Here at WLOS, 106.66 on your dial, we're all fascism, all the time! Anti-fascism, that is.
Our last post was a link to a paper about interwar European "shirt movements."
Today, we link to a paper about the same topic and the same period, but in the USA:
Star-spangled fascism: American interwar political extremism in comparative perspective
It's an academic paper, but I also add a link to a retrospective by the Saturday Evening Post on the same topic. (Apparently all fascists in the US are "star-spangled"....Why not Yankee Doodle Death Camps? Or The Reich's Red Glare?)
Star-Spangled Fascists White Shirts, Silver Shirts, White Camellias, and plain, old Nazis: here is the 1939 field guide to America's hate groups.
We've spoken elsewhere of Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion, aka "Silver Shirts"; this current post is a short riff on a few of his fellow travelers.
One such group was the Crusader White Shirts. They were founded by KKK alumnus George W. Christians in the early 1930's; Christians had also founded the American Fascists, previously the American Reds. He once claimed to be so red he made the Russians look yellow. So I guess he took whatever extremism he could find. Antisemitism was the constant....despite his fascist moniker, he often promoted himself as a communist. Keep 'em guessing. This, I should add, is consistent with another theme we keep running across: that the lines to the political left and right are curved, circle towards each other, and meet up. It's almost as if the specific ideology is incidental to the extremism, whatever it may be.
Christians fancied himself something of a Templar, which is another recurring theme in this little niche of history. Oslo fascist
terrorist Anders Breivik claimed to be a Templar. Blackwater/Xe
mercenaries were said to use Templar-related call signs, and ex-employees have testified that there
was a culture of Christian supremacy and a Crusader mentality among their operatives. They were also linked to the Knights of Malta.
The famous bit of Nazi propaganda you can see above has Hitler himself pictured as a knight, a "standard bearer," and what some say
is specifically a Grail knight; legends say the Templars are the grail guardians. This is all what I have previously felt is an underlying Romanticism in the fascist mindset....Fascism recalls a mythical great past, because the future is scary and the present often sucks; the fascists politicize nostalgia, a powerful emotion; Peter Pan as impish storm-trooper....And one can't help but think of the slogan:
Make America Great ....Again. If the brown-shirt fits....
The fascist mindset of the 1920's, as articulated by Futurist poet F.T. Marinetti, makes it possible to think of fascism itself as a work of art. A sophisticated "happening" that goes beyond politics into the reorganization of society to such a point that perception itself is affected. Everything from dates and times to weights and measures undergo an almost magical renaming, one long ceremony in which dark forces brazenly possess the powerful and speak through them, dictating inhuman programs and pogroms, inner psychoses manifest in one large orgy of hate and apocalyptic violence. The uniform of a fascist is less appealing than a mad hobo's tattered rags. The tipping point is razor-thin. Leading a nation into total war is a coin-toss away from sleeping in one's own shit.
(Footnote: the point where even sculptures along the axes of the world quiver,
shake, beg for coin, move in square, 2-axes movements, like forks
wielded by mechanical men in spray-painted bed-sheets.)
Marinetti would disagree and proclaim that the "Toot!" of the factory whistle every morning is the daily recurrence of Fiat Lux! And on the 7th day, rest....
(Foonote 2: "....today" is always a hot, stinking mess, and tomorrow is the apocalypse. Unless of course you go to the fascist strongman who can "get 'er done...." Fascism is personality-driven; it's not about ideas; whether swastika or hammer and sickle, it doesn't matter; it's the power of emotion in the ceremonial Black Mass of the state religion, the charismatic warrior-priest to follow. History as a series of "great men".)
An ongoing fascination, these Templars....in the end, George Christians may just have been a lunatic:
Christians was investigated by U.S. Army military intelligence who
described him as having "a brilliant mind but of erratic temperament",
and as posing no threat. Raymond Moley described him as a "harmless lunatic"
In 1934, Pat McGrady, author of Fascism in America, visited Christians in Chattanooga for New York's Jewish Daily Bulletin....thought that Christians was not as much of a "nut" as some made out, saying:
He is a clever fellow with a fine appreciation of the
limits of our broad liberties of speech and action which he strains in
promoting his personality and an economic scheme which, if effective, is
enough to surrender the rights and properties of the people into the
hands of whoever may be strong enough to grasp control of a despairing
nation.
Despite his intelligence, McGrady identified in Christians a deep
ignorance of the principles of Fascism and of its practice in Germany
and Italy, fostered, he thought, by the narrow sources on which
Christians was able to draw in Chattanooga in understanding World
affairs. This made the question of whether Christians was really a
Fascist, a moot one.
In his 1943 book Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, Christians was described by John Roy Carlson (Arthur Derounian) as "an odd combination of comedian and sinister revolutionist", strongly anti-Catholic but not anti-Semitic.
Another pro-Nazi, KKK alumnus was a dude with the unlikely name of George E. Deatherge. Death urge? Thanatos much? He founded a group called the Knights of the White Camelia, based on a group linked to the first (1860's) version of the KKK. Deatherge mixed with anti-Jewish circles until WW2 forced all these dickheads out of business. Good thing. The tactics of the original KWC included "harassment, floggings, and sometimes murder." Apparently, groups with this name have cropped up in our time, in Florida and Louisiana, probably elsewhere....
There was a brief flare-up in the USA known as the "Brown Scare" under the Roosevelt administration, during the war, when a number of fascists were put on trial for sedition and/or tax-related charges. Christians was arrested for sedition in 1942; Deatherge was charged in 1944 under the same law, the Alien Registration Act, aka the Smith Act. He was arrested on 12 counts of sedition and conspiracy, eventually serving 8 out of 15 years in prison. He was one of 30 defendants in his 1944 trial, know as the "Great Sedition Trial of '44."
Roosevelt's crackdown was effective. These groups were all but destroyed. No mass incarceration like the Japanese, just a targeted approach.
Nazi leader Julius Kuhn was arrested as early as 1939, for tax evasion, and re-arrested in 1943 on charges related to his activity as a foreign agent. He was deported in 1945 and later imprisoned in Germany under their postwar de-Nazification laws. He was released shortly before his death in 1951.
This page on the Brown Scare is a neat little summary, specifically mentioning Kuhn and Pelley, but it doesn't speak about Deatherge and Christians.
The Great Sedition Trial of 1944 included 30 defendants, George Deatherge among them.
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George Deatherge
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So, these were just a few of the many would-be American führers, not to mention the thousands of rank and file sympathizers, of fascism in America. Had the Japanese not attacked pearl Harbor, the US may never have entered the war. Man-on-the-street interviews from the time show that many Americans saw the war as a European problem we'd best stay out of.
There were a number of fascist outfits in the US before WW2, but the only outright Nazis were the German-America Bund. They were actually in contact with the Reich. Their leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, was a German immigrant and member of the Nazi party. That said, relations with Germany were somewhat fraught and the Bund, despite some success, never seems to have been really important to Berlin.
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Julius Kuhn
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The Bund started life in the mid-20's as the Free Society of Teutonia. From 1933 to 1935, they were known as the Friends of New Germany. Reshuffling, time-biding, a lot of this reorganization was made in collaboration with Berlin, but it doesn't seem like anyone in Berlin really cared all that much. Whereas the Bund was in contact with German officials who issued directives, meetings between reps from the Bund and the Germans government were more often than not "disappointing."
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| Bund flag |
The Bund flag is kind of odd. It has the three Nazi colors: black, white, and red, forming an Iron Cross. But the golden, 3D swastika looks like an Art Deco trophy. It's kind of silly.
The "AV" stands for Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, but is it really necessary? A flag shouldn't need subtitles. The Bund flag is a failure on all levels from the POV of vexillology.
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Bund youth group flag
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The flag of the Bund's youth group has a starker color scheme, with a Celtic-type cross and the sig rune...comic-book villainy. Weird how it shares zero in common with the flag of the parent organization. One would never look at thee two flags and think that they are somehow related.
As I stated above, after the US entered WW2, American fascist leaders were either sent to prison or otherwise silenced. After war was declared on the Axis, some groups found discretion was the better part of valor, and closed of their own accord. But just 2 years prior (cue dithering harp music):
....the zenith of the Bund's activities was the rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939....Some 20,000 people attended....Most shocking to American sensibilities was the outbreak of violence between protesters and Bund storm troopers.
Charlottesville"s "Unite the Right" rally comes to mind; it shocked many in the nation, but it shouldn't have. Fascists negotiate with their fists.
As the memory of WW2 fades, young people seem willing to pick up the Tiki-torch and run with it, but they run nowhere. Fascism is a dead end. Don't be surprised by fisticuffs; fascism fetishizes violence, and fascists attack in packs, like dogs:
Survival of the Fittest.
Might makes Right.
Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.
Violence is part and parcel of fascist ideology, violence is their currency. Fight Club. A glorification of the jackal. An almost suspect over-glorification of the family. The homosocial, coded violence of the soldier, the athlete, the Proud Boy....
The word "fascist" has been tossed around so much it's somewhat lost its power. Ho-hum hipster yawn. Been there, done that. Like the boy who cried wolf. But I think it's something to take seriously. White sheets and all-black uniforms have given way to polo shirts and less menacing attire, but the goals remain the same. It's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, perhaps because our lives are relatively short. WW2 finished a mere 25 years before I was born. Fascism was never fully vanquished, just forced underground, and then only barely.
We're a violent society, inflation has skyrocketed, our climate is going berserk, and we're still in the uncertain throes of an ugly pandemic. Some positive Star Trek version of society could emerge as we sit on the brink of environmental and economic challenges (collapse?) the likes of which we haven't seen in centuries. But I have a feeling things will get worse before they get better. Make the country great. Again. I'd focus on making it tolerable, or even functional, first....
