Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (20 page)

The reason is as follows. During the 1930s, FDR and American progressives drew heavily from multiple strands of European fascism. They borrowed from the fascist style of charismatic leadership, from fascist monumentalist architecture, and from fascist techniques of political propaganda. Progressives especially loved the forward-looking emphasis of fascism, encapsulated in the slogan of the Hitler youth song featured in the movie
Cabaret
, “Tomorrow belongs to me.”

Progressives did far more than emulate the style of fascism; they also adopted its ideas. Progressivism was in line with fascist social policy, which mainly involved killing off undesirables and excluding immigrants. Progressives also embraced fascist economic policy—instituting citizen entitlements and then using those to justify state control over the private sector—which shaped the contours of the New Deal.

After World War II, fascism—to put it mildly—fell into bad repute. It became politically impossible in decent company to profess an ideology that took on the odor of the Holocaust. So progressives dumped many of the social and political features of fascism—no more compulsory sterilization or racist immigration policies—while retaining fascist economic policy.

Progressives quickly got rid of the fascist label and, in a creative move, they publicly pretended that fascism was the very antithesis of what they had always been about. Now they portrayed fascism as somehow a conservative, right-of-center phenomenon. To this day, without bothering to define what they mean, progressives routinely accuse conservatives of being “fascists.”

The prime progressive candidate to be a fascist is, of course, Donald Trump. The online magazine
Slate
even interviewed a supposed expert on fascism to explore how closely Trump fits the fascist label. The expert, Robert Paxton, found “some echoes of fascism” by noting that Trump is a nationalist, Trump appeals to people of low education, and he “even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out.”
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But if progressives consider Republicans to be fascist because fascism is “right wing,” this is not how the fascists themselves saw it. The fascists themselves always knew they were left-wingers. We are blinded to this today because we think of socialism and fascism as opposed to each other, and we tend to liken progressivism to socialism. In reality, socialism and fascism are closely linked. That’s why, at least in one stage of World War II, it was natural for Hitler and Stalin to ally with each other; both believed they were fighting on the same side.

The link between fascism and socialism can also be seen in the way the Nazis described themselves. They called themselves National Socialists. The Nazi program involved nationalization of trusts, government control of industry, confiscations of amassed wealth, shared profits with labor, a whole range of entitlements. Fascism, in other words, was a branch of socialism and was recognized as such by its champions and adherents.

Progressivism, Communism, and Fascism are today considered to be the three alternative systems of government that emerged in the twentieth century. But in fact all three are expressions of collectivism—of a powerful centralized state. Collectivism is the big idea of the twentieth century. It gained power as a consequence of the Great Depression, which many saw as proof of the collapse of capitalism. As a result of this erosion of confidence, people proved willing to put their faith in collectivist solutions.

Progressives today insist that progressivism—as manifest in FDR’s New Deal—“saved” capitalism. This is part of the progressive postwar story, and it’s pure bunkum: progressivism no more “saved” capitalism than fascism or communism did. These were from the outset systems to replace and subvert capitalism. The fact that capitalism survived and even thrived was not due to progressivism but due to the failure or inadequacy of progressive efforts to subvert capitalism.

To compare progressivism with fascism is not to equate FDR, Mussolini, and Hitler. All three were charismatic leaders, but there are obvious differences between them. Partly they reflected cultural differences between their three respective countries. They were also different people. FDR wasn’t a mass murderer, as Hitler was. Neither was FDR an outright
dictator, like Mussolini became. Rather, FDR for the most part used the democratic process to achieve goals that reflected his version of fascism—fascism, one may say, American-style.

Yet if FDR was freely elected, so was Hitler. Both came to power through a democratic process. If FDR embodied the spirit of the American people, so did Mussolini and Hitler respectively embody the Italian and the German spirit. Hitler and Mussolini jettisoned democracy immediately upon taking power, but FDR too assumed virtually dictatorial wartime powers.

Even in peacetime, FDR sought to circumvent the constitutional system of checks and balances by packing the Supreme Court. Fortunately, this packing scheme didn’t work, but FDR achieved his greater purpose when the court changed its tune and became a pliant supporter of the New Deal.

Hitler was a racist in a way that Mussolini wasn’t, with FDR occupying a position somewhere between the two of them. FDR was not an anti-Semite, as Hitler was, but he did share Hitler’s low view of Asians and blacks. During World War II, FDR ordered that many Japanese Americans, under suspicion of disloyalty, be interned in camps. There is, of course, an argument in wartime for holding captive those who pose a security risk. My point, however, is that FDR made no similar arrangements for Italians and Germans in the United States.

So there was a clear racial element in FDR’s approach to security. FDR was culpable for doing exactly what progressive Democrats accuse Donald Trump of doing when he threatens to target violent Islamists. Yet Trump doesn’t single out radical Muslims while exonerating other groups who act like them. FDR, by contrast, treated Japanese Americans in a way he didn’t treat German Americans or Italian Americans.

That, I’m suggesting, is because FDR, even during World War II, retained a soft spot for German and Italian fascism. Also FDR wasn’t turned off by the fascist idea of a racial hierarchy; indeed, here was FDR implementing one himself. Incidentally Japanese internment is another crime that Democrats blame on “America” when their own hero, FDR, is the one who ordered it.

FDR, Mussolini, and Hitler all denounced the free market and blamed the problems of their society on private business. All vowed to use the state to combat the power of business, and offered themselves as the true manifestation of the collective good. If one ended as the enemy of the other two, it shouldn’t blind us to their earlier mutual admiration.

THE EUGENIC LINK

We may think that the progressive association with fascism begins with Mussolini and Hitler but actually it begins much earlier, in the eugenics movement championed by Margaret Sanger. In the previous chapter I focused on Sanger’s views of blacks, but Sanger, it turns out, had a much bigger list of undesirables that she wanted to see wiped off the earth.

Sanger was a eugenicist who saw birth control and sterilization as the means to create what she called “a race of thoroughbreds.” This required making women she termed “reckless breeders” stop producing “human weeds.” Sanger drew a sharp line not so much between black and white as between “fit” and “unfit.” By fit she admittedly meant whites, but only educated, upper-class whites. By “unfit” she meant pretty much everyone else. Sanger viewed birth control as a mechanism to multiply the numbers of the fit while reducing the numbers of the unfit.

As we saw earlier, she preferred to use social pressure and propaganda but, if those failed, she wholeheartedly supported compulsory sterilization. (Abortion was not an issue during that time; later Planned Parenthood would become a zealous promoter and performer of abortions.) If Sanger had lived longer I’m sure she would have become an abortion enthusiast—at least for “unfit” populations. For Sanger, what mattered was not the means but the result. As she put it on the cover of her magazine
Birth Control Review
, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—this is the chief aim of birth control.”
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Sanger was also an early advocate of the Nazi sterilization laws as setting a global example in this area. Sanger corresponded with psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and chief
architect of Hitler’s sterilization program. In 1933, she also published Rudin’s article, “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” in her
Birth Control Review
. The earliest of the Nazi sterilization laws were, by Rudin’s admission, modeled on American laws drafted by Sanger and her associates at the American Birth Control League.
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Sanger’s like-minded associates, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, also maintained good personal ties with the Nazis. Grant received letters of praise from the German chancellor, and his book
The Passing of the Great Race
was personally inscribed by Hitler as “my bible” on the subject of eugenics. Stoddard met with Hitler and praised him in 1940 for “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock,” adding that the Jew problem in Germany is “settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves.”

Progressives like Sanger weren’t just concerned with limiting the births of nonwhite people; they were also concerned with limiting their immigration to the United States. What these people feared was the browning of America. They fought it on two fronts. First they tried to construct a legal blockade to keep the brown people out, and if they got through the blockade, to restrict their breeding. The two methods worked together, in a kind of scissors motion, toward the same racially restrictive end.

Progressives like Edward A. Ross, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant—all associates of Sanger—were leading champions of laws restricting immigration. Ross was an academic advisor to Sanger. Employing with full gusto the social Darwinist rhetoric of early twentieth century progressivism, Ross described immigrants from central and southern Europe as “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”
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Stoddard, who served on the board of Sanger’s Birth Control League—the forerunner to Planned Parenthood—was the author of
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy
. He was, during the 1920s, the most famous racist writer in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan regularly cited his work and so did the Nazis. Stoddard wrote
that immigrants were a kind of virus and “just as we isolate the bacterial invasion, and starve out the bacteria, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.”
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Madison Grant was president of the New York Zoological Society and one of Sanger’s heroes; she listed his book
The Passing of the Great Race
as required reading on the eugenics list of her
Birth Control Review
. Grant warned that what he called Nordic civilization was being swamped and vitiated by inferior Alpine and Mediterranean strains from central and southern Europe. These darker Europeans were really “Western extensions of Asiatic species,” Grant insisted, while Nordics were Aryans, “the white man par excellence.”
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KEEPING OUT THE “UNFIT”

Although we hear many progressive laments today about how Republicans are against immigrants—an allegation supported by nothing more than opposition to illegal immigration—in reality no one has attacked immigrants with the venom of progressives. In fact, the progressive assault on immigrants in the 1920s was unprecedented and had far-reaching consequences.

America had long been considered a magnet for immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of Irish, Italians, and Jews came to America in the nineteenth century, and these groups helped build America. Immigration levels were just as high in the early twentieth century. More than four hundred thousand immigrants came to America each year from 1900 to 1920.

But progressives hated immigration largely because they hated the types of immigrants whom they saw entering the country. Sanger’s main cause was birth control, but she too eagerly backed immigration curbs for “unfit” populations. Sanger argued that America should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as the feebleminded, idiots, morons, the insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others.”
¹³

Progressive influence was instrumental in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. From the outset Sanger supported the law, but her public endorsement of restrictive immigration came later, in a speech in 1932 titled “My Way to Peace.” Nevertheless, for the first time in American history, laws were passed that systematically barred people from entry and established quotas based on race and national origin. White immigrants were preferred over immigrants of color, and northern Europeans were preferred over southern Europeans.

Of course there were laws that restricted Chinese immigration in the nineteenth century. These were anomalous, however, and there were no laws that curtailed immigration from Europe. The 1924 law put even most Europeans on the unwanted list. The effect was immediate. In the period from 1925–1939, immigration levels dropped to around twenty-five thousand a year, an astonishing 95 percent decline from earlier levels. Progressive “reform” had won the day.

This “reform,” however, had dangerous consequences. During the 1930s there were last-ditch efforts to waive some of the restrictions of the 1924 Immigration Act in order to grant asylum to Jews whose lives were in mortal danger from the Nazis. These were not Jewish applications that came through the mail from Germany. The issue was far more pressing. Almost a thousand German Jews waited desperately in a ship off the coast of Florida, seeking a life-saving approval of their immigration papers.