Most people know that I love my history and will take every opportunity to enlighten my readers on the history of this nation….that is what you get from someone with a degree in political history and sorry but you must suffer.
This post is about a book and a podcast transcript….that traces fascism in the early days….
For more than a decade, we’ve been flooded with books warning about fascism — how to recognize it, how it spreads, how democracies lose their way. Almost all begin with the same assumption: Fascism was a European creation that eventually washed up on American shores.
Joseph Kelly says we’ve got it backwards.
Kelly, a professor at the College of Charleston and author of The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism 1818-1915, began writing a history of the 1920s and 30s. But every thread he pulled led somewhere earlier — past the World Wars, past the Ku Klux Klan, deep into the 19th-century South — until he found himself asking a far more unsettling question: What if America wasn’t simply influenced by fascism? What if it helped invent the political playbook that Europe later embraced?
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Kelly traces that story from the compromises over slavery at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to the post-Civil War politics of Jim Crow and beyond. He explains why fascism is less an ideology than a corruption of democracy itself, why “the Big Lie” has such enduring political power, and why Hitler looked to the American South not simply as an observer, but as an admirer.
Kelly insists this isn’t a book about today’s politics. It’s about how democracies convince themselves that dangerous ideas will simply fade away — and what happens when they don’t. It’s an argument about American history that may change the way you think about American democracy itself.
This is a subject that has seen an obscene amount of ink and with good cause….
Please feel free to write your opinion.
Educate, Agitate
I Read, I Write, You Know
cogito ergo agito
Daily Agitator 
When I was younger I read quite a bit about The German American Bund. It was believed to be involved in sabotage, and spying for the Nazis. Best wishes, Pete.
The German American Bund was a pro-Nazi organization in the United States led by Fritz Kuhn that operated from 1936 to 1941. It promoted Adolf Hitler’s government, spread extreme anti-Jewish hatred, and held large military-style rallies before being shut down when America entered World War II. The German-American Bund had an estimated peak membership of 8,000 to 25,000 active, dues-paying members in the late 1930s. While its leader, Fritz Kuhn, loudly claimed up to 200,000 followers, and large events like the 1939 Madison Square Garden rally drew 20,000 attendees.’
Giant posters of Geo. Washington…..they were popular for awhile….but that did not last. chuq