Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

Benjamin L. Alpers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807854167, 9780807827505
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861226
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the late 1920s through the early years of the Cold War.

During the early 1930s, most Americans' conception of dictatorship focused on the dictator. Whether viewed as heroic or horrific, the dictator was represented as a figure of great, masculine power and effectiveness. As the Great Depression gripped the United States, a few people — including conservative members of the press and some Hollywood filmmakers — even dared to suggest that dictatorship might be the answer to America’s social problems.

In the late 1930s, American explanations of dictatorship shifted focus from individual leaders to the movements that empowered them. Totalitarianism became the image against which a view of democracy emphasizing tolerance and pluralism and disparaging mass movements developed. First used to describe dictatorships of both right and left, the term “totalitarianism” fell out of use upon the U.S. entry into World War II. With the war’s end and the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, however, concerns about totalitarianism lay the foundation for the emerging Cold War.

1 THE ROMANCE OF A DICTATOR

DICTATORSHIP IN AMERICAN PUBLIC CULTURE, 1920s–1935

In the summer of 1927, Studebaker introduced a new car. Originally called the Model EU Standard Six, the smaller cousin of the Big Six Commander and President models was soon given a name that would fit in with the rest of the line: the Dictator. There were, of course, some political problems connected with the name “Dictator.” A number of the European monarchies to which Studebaker exported the car were wary of the moniker. Diplomatically, the company marketed its Standard Six as the “Director” in these countries. In the United States, however, the name appears initially to have caused no problems. In its introductory year alone, Studebaker produced over forty thousand Dictators, which the company advertised—one assumes with no pun intended—as “a brilliant example of excess power.”¹ The Dictator continued as the bottom of Studebaker’s standard sedan line, its sales seemingly affected only by the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929. Yet after 1937, the name “Dictator” was abruptly dropped by the company. No internal records of the reasons for this decision exist, but a name that had been commercially worth keeping in the United States despite European protest had suddenly become unusable.

With decades of hindsight, the decision to drop the name appears only natural. As one history of the Studebaker Corporation puts it, “no one could have predicted in the peaceful days of 1927, however, that a madman would arise in Europe to give dictators a bad name forever.” Such an account sidesteps a more interesting history. Studebaker Dictators were named not out of political naïveté, but out of political-cultural calculation. When the first of these cars rolled off the assembly line in South Bend, Indiana, Americans would have thought of only one person when they heard the word “Dictator”: Benito Mussolini. In the five years since he had assumed power, Mussolini had already vividly indicated to the world that Italian Fascism was not entirely “peaceful.” Studebaker executives, like other Americans, would have read in newspapers and magazines about the brutalities of the Italian regime, such as the 1924 murder of socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti, which received much negative coverage in the U.S. press.² But also like many other citizens, the decision markers at Studebaker continued to see in Mussolini, as in the figure of the dictator generally, a positive icon, an image that could inspire and, not incidentally, sell cars.

Since the mid-1930s, dictators and dictatorship have been the absolute Other of democracy in U.S. political culture; thus their place in American political cultural life immediately before that time is, in retrospect, surprising. From the time of Il Duce’s “March on Rome” in October 1922 until well into the 1930s dictatorship played a less significant role in U.S. political culture than it later would, but that role was also more multifaceted and ambivalent. Dictatorship and especially the figure of the dictator himself evoked positive as well as negative fantasies. Many of these fantasies were only quasi-political. Like the members of the British royal family after World War II, Mussolini was enormously attractive to many Americans who had no wish for his form of government. Just as the success of brand names such as “Burger King” and “Royal Crown Cola” does not indicate that the country is teeming with monarchists, so the attraction of Studebaker’s Dictator to American consumers in the 1920s and 1930s cannot, by itself, be taken as evidence of a desire for dictatorship. But the car’s popularity does suggest that the dictator was a powerfully attractive figure at the time.

A smaller number of Americans in the 1920s and early 1930s saw dictatorship as an attractive political system. On the American left, the Communist Party (CP) of the United States and its predecessors, the Workers Party of America and the Workers (Communist) Party, were deeply committed to the Russian model of a conspiratorial party seeking to create a dictatorship of the proletariat through revolutionary action.³ Many reform-minded liberals in the 1920s, including Charles Beard, Horace M. Kallen, and Herbert Croly, briefly regarded Italian Fascism as a possible solution to problems of modern society. On the right, especially prior to the advent of the New Deal, Mussolini’s apparent restoration of order to Italy made a number of American conservatives sympathetic to the idea of dictatorship. The coming of the Great Depression, which suggested the possibility of total social collapse in the United States, increased the attractiveness of the dictatorial model.⁴

Rather than viewing Studebaker’s 1937 decision to stop producing Dictators as the company’s belated recognition of its own political naïveté, we should see it as marking the end of an era in American political culture, a period in which the figure of the dictator lent itself to a variety of uses that became increasingly untenable as the 1930s progressed. Understanding the political culture in which a car called the “Dictator” could flourish in the United States is important for at least two reasons. First, it provides a crucial reminder that the later place of dictatorship in American political culture was and is a highly contingent one, far from the automatic result of a “madman” arising in Europe. Second, the changes that took place in American views of dictatorship over the course of the 1930s were subtle and complicated; they involved much more than simply the nearly universal condemnation of the phenomenon. Those writing and thinking about European dictatorship before the mid-1930s most often focused on the dictator himself, frequently as a romantic or even eroticized figure. At the very least, he was the author of his regime and the principal source of its program. By the late 1930s, Americans had begun to see the European dictatorships in less personalistic terms: Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy, and Communism in Russia were presented less often as the creation of heroic, or horrific, individuals who molded society to their will and more often as the result of peculiar changes in mass psychology.

This chapter explores the ambivalent place of dictatorship in American political culture in the 1920s and early 1930s, starting with the enormous popularity of Mussolini in the United States during his first decade in power. His celebrity inspired the idea that a dictator might solve the problem of the crowd. This notion gained greater domestic importance as social conditions worsened during the depression. For a brief period between the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1933 a small but varied group of influential citizens began to call for some variation of dictatorship in the United States. However, the nation’s romance with the dictator soon faded with the arrival of the New Deal at home and the rise of Hitler in Germany. But even as dictatorship became nearly universally unpopular in America, the problems of social disorder that a dictator had seemed to solve continued. Many Americans searched for alternative authority figures, men (and it was almost always men) who could provide the benefits of a dictator without the drawbacks. If dictatorship represented an extraordinary authority, then the most feasible alternative was the most ordinary authority imaginable in American society during the 1930s—the patriarchal domination of husband and father within the bounds of the nuclear family.

A Brilliant Example of Excess Power: The Dictator before 1932

From his 1922 March on Rome through the early 1930s Benito Mussolini received an uncommonly favorable reception from many elements of American society. The press devoted much space to his praise, with the Saturday Evening Post leading the way. Italian Americans found a new sense of national identity and pride through his rise to power.⁵ Business leaders looked to his example first as a way of dealing with labor problems and, with the advent of the depression, as a way of ordering the economy along nonsocialist lines. A number of progressive thinkers flirted with the idea that Fascism might have something to teach Americans interested in reorienting society. Toward the end of his life, even Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), saw Italian Fascism as a model of labor-management reconciliation. Despite his claim that he opposed dictatorship on principle, Gompers went out of his way to celebrate Mussolini as “a man whose dominating purpose is to get something done; to do rather than theorize; to build a working, producing civilization instead of a disorganized, theorizing aggregation of conflicting groups.” Many Americans, of course, bitterly opposed Il Duce and his regime, among them, most, but by no means all, intellectuals; most of the labor movement, including the AFL following Gompers’s death in 1924; the Italians in exile from Fascism; and the multifaceted American left. Moreover, events in Italy occasionally produced some oscillation in support for Mussolini even among those more favorably disposed toward him. But the predominant view of Italy’s new political course was positive and remained so until 1935. As biographer Emil Ludwig told Il Duce during one of many interviews in 1933, “Curiously enough, in the course of my travels I have found you more popular in America than anywhere else.”⁶

Two aspects of Mussolini’s popularity stand out. First, much of his initial appeal to the business community, the mainstream press, and the conservative elements of the labor movement was that he had apparently solved the problem of social unrest. The specter of communism haunted U.S. business and government leaders following World War I. In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, fearful Americans tended to see Bolshevism not as a form of dictatorship but as a form of anarchy.⁷ Many elites feared social unrest at home and abroad. U.S. reaction to the Russian Revolution, which bolstered earlier images of bomb-throwing radicals, sowed the seeds of the 1919 Red Scare, which led to the deportation of many suspected radicals and eventually to the imposition of strict immigration restrictions the first ever levied on Europeans.

Fear of the crowd and of social disorder extended well beyond the anti-radicalism of U.S. elites. Responding to a widely perceived explosion of mass individualism, many cultural producers from across the political spectrum expressed concern that democracy in a modern society might shatter necessary bonds of social solidarity or lead to total anomie.⁸ A 1928 U.S. Army training manual, widely used by the War Department, denounced democracy for harboring a “communistic” attitude toward property and for generally leading to “mobocracy.” Democracy, the manual warned, resulted “in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.”⁹ In Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), liberal (formerly socialist) social critic Walter Lippmann warned that irrational, mass thinking might make modern democracy impossible. The classic silent film The Crowd (1928) elaborated what was by then a cultural cliché: the destruction of the American individual by the social and economic realities of the modern city. The film’s hero goes from a small town to New York City to make his fortune. But the more he pursues individual success and happiness, the less satisfied and individuated he becomes.

As American cultural producers questioned the ability of democracy to function in a modern society, Mussolini strode onto the political scene. The war that the United States had fought to make the world safe for democracy seemed to have done little good for countries like Italy, where the collapse of the regime seemed imminent from the end of the war to Mussolini’s March on Rome. Americans regarded Italy as both a font of culture and a repository of social and political disorder; this latter view fueled, and was fueled by, American nativism. So relieved was the U.S. press at Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 that few journalists bothered to report his hostility to democracy. Most of them also overlooked his radical past. What was important was that he had declared war on social chaos and seemed to have won. Mussolini appeared to have tamed the crowd single-handedly.

The second significant aspect of his popularity in America was its extremely personal nature. Although his anticommunism was an initial attraction, Il Duce’s acclaim was due more to persona than ideology. In taming the crowd, he appeared to rise above it. For many Americans as well as many Italians, he became an almost heroic figure. Mussolini presented himself as physically powerful and tremendously masculine. He enjoyed being photographed bare-chested, engaged in athletic activities. In the first installment of his serialized autobiography in the Saturday Evening Post, he is pictured in suit and hat powerfully striding along a beach. Mussolini’s most famous action was also imagined physically: his seizure of power was a march on Rome. In fact, as some commentators eventually began to point out, he did not join his Blackshirts in their parade into the capital, preferring to stay in Milan. Nevertheless, with or without proper disclaimer, a favorite image in American publications was of Il Duce leading marching columns of fascisti, flanked by his deputies, the Quadrumviri. All of this athleticism and pseudoathleticism, although designed primarily for Italian consumption, appealed to the United States, which was busily glorifying the physical achievements of its own Tildens, Ruths, and Lindberghs. Comparing Mussolini to a pugilist, Clarence Streit summed him up in one word: “Punch.” In keeping with the image of his physicality and his Latin background, otherwise staid press organs mentioned his sexual prowess admiringly. “Switzerland,” wrote Fortune magazine of Mussolini’s two-year self-appointed exile there, “was full of Russian Anarchists, some of the most appealing being blond-maned women who admitted Benito Mussolini to their confidence and their beds. With Russian intuition they surmised before he surmised it himself that they were sleeping with a great revolutionist.”¹⁰

This political capability intuited erotically by Fortune’s “blond-maned” Russians was the final, and most important, ingredient of Mussolini’s heroic persona. More than anything else, he was a man of iron will who could get any job done if he set his mind to it. Such an individual, leading a country known in the United States largely for social chaos, was a wonder indeed. Born in the humblest of circumstances, Mussolini rose to political power through his own skill and persistence. His Blackshirts violently beat back the forces of social disorder—the socialists and communists. His attitudes and policies toward women—“Woman must play a passive part,” he told Emil Ludwig—ensured that the nuclear family would be strengthened. The historic Lateran Accords of 1929 between Mussolini’s government and the Vatican both gave the Italian state recognition that had been denied it since the Risorgimento and added a sense of religious commitment to Il Duce’s many other virtues. His agricultural and industrial programs—the most spectacular of which was the draining of the Pontine Marshes—also garnered a fair bit of attention. But perhaps most amazing of all was his command of the crowd. The masses that seemed so threatening and disorderly after the war, and whose cousins in the United States had put fear in the hearts of business leaders during the Red Summer of 1919, hung on Mussolini’s every word. The image of him deftly playing crowds of incredible size was perhaps the most powerful icon of fascism in American public culture. Fortune’s special issue on Italian fascism in July 1934 featured large images of enormous crowds being addressed by Mussolini, photographed from above; in one spread, they form a frame for the story’s text. These throngs—huge, active but ordered and at the beck and call of their leader’s superior intellect—were the anarchist/communist striking mobs of 1919 defanged. By the late 1920s Mussolini had become an authentic American hero. In 1927 the Literary Digest conducted an editorial survey on the theme, “Is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• DICTATORS, DEMOCRACY, AND AMERICAN PUBLIC CULTURE
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE ROMANCE OF A DICTATOR
• 2 THE TOTALITARIAN STATE
• 3 THE DISAPPEARING DICTATOR
• 4 THE AUDIENCE ITSELF IS THE DRAMA
• 5 DICTATOR ISMS AND OUR DEMOCRACY
• 6 THIS IS THE ARMY
• 7 HERE IS GERMANY
• 8 THE BATTLE OF RUSSIA
• 9 A BOOT STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE—FOREVER
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX