American Academy Lecture at HCA

Fascism in America: Reflections on the 1930s

Fascism has a curious history in America. In the 1920s and early 1930s, fascism in its Italian form drew significant interest and support from American elites, and some scholars believe that Mussolini’s “corporate state” influenced the early New Deal. The racially obsessed variety of fascism that emerged in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s attracted a much smaller number of Americans but played an important part in the emergence of the “new right” in America. This new right rejected the New Deal, spread conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media, banking, and politics, opposed any US intervention in overseas affairs, fueled distrust of “rigged” democracy, and praised European fascists like Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and Hitler. This talk will explore the reasons why these admirers of fascism failed to gain much traction in 1930s America, despite the prolonged economic crisis of that decade; and it will assess the ways that these same ideas returned in the postwar era and emerged after the Cold War as the dominant ideology of today’s Republican Party.

In cooperation with Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut (DAI) Heidelberg and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg