Maybe they mean to repeat history
When was America great the first time? Someone go ask Donald Trump. Maybe Jordan Klepper should query Trump rally attendees what “great again” means again.
I’m guessing they really mean 1859.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.
Historian Seth Cotlar (Rightlandia) will be in Seattle on Tuesday interviewing Rachel Maddow about her new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Those who listened to her latest podcast, Ultra, know the basics. She traces the America fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s in more detail. What Cotlar finds interesting is how this history disappeared down the collective memory hole for most Americans in subsequent generations:
One thing we learn from Maddow’s book is that almost all of the seditious American fascists from the 1930s and 40s—people who literally wanted to work together with the Nazis to eliminate or deport the nation’s Jews and turn the country into an authoritarian homeland for white Christians—got off scot free after WWII and went on to live fairly normal lives as people who their neighbors generally thought of as “Commie-hating Christian Patriots,” if perhaps slightly eccentric or kooky ones.
Likely, history will once again consign people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, convicted insurrectionists from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, et al. to the slightly eccentric or kooky category. Those who don’t go to jail will return to their normal lives, their yards, and their pet goldfish.
Cotlar continues:
Let’s take Charles Lindbergh as our first case study. I vividly remember, as a teenager visiting DC for the first time in 1983, staring up in awe at The Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the rafters of the Air and Space Museum. As far as I can remember, Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi sensibilities were not part of what I learned about him on that day. Had that come up, I suspect I would have dismissed it as a fairly unimportant aspect of who that brave aviator was.
It appears that Lindbergh had kind of a cultural moment in the mid-1980s, because in 1985, Minneapolis made the decision to name one of its airport terminals after Mr. “Let’s Put America First Because the Jews are Trying to Drag us into a War” and Mr. “aviation technology was a gift to the white people of the world so we can maintain our dominance over the world’s savage hordes of non-whites.” I blithely flew in and out of Minneapolis’s Lindbergh terminal many times in the 1990s and 2000s, DURING and AFTER my PhD work in US History, and I swear it was not until the mid-2010s that I first thought to myself “hey, wait a minute, why the hell is that Hitler-lover Lindbergh’s name on this terminal?”
I was just as ignorant of the fascist proclivities of Henry Ford, who had a framed picture of Hitler on his desk in the 1930s which was reciprocated by Hitler who had a framed picture of Henry Ford on his desk. I vaguely remember hearing some relatives talk about how Ford was an antisemite, but I imagined that meant he was personally rude to individual Jewish people. I did not know that aside from innovating the Model T and the assembly line (factoids I dutifully learned in history class), he also was responsible for producing and disseminating an enormous barrage of lying, antisemitic propaganda that fueled a violently fascist movement in the pre-WWII era. Many Ford dealerships in the 1920s and 30s placed copies of Ford’s publication (a representative sample below) on the seat of every new Ford they sold. So it’s not that Ford’s antisemitism simply made him guilty of private “wrongthink.” He’s not just “a man of his time” who’s been subjected to unfair cancellation these days by the woke mob and “revisionist historians.” He poured a large chunk of his wealth into building a robust fascist movement that talked openly about eliminating Jewish people from America and the earth. The pro-democracy Americans who fought against fascism in Ford’s time understood that quite well.
The problem is that by not teaching that inconvenient history, the “buffoonishly illiberal bigotry” of the past has a way of slip-sliding its way largely unnoticed into the present. Cotlar presents a list of forgotten minor figures from the fascist movement now resurrecting nearly a hundred years later.
Normalizing such people as mere “anti-communists” or “fundamentalist Christians” or “ultraconservative patriots” or “principled isolationists” was a mistake. So was minimizing them as irrelevant “kooks” or “crackpots.” Both impulses did a real disservice to the nation’s political memory by weakening our antifascist defenses and atrophying our pro-democratic muscles. Gerald LK Smith, for example, had a mailing list of over 3 million names in the 1960s. The Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio show could be heard on over 470 AM radio stations in that decade. Calling these folks “crackpots” did nothing to stem the torrent of fascist bile they poured into the reservoir of our political culture on a daily basis, bile that was generally ignored as irrelevant by the vast majority of Americans and interpreted as perfectly normal, “patriotic, pro-Christian, anti-Communist Americanism” by the millions of people to whom it appealed.
One of my takeaways (IIRC) from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” is how Americans with no knowledge of the history of ideas naively believe the ones in their heads are original, theirs. Those who don’t know the difference are doomed to repeat the same historical mistakes of their forebears. Unless our resurrected fascist movement footsoldiers see them not as mistakes but missed opportunities.
America has a rich history of racism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that pushed against that racism. America has a rich history of fascism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that sought to blunt the power and influence of those fascists. In passing down such histories to the rising generations, there’s no need for us to bothsides them as if we should honor them as equally valued and respected parts of our national tapestry. To a great extent, nations are the stories they tell themselves about themselves. One way we can hopefully move toward a more democratic future is by more fully and truthfully telling the history of fascism and those who resisted it in the American past.