Paxton and Sheri Berman have noted, Italian fascism did not emerge as a sui generis authoritarian ideology and, in the beginning, was not explicitly premised on extreme racism, in contrast to German National Socialism. This American fascination arose in part from fascism’s view of national struggle.
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Their sympathy flowed from different social and political moorings, but as Hull explains, all thought that the United States, coming into full force as a world power, lacked the political leadership required “to make democracy relevant, to manage the pace of industrialization, and to support those who felt left behind in the modern world.” Italian fascism stood for them as an appealing model, yoking together communitarian values and national progress in a way that had eluded American government. Hull takes these four figures as representative of common threads of fascist sympathy in the United States. In lean, eloquent prose, Hull weaves together the intellectual and status-seeking journeys of four Americans: the conservative ambassador to Italy (1921–1924) and writer Richard Washburn Child, the political philosopher Herbert Wallace Schneider, the Italian-American newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, and McCormick herself. How did an ideology that relished violence, dictatorship, and illiberal communitarianism animate so many different people in a country whose founding myths extolled individualism and self-government? What led these Americans to admire fascism and even suggest it was the logical successor to democracy? The historian Katy Hull’s new book, The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism, is a welcome study of these questions, examining the intellectual legitimation of fascism in the United States in the interwar period. It is intriguing to revisit this history in light of conversations about fascism today.
By the late 1930s, fascist sympathy reached the center of American political thought.
Italian fascism seemed to offer possibilities for an American state still in severe need of modernization.
From Henry Ford to the esteemed, path-blazing New York Times foreign correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick, expressions of fascist sympathy had reached the center of mainstream discourse and American political thought by the late 1930s. Among the most visible sympathizers of the time was the anti-Semitic radio broadcaster Charles Coughlin, who regularly reached tens of millions of listeners, but Roosevelt and his administration knew fascist sympathy was diffuse among prominent Americans. politics, the rise of American sympathy with fascism had become an urgent concern for Roosevelt. will grow in strength in our land.” While opposition to communism was a standard current in U.S. “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens,” he remarked, “then Fascism and Communism. On the eve of the November 1938 midterm elections, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a forceful radio address. The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism
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