Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
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55. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to U.S. Congress, Jan. 3, 1936, quoted in James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 17.
56. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 340.
57. William A. Schambra, "The Quest for Community, and the Quest for a New Public Philosophy," paper presented at the American Enterprise Institute's Public Policy Week, Washington, D.C., Dec. 5-8, 1983, quoted in Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 51; text of President Roosevelt's Speech to His Neighbors, New York Times, Aug. 27, 1933, p. 28.
58. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, p. 186.
59. Ibid., p. 37. Emphasis mine.
5. THE 1960s: FASCISM TAKES TO THE STREETS
1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 315.
2. Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 172. I am aware that responsibility for the Reichstag fire is a subject of considerable debate among historians. But the Nazis did not care who was actually responsible for the fire. Rather, they exploited the fire for their own purposes. Some of the Black Nationalists at Cornell surely believed the cross was burned by white racists, but the leadership knew this was not the case and seized on the opportunity.
3. Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 478.
4. John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), p. 75.
5. Ibid.
6. Miriam Beard, "The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany," New York Times, June 7, 1931.
7. Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (New York: Da Capo, 1995), p. 306.
8. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 200.
9. Walter Schultze, "The Nature of Academic Freedom," in Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, ed. George L. Mosse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 316.
10. Downs, Cornell '69, p. 9; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "'New Order' at Cornell and the Academic Future," Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1969, p. C11.
11. Walter Berns, "The Assault on the Universities: Then and Now," in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 158-59.
12. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 339.
13. Paul Farhi, "Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s," Washington Post, Dec. 28, 2003, p. A05.
14. Kerry denies attending the session when the issue was debated. Some claim he was there but voted against the idea. Nobody credibly alleges that he supported such a policy.
15. Farhi, "Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s," p. A05.
16. Richard J. Ellis, "Romancing the Oppressed: The New Left and the Left Out," Review of Politics 58, no. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 109-10; James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 30-31; Tom Hayden, "Letter to the New (Young) Left," in The New Student Left: An Anthology, ed. Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, rev. and expanded ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 5-6. The article originally appeared in the Activist (Winter 1961).
17. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 159.
18. Peggy Kamuf, an American translator of many of Derrida's books, recalls that reading his work in 1970, while a graduate student at Yale, offered a way of finding solidarity with radicals in the streets. Deconstruction, she said, offered a way to do academic work while maintaining "that urgency of response to the abuses of power" that fed political engagement. In short, it let radical academics keep their jobs while turning the universities into incubators for radicalism. Quoted in Scott McLemee, "Derrida, a Pioneer of Literary Theory, Dies," Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 22, 2004, p. A1, chronicle.com/free/v51/i09/09a00101.htm (accessed Jan. 4, 2007).
19. Downs, Cornell '69, p. 232. See also "The Agony of Cornell," Time, May 2, 1969; Homer Bigart, "Cornell Faculty Reverses Itself on Negroes," New York Times, April 24, 1969. The trauma over the climate of betrayal and bitterness Rossiter both endured and fostered--academic, professional, and personal--doubtless contributed to his tragic decision to kill himself the following year. Caleb Rossiter, Clinton's son, discounts this view in two vivid chapters in his autobiography. However, it is difficult to read his account without concluding that the stress of these events--particularly the extreme radicalism of his own sons--played some role.
20. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 6.
21. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 6-7.
22. The relationship between Pragmatism and conservatism is a bit more complicated. William James was a great American philosopher, and there is much in his work that conservatives admire. And if by Pragmatism you simply mean realism or practicality, then there are a great many conservative pragmatists. But if by Pragmatism one means the constellation of theories swirling among the progressives or the work of John Dewey, then conservatives have been at the forefront of a century-long critique of Pragmatism. However, it should be said that both James and Dewey are thoroughly American philosophers whose influence in a wide range of matters defies neat categorization along the left-right axis.
23. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 60.
24. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 311.
25. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 16, 17; R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 39.
26. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 61; Beard, "The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany."
27. See Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 169. The SDS itself started as an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, an anti-communist socialist organization briefly headed by John Dewey. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 232.
28. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 337.
29. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 56.
30. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 283.
31. The Port Huron Statement, in Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 61; Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Avalon, 2005), pp. 97, 52; Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, pp. 229, 233.
32. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 101; Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 173, 174. See also W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 8; Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Holt, 1994), pp. 117-18, 427; Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 196-97.
33. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 107; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 291.
34. Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, p. 235. See also Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 300-5.
35. Walter Laqueur, "Reflections on Youth Movements," Commentary, June 1969.
36. Jay W. Baird, "Goebbels, Horst Wessel, and the Myth of Resurrection and Return," Journa
l of Contemporary History 17, no. 4 (Oct. 1982), p. 636.
37. Ibid., pp. 642-43.
38. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 102.
39. Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 359-60; Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Collier, 1989), p. 247; Henry Raymont, "Violence as a Weapon of Dissent Is Debated at Forum in 'Village' Moderation Criticized," New York Times, Dec. 17, 1967, p. 16; Tom Hayden, "Two, Three, Many Columbias," Ramparts, June 15, 1968, p. 40, in America in the Sixties--Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), pp. 231-33. See also Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 292.
40. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, p. 310; Jeff Lyon, "The World Is Still Watching after the 1968 Democratic Convention, Nothing in Chicago Was Quite the Same Again," Chicago Tribune Magazine, July 24, 1988. See also James W. Ely Jr., "The Chicago Conspiracy Case," in American Political Trials, ed. Michael R. Belknap (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), p. 248; Tom Hayden, Rebellion and Repression (New York: World, 1969), p. 15. For the recollections of the defendants and defense attorneys, see "Lessons of the '60s," American Bar Association Journal 73 (May 1987), pp. 32-38.
41. Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 243.
42. Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 399, 401.
43. Ibid., pp. 399, 400. This account, as well as many of the accounts in this chapter, is derived from ibid. as well as Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets.
44. Gitlin, Sixties, p. 399. Dohrn spent a decade in hiding after her involvement in the "Days of Rage" assault on Chicago, where she now works as the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. In 1993 she told the New York Times, "I was shocked at the anger toward me." She blamed part of the reaction to sexism--because she refused to behave like a "good girl." Susan Chira, "At Home With: Bernardine Dohrn; Same Passion, New Tactics," New York Times, Nov. 18, 1993, sec. C, p. 1.
45. The Nazis were pranksters of a sort as well. When All Quiet on the Western Front opened in Germany, Goebbels bought up huge numbers of tickets, ordering his storm troopers to heckle the movie and then release hundreds of white mice into the theater.
46. Abbie Hoffman, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), p. 62; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, pp. 285-86; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 324.
47. Richard Jensen, "Futurism and Fascism," History Today 45, no. 11 (Nov. 1995), pp. 35-41.
48. Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. 62.
49. Gold believed that an "agency of the people" would have to take over the United States once imperialism had been dismantled. When someone said his idea sounded like a John Bircher's worst dream, Gold replied, "Well, if it will take fascism, we'll have to have fascism." Gitlin, Sixties, p. 399.
50. I vote for the Democratic Party
They want the UN to be strong
I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts,
He sure gets me singing those songs.
And I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come along.
So love me, love me, love me--
I'm a liberal.
(Gitlin, Sixties, p. 183.)
51. Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 120-21.
52. Ibid., p. 21.
53. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, p. 17.
54. Jay Nordlinger, "Che Chic," National Review, Dec. 31, 2004, p. 28.
55. Paul Berman, "The Cult of Che," Slate, Sept. 24, 2004, www.slate.com/id/2107100/ (accessed March 15, 2007); Nordlinger, "Che Chic," p. 28.
56. Lumumba, contrary to what I was taught in school, was assassinated not by the CIA but by opposing Congolese forces in a nasty civil war (though the CIA did have a plan in the works to get rid of him). He was handed over to his enemies by his former handpicked chief of staff Mobutu Sese Seko, who eventually took over the country and became a fascistic dictator whose ruthlessness didn't dissaude the American left, particularly the black left, from making him into a Pan-African hero.
57. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), p. 22; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 344.
58. When the black fascisti took over Straight Hall, one desperate parent called campus security. The first question the security dispatcher asked the man was whether the perpetrators were white or black. When the father responded they were black, "I was told that there was nothing that could be done for us." Regarding black students and SAT scores, Thomas Sowell writes: "Most of the black students admitted to Cornell had SAT scores above the national average--but far below the averages of other Cornell students. They were in trouble because they were at Cornell--and, later, Cornell would also be in trouble because they were there...[S]ome academically able black applicants for admission were known to have been turned away, while those who fit the stereotype being sought were admitted with lower qualifications." See Thomas Sowell, "The Day Cornell Died," Weekly Standard, May 3, 1999, p. 31. Also see Berns, "Assault on the Universities."
59. Michael T. Kaufman, "Stokely Carmichael, Rights Leader Who Coined 'Black Power,' Dies at 57," New York Times, Nov. 16, 1998.
60. D'Souza, End of Racism, pp. 398-99. See also W. E. B. DuBois, "Back to Africa," Century, Feb. 1923, cited by John Henrik Clarke, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 101, 117, 134; John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 132-34. Today, much like in the 1960s, Black Nationalist groups, journals, and "intellectuals" frequently find common cause with white supremacists. The Third World Press, run by the Black Nationalist Haki Madhubuti, typically bars white authors but makes allowances for such anti-Semitic scribblers as Michael Bradley, whose theories about the Jews are perfectly consistent with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
61. For the Forman quotation, see Nina J. Easton, "America the Enemy," Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 18, 1995, p. 8. Chavis was released after the governor of North Carolina caved to international pressure--including from the Soviet Union--alleging an unfair trial.
62. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, p. 7.
63. Morris L. Fried, "The Struggle Is the Message: The Organization and Ideology of the Anti-war Movement, by Irving Louis Horowitz," Contemporary Sociology 1, no. 2 (March 1972), pp. 122-23, citing Irving Louis Horowitz, The Struggle Is the Message: The Organization and Ideology of the Anti-war Movement (Berkeley, Calif.: Glendessary, 1970), pp. 122-23.
64. Seymour Martin Lipset, Rebellion in the University (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 115; Robert Soucy, "French Fascist Intellectuals in the 1930s: An Old New Left?" French Historical Studies (Spring 1974).
6. FROM KENNEDY'S MYTH TO JOHNSON'S DREAM: LIBERAL FASCISM AND THE CULT OF THE STATE
1. Max Holland, "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination," Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (June 1994), pp. 192-93; "Chapter II--or Finis?" Time, Dec. 30, 1966; Philip Chalk, "Wrong from the Beginning," Weekly Standard, March 14, 2005; Mimi Swartz, "Them's Fightin' Words," Texas Monthly, July 2004.
2. "Pope Paul Warns That Hate and Evil Imperil Civil Order," New York Times, Nov. 25, 1963, p. 1; Wayne King, "Dallas Still Wondering: Did It Help Pull the Trigger?" New York Times, Nov. 22, 1983, p. A24. The "city of hate" designation remains one of the more bizarre episodes in American mass psychology. It seemed to be pegged largely to the rough treatment LBJ got in his home state from some protesting Republican women during the 1960 election, as well as an anti-UN protest in 1963 that resulted in Adlai Stevenson--then the U.S. ambassador to the UN--getting bonked on the head with an anti-UN placard.
3. Warren Commission, The Warren Commission Report: Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), p. 416.
4. On MacBird, see Arthur Herman, Joseph Mc
Carthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 13. Kennedy requested $52.3 billion in military spending plus an additional $1.2 billion for the space program--which he indisputably saw as a defense-related investment--out of a total budget of $106.8 billion. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Shapes Our World (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 267; Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 140.
5. Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (Roseville, Calif.: Prima, 2001), p. 23; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 136-37. Kennedy's reaction to the Freedom Rides in the spring of 1961 was hardly unequivocal. He did the right thing by offering federal resources to stem the violence, but he was privately furious with the Congress of Racial Equality for creating strife while he was trying to focus on the Vienna summit with Khrushchev. "Can't you get your friends off those goddamned buses?" he implored Harris Wofford, his civil rights adviser. "Stop them," he pleaded. He and Bobby also fought hard to prevent Martin Luther King's March on Washington. When they failed, they worked closely with civil rights leaders to spin the message of the famous rally in the administration's favor. What became the 1964 Civil Rights Act was hopelessly bogged down in Congress when Kennedy was murdered, and it's unlikely that he would have pressed for its passage in his reelection campaign.
6. The Camelot appellation hangs on some fairly fragile hooks. Jackie Kennedy recalled that her husband liked the soundtrack to the popular Broadway musical Camelot, which had opened a month after Kennedy's election. Theodore White, a Kennedy chronicler, convinced Life magazine to run with the idea. The musical's tagline, "for that brief shining moment," became an overnight cliche to describe Kennedy's "thousand days," itself a clever bit of wordplay designed to make the Kennedy moment seem all the more precious and fleeting. See also James Reston, "What Was Killed Was Not Only the President but the Promise," New York Times Magazine, Nov. 15, 1964, p. SM24.