Death to Fascism by John P. Enyeart

Author:John P. Enyeart [Enyeart, John P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Social Activists, Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780252051357
Google: lkKZDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-06-30T05:14:18+00:00

Adamic’s Anti-Imperialist Turn

When pressured to identify his politics, Adamic rejected the terms liberal and leftist, instead identifying himself as a progressive. Liberals lacked conviction, he argued, and leftist had become synonymous with communist, an ideology he had long rejected. He defined progressives as those dedicated to advancing democracy and pointed to Vice President Henry Wallace as the epitome of this outlook.12 In 1942, Wallace proclaimed that for the previous 150 years, a people’s revolution had occurred with the express goal of giving the common man a better standard of living. Beginning with the American Revolution, a “millennial and revolutionary march toward manifesting here on earth the dignity that is in every human soul” was happening. The Nazis represented the forces of counterrevolution and the Allies had to win in order for each person the world over to experience the right to self-government and aid in industrializing. Wallace’s vision, which he called the “Century of the Common Man,” opposed Life magazine publisher Henry Luce’s call for the “American century,” which promoted the dominance of the United States through free enterprise as the basis for remaking the world at the war’s end. Luce favored a US economic imperialism. Controversially, Wallace (1944) asserted that the American and Russian revolutions had similar aims. They both wanted to better the lives of everyday people.13 Adamic had made a similar contention in 1938 when he advocated communist revolutions in places where they fostered greater equality. By 1944, Wallace declared that destroying fascism meant more than defeating the Axis forces. It included the US government enacting greater regulations on monopolies, expanding union membership, putting an end to Jim Crow practices, embracing cultural pluralism, and engaging in a foreign policy that privileged human welfare above economic gain.14

Adamic could not have agreed more. In fact, he attended a conference in Havana, Cuba, in 1941 with academics, exiles escaping fascist rule, and writers from the United States, Europe, and Latin America focused on how best to advance democracy globally. W. E. B. DuBois, a featured speaker at the meeting, told a reporter that he left the gathering especially emboldened by those who shared his desire to advance a “fellowship in a new crusade, all men of every race, creed and hue, for a world movement toward … a democracy where every man has a voice in government, in art and in work.”15

Adamic recognized that ushering in the world he desired meant revolutionizing the present by redefining its relationship to the past. That included challenging the idea that US history was Anglo-Saxon history, which he did in his 1945 book Nation of Nations. It built on his “Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island” lecture from six years earlier and contended that a misinterpretation of US history created the perception that foreigners and African Americans resided on the periphery of the nation’s economic, social, cultural, and political development. Adamic insisted that these groups should be at the center of any narrative explaining the making of modern America because they built it, physically and culturally.

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