Fascism Comes to America

Bruce Kuklick is the Nichols Professor of American History, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is most recently the author of Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba written with Emmanuel Gerard, and The Fighting Sullivans.

"Popcorn doesn’t come with books published by respected university presses, but in the case of Fascism Comes to America, maybe it should. The book is as much about Hollywood as it is about a movement or ideology. Mr. Kuklick, an accomplished historian of ideas, turns his skills to Hollywood’s treatment of fascism. He explains why American entertainers, intellectuals, and others have so often resorted to the term 'fascism' to denounce things they don’t like: FDR’s New Deal, the Reagan Revolution and much else....Readers may need whiskey to accompany that popcorn when they come to Mr. Kuklick’s brief excursus on American government and the Founders’ 'agony' over democracy. He surmises that Americans’ obsession with fascism is the flip side of a collective inability to reckon with the calamitous gap between the Founders and contemporary America."

• Introduction: Expressing FascismPart I: 1909–49Why Fascism?1 Fascism before Fascism, 1909–352 Franklin Roosevelt and Political Culture, 1932–363 Perplexity at Home and Abroad, 1934–384 Foreign and Domestic Contradictions, 1938–405 The Coming of the War, 1939–426 Fascism Penetrates Popular Life, 1936–49Part II: 1942–2020Performing Words7 Fascism on the Right, 1942–708 Europeans Bring Fascism to the States9 Fascism Triumphs over Communism10 Scholars Approach Fascism11 Fascism Everywhere, 1970–202012 Democracy and FascismConclusion: Fascism without FascismAcknowledgmentsNotes, Sources, and MethodsNotesIndex