The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920 -1940 Paperback – October 22, 2018

In the Coming of the American Behemoth, Dr. Michael Joseph Roberto systematically lays out how a particular strain of fascism began to take hold in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. And, unlike in Germany and Italy, the fascism did not arise due to public support for a cult leader/dictator such as Hitler or Mussolini. Instead, it came from the actions of big business, along with an assist from the federal government.Even though the Roaring Twenties seemed like a time of prosperity, it was only mostly prosperous for major corporations, as well as for members of the upper class. In order for industry to maintain their profit levels, they needed to encourage the common man to buy more and more product---even if it wasn’t needed. And, advertising and public relations began to be used aggressively to encourage purchases, and to use installment plans and buying on time.After the stock market crash, the New Deal was introduced. While it purported, among other things, to be a program that would help the ordinary citizen, it actually did a lot more to stabilize, and help grow, big business---to the detriment of the working man. The strongest fascistic tendencies during this period came from monopoly-finance capitalism: Big Business, Big Finance, Big Industry, Big Ownership. All pretending to operate under the guise of American free enterprise, but a ruling class that was secretly trying to establish a capitalist dictatorship within the framework of a liberal democracy.What Dr. Roberto is trying to point out is that the fascism introduced in our country during the twenties and thirties is still alive today, and if anything, has gotten stronger and more insidious. Just as Big Business and business organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the US Chamber of Commerce were against strong regulations on business, against providing support to the unemployed and for weakening or doing away with social security in their day, we find some similar types of objections coming from those same groups today.Much of the new, or more appropriately the rediscovered, insights presented in this book come from the prescient authors writing critically in the 1930s. Their work was covered up for years, both intentionally and unintentionally. Roberto set out to rediscover and literally bring to the surface this wealth of information---and to re-introduce it to a modern audience. It is quite timely and may begin to educate us about what is going on in the United States during these turbulent times.Frank FasanoFurlong, PA

Taking its title from Frank Neumann’s unparalleled study of Nazi Germany and its political economy, Michael J. Roberto promised big things. The Coming of the American Behemoth mostly delivers, subjecting the U.S. monopoly capitalist system to the same rigorous class analysis that Neumann used. He traces the political trend towards more authoritarian and eventually fascist forms of state rule back to its origins in monopolization and the concentration of capital. In doing so, he raises important, largely unasked questions about just how different Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover really were from “that fine Italian gentleman” across the Atlantic. The first half of the book is a very thorough, well-documented examination of the 1920s in the United States, the origins of the Great Depression and the developing right-wing political forms brewing in this foul mixture.The second half delivers what’s promised in the title, namely a look at homegrown American fascism—from Father Coughlin to Huey Long (although Roberto, like me, doesn’t classify Long as a fascist and contents himself to looking at the ways along manifested the political currents brewed by monopoly capitalism’s historic crisis at the time). He examines less well-known cases too, like the Silver League and the Black Legion, as well as the resurrection of the Klan. At every step, he affirms the general position on fascism outlined by Georgi Dimitrov at the Comintern’s 7th Congress: that in power, it’s the terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary section of finance capital. America never had a fascist takeover in the 20s or 30s, unlike many other capitalist countries in Europe, and Roberto’s eye for political economy explains why—without resorting to bogus liberal idealism about ‘American democracy’ or ‘republicanism’. In fact, the biggest takeaway we get from Roberto’s book is how positively unremarkable the United States was among its contemporary imperialist competitors—and how easily it could have slid into something like Germany (or worse).Roberto’s argument is well-sourced and thoroughly developed, but he could have used a more assertive copy editor. There are whole sections of the book—mostly in the first half—that are very clearly older drafts of the same arguments that already appear elsewhere. It’s distracting, but worse, it slows the pacing of an overall exciting thesis to a crawl—and it’s turned the page count into a Behemoth of its own.I think Roberto’s book would benefit from a second revised edition—slimmed down and tightened. Having written about this period of history myself, I understand how tough it is to get the wording just right. This leads to countless iterations of essentially the same point, from which the author is supposed to pick the clearest one. But in writing this dense with content, some of those old iterations get lost in the pages and never get taken out. That’s the job of an editor—not the author. But the Coming of the American Behemoth is too good of a premise to be slowed down by technical weaknesses in the presentation like this.

At at the Comintern’s 7th Congress. Bulgarian Stalinist Georgi Dimitrov fascism outlined the standard communist definition of "fascism", which was essentially a propagandistic spiel that had nothing to do with the reality of fascism, and everything to do with Stalin's ongoing struggle to undermine Western Social-Democracy and Trotskyism, both of which Dimitrov condemned as "fascist".During Stalin's purges of the 1930's, Dimitrov worked with the secret police (NKVD) in luring several prominent Communist dissidents back to the USSR where they were arrested and murdered. He was Stalin's mouthpiece in denouncing Tito. Ironically, Dimitrov later was murdered with poison, apparently under Stalin's order, in 1949.It is sad that Roberto has built an entire thesis on Dimitrov's "analysis", especially given that it requires one to ignore most modern scholarship on the nature of fascism, modern capital and US social relations, to produce what is, in academic and practical terms, a turgid piece of Stalinist hackery that proves next to useless in examining the nature of either so-called American "fascism" or Capitalism.