Unfortunately, I’ve run out of free articles here, but found Churchwell insightful at the time I read this essay. In her view, the original KKK, of the Reconstruction era, was the first true fascist organization of the modern era.
I don’t disagree that real Fascism has been attempted here in the United States, or that the KKK was proto-Fascist, but neither the beginning nor the zenith were in the Reconstruction Era. It is easy to argue that
Abraham Lincoln was the beginning with suspension of habeas corpus, arresting thousands whose only crime was being critical of the government, and autocratically granting himself the power to fight a war to firmly establish nationalism without a formal declaration of war or any input from Congress at all.
The power of the KKK peaked in the Progressive Era with
Teddy Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson. I’ve recently detailed Teddy’s establishment of concentration camps in the Philippine-American War. Woodrow Wilson resegregated the Federal workforce, showed the KKK propaganda film ‘Birth of a Nation’ at the White House, and enacted a not-so-soft type of Imperialism that we still refer to as ‘Wilsonian’.
The arguable end to America’s flirtation with Fascism came in 1935 during the New Era when
FDR’s National Recovery Administration was ruled unconstitutional. FDR had threated to pack the Supreme Court to make it constitutional but ultimately demurred.
That is two from the Republican side and two from the Democrat side. I do think you are fixated on the wrong side of the political aisle today with your Fascism worries. Please note that of the four fascist-adjacent US Presidents mentioned above, three of them were listed in the top-5 of the Presidents ranking list you recently posted. Your linked president rankings list was from lefty college professors, not historians, but lefty college academics of any discipline voting for their favorites, and they liked the fascist ones best.
The results are in from the US academics, and it does not bode well for the GOP nominee
www.independent.co.uk
