I read Gen. Clark's book about modern wars and he thinks that the fight against terror is not a "war" as such.  He advises that going after terrorists with armies, tanks, and ships is a waste of people and money.  The method he would use to go after them is small groups of special forces with specific intelligence to get them.  We see what the use of military power, invading and occupation has brought.  More and more terrorists and no end in sight.  There are terrorists in almost every country on earth.  Our military is not meant to police the world.  So as to the question about the comparison, we are not warring against any country but a loose band of assassins.  No comparison.

So we just send in a little band of specialists headed by a modern day Indiana Jones? No problems with coordination, comminication, supplies, etc....just make it so.

So we just send in a little band of specialists headed by a modern day Indiana Jones? No problems with coordination, comminication, supplies, etc....just make it so.

That's how its's done--Eisenhower's set the standard.  US covert operations used to be quite good at coordinating and supplying friendly regimes.

We're lucky they didn't force the closure of the CIA when the Berlin wall came down.

Doubt if the true history has been told, and I suspect there is more to the cessation of the assisination policy than just chicken-lefties.  I have no problem with your "50 cent bullet" theory of foreign policy if a congressional vote is taken on each one.  Make it a secret session and enter votes into the record after the fact.  The people's representatives need to declare war.

Might as well not bother. There's no such thing as a secret in politics. My guess is the target would know before you or I, and of course would plan on retribution(as well as a good hiding place).

This is why congress has been cut out of the loop.  In the 70's and 80's, even the house intelligence committee couldn't keep a secret.  One leaker charged with treason and sent to Leavenworth (or hanged) would tighten things up.  Once a war is declared, leaking IS treason.

Sure would be funny to see a congressperson brought up on charges. Sad to say they'd probably stick up for each other regardless of party. Of course that means they'll be even less likely to actually declare war. The whole concept of declared war comes from a time and place that has largely dissappeared.

I don't know why it is presumed impossible to follow the law of the land when it comes to something as basic as engaging the country in a war.  Sure, technology and times change.  The Constitution can be amended, but it should not be ignored.

Amending the Constitution is harder than declaring war, which is damn near impossible already.

Polluting the amendment process with phony flag burning and anti-gay marriage proposals hasn't helped.

I'm not sure that just because some amendments aren't ever going to pass they shouldn't be proposed. Personally I think they end up reflecting badly on their backers as often as not. They rally a small base and alienate a broader middle.

Today our governor said the Constitution should be used as a shield, not a sword.  No to the gay marriage amendment.  My husband and I had a civil ceremony, in the courthouse, with a judge.  It wasn't a religious ceremony.  This is what the gay and lesbion people should get, it's a legal partnership but religion isn't involved.  Civil unions are what Kerry favors and so do I,

The reich wingers spew this constantly and I just do not see it.

Perhaps in the furthest streatches of the imagination, but otherwise the comparisson is a comedy of propaganda.

As for your "reich" wingers...
The Nazi party was a politcal party of SOCIALISTS. If pressed I may find some similarities for you, but I would like to see you learn your LEFT from your RIGHT.

It's been pointed out many times. Saddam's regime was socialist as well. Like the Political Compass pointed out that "Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground. "

http://www.politicalcompass.org/
The problem is politics from the left has been reduced to calling everyone Dems disagree with a Nazi. Left, right and middle have been muddled.

Take the test and view the analysis if you have time. Most here have taken it.

Hey Artie, how 'ya doin'?

I've ramped up my readings on WW II lately, so allow me to share some thoughts.

Hitler and Stalin were each driven to concentrate power within their respective selves.  Each felt this drive was fueled not for selfish concerns, but to  accomplish societal and historical imperatives.  Neither treated state terror and brutal coercion as anything other than instruments of  political and public policy goals.  They shared beliefs in a number of isms:  anti-semitism,  miltarism, revanchism and totalitarianism.    They were each paranoid of real and imagined plotters within their regimes (Hitler having more cause to fear than Stalin.)  They each could - and did- blithley turn on long-time, and/or loyal associates and allies.  Imprisonment, torture and murder was generally the fate of those who fell from favor.  Conversely, the hate and suspicion each held for the other, could be put aside in the signing of a  non-aggression pact.

"Hitler had long admired Stalin, regarding his as 'one of the extraordinary figures in world history,' and once shocked a group of intimates by asserting that he and the Soviet leader had much in common since both had risen from the lower classes, and when one listener protested comparison with a former bank robber, he replied, 'If Stalin did commit a bank robbery, it was not to fill his own pockets but to help his party and movement.  You cannot consider that bank robbery."

Adolf Hitler, Toland, John, Double Day & Co., 1976, P. 542.

As to Nazism being socialist, I've read that more and more of late, usually posited as so by the right.  I think that to hold this opinion  is as correct as calling the pre-Hitler Nazi party, a "political party."

The original Nazi party  never had more than 16 members.  The founder of the group, Anton Drexler, formed the group to combat marxism in the work force.  Political  activity was usually no more than  periodic beer guzzling in dingy beer halls.  As Hitler himself commented, when he received a notice in the mail that he had been accepted as a member of the party, (party member #7,) he didn't know whether to laugh or feel anger.  Hitler himself never seemed to hold any socialist views.  He would as a convenience though,  pay lip service to socialist ideals.  Thus, as his fame and power spread, and he cozied up to the industrialists,  the German Workers Party, changed its name to National Socialist German Workers Party.  This was  both a sop to the party faction that truly believed, and a way to woo citizens away from the numerous, popular leftist parties.  Hitler knew little about economics, and never enacted the parts of Nazi  program that could be assigned as socialist (e.g. abolishing income not derived from work; communizing department stores for the benefit of small vendors.) 
 
Finally, I agree with you about too loosely and easily tossing around the Nazi tag.  It just doesn't belong in any rationale discourse.

On the other hand - and speaking at least for myself - I don't appreciate being called a traitor, commie-lover-that's-morphed-into-islamo-fascist, surrender-monkey, one-world government, kum-by-ya naive idealist, because I choose to dissent.

All the best.

Hey Artie, how 'ya doin'?

I've ramped up my readings on WW II lately, so allow me to share some thoughts.

Hitler and Stalin were each driven to concentrate power within their respective selves.  Each felt this drive was fueled not for selfish concerns, but to  accomplish societal and historical imperatives.  Neither treated state terror and brutal coercion as anything other than instruments of  political and public policy goals.  They shared beliefs in a number of isms:  anti-semitism,  miltarism, revanchism and totalitarianism.    They were each paranoid of real and imagined plotters within their regimes (Hitler having more cause to fear than Stalin.)  They each could - and did- blithley turn on long-time, and/or loyal associates and allies.  Imprisonment, torture and murder was generally the fate of those who fell from favor.  Conversely, the hate and suspicion each held for the other, could be put aside in the signing of a  non-aggression pact.

"Hitler had long admired Stalin, regarding his as 'one of the extraordinary figures in world history,' and once shocked a group of intimates by asserting that he and the Soviet leader had much in common since both had risen from the lower classes, and when one listener protested comparison with a former bank robber, he replied, 'If Stalin did commit a bank robbery, it was not to fill his own pockets but to help his party and movement.  You cannot consider that bank robbery."

Adolf Hitler, Toland, John, Double Day & Co., 1976, P. 542.

As to Nazism being socialist, I've read that more and more of late, usually posited as so by the right.  I think that to hold this opinion  is as correct as calling the pre-Hitler Nazi party, a "political party."

The original Nazi party  never had more than 16 members.  The founder of the group, Anton Drexler, formed the group to combat marxism in the work force.  Political  activity was usually no more than  periodic beer guzzling in dingy beer halls.  As Hitler himself commented, when he received a notice in the mail that he had been accepted as a member of the party, (party member #7,) he didn't know whether to laugh or feel anger.  Hitler himself never seemed to hold any socialist views.  He would as a convenience though,  pay lip service to socialist ideals.  Thus, as his fame and power spread, and he cozied up to the industrialists,  the German Workers Party, changed its name to National Socialist German Workers Party.  This was  both a sop to the party faction that truly believed, and a way to woo citizens away from the numerous, popular leftist parties.  Hitler knew little about economics, and never enacted the parts of Nazi  program that could be assigned as socialist (e.g. abolishing income not derived from work; communizing department stores for the benefit of small vendors.) 
 
Finally, I agree with you about too loosely and easily tossing around the Nazi tag.  It just doesn't belong in any rationale discourse.

On the other hand - and speaking at least for myself - I don't appreciate being called a traitor, commie-lover-that's-morphed-into-islamo-fascist, surrender-monkey, one-world government, kum-by-ya naive idealist, because I choose to dissent.

All the best.

So we just send in a little band of specialists headed by a modern day Indiana Jones? No problems with coordination, comminication, supplies, etc....just make it so.

It amazes me that people looked at communism as for the people and as Nazism as oppressive, but the truth isn't so simple.

Who looked at Communism as "for the people" and at "Nazism as oppressive"?

In Western Europe and in the U.S., there have always been more people sympathetic to Fascism/Nazism than to Communism.

Wow. Been awhile since we had a



(That's a really giant "tip of.")

Quite the term paper. I hope you come back to post some more of them. First of all, as to the Nazi party beer hall days. Do you now why they called it the Beer Hall Putsch? Because all those drunk Nazis were always putsching and shoving to get to the bar.    Sorry, but I had to do it.

I'm glad you got to Toland. I have him out in the shed(but I do leave the light on for him). But I think it's also good to get some inside views of the Nazis. Albert Speer's prison diaries are especially enlightening. He took a lot of grief from some Germans for pulling a mea culpa and leaving others out to dry. Some saw it as a cynical ploy, but I think he truly regreted all he did to keep the Reich running. He also risked his life for the German people by ignoring Hitler's orders to leave nothing standing for the people to rebuild with. The Goebbels Diaries are also interesting.

For American writers my favorite is Robert Leckie. His Wars of America is the best overview of American military history I've read. Strikes just the right balance between strategy and tactics, with a touch of geopolitics and a few personal stories thrown in. His Strong Men Armed is a good treatment of the Marines in WWII.

Personally I find the USSR more interesting. It amazes me that people looked at communism as for the people and as Nazism as oppressive, but the truth isn't so simple. An interesting tidbit to chew on is that the Nazis were still producing consumer goods almost to the very end of WWII. The communists pretty much never worried about the consumer.(and that IS the people).

Ever see Enemy at the Gates? I highly recommend it. The point it reiterated that I thought was interesting was the general treatment of the soldiers at the hands of the party comissars. They kept the best firepower behind the lines to keep the soldiers in line rather than using it against the enemy. Some people's movement.

Sorry to ramble on so. Hope to see you around with some new author under your belt. Check out Leckie's Delivered from Evil if you get to the library. One big-asses WWII book, but great for one-volume history. Much more readable than  Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Artie:
Reread my post.  Jeez, sorry to be so pedantic.


Hey, maybe if we can get others interested, we can form a book club, and have exchanges or chats.

Hi Lil Bart:

I wish I could write as succintly as you! 

Pedantic is in this year. Especially around here. The board is always open for a new topic if you find something interesting. Sounds like you have a lot of reading already lined up. I think I'll dig up Toland and recheck it out in the meantime.

I got your little bit about the namecalling and politics but chose not to mention it because it's nice to have a discussion outside of politics. Suffice to say the stuff about traitors is just a bit of the nastiness when politics gets involved. So I just prefered to read your words and move on sans mention of Dem/Rep politics.
I have one last reading suggestion, if you can find it. Gwynn Dyer's War. It was also a documentary series that ran on PBS. It has bits of history woven into the commonality of military development through the ages. How armies evolved even as humans stayed more or less the same. It's a pretty easy read and I found it hard not to go back and reread the little blurbs of personal history written by soldiers and commanders going back before the hoplite.

http://www.samrc.com/am/AM_2001-2002/AM-De...m-Dec2001-7.htm

I am so very glad you don't. Enjoying this exchange here. I will weigh in a trifle sometime. 

I hear 'ya.  I know that at times I have succombed to venting frustrations instead of sharing or debating perspectives.  Talk about getting a grip!  Life and its enjoyment should not be stoked by which faction of the American nomenklatura wields power. 


One thing I forgot to mention about "Enemy at the Gates" is that I found a Russian organization that devotes itself to chronicling the battle of Stalingrad.  They dig, where possible, in spots to unearth artifacts, and to landmark locations.  Most importantly, they dig and search for remains for ID and proper burial.  They support their work by selling the artifacts and materiel they find.  I'll get you the site if you wish.

To you, and yours, and everyone else, Happy Thanksgiving!

Life and its enjoyment should not be stoked by which faction of the American nomenklatura wields power.

Try and hold a Nazi party rally in Germany sometime. Communism did kill a lot more people, but it still has a lot of sympathizers anyway.

The history of this conventional wisdom begins in the 1920s. The press praised Mussolini for single-handedly bringing order to Italy's political life. Many saw a similar quality in Stalin's first Five-Year Plan. In the early years of the Great Depression, dictatorship was an important political fantasy for a heterogeneous group of Americans. Although most Americans were not attracted to dictatorship, for some it seemed necessary in light of the socioeconomic crisis, either as a permanent, more efficient solution to the problems of modern life or, in the classical sense, as a temporary measure to put democracy back on course. Barron's, the conservative business weekly, hoped in February 1933 that the newly elected and yet-to-be-inaugurated Franklin Delano Roosevelt might act as a "semi-dictator" to save America from social chaos. Liberal filmmaker Walter Wanger produced Gabriel over the White House (1933), a political fantasy in which a president solves the country's problems by becoming a divinely inspired dictator. The Communist Party (CP), in its ideologically militant "Third Period," declared that capitalist, bourgeois democracy was already doomed and that the only real political choice was between a communist dictatorship of the proletariat and a fascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

By the second half of the 1930s this had changed. Dictatorship became the evil against which nearly everyone in American political life struggled. Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leader John L. Lewis declared in 1936 that the greatest question facing American workers was "whether the working population of this country shall have the voice in determining their destiny or whether they shall serve as indentured servants for a financial and economic dictatorship that would shamelessly exploit our resources."[1] The Popular Front strategy, adopted by many liberals, radicals, and the Communist Party, sought to organize all political effort around the struggle between democracy and fascism. Although it is today correctly remembered as a document entirely honored in the breach, the Soviet Union's Constitution of 1936 formally recognized political and civil liberties and thus enabled communists and the much larger group of those generally sympathetic to Russia to argue that the Soviet Union itself was well on its way to embracing democracy. Their opponents on the anti-Stalinist left and liberal anticommunists argued that the USSR was a dictatorship as brutal as Nazi Germany. Toward the end of the decade, the Roosevelt administration, interested in nudging the country toward intervention in Europe, backed what Leo Ribuffo has called the "Brown Scare," raising fears that America was threatened by a Nazi "fifth column." Anti-interventionists, on the other hand, argued that U.S. involvement in the European war might lead to dictatorship. Republicans saw signs of dictatorship in FDR's 1940 quest for a third term and donned buttons that read, "Third Reich. Third International. Third Term."[2] In an interventionist tract, published just before the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, William Dow Boutwell, head of the Division of Radio, Publications, and Education in the U.S. Office of Education, captured the situation effectively:

American leaders are united in their distaste for totalitarian governments. Like President Coolidge's minister who was "against sin," they are, with almost no exception, "against totalitarianism." Yet each finds a different "sin" in dictatorship. The men who want wider freedom for corporate business fear totalitarian "collectivism." Writers, poets, artists are against dictators because dictators restrict freedom of expression. To labor leaders the liquidation of unions is the greatest threat. Religious leaders make the issue a holy war. Educator, farmer, scientist, merchant—each finds his central faith and interest imperiled, his own ox gored. They are all against totalitarian rule.[3]

Boutwell's statement captures another aspect of the growing conventional wisdom about dictatorship: by the late 1930s the word "totalitarian" and its substantive sibling "totalitarianism" were regularly applied to the European dictatorships.
Understanding the idea of totalitarianism as a product—and an important component—of 1930s U.S. political culture forces us to reconsider that political culture. To a great extent, our understandings of the political culture of the thirties have been products of a scholarly continuation of many political battles of that tumultuous decade. The era has been a favorite hunting ground for those in search of a usable past. The Popular Front (understood either as a movement led by the Communist Party or as a broad-based coalition of the left), the anti-Stalinist left, noninterventionists, liberal anticommunists, and New Dealers, among others, have each had their acolytes and their detractors among historians. Most recently, the CIO, usually as an object of celebration, has found itself in the center of many understandings of 1930s political culture. These studies have clearly illumined the battle lines in American politics during the decade of depression. Taken together, such studies contribute to a rich understanding of the complexity of those political battles. Indeed, with the exception of World War II, the Great Depression is probably the most studied and debated period in the last century of the American past.

For historians, one of the attractions of the period has been the fascinating and complicated state of American politics. With world economic and political crises calling into question some of the most basic aspects of U.S. social, political, and economic life, it is not surprising that American writers and thinkers, as well as the public at large, adopted a wide range of political views. It is common to describe politics as a spectrum, ranging from left to right. This terminology, derived originally from the way in which parties were seated in the constituent assembly during the French Revolution, is significant, both because it is the way that most modern Western political actors have understood their own politics and because it allows us to draw some admittedly rough comparisons between the politics of our own time and the politics of the past. But if we cannot avoid talking in terms of a left-right spectrum, we should acknowledge the limitations of this model. Politics takes place in many dimensions and cannot be reduced to a single one. Often, people's own descriptions of their politics owe more to the rhetorical requirements of the day than to an unchanging political spectrum: today, politicians avoid the word "liberal" like the plague; in the 1930s few wanted the label "conservative." Moreover, unlike an optical spectrum, which naturally divides into a series of separate colors, we can, and often must, group political actors in a variety of ways. With all these caveats in mind, I will try to provide a roadmap of American politics in the 1930s and early 1940s from left to right.

The American left of the 1930s was large and heterogeneous. Those located on the left in this book believed that modern capitalism was in one way or another fundamentally flawed and urged a radical transformation of American society to distribute goods more democratically. There were many ideological splits within this left. Among the most salient of these divisions—both in later decades and for the purposes of this study—was the division between the Communist Party and its sympathizers on the one hand and the anti-Stalinist left on the other. Although small and deeply opposed to coalition politics at the start of the depression, the CP grew to become the most influential left-wing party in the middle of the decade when it adopted the Popular Front strategy of encouraging most left-of-center parties to band together to oppose fascism. The Popular Front tent ended up encompassing a diverse set of groups and individuals (some more liberal than leftist), drawn together by antifascist, antiracist, and pro-labor politics and a sincere, if misguided, belief that the Soviet Union stood in the forefront of such efforts around the world.

The non-Stalinist (or anti-Stalinist) left was smaller, but even more variegated. Its ranks included Marxist-Leninists who contended that Stalin had betrayed the Russian Revolution: Trotskyists and quasi-Trotskyists, among them many intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review in the late 1930s and the 1940s; Lovestoneites, who were associated with the Bukharinite critique of Stalinism; and a variety of independent Marxist thinkers. Many, like the young Sidney Hook, left, or were expelled from, the CP during the ideological warfare of the 1920s and early 1930s and later drifted in and out of various groups on the sectarian left. The non-Stalinist left also included individuals and groups from other radical traditions, including the old Socialist Party, then led by Norman Thomas. Although much less visible than the Popular Front, anti-Stalinist leftists were intellectually very important in the development of the American critique of dictatorship. Many, though by no means all, of them moved steadily rightward over the course of the 1930s and 1940s.

Liberalism stood at the center of the nation's politics in the 1930s, though it was itself undergoing change. Franklin Roosevelt might stand as a perfect symbol for American liberalism during this decade. First and foremost a political experimentalist, FDR would try a variety of approaches, often simultaneously, to solve the problems facing America in depression and war. While liberals tended to embrace the notion of a vigorous federal government, their other commitments were extraordinarily various. Although some shared the belief that U.S. social and economic life needed to be fundamentally transformed to meet the challenges of the modern world, liberals were generally gradualists. They tended to place a lot of hope in the New Deal and Roosevelt's leadership. Those pushing for radical change often allied themselves with the Popular Front or other parts of the left; I have identified them as "left liberals" in this book. Other liberals—like Dorothy Thompson, who was both one of the leading antifascist voices in the American media and a Republican whose support for FDR wavered on a number of occasions—welcomed an aggressive federal response to the worldwide economic and political crises but were suspicious of fundamental transformations in American capitalism and democracy; I have designated such people "moderate liberals."

Finally, there was the beleaguered American right. If support for FDR defined 1930s liberalism, opposition to him largely characterized 1930s conservatism. Anti-New Dealers included much of the southern wing of the Democratic Party, as well as a large portion of the Republican Party, especially its conservative wing, which was strongest in the Midwest. If most of America loved FDR, his enemies hated him. Indeed, for much of the right, FDR himself became a symbol of dictatorship. Some of the most prominent voices on the right, such as former president Herbert Hoover, were most concerned about federal intervention in the economic marketplace. Others, like many white Southern Democrats, worried about the demands for racial justice emanating from the left. Further to the right lay a variety of individuals and groups often accused (fairly or unfairly) of representing the beginnings of American fascism, including various proponents of reactionary populism, most famously Huey Long and Father Coughlin; fundamentalist leaders of the old Christian right like Reverend Gerald Winrod; and even a small number of self-identified fascists, such as Lawrence Dennis.

By the middle of the decade, a political division very important for this study began to cut across this rough spectrum: the rift over intervention in the growing European crisis. With the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and the invasion of Poland in 1939, Americans faced the question of whether, and how, to intervene in Europe. Although history has tended to associate the interventionist position with liberals and the left and the noninterventionist (or isolationist, as interventionists were apt to call it) position with the right, in fact the division was more complicated. Although many of the most prominent noninterventionists, such as Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick, were conservatives, boisterous opponents of intervention also included noted liberals like United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis. And following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in the summer of 1939, the Communist Party, and those who chose to go along with it, abruptly switched from strong support for intervention in Europe to equally strong opposition, only to change course yet again when Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941.

Historians have done much to illuminate this complicated world of 1930s U.S. politics. But, despite its richness, the historiography has suffered from its reliance on the political divisions of that decade. Much that distinguished the political culture of the Great Depression cut across the political fault lines of the era. Drawing attention to these commonalities should in no way suggest that the differences between competing groups were any less real. Rather, such a focus can provide a valuable new understanding of the dynamics of the period. One of the reasons we write history is to rethink the past in ways that those who lived at the time could not have understood it. This is roughly how Richard Hofstadter, still one of the greatest students of American political culture, came to understand his own work. As he put it in a preface to The American Political Tradition written twenty years after the book's 1948 original publication: "I had been looking at certain characters in American political history not only somewhat from the political left but also from outside the tradition itself, and that from this external angle of vision the differences that seemed very sharp and decisive to those who dwelt altogether within it had begun to lose their distinctness, and that men on different sides of a number of questions appeared as having more in common, in the end, than one originally imagined."[4]

Although it is well established that the word "totalitarianism" was widely used in the United States by the late 1930s, thinking of the phenomenon as a product of the thirties still strikes most historians as odd.[5] This is in large measure due to the extraordinary cultural power that the term, and its equation of communism with Nazism, accrued during the Cold War. To a certain extent, totalitarianism seems out of place in the Age of Roosevelt precisely because the concept seems so at home in the era of the Truman Doctrine. It is easy to reduce the popularity of the word "totalitarianism" during the 1930s to a kind of dramatic foreshadowing, a gun appearing in Act I that is doomed to go off in Act III. Such an explanation, however, is unsatisfying historically. Rather than dealing with the idea of totalitarianism in the age of the Popular Front, it replaces explanation with teleology. But historians are not wrong to regard the wide use of the term in the 1930s as an anomaly, for the notion of totalitarianism seems, in many ways, fundamentally at odds with 1930s political culture as we usually understand it.

The thirties are correctly remembered as a decade in which populism flourished in many forms. On the left, Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign, the rise of the CIO, and the growth of the Popular Front all represented different forms of populism. Father Coughlin and Huey Long were but the most famous heirs to the right-wing strain of American populism. In between were all sorts of liberal versions, from Roosevelt's rhetorical attack on "economic royalists" to the political fantasies of film director Frank Capra. The American populist tradition divides the world into "us" and "them." It typically imagines the great, virtuous mass of hardworking people arrayed against a small group of distant elites, bankers, bureaucrats, and the like.[6] At first glance, the populism of the 1930s easily fit this mold. Coughlin railed against Jewish bankers, Capra's Jefferson Smith battled corrupt U.S. senators, and the CIO's John L. Lewis railed against the "money trust" of Wall Street.

All of this seems very different from the Cold War fears of totalitarianism. The postwar critique of totalitarianism, at least as it developed among intellectuals in the United States such as Hannah Arendt, had at its core a critique of mass culture. Far from extolling the people, these intellectuals most often saw them, at least in their modern-day form, as the greatest potential source of political danger. Rootless, dispossessed of even folk culture, often fanatical, the modern masses were imagined not as sturdy preservers of individualism but as a "lonely crowd" that threatened American democracy.[7] Like populism's celebration of the people, such fears of the people had deep roots in American political culture. In the 1920s, for example, Walter Lippmann and a host of social scientists suggested that the vast majority of people in a modern society were incapable of rational political action.[8] But among American thinkers in the 1930s, we tend to associate such views with dissenters who felt out of step with the times, such as the anti-Stalinist left-wing critics identified with the Partisan Review.

Despite their celebration of the people, many Americans we connect with populism in the 1930s harbored fears of the masses. Usually, cultural producers tried to distinguish between the people, on the one hand, and the crowd on the other. But the distinction often proved hard to make, and as the decade wore on fear of the crowd often began to trump faith in the people. Frank Capra's social trilogy—Mr. Deeds Comes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941)—is usually seen as a locus classicus of the centrist variety of 1930s populism. But though honoring Deeds, Smith, and Doe as everyman heroes, these films see the biggest threat to the protagonists' success not in the scheming, corrupt elites but in the great mass of the people. This is especially true of the latter two productions. Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an idealistic political novice, is opposed in his plan to build a boys' summer camp by his state's corrupt senior senator Harrison Paine (Claude Raines). Paine and his political machine represent classic populist enemies: elites scheming against the interests of honest citizens like Smith and the boys of his home state. But Smith's darkest moment comes when thousands of his constituents, successfully rallied by the Paine machine, send letters to the floor of the U.S. Senate urging Smith to give up his plan. Although Smith represents average people, the people themselves are easily turned against him and become his most intractable opponents. Only when Paine, struck by a sudden bout of conscience, first attempts suicide and then confesses his corruption to the Senate is Smith able to get his project approved.

Doe's indictment of the people is even more direct. Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a minor-league baseball player turned hobo, is hired by a newspaper to play the role of "John Doe," in whose name columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) has been writing homey, populist truths. Willoughby/Doe is soon catapulted to radio stardom with the help of scripts written by Mitchell. Suspicious of posing as an authentic voice of the masses, Willoughby almost quits until he experiences firsthand how much strength ordinary people have gained from his messages. But Willoughby soon becomes an unknowing tool of the newspaper's publisher, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold), who hopes to lead a quasi-fascist American political movement built on popular support for John Doe. When Willoughby discovers the plot, Norton easily turns the people against Doe by passing out flyers attacking him at a John Doe rally. As in Smith (and so many other Capra films), it takes an attempted suicide (in this case by Willoughby himself) to bring the people to their senses at the film's conclusion—regarded then and since as the least convincing part of the movie. As in Smith, populism and "the people" triumph in Doe. However, in both films the people are easily manipulated and prove to be the greatest threat to the hero's (and populism's) success.

Versions of late 1930s populism to the left of Capra also viewed the people in decidedly ambivalent ways. Orson Welles, for instance, was extremely active in the Popular Front theater, leading a series of Federal Theatre Project productions before striking out on his own by establishing the Mercury Theatre, which in turn migrated from the stage to radio and eventually to Hollywood. Welles was deeply concerned with democratizing the theater, creating stage and radio productions of classic plays and novels that would both engage current events and speak to the broadest possible audience. He also shared Capra's fascination with the media's ability to manipulate popular opinion. But even more than Capra, Welles had trouble imagining that the people could resist such manipulation. His famous "Blackshirt" stage presentation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as an antifascist allegory portrayed the public as incapable of resisting propaganda. The 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, the most famous production of Welles's Mercury Theatre before Citizen Kane, displayed his skill at revealing to the public the ease with which it could be duped. Although Welles hoped to educate the audience about this manipulation, he was never able to portray—on stage, over the air, or on screen—such an unmanipulated public. Whereas the people were always Welles's imagined audience, his plays and films portrayed only the crowd.[9]

In Welles's case, and arguably in Capra's as well, the catalyst for this growing suspicion of the crowd was antifascism. American antifascism, which dated back to the 1920s, was particularly strong on the left. Nevertheless, a variety of Americans unconnected to the left, such as Dorothy Thompson, began to embrace it in the 1930s. In the early thirties some American observers, especially those on the left, came to regard fascism as a movement that simply represented the interests of an old, failing elite. In fact, in both Italy and Germany a traditionally conservative head of state (King Victor Emmanuel II in Italy and President Paul von Hinderburg in Germany) had invited the future fascist dictator to head the government. Such a view nicely dovetailed with that of Americans who admired Mussolini: for both fascism was a top-down affair.

But over the course of the 1930s, this portrayal of fascism came to be less and less tenable for many Americans. The absence of any strong domestic opposition in Germany and Italy and the new regimes' apparent ability to build mass support for huge and costly state projects—most spectacularly, wars of conquest—persuaded more and more U.S. observers that these regimes were based not in the singular authority of a dictator and his henchmen but rather in the often irrational desires of the masses. The move away from a cautious optimism about dictatorship in the early 1930s to the nearly universal condemnation of the phenomenon late in the decade was accompanied by a shift from dictator-centered to crowd-centered explanations of modern dictatorship. Such reasoning was relatively comfortable for many conservative critics, who could draw on a well-developed antimodernist critique of mass culture and who tended to focus on Soviet communism, which they had long considered to be a mass movement. Similarly, critics connected with the small, anti-Stalinist left developed a scathing analysis of mass culture that became a substantial part of their indictment of Stalinism, fascism, and capitalism alike.

For liberals and leftists associated with the Popular Front, however, understanding fascism as essentially a mass phenomenon was intellectually and ideologically more difficult. The Popular Front eagerly embraced mass culture. It placed great hope in the ability of mass media such as film, popular theater, radio, and magazines to function, in Michael Denning's phrase, as a "cultural front" in the struggle against fascism. Whereas "Third Period" communism had talked incessantly of "the proletariat," the Popular Front tended to speak of "the people." For Orson Welles, Max Lerner, Lewis Mumford, Richard Wright, and many others on the American left, understanding fascism as essentially a mass movement raised many thorny questions. These questions were not new; mass culture and mass political movements had frequently been viewed with suspicion by those who considered themselves to be fervent democrats. But the rising danger of fascism and changes in American understandings of it helped these questions metastasize in the late 1930s.

It is in this context that the rise of the term "totalitarianism" in the late 1930s can best be understood. "Totalitarian" and "totalitarianism" came to be associated both with the equation of communism and fascism and with the crowd-based understandings of the regimes in question. Although the first of these two meanings obviously divided American observers, many of whom felt that communism and fascism were polar opposites, the second was attractive across the political spectrum. When the Committee for Cultural Freedom, a group of anti-Stalinist American intellectuals from both left and right, denounced in its 1939 founding manifesto both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as examples of totalitarianism, Nation editor Freda Kirchwey, who was generally sympathetic to the Soviet Union, responded not by attacking the notion of totalitarianism, but rather by arguing that the term ought to be reserved for fascist states alone.

World War II changed this conversation in several key ways. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 and the USSR's invasion of Finland the following winter, the notion that Nazism and Stalinism were essentially alike gained much ground in the United States. By the time Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, totalitarianism had come to be used almost invariably to link dictatorships of the left and the right. Whereas interventionists had invoked the notion of totalitarianism before the summer of 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union and the U.S. decision to extend Lend-Lease to the USSR, noninterventionists began to use the term to criticize a war in which the United States would side with Russia. Once America entered the war in December 1941, the word "totalitarianism" began to lose its currency, except among those most critical of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union.

Another change in American views of dictatorship also took place during the war years. For rather different reasons, depictions of both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia began to distinguish between each country's people and its leadership. Although the sense of Nazism and communism as mass regimes never disappeared, wartime understandings tended to emphasize the importance of small leadership groups in crafting and maintaining these regimes.

The idea of totalitarianism would come back into vogue with the end of the war, the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, and the coming of the Cold War. But American understandings of totalitarianism were subtly altered during World War II. This book concludes with an attempt to place three of the most significant and popular accounts of totalitarianism from early in the Cold War—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Vital Center (1949), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)—in the context of the decades-long public discussion of dictatorship that had been taking place in the United States. Each of these books became crucially important in American political culture. Each is most often seen as a product of the Cold War, as a starting point, not an ending point, for a consideration of the idea of totalitarianism in American public culture. Yet we misunderstand Schlesinger, Orwell, and Arendt if we do not take full measure of the grounding of their ideas in understandings of modern dictatorship that began two decades earlier. By placing this analysis at the end of my study, I am suggesting that there are real continuities in American political culture between the late 1930s and the late 1940s that historians have often overlooked. In emphasizing these continuities, I am in no way disputing that there were also real differences. However, just as historians have shown the many ways in which Popular Front culture continued long after the collapse of the Popular Front, I believe that the roots of Cold War political culture go deeper into America's past than we often suppose.
…
In this book I examine not only works of social theory, political speeches, and serious journalism, but also novels, plays, radio dramas, and motion pictures. The late Warren Susman famously argued that the 1930s should be seen not as the Age of Roosevelt, but rather as the Age of Mickey Mouse. It was, of course, both. Conventional wisdoms are formed both by high-brow texts, such as works of political theory, and by low-brow ones, such as movies. There is always some interconnection between these realms, but during the period considered in this study, these connections are particularly deep and important. Academics attempting to analyze the behavior of the European dictatorships frequently had to rely on journalists and the popular works of recent exiles for up-to-date accounts of conditions in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In the politically serious cultural worlds of the 1930s and 1940s, playwrights, novelists, moviemakers, and journalists read the works of intellectuals to inform their representations of dictatorship. Thus, a book like Gregor Ziemer's Education for Death (1941), a relatively serious study of Nazi educational and child-rearing practices, was abridged in the Reader's Digest and later turned into a hit motion picture, Hitler's Children (1943). In short, the images and understandings of dictatorship that journalists, politicians, moviemakers, and academics created informed each other and, together, represent a single—albeit complicated and multifaceted—discussion
of dictatorship in American culture.

A.V., why must you always, invariably, come back with a non sequitor? There are plenty of neo-Nazis in Germany. Moreover, fascism, in general, has been much more popular among the masses in Western Europe and DEFINITELY in the United States than Communism.

Hear, hear!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, amnjr.

Pedantic is in this year. Especially around here. The board is always open for a new topic if you find something interesting. Sounds like you have a lot of reading already lined up. I think I'll dig up Toland and recheck it out in the meantime.

I got your little bit about the namecalling and politics but chose not to mention it because it's nice to have a discussion outside of politics. Suffice to say the stuff about traitors is just a bit of the nastiness when politics gets involved. So I just prefered to read your words and move on sans mention of Dem/Rep politics.
I have one last reading suggestion, if you can find it. Gwynn Dyer's War. It was also a documentary series that ran on PBS. It has bits of history woven into the commonality of military development through the ages. How armies evolved even as humans stayed more or less the same. It's a pretty easy read and I found it hard not to go back and reread the little blurbs of personal history written by soldiers and commanders going back before the hoplite.

http://www.samrc.com/am/AM_2001-2002/AM-De...m-Dec2001-7.htm

Artie:

Again I offer thanks for the suggestion on Gwynn Dyer.  I admit, I was not familiar with his works, but have now read a couple of articles he's  written.  Not your staid academic.  I'm gonna follow up.

Good discussion with Nomarchy on the mass appeal of the extreme right or left.  But doesn't the discussion need a reference to time and place?  Confining the discussion just to the U.S., different periods, in response to different global and societal disruptions, served as stimuli to the growth and appeal of extremism, right or left.

Yes?

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

Good Thanksgiving. Played basketball with some local kids and had turkey pot pies for dinner. I'm still sore and my sunburn is almost gone.

As for extremism I used the French revolution as an example of extremists run amuck, killing moderates as well as opposite extremists. The Russian revolution works as well. hunin made some refences to moderates as being unwilling to stoop to assasination, but personally it seems to me to beat outright mass slaughter. If the moderates are the majority they best be willing to stand up to extremism at some point.  Even to the point of not looking too moderate.  Guys like Robespierre don't just go away.

And who are the Robespierres today, domestically and internationally?

Look around where there are missing heads.

Oh, so it has to be the same exact method. Ok, then, no domestic Robespierres. I take it you're implying that the beheading terrorists/insurgents/whatever in Iraq are Robespierre-like?

You don't have to be exactly literal, but it is ironic that radicals in the ME are hacking off heads.

Not particularly, since they've been hacking heads in e.g. Saudi Arabia for years. The radicals in the ME did not pick up the beheading thing from the French.

I read Gen. Clark's book about modern wars and he thinks that the fight against terror is not a "war" as such.  He advises that going after terrorists with armies, tanks, and ships is a waste of people and money.  The method he would use to go after them is small groups of special forces with specific intelligence to get them.  We see what the use of military power, invading and occupation has brought.  More and more terrorists and no end in sight.  There are terrorists in almost every country on earth.  Our military is not meant to police the world.  So as to the question about the comparison, we are not warring against any country but a loose band of assassins.  No comparison.

Good Thanksgiving. Played basketball with some local kids and had turkey pot pies for dinner. I'm still sore and my sunburn is almost gone.

As for extremism I used the French revolution as an example of extremists run amuck, killing moderates as well as opposite extremists. The Russian revolution works as well. hunin made some refences to moderates as being unwilling to stoop to assasination, but personally it seems to me to beat outright mass slaughter. If the moderates are the majority they best be willing to stand up to extremism at some point.  Even to the point of not looking too moderate.  Guys like Robespierre don't just go away.

As the saying goes, revolutions eat their own.  Not all the time, but frequently enough.  Its probably also  true that resort to barbarity has been committed in the interest of halting barbarity.  Or that victims of atrocities may feel free of any  constraints in committing the same against their victimizer (Soviet maltreatment of vanquished German forces; allied bombings of German and Japanese civilian centers.) 



One take on your observation is "The Totalitarian Temptation" by Jean-Francois Revel (yeah, a cheese-eating surrender monkey.)  Ever read  or heard of it?  The author's take squares with yours.

Take care.

All of that aside, you suggested that a consensus has formed  on rejecting rightist extremism, but not so to leftist extremism.