Fascism in the United States

Fascism in the United States is an expression of fascist political ideology that has been argued by scholars to date back over a century in the United States, with roots in white supremacy, nativism, and violent political extremism. Though it is a frequently overlooked chapter of US history that was overshadowed by fascism in Europe, particularly by Nazi Germany, scholars say that far-right authoritarian movements have long been a part of the political landscape of the US.
Scholars point to early 20th-century groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and domestic proto-fascist organizations which existed during the Great Depression as the origins of fascism in the US. These groups flourished amid social and political unrest. Alongside homegrown movements, German-backed political formations during World War II worked to influence U.S. public opinion towards the Nazi cause. After the U.S.'s formal declaration of war against Germany, the U.S. Treasury Department raided the German American Bund headquarters and arrested the leaders. Italian antifascist activism during World War II and other antifascist groups later on played a role in confronting these ideologies.
Events such as the 2017 Charlottesville rally have exposed racism, antisemitism and white supremacy within US society. The resurgence of fascist rhetoric in contemporary U.S. politics, particularly under the administration of Donald Trump, has highlighted the persistence of far-right ideology and rekindled questions and debate surrounding fascism in the United States.
The origins of fascism in the United States date back to the late 19th century with the passage of Jim Crow laws in the American South, the rise of the eugenicist discourse in the US, and the intensification of nativist and xenophobic hostility towards immigrants. During the early 20th century, several groups were formed in the United States that contemporary historians have classified as fascist organizations – with a prominent example being the Ku Klux Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or "the Klan", is an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group founded in 1865 during the post-civil war reconstruction era in the devastated South.
Scholars have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group, and compared its emergence to fascist trends in Europe. Historian Peter Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental. ... [The KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system."
The first Klan, founded by Confederate veterans, assaulted and murdered politically active Black people and their white political allies in the South. The second Klan was formed in 1915 as a small group in Georgia, and flourished nationwide by the mid-1920s.
The rise of fascism in Europe during the interwar period raised concerns in the U.S.; however, European fascist regimes were largely viewed positively by the American ruling class. This was due to the fact that fascist interpretations of ultranationalism allowed a nation to gain a significant amount of economic influence in the Western world and permitted a nation's government to destroy leftists and labour movements.
During the 1920s, American scholars frequently wrote about the rise of Italian fascism under Benito Mussolini, but few of them supported it; however, Mussolini's fascist policies initially gained widespread support among Italian Americans.
William Phillips, who served as the American ambassador to Italy, was "greatly impressed by the efforts of Benito Mussolini to improve the conditions of the masses" and found "much evidence" in support of the fascist argument that "they represent a true democracy in as much as the welfare of the people is their principal objective".
Phillips found Mussolini's achievements "astounding [and] a source of constant amazement", and greatly admired his "great human qualities". United States Department of State officials enthusiastically agreed with Phillips' assessment, praising Italian fascism for having "brought order out of chaos, discipline out of license, and solvency out of bankruptcy", as well as Mussolini's "magnificent" achievements in Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
The American poet Ezra Pound moved from the United States to Italy in 1924, and he became a loyal supporter of Benito Mussolini, the founder of a fascist state. He wrote articles and produced radio broadcasts that were critical of the United States, international bankers, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Jews. His propaganda was poorly received in the U.S.
In 1925, Virgil Effinger established the paramilitary Black Legion, a violent white supremacist offshoot of the KKK that sought to establish fascism in the United States by launching a revolution against the federal government. The Black Legion was active in the Midwestern United States in the 1920s and the 1930s and grew to prominence during the Great Depression. The FBI estimated that its membership numbered "at 135,000, including a large number of public officials, including Detroit's police chief." Historians have suggested lower estimates.
The Black Legion is widely viewed as having been an even more violent and radical offshoot of the Klan. In 1936, the group was suspected of having killed as many as 50 people, according to the Associated Press, including Charles Poole, an organizer for the federal Works Progress Administration. Eleven men were found guilty of Poole's murder. The Associated Press described the organization as "a group of loosely federated night-riding bands operating in several States without central discipline or common purpose beyond the enforcement by lash and pistol of individual leaders' notions of 'Americanism'." Nearly 50 Legionnaires were ultimately convicted of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, arson, and perjury. Although it was responsible for numerous attacks, the Black Legion remained limited in size and ultimately petered out.
Father Charles Coughlin was a Roman Catholic priest who hosted a prominent radio program in the late 1930s, on which he often ventured into politics. In 1932, he backed and welcomed the election of President Franklin Roosevelt, but the two had a falling out after 1934. His radio program and his newspaper, "Social Justice", denounced Roosevelt, as well as the "big banks" and "the Jews". When the United States entered World War II, the U.S. government took his radio broadcasts off the air, and blocked his newspaper from the mail. He abandoned politics, but continued to be a parish priest until his death in 1979.
The American architect-to-be Philip Johnson was a correspondent (in Germany) for Coughlin's newspaper between 1934 and 1940 (before beginning his architectural career). He wrote articles that were favorable to the Nazis and critical of "the Jews", as well as taking part in a Nazi-sponsored press tour, in which he covered the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland. He quit the newspaper in 1940, was investigated by the FBI and was eventually cleared for army service in World War II. Years later he would refer to these activities as "the stupidest thing I ever did ... [which] I never can atone for".
Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. In the years that followed, prior to the outbreak of World War II, some German-Americans attempted to create pro-Nazi movements in the U.S., often bearing swastikas and wearing uniforms. These groups had little to do with Nazi Germany, and they lacked support from the wider German-American community.
Across the US, so many small groups sprang up wearing uniforms and identifying as fascist that in 1934, the American Civil Liberties Union released a pamphlet titled “Shirts! A Survey of the New ‘Shirt’ Organizations in the United States Seeking a Fascist Dictatorship” detailing the gold, silver, brown, black, gray, white and blue-coloured shirt liveries of the different emergent fascist groups.
In May 1933, Heinz Spanknöbel, a German immigrant to America, received authority from Rudolf Hess, the deputy führer of Germany, to form an official American branch of the Nazi Party. The branch was known as the Friends of New Germany in the U.S. The Nazi Party referred to it as the National Socialist German Workers' Party of the U.S.A. Though the party had a strong presence in Chicago, it remained based in New York City, having received support from the German consul in the city. Spanknöbel's organization was openly pro-Nazi. Members stormed the German-language newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and demanded that the paper publish articles sympathetic to Nazis. Spanknöbel's leadership was short-lived, as he was deported in October 1933 following revelations that he had not registered as a foreign agent.
Some American corporations had branches in neutral countries that traded with Germany after the U.S. declared war in late 1941.
The German American Bund was the most prominent and well-organized fascist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1936, following the model of Hitler's Nazi Germany. It appeared shortly after the founding of several smaller groups, including the Friends of New Germany and the Silver Legion of America, founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley and the Free Society of Teutonia. The Friends of New Germany dissolved in December 1935 when Hess ordered all German citizens to leave the group after realizing that the organization was not beneficial to advancing their cause.
The German American Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn, was formed in 1936 and lasted until America formally entered World War II in 1941. The Bund existed with the goal of a united America under ethnic German rule and following Nazi ideology. It proclaimed communism as their main enemy and expressed anti-Semitic attitudes. After March 1, 1938, membership in the German-American Bund was only open to American citizens of German descent. Its main goal was to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany. The Bund was very active, providing its members with uniforms and encouraging participation in "training camps".
Inspired by the Hitler Youth, the Bund created its youth division, where members "took German lessons, received instructions on how to salute the swastika, and learned to sing the 'Horst Wessel Lied' and other Nazi songs." The Bund continued to justify and glorify Hitler and his movements in Europe during the outbreak of World War II. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bund leaders released a statement demanding that America stay neutral in the ensuing conflict and expressed sympathy for Germany's war effort. The Bund reasoned that this support for the German war effort was not disloyal to the United States, as German-Americans would "continue to fight for a Gentile America free of all atheistic Jewish Marxist elements."
The Bund held rallies with Nazi insignia and procedures such as the Hitler salute. Its leaders denounced the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jewish-American groups, Communism, "Moscow-directed" trade unions and American boycotts of German goods. They claimed that George Washington was "the first Fascist" because he did not believe that democracy would work.
The high point of the Bund's activities was their rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939, with around 20,000 people in attendance. The anti-Semitic Speakers repeatedly referred to President Roosevelt "Frank D. Rosenfeld", calling his New Deal the "Jew Deal", as well as denouncing the supposed Bolshevik-Jewish American leadership. The rally ended with violence between protesters and the Bund's "storm-troopers". In 1939, America's top fascist, the Bund's leader Fritz Julius Kuhn, was investigated by the city of New York, and was found to be embezzling the Bund's funds for his own use. He was arrested, his citizenship was revoked, and he was deported.
In 1940, the U.S. Army organized a draft in an attempt to bring citizens into military service. The Bund advised its members not to submit to the draft. On the basis of this piece of advice, the Bund was outlawed by the U.S. government, and Kuhn fled to Mexico.
After many internal and leadership disputes, the Bund's executive committee agreed to disband the party on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 11, 1941, the United States formally declared war on Germany, and Treasury Department agents raided Bund headquarters. The agents seized all records and arrested 76 Bund leaders.
During World War II, Canada and the United States battled the Axis powers. As part of the war effort, they suppressed the fascist movements within their borders, which were already weakened by the widespread public perception that they were fifth columns. This suppression consisted of the internment of fascist leaders, the disbanding of fascist organizations, the censorship of fascist propaganda and pervasive government propaganda against fascism. In the U.S., this campaign of suppression culminated in "The Great Sedition Trial" of November 1944, in which George Sylvester Viereck, Lawrence Dennis, Elizabeth Dilling, William Dudley Pelley, Joe McWilliams, Robert Edward Edmondson, Gerald Winrod, William Griffin, and, in absentia, Ulrich Fleischhauer were all put on trial for aiding the Nazi cause, supporting fascism and isolationism. After the death of the judge however, a mistrial was declared and all of the charges were dropped.
In the 1980s, the Office of Special Investigations estimated around ten thousand Nazi war criminals entered the United States from Eastern Europe after the conclusion of World War II, albeit the number has since been determined to have been much smaller.
Some were brought in Operation Paperclip, a project to bring German scientists and engineers to the U.S. Most Nazi collaborators entered the United States through the 1948 and 1950 Displaced Persons Acts and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. Supporters of the acts exhibited only slight awareness that Nazi war criminals would exploit the legislation to enter the United States. Most of the supporters' concern was about disallowing known communists from entering. This shift of focus was likely due to the pressures of the Cold War in the years after World War II, when the United States focused on countering Soviet communism more than Nazism.
During the 1950s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service conducted several investigations into suspected Nazi war criminals. No official trials came from these investigations. The Holocaust and the possibility of Nazi collaborators living in the country entered the national discussion in the 1960s with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, accusations of war criminals during Soviet war crimes trials, and a series of articles published by Charles R. Allen detailing the presence of Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. The federal government began to focus on uncovering Nazi war criminals remaining in the country.
Public awareness of the Holocaust and remaining Nazi war criminals increased in the 1970s. Many cases made headline news. The case of Hermine Braunsteiner, the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States, received widespread media coverage. The case triggered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to locate Nazi collaborators further. By the late 1970s, INS addressed thousands of cases, and the U.S. government formed the Office of Special Investigations, which was dedicated to locating Nazi war criminals in the United States.
Neo-Nazism began to emerge as an ideology in the 1970s, seeking to revive and implement Nazi ideology. In the United States, organizations such as the American Nazi Party, the National Alliance and White Aryan Resistance were formed during the second half of the 20th century. While initially composed of distinctive movements, in the 21st century, many US Neo-Nazi groups have moved towards more decentralized organization and online social networks with a terroristic focus.
In 1959, the American Nazi Party was founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, a former U.S. Navy commander, who was dismissed from the Navy due to his espousal of fascist political views.
Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, the organization was originally named the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, a name intended to denote opposition to state ownership of property. The same year—it was renamed the American Nazi Party in order to attract 'maximum media attention'.
The party was based largely upon the ideals and policies of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in Germany during the Nazi era, and embraced its uniforms and iconography. Since the late 1960s, a number of small groups had used the name "American Nazi Party" with most being independent of each other and disbanding before the 21st century.
On August 25, 1967, Rockwell was shot and killed in Arlington by John Patler, a former party member who had previously been expelled by Rockwell due to his espousal of his alleged "Bolshevik leanings". The Party was dissolved in 1983.
The National Alliance is a neo-Nazi, white supremacist political organization founded by William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, in 1974 and based in Mill Point, West Virginia. It was the largest and most active neo-Nazi group in the United States in the 1990s. In 2002, its membership was estimated at 2,500 with an annual income of $1 million.
Its membership declined after Pierce's death in 2002, and after a split in its ranks in 2005, became largely defunct. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Alliance had lost most of its members by 2020 but is still visible in the U.S. Other groups, such as Atomwaffen Division, have taken its place.
The National Socialist Movement (NSM or NSM88) is a US-based Neo-Nazi organization that was founded in 1974. The NSM has been described by the Anti-Defamation League as "one of the more explicitly neo-Nazi groups in the United States." It seeks the transformation of the United States into a white ethnostate from which Jews, non-Whites, and members of the LGBTQ community would be expelled and barred from citizenship.
Once considered to be the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi organization in the United States, its membership has plummeted since the late 2010s. It is a part of the Nationalist Front and is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
From 11 to 12 August 2017, the Unite the Right rally, a white-nationalist event, took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was organized by Richard B Spencer and Jason Kessler, both Neo-Nazism adherents. Marchers included members of the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias.
Some groups chanted racist and antisemitic slogans and carried weapons, Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols, the valknut, Confederate battle flags, Deus vult crosses, flags, and other symbols of various past and present antisemitic and anti-Islamic groups. The organizers' stated goals included the unification of the American white nationalist movement and opposing the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville's former Lee Park. The rally sparked a national debate over Confederate iconography, racial violence, and white supremacy.
Patriot Front is an American white supremacist and neo-fascist hate group. Part of the broader alt-right movement, the group split off from the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in 2017.
Patriot Front's aesthetic combines traditional Americana with fascist symbolism. Internal communications within the group indicated it had approximately 200 members as of late 2021. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the group generated 82% of reported incidents in 2021 involving distribution of racist, antisemitic, and other hateful propaganda in the United States, comprising 3,992 incidents, in every continental state.
Some scholars have drawn comparisons between the political stylings of Donald Trump and fascist leaders. Such assessments began during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and continued throughout the first Trump presidency as he appeared to court far-right extremists, including his attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election after losing to Joe Biden, and culminating in the 2021 United States Capitol attack.
The attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, has been compared to the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup attempt in Germany by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler against the Weimar government in 1923.
In "Trump and the Legacy of a Menacing Past", Henry Giroux argued that understanding the rise of "fascist politics" in the US necessitates examining the power of language, social media, and public spectacle in fostering an American-style fascism. Jason Stanley argued in 2018 that Trump employed "fascist techniques" to mobilize his base and weaken liberal democratic institutions. Trump has also been compared to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while former aide Anthony Scaramucci compared Trump to Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet.
Anti-fascist Italian expatriates in the United States founded the Mazzini Society in Northampton, Massachusetts in September 1939 to work toward ending Fascist rule in Italy. As political refugees from Mussolini's regime, they disagreed among themselves whether to ally with Communists and anarchists or to exclude them. The Mazzini Society joined with other anti-Fascist Italian expatriates in the Americas at a conference in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1942. They unsuccessfully promoted one of their members, Carlo Sforza, to become the post-Fascist leader of a republican Italy. The Mazzini Society dispersed after the overthrow of Mussolini as most of its members returned to Italy.
During the Second Red Scare which occurred in the United States in the years that immediately followed the end of World War II, the term "premature anti-fascist" came into currency and it was used to describe Americans who had strongly agitated or worked against fascism, such as Americans who had fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, before fascism was seen as a proximate and existential threat to the United States (which only occurred generally after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and only occurred universally after the attack on Pearl Harbor). The implication was that such persons were either Communists or Communist sympathizers whose loyalty to the United States was suspect. However, the historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have written that no documentary evidence has been found of the US government referring to American members of the International Brigades as "premature antifascists": the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Office of Strategic Services, and United States Army records used terms such as "Communist", "Red", "subversive", and "radical" instead. Indeed, Haynes and Klehr indicate that they have found many examples of members of the XV International Brigade and their supporters referring to themselves sardonically as "premature antifascists".
Modern antifa politics can be traced back to opposition to the infiltration of Britain's punk scene by white power skinheads in the 1970s and 1980s, and the emergence of neo-Nazism in Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Germany, young leftists, including anarchists and punk fans, renewed the practice of street-level anti-fascism. Columnist Peter Beinart writes that "in the late '80s, left-wing punk fans in the United States began following suit, though they initially called their groups Anti-Racist Action (ARA) on the theory that Americans would be more familiar with fighting racism than they would be with fighting fascism".
Dartmouth College historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, credits the ARA as the precursor of modern antifa groups in the United States. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ARA activists toured with popular punk rock and skinhead bands in order to prevent Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other assorted white supremacists from recruiting. Their motto was "We go where they go" by which they meant that they would confront far-right activists in concerts and actively remove their materials from public places. In 2002, the ARA disrupted a speech in Pennsylvania by Matthew F. Hale, the head of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator, resulting in a fight and twenty-five arrests. In 2007, Rose City Antifa, likely the first group to utilize the name antifa, was formed in Portland, Oregon. Other antifa groups in the United States have other genealogies. In 1987 in Boise, Idaho, the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment (NWCAMH) was created in response to the Aryan Nation's annual meeting near Hayden Lake, Idaho. The NWCAMH brought together over 200 affiliated public and private organizations, and helped people, across six states--Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a group called the Baldies was formed in 1987 with the intent to fight neo-Nazi groups directly. In 2013, the "most radical" chapters of the ARA formed the Torch Antifa Network which has chapters throughout the United States. Other antifa groups are a part of different associations such as NYC Antifa or operate independently.
Modern anti-fascism in the United States is a highly decentralized movement. Antifa political activists are anti-racists who engage in protest tactics, seeking to combat fascists and racists such as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right extremists. This may involve digital activism, harassment, physical violence, and property damage against those whom they identify as belonging to the far-right. According to antifa historian Mark Bray, most antifa activity is nonviolent, involving poster and flyer campaigns, delivering speeches, marching in protest, and community organizing on behalf of anti-racist and anti-white nationalist causes.
A June 2020 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies of 893 terrorism incidents in the United States since 1994 found one attack staged by an anti-fascist that led to a fatality (the 2019 Tacoma attack, in which the attacker, who identified as an anti-fascist, was killed by police), while attacks by white supremacists or other right-wing extremists resulted in 329 deaths. Since the study was published, one homicide has been connected to anti-fascism. A DHS draft report from August 2020 similarly did not include "antifa" as a considerable threat, while noting white supremacists as the top domestic terror threat.
There have been multiple efforts to discredit Antifa groups via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag attacks originating from alt-right and 4chan users posing as Antifa backers on Twitter. Some hoaxes have been picked up and reported as fact by right-leaning media.
During the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020, the Trump administration blamed Antifa for orchestrating the mass protests. Analysis of federal arrests did not find links to Antifa. There had been repeated calls by the Trump administration to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, a move that academics, legal experts and others argued would both exceed the authority of the presidency and violate the First Amendment.