salesmen and clerks, men he saw every day. Some were college students home for the summer, and many were active in their local churches. The only way he could tell one group from another is that the guys he was with were the ones shouting, “Kikes! Go back to Russia!” Finally, he managed to slip away into the night, leaving his friends behind.

By ten o’clock, state police broke up the melee. Protestors melted back into the woods. Only twelve arrests were made, including several of Tommy Tomkins’s friends, who were proud of their newfound fame. A judge let them off with a warning.

*  *  *

Ku Klux Klan activity in Peekskill, just an hour north of New York City, was nothing new—local groups protested Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928, and every few years they organized a march against an assortment of perceived foes. But in 1949, Russians tested their first hydrogen bomb (N.B.: that was a fission, not a fusion(hydrogen) bomb in 1949) and Communist forces gained the upper hand in China. Anti-Communism became a great panic, a fever-dream in which enemies suddenly appeared in the guise of friends and neighbors. It wasn’t hard to hate and fear Communists, if you had already grown up hating and fearing Catholics and Jews and Blacks. But none of the concert organizers had imagined the kind of violence they would face. “Why should anyone make trouble?” asked writer Howard Fast, chairman of the concert, in the days leading up to the event. It wasn’t a political meeting or demonstration, just a summer picnic.

The concert’s main organizer, William Patterson, a prominent Black Communist and the executive secretary of the leftwing Civil Rights Congress, planned the event as a fundraiser and as a showcase for Robeson, his close colleague. But Robeson never made it to the concert grounds that day—stuck in the traffic jam caused by the roadblock, he returned to Manhattan amid rumors that he was being burned in effigy somewhere along the hillside.

Robeson had performed in Peekskill at benefit concerts for the Civil Rights Congress for the previous three years without incident. But veterans in the northeast began protesting Robeson earlier that summer, after the Associated Press reported the singer as saying, “It is unthinkable that American Negros would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations, against the Soviet Union, which in one generation has lifted our people to full human dignity.” Many chapters of the American Legion, and other veterans’ groups, immediately denounced Robeson as a Moscow-loving Communist, an un-American. Veterans of Foreign Wars picketed a Robeson concert in Newark, and the New Haven American Legion tried to ban his concerts there. The Peekskill Evening Star published Robeson’s comments days before the Peekskill concert, prompting several locals to pen letters to the editor, calling on concerned citizens to take action. “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out,” one writer declared.  “It is clear that fascism can be introduced gradually and almost imperceptibly.”

On August 30, thousands of people gathered in Harlem’s Golden Gate Ballroom to hear Robeson declare he would return to Peekskill to deliver his canceled concert. In response, veterans again announced that they would stop the event, pledging to bring 30,000 people to parade and demonstrate at the new concert venue, the Hollowbrook Country Club. At this, the local media and the District Attorney grew alarmed, and the DA pleaded with veterans’ groups to move their protest elsewhere. They refused.

On the afternoon of September 4, over 20,000 people arrived at the country club and took their seats on the lawn. African-American soprano Hope Foye stepped onto the stage and delivered the first half of the program, singing the art song repertoire of Bach, Verdi, and Mozart. Then Robeson, a towering figure with a resoundingly deep bass-baritone voice, took the stage. He began to sing a traditional African American spiritual. When Israel was in Egypt’s land … Let my people go … Oppress’d so hard they could not stand … Let my people go.

Up and down the hillside, thousands of men, most of them white, stood together in a human chain, encircling and protecting the concert and the singer. One guard could see down to the entrance of the Hollowbrook grounds at the far end of the field. At 1:30 p.m., as Robeson began the second half of his program, the guard heard the protestors’ parade begin. Though the protestors had promised to bring thirty thousand, the guard counted fewer than a thousand people, walking in single file to make the group seem bigger. About half an hour later the parade marched back into view from the other direction, this time attempting to make even more noise. “Hitler started it, we’ll finish you!” the marchers yelled. “Hitler killed only half the Jews, we’ll kill all the rest!” “You got in, but you’ll never get out!” The guard saw a policeman laugh.

As the concert ended, audience members trickled back to the parking lot to find that the bus drivers they had hired to drive them back to New York had disappeared. Men from the audience, many of them old-time labor activists from the Fur and Leather Workers Union and other radical unions, immediately climbed into the buses and offered to drive everyone home. As vehicles moved single-file down the narrow lane, police moved in and slowed the flow of traffic at the country club entrance. As cars inched past the police roadblock, drivers could see that the roads were lined with protestors, many wearing white World War I helmets. The police turned away from the protesters and stood facing the road, as baseball-sized rocks flew through the air, launched from protestors’ hands and aimed at car windows. Many hit their target. Men, women, and children were caught in a trap, huddling low in their cars as missiles hurtled through their windshields. One man sat in his battered car and picked shards of glass out of his young daughter’s hair.

Protestors began hunting down any Black people they could find, pulling them from their cars. One Black man was dragged from his car and hit over the head by several men. As he attempted to crawl underneath the car for protection, four state troopers stepped in to join the melee. The man crawled back down the road towards the concert grounds as the troopers continued to beat him.

The Westchester County Grand Jury ultimately indicted six people for their actions during the second riot. None faced serious consequences. In the meantime, Robeson launched a six-city concert tour, vowing he would not be silenced “until every Black man in America can walk with dignity in his own country.”

*  *  *

After that night on the road, Tommy Tomkins began to listen carefully to the things his mother said about Jews. She made it sound like Jews had taken something from them, and the riot was a way of trying to even the score. It made him uncomfortable, but he couldn’t find anyone to talk to about it. His house was full of lace doilies, but no books. The Peekskill riots turned him into a liberal, he said later. He decided, all of a sudden, to leave Peekskill, maybe go to college. He didn’t return home for class reunions.

Following the riots, accusations flew in all directions, and many commentators tried to reconstruct the causes of the violence. Some veterans admitted that they had not anticipated the intense currents of hatred that had surged through the crowds of protestors like an electrical fire. The ACLU’s investigative report blamed anti-Semitism as the chief cause of the riots, but the Civil Rights Congress demurred, suggesting that “the pogrom was more against Negroes than against Jews.” A writer for the New York Age, a Black newspaper, blamed whites on both sides of the divide, arguing that Black bodies were on the line whenever whites instigated violence. Communism, with all its promised panaceas, the columnist wrote, could not solve this fundamental problem.  Woody Guthrie remarked later that he’d seen a lot, but Peekskill was the worst.

The Westchester Grand Jury, convened to examine the causes of the riot, placed blame on Communists, concluding that men like Robeson and Patterson hoped to inflame racial tensions for their own political gain. The anti-Communist, Jewish intellectual-led journal Commentary reached similar conclusions. “Peekskill is an ordinary American community which has undergone rather extraordinary social strains,” they wrote. The authors argued that the riots did not erupt solely from prejudice, but also from a necessary defense reaction against the “totalitarian regime waging an undeclared war” against America. They also placed the blame for the riots on social upheaval, racial integration, and the influx of left-wing summer residents who had a destabilizing effect on the community.

Blaming Cold War fear-mongering on American elites, the socialist Monthly Review countered that the riots erupted because large swaths of the American public had been “worked up to a dangerous state of frenzy.” The Review’s editors declared that the real perpetrators of the violence in Peekskill were the federal government, the police, religious authorities, and the media. Ultimately, these authors believed, the violence at Peekskill demonstrated to those paying attention that the American ruling class need not trouble itself by assembling paramilitaries like the SS, because the instruments of power were already available for the taking. Institutions of social control, from the police, the media, veterans’ organizations, and local government, could be effectively harnessed as special instruments of violence and intimidation. “It is clear that fascism can be introduced gradually and almost imperceptibly,” they wrote. Fascism was imminently achievable in America, they believed, because the country lacked a strong labor movement and an outspoken liberal intellectual class that would strenuously defend the violation of civil liberties when they occurred against political and racial minorities.

*  *  *

The folksinger Woody Guthrie, who experienced the second riot from a smashed-up Jeep, remarked later that he’d seen a lot, but Peekskill was the worst. He holed up at home in the following weeks and churned out twenty-one songs about that night. Guthrie wrote obsessively, spanning musical genres from Carter Family country standards to Joe Hill protest ballads. Thematically, the songs all focused on the same material: burning crosses, stoning, and police violence. His moody, dark “Peekskill Blues” includes the lament, “P’liceman beatin’ down my buddy / I c’n see him in my dream / If you ev’r seen your buddy Kueklucked / You know just what I mean.” In his characteristically repetitive, circular style, Guthrie’s focus returned to rocks flying, and blood dripping on broken glass. In his telling, the bloodshed in Peekskill flowed into the Hudson River, so “New York waters gonna taste like Peekskill blood.” But Guthrie didn’t believe in passive resistance; he threatened to “grab you bloodyrock hoodlums, an’ I’ll sink you in that Hudson mud.” Throughout his Peekskill song cycle, Guthrie blasted the enthusiastic violence of small-town American men and women, the casual way they invoked Hitler, and the group mentality they cultivated that bred vicious hatred.

Born a year after the brutal lynching of a mother and son in his Oklahoma hometown, Guthrie came of age in an atmosphere of casual, unreflective racism. As a young man in 1930s California, Guthrie sang minstrel songs on his radio show until he received a “politely incandescent” letter from a young Black listener. The effect of this letter upon Guthrie was profound: he read the letter on air, publicly apologized, and promised he would never use the word “nigger” again. From Guthrie’s subject position as a “Dust Bowl refugee,” he slowly developed an empathy for the underdog that would characterize his later lyrics and activism. He began to examine the stories of other marginal and disenfranchised people in songs such as “When the Curfew Blows,” which described police harassment of migrants.

Fascism had always been creeping in around the edges of American politics, but now it had sprung up overnight in poisonous fluorescence, threatening the vitality of the entire landscape.

After World War II began, Guthrie joined the merchant marines. He grew angry at American hypocrisy, at segregated troops, and at the arbitrary cruelness of Jim Crow. In reaction, Guthrie began honing his own theory of fascism: “Anybody that hates a whole race or color or a whole nation or a whole continent of people is a Nazi and a fascist,” he declared. He believed that the American people needed to be on constant guard against the fascists and Nazis in their own country, not just overseas. To his alarm, these forces did not recede after the war. Guthrie worried that World War II had been fought for nothing: America retained its status quo.

In the late 1940s, Guthrie wrote a series of letters to his mother-in-law, the Yiddish poet Aliza Waitzman Greenblatt, in which he reflected on his sense of anguish that the forces of hate that brought the world into two massive wars could still endure. Guthrie worried that past generations made “sad and terrible mistakes” that the current generation could not undo. He wondered if his generation “did not do all in our earthly powers to set those wrong things right.” Borrowing from the language of the Jewish prayer Al Chet, the confession of sins recited eight times during Yom Kippur, the day of repentance, Guthrie composed his own pseudo-liturgical invocation. “We trusted wrong friends,” he wrote. “We followed wrong crowds. We read wrong words. We went lost ways and walked in the wrong winds. But we did fix up our rooms a little speck better than we found them. We found two faiths, two gospels, when we passed by this very spot, one gospel was the gospel of hate, and the other gospel was the gospel you call love … to the best of our mental ability, some of us in your generation and my own worked and labored to make the gospel of love sound out a little plainer.”

*  *  *

Peekskill didn’t change Guthrie’s vision, but it tinged it. For those on the left, men and women who had fought against fascism in Spain and then across all of Europe, homegrown fascism looked like a toxic bloom. It had always been creeping in around the edges of American politics, but now it had sprung up overnight in poisonous fluorescence, threatening the vitality of the entire landscape.

By the late 1940s, it was sickeningly clear that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a rough coalition of labor unions, Jews, African Americans, Catholics, and Southern Democrats, was finished. In 1948, FDR’s former vice president Henry Wallace ran a third party presidential campaign under the Progressive Party, advocating government-funded universal health insurance, full voting rights for African Americans, and an end to the Cold War. He received zero electoral votes, and eked out a popular vote tally behind that of segregationist Strom Thurmond.

1949 became symbolic of this vertiginous transition from the FDR years into a more fractured, chaotic era. Reflecting on 1949 from the relatively removed vantage point of 1974, playwright Arthur Miller wrote an essay for New York magazine entitled “The Year it Came Apart.” Miller applied a dramatist’s eye to the transformation of American society in the late 1940s. He called 1949 “the last postwar year,” arguing, “an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” In early 1949, Miller’s Death of a Salesman first appeared on Broadway. His audience that year came of age during the Depression, elected the same president four times, witnessed Pearl Harbor, and won a World War. They understood Willy Loman’s struggles intuitively. But Miller soon lost his sense of communion with the public—the “tender pity for the fallen man” that characterized initial responses to Death of a Salesman became “a new bellicosity” in the public sphere, characterized by the vicious takedown of the vulnerable for the sake of power harnessed to moral authority.

Psychoanalysis overtook Marxism, and suddenly everyone was searching for hidden meanings, Miller believed. “We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology called Spectral Evidence, the testimony of afflicted persons against their invisible, devil-sent persecutors,” he wrote. In 1952, veterans groups picketed the film version of Death of a Salesman, and pressured Miller to issue an anti-Communist declaration. In response, he wrote The Crucible, a story of the Salem witch trials.

On December 15, 1951, William Patterson and Paul Robeson delivered a petition to the United Nations, accusing the United States government of genocide. The document, hundreds of pages in length, censured state-sponsored racism, from police slayings in the North to lynchings in the South, and blasted “lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty, and disease.” The petition included an appendix listing hundreds of cases of the killing or assault of Black people since 1945. The American paradox was stated boldly for all to see: the ostensible guardian of democracy and freedom could not bequeath basic human rights to a portion of its own citizens. Largely ignored by the press and ridiculed by politicians, the petition nonetheless served future generations of Black activists, from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, as a record and a template for holding the state accountable for its crimes.

A year before the Peekskill riots, Guthrie wrote in his diary, “Fascism is the gospel of hate that makes so much noise. You’d think that the gospel of hate was more in our mainstream than down in our undertow. The yells of hate are not as loud as the soft little echo of love and democracy. This fascist hate will wax your ears and spike your eyes, and love and love alone can heal the dead.” For Guthrie, this soft little echo of love and democracy was the only thing that could stand up to the Goliath of homegrown fascism. For many Americans now, it is the only tool they have left.

“We trusted wrong friends…” Woody Guthrie, May 26th, 1949. Copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.
“Anybody that hates a whole race…” Woody Guthrie, June 14, 1949. Copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.
“Fascism is the gospel of hate…” Woody Guthrie, July 1948. Copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.
Excerpts from “Peekskill Blues,” by Woody Guthrie, Copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.

 

Jennifer Young is a Canadian writer, historian, and museum educator living in New York City. Her work has appeared on Time.com, Atlas Obscura, Orion, and Untapped Cities.

See: https://portside.org/print/2017-02-17/peekskill-blues-sounds-fascism

The Worst False Equivalencies of 2016

Attempts to find “balance” between Trumpism and wholly unrelated phenomena to its left were tone deaf.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Adam Johnson / FAIR

See: http://www.alternet.org/media/worst-false-equivalencies-2016?akid=14990.123424.cgKTTR&rd=1&src=newsletter1068658&t=4

Danger on the right

Donald Trump is a distraction from the fact that the mainstream media has pretended the GOP is a normal party with values just to the right.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Neal Gabler/Moyers and Co

Emphasis Mine

As incendiary and dangerous as he is—and he is very dangerous—and as much of a main event as he has been in this election season, Donald Trump is largely a distraction from what really ails our political discourse. Long after he is gone from the scene, the Republican Party that engendered him, facilitated him, and now supports him—despite a severe case of buyer’s remorse—will no doubt still thrive, booting up for a future candidacy of Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan. And the media will still act as if Trump were an aberration, a departure from so-called “sensible” conservatism. If so, it will be yet another act of media dereliction.

In fact, worse than dereliction, because the Republican Party, with its history of dog-whistle racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, and gun addiction, salted now by incipient fascism, has been legitimized by the mainstream media (MSM) for years. One could say that the GOP and MSM have operated in collusion to the great detriment of this country. One could say that and not even be a liberal, just a commonsensical American.

The MSM continue to treat the Republican Party as if it were just another constellation of ideology and policy—another way of governing the country, even though this campaign season, if not the last 30 years, should have disabused journalists of that notion. Today’s GOP is closer to a religious cult than a political institution. It operates on dogma, sees compromise as a moral failing, views enemies as pagans who must be vanquished, and considers every policy skirmish another Götterdämmerung.

That isn’t politics; it’s a modern version of the medieval Crusades, and as the ancient Crusades did to Europe, it has inflicted untold damage on our country. Because it is deep in the bones of the Republicans, it won’t end with Trump, who is a non-believer himself when it comes to conservative orthodoxy. It can only end with the extinction of the party itself as presently constituted—Cruz, Ryan, Rubio, McConnell, et al.—and the rise of a new conservative party, not a cult.

You won’t hear that in the MSM, in large part because, partisan organs like Fox News and MSNBC aside, it tries to maintain that deadly and deadening balance so often discussed and decried by media critics like me. This is a practice that requires a tit for every tat, so that blame can never be leveled against one party unless the media immediately level it against the other as well. Political equipoise, as it were.

Part of this is laziness. Part is fear. The press knows that if it were to come right out and criticize the GOP for its denial of climate change, its campaign to deny the LGBT community its civil rights, its efforts to strip food stamps from children and health insurance from the poor, its systematic attempts to suppress minority voters, its recent howl to protect the Second-Amendment rights of suspected terrorists while at the same time calling for greater surveillance of us all, there would be hell to pay from the right wing, which would invoke the mythical and dreaded “liberal media.” The historian and columnist Eric Alterman calls this “working the refs,” and the MSM fall for it every time.

But there is another reason why the MSM haven’t called out the Republican Party, despite its egregious behavior, and this one is especially relevant in this election: The media simply won’t discuss the Republican Party’s values, as values are the third rail of political journalism. You just don’t talk about values, because when you do so, you can’t fake balance. We all know that there is a big difference between Republicans and Democrats, and it isn’t just a matter of philosophy-cum-policy. It is a matter of what values underlie the parties’ philosophies. And, if I may be blunt, Republican values just aren’t very consistent with what most of us think when we think of good values.

So the GOP’s blatant contradictions, its hate disguised as individual rights and its disdain for the weakest among us, largely go unexamined. Indeed, our media state of affairs is so sad that it largely has fallen to comedians to be our primary truth tellers about what one of our two major parties really stands for—among them, Jon Stewart in his day, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee, whose recent broadcasts on Orlando and guns and on Republican racism have torn the so-called “principled ideological” veil off the GOP and exposed it for what it is: a cult of cranks.

By rousing the hatefulness within the GOP rank and file, Donald Trump has emboldened a few intrepid MSM journalists to rip off the veil, too—even journalists who treat Paul Ryan as if he were a first-rate intellect. Andrew Rosenthal, the departing editorial page editor atThe New York Times, wrote a blistering takedown of the GOP’s refusal to denounce Trump, and Times columnist and Iraq War apologist Thomas Friedman, the very definition of a cautious Big-Foot pundit who slavishly creates and follows the conventional wisdom, called for a reconstituted Republican Party on the basis of “moral bankruptcy.” It is a terrific column. Read it.

Of course, two larks don’t an exaltation make, and in any case, both Rosenthal and Friedman are primarily print journalists. Television news still has the longest national reach, and it will never call out the Republican Party no matter what it does, much less examine its values. Instead, we get endless horse-race coverage that turns the election into a long sporting event in which nothing seems to matter except who’s winning. We all know that now, and despite the yowls of protest, we also know that it is not likely to change. Political journalists are like sports writers, tracking a team’s game plans and checking the score—or, as we call it in politics, the polls.

But what we may fail to notice is that, with all its blather about what states are in play or whose field operation is better or which internecine battles presently engage the candidates’ staffs, this kind of coverage is not only a way to juice the political narrative; it’s also a way to avoid touching that third rail. So long as we are talking about strategy or who is winning, we don’t have to talk about policy (borrrrrrrring!!!) or about values.

Avoiding talking about values is one of the reasons we find ourselves in our current political situation. Doing so might have stopped the threat of Donald Trump. Thirty years ago, it might even have stopped the march of the current Republican Party; its values could have been exposed as indefensible, which could have shamed them (and us) into changing. There is a reason the Republicans contrived the slogan “compassionate conservatism.” It was because even they knew their compassion was dubious. It would have been nice to have the MSM examine that, though, of course, it would have required both the courage to buck the right-wing, who would howl, and the seriousness to discuss just how important values are in our politics. In some measure, because we never got that discussion, for three decades the GOP has gotten off scot-free.

Now the MSM routinely rebuke Trump, but that easy critique allows them not to have to rebuke the Republican Party itself, whose values, if not his often-changing policy pronouncements, are virtually identical with Trump’s, minus his oft-changing policy pronouncements. It is the politesse of a Paul Ryan that Trump lacks in expressing his hostility, and it is that politesse that has conned a gullible, frightened media.

When Trump’s candidacy first began taking hold, we were told in the media that Republicans had a Trump problem. As he rose to the top of the GOP presidential heap and rank-and-file Republicans supported him—because of his hateful rhetoric, and not in spite of it—we realized the Republicans had a Republican problem, though, again, the media dare not say it. Now that Trump is the party’s presumptive nominee and Republicans are falling into line just as conservatives did in Germany in 1933, we have come to a much graver realization: America has a Republican problem.

This isn’t about whom we elect as president. It goes much deeper. This is about who we want to be as a people. For three decades, the MSM have been collaborators with the GOP, pretending the cult is a normal party with values just to the right of center. The result is the proto-fascist Donald Trump and an institution that continues to legitimize what is worst in us.

Neal Gabler is the author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, and USA Today’s biography of the year. He is a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society.

See: http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/america-has-republican-problem-and-media-blame?akid=14377.123424.G1plnU&rd=1&src=newsletter1058867&t=8

When Fascism Was American

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Antisemitic Christian Mobilizers in New York in 1939.
Antisemitic Christian Mobilizers in New York in 1939.

Source: Portside

Author:Joe Allen/Jacobian

Emphasis Mine

(N.B.: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  George Santayana, The Life of Reason.)

The US hasn’t seen the stirrings of fascist mobilization since the late 1930s when mounting fascist victories in Europe galvanized its adherents in America, chief among them Father Charles Coughlin and his Christian Front. This history has something to offer us today.
Joe Allen
Jacobin

The open racism and xenophobia that have characterized Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and perhaps provided much of its appeal, has been alarming. For a growing number of people, Trump’s rhetoric is a sign of something deeper and more frightening: the growth of a fascist movement in the United States.

Ohio governor John Kasich — one of Trump’s many rivals for the Republican nomination — produced an anti-Trump video that paraphrases Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning about the Nazis.

For many other commentators, as well, the violence Trump supporters have directed at critics during campaign rallies, along with the candidate’s call for banning Muslims from the United States, are further confirmation that Trump is a Nazi. In the last Democratic presidential debate, former Maryland governor and presidential candidate Martin O’Malley denounced Trump as a “fascist demagogue.”

Yet, on too many of these occasions, the fascist label has been reduced to a vague term of abuse rather than a bridge to a real political analysis of the underlying political forces that could produce a fascist movement in the United States.

The US hasn’t seen the stirrings of fascist mobilization since the late 1930s when mounting fascist victories in Europe galvanized its adherents in America, chief among them Father Charles Coughlin and his Christian Front. This history has something to offer us today.

Our Father

By late 1938, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy had shifted the balance of forces among the world’s major powers, while fascist general Francisco Franco wrestled most of Spain from republican forces. The growing power of fascism was increasingly impacting civilian populations, particularly in Germany. According to historian Warren Grover:

That year [1938] Germany demonstrated to the world that it would move with impunity in Europe and violate Jews’ most basic rights: Jewish community organizations lost their official status and recognition (March); the registration of all Jewish property became compulsory (April); over 1,500 German Jews were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps (June); Jewish physicians could no longer treat Christians (June); Nazis ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue in Munich (July); All Jewish men were required to add “Israel” to their name and all Jewish women “Sarah” (August); Jews were barred from practicing law (September); German-Jewish passports were marked with the letter “J” for Jude (October); and finally Kristallnacht (November).

In the United States, the public and the press were virtually unanimous in condemning Kristallnacht, with one poll reporting that nearly 94 percent of Americans disapproved of Germany’s treatment of Jews.

Yet despite Nazism’s unpopularity, one voice took to the airwaves to defend these actions — Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest based in Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin was a popular radio personality with an audience of millions, largely concentrated in the northeastern United States, and in New York City in particular.

In a highly anticipated broadcast that took place eleven days after Kristallnacht, Coughlin began by posing three questions: “Why is there persecution in Germany today?”; “How can we destroy it?”; and why is “Nazism so hostile to Jewry?”

Coughlin presented a simple answer: Nazism was a “defense mechanism against Communism,” and that the “rising generation of Germans regard Communism as a product not of Russia, but of a group of Jews who dominated the destinies of Russia.”

In the broadcast Coughlin minimized the Nazi “fine” of $400 million on Germany’s Jewish community with the claim that “between these same years not $400 million but $40 billion . . . of Christian property was appropriated by the Lenins and Trotskys . . . by the atheistic Jews and Gentiles” and accused the New York investment bank Kuhn Loeb & Company with helping to finance the Russian revolution and other Communist plots.

Coughlin’s unapologetic Nazi propaganda inspired swift backlash. WMCA, the New York radio station that provided his largest audience, demanded to see his scripts in advance of any future broadcasts, and cancelled his program after he refused. Coughlin later admitted that he used “Nazi sources” in his broadcast.

Following the broadcast the New York Times’ Berlin correspondent reported that Coughlin had become “the new hero of Nazi Germany.” But Coughlin wasn’t only a hero in Berlin; thousands of American supporters responded enthusiastically to his calls for militant action against “atheistic communism.”

Coughlin began broadcasting from his Michigan church, “The Shrine of the Little Flower,” in 1926, when radio represented a novel, thrilling experience for millions of people. With his rich baritone voice, and slight Irish brogue which he employed for great theatrical effect, Coughlin was made for the new medium.

The 1929 Wall Street crash and the ensuing depression impoverished large parts of Coughlin’s working- and lower-middle-class audience. In the wake of the crisis his broadcasts changed from religious sermonizing to political commentary that began with violent attacks on communism. According to historian Alan Brinkley,

[Coughlin] continued to dwell upon his abhorrence of communism, socialism, and “kindred fallacious social and economic theories,” but [his broadcasts] also emphasized other concerns: Coughlin’s fear that the selfish practices of “predatory capitalism” would drive Americans to embrace these pernicious doctrines.

As Coughlin attacked the “banksters” he blamed for the Great Depression, his audience grew massive. By 1933, the network of radio stations that carried his broadcasts reached a potential listenership of forty million.

In November 1934, Coughlin announced that he would organize his followers into a new political organization, the National Union for Social Justice. He denied that it was a third party even though it bore the hallmarks of every traditional American political party, and was organized by congressional districts. Coughlin waited for the right issue to flex the muscles of his new formation and got it in January 1935 when Roosevelt proposed that the United States affiliate to the World Court. – See more at: http://portside.org/2016-01-02/when-fascism-was-american#sthash.ShNLQb0I.dpuf

He denied that it was a third party even though it bore the hallmarks of every traditional American political party, and was organized by congressional districts. Coughlin waited for the right issue to flex the muscles of his new formation and got it in January 1935 when Roosevelt proposed that the United States affiliate to the World Court.

No president since Woodrow Wilson — for fear of provoking an isolationist backlash — had proposed the US make itself accountable to an international institution. A largely symbolic act, it initially appeared that Roosevelt would win the Senate majority needed to ratify the treaty for affiliation.

Coughlin mobilized his forces along with other World Court opponents, including the mighty newspaper chain of arch-reactionary William Randolph Hearst. They overwhelmed Washington with hundreds of telegrams over one crucial weekend and defeated the treaty. A jubilant Coughlin declared that he intended to slay greater dragons. “Our next goal is to clean out the international bankers.”

The phrase “international bankers” was a euphamism for Jews and was widely used in those years by numerous public figures including auto magnate (and fellow Michigander) Henry Ford, who bankrolled the distribution of antisemitic propaganda through his newspaper the Dearborn Independent.

Coughlin made the leap from antisemitism to open fascism after his political ambitions were crushed in the 1936 election. Coughlin had merged his National Union of Social Justice with the remnants of the late Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth clubs, led by the antisemitic preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, and old-age pension activist Francis Townsend, in order to mount a third-party challenge to Roosevelt.

The Union Party nominated North Dakota congressman William Lemke for president. Roosevelt, however, had shifted dramatically to the left during the course of 1935. In the face of failing New Deal policies and a huge upsurge in labor struggle, the president signed into law historic legislation including the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, the popularity of which undercut any electoral challenge.

As Lemke’s campaign faltered, Coughlin grew increasingly agitated and vitriolic. “When an upstart dictator in the United States succeeds in making this a one-party form of government, then the ballot is useless,” he asserted to an audience of twenty-five thousand supporters in Providence, Rhode Island. Coughlin declared: “I shall have the courage to stand up and advocate the use of bullets” and promised “more bullet holes in the White House than you could count with an adding machine.”

Winning less than nine hundred thousand votes across the country, Lemke went down in crushing defeat while Roosevelt secured one of the biggest presidential landslides in US history. With the election over, Coughlin announced that he would retire from the airwaves. Despondent, he confided to a reporter, “Democracy is doomed. This is our last election . . . It is fascism or communism. We are at a crossroads.”

“What road do you take, Father Coughlin?” the reporter asked.

“I take the road of fascism,” the priest replied.

The Christian Front

In the estimation of biographer Donald Warren, “it would not be until 1938 that [Coughlin] truly was able to recover from defeat.” To an audience diminished but still numbering in the millions, he retook the airwaves emboldened by troubles for Roosevelt at home and the victories of fascism abroad. The short-lived economic recovery of the president’s first term had been wiped out by a dramatic downturn.

The “Roosevelt recession” brought mass unemployment and the forward march of the militant CIO was halted as factories and shipyards closed or laid off much of their workforces. Roosevelt’s bungled effort to pack the Supreme Court with his allies provided Dixiecrats and Republicans cover to sabotage and roll back the New Deal. Meanwhile in Europe, fascism advanced.

Starting in 1936, Coughlin augmented his radio presence with the newspaper Social Justice, sold on the streets of major cities especially in the Midwest and Northeast. As Warren notes, “throughout 1937 and into early 1938, Jewish financial control became a regular theme of Social Justice . . . [Coughlin] printed his own version of the very centerpiece of antisemitic literature at the time, the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Coughlin also attempted to make an alliance with Mussolini, offering the Italian dictator space in Social Justice to defend the racial policies of his government. (He got no reply.) In addition to their fascination with Mussolini, Coughlin and Social Justice were fixated on the Spanish Civil War and General Francisco Franco’s martial aura. They portrayed Franco as a hero defending “Christian civilization” from marauding communists.

The paper published lurid and false stories of Christians massacred by Republican forces, and baited American Jews for supporting the antifascist cause. Six months before Kristallnacht, he told his radio audience:

If every reader of Social Justice formed at once a platoon of 25 or more persons dedicated to opposing Communism in all its forms, a Christian Front of 25,000,000 Americans would already be in action.

Coughlin claimed he was inspired to call for a “Christian Front” by the Communist Party’s support for a Popular Front against fascism, but the call also evoked the “front line” of a war and his use of “platoon” left little room for interpretation. “Rest assured,” he threatened his left-wing enemies in a later radio address, “we will fight you in Franco’s way, if necessary . . . rest assured we will fight you and we will win.”

Following Kristallnacht and the public reaction to Coughlin’s commentary on Nazism, WMCA cancelled his broadcasts. In response, according to Donald Flamm, the owner of the Manhattan station, “several thousand people encircled the block where our studios are located, denounced the WMCA as un-American, and shouted its slogan of ‘Don’t buy from Jews,’ ‘Down with Jews,’ etc.” A memorandum of the American Jewish Council recorded “remarks uttered by the picketers . . . more explicit than the legends on the signs”:

Send refugees to Russia where they can be appreciated!

This is a Christian country. Who isn’t Christian throw them out!

Wait until Hitler comes over here.

Down with Jewish war-mongers.

Heil Hitler!

Determined to punish WMCA, the Christian Fronters demonstrated outside the station weekend after weekend. In an autobiography written two decades later, Wechsler recalled,

The Christian Front hysteria reached its peak in midsummer [1939]. There was a genuine fear that a fascist movement had finally taken root in New York, and that its counterpoint was developing in other areas under the stimulus of Coughlin’s weekly sermons.

The journalist estimated that the Christian Front held thirty rallies a week throughout all of the city’s boroughs, and attracted crowds as large as two thousand supporters. Jewish storeowners in Brooklyn and the Bronx faced regular Christian Front pickets.

Gene Fein, a historian of Christian Front, notes that a typical street meeting began with the proclamation, “For Christ and Country, I open this meeting in the name of the Christian Front! The leader of the Christian Front is Jesus Christ.” Queens Christian Front leader Daniel Kurz held regular public meetings in which he would address crowds with a paranoid mix of anticommunism, antisemitism, and xenophobia.

According to Fein, Kurz denounced the Russian revolution as a plot by Jews that slaughtered “thirty million Christians,” and proclaimed an immediate mortal danger posed by Trotsky in Mexico, where he said the Russian revolutionary was building a secret army, ready to join American comrades and launch a communist revolution while the military was tied up in Europe.

The Christian Front also issued a “Christian index” listing preferred shopkeepers and stores, and street sales of Social Justice by Christian Front members provided an easy excuse to provoke fights or heckle anyone who “looked Jewish.”

The heavily Irish New York Police Department and judiciary provided a supportive backdrop, going easy on Christian Fronters while leaning hard on antifascists. A rally of the Transport Workers Union — led by Mike Quill, the most high profile Irish Communist union official in New York — was attacked and nearly broken up by rightist mobs.

In August 1939, the hysteria spurred by fascist violence in New York reached its height as the Christian Mobilizers, an even more violent splinter of the Christian Front, took to the streets. Harper’s journalist Dale Kramer reported that New York police recorded the Mobilizers holding fifty meetings a week in that month alone, drawing a total audience of more than twenty thousand.

Not to be outdone, the Christian Front called for an August 19 “Manifestation of Christianity” — a march from Columbus Circle to Union Square, well-known as the home of the Communist Party’s national headquarters and many of the city’s most prominent unions. “I was convinced that the so-called parade,” reported John Roy Carlson, who gained fame with his exposé Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, “would serve as the pretext for another bloody riot.”

Coughlin diassociated himself from the demonstration only after intense political pressure was brought to bear from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and Mayor La Guardia’s office.

Despite spectacular street violence and the Christian Front’s remarkable degree of organization, observers were divided on the meaning of the growing movement. James Wechsler cautioned at the time that “a picture of sustained terrorism blanketing the city would be a wrong one,” and that “the Coughlin movement is still a ‘fringe’ affair; whatever mass sympathy it has evoked is of a passive sort, largely confined to the Catholic Church.”

For a variety of reasons, including the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the growing threat of a European-wide war, the fascist threat began to subside after the terrible summer of 1939. But the period provides a vivid image of how a powerful, organized fascist movement could emerge in the United States.

Past and Present

There is much to distinguish Coughlin’s United States from Donald Trump’s today. The country is substantively more diverse than it was seventy-five years ago and the traumatic memory of the Holocaust still renders the open embrace of fascism a ticket to the margins of society.

Nevertheless, three decades of inequality and austerity have impoverished large sections of the American working class — along with declining US political prestige, bloody military adventures, and pervasive outrage at corruption in mainstream politics — have made a growing number of Americans more receptive to xenophobic and racist appeals that give voice to the powerlessness they feel in the face of hardship.

Trump has tapped into this anger and sense of powerlessness brilliantly. But is Trump a fascist whose real politics are being revealed drip by drip? Perhaps. His incendiary speeches have certainly drawn comparisons with infamous demagogues of the American past, including Coughlin. But more pressing than the question of which ideological label most precisely applies to Trump is the larger political force he heralds.

Many liberals and Democratic Party strategists are overjoyed at the light in which Trump’s popularity has cast Republican presidential ambitions, and media speculation has focused heavily on his personal beliefs.

The Left should avoid this lazy politics and focus both on the economic and political conditions that have created a massive and growing constituency that enthusiastically supports Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic worldview, and the potential emergence of a strong far-right movement independent of Trump. “We have been awakened,” a far-right activist recently told New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos.

The past shows that the US is not immune to fascism. We must take the current far-right upsurge seriously and use every tool at our disposal to destroy it.

Joe Allen’s latest book is People Wasn’t Made to Burn: A True Story of Race, Murder, and Justice in Chicago.

Jacobin relies on your generous support and subscriptions to keep publishing.

see:http://portside.org/2016-01-02/when-fascism-was-american

Chilling New Poll Finds GOP Fascism Is Very Real

A shocking number of Republicans say they can conceive of a situation in which they’d sympathize with a military coup.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Heather Digby Parton

Emphasis Mine

Last week, as the nation observed the anniversary of 9/11, one could not help but look back at that time and contemplate the reaction by our fellow citizens and foreign nations. Rick Perlstein wrote a very poignant piece a couple of years back about the solidarity that horrible day inspired among all Americans and people around the world — and how it was lost.

Perlstein describes how bills such as the vote to authorize war and the Patriot Act passed nearly unanimously and without debate, which he says happened because in that moment of oneness,”it seemed unimaginable that this extraordinary grant of executive power could possibly be abused.” The man who should have been president, Al Gore, famously said, “George W. Bush is my commander in chief.”

Lefties from Ellen Willis to Barbra Streisand immediately fell into line and supported the president unequivocally. Bush memorably put this new sense of trust and good will into words when he addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, and asked the American people to pull together for the sake of the nation as a whole. He also admonished them to be decent to the people of Middle Eastern descent who lived among us.

“I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We’re in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

Here is the notoriously fractious Congress all gathered together on 9/11 to sing God Bless America on the Capitol steps.

Sadly, as Perlstein pointed out, it didn’t take long for all of that solidarity to fall apart. One year later, conservative pundit Peggy Noonan was writing:

“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt. And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.”

Noonan went on to condemn the “young Muslim males” — medical students — who inspired the column as bigots for failing to properly soothe a hysterical woman who panicked to see them eating dinner in a Georgia restaurant. (Jeb Bush, by the way, called the woman to congratulate her for her sharp observation.)

Anyone who was in America during that period also remembers the intense patriotic fervor exemplified by the anthem of the era, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (the Angry American)”:

Hey Uncle Sam
Put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty Started shakin’ her fist
And the eagle will fly
Man, it’s gonna be hell
When you hear Mother Freedom Start ringin’ her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Brought to you Courtesy of the Red White and Blue
Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way

As the Dixie Chicks found out, anyone who didn’t agree could expect to be met with a furious reaction from conservatives who enforced the new patriotism with near religious fervor. And their love of country was not confined to the military. When president George W. Bush donned a Navy flight suit and landed on an aircraft carrier in a fighter jet to (prematurely) declare victory in Iraq, the right wing went into a major collective swoon. You could even buy a bronze bust of George W. Bush wearing the jumpsuit that was advertised with this stirring sales pitch:

“President Bush is a Leader who has the courage to lead. It is political courage. It is not poll driven it is conviction driven. It is consistent and does not change because of pressure or threats of political survival. It is reconfirmed every day. It differs from combat courage in that it is thought oriented not reaction oriented. Combat courage does not necessarily translate into political courage. Combat courage is admirable and you only know if you have it when you are in combat. President Bush has demonstrated that he has political courage and this is why he was re-elected. By owning a bust of President Bush, Commander in Chief you will be making a statement and in a politically charged environment, it takes courage.”

In those days, Republicans believed that government and military leaders were heroic protectors of all we hold dear. But even as kitschy as Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” performance was, and as overweening as the GOP’s patriotic love of men in uniform, that statement above is a remarkable validation of the American dedication to the concept of civilian control of the military. He might have been wearing a fake uniform (he liked to do that) but they acknowledged and respected him for his political leadership.

Something seems to have changed their minds. According to this new YouGov poll, these same patriotic Republicans still love the military passionately but are no longer attached to that moldy old concept of civilian control:

“Republicans (43%) are more than twice as likely as Democrats (20%) to say that they could conceive of a situation in which they would support a military coup in the United States.”

More to the point, only 32 percent of Republicans state unequivocally that they would not conceive of a situation in which they would support a military coup. One would be tempted to think this is simply a matter of partisanship, but there is no evidence that Democrats have ever entertained the notion of a military coup, no matter who was president, even one as widely loathed as George W. Bush. It’s as “un-American” as it gets.

For years the right has accused the opposition of being unpatriotic and failing to properly love America. And here they are, endorsing something that’s only seen in Banana Republics and totalitarian police states.

But there is some good news in all this. It’s likely that as soon as they get a president they like, they will once again discover that the Constitution is sacrosanct and the president is worthy once again to be the Commander in Chief. For instance, the latest Washington Post poll shows that they are not so cynical that they cannot imagine anyone having the qualities that are required for such a job:

1) Republicans say by 64-35 that Trump is “qualified to serve as president.”

2) Republicans say by 60-35 that Trump is “honest and trustworthy.”

3) Republicans say by 53-45 that Trump understands the problems of people like them.

4) Republicans say by 54-42 that Trump “has the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president.”

So we can all rest easy. As long as a qualified leader like Donald Trump is in charge they are unlikely to support something as radical as a military coup. But Barack Obama has clearly worn on their last nerve. And you don’t even want to think about what will happen if Hillary Clinton becomes Commander in Chief. One can easily imagine them calling for this coup and telling themselves “it’s the American way.”

For these folks the American way is whatever they want it to be including, apparently, a military dictatorship.

 

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

See: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/chilling-new-poll-finds-gop-fascism-very-real?akid=13479.123424.9YvtrN&rd=1&src=newsletter1042471&t=6