It Can Happen to US
In 1940, a twenty-four-year-old Peter Viereck warned of “The Coming American National Socialism.” He had some ideas for how to stop it.
By Micah Rosen*
It was February 20, 1939, two days before George Washington’s birthday. Fritz Kuhn, leader of the prominent pro-Nazi German American Bund, took the stage at Madison Square Garden. Behind him stood a towering 30-foot portrait of the first US president between giant swastikas, and around him twenty thousand rally-goers. Posters at this infamous Pro-America Rally promised a “mass-demonstration for true Americanism,” bringing National Socialist ideals to the American people. Participants waved American flags, marched to loud drum rolls, and heard pro-fascist speeches. Speakers urged the audience to embrace National Socialism, not merely to show support for Germany, but above all because it was fundamentally American.
The event met with widespread condemnation. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called it an “exhibition of international cooties.” Others were critical, but did not see great cause for alarm. Shortly after the event an editorial in the New York Times expressed confidence that the rally-goers were no more than a harmless fringe group. “The Bund, functioning freely, is its own best argument against itself,” read the piece. “We are not, to state the case mildly, afraid of the Bund. The limits to which this or any group… may go are definite.”
But to one young man by the name of Peter Viereck, there was more cause for concern. A twenty-two-year-old poet and student of history at the time, Viereck feared the implications of rallies like this — both for his family and his country. Just five years earlier, when he was in college, his German-American father, George Sylvester Viereck, had stood on the same stage and proclaimed his support for Hitler to a crowd of tens of thousands of Nazi sympathizers. A few years later, the anti-fascist son would make National Socialism the focus of his graduate studies at Oxford and Harvard, all the while writing to his father and making their political differences clear: the world, he insisted, must push Nazi Germany “to national destruction just as Western civilization … puts one of its deranged or over-aggressive children in a strait-jacket.”
The young Viereck’s scholarship was his way of fighting National Socialism’s dangerous rise, and this fight also entailed confronting the prospect of a uniquely American fascism at home. American National Socialism, Viereck feared, would tap into powerful traditions of prejudice and yearnings for economic justice. It would inspire, as the German variety did, an enormous and terrible sense of pride, community, and empowerment in the masses. And the only way to forestall the threat of American fascism was to outdo its spiritual appeal and make American democracy a source of purpose, energy, and meaning to the American people.
In 1939, American support for National Socialism was not new. There had been supporters of Nazi Germany in the United States as far back as Hitler’s ascent to power in the early thirties, while similar far-right movements without foreign affiliations arose throughout the decade as well. As these movements gained a wider audience and greater visibility, so too did intellectuals like Viereck, who warned of a fascist apocalypse.
While the German American Bund continued to attract supporters, the far-right radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin was preaching national chauvinism and anti-Semitism to millions of listeners, inciting his supporters to violence. Iconic aviator Charles Lindbergh was traveling across the country to promote the isolationist America First Committee, attracting an array of nationalists and Nazi sympathizers. Business leaders, politicians, and students acted as surrogates for the National Socialist cause in America, taking aim at the Roosevelt administration and at minorities across the country. It became increasingly clear that fascist-style politics was offering large numbers of Americans, alienated by the turbulent economic and social changes of the Depression era, something to put their faith in.
Much to Peter Viereck’s horror, his own father George was one such American. Since his childhood, George Viereck had felt a unique connection to Germany. He was born in Bavaria to a socialist who, although later exiled to America, was rumored to be the illegitimate child of Kaiser Wilhelm I. In America, George Viereck grew into a prominent public figure. Enjoying considerable success as a poet, he made his name in journalism, interviewing and befriending notables like Sigmund Freud, Theodore Roosevelt, and Albert Einstein. But as the United States entered the First World War against Germany, George’s career took a sharp turn. From his position at the head of several periodicals, George fought to redeem Germany’s image, growing more defensive as Americans’ disdain for the country — and for his views — deepened.
In the decade that followed the war, while support for fascism grew in the United States, George Viereck became infamous as one of country’s most prominent Nazi apologists. To him, the Nazi movement was simply Germany’s unique response to the spiritual turmoil facing Western society — an understandable yearning for, as he described in in a 1939 essay, a “new certainty, a new absolute, a new religion” in an age that felt fragmented, chaotic, and anarchic. He hoped that his son’s zealous anti-Nazi phase would pass, much as he hoped America would abandon its stance against Hitler’s “New Germany.” While George’s pro-Hitler convictions sank his own career, eventually leading him to face trial and imprisonment in late 1941 on charges of sedition, his son became all the more passionate and outspoken in his opposition to Nazism.
If there was a way to prevent the looming convulsion of American National Socialism, Peter Viereck was desperate to find it. While most Americans were dangerously ignorant of their democracy’s vulnerability, even those who tried to address it were, to Viereck, misguided. If neither unrestrained capitalism nor uninspiring leftism could win Americans away from the National Socialist cause, what would? Was it possible to harness the public’s desire for a more spiritually satisfying politics, and use it to defend rather than undermine democratic ideals? To answer this, Viereck turned to an unlikely source: the architects of National Socialism themselves.
From 1936 to 1940, Peter Viereck immersed himself in the study of National Socialist ideology. He aimed to prove that the Nazi revolution was about more than just economic strife and resentment over the Treaty of Versailles. He traced the roots of National Socialism to nineteenth-century German Romanticism. This helped explain the movement’s contemporary psychological appeal, namely in how it exploited the German people’s desire for a politics of dynamic energy, emotional excitement, and communal belonging against the bleakness of the industrial age. Viereck explored the origins of key National Socialist themes in the works of far-right German nationalists like Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg. In his attempt to understand the psychology behind National Socialism, Viereck wrote to his father that he hoped to force the public to consider the strength and power of Nazi mythology rather than “[dismissing] our enemies as gangster.”
In his writings, Viereck characterized National Socialism and its Romantic foundation as a despicable “revolt” against the “ideals toward which our western civilization is ever striving.” These ideals included rationalism, rule of law, freedom, nonviolence, constitutionalism, and racial equality. But the avid anti-fascist then took a surprising turn. He wrote that the “Nazi religion” was “for once right” when it “reacted against the self-destructive economic materialism of our democracy.” In other words, the tragedy of National Socialism was that it took a sincere criticism of liberal society’s “muddling smug capitalist democracy” and turned it into a violent, racist revolt against democratic values. As Viereck warned his liberal contemporaries, “mankind sometimes prefers the bloodiest revolt against reason to an industrialism which is just plain dull and a material progress which starves the emotions and the imagination.”
This narrative gave rise to a message for Viereck’s contemporaries: winning the war for Western democracy necessitates “[winning] the imagination of the new generation” and “[showing] that the free peoples in their greatest crisis can be even more productive, unselfish, and co-operative than the most efficient slaves.” It requires transcending an “unduly utilitarian brand of democracy” that had given Nazism a monopoly on emotional appeal. To reject National Socialism was not to reject the idealism fueling its victories — it was to use that idealism for better, more democratic ends.
Viereck’s graduate research caught the attention of one notable intellectual: the German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, who had seen some of Viereck’s essays in the magazine Common Sense, and decided to sponsor his historical research for publication as a book. The Alfred A. Knopf Company published it in September 1941, under the title Metapolitics, from the Romantics to Hitler. Viereck was just twenty-five years old.
Curiously, what was perhaps the most powerful, perceptive, and relevant section of the book for today was left out of the final publication and indeed has never been published. While writing Metapolitics, Viereck had been alarmed by Nazi leaders’ interest in promoting their ideas in the United States, a country gutted by the Depression and poisoned from within by racial prejudice. It was as if the Nazis saw the United States as an easy mark. What appeared equally dangerous to Viereck was the complacent response of the general American public, the idea that fascism was only possible “over there.” This complacency made them blind to the rapidly expanding appeal of National Socialist ideas at home, and to the economic and spiritual woes that were driving that expansion.
In an attempt to dispel these delusions, in 1940, Viereck had written a chapter entitled “The Coming American National Socialism.” The reasons for its exclusion from Metapolitics remain a mystery. Given that it diverges from the book’s focus on Germany, his editor may have encouraged him to cut it out. Perhaps Viereck thought the instability of the national situation would make it difficult for society to accept such a message, or maybe he feared the chapter would give credence to his father’s view that the Germans were unfairly singled out. Whatever the reason, a reader of the chapter now sees Viereck wrestling with questions that appear all the more pertinent today: What might an American National Socialism look like? What would facilitate it and what could prevent it?
“The Coming American National Socialism” opens with a set of predictions as to how and why National Socialism would take hold in American politics. Whereas many anti-fascists focused on surrogates of Hitler’s regime, Viereck believed that the content of America’s fascism would overlap only imperfectly with that of German Nazism. It would look American: a high-octane blend of nativism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, racism, and mob-like persecution of liberals and communists, with a “slogan” akin to “‘free’ America from The Foreigners and give it back to the White Protestant American stock who built it.” Followers of this form of fascism would “crack the skulls of New York’s Nazi Bund as gleefully as the skulls of liberals and reds,” insisted Viereck, for “fascism… panders to the most violent nativist prejudices of its particular audience.” Therein lay the true danger of American National Socialism — its presentation as a “true” democratic, anti-Nazi movement would distract from its own racist and despotic core.
For this reason, Viereck cautioned against the patriotic and often xenophobic rallying cries against Nazi Germany. He feared that a loud public culture of American exceptionalism, despite its “democratic lip-service” and “justified” fight against Germany, was becoming “unconsciously… perverted into an intolerant American nationalism.” As he urged his government and fellow citizens, “national superiority is manifested by emancipation from … childish or senile cults of national self-worship. […] Should America ever be forced to go to war with Nazi Germany, let it be for our universal traditions and brotherhoods.” If anti-Nazism in the United States did not arise out of sincere moral conviction, and instead served merely to champion American national culture, a new kind of fascism would sprout up in the cracks.
Still, success against fascism at home and abroad required more than good intentions. It required active, engaged leaders who were “ever alert to make [the] people aware of [their country’s] faults for the purpose of ceaseless reform and improvement.” But “reform and improvement” was a vague goal hotly debated by America’s anti-fascists. This led to the next chief inquiry of “The Coming American National Socialism”: What exactly should improvement look like?
Peter Viereck was not the first to see the need for addressing far-right tendencies in the US, nor was he the first to theorize their relation to American social problems. Of particular interest to him were the proposals put forth by the American Popular Front, an ideologically diverse alliance of liberal, progressive, and communist opponents of fascism. Many affiliates of the Popular Front saw the rise of American fascism as an outgrowth of class friction and economic injustice, a view often expressed in magazines like the Marxist New Masses and progressive Nation. The Front’s proposed solutions varied widely across its different groupings and venues, but the idea of counteracting laissez-faire economics and lifting up society’s underclasses were often central.
Was there merit to the Popular Front’s narrative, wondered Viereck? In part, yes, for its message of economic justice addressed a powerful and — in Viereck’s eyes — largely valid selling point of National Socialism. Huey Long’s autocratic politics in Louisiana during the late 1920s and early ‘30s, for example, looked a lot more appealing alongside his ambitious economic redistribution plans, his sweeping proposals to revitalize national infrastructure, his enmity towards rich elites, and his self-fashioning as a man of the ordinary folk. His bold rhetoric of social justice overshadowed a rather inconsistent record of accomplishments. Still, Long fueled a movement that may have propelled him to the presidency, had he not been assassinated in 1935, before he could run. Similarly, Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic movement fed off of popular outrage against the corrupt “Wall Street” elites, a message that was amplified by Coughlin’s magazine Social Justice. Consistent with his narrative of injustice against the common man, he embraced a variety of progressive economic policies.
What figures like Long and Coughlin, alongside Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, were tapping into, Viereck argued, was people’s distaste for a politics that was all about the material — about profit, wealth, selfishness, and utilitarian progress without any consideration for people’s spiritual needs. Viereck feared a democratic society in which “souls are starved by too economic and industrial and urban a level of existence,” because “to such a society the Nazi faith and fervor… will soon has an [ever-vaster] spiritual appeal… than Nazi critics realize.”
It was on these grounds that Viereck denounced laissez-faire economics, which he characterized as “the anarchistic robber-baron economics… of a coupon-clipping minority.” He was frightened of letting democracy become the “dog-eat-dog materialism” and “selfish pig-ethics of… class interests” that the far-right figures cynically caricatured it to be. In this sense, he aligned with the Popular Front critiques. But this marked the limit of his agreement with the Left. For while he denounced the damage caused by unbridled capitalism, he also passionately insisted that leftism could be just as dangerous.
The reason had to do with the way National Socialists were successfully fusing racism and social justice. Viereck himself emphatically condemned this tendency — he viewed any sort of racial supremacy as a despicable belief to be avoided at all cost. Still, he recognized the ability of racism to corrupt and overpower messages of economic populism. Craving a sense of community that they felt to be lost in modern times, the “masses” would co-opt the left’s pursuit of social justice, “emotionally demand[ing] fascist programs of persecution” rather than the leftist “programs of humanity and reconciliation.”
The Nazis, for instance, shared the leftists’ distaste for “elites,” but they understood those elites as a cultural and racial class rather than just an economic one. As far back as Richard Wagner, the predecessors of Nazism had inflated their social grievances into a symbolic racial struggle, in which foreign races were seen as threats to German values, practices, and traditions. Frustration with the powerful classes would devolve into racist antagonisms. Consequently, the Nazis’ battle against “Jewishness” became essential to their worldview, painting elites not as powerful Germans, but as nationless enemies of the German people. National Socialists like Rosenberg — using the anti-Semitic lexicon that the German Romantics had developed — began denouncing socialism too as the mirror of capitalism. They viewed both as oppressive, materialistic philosophies out to level the distinction between races. Simply put, “German-ness” would have no place in a Marxist or a hyper-capitalist world.
Viereck saw similar trends in American society. He observed that most people liked to think of themselves as middle class — almost nobody identified with the proletariat, nor with the powerful upper classes. Victims of capitalism, though “bitter and revolutionary about having their potential organizing power and productivity wasted,” were at the same time “too proud of their ‘washedness’ and white collars to join for this purpose any Marxist, liberal, or trade-union movement.” To these disgruntled citizens, being part of the oppressed class meant associating oneself with the “‘inferior’ aliens and ‘unwashed’ immigrants.” It meant being one indistinguishable actor in a sea of other underprivileged people. The homogeneous proletariat was less “sexy” and ego-enhancing than the prideful community of “White Protestant Americans.” Consequently, anti-elitism was violently directed against immigrants, Jews, and other groups viewed as “foreign.”
As Viereck saw it, the cardinal sin of liberal and leftist philosophies was that they ignored this tendency towards nationalism and failed to offer something sufficiently captivating in its place. They offered no positive notion of community and pride to replace the Nazis’ hateful and exclusive one. Fascism was therefore able to “out-demagogue” its rivals. As such, Viereck feared that if Marxist anti-capitalism continued stirring the pot against financiers and capitalists, a racist middle class would move towards National Socialism rather than democratic socialism.
The best way to protect democratic ideals, Viereck believed, was to make them essential to Americans’ culture and national self-image. He sought to defend principles like the rule of law, rationality, religion, and constitutionalism by making them “suitable to and palatable to the special unique traditions and lack of traditions which compose America.” Although Viereck positioned himself against all forms of “the neurosis called nationalism,” this to him meant a “narrow exclusive” form of nationalism that “flattered [the] people’s prejudices” and espoused “inherent moral superiorities.” He still urged practical use of concepts like tradition, nation, and patriotism, but only as a means of promoting a “tolerant and humane universalism.” Historicizing his values was Viereck’s way of redefining what it meant to be “American,” away from the nationalist and racialized conception. Democracy should feel more like an inalienable communal tradition than a set of abstract principles.
To better retain this cultural support for democracy, Viereck continued, American leaders must reform the nation’s laws with the aim of social and economic justice. But this change must occur through “free institutions… based on indirect action [and] representative parliaments,” rather than through what he termed “direct action,” including illegal factory seizures and violent strikes. He condemned direct action as a means of “[short-cutting] to democratic ends by a technique dangerous to democratic liberties.” As he saw it, elected leaders must balance dynamism and democracy, “life” and “law.” They must simultaneously facilitate respect for legal norms while supplementing that respect with constant change, activity, and reform, protecting democratic principles while also preventing the “hedonist exploitation of freedom and ‘rights.’” Breaking democratic constraints to further a cause was just as dangerous as abusing democratic constraints to suppress meaningful change.
Afraid that popular politics could send America down the same path as Germany, Viereck saw this process of democratization as necessarily top-down. His distrust of the “masses” and contempt for direct action led him to see political leaders as a critical bulwark against mob rule. Politics left to the “majority” was to Viereck highly corruptible, for fascists would “convert democracy’s ideal concept ‘majority’ into the appalling actuality ‘mob.’ It is the mob… who will ecstatically lift on its shoulders the American national-socialist dictator.” Change must come not through “excited mass-meetings” but through an elected body of leaders — “democracy freely guided to drastic reforms by the paternalistic squire.” Viereck acknowledged that this top-down approach could be “hypocritically exploited” by fascists and capitalists alike, who may abuse “its indirectness” to “enslave the people instead of guide and serve the people.” But this did not sway him. He still believed that representatives were guardians of democratic norms, albeit with a responsibility to work tirelessly and thoughtfully on behalf of the people.
Viereck therefore called for America’s leaders to cultivate respect for democratic ideals by inspiring the people and igniting their emotions and imaginations. It would take what Viereck amusingly described as “ideological ‘oomph’” — the “glamor-girl,” the “‘it’ that packs the mass-meetings.” He warned the West’s anti-fascists that “civilization’s defense against the Nazi brand of religious spirit” could not mean simply “shallow mockery of all spirit.” Instead, a “rejuvenated” form of leadership “must make peace and freedom more exciting to our youth than Hitler makes war and dictatorship.” “The Coming American National Socialism” was his attempt to compete with the Nazi claim to the soul, spirit, faith, and fervor of the people. Led by their leaders towards cooperation, self-sacrifice, and enthusiastic respect for both democracy and progress, he hoped Americans could overcome their vulnerabilities.
With the provocative warnings of “The Coming American National Socialism,” Peter Viereck urged America to awaken to its problems, imperfections, inhumanities, and neglect of responsibility, and confront the injustices and deficiencies that its culture had long enabled, and that were now creating dire consequences for politics. No country, he felt, should be apathetic towards its own societal problems just as no country was immune to the dangerous political consequences unleashed by those problems.
But the apocalypse Viereck feared did not come. Mobilized to wage an ultimately victorious war against Nazi Germany and its allies, Americans never had to confront American National Socialism in the way that Viereck had foreseen. The feeling of vulnerability dissipated. As historian John Patrick Diggins reflected, many Americans later looked back and celebrated what they believed to be their country’s exceptional durability without feeling a need to examine the causes of the far-right’s ascendancy. For Diggins, the abrupt and non-transformative end to the war left some intellectuals deeply unsettled, terrified by the thought of restoring the same “dreck culture” that had produced fascism, the “numbing ‘civilization’ of things and machines,” “middle-class status anxieties,” “conspiratorial phobias,” “racist and authoritarian personalities,” “chronic outbursts of anti-Communism,” and “vague feeling of anomie and alienation” that made crisis continually possible.
In the postwar decades, Viereck’s ideas lost much of their traction. After helping to establish American conservatism as a mainstream movement after the war, Viereck soon saw this movement co-opted and his ideas sidelined. By the early 1950s, conventional conservatism started to fall under the sway of thinkers like William F. Buckley, who lionized laissez-faire capitalism, worshiped Adam Smith as others worshiped Marx, reveled in a cult of privilege, rejected social and economic reform, and preached, as Viereck wrote, a materialist “outworn Old Guard antithesis to the outworn Marxist thesis.” Meanwhile, democracy lost ground to the hateful chauvinism of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Viereck also sharply condemned. It seemed that the nation’s promise of freedom and tolerance could not withstand the emotional and invigorating demagoguery of the American far-right.
Looking back, there is no telling if a humbler reckoning with the country’s far-right demons would have inoculated the country against their revival in our time. Liberal countries had encountered violent episodes of racist nationalism before, but in Viereck’s view, they repeatedly failed to take those lessons to heart once the threats were quelled. The postwar period marked merely the continuation of this trend. Lacking the vulnerability and humility that a closer shave with domestic crisis would have instilled, many postwar leaders fell into the same trap of overconfidence and indifference that Viereck warned about on the eve of the Second World War. Engrossed instead with their new patriotic war against Communism, they were unwilling to, in Viereck’s words, confront the “pain of looking realities straight in the face: […] our mechanized personal lives, slowly disintegrating, and the anti-democratic forces disintegrating our national life.” Viereck republished Metapolitics in multiple editions, hoping unsuccessfully to remind Americans of a forgotten moment of crisis. To forget that moment would to him “have become a gesture of concession to something even ghastlier: the present American mood of smugness in general and of forgetfulness about the Nazi evil in particular.”
And yet, as Viereck’s writings foresaw, the past century of American history has been stained by ongoing flirtations with far-right nationalism. Although today many Americans are more ready to admit their democracy’s vulnerabilities, the challenge will lie in truly and sincerely addressing them at their source.
Taking our lessons from the turbulence of 1941 and the forgetfulness of postwar America, what can today’s democratic leaders do in their aftermath of their victory? As Viereck would have it, they must use their power to break the “pendulum swing” between a liberalism that overlooks its people’s economic and spiritual needs and a racist nationalism that solves them only for some and at a terrible cost to humanity. These leaders must recognize that the deeper reform does not become obsolete once they have defeated a particular movement, and must speak just as directly to the lonely and alienated as they do to the active and engaged. Lastly, they must do their utmost to alleviate the pains of modernity within the boundaries of a just, tolerant, and humane democracy. These responsibilities are unending, crisis or no.
*Micah Rosen is a recent graduate of Brown University. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.
**Lauren Campbell is a student at Brown University and the founding editor of A Dash of Awkward, an online magazine about food, culture, and/or identity.
