In our fifth installment, we look at the small, but significant, smattering of fascist movements that took root in the United States and the mother country in the time before World War II. We interview Nancy MacLean, historian at Duke University and author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, to find out more about fascism’s hold on the American mind in the 1920s and 1930s.
Supplementary reading for this episode:
- Joe Allen, “When Fascism Was American,” Jacobin magazine, Dec. 29, 2015
- Sally Denton, The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right
- Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema Chapter 4: “Dictators and Democrats: The Rage for Order”
- Holocaust Encyclopedia article on the German American Bund, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Nancy Maclean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
- Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars
- Radio Diaries episode on the Bonus Army
