The Color of Fascism by Horne Gerald

Author:Horne, Gerald.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2006-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

8

Fascism on Trial

Dennis was to pay a costly price for his outspokenness, his “prediction” of fascism’s imminence, and his pointed analyses of race. But, for all that, it was a book that helped to bring him to the brink of imprisonment. Ironically, the author, John Roy Carlson, was “passing” in a sense, since he was of Armenian descent and later in life adopted his authorial name that echoed Britain,1 not to mention the fact that in the irony of ironies, he posed—or “passed”—as a fascist in order to gain Dennis’s confidence. Perhaps this ethnic plasticity provided Carlson with insight for one of the points he highlighted in his best-seller—though, curiously, this tabloid-like assertion gained little traction—was that Dennis was probably a “Negro.” It was almost as if Dennis’s critics were reluctant to confront the fact that his roots were among a persecuted minority for that might involve unwanted soul-searching about racism—which many would prefer to “normalize,” take for granted, assume as God-given, and certainly not engage in the bruising battle with the Dixiecrats to force this phenomenon into retreat—and might provide succor to Dennis’s now officially scorned ideology and why he might have turned toward it to strike back at a society that had wounded him.

In fact, this was one of the many curious aspects of a book that the wildly popular journalist, Walter Winchell, touted as “the number one best-seller in nearly every leading city”;2 Winchell was the “biggest booster” of this work and used his foothold in radio to extol its glories, where he was joined by other airwave stars and celebrated writers such as Max Lerner, Victor Riesel, and Rex Stout.3

Carlson’s lurid exposé also received a gigantic boost from the government. Apparently, the author made a “promise” to the authorities that he “would submit the proof sheets” of the book “for review” by Washington “before it is set in type.”4 Carlson was a “confidential informant” for the authorities, who knew that for whatever reason he had multiple aliases, including “Thomas Decker, George Carlson, George Pagnanelli”—in addition to his given name, “Avedis Derounian.”5 With such boosting, this book sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in a matter of months.6

What the battalions of readers learned when they cracked open this book by Carlson was bound to raise questions not only about Dennis and his fascist cohorts but, as well, the nation that gave birth to both.

“It was on September 23, 1940,” wrote the author dramatically, “that I first heard ‘Heil Hitler’ shouted out in Harlem. There were a dozen street speakers with their dark groups of listeners stretched from 114th Street to 135th Street on Lenox Avenue. They were fanatic speakers” ballyhooing the presumed virtues of fascism. The perspicacious reader had to consider the import of a persecuted minority in Harlem turning toward a growing foe of the nation and what it was that could give rise to such a dreadful state of affairs.

Meanwhile, back in Harlem, Arthur Reid, “Director of the African Progressive Business League shouted, ‘I like Hitler.… let the white man kill his brother white man.

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