It Could of Happened Here

Up 'til now, the classic fictionalized treatment of fascism in America was Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, which gave us the famous line, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." While Lewis' 1935 book is an enduring classic, it is now joined by Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which, published in 2004, is now showing up in remainder bins everywhere for six or seven bucks. If you haven't picked this one up yet, now is the time.

Roth fictionalizes his own childhood growing up in Newark, NJ to consider how his family history might have looked in a different sort of America. In Roth's alternate version, instead of FDR being re-elected for a third term in 1940, he is defeated by isolationist Charles Lindbergh, who blames the Jews for trying to drag America into World War Two. Roth isn't making that part up. Lindbergh was indeed a anti-semitic isolationist, as this speech, delivered in 1941 at an America First rally clearly attests. While Lindbergh did become active in politics and was encouraged to run for high office, his isolationism and pro-Nazi statements made him politically radioactive after Pearl Harbor settled the intervention question once and for all.

The back of the book contains a number of historic chronologies of main characters, as well as briefs on the more minor persons involved. Henry Ford, the father of the assembly line, had a soft spot for fascism as well, and his Dearborn Independent newspaper, to which Ford dealers were forced to subscribe, ran a regular column called The International Jew, The World's Problem. These were later published in a four-volume set in a book of the same title.

In Roth's book, the election of Lindbergh unleashes and legitimates an undercurrent of American anti-Semitism that leads to pogroms and culminates in an unsuccessful fascist putsch that features a near war with Canada, imposition of martial law, and the arrest of leading Jews and even Roosevelt himself.

While Roth has been criticized for slandering the dead, it seems to me that those such as Lindbergh who were unkindly fictionalized richly deserved their treatment. It's always interesting to consider the big historical What Ifs. In this case, there were clearly those in America who favored an isolationist course and admired fascism. America's non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War and treatment of those who fought in Spain as "premature anti-fascists" is evidence that things could have gone a different way.

The fact is, however, that America turned on the Lindberghs and Fords, and was disgusted by their pro-fascist and anti-semitic sentiments. Fascism is nothing if not opportunistic, and a fascism of today would look differently than that of the thirties and forties. While we now see many alarming signs, I still believe that any American leader who grabs for power in this manner will ultimately find himself disgraced, out of power, and reviled by history.

Rich Lang has called an emergency meeting at Trinity United Methodist Church, on Aug. 1 at 7 p.m. to discuss an appropriate response to the President's latest Executive Order. These are serious times. Be there if you can.

Premature Anti-Fascist

I love Bernard Knox. And the best part is, he's not dead yet. I thought he was. This would be a reasonable expectation of anyone born in 1914, but apparently, I was wrong. Most recently, he has written the introductions to the Robert Fagles translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and now The Aeneid as well. He is, for me, everything anyone could want in an engaged intellectual.

Tonight I stumbled across this gem, entitled Premature Anti-Fascist, on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. This is a remarkable speech delivered by Knox at New York University in 1998. The term "premature anti-fascist" was code in the US military during the 40s for "communist." US soldiers in WW II who had previous experience fighting fascism were considered politically unreliable and withheld from the front lines. Somehow Knox got through. They probably figured that as a Brit, this sort of lapse was more to be expected. Besides, he was fluent in French, and they needed that.

The essay discusses the state of the world in the 30s and 40s, and reminds us that the western powers were perfectly ready to make their peace with fascism and only recognized this threat to civilization for what it was when it was nearly too late. As he says, it was already too late for many, the Jews and the Poles in particular.

Knox was wounded in Spain fighting with the POUM in 1936, emigrated from England to the US, and joined the OSS, where he was trained and sent to parachute, "in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance." After the war, he attended graduate school at Yale, where he would become a Professor of Classics, specializing in Virgil, Thucydides, and the Greek playwrights.

In the introduction to Essays Ancient & Modern, which covers much of the same biographical ground as his 1998 speech, he writes about finding a copy of Virgil in a ruined house in Italy. The war had yet to end and his unit was engaging the Germans in sporadic combat. He remembers the idea of the Virgilian lottery, in which one would open Virgil anywhere, and where one's finger landed was thought to be predictive. His lands on this passage from the First Georgic:

"Here right and wrong are reversed, so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil. The plow is despised and rejected; the farmers march off, the fields untended. The curving sickles are beaten straight to make swords. On one side, the East moves to war; on the other, Germany. Neighboring cities tear up their treaties and take to arms. The vicious war god rages the world over."