Why Did the Nazi Party Glorify Old German Myths and Denounce Modern Art
"Southward adly, the American dream is dead," Donald Trump proclaimed when he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing them. Only this reversal was just a gustation of what was to come, as he revealed an unnerving skill at twisting what would be negative for anyone else into a positive for himself.
Past the time he won the election, Trump had flipped much of what many people thought they knew about the United states on its caput. In his credence spoken language he again pronounced the American dream dead, just promised to revive it. We were told that this dream of prosperity was under threat, so much and so that a platform of "economic nationalism" carried the presidency.
Reading last rites over the American dream was disquieting enough. Only throughout the entrada, Trump too promised to put America commencement, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a agonizing phrase; think pieces on the slogan'due south history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.
In fact, "America first" has a much longer and darker history than that, ane deeply entangled with the country'due south brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia. Gradually, the complex and oft terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – only kept alive by hugger-mugger fascist movements. "America first" is, to put it patently, a canis familiaris whistle. The expression's backstory seems at first to uncannily conceptualize Trump and (at least some of) his supporters, but the truth is that eruptions of American conservative populism are nothing new – and "America first" has been associated with them for well over a century. This is only the latest iteration of a powerful strain of populist demagoguery in American history, from president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to Louisiana senator Huey Long a century later – one that now extends to Trump.
The slogan appears at to the lowest degree as early as 1884, when a California paper ran "America Get-go and Always" as the headline of an article about fighting trade wars with the British. The New York Times shared in 1891 "the idea that the Republican Party has e'er believed in", namely: "America commencement; the rest of the world afterward". The Republican party agreed, adopting the phrase every bit a campaign slogan past 1894.
A few years later, "See America Kickoff" had become the ubiquitous slogan of the newly burgeoning American tourist industry, i that adjusted easily equally a political hope. This was recognised by an Ohio newspaper possessor named Warren G Harding, who successfully campaigned for senator in 1914 under the banner "Prosper America First". The expression did non get a national catchphrase, nonetheless, until April 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson gave a spoken language defending US neutrality during the first world war: "Our whole duty for the present, at any rate, is summed up in the motto: 'America First'."
American opinion was securely divided over the war; while many decried what was widely perceived as a baldly nationalist venture by Germany, there was plenty of anti-British sentiment, besides, particularly among Irish-Americans. American neutrality was by no means always motivated by pure isolationism; it mingled pacifism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism and exceptionalism as well. Wilson was delivering the "America offset" speech with his middle on a 2d presidential term: "America first" should not be understood "in a selfish spirit", he insisted. "The ground of neutrality is sympathy for mankind."
The phrase was rapidly taken up in the name of isolationism, notwithstanding, and past 1916 "America first" had become then popular that both presidential candidates used it every bit a campaign slogan. When the US joined the war in 1917, "America first" was transposed into a jingoistic motto; subsequently the war, it slipped dorsum into isolationism. In the summer of 1920, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge delivered a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, denouncing the League of Nations in the name of "America first". Harding secured the Republican nomination and promptly sailed to victory that November using the slogan, which his administration would invoke ceaselessly before it collapsed among the ruins of the United states's greatest political blackmail scandal to date.
By 1920, "America first" had joined forces with another popular expression of the time, "100% American", and both soon functioned as articulate codes for nativism and white nationalism. It is impossible to grasp the full meaning of "100% American" without recognising the legal and political force of eugenicist ideas well-nigh percentages in the The states. The so-called "1-drop dominion" – which said that 1 drop of "Negro blood" made a person legally black – was the foundation of slavery and miscegenation laws in many states, used to determine whether an individual should be enslaved or free. The logic of the one-drib dominion extended from the notorious three-fifths compromise in the constitution, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Declaring someone 100% American was no mere metaphor in a state that measured people in percentages and fractions, in order to deny some of them full humanity.
In 1920 Upton Sinclair published a furiously satirical novel called 100%: The Story of a Patriot, inspired by the case of a radical, Tom Mooney, who was sentenced to hang for a 1916 bombing on charges widely viewed equally spurious. Sinclair's novel is told from the perspective of Peter, "a patriot of patriots, a super-patriot; Peter was a red-blooded American and no mollycoddle; Peter was a 'he-American', a 100% American ... Peter was so much of an American that the very sight of a greenhorn filled him with a fighting impulse."
Peter fully believes that:
100% Americanism would find a way to preserve itself from the sophistries of European Bolshevism; 100% Americanism had worked out its formula: "If they don't similar this country, let them go back where they come from." But of course, knowing in their hearts that America was the all-time country in the world, they didn't want to go back, and it was necessary to make them go.
But "100% American" was non only xenophobic and nativist. When Senator Knute Nelson died in 1923, he was hailed in obituaries across the United states as "100% American" – despite having been born in Norway. Why? Because Nelson was descended from "the truthful Nordic line", "from the race which ready up strong gods and bred potent men".
"Nordic" was yet another code, used in the same means that the Nazis would use "Aryan". "Nordicism" held that people of northern Europe were racially superior to those of southern Europe (and everywhere else), a theory consort past white supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, whose The Passing of the Great Race: or The Racial Basis of European History (1916) became one of the near influential works of eugenicist scientific racism. Merely in practice, Nordic was used to depict anyone who was blond, white, Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon. Colloquially, "Nordic", "100% American" and "America beginning" were used all but interchangeably.
It should come as footling surprise, then, that the Ku Klux Klan likewise adopted "America first" equally a motto. In 1919 a Klan leader gave a Fourth of July speech declaring: "I am for America, get-go, final and all the time, and I don't want any strange element telling the states what to do." The fantasy of a U.s.a. once populated solely by the racially pure Nordic "mutual man" was the Klan's genesis myth as well, the prelapsarian past to which they intended to force the country to return – by violence if necessary.
In Jan 1922, the Klan staged a parade in Alexandria, Louisiana, bearing ii flaming crimson crosses and banners with slogans including "America Outset", "100% American" and "White Supremacy". That summertime the Klan took out an advertisement in a Texas newspaper: "The Ku Klux Klan is the ane and just organization composed absolutely and exclusively of ONE HUNDRED PER CENT AMERICANS who place AMERICA First."
Within months, Americans were watching the rise of fascism in Europe, as Mussolini took power in Rome. Explaining "fascists" to American readers that yr, the press found an obvious example fix to hand. "In our own picturesque phrase," wrote the New York World, "they might exist known equally the Ku Klux Klan." It does not require hindsight to view the Klan every bit a crypto-fascist arrangement: their contemporaries could instantly come across the likeness, and the danger. In November 1922 a Montana paper noted that, in Italy, fascism meant "Italy for the Italians. The fascisti in this state telephone call it 'America starting time'." At that place are plenty of the fascisti in the United States, it seems, but they accept always gone under the proud banner of "100% Americans".
The autumn of 1922 also saw the offset mention of a rise High german fringe politician called Adolf Hitler in the US press. At the time, a young American journalist named Dorothy Thompson was living in Vienna, where she was reporting on the rise of antisemitism. By November 1923, she was in Munich trying to interview Hitler following his abortive Beer Hall Coup d'état, filing articles on the fashion he had updated German nationalism thanks to "suggestions from Mussolini".
Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle warned its readers that the KKK was no unlike from "100 % patriotism in Europe":
There should exist no misunderstanding about the Klan. It represents in this country the aforementioned ideas that Mussolini represents in Italy; that Primo Rivera represents in Spain. The Klan is the American Fascista, determined to dominion in its ain way, in utter disregard of the central laws and principles of democratic government.
If such people were allowed to take over the US, it cautioned, "we shall have a dictatorship".
By 1927, the Klan had spread across the land. That May, roughly 1,000 Klansmen gathered to march in the Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, many in white robes and hoods, accompanied by 400 members of their women's organisation, the Klavana. Some of the reported twenty,000 spectators in Queens that day objected to the Klan'due south presence in a civic parade; fights bankrupt out, and it turned into a anarchism. In the days that followed, the New York papers revealed the names of a total of seven men who had been arrested in Queens. Five of them were identified as "avowed Klansmen" who had been marching in the parade and were arrested for "refusing to disperse when ordered". A sixth was a mistake – a car had run over his human foot – and he was immediately released. The seventh, a 21-year-former German-American, was not identified in the press as a Klansman. The reports only stated that he was arrested, arraigned and discharged. No i knows why he was at that place. His proper noun was Fred Trump.
I north September 1935, a month afterward announcing he would run for president, Senator Long of Louisiana was assassinated. Called "America's get-go dictator", Long had worried many observers with his blend of populism and authoritarianism. Later his expiry, one writer referred to Long equally "the Mississippi valley rendering of Il Duce". Despite assurances from many Americans that it tin't happen here, Long's rise to power had shown just how it could. Its growing presence was then articulate that at the end of 1935 Sinclair Lewis published a novel inspired by Long's career (but written before his murder), in which he imagined what American fascism would look similar. The title of It Tin't Happen Hither was "ironical", Lewis told reporters: "I don't say fascism will happen here," he said, "only that it could."
Lewis and Thompson had married in 1928, and his novel was heavily influenced by her circle'southward conversation about the situation in Europe. She had just become the outset American strange contributor to exist ejected from Germany by Hitler, making her an international celebrity. "Whatever else the Hitler revolution may or may not be," she wrote, "it is an enormous mass flight from reality." On her return to the United states of america, Thompson was given a nationally syndicated paper column; immediately she began writing near the emergence of bands of loosely organised fascists effectually the United states of america, where a "Union party" had assembled to unite the right, creating an amalgamation of white supremacist fascist groups.
One of Thompson'south columns on American fascism was titled "It Can Happen Here", in which she asked:
Whom practise they detest? Life, which has treated them badly. Who is to blame? Some scapegoat is to blame. The Negroes working in the fields that should be theirs? Or the Jews? Do they non go on the prosperous shops? Or the Communists … or the trade unionists … Or the Catholics who accept a Pope in Rome? Or the foreigners who take the jobs? These are to blame. Therefore exterminate them. We are poor and dispossessed. But nosotros are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. Our fathers founded this country. Information technology belongs to us.
Merely as Thompson's column was published, in May 1936, William Faulkner finished Absalom, Absalom!, a novel driven by the proffer that what had defined southern history was the fact that poor white people gained self-respect and racial pride from their belief in their inherent superiority to blackness people. If that sense of racial superiority were always threatened, the story predicted, they would erupt in violence. A twelvemonth earlier, Spider web Du Bois had explained that "white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor". Although white labourers remained poor, Du Bois wrote, they were "compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage", the wage of racial superiority.
I due north the autumn of 1940, a coalition of Americans against US entry into the 2nd earth state of war formed the America First Committee. Charles Lindbergh would become their spokesman, Thompson perhaps their fiercest opponent. "I am absolutely certain in my mind that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi," she wrote in 1941. "He hates the present autonomous arrangement and … intends to be President of the United States, with a new party along Nazi lines backside him." Past May 1941, Lewis had joined the America First Committee, while he and Thompson had quietly separated. According to Lewis's biographer, he was "at that time vigorously opposed to American intervention in the European state of war … his sympathies with the America First people".
In August 2017, vii months into Donald Trump'southward presidency, a coalition of American fascists calling themselves Unite the Right staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Information technology came as a shock to many observers that the Klan and neo-Nazis could march in modern America, shouting: "Jews will non supersede us." Information technology came as a greater daze that Trump refused to condemn them.
When the story emerged during the 2016 campaign that Trump'southward father had been arrested at what was often described (erroneously) as a "Klan rally", Trump at first denied that the Fred Trump in question was his father, maxim they'd never lived at the address named in the newspaper reports. But although Donald never lived there, the Trump family unit did. There is no prove that Fred was at the 1927 Memorial Twenty-four hours parade to back up the Klan. What'southward remarkable is that, of the parade'due south 20,000 spectators, the simply six who were arraigned after the riots were five "avowed Klansmen", and Fred Trump.
Donald has spoken oft, and proudly, of the father he idolised. "My legacy has its roots in my male parent'due south legacy," he stated in 2015. There is good reason to retrieve eugenics plays a office in that legacy. "The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human being development," said i of Trump's biographers, Michael D'Antonio. "They believe that there are superior people and that if you lot put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you go a superior offspring." Trump also endorsed a garbled version of eugenics in a 2010 interview: "I think I was born with the drive for success because I take a sure cistron. I'grand a cistron believer." And while information technology is true that no i knows why Fred Trump was arrested forth with five members of the Klan in 1927, information technology is also true that his later on record would not suggest he was there to protestation against the Klan. Maybe it was all just a coincidence.
Or possibly not. In Oct 2017, the New York Times reported that Trump's shut adviser, Stephen Miller, chose "100% Americanism" as a quotation for his loftier school yearbook page. Trump made international headlines in January 2018 when he demanded during discussions of immigration from Haiti and Africa why he would want "all these people from shithole countries", adding that he wanted "more people from places like Norway". Commentators noted that Norway is overwhelmingly ethnically white, but many were puzzled by what seemed an arbitrary preference. "Why Norway?" asked a Houston Chronicle report, highlighting the "racialism" of the choice; information technology added that the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer had approved Trump's remarks, which indicated: "Trump is more or less on the same folio as u.s.a.." The Chronicle did not, even so, mention that the folio in question continues to specify Nordicism per se – and "America showtime" – as its racial ideal for the U.s.a..
We cannot hear a dog whistle if we are not in its range. We cannot empathise the subtexts of our own slogans if we do not sympathise their contexts; we hazard misreading our own moment if we don't know the historical meanings of expressions we resuscitate, or perpetuate. Nosotros are all asking urgent questions most the present, but there are far more than surprising answers than many call back to be found in the by. The backstory of loaded phrases can help united states understand how we constitute ourselves facing these problems today – and even, mayhap, how to cease them from detonating into violence again
- Sarah Churchwell'due south Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream is published by Bloomsbury (£xx). To order a copy for £17, get to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free Britain p&p over £ten, online orders simply. Phone orders min. p&p of £one.99.
- Sarah Churchwell delivers the 2018 Raymond Williams Lecture at Hay Festival, Sat 2 June.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/21/end-of-the-american-dream-the-dark-history-of-america-first
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