'It
will be called Americanism': the US writers who imagined a fascist
future
From
Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth to Donald Trump’s favourite film,
Citizen Kane, US culture has long told stories about homegrown
authoritarianism. What can we learn from them?
Sarah Churchwell
Friday 3 February
2017 12.00 GMT
To have enslaved
America with this hocus-pocus! To have captured the mind of the
world’s greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth!
Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on
earth!” These words come near the end of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel
The Plot Against America, but for some they could have been written
yesterday. The election of Donald J Trump as president has been
called “unimaginable”, but the truth is many people did imagine
the forces that have brought him to power, or versions of them; we
just stopped listening to them.
In 1944, an article
called “American Fascism” appeared in the New York Times, written
by then vice president Henry Wallace. “A fascist,” wrote Wallace,
“is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an
intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties,
classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him
ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.”
Wallace predicted that American fascism would only become “really
dangerous” if a “purposeful coalition” arose between crony
capitalists, “poisoners of public information” and “the KKK
type of demagoguery”. Those defending the new administration insist
it isn’t fascism, but Americanism. This, too, was foretold: in
1938, a New York Times reporter warned: “When and if fascism comes
to America it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not
be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it
will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.”
Today, George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is No 1 on Amazon.com, while Hannah
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism has been selling at 16
times its normal rate since December. The Trump administration’s
use of Newspeak (“designed to diminish the range of thought”, in
Orwell’s words), its partiality for “alternative facts”, have
sent readers diving back into history in search not only of
explanations, but solutions.
One perspective
fiction can offer is to imagine not alternative facts but alternative
futures, based on shared pasts. These are the stories we call
“counterfactual”, the what-ifs that might have emerged had
historical forces twisted in different directions. Nineteen
Eighty-Four was Orwell’s vision of postwar fascism, while Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World, written just as European fascism began to
consolidate in 1932, incorporated American culture into its dystopian
vision, in which citizens of the “World State” pray to long-dead
gods of technology (“In Ford We Trust”) and entertain themselves
with “Feelies” (a play on “talkies”, the new sound films).
Books are suppressed, but no one wants to read them any more anyway.
Books are the
enemies of totalitarians, which is why they like to burn them. And
there are certainly crucial lessons to be learned from Orwell,
Arendt, Elie Wiesel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many of other writers
of the last century who emerged from the first waves of modern
totalitarianism determined to share their painful lessons. Consoling
tales about defeating nazism remain perennially popular, but darker
counterfactual stories have gradually been reclaiming our attention.
Len Deighton’s 1978 novel SS-GB, recounting an alternative history
in which the Battle of Britain was lost and Germany occupied Great
Britain, is being adapted for the BBC, while Amazon’s version of
Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which imagines
the world after the axis powers triumphed, is filming a third season.
Its plot hinges on propaganda films that literally offer “alternative
facts”, as history changes according to individual choices.
Alongside these
fables of evil Nazis and heroic freedom fighters is the spectre of
homegrown totalitarianism. And despite America’s insistence that
“it can’t happen here”, many writers have shown exactly how it
could. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood’s vision of
theocratic misogynists taking over America, is among the most
powerful modern cautionary tales. One of its most quoted lines
articulates the argument of authoritarians everywhere, that “there
is more than one kind of freedom … freedom to and freedom from. In
the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given
freedom from.” Atwood’s parable was published a year after Ronald
Reagan passed the “global gag” rule, restricting funding of
reproductive rights – the same rule that Trump, surrounded by a
group of men, was just photographed signing back into law.
American
authoritarianism has always been entangled not only with patriotism,
but with the country’s two most familiar belief systems: religion
and business. “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in
the flag and carrying a cross,” someone once observed, who might
have added that it would also be waving a dollar bill. That person
was not, as is often reported, Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It
Can’t Happen Here, a furious satire of the idea that American
exceptionalism might inoculate it against fascism. But Lewis’s
novel does make a similar (if less pithy) observation, declaring that
in America, fascism’s most dangerous supporters would be those “who
disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to
capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native
American liberty”. American fascism will necessarily be shaped by
capitalism – or, as Lewis memorably puts it, “government of the
profits, by the profits, for the profits”.
It Can’t Happen
Here lambasts the “funny therapeutics” of trying to “cure the
evils of democracy by the evils of fascism”. Senator Buzz Windrip
runs for president on a populist campaign of traditional values,
making simplistic promises about returning prosperity (“he
advocated everyone’s getting rich by just voting to be rich”). A
newspaper editor issues futile warnings: “People will think they’re
electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the
Terror!” Once in office, Windrip makes good his authoritarian
threats, creating a private security force called the Minute Men and
imprisoning his political enemies in “concentration camps”. As
the midwest grumbles about secession, the administration decides to
arouse “that useful patriotism which always appears upon threat of
an outside attack” by arranging “to be insulted and menaced in a
well-planned series of deplorable ‘incidents’ on the Mexican
border, and declare war on Mexico”. Windrip was inspired by Huey
Long, the charismatic populist from Louisiana who was assassinated in
1935 and to whom Trump has been frequently compared. Robert Penn
Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946) told another tale inspired by
Long’s rise and fall: “Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the
fat boys,” politician Willie Stark is cynically advised. “Make
’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em mad, even mad at you. Stir
them up and they’ll love it and come back for more.”
More recently,
Roth’s The Plot Against America, set at the beginning of the second
world war, imagines Charles Lindbergh winning the White House on a
slogan of “America First”, the antisemitic platform he supported
in real life. In fact, the phrase “America First” was originally
associated not with Lindbergh, but with the 1916 campaign of Woodrow
Wilson, and then echoed four years later by the first businessman to
become president, Warren G Harding, who said during his campaign that
“patriotic devotion” meant “to prosper America first, to think
of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere
America first”. Harding’s version of putting America first was to
allow the rise of the Ku Klux Klan while creating a graft-ridden
cabinet responsible in 1923 for the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, the
worst corruption scandal in American political history so far – but
then American history isn’t over yet.
The Plot Against
America begins as Lindbergh wins the election, thanks to “carnival
antics” that leave Republican leaders “in despair over their
candidate’s stubborn refusal to allow anyone other than himself to
determine the strategy of his campaign”. The president-elect heads
immediately to Europe for “cordial talks” with Hitler, agreeing
to peaceful relations. This leads to protests at home, but
establishes “a new order in Europe”. Still, Americans insist that
“America wasn’t a fascist country and wasn’t going to be”
because the president and congress were “bound to follow the law as
set down by the constitution. They were Republican, they were
isolationist, and among them, yes, there were antisemites … but
that was a long way from their being Nazis.” The story concerns the
gradual erosion of norms and acceptance of oppression: “Now they
think they can get away with anything. It’s disgraceful. It starts
with the White House.” For all its brilliance, however, Roth’s
Plot evades its own central quandary, which is that of history: what
is the solution? Roth settles for an easy optimism, one of the US’s
national hallmarks, in which American virtue asserts itself and
Lindbergh literally disappears.
We call such facile
resolutions “Hollywood endings” for a reason, but it’s also
true that the dream factory has been the source of some of America’s
most powerful stories about domestic fascism, including the one that
Trump has named his favourite film, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane
(1941). When Trump appeared at the Republican National Convention
last July in front of a colossal picture of his own face, many were
startled by his conjuring of fascist iconography. It seems more
likely that he was visually quoting Citizen Kane’s invocation of
fascism, in its famous scene of Kane holding a campaign rally with a
giant self-portrait behind him; Welles’s satire appears to have
been lost in translation. When Kane loses his bid for governor,
brought down by a sex scandal, we learn that his newspaper had
prepared two headlines, depending on the election outcome: either
“Kane Elected” or “Fraud at Polls”. Trump has said he
identifies with Kane, overlooking the fact that Kane destroys himself
in his quest for greatness. Kane’s only friend says of him after
his death: “He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He
never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life.” It wasn’t
intended as a recommendation.
Citizen Kane was
more about megalomania than the autocracy to which it almost led.
(Like Lindbergh, for whom he was instrumental in reviving the phrase
“America First”, William Randolph Hearst – on whom Kane was
based – spoke approvingly of Hitler, and an early draft of the film
reveals that Kane’s son became a card-carrying Nazi.) But during
the second world war, Hollywood produced many stories about the
defeat of totalitarianism at home, as well as abroad. Frank Capra’s
Meet John Doe, also released in 1941, offers a more sentimental
version of a similar story. A business tycoon called Norton tries to
harness a populist movement for his own purposes, but the people
reject him in the name of democratic ideals. “I get mad not just
for myself but for a guy named Washington, and Jefferson, and
Lincoln,” declares a freedom-loving newspaper editor. Norton
believes that “what the American people need is an iron hand” and
tries to manipulate the crowd into hating John Doe, their populist
hero. But in the end, Doe is saved by a handful of Americans who
believe in him, leading to the editor’s valedictory line: “There
you are, Norton, the people! Try and lick that!”
These stories
continually depict the people rising up to assert their decency, with
journalists as their spokespeople. The free press saves America from
fascism again and again, as in an all but forgotten film called
Keeper of the Flame (1942), the least well known of the screen
partnerships of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. As it opens, a
successful businessman who has become a popular demagogue dies under
mysterious circumstances. Eventually his widow reveals that he was,
in fact, a secret fascist, supported “by a few private individuals
to whom money didn’t mean anything any more but who wanted
political power. Knew they could never get it by democratic means.”
While movies like Meet John Doe allow that individual authoritarians
might occasionally spring up, Keeper of the Flame is one of the few
Hollywood films that explicitly imagines a fully fledged homegrown
American fascist movement. The demagogue’s campaign is managed by a
media manipulator who plants fake stories to stir up hatred,
including an “antisemitic paper attacking the Jews”, a Farmer’s
Gazette that savages “the city dwellers”, a “Southern appeal to
the Ku Klux Klan,” along with plans to create “America’s first
storm troopers”. “Of course,” the widow explains, “they
didn’t call it fascism. They painted it red, white, and blue, and
called it Americanism.”
Media provides both
sides with their weapons: the fascists in Keeper of the Flame are
defeated when the truth is revealed by the journalist who speaks for
democracy, once again. The power of the press drives another
political film Hepburn and Tracy made a few years later, State of the
Union (1948), which begins with an authoritarian Republican newspaper
tycoon’s failed efforts to become president. Just as reporters were
the voice of the people, so American fascists were often imagined as
newspaper tycoons, thanks to the toxic mix of capitalism, media and
politics, the perversion of America’s cult of business, against
which people such as Henry Wallace cautioned.
The TV adaptation
of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Photograph: Amazon
Studios
McCarthyism
engendered a whole new cadre of warnings against authoritarianism,
with a specifically ideological cast. By 1959, this had inspired
books such as The Manchurian Candidate, made into a film in 1962, and
also frequently invoked in recent weeks by those who argue that Trump
is, in fact, a puppet of the Russian state. These fears were hardly
assuaged by his shouts of “no puppet” during the presidential
debates, perhaps because they brought to mind a line from The
Manchurian Candidate: “You just keep shouting ‘Point of Order,
Point of Order’ into the television cameras and I will handle the
rest.” As the sinister brainwashing scientist observes: “His
brain has not only been washed, as they say, it’s been
dry-cleaned.”
McCarthyism
camouflaged itself as a story about external enemies infiltrating
peaceful American society, so that “Americanism” could define
itself against “un-Americanism” and pretend this was a cold war
rather than a civil one. As the rifts created by the Vietnam war
deepened, however, so did the sense that America was fighting an
internal, not an external, battle, an existential struggle for the
nation’s soul that drove many people towards a crude nationalism.
This is the lesson of a forgotten popular novel written in response
to Watergate, another historical shock to America’s democratic
spirit. In The R Document (1976) by Irving Wallace, a power hungry
FBI director plans to overturn the Bill of Rights with a new
constitutional amendment: “No right or liberty guaranteed by the
constitution shall be construed as licence to endanger the national
security.” He tries to shut down all press opposition and fakes
statistics to make his case. Eventually, in another Hollywood ending,
a crusading district attorney reveals the truth and shocked
congressmen defeat the amendment, but not before Wallace has warned
his readers: “If fascism ever comes to the United States, it’ll
be because the people voted it in.” Or, as Wallace’s epigraph
from Benjamin Franklin puts it, the founding fathers gave us “a
republic, if you can keep it”.
These parallels
between fictional pasts and our political present may seem eerie:
they aren’t. There is nothing surprising about people trying to
replicate the oldest models of power. Wallace also quotes the
observation of the writer Charles Péguy, killed in the first world
war, that tyranny is by definition better organised than freedom. To
this it could be added that tyranny is always simpler than freedom,
because it decides its own rules, or whether to have any at all.
What all these
stories demonstrate – and what their resolutions rely on – is
that democracy depends on good faith. Individuals operating in bad
faith are nothing new, but these stories trust that the majority work
in good faith, and will prevail. Only in Preston Sturges’ The Great
McGinty (1940) is the whole system riddled with bad faith, so that a
corrupt politician has to flee the country when he tries to go
straight. The crisis facing America today isn’t ultimately about
political differences: it’s about ethical ones. Faith in business,
or religion, or nation means nothing if those faiths are deployed for
cynical or vicious ends; it turns out our idealism was there to
protect our ideals. “Common decency,” after all, means not only
basic decency, but a decency that is held in common. American history
is not on Trump’s side; his own favourite film isn’t even on his
side.
There are two ways
to learn: one is by direct experience, otherwise known as the hard
way. The easier way is to read, and pay attention. Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism.
In Bradbury’s dystopian near-future, books were neglected as
people’s attention span shortened, until finally they were banned
(“a book is a loaded gun in the house next door”). Gradually a
fireman who burns books realises they may contain lessons that could
save society from repeating the mistakes of the past: “The books
are to remind us what asses and fools we are … When they ask us
what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where
we’ll win out in the long run.”
During the writing
of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis was married to Dorothy
Thompson, one of the most influential American journalists of the
late 1930s, and the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn’s character
in her first pairing with Spencer Tracy, Woman of the Year (1942).
Thompson interviewed Hitler in 1931, calling him “the very
prototype of the little man”; by 1939, Time magazine named her the
second most popular woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt. In
1941, Thompson wrote an article for Harper’s magazine, called “Who
Goes Nazi?”, in which she recommends a “somewhat macabre parlour
game” for social gatherings, “to speculate who in a showdown
would go Nazi”. Cataloguing various sub-groups (born Nazis,
persuaded Nazis, never-Nazis), Thompson notes that nazism was not a
matter of nationality but of “a certain type of mind”. She
describes Person A, Person B and so on, predicting each one’s
potential for fascism, before arriving at “young D”, who is,
Thompson declares, “the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the
spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his
life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away
with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the
fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the
alimony. His life is spent in sensation seeking and theatricality. He
is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good looking, in a
vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly
fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord
it over others.”
There is also a
young immigrant: “The people in the room think he is not an
American, but he is more American than almost any of them.” Along
with the Americans who understand their own values, one of which is
kindness, the immigrant is the greatest opponent of nazism in the
room. Only together, Thompson implies, can they recognise, and
defeat, young D.
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