Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

3

Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism

IT CAN'T HAPPEN here."

Any discussion of American fascism must get around this mossiest of political cliches. Most often used by leftists, it is typically also used sarcastically, as in: "George Bush is a crypto-Nazi racist stooge of the big corporations pursuing imperialist wars on the Third World to please his oil-soaked paymasters, but — yeah, right — 'it can't happen here'" (though Joe Conason in typically humorless fashion has titled his latest book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush).

The phrase, of course, comes from Sinclair Lewis's propagandistic novel of 1935. It Can't Happen Here tells the story of a fascist takeover of America, and it is, by general agreement, a terrible read, full of cartoonish characters, purple prose, and long canned speeches reminiscent of Soviet theater. But it wasn't seen that way when it was released. The New Yorker, for example, hailed it as "one of the most important books ever produced in this country...It is so crucial, so passionate, so honest, so vital that only dogmatists, schismatics, and reactionaries will care to pick flaws in it."¹

The hero of the dystopian tale is the Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup, who describes himself as an "indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal."² The villain, Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, is a charismatic blowhard — modeled on Senator Huey Long — who is elected president in 1936. The plot is complicated, with fascist factions staging coups against an already fascist government, but the basic gist should be very appealing to liberals. A good Vermont liberal (a very different thing, however, from a Howard Dean liberal today), Jessup stages an underground insurrection, loses, flees to Canada, and is about to launch a big counterattack when the book ends.

The title derives from a prediction made by Jessup shortly before the fateful election. Jessup warns a friend that a Windrip victory will bring a "real Fascist dictatorship."

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" replies his friend. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen...[I]t just can't happen here in America."

"The hell it can't," Jessup replies. And he is soon proven right.

The phrase and the phobia captured by It Can't Happen Here have been with us ever since. Most recently, Philip Roth's Plot Against America offered a better-written version of a similar scenario in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. But Roth's was just the latest in a long line of books and films that have played on this theme. Hollywood has been particularly keen on the idea that we must be eternally vigilant about the fascist beast lurking in the swamps of the political right.

The irony, of course, is that it did happen here, and Lewis virtually admits as much. In the same scene Jessup unleashes a gassy tirade about how America is ripe for a fascist takeover. His argument hinges on what happened in America during and immediately after World War I:

Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical — yes, or more obsequious! — than America...Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut "Liberty cabbage" and somebody actually proposed calling German measles "Liberty measles"? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!...Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares...Prohibition — shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor — no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!³

Lewis undersold his case. The period of liberty cabbage, wartime censorship, and propaganda wasn't an example of how America might someday be ripe for fascism. It was an example of how America had actually endured a fascistic dictatorship. If the events that transpired during and immediately after World War I occurred today in any Western nation, few educated people would fail to recognize it for what it was. Indeed, a great many educated people have convinced themselves that America under George W. Bush has nearly become "a thinly veiled military dictatorship," in the words of the writer Andrew Sullivan. The liberty cabbage, the state-sanctioned brutality, the stifling of dissent, the loyalty oaths and enemies lists — all of these things not only happened in America but happened at the hands of liberals. Self-described progressives — as well as the majority of American socialists — were at the forefront of the push for a truly totalitarian state. They applauded every crackdown and questioned the patriotism, intelligence, and decency of every pacifist and classically liberal dissenter.

Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept where every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole. The militarization of society and politics was considered simply the best available means toward this end. Call it what you like — progressivism, fascism, communism, or totalitarianism — the first true enterprise of this kind was established not in Russia or Italy or Germany but in the United States, and Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century's first fascist dictator.

This claim may sound outrageous on its face, but consider the evidence. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in a few years under Wilson than under Mussolini during the entire 1920s. Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve. Wilson created a better and more effective propaganda ministry than Mussolini ever had. In the 1920s Mussolini's critics harangued him — rightly — for using his semiofficial Fascisti to bully the opposition and for his harassment of the press. Just a few years earlier, Wilson had unleashed literally hundreds of thousands of badge-carrying goons on the American people and prosecuted a vicious campaign against the press that would have made Mussolini envious.

Wilson didn't act alone. Like Mussolini and Hitler, he had an activist ideological movement at his disposal. In Italy they were called Fascists. In Germany they were called National Socialists. In America we called them progressives.

The progressives were the real social Darwinists as we think of the term today — though they reserved the term for their enemies (see Chapter 7). They believed in eugenics. They were imperialists. They were convinced that the state could, through planning and pressure, create a pure race, a society of new men. They were openly and proudly hostile to individualism. Religion was a political tool, while politics was the true religion. The progressives viewed the traditional system of constitutional checks and balances as an outdated impediment to progress because such horse-and-buggy institutions were a barrier to their own ambitions. Dogmatic attachment to constitutions, democratic practices, and antiquated laws was the enemy of progress for fascists and progressives alike. Indeed, fascists and progressives shared the same intellectual heroes and quoted the same philosophers.

Today, liberals remember the progressives as do-gooders who cleaned up the food supply and agitated for a more generous social welfare state and better working conditions. Fine, the progressives did that. But so did the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. And they did it for the same reasons and in loyalty to roughly the same principles.

Historically, fascism is the product of democracy gone mad. In America we've chosen not to discuss the madness our Republic endured at Wilson's hands — even though we live with the consequences of it to this day. Like a family that pretends the father never drank too much and the mother never had a nervous breakdown, we've moved on as if it were all a bad dream we don't really remember, even as we carry around the baggage of that dysfunction to this day. The motivation for this selective amnesia is equal parts shame, laziness, and ideology. In a society where Joe McCarthy must be the greatest devil of American history, it would not be convenient to mention that the George Washington of modern liberalism was the far greater inquisitor and that the other founding fathers of American liberalism were far crueler jingoists and warmongers than modern conservatives have ever been.

THE IDEALISM OF POWER WORSHIP

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856, and his first memory was of hearing the terrible news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president and that war was inevitable. The Wilsons were northern transplants from Ohio who lived in Georgia and South Carolina, but they quickly acclimated to southern ways. Joseph Wilson, a Presbyterian minister, served as a chaplain to Confederate troops and volunteered his church as a military hospital. Young Woodrow was a frail boy with terrible dyslexia who was mostly homeschooled and didn't learn how to read until the age of ten. Even after, study always required intense concentration. That he made a career as a prominent academic, let alone president of the United States, is a testament to his extraordinary patience, willpower, and ambition. But it all came at a terrible cost. He had virtually no close friends for most of his adult life, and he suffered from terrible stomach problems, including persistent constipation, nausea, and heartburn.

There's no disputing that a big part of Wilson's appeal, then and now, stemmed from the fact that he was the first Ph.D. to serve in the Oval Office. Of course, the White House was no stranger to great minds and great scholars. But Wilson was the first professional academic at a time when the professionalization of social science was considered a cornerstone of human progress. He was both a practitioner and a priest of the cult of expertise — the notion that human society was just another facet of the natural world and could be mastered by the application of the scientific method. A onetime president of the American Political Science Association, Wilson himself is widely credited with having launched the academic study of public administration, a fancy term for how to modernize and professionalize the state according to one's own personal biases.

Wilson started his academic career at Davidson College, but he was homesick and left before the end of his first year. In 1875, after another year of homeschooling from his father, he tried again. This time he enrolled at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, to study politics and history. Wilson liked his new environment, in part because of the high number of southern Presbyterians, and he excelled there. He launched the Liberal Debating Society and served as editor of the school newspaper and secretary of the football association. Not surprisingly, the young Wilson got a taste for politics as he gained self-confidence and learned to like the sound of his own voice.

After graduating from Princeton, he enrolled at the University of Virginia to study law in hopes of one day entering politics. Homesickness and a lifelong difficulty making friends plagued him once again. He left UVA on Christmas Day of his first year, claiming he had a cold, and never returned. He finished his studies at home. After passing the Georgia bar, he spent a short time as a lawyer but found he didn't have the knack for it and concluded that it was too arduous a course for him to take into politics. Frustrated in his desire to become a statesman, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University, where he pursued his Ph.D. After graduating, he landed several teaching posts while he worked on his academic writing, specifically his widely acclaimed eight-hundred-page tome The State. Wilson eventually returned to the one institution where he had known some social happiness, Princeton University, where he rose to president.

Wilson's choice to head down an academic path should not be seen as an alternative to a political career. Rather, it was an alternative path to the career he always wanted. The Sage of New Jersey was never a reluctant statesman. Not long after finishing The State, Wilson began moving beyond narrow academic writing in favor of more popular commentary, generally geared toward enhancing his political profile. High among his regular themes was the advocacy of progressive imperialism in order to subjugate, and thereby elevate, lesser races. He applauded the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines — "they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice" — and regularly denounced what he called "the anti-imperialist weepings and wailings that came out of Boston."⁴ It's a sign of how carefully he cultivated his political profile that four years before he "reluctantly" accepted the "unsolicited" gubernatorial nomination in New Jersey, Harper's Weekly had begun running the slogan "For President — Woodrow Wilson" on the cover of every issue.

Indeed, from his earliest days as an undergraduate the meek, homeschooled Wilson was infatuated with political power. And as is so common to intellectuals, he let his power worship infect his analysis.

Lord Acton's famous observation that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak. Wilson is guilty on both counts: he not only fawned over great men but, when he attained real power, was corrupted by it himself. Time and again, his sympathies came down on the side of great men who broke the traditional restraints on their power. Two of his biggest heroes were the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln. It might seem odd that someone who fervently believed that giving blacks the right to vote was "the foundation of every evil in this country" would celebrate Lincoln. But what appealed to Wilson about the Great Emancipator was Lincoln's ability to impose his will on the entire country. Lincoln was a centralizer, a modernizer who used his power to forge a new, united nation. In other words, Wilson admired Lincoln's means — suspension of habeas corpus, the draft, and the campaigns of the radical Republicans after the war — far more than he liked his ends. "If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson," writes the historian Walter McDougall, "it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power."⁵

Wilson's fascination with power is the leitmotif of his whole career. It informed his understanding of theology and politics, and their intersection. Power was God's instrument on earth and therefore was always to be revered. In Congressional Government he admitted, "I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive." Such love of power can be found in many systems and men outside the orbit of fascism, but few ideologies or aesthetics are more directly concerned with the glory of might, will, strength, and action. Some of this was on display in fascist art and architecture, which wallowed in the powerful physical form and the unconquerable might of the nation: strength in unity, the triumph of will, the domination of destiny over decadence and indecision. Doctrinaire fascism, much like communism, sold itself as an unstoppable force of divine or historical inevitability. Those who stood in the way — the bourgeoisie, the "unfit," the "greedy," the "individualist," the traitor, the kulak, the Jew — could be demonized as the "other" because, at the end of the day, they were not merely expendable, nor were they merely reluctant to join the collective, they were by their very existence blocking the will to power that gave the mob and the avant-garde which claimed to speak for it their reason for existence. "Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking," wrote George Orwell. "Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion."⁶ For some, like Wilson, God gave a divine writ for bullying. For others the license for organized cruelty came from more impersonal historical forces. But the impulse was the same.

Wilson would later argue when president that he was the right hand of God and that to stand against him was to thwart divine will. Some thought this was simply proof of power corrupting Wilson, but this was his view from the outset. He always took the side of power, believing that power accrued to whoever was truly on God's side. As an undergraduate, Wilson was convinced that Congress was destined to wield the most power in the American system, and so he championed the idea of giving Congress unfettered control of governance. During his senior year, in his first published article, he even argued that America should switch to a parliamentary system, where there are fewer checks on the will of rulers. Wilson was a champion debater, so it's telling that he believed the best debaters should have the most power.

Wilson wrote his most famous and original work, Congressional Government, when he was a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins. He set out to argue that America should switch to a centralized parliamentary system, but the work evolved into a sweeping indictment of the fragmentation and diffuseness of power in the American political system. Wilson fully abandoned his faith in congressional government when he witnessed Teddy Roosevelt's success at turning the Oval Office into a bully pulpit. The former advocate of congressional power became an unapologetic champion of the imperial presidency. "The President," he wrote in 1908 in Constitutional Government in the United States, "is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution,...but only because the President has the nation behind him and Congress has not."⁷

Wilson's view of politics could be summarized by the word "statolatry," or state worship (the same sin with which the Vatican charged Mussolini). Wilson believed that the state was a natural, organic, and spiritual expression of the people themselves. From the outset, he believed that the government and people should have an organic bond that reflected the "true spirit" of the people, or what the Germans called the Volksgeist. "Government is not a machine, but a living thing," he wrote in Congressional Government. "It falls not under the [Newtonian] theory of the universe, but under the [Darwinian] theory of organic life." From this perspective, the ever-expanding power of the state was entirely natural. Wilson, along with the vast majority of progressive intellectuals, believed that the increase in state power was akin to an inevitable evolutionary process. Governmental "experimentation," the watchword of pragmatic liberals from Dewey and Wilson to FDR, was the social analogue to evolutionary adaptation. Constitutional democracy, as the founders understood it, was a momentary phase in this progression. Now it was time for the state to ascend to the next plateau. "Government," Wilson wrote approvingly in The State, "does now whatever experience permits or the times demand."⁸ Wilson was the first president to speak disparagingly of the Constitution.

Wilson reinforced such attitudes by attacking the very idea of natural and individual rights. If the original, authentic state was a dictatorial family, Wilson argued in the spirit of Darwin, what historical basis was there to believe in individual rights? "No doubt," he wrote, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, "a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle." If a law couldn't be executed, it wasn't a real law, according to Wilson, and "abstract rights" were vexingly difficult to execute.

Wilson, of course, was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. "[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many," declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams. "Now men are free," explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896, "but it is often the freedom of grains of sand that are whirled up in a cloud and then dropped in a heap, but neither cloud nor sand-heap have any coherence." The remedy was obvious: "New forms of association must be created. Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life." Elsewhere Rauschenbusch put it more simply: "Individualism means tyranny."⁹ In a sense, the morally inverted nonsense made famous by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s — "oppressive freedom," "repressive tolerance," "defensive violence" — was launched by the progressives decades earlier. "Work makes you free," the phrase made famous by the Nazis, was anticipated by progressives who believed that collectivism was the new "freedom."

America is today in the midst of an obscene moral panic over the role of Christians in public life. There is a profound irony in the fact that such protests issue most loudly from self-professed "progressives" when the real progressives were dedicated in the most fundamental way to the Christianization of American life. Progressivism, as the title of Washington Gladden's book suggested, was "applied Christianity." The Social Gospel held that the state was the right arm of God and was the means by which the whole nation and world would be redeemed. But while Christianity was being made into a true state religion, its transcendent and theological elements became corrupted.

These two visions — Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism — seem contradictory today because they reside on different sides of the culture war. But in the Progressive Era, these visions complemented each other perfectly. And Wilson embodied this synthesis. The totalitarian flavor of such a worldview should be obvious. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn't want to behave, let alone "evolve." Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming.

Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get children out of the home as quickly as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in America for precisely this purpose — to shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, "Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can."¹⁰

If the age of parliamentary democracy was coming to an end — as progressives and fascists alike proclaimed — and the day of the organic redeemer state was dawning, then the Constitution must evolve or be thrown into the dustbin of history. Wilson's writings are chockablock with demands that the "artificial" barriers established in our "antiquated" eighteenth-century system of checks and balances be smashed. He mocked the "Fourth of July sentiments" of those who still invoked the founding fathers as a source for constitutional guidance. He believed the system of governmental checks and balances had "proven mischievous just to the extent to which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities."¹¹ Indeed, the ink from Wilson's pen regularly exudes the odor of what we today call the living Constitution. On the campaign trail in 1912, Wilson explained that "living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life...it must develop." Hence "all that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle."¹² As we've seen, this interpretation leads to a system where the Constitution means whatever the reigning interpreters of "evolution" say it means.

A more authentic form of leadership was needed: a great man who could serve both as the natural expression of the people's will and as a guide and master checking their darker impulses. The leader needed to be like a brain, which both regulates the body and depends on it for protection. To this end, the masses had to be subservient to the will of the leader. In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the "true leader" uses the masses like "tools." He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.

"Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses," Wilson wrote. "They must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once. The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people's characters: he cares much — everything — for the external uses to which they may be put...He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates...It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader."¹³ A cynic might concede that there is much truth in Wilson's interpretation, but he would at least acknowledge his own cynicism. Wilson believed he was an idealist.

Many believed, including Wilson, that they had found just such a figure in Theodore Roosevelt. More than a popular leader, he was the designated idol of a true leadership cult. William Allen White, the famed progressive writer, recalled in 1934 that he'd been "a young arrogant protagonist of the divine rule of the plutocracy" until Roosevelt "shattered the foundations of my political ideals. As they crumbled then and there, politically, I put his heel on my neck and I became his man."¹⁴ Roosevelt was the first to translate "L'etat, c'est moi" into the American argot, often claiming that the nation's sovereignty was indistinguishable from his own august personage. As president, he regularly exceeded the bounds of his traditional and legal powers, doing his will first and waiting (or not) for the courts and the legislatures to catch up.

This captured in small relief the basic difference between Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, bitter rivals and the only two proudly progressive presidents of the Progressive Era. These were very different men with very similar ideas. Roosevelt was a great actor upon the world stage; Wilson saw himself more as a director. Roosevelt was the "bull moose" who charged into any problem; Wilson was the "schoolmaster" who first drew up a lesson plan. One wanted to lead a band of brothers, the other a graduate seminar. But if the roles they played were different, the moral of the story was the same. While Wilson wrote treatises explaining why Americans should abandon their "blind devotion" to the Constitution, Teddy was rough-riding all over the document, doing what he pleased and giving bellicose speeches about how the courts had sided against "popular rights" and were "lagging behind" the new realities. Indeed, William Howard Taft — Roosevelt's honorable yet overwhelmed successor in the White House — might not have chosen to run for reelection, hence denying Roosevelt the Republican nomination, had he not been convinced that Roosevelt's "impatience with the delay of the law" made him "not unlike Napoleon."¹⁵

There were many fault lines running through Progressivism. On one side, there were the likes of John Dewey and Jane Addams, who were more socialistic and academic in their approach to politics and policy. On the other were the nationalists who appealed more directly to patriotism and militarism. Wilson and Roosevelt more or less represented the two sides. In much the same way national socialists often split into two camps emphasizing either nationalism or socialism, some progressives concentrated on social reform while others were more concerned with American "greatness."

One might also put it that Roosevelt reflected the masculine side of Progressivism — the daddy party — while Wilson represented the movement's maternal side. Roosevelt certainly trumpeted the "manly virtues" at every opportunity. He wanted a ruling elite drawn from a (metaphorical) warrior caste that embraced the "strenuous life," a meritocracy of vigor dedicated to defeating the decadence of "soft living." Wilson's ruling elite would be drawn from the ranks of "disinterested" technocrats, bureaucrats, and social workers who understood the root causes of social decay.

Few progressives saw these as opposing values. There was no inherent trade-off between militant nationalism and progressive reform; rather, they complemented each other (a similar complementarity existed between the different branches of progressive eugenicists, as we'll see). Consider, for example, Senator Albert J. Beveridge, the most important progressive in the U.S. Senate during the first decade of the twentieth century. When Upton Sinclair's Jungle exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry, it was Beveridge who led the fight for reform, sponsoring the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. He shepherded the fights against child labor and in favor of the eight-hour workday. He was perhaps Teddy Roosevelt's chief senatorial ally in the progressive insurgency against the "conservative" wing of the Republican Party. He was the bane of special interests, railroad magnates, and trusts and the friend of reformers, conservationists, and moderns everywhere. And he was a thoroughly bloodthirsty imperialist. "The opposition tells us we ought not to rule a people without their consent. I answer, the rule of liberty, that all just governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government."¹⁶ Indeed, the progressives in Congress actively supported or went along with virtually every major military excursion of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. Under Wilson, they were decidedly more hawkish than the White House. All the while it fell to the conservatives in Congress to fight expenditures on such things as the "big navy," the cornerstone of the imperial project. Indeed, it must be understood that imperialism was as central to Progressivism as efforts to clean up the food supply or make factories safe.¹⁷

The 1912 election boiled down to a national referendum on the sort of Progressivism America wanted, or at least the sort of Progressivism it would get. The beleaguered incumbent, William Howard Taft, had never wanted to be president. His real dream — which he later accomplished — was to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. Taft meant it when he said he was the conservative in the race. He was a conservative liberal — among the last of a dying breed. He believed classical liberalism — or his fairly worldly version of it — needed to be defended against ideologues who would read their own will into the law.

Today the issues in the 1912 campaign seem narrow and distant. Wilson championed the "New Freedom," which included what he called the "second struggle for emancipation" — this time from the trusts and big corporations. Roosevelt campaigned on the "New Nationalism," which took a different view of corporations. Teddy, the famous trustbuster, had resigned himself to "bigness" and now believed the state should use the trusts for its own purposes rather than engage in an endless and fruitless battle to break them up. "The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed," he explained. "The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare." Teddy's New Nationalism was equal parts nationalism and socialism. "The New Nationalism," Roosevelt proclaimed, "rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." This sort of rhetoric conjured fears among classical liberals (again, increasingly called conservatives) that Teddy would ride roughshod over American liberties. "Where will it all end?" asked the liberal editor of the New York World about the rush to centralize government power. "Despotism? Caesarism?"¹⁸

Huey Long famously said — or allegedly famously said — that if fascism ever came to America it would be called "Americanism." It's interesting, then, that this is the name Teddy Roosevelt gave to his new ideology. Not everyone was blind to this distressing side of Roosevelt's personality. The America "that Roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within," declared H. L. Mencken. Deriding Roosevelt as a "Tammany Nietzsche" who'd converted to the "religion of militarists," Mencken scored him for stressing "the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the citizen."¹⁹

In this context, Wilson was perceived as the somewhat more conservative candidate — because, again, he was closer to nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism. He promised to limit government's ability to centralize power by corralling industry into the same bed as the state. In a famous campaign speech at the New York Press Club he proclaimed, "The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power." Alas, it is difficult to take his liberty-loving rhetoric too seriously. Just two weeks after his Press Club speech, Wilson returned to his progressive antipathy toward individualism: "While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson's which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible ...But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise."²⁰

Since Wilson ended up governing largely as a New Nationalist, the subtler distinctions between his and Roosevelt's platforms do not matter very much for our purposes. America was going to get a progressive president no matter what in 1912. And while those of us with soft spots for Teddy might like to think things would have turned out very differently had he won, we are probably deluding ourselves.

HOW IT HAPPENED HERE

The prevailing assumption today is that the rise of fascism in Europe transpired on a completely independent track — that due to numerous national and cultural differences between America and Europe, it couldn't happen here. But this makes no sense whatsoever. Progressivism and, later, fascism were international movements — and, in their origin, expressions of great hopes — that assumed different forms in different countries but drew on the same intellectual wellsprings. Many of the ideas and thinkers the Fascists and Nazis admired were as influential here as they were in Italy and Germany, and vice versa. For example, Henry George, the radical populist guru of American reform, was more revered in Europe than he was in America. His ideas gave shape to the volkisch economic theories on which the Nazi Party was initially founded. Among British Socialists, his Progress and Poverty was a sensation. When Marx's son-in-law came to America to proselytize for scientific socialism, he was so enamored of George that he returned to Europe preaching the gospel of American populism.

From the 1890s to World War I, it was simply understood that progressives in America were fighting the same fight as the various socialist and "new liberal" movements of Europe.²¹ William Allen White, the famed Kansas progressive, declared in 1911, "We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats [that is, the Socialists] in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause." When Jane Addams seconded Teddy Roosevelt's nomination at the Progressive Party Convention in 1912, she declared, "The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action."²²

Ultimately, however, America was the sorcerer's apprentice to Europe's master. American writers and activists drank from European intellectual wells like men dying of thirst. "Nietzsche is in the air," declared a reviewer in the New York Times in 1910. "Whatever one reads of a speculative kind one is sure to come across the name of Nietzsche sooner or later." Indeed, he went on, "[m]uch of the Pragmatism of Prof. [William] James bears auspicious resemblance to doctrines of Nietzsche." Noticing that Roosevelt was always reading German books and "borrowing" from Nietzsche's philosophy, Mencken (a serious, if imperfect, Nietzsche scholar himself) concluded, "Theodore had swallowed Friedrich as a peasant swallows Peruna — bottle, cork, label and testimonials."²³ William James, America's preeminent philosopher, looked to the southern corners of the continent as well. As discussed earlier, James was a close student of the Italian pragmatists who were busy laying the groundwork for Mussolini's Fascism, and Mussolini would regularly acknowledge his debt to James and American Pragmatism.

But no nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany. W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay.²⁴

No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler," writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought." Bismarck's "top-down socialism," which delivered the eight-hour workday, health care, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old," he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward," he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system...the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.²⁵

Indeed, few figures represent the foreign, particularly German influence on Progressivism better than Wilson himself. Wilson's faith that society could be bent to the will of social planners was formed at Johns Hopkins, the first American university to be founded on the German model. Virtually all of Wilson's professors had studied in Germany — as had almost every one of the school's fifty-three faculty members. But his most prominent and influential teacher was Richard Ely, the "dean of American economics," who in his day was more vital to Progressivism than Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek have been to modern conservatism. Despite his open hostility to private property, and his fondness for what would today be called McCarthyite politics, Ely was not a top-down socialist like Bismarck. Rather, he taught his students to imagine a socialism of spirit that would replace laissez-faire from within men's hearts. Ely eventually moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he helped found the "Wisconsin model" — a system still admired by leftist intellectuals whereby college faculties help run the state. Ely also served as a mentor to Teddy Roosevelt, who said that Ely "first introduced me to radicalism in economics and then made me sane in my radicalism."²⁶

Wilson revered Bismarck as much as Teddy Roosevelt or any of the other Progressives did. In college he wrote a fawning essay in which he lavished praise on this "commanding genius" who united the "moral force of Cromwell and the political shrewdness of Richelieu; the comprehensive intellect of Burke...the diplomatic ability of Talleyrand, without his coldness." Wilson goes on about the Iron Chancellor's "keenness of insight, clearness of judgement, and promptness of decision," and ends wistfully, "Prussia will not soon find another Bismarck."²⁷

Bismarck's motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving the people the sort of thing they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle class dependent upon the state. The middle class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy but an alternative to it. Such logic proved disastrous little more than a generation later. But it was precisely this logic that appealed to the progressives. As Wilson put it, the essence of Progressivism was that the individual "marry his interests to the state."²⁸

The most influential thinker along these lines — and another great admirer of Bismarck's — was the man who served as the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt and Wilson: Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life, the founding editor of the New Republic, and the guru behind Roosevelt's New Nationalism.

After Taft was elected president in 1908, Roosevelt tried to give his protege a wide berth, first going on a famous African safari, followed by a fact-finding tour of Europe. At some point he picked up a copy of The Promise of American Life, which his friend Judge Learned Hand had sent him. The book was a revelation. "I do not know when I have read a book which profited me as much," he wrote to Croly. "All I wish is that I were better able to get my advice to my fellow-countrymen in practical shape according to the principles you set forth."²⁹ Many people at the time credited Croly's book with convincing Roosevelt to run for president again; more likely, the book provided a marketable intellectual rationale for his return to politics.

Even if Croly's contribution to American liberalism had begun and ended with The Promise of American Life, he would rank as one of the most important voices in American intellectual history. When the book came out in 1909, Felix Frankfurter hailed it as "the most powerful single contribution to progressive thinking."³⁰ The book was praised by dozens of reviewers. More than any other writer, Croly was credited with giving a coherent voice to the progressive movement and, by extension, modern liberalism. It has been celebrated ever since by liberals, even though most of them have probably never read this long, bizarre, often tedious, tortuous tome. Indeed, the fact that it is such a badly written book may be the sign that its appeal rested on something more important than its prose: it gave form to an idea whose time had come.

Croly was a quiet man who'd grown up with noisy parents. His mother was one of America's first female syndicated columnists and a dedicated "feminist." His father was a successful journalist and editor whose friends dubbed him "The Great Suggester." Their home was something of a "European island in New York," according to one historian.³¹ The most interesting thing about the senior Croly — if by "interesting" you mean really loopy — was his obsession with Auguste Comte, a semimystical French philosopher whose biggest claim to fame was his coinage of the word "sociology." Comte argued that humanity progressed in three stages and that in the final stage mankind would throw off Christianity and replace it with a new "religion of humanity," which married religious fervor to science and reason — even to the extent of making "saints" out of such figures as Shakespeare, Dante, and Frederick the Great.³² Comte believed that the age of mass industrialization and technocracy would pluck the human mind from the metaphysical realm for good, ushering in an age where pragmatic managers would improve the plight of all based upon man-made morality. He anointed himself the high priest of this atheistic, secular faith, which he called positivism. The elder Croly made his Greenwich Village home into a positivist temple where he held religious ceremonies for select guests, whom he would try to convert. In 1869 young Herbert became the first and probably last American to be christened in Comte's religion.

Croly attended Harvard University, though due to family and personal problems he was absent for long stints. While there he studied closely under William James as well as Josiah Royce and George Santayana. From James, he learned to think pragmatically. Thanks to Royce he converted from positivism to progressive Christianity. Santayana persuaded him of the need for a "national regeneration" and a new "socialistic aristocracy." The result of all these influences was a brilliant young man who was capable of remarkable hardheadedness while never losing his mystical zeal. He was also a fascist. Or at least he was an exponent of a pre-fascist worldview that would seem prescient just a few years later.

When reading about Herbert Croly, one often finds phrases such as "Croly was no fascist, but..." Yet few make the effort to explain why he was not a fascist. Most seem to think it is simply self-evident that the founder of the New Republic could not have been a disciple of Mussolini's. In reality, however, almost every single item on a standard checklist of fascist characteristics can be found in The Promise of American Life. The need to mobilize society like an army? Check! Call for spiritual rebirth? Check! Need for "great" revolutionary leaders? Check! Reliance on manufactured, unifying, national "myths"? Check! Contempt for parliamentary democracy? Check! Non-Marxist Socialism? Check! Nationalism? Check! A spiritual calling for military expansion? Check! The need to make politics into a religion? Hostility to individualism? Check! Check! Check! To paraphrase Whittaker Chambers: from almost any page of The Promise of American Life, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, "To fascism go!"

Croly was an unabashed nationalist who craved a "national reformer...in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight," to redeem a decadent America. This secular "imitator of Christ" would bring an end to "devil-take-the-hindmost" individualism in precisely the same manner that the real Jesus closed the Old Testament chapter of human history. "An individual," Croly wrote, sounding very much like Wilson, "has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed." Echoing both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Croly argued that "national life" should be like a "school," and good schooling frequently demands "severe coercive measures."³³

Croly's ideas garnered the attention of Willard Straight, an investment banker with J. P. Morgan and a diplomat, and his wife, Dorothy, a member of the Whitney family. The Straights were prominent philanthropists and reformers, and they saw in Croly's ideas a map for the transformation of America into a "progressive democracy" (the title of another of Croly's books). They agreed to support Croly in his effort to start the New Republic, a journal whose mission was "to explore and develop and apply the ideas which had been advertised by Theodore Roosevelt when he was the leader of the Progressive party."³⁴ Joining Croly as editors were the self-described socialist-nationalists Walter Weyl and the future pundit extraordinaire Walter Lippmann.

Like Roosevelt, Croly and his colleagues looked forward to many more wars because war was the midwife of progress. Indeed, Croly believed that the Spanish-American War's greatest significance lay in the fact that it gave birth to Progressivism. In Europe wars would force more national unification, while in Asia wars were necessary for imperial expansion and for the powerful nations to let off a little steam. Croly constructed this worldview out of what he deemed vital necessity. Industrialization, economic upheaval, social "disintegration," materialistic decadence, and worship of money were tearing America apart, or so he — and the vast majority of progressives — believed. The remedy for the "chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization" was a "regeneration" led by a hero-saint who could overthrow the tired doctrines of liberal democracy in favor of a restored and heroic nation. The similarities with conventional fascist theory should be obvious.³⁵

One might defend Croly by noting that such ideas were simply "in the air" at the end of the nineteenth century, a common set of responses to a common atmosphere of social, economic, and political change. And indeed, this is part of my argument. There were of course significant differences between fascism and Progressivism, but these are mainly attributable to the cultural differences between Europe and America, and between national cultures in general. (When Mussolini invited the leader of the Falange Espanola — the Spanish fascists — to the first Fascist congress, he adamantly refused. The Falange, he insisted, was not fascist, it was Spanish!)

Fascism was one name given to one form of "experimentation" in the 1920s. These experiments were part of the great utopian aspirations of the "world-wide movement" Jane Addams spoke of at the Progressive Party Convention. There was a religious awakening afoot in the West as progressives of all stripes saw man snatching the reins of history from God's hands. Science — or what they believed to be science — was the new scripture, and one could only perform science by "experimenting." And, just as important, only scientists know how to conduct a proper experiment. "Who will be the prophets and pilots of the Good Society?" Herbert Croly asked in 1925. He noted that for a generation progressive liberals believed that a "better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover and ingenuity could devise." Five years earlier, Croly noted in the New Republic that the practitioners of the "scientific method" would need to join with the "ideologists" of Christ, in order to "plan and effect a redeeming transformation" of society whereby men would look for "deliverance from choice between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation."³⁶

To better understand the spirit of this fascist moment, we need to examine how progressives looked to two other great "experiments" of the age, Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism. Some of this was touched upon in Chapter 1, but it's worth repeating: liberals often saw Mussolini's project and Lenin's as linked efforts. Lincoln Steffens referred to the "Russian-Italian" method as if the two things constituted a single enterprise.

The New Republic in particular was at times decidedly optimistic about both experiments. Some seemed more excited about the Italian effort. Charles Beard, for example, wrote of Mussolini's efforts:

This is far from the frozen dictatorship of the Russian Tsardom; it is more like the American check and balance system; and it may work out in a new democratic direction...Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made here, an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism, politics and technology. It would be a mistake to allow feeling aroused by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the Fascist process (as all other immense historical changes) to obscure the potentialities and the lessons of the adventure — no, not adventure, but destiny riding without any saddle and bridle across the historic peninsula that bridges the world of antiquity and our modern world.³⁷

Such enthusiasm paled in comparison to the way progressives greeted the "experiment" in the Soviet Union. Indeed, many of the remaining left-wing footdraggers on the war became enthusiastic supporters when they learned of the Bolshevik Revolution. Suddenly Wilson's revolutionary rhetoric seemed to be confirmed by the forces of history (indeed, Wilson himself saw the earlier fall of the tsar to the Kerensky government as the last obstacle to U.S. entry into the war, since he would no longer have a despotic regime as an ally). A wave of crusading journalists went to Moscow to chronicle the revolution and convince American liberals that history was on the march in Russia.

John Reed led the charge with his Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed was an unreconstructed admirer of the Bolsheviks. He dismissed complaints about the Red Terror and the mass murder of non-Bolshevist socialist revolutionaries easily: "I don't give a damn for their past. I'm concerned only with what this treacherous gang has been doing during the past three years. To the wall with them! I say I have learned one mighty expressive word: 'raztrellyat' [sic] (execute by shooting)." The progressive public intellectual E. A. Ross — who will reappear in our story later — took a common tack and argued that the Bolsheviks had killed relatively few members of the opposition, so it really wasn't a big deal.³⁸ Reed and Ross at least acknowledged that the Bolsheviks were killing people. Many pro-Bolshevik liberals simply refused to concede that the Red Terror even transpired. This was the beginning of nearly a century of deliberate lies and useful idiocy on the American left.

When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government, Wilson's refusal to recognize them — and his subsequent intervention in Siberia and Murmansk — were denounced as "Wilson's stab in Russia's back" because most liberals saw the Bolsheviks as a popular and progressive movement. One British journalist writing in the New Republic proclaimed the Bolsheviks "stand for rationalism, for an intelligent system of cultivation, for education, for an active ideal of cooperation and social service against superstition, waste, illiteracy, and passive obedience." As the historian Eugene Lyons noted, these crusaders "wrote as inspired prophets of an embattled revolution...they were dazzled by a vision of things to come."³⁹

To be sure, not all left-leaning observers were fooled by the Bolsheviks. Bertrand Russell famously saw through the charade, as did the American socialist Charles E. Russell. But most progressives believed that the Bolsheviks had stumbled on the passage out of the old world and that we should follow their lead. When the war ended and Progressivism had been discredited with the American people, the intellectuals looked increasingly to the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy as exemplars of the new path that America had foolishly abandoned after its brilliant experiment with war socialism.

Nearly the entire liberal elite, including much of FDR's Brain Trust, had made the pilgrimage to Moscow to take admiring notes on the Soviet experiment. Their language was both religiously prophetic and arrogantly scientific. Stuart Chase reported after visiting Russia in 1927 that unlike in America, where "hungry stockholders" were making the economic decisions, in the Soviet Union the all-caring state was in the saddle, "informed by battalions of statistics" and heroically aided by Communist Party officials who need "no further incentive than the burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth which flames in the breast of every good Communist."⁴⁰

That same year two of America's leading New Deal economists, Rexford Guy Tugwell and Paul Douglas, pronounced themselves awed by the Soviet "experiment." "There is a new life beginning there," Tugwell wrote in his report. Lillian Wald visited Russia's "experimental schools" and reported that John Dewey's ideas were being implemented "not less than 150 per cent." Indeed, the whole country was, for liberals, a giant "Laboratory School." Dewey himself visited the Soviet Union and was much impressed. Jane Addams declared the Bolshevik endeavor "the greatest social experiment in history." Sidney Hillman, John L. Lewis, and most of the other leaders of the American labor movement were effusive in their praise of "Soviet pragmatism," Stalin's "experiment," and the "heroism" of the Bolsheviks.⁴¹

W. E. B. DuBois was thunderstruck. "I am writing this in Russia," he wrote back to his readers in the Crisis. "I am sitting in Revolution Square...I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik."⁴²

DuBois offers a good illustration of how fascism and communism appealed to the same progressive impulses and aspirations. Like many progressives, he'd studied in Germany in the 1890s and retained a fondness for the Prussian model. An anti-Semite early in his career — in 1924 his magazines started carrying a swastika on the cover, despite complaints from Jewish progressives — DuBois applied for a grant in 1935 from an organization with known ties to the Nazis that was run by a well-known Jew hater who'd dined with Joseph Goebbels. He truly believed the Nazis had a lot of great ideas and that America had much to learn from Germany's experiment in National Socialism (though later, DuBois denounced Nazi anti-Semitism).

And so it was with other pro-Soviet liberal icons. Recall how a year before Lincoln Steffens announced he'd seen the future in the Soviet Union, he'd said much the same thing about Fascist Italy. The heroic success of fascism, according to Steffens, made Western democracy — run by "petty persons with petty purposes" — look pathetic by comparison. For Steffens and countless other liberals, Mussolini, Lenin, and Stalin were all doing the same thing: transforming corrupt, outdated societies. Tugwell praised Lenin as a pragmatist who was merely running an "experiment." The same was true of Mussolini, he explained.

The New Republic defended both fascism and communism on similar grounds throughout the 1920s. How, a correspondent asked, could the magazine think Mussolini's brutality was a "good thing"? Croly answered that it was not, "any more than it was a 'good thing' for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy."⁴³

Charles Beard summed up the fascination well. Il Duce's hostility to democracy was no big deal, he explained. After all, the "fathers of the American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could desire." Mussolini's dictatorial style was likewise perfectly consistent with the "American gospel of action, action, action." But what really captured Beard's imagination was the economic system inherent to fascism, namely corporatism. According to Beard, Mussolini had succeeded in bringing about "by force of the State the most compact and unified organization of capitalists and laborers into two camps which the world has ever seen."⁴⁴

The key concept for rationalizing progressive utopianism was "experimentation," justified in the language of Nietzschean authenticity, Darwinian evolution, and Hegelian historicism and explained in the argot of William James's pragmatism. Scientific knowledge advanced by trial and error. Human evolution advanced by trial and error. History, according to Hegel, progressed through the interplay of thesis and antithesis. These experiments were the same process on a vast scale. So what if Mussolini cracked skulls or Lenin lined up dissident socialists? The progressives believed they were participating in a process of ascendance to a more modern, more "evolved" way of organizing society, replete with modern machines, modern medicine, modern politics. In a distinctly American way, Wilson was as much a pioneer of this movement as Mussolini. A devoted Hegelian — he even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife — Wilson believed that history was a scientific, unfolding process. Darwinism was the perfect complement to such thinking because it seemed to confirm that the "laws" of history were reflected in our natural surroundings. "In our own day," Wilson wrote while still a political scientist, "whenever we discuss the structure or development of a thing...we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin."⁴⁵

Wilson won the election of 1912 in an electoral college landslide, but with only 42 percent of the popular vote. He immediately set about to convert the Democratic Party into a progressive party and, in turn, make it the engine for a transformation of America. In January 1913 he vowed to "pick out progressives and only progressives" for his administration. "No one," he proclaimed in his inaugural address, "can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party...I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!" But he warned elsewhere, "If you are not a progressive...you better look out."⁴⁶

Without the sorts of mandates or national emergencies other liberal presidents enjoyed, Wilson's considerable legislative success is largely attributable to intense party discipline. In an unprecedented move, he kept Congress in continual session for a year and a half, something even Lincoln hadn't done during the Civil War. Sounding every bit the Crolyite, he converted almost completely to the New Nationalism he had recently denounced, claiming he wanted no "antagonism between business and government."⁴⁷ In terms of domestic policy, Wilson was successful in winning the support of progressives in all parties. But he failed to win over Roosevelt's followers when it came to foreign policy. Despite imperialist excursions throughout the Americas, Wilson was deemed too soft. Senator Albert Beveridge, who had led the progressives to their greatest legislative successes in the Senate, denounced Wilson for refusing to send troops to defend American interests in China or install a strongman in Mexico. Increasingly, the core of the Progressive Party became almost entirely devoted to "preparedness" — shorthand for a big military buildup and imperial assertiveness.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 distracted Wilson and the country from domestic concerns. It also proved a boon to the American economy, cutting off the flow of cheap immigrant labor and increasing the demand for American exports — something to keep in mind the next time someone tells you that the Wilson era proves progressive policies and prosperity go hand in hand.

Despite Wilson's promise to keep us out of it, America entered the war in 1917. In hindsight, this was probably a misguided, albeit foregone, intervention. But the complaint that the war wasn't in America's interests misses the point. Wilson boasted as much time and again. "There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for," he declared. Wilson was a humble servant of the Lord, and therefore selfishness could not enter into it.⁴⁸

Even for ostensibly secular progressives the war served as a divine call to arms. They were desperate to get their hands on the levers of power and use the war to reshape society. The capital was so thick with would-be social engineers during the war that, as one writer observed, "the Cosmos Club was little better than a faculty meeting of all the universities."⁴⁹ Progressive businessmen were just as eager, opting to work for the president for next to nothing — hence the phrase "dollar-a-year men." Of course, they were compensated in other ways, as we shall see.

WILSON'S FASCIST POLICE STATE

Today we unreflectively associate fascism with militarism. But it should be remembered that fascism was militaristic because militarism was "progressive" at the beginning of the twentieth century. Across the intellectual landscape, technocrats and poets alike saw the military as the best model for organizing and mobilizing society. Mussolini's "Battle of the Grains" and similar campaigns were publicized on both sides of the Atlantic as the enlightened application of James's doctrine of the "moral equivalent of war." There was a deep irony to America's war aim to crush "Prussian militarism," given that it was Prussian militarism which had inspired so many of the war's American cheerleaders in the first place. The idea that war was the source of moral values had been pioneered by German intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the influence of these intellectuals on the American mind was enormous. When America entered the war in 1917, progressive intellectuals, versed in the same doctrines and philosophies popular on the European continent, leaped at the opportunity to remake society through the discipline of the sword.

It is true that some progressives thought World War I was not well-advised on the merits, and there were a few progressives — Robert La Follette, for example — who were decidedly opposed (though La Follette was no pacifist, having supported earlier progressive military adventures). But most supported the war enthusiastically, even fanatically (the same goes for a great many American Socialists). And even those who were ambivalent about the war in Europe were giddy about what John Dewey called the "social possibilities of war." Dewey was the New Republic's in-house philosopher during the lead-up to the war, and he ridiculed self-described pacifists who couldn't recognize the "immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war." One group that did recognize the social possibilities of war were the early feminists who, in the words of Harriot Stanton Blatch, looked forward to new economic opportunities for women as "the usual, and happy, accompaniment of war." Richard Ely, a fervent believer in "industrial armies," was a zealous believer in the draft: "The moral effect of taking boys off street corners and out of saloons and drilling them is excellent, and the economic effects are likewise beneficial." Wilson clearly saw things along the same lines. "I am an advocate of peace," he began one typical declaration, "but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war." Hitler couldn't have agreed more. As he told Joseph Goebbels, "The war...made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."⁵⁰

We should not forget how the demands of war fed the arguments for socialism. Dewey was giddy that the war might force Americans "to give up much of our economic freedom...We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step." If the war went well, it would constrain "the individualistic tradition" and convince Americans of "the supremacy of public need over private possessions." Another progressive put it more succinctly: "Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control."⁵¹

Croly's New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine's very first editorial, written by Croly, the editors expressed their hope that war "should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home." Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America's entry into the war would provide "the tonic of a serious moral adventure." A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson's Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a "transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect." This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche's call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protege of William James's, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatist's trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations "as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century."⁵²

Meanwhile, socialist editors and journalists — including many from the Masses, the most audacious of the radical journals that Wilson tried to ban — rushed to get a paycheck from Wilson's propaganda ministry. Artists such as Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, and Joseph Pennell and writers like Booth Tarkington, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Ernest Poole became cheerleaders for the war-hungry regime. Musicians, comedians, sculptors, ministers — and of course the movie industry — were all happily drafted to the cause, eager to wear the "invisible uniform of war." Isadora Duncan, an avant-garde pioneer of what today would be called sexual liberation, became a toe tapper in patriotic pageants at the Metropolitan Opera House. The most enduring and iconic image of the time is Flagg's "I Want You" poster of Uncle Sam pointing the shaming finger of the state-made-flesh at uncommitted citizens.

Almost alone among progressives, the brilliant, bizarre, disfigured genius Randolph Bourne seemed to understand precisely what was going on. The war revealed that a generation of young intellectuals, trained in pragmatic philosophy, were ill equipped to prevent means from becoming ends. The "peculiar congeniality between the war and these men" was simply baked into the cake, Bourne lamented. "It is," he sadly concluded, "as if the war and they had been waiting for each other."⁵³

Wilson the great centralizer and would-be leader of men moved overnight to empower these would-be social engineers, creating a vast array of wartime boards, commissions, and committees. Overseeing it all was the War Industries Board, or WIB, chaired by Bernard Baruch, which whipped, cajoled, and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state long before Mussolini or Hitler contemplated their corporatist doctrines. The progressives running the WIB had no illusions about what they were up to. "It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel — a dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent which step by step at last encompassed the Nation and united it into a coordinated and mobile whole," declared Grosvenor Clarkson, a member and subsequent historian of the WIB.⁵⁴

More important than socializing industry was nationalizing the people for the war effort. "Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way," Wilson threatened in June 1917. Harking back to his belief that "leaders of men" must manipulate the passions of the masses, he approved and supervised one of the first truly Orwellian propaganda efforts in Western history. He set the tone himself when he defended the first military draft since the Civil War. "It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling: it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass."⁵⁵

A week after the war started, Walter Lippmann — no doubt eager to set about the work of unleashing a transvaluation of values — sent a memo to Wilson imploring him to commence with a sweeping propaganda effort. Lippmann, as he argued later, believed that most citizens were "mentally children or barbarians" and therefore needed to be directed by experts like himself. Individual liberty, while nice, needed to be subordinated to, among other things, "order."⁵⁶

Wilson tapped the progressive journalist George Creel to head the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, the West's first modern ministry for propaganda. Creel was a former muckraking liberal journalist and police commissioner in Denver who had gone so far as to forbid his cops from carrying nightsticks or guns. He took to the propaganda portfolio immediately, determined to inflame the American public into "one white-hot mass" under the banner of "100 percent Americanism." "It was a fight for the minds of men, for the 'conquest of their convictions,' and the battle line ran through every home in every country," Creel recalled. Fear was a vital tool, he argued, "an important element to be bred into the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation."⁵⁷

Countless other liberal and leftist intellectuals lent their talents and energies to the propaganda effort. Edward Bernays, who would be credited with creating the field of public relations, cut his teeth on the Creel Committee, learning the art of "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses." The CPI printed millions of posters, buttons, pamphlets, and the like in eleven languages not counting English. The committee eventually had more than twenty subdivisions with offices in America and around the world. The Division of News alone issued more than six thousand releases. Just under one hundred pamphlets were printed with an estimated circulation of seventy-five million. A typical poster for Liberty Bonds cautioned, "I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!...[I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man's Land for you!" A CPI poster asked, "Have you met the Kaiserite?...You find him in hotel lobbies, smoking compartments, clubs, offices, even homes...He is a scandal-monger of the most dangerous type. He repeats all the rumors, criticism, he hears about our country's part in the war. He's very plausible...People like that...through their vanity or curiosity or treason they are helping German propagandists sow the seeds of discontent."⁵⁸

One of Creel's greatest ideas — an instance of "viral marketing" before its time — was the creation of an army of nearly a hundred thousand "Four Minute Men." Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four-minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters — anyplace they could get an audience — to spread the word that the "very future of democracy" was at stake. In 1917-18 alone, some 7,555,190 speeches were delivered in fifty-two hundred communities. These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human Huns. Invariably, the horrors of German war crimes expanded as the Four Minute Men plied their trade. The CPI released a string of propaganda films with such titles as The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin, and The Prussian Cur. The schools, of course, were drenched in nationalist propaganda. Secondary schools and colleges quickly added "war studies courses" to the curriculum. And always and everywhere the progressives questioned the patriotism of anybody who didn't act "100 percent American."

Another Wilson appointee, the socialist muckraker Arthur Bullard — a former writer for the radical journal the Masses and an acquaintance of Lenin's — was also convinced that the state must whip the people up into a patriotic fervor if America was to achieve the "transvaluation" the progressives craved. In 1917 he published Mobilising America, in which he argued that the state must "electrify public opinion" because "the effectiveness of our warfare will depend on the ardour we throw into it." Any citizen who did not put the needs of the state ahead of his own was merely "dead weight." Bullard's ideas were eerily similar to the Sorelian doctrines of the "vital lie." "Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms...there are lifeless truths and vital lies...The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it's true or false."⁵⁹

The radical lawyer and supposed civil libertarian Clarence Darrow — today a hero to the left for his defense of evolution in the Scopes "Monkey" trial — both stumped for the CPI and defended the government's censorship efforts. "When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace," Darrow wrote in a government-backed book, "I know he is working for Germany." In a speech at Madison Square Garden he said that Wilson would have been a traitor not to defy Germany, and added, "Any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor." Darrow's expert legal opinion, it may surprise modern liberals to know, was that once Congress had decided on war, the right to question that decision evaporated entirely (an interesting standard given the tendency of many to assert that the Bush administration has behaved without precedent in its comparatively tepid criticism of dissent). Once the bullets fly, citizens lose the right even to discuss the issue, publicly or privately; "acquiescence on the part of the citizen becomes a duty."⁶⁰ (It's ironic that the ACLU made its name supporting Darrow at the Scopes trial.)

The rationing and price-fixing of the "economic dictatorship" required Americans to make great sacrifices, including the various "meatless" and "wheatless" days common to all of the industrialized war economies in the first half of the twentieth century. But the tactics used to impose these sacrifices dramatically advanced the science of totalitarian propaganda. Americans were deluged with patriotic volunteers knocking on their doors to sign this pledge or that oath not only to be patriotic but to abstain from this or that "luxury." Herbert Hoover, the head of the national Food Administration, made his reputation as a public servant in the battle to get Americans to tighten their belts, dispatching over half a million door knockers for his efforts alone. No one could dispute his gusto for the job. "Supper," he complained, "is one of the worst pieces of extravagance that we have in this country."⁶¹

Children were a special concern of the government's, as is always the case in totalitarian systems. They were asked to sign a pledge card, "A Little American's Promise":

At table I'll not leave a scrap

Of food upon my plate.

And I'll not eat between meals but

For supper time I'll wait.

I make that promise that I'll do

My honest, earnest part

In helping my America

With all my loyal heart.

For toddlers who couldn't sign a pledge card, let alone read, the Progressive war planners offered a rewritten nursery rhyme:

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!

The cook's using wheat where she ought to use corn

And terrible famine our country will sweep,

If the cooks and the housewives remain fast asleep!

Go wake them! Go wake them! It's now up to you!

Be a loyal American, Little Boy Blue!⁶²

Even as the government was churning out propaganda, it was silencing dissent. Wilson's Sedition Act banned "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military." The postmaster general was given the authority to deny mailing privileges to any publication he saw fit — effectively shutting it down. At least seventy-five periodicals were banned. Foreign publications were not allowed unless their content was first translated and approved by censors. Journalists also faced the very real threat of being jailed or having their supply of newsprint terminated by the War Industries Board. "Unacceptable" articles included any discussion — no matter how high-minded or patriotic — that disparaged the draft. "There is a limit," Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson declared. That limit has been exceeded, he explained, when a publication "begins to say that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for the wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the Government for going into the war. They can not say that this Government is the tool of Wall Street or the munitions-makers...There can be no campaign against conscription and the Draft Law."⁶³

The most famous episode of censorship came with the government's relentless campaign against the Masses, the radical literary journal edited by Max Eastman. The postmaster general revoked the magazine's right to be distributed via the mails under the Espionage Act. Specifically, the government charged the magazine with trying to hamper military recruitment. Among the "illegal" contents: a cartoon proclaiming this was a war to make the world "safe for capitalism" and an editorial by Eastman praising the courage of draft resisters. Six editors faced trial in New York but managed to "win" hung juries (jurors and lawyers commented afterward that the defendants would almost certainly have been found guilty if any of them had been German or Jewish).

Of course, the "chilling effect" on the press in general was far more useful than the closures. Many of the journals that were shut down had tiny readerships. But the threat of being put out of business did wonders in focusing the minds of other editors. If the power of example wasn't strong enough, editors received a threatening letter. If that didn't work, they could lose their mail privileges "temporarily." Over four hundred publications had been denied privileges by May 1918. The Nation had been suppressed for criticizing Samuel Gompers. The journal Public had been smacked for suggesting that the war should be paid for by taxes rather than loans, and the Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register for reprinting Thomas Jefferson's views that Ireland should be a republic. Even the pro-war New Republic wasn't safe. It was twice warned that it would be banned from the mails if it continued to run the National Civil Liberties Bureau's ads asking for donations and volunteers.

Then there was the inevitable progressive crackdown on individual civil liberties. Today's liberals tend to complain about the McCarthy period as if it were the darkest moment in American history after slavery. It's true: under McCarthyism a few Hollywood writers who'd supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs in the 1950s. Others were unfairly intimidated. But nothing that happened under the mad reign of Joe McCarthy remotely compares with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America. Under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence (a law Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld years after the war, arguing that such speech could be banned if it posed a "clear and present danger"). In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn't want to buy Liberty Bonds.⁶⁴

No police state deserves the name without an ample supply of police. The Department of Justice arrested tens of thousands without just cause. The Wilson administration issued a letter for U.S. attorneys and marshals saying, "No German enemy in this country, who has not hitherto been implicated in plots against the interests of the United States, need have any fear of action by the Department of Justice so long as he observes the following warning: Obey the law; keep your mouth shut."⁶⁵ This blunt language might be forgivable except for the government's dismayingly broad definition of what defined a "German enemy."

The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, known as the American Protective League, or APL. They were given badges — many of which read "Secret Service" — and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Used as private eyes by overzealous prosecutors in thousands of cases, they were furnished with ample government resources. The APL had an intelligence division, in which members were bound by oath not to reveal they were secret policemen. Members of the APL read their neighbors' mail and listened in on their phones with government approval. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the APL to help extract confessions from black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. The APL's American Vigilante Patrol cracked down on "seditious street oratory." One of its most important functions was to serve as head crackers against "slackers" who avoided conscription. In New York City, in September 1918, the APL launched its biggest slacker raid, rounding up fifty thousand men. Two-thirds were later found to be innocent of all charges. Nevertheless, the Justice Department approved. The assistant attorney general noted, with great satisfaction, that America had never been more effectively policed. In 1917 the APL had branches in nearly six hundred cities and towns with a membership approaching a hundred thousand. By the following year, it had exceeded a quarter of a million.⁶⁶

One of the only things the layman still remembers about this period is a vague sense that something bad called the Palmer Raids occurred — a series of unconstitutional crackdowns, approved by Wilson, of "subversive" groups and individuals. What is usually ignored is that the raids were immensely popular, particularly with the middle-class base of the Democratic Party. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was a canny progressive who defeated the Republican machine in Pennsylvania by forming a tight bond with labor. He had hoped to ride the popularity of the raids straight into the Oval Office, and might have succeeded had he not been sidelined by a heart attack.

It's also necessary to note that the American Legion was born under inauspicious circumstances during the hysteria of World War I in 1919. Although it is today a fine organization with a proud history, one cannot ignore the fact that it was founded as an essentially fascist organization. In 1923 the national commander of the legion declared, "If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country's institutions and ideals as the fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy."⁶⁷ FDR would later try to use the legion as a newfangled American Protective League to spy on domestic dissidents and harass potential foreign agents.

Vigilantism was often encouraged and rarely dissuaded under Wilson's 100 percent Americanism. How could it be otherwise, given Wilson's own warnings about the enemy within? In 1915, in his third annual message to Congress, he declared, "The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags...who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue." Four years later the president was still convinced that perhaps America's greatest threat came from "hyphenated" Americans. "I cannot say too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready. If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic."⁶⁸

This was the America Woodrow Wilson and his allies sought. And they got what they wanted. In 1919, at a Victory Loan pageant, a man refused to stand for the national anthem. When "The Star-Spangled Banner" ended, a furious sailor shot the "disloyal" man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, "the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping." Another man who refused to rise for the national anthem at a baseball game was beaten by the fans in the bleachers. In February 1919 a jury in Hammond, Indiana, took two minutes to acquit a man who had murdered an immigrant for yelling, "To Hell with the United States." In 1920 a salesman at a clothing store in Waterbury, Connecticut, received a six-month prison sentence for referring to Lenin as "one of the brainiest" leaders in the world. Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes was arrested, tried, and convicted for telling a women's group, "I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers." The Republican antiwar progressive Robert La Follette spent a year fighting an effort to have him expelled from the Senate for disloyalty because he'd given a speech opposing the war to the Non-Partisan League. The Providence Journal carried a banner — every day! — warning readers that any German or Austrian "unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy." The Illinois Bar Association ruled that members who defended draft resisters were not only "unprofessional" but "unpatriotic."⁶⁹

German authors were purged from libraries, families of German extraction were harassed and taunted, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage," and — as Sinclair Lewis half-jokingly recalled — there was talk of renaming German measles "liberty measles." Socialists and other leftists who agitated against the war were brutalized. Mobs in Arizona packed Wobblies in cattle cars and left them in the desert without food or water. In Oklahoma, opponents of the war were tarred and feathered, and a crippled leader of the Industrial Workers of the World was hung from a railway trestle. At Columbia University the president, Nicholas Murray Butler, fired three professors for criticizing the war, on the grounds that "what had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason." Richard Ely, enthroned at the University of Wisconsin, organized professors and others to crush internal dissent via the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion. Anybody who offered "opinions which hinder us in this awful struggle," he explained, should be "fired" if not indeed "shot." Chief on his list was Robert La Follette, whom Ely attempted to hound from Wisconsin politics as a "traitor" who "has been of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops."⁷⁰

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that some 175,000 Americans were arrested for failing to demonstrate their patriotism in one way or another. All were punished, many went to jail.

For the most part, the progressives looked upon what they had created and said, "This is good." The "great European war...is striking down individualism and building up collectivism," rejoiced the Progressive financier and J. P. Morgan partner George Perkins. Grosvenor Clarkson saw things similarly. The war effort "is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole." The regimentation of society, the social worker Felix Adler believed, was bringing us closer to creating the "perfect man...a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any...that has yet existed." The Washington Post was more modest. "In spite of excesses such as lynching," it editorialized, "it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country."⁷¹

Perhaps some added context is in order. At pretty much the exact moment when John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and so many others were gushing about the "moral tonic" the war would provide and how it was the highest, best cause for all people dedicated to liberal, progressive values, Benito Mussolini was making nearly identical arguments. Mussolini had been the brains of the Italian Socialist Party. He was influenced by many of the same thinkers as the American progressives — Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, James, and others — and he wanted Italy to fight on the Allied side, that is, the eventual American side. And yet Mussolini's support for the war automatically rendered him and his Fascist movement "objectively" right-wing according to communist propaganda.

So does this mean that the editors of the New Republic, the progressives in Wilson's government, John Dewey, and the vast majority of self-described American Socialists were all suddenly right-wingers? Of course not. Only in Italy — home of the most radical socialist party in Europe after Russia — did support for the war automatically transform left-wingers into right-wingers. In Germany the socialists in the Reichstag voted in favor of the war. In Britain the socialists voted in favor of the war. In America the socialists and progressives voted in favor of the war. This didn't make them right-wingers; it made them shockingly bloodthirsty and jingoistic left-wingers. This is just one attribute of the progressives that has been airbrushed from popular history. "Perhaps I was as much opposed to the war as anyone in the nation," declared none other than Mother Jones, a champion of "Americanist" socialism, "but when we get into a fight I am one of those who intend to clean hell out of the other fellow, and we have to clean the kaiser up...the grafter, the thief, the murderer." She was hardly alone. The pro-war socialist Charles E. Russell declared that his former colleagues should be "driven from the country." Another insisted that antiwar socialists should be "shot at once without an hour's delay."⁷²

In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and "America" writ large. progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds — say, McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight "hard enough" for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

War socialism under Wilson was an entirely progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal. To this day liberals instinctively and automatically see war as an excuse to expand governmental control of vast swaths of the economy. If we are to believe that "classic" fascism is first and foremost the elevation of martial values and the militarization of government and society under the banner of nationalism, it is very difficult to understand why the Progressive Era was not also the Fascist Era.

Indeed, it is very difficult not to notice how the progressives fit the objective criteria for a fascist movement set forth by so many students of the field. Progressivism was largely a middle-class movement equally opposed to runaway capitalism above and Marxist radicalism below. Progressives hoped to find a middle course between the two, what the fascists called the "Third Way" or what Richard Ely, mentor to both Wilson and Roosevelt, called the "golden mean" between laissez-faire individualism and Marxist socialism. Their chief desire was to impose a unifying, totalitarian moral order that regulated the individual inside his home and out. The progressives also shared with the fascists and Nazis a burning desire to transcend class differences within the national community and create a new order. George Creel declared this aim succinctly: "No dividing line between the rich and poor, and no class distinctions to breed mean envies."⁷³

This was precisely the social mission and appeal of fascism and Nazism. In speech after speech, Hitler made it clear that his goal was to have no dividing lines between rich and poor. "What a difference compared with a certain other country," he declared, referring to war-torn Spain. "There it is class against class, brother against brother. We have chosen the other route: rather than to wrench you apart, we have brought you together." Robert Ley, the head of the Nazis' German Labor Front, proclaimed flatly, "We are the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle." Whether the rhetoric matched the reality is beside the point; the appeal of such a goal was profound and the intent sincere. A young and ambitious German lawyer who wanted to study abroad was persuaded by his friends to stay home so he wouldn't miss the excitement. "The [Nazi] party was intending to change the whole concept of labour relations, based on the principle of co-determination and shared responsibility between management and workers. I knew it was Utopian but I believed in it with all my heart...Hitler's promises of a caring but disciplined socialism fell on very receptive ears."⁷⁴

Of course, such utopian dreams would have to come at the price of personal liberty. But progressives and fascists alike were glad to pay it. "Individualism," proclaimed Lyman Abbott, the editor of the Outlook, "is the characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization."⁷⁵ The Wilsonian-Crolyite progressive conception of the individual's role in society would and should strike any fair-minded person of any true liberal sensibility today as at least disturbing and somewhat fascistic. Wilson, Croly, and the vast bulk of progressives would have no principled objection to the Nazi conception of the Volksgemeinschaft — "people's community," or national community — or to the Nazi slogan about placing "the common good before the private good." Progressives and fascists alike were explicitly indebted to Darwinism, Hegelianism, and Pragmatism to justify their worldviews. Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony is that according to most of the criteria we use to locate people and policies on the ideological spectrum in the American context — social bases, demographics, economic policies, social welfare provisions — Adolf Hitler was indisputably to Wilson's left.

This is the elephant in the corner that the American left has never been able to admit, explain, or comprehend. Their inability and/or refusal to deal squarely with this fact has distorted our understanding of our politics, our history, and ourselves. Liberals keep saying "it can't happen here" with a clever wink or an ironic smile to insinuate that the right is constantly plotting fascist schemes. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight is this simple fact: it did happen here, and it might very well happen again. To see the threat, however, you must look over your left shoulder, not your right.