Friday, Sept. 18, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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With his fearmongering rhetoric, President Donald Trump is cribbing from the lowest denominator playbook of another volatile moment in history — the presidential election of 1932, when populists Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin spewed vitriolic anti-Jewish, pro-fascist slogans.
“The cruelest year,” as historian William Manchester described it, the human toll of the Great Depression was crushing, and the destitute, unemployed and hopeless desperately sought a Messiah who would bring some relief.
Unemployment was at 16 million, more than 5,000 banks had failed, financial capitalists had rigged the market and bilked millions of customers, hundreds of thousands of families had lost their homes. There were no government safety nets — no unemployment insurance, minimum wage, Social Security or Medicare.Economic despair gave rise to panic and unrest, and whether real or exaggerated, the political firebrands eagerly fanned the paranoia of socialism, global conspiracies and threats from within the country as well as abroad. Inciting first fear and then rage, Long and Coughlin unleashed a tempest that took on a life of its own.
Rather than inflame a quavering nation, Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt — like former Vice President Joe Biden today — calmly urged Americans to overcome fear, banish apathy, unite and restore their confidence in the country’s future. Roosevelt thought government in a civilized society had an obligation to abolish poverty, reduce unemployment and redistribute wealth — concepts that his rivals found radical, if not revolutionary.
Italy’s Benito Mussolini and fascism were enormously popular and highly regarded in America at the time. Mussolini had legendarily made the trains run on time and revived the Italian economy, and many American intellectuals and business leaders saw him and fascism as a viable model for America. His Black Shirts — the military arm of his organization made up of two hundred thousand soldiers — were a potent image of strength to a nation that felt emasculated.Even the rise of Adolf Hitler and the explosion of the Nazi revolution in Germany struck a chord with prominent American elites and anti-Semites such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, who rushed to brandish the “America First” slogan coined by media magnate William Randolph Hearst — the same xenophobic theme that Trump resurrected and then morphed into Make America Great Again, to wildly enthusiastic crowds.
Idealogue and longtime icon of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Louisianan Long saw himself as the spokesman for the far right and far left of both national parties. A charismatic orator called the “American Mussolini” by historian Kenneth Davis, Long and his “Share Our Wealth Society” envisioned the creation of a third party that would usher in his presidency. For his part, Coughlin was the Depression era’s Rush Limbaugh — a rabidly reactionary Catholic priest called “the father of hate radio” for his inflammatory anti-Communist sermons broadcast to 40 million people from his radio pulpit in his Church of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Mich. Calling Wall Street financiers “shylocks” and “money changers,” Coughlin also sought to create a third party. He supported the founding of the pro-fascist Christian Front to counteract the godless Marxists and secularists, and would go on to call FDR’s New Deal the “Jew Deal.”
While Hitler frightened many European nations with the Nazi suspension of civil liberties and the terrorizing of Jewish citizens, his elite Brown Shirts — a 60,000-unit of storm troopers attached to the 100,000-man German army — was a stark symbol to the powerless American masses.
In this climate of restless uncertainty, volatile protests, terrifying conspiracies and ominous threats, America’s right wing was inspired to form its own paramilitary organizations. What I described in my book “The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right” as “a rainbow of colored shirts,” militias sprung up throughout the land. A diehard core of conservative veterans formed the Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia and recruited pro-Mussolini immigrants. The Silver Shirts was an apocalyptic Christian militia patterned on the notoriously racist Texas Rangers that claimed to operate in 46 states and stockpiled weapons at its headquarters in Oklahoma. The Gray Shirts of Glen Falls, N.Y., were bent on removing “communist college professors” from the nation’s education system, and the White Shirts of Chattanooga, Tenn., wore white shirts bearing a Crusader cross and agitated for the takeover of Washington.
So while Trump’s playbook might seem fresh and appealing to an American populace without a sense of history, it is far from benign. It is code for White America, and it is steeped in a deep and dangerous impulse that America’s finest minds and leaders have sought for centuries to quell.
Sally Denton is a journalist and historian, and the author, most recently, of “The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World.”
