The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States

254 Pages·2006·1.92 MB·English

by  Gerald Horne

The Color of Fascism
Lawrence Dennis in his study. Photo by Charles E. Steinheimer.
Courtesy of Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images.
The Color
of Fascism
Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and
the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in
the United States
Gerald Horne
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
new york university press
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2006by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horne, Gerald.
The color of fascism : Lawrence Dennis, racial passing, and the rise
of right-wing extremism in the United States / Gerald Horne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-3686-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-3686-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Dennis, Lawrence, 1893–1977. 2. Fascists—United States—
Biography. 3. Right-wing extremists—United States--Biography.
4. African Americans—Biography. 5. Passing (Identity)—United
States—Case studies. 6. Radicalism—United States—Case studies.
7. Isolationism—United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HN90.R3H578 2006
335.6092—dc22 [B] 2006018156
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: More Than Passing Strange 1
1 Passing Fancy? 17
2 Passing Through 31
3 Fascism 44
4 The Face—of Fascism 59
5 Fascism and Betrayal 71
6 Approaching Disaster 85
7 Framing a Guilty Man? 98
8 Fascism on Trial 112
9 A Trial on Trial 126
10 After the Fall 140
11 An Isolationist Isolated? 156
12 Passing On 171
Notes 179
Index 209
About the Author 228
v

Preface
Lawrence Dennis, much touted as the “brain” behind U.S. fas-
cism, had “hair” that was “wooly, dark and kinky. The texture of his
skin,” said John Roy Carlson, who interviewed him face-to-face in
preparing his best-selling book of 1943, “is unusually dark and the eyes
of Hitler’s intellectual keynoter of ‘Aryanism’ are a rich deep brown, his
lips fleshy.” It was also reported, in words replete with multiple meaning,
appropriate for the racially ambiguous, that Dennis was “born in Atlanta
‘of a long line of American ancestors.’”1 Encountering him a few years
before, in 1927, when he was a highly placed U.S. diplomat with postings
ranging from Europe to Latin America, a New York Times journalist was
taken by his “tall, trim powerful build with close cropped bristly hair and
[skin] deeply bronzed by the tropical sun.”2
PM,the voice of the left-led “popular front” referred to Dennis as “the
tall swarthy prophet of ‘intellectual fascism,’” as they too danced nimbly
around his suspected racial origins,3 as did the historian from the other
shore, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who termed him—apparently metaphori-
cally—a “dark and saturnine figure.”4
Charles Lindbergh was quite attuned to the “‘rivalry of the races’”; in-
deed, suggests one perceptive analyst, he had “displayed an obsession
with race—its improvement, its degradation, its superior and inferior el-
ements”—with the African deemed decidedly to be among the latter. He
was passionately concerned with the ability of the “‘White race to live ...
in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown.’” Such lunatic notions had
not halted his ascension to the status of being deemed a “superhuman
figure,” a “‘demigod,’” according to one star-struck onlooker.5But even
Lindbergh’s signal achievement—his transatlantic flight—was dripping
with racial animus. For it was flight and air power, he thought, that guar-
anteed that a “white” minority could dominate the colored, which is why
he was hostile to war between Berlin and Washington since it distracted
vii
viii | Preface
from the true mission: “it is our turn to guard our heritage,” he said,
“from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a
limitless foreign sea. ... we can have peace and security,” he exclaimed,
“only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless posses-
sion, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard our-
selves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.”6
Such bizarre ideas had not endeared him to U.S. Negroes. One of their
leaders, the moderate Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, disliked him because
of his alleged refusal to shake hands with Negroes and his failure to meet
with the black man who found his kidnapped son’s remains—after the
child had been murdered in the “crime of the century”—and because his
family hired European, as opposed to Negro domestic servants.7
Yet, it is unclear how Lindbergh would have reacted if he had realized
that the man whose hand he embraced, Lawrence Dennis, had African
“blood” flowing in his veins—he was a walking example of “blood dilu-
tion”—and had begun life as a celebrated “Negro” child preacher.
Lindbergh found Dennis to be a “striking man—large, dark-complex-
ioned, strong and self-assured.” The controversial aviator, who had fas-
cist leanings all his own, was taken aback when he laid eyes on the silken
Dennis. It was “rather a shock, when one sees him for the first time, es-
pecially in a room in Washington,” a city of rigid racial segregation, “for
one is so unprepared for his type. He would seem more in place at some
frontier trading post along the eastern border of Europe.” Lindbergh,
who had firmly held ideas about white supremacy and racial purity,
“tried” as they “talked” to “fathom the nationality of his ancestors.” But
Dennis, a product of Exeter and Harvard, could perform “whiteness”
with the best of them, with his elegant manner, his refined accent with
echoes of pastoral New England though he had been born in gritty Jim
Crow Atlanta, his honed and precise diction, his Ivy League dress and
manner, his utter confidence in the rightness of his beliefs—his evident
patrician veneer dismissed doubts about his origins in the same way that
a similar façade, evinced by a latter-day conservative, William F. Buckley,
Jr., eroded any residue of doubt in the North Atlantic about his Irish
Catholic origins.
Actually “performance” is an all too apt term to describe Dennis’s de-
portment for, to continue the analogy, a Hollywood actor of African an-
cestry inexorably is slotted for “black” roles, while one of European
background has access to a broader array of opportunities. “I am in favor
of opportunity for all persons and races,” Dennis said tellingly at one
Preface | ix
point, “but I believe fundamental differences between persons, races and
nations are inevitable and must forever persist.”8Given this gloomy view,
unsurprisingly Dennis opted for the opportunity provided by crossing the
“color line.”
Surrendering to Dennis’s bedazzling performance of “whiteness,”
Lindbergh “concluded that some” of his “ancestors” “might have come
from the Near East”—perhaps he would have surmised years later that
he was as “white” as, say, the Lebanese-Americans Ralph Nader and
Marlo Thomas or as “white” as the contemporary singer, Norah Jones,
who describes herself using this privileged term though her father is South
Asian. Thus, with the obstacle of Dennis’s possible tinge of the tar-brush
swept aside, Lindbergh surrendered and could now affirm enthusiasti-
cally, “I must get to know Dennis better. He has a brilliant and original
mind—determined to the point of aggressiveness. I like his strength of
character, but I am not sure how far I agree with him.”9
“Lucky Lindy” came to agree with Dennis more and more. In fact, says
one biographer of the charismatic man who for a time defined celebrity,
Lindbergh’s “arguments and phraseology had some striking parallels
with Hitler’s and even more those of Lawrence Dennis” with whom he
was to be in “frequent contact.” There was “no doubt that the flier had
read and been strongly influenced by Dennis’ books.”10Late in life, Den-
nis—rarely hesitant to trumpet his own presumed assets, perhaps as a de-
fensive reaction to being deemed arbitrarily to be part of an “inferior
race”—recalled warmly that there was a “paragraph” in a Lindbergh
book “about me in which he says I have a brilliant and original mind.”11
Dennis’s paradigmatic relationship with Lindbergh also revealed an-
other defensive trait of his: he often derided the intelligence of those who
were part of the presumed “superior race,” perhaps as a defensive reac-
tion to the hand that fate had dealt him. In fact, his less than exalted opin-
ion of the nation’s “racial” majority helps to explain why he felt the
United States would benefit from the rule of a fascist elite, headed by
those like himself. How could Dennis have faith in the intellect of, say, the
white working class when it often preferred to align with its bosses who
were of the same “race” than those of their class of a different “race”?
Thus, Lindbergh, Dennis sniffed, “was and is not an intellectual or a
thinker,” he “is not interested in politics or sociology and never was”12
—unlike Dennis himself who, if nothing else, was a man of ideas. The
prominent social scientist, Bertram Gross, told Dennis as his career was
in its twilight, “I have been re-reading some of your books, which are