U.S. culture and global fascism, 1914-1933

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Content U.S. Culture and Global Fascism, 1914-1933 by Sanders Isaac Bernstein A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2022 Copyright 2022 Sanders Isaac Bernstein ii Dedication For my grandparents: Ruth M. Bernstein Aaron Bernstein (1920-2018) Charles S. Gehrie (1923-2018) Jeannette D. Gehrie (1921-2014) iii Acknowledgments It is fitting that this study of fascism, often conceived as an ideology of a singular voice, only comes into being because of a multiplicity of voices, some of whom have spoken directly to and through this project, others whose voices are now so much a part of me that without them I would not be able to write what I write or think what I think at all. These acknowledgments cannot fail to adequately recognize the material and spiritual debt I owe to those mentioned below and, even more, those whose names go unmentioned but to whom I am, all the same, profoundly indebted. The project began through the encouragement and guidance of my chair, John Carlos Rowe. It was he who set me on course toward this text when he suggested I read Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies in his seminar in 2014, “Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literary Transnationalism,” to make sense of this strange early German film remediation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. His gentle, critical interventions and ongoing support have been vital to this dissertation. He believed in this project—and me—even when I would lose faith in one, the other, or both. Indeed, I have been very lucky to work with such an extraordinarily kind and supportive committee. Kate Flint has been a generous interlocutor; she would not let me lapse into complacent thought, asking me from the first time we met to think deliberately about my method and how to make my archive, when I found it silent, speak. Joe Boone has improved this project tremendously with his close attention to the structure of my prose as well as the content of my argument (if you’ll forgive me for so crudely breaking them apart). Thanks to Laura Serna’s encouragement and prompting, I dedicated myself to the reception history to be found in the archive while also trying my best to attend to the visual images in the texts I examine here. Last, but not least, I am grateful to Chris Vials for being iv so willing to join in on this venture, lending his expertise and encouragement and pushing me to think more precisely about fascism. This dissertation has also benefitted from opportunities for critique outside of USC. Don Pease’s seminar at the 2018 Futures of American Studies Institute allowed me to work through important questions for Chapter Two. I am also grateful to the audiences and co- panelists at ASA, MSA, ALA, ACLA, MLA, and the Dickens Universe Winter Conference, which granted me chances to develop this project in dialogue. The Culture Department of the Freie Universität’s John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies has been a second academic home in Berlin. My welcoming Betreuer, Frank Kelleter, extended invitations for me to participate in semesterly colloquia, where the feedback helped spark the final push to completion. I am also indebted to Simon Strick and Winfried Fluck, who both took the time to read parts of this project and discuss it with me. The research could not have been carried out without the support of librarians near and far. Sophie Lesinska could not have been more helpful in navigating USC’s resources. Birgit Umathum and Cordula Döhrer spent too much time with this bumbling researcher in the Zeitschriftarchiv of the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. Deborah Classen, Michael Schurig, and Christof Schöbel helped immeasurably at the Deutsches Film Institut in the Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt. Florian Spillert of the Archiv-Max-Planck in Dahlem was always able to unearth what I was looking for, even when I had an incomplete reference number. Frau Klawiter of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin also extended herself to help me secure materials related to Der Wildtöter. At the very beginning of my research Sophia Lorent of the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman House made it possible for me to see the original film print. And, at the project’s very end, the staff of the American v Philosophical Society’s library in Philadelphia located all the documents—and more— necessary to complete this project. However, these many library and archival visits were only possible because of the material support I was lucky enough to receive. This dissertation would have looked very different if not for the generous funding that enabled me to carry out archival research in the U.S., Germany, and Italy—not to mention dedicate so much of the latter years of my doctorate to attempting to write this project. My research for this dissertation profited from the support of an initial Provost’s Doctoral Fellowship, a Provost’s Mentored Teaching Fellowship, a Research Enhancement Fellowship, a Manning Endowed Fellowship, two Ralph and Jean Hovel Travel Awards, the Visual Studies Research Institute’s Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Research Grant, and USC English Department Summer Funding. I am also grateful to the Studienstiftung des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin for funding a year in Berlin—a stay that generally transformed this project’s scope and ambition—and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the (long-delayed) short-term residency grant that allowed me to finish at the APS Library in Philadelphia. But completing this dissertation required not only material but also spiritual support—especially during the strange days of this pandemic. Beyond my dissertation committee and chair, an important role was played by the members of my American literature reading group—unbeknownst to them when they agreed to read and discuss a classic of U.S. literature once a month many years ago. Nicholas Guy Beck was always there, first as roommate, and, later, on long telephonic walks, to assure me that my chapters weren’t doomed. Julian Suhr could always coax me out of dissertation despair. Zach Mann read—and generously edited—more of this dissertation than he could have enjoyed. vi I am also grateful to the people who have made up my community over these years, taking classes with me and discussing many of the ideas that made their way here: Kendra Atkin, Brianna Beehler, Michael Benitez, Athia Choudhury (whose last-minute reading of my introduction was a great gift), Rebecca Ehrhardt, Huan He, Sylvie Lydon, Nike Nivar Ortiz, Stephen Pasqualina, Betsy Sullivan, and Joselyn Takacs. In Berlin, the Kollegin, Sara Friedman, always offered a reason for the week’s biweekly outing to the library in Potsdamer Platz. Alex Wells and Mathilde Montpetit kept spirits high through the darkness of the pandemic, talked about this with me beyond reason, and, still, read (and commented on) so much of it. While there are more people for whom I am thankful at USC and beyond than I can name here, I cannot omit my mentors—Vicki Grant, Nikolas Prevelakis, Tom MacFaul, and Sally Bayley—who all led me toward the PhD and marked the thought in this document, not to mention helped to awaken the desire to write something like it. I leave these long eight years with much gained—but also it was a time inaugurated by loss. My maternal grandmother, Nana, died the October I began at USC in 2014. My grandfathers, Papa and Zayde, died a month after each other—just after I had passed my qualifying exams in Spring 2018. They all encouraged the reading that led me here and gave me the space to wander into this dissertation, whose completion would have given them so much joy—as it did for my still-spritely Grandma, who travelled to Los Angeles to celebrate my defense. As I end graduate school, the sheltering canopy under which I have had the blessing to live so much of my life has thinned out—but the ecosystem remains. To my parents and brother: my gratitude to you extends beyond words. I dedicate this project to my grandparents—in the hope that the next will be even more worthy of them, my parents, and brother, and all who have helped me arrive here. vii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii List of Figures ix Abstract x Preface xiv Introduction U.S. Culture | Global Fascism 1 Chapter One Mussolini: Emersonian Superuomo? 34 The Meaning of Mussolini 34 “The heart of all American fascists” 39 “A great admirer of Emerson” 58 “The movement and its leader are one” 84 “As a liberal by deepest conviction” 96 Chapter Two Die Ku-Klux-Klan Idee: American Race Melodrama and German Fascism 98 Americanization and the Ku Klux Klan Idea 98 Thomas Dixon’s Melodramatic Politics 105 The Movement of the Klan 120 The “Ku-Klux-Klan Idee” in Germany 139 Melodramatic Fascism or Fascist Melodrama? 160 Chapter Three Bloodlines, Borders, and Bodies: The Transnational Correspondence of Charles Davenport, The Great Gatsby, and the Eugenic Racket 166 “The only politician who can implement eugenic measures” 166 American Nativism, World Eugenics, and the Threat of Biological Degeneracy 173 The National Origins Act and the American Body 193 The Great Gatsby’s Racket Society 202 Rosenberg’s American Model 215 viii Chapter Four Regeneration Through Violence: The Fascist Masculinity of “Going Deerslayer” 219 “The Ideal of our Boyhood Years” 219 The Deerslayer’s Logic of Violence 227 Der Wildtöter’s Body Politics 239 A Model Barbarian 253 Barbaric Futures 266 Chapter Five The Feminine Frontier of Fascism: The Transatlantic Landscapes of S.O.S. Eisberg and The Victory of Faith 269 The Wonder of the Land 269 The Elemental Force of (Feminine) Nature 277 The Manifest Destiny of the Mountain Film 293 “A Source of Strength” 312 Nazism’s Manifest Domesticity 323 Epilogue U.S. Modernist | Global Fascist 327 Bibliography 338 ix List of Figures Figure 1: “Comradery,” Josef Thorak (1937) 247 Figure 2: Still from Deerslayer and Chingachgook (1923) 248 Figure 3: Still from Deerslayer and Chingachgook (1923) 250 Figure 4: Promotional Poster for Der Wildtöter 252 Figure 5: Promotional Poster for S.O.S. Eisberg 277 Figure 6: Still from S.O.S. Eisberg 285 x Abstract U.S. Culture and Global Fascism: 1914-1933 investigates how U.S. culture, circulating transnationally, shaped the development of fascist movements in the United States and Europe in the interwar period. Where recent work in American Studies has begun to center fascism in American cultural history, this project resituates U.S. literary culture and its remediations within the global currents that coalesced in fascist ideology. It follows in the wake of Alexander Weheliye, Paul Gilroy, and Hannah Arendt, whose work emphasizes the relationality of imperialism, colonialism, and fascism, to offer a rigorous historical account of how this culture, forged through the settler-colonial project of the United States, returned to Europe to shape fascism’s political emergence across national contexts. This dissertation considers five U.S. cultural traditions stretching from the nineteenth century into the period under question in which strands of fascist desire intertwine: the Emersonian tradition, race melodrama, Eugenics, “playing Indian,” and the Film Western. Each chapter offers a reception history of a transnational fascist current circulating globally. Each chapter highlights both how U.S. culture crystallized fascist desire—an instance of “palingenetic ultranationalism”—in the United States, Germany, and Italy as well as how it contributed to fascist ideology in the abstract, making visible fascism’s entanglement with other ideological formations that structure U.S. history, such as imperialism, settler-colonialism, race slavery, and nationalism. Chapter One examines the 1928 publication of Benito Mussolini’s My Autobiography to argue that Mussolini not only was received through the Emersonian concept of the “representative man” but also that the Italian dictator formed himself in relation to the Emersonian idea. Reframing the debate on Mussolini’s interwar reception xi with a longer view, grounded in Emerson’s reception history in Italy, I show how the Fascist authority of Mussolini could take form in the thought of Emerson and how Emerson’s work on representative men serves as an origin of U.S. fascist desire. I thus offer a revision of Emerson, whose work, I suggest, stands not only at the head of U.S. liberalism but also undergirds a strand of fascist desire. Ultimately, this chapter reveals how Sacvan Bercovitch’s concept of the “auto-American-biography,” a supposedly uniquely-American conflation of nation and individual, always-already was entangled with, in its integration of self and nation, the global concept of the fascist leader. With this reading of the U.S. reception to represent an organic authority that transcended the multivocal nature of modern multicultural democracy, I chart a liberal genealogy of the desire for national rebirth through ultranationalism. Chapter Two tracks this desire in the form of the “Ku Klux Klan Idea,” as Béla Balázs named the threat posed by Birth of a Nation in his 1925 review of the U.S. race melodrama. Drawing on the film’s reception history in the United States and Germany, this chapter explores The Birth of a Nation’s melodramatic racial logic—the construction of blackness as a decadence that needed to be eliminated—and its influence on the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and on Nazism in Germany, as it moved from the cinematic screen into a social reality. Following this race melodrama’s evolution from Thomas Dixon’s novels of reconstruction into their filmic renditions, I reconsider Miriam Hansen’s notion of “vernacular modernism,” arguing for how the exportation of U.S. cinema, structured by and intensifying melodrama, also exported the idea of national rebirth through the elimination of the Other from the public sphere. Birth of a Nation, as a U.S. race melodrama, I ultimately suggest, offered a melodrama of race politics that facilitated fascist desire in the formation of Ku Klux Klan-like movements, like Nazism. This xii chapter’s argument, then, ultimately underscores how fascism articulates itself structurally through the conjuring of the Other. It is the articulation of this Other that lies at the center of Chapter Three, which focuses on the transnational discourse on Eugenics that moved through the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. This chapter clusters around the transnational correspondence of Charles Davenport, the U.S.’s leading eugenicist of the period, to examine how Eugenics inscribed the fascist desire for national rebirth on the entangled human body and national body politic. Placing the United States within a global eugenic discourse, the chapter reads two U.S. political and literary productions, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and The Great Gatsby (1925), as part of a transnational network of fascist desire that sought national regeneration through the elimination of the Other. This chapter thus resists the particularism of the discourse of U.S. nativism and instead reinstates U.S. culture within a global context, revealing its fascist possibilities. Chapter Four offers one image of what this possible fascist futurity could look like. It considers the formation of fascist masculinity, offering one answer to the central question of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies: “By what means is a boy made a soldier?” To answer this question, it examines the first feature film adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s classic novel, The Deerslayer (1841), the German Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook (1920) while also contemplating the more abstract ideological query: to what extent did settler-colonialism serve as an origin of fascism? This chapter roots the male fantasies of the German fascist type, Klaus Theweleit’s “soldier male,” in Cooper’s novel and shows how they return to the United States, under the Boy Scouts’ auspices, to be broadcast as the film, Deerslayer and Chingachgook (1923). This chapter indexes the role of “playing Indian” in cultivating a transatlantic primitive masculinity, represented in xiii Deerslayer’s cinematic body, as a means to overcome modern decadence and revitalize the nation—a rebirth in the form of “Tomorrow’s Men.” Chapter Five contemplates fascism’s promised rebirth, what Griffin calls “the horizon of health.” It focuses on Leni Riefenstahl’s overlapping role as actress in the 1933 Hollywood-Berlin mountain film, S.O.S Eisberg, filmed before and released after Hitler’s Machtergreifung, and as director of The Victory of Faith (1933), her first Nazi propaganda film. It argues that her work makes visible the continuity between the imperialist gaze of the American Western and the fascist desires of the German mountain film. Highlighting the imbricated relationship of the American Western and the German mountain film, this chapter reexamines organic precepts of national belonging to the land. It thus reconsiders both U.S. precepts of Manifest Destiny and the European concept of the “fascist feminine”—a seamless reproduction that transcends the divide between nature and civilization as well as culture and politics. Finally, I end with a brief reconsideration of Ezra Pound as both a global and U.S. fascist. Arguing against conceptions of Pound’s fascism as both foreign to the U.S. and idiosyncratic, this epilogue approaches his fascism as a global phenomenon. Pound’s fascism is thus shown to be typical of fascism as I have discussed it in this project, offering a final case study that reveals the inextricable entanglement of liberalism and fascism, nineteenth-century and modernist culture, and national and global contexts. xiv Preface We live today amidst the global networks of the Right, which conjoin anonymous troll and world leader, oscillating between the deadly urgent and the frivolous aggravation. Online, they trade memes comparing the contained seating posture of Justin Trudeau— “Globalization”—to the manspreading of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonero— Nationalism. 1 Other memes more earnestly foreground their ambitions. “How to fix the West” hovers above a slate of far-right leaders and movements from the U.S. through Italy. Celebrating the victory of Trump and Brexit, it brags: “2 to [sic] down. 4 to go.” In the news, a former U.S. president trades endorsements with the Hungarian head of state, Viktor Orbán; endorsements from “the Trump before Trump” in 2016 and 2020 return years later under the banner of “Save America.” “A strong leader and respected by all,” writes Trump with strange capitalization in a post dated February 3, 2022. “He has my Complete support and Endorsement for reelection as Prime Minister!” 2 Querdenkers in Germany protest pandemic measures while holding aloft the Reichsflagg emblazoned with Trump’s face. 3 In the United States, Trump reiterates his admiration for Vladimir Putin—whom Sean Hannity claims on the radio is “channeling his inner Trump”—after the Russian leader has invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine, beginning a war that clouds the writing of this preface. 4 1 Simon Strick, Rechte Gefühle: Affekte und Strategien des digitalen Faschismus (Bielefeld, DE: Verlag, 2021), 29 Abb. 11. 2 Quint Forgey, “Trump endorses Hungary’s Orbán for reelection” Politico. 3 February 2022. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/03/trump-endorses-viktor-orban-hungary- 526383. 3 Katja Thorwarth, “Corona-Demos in Berlin: Von Reichsflagge bis AfD - Eine Fahnenkunde.” Frankfurter Rundschau. 5 September 2020. https://www.fr.de/politik/coronavirus-corona-demo-proteste-berlin-hygienedemos- querdenker-fahnen-reichsflagge-reichskriegsfahne-90036343.html 4 I reference Hannity’s phrase not to suggest that Trump has influenced Putin, or is his antecedent. Rather, as the nickname for Viktor Orbán, “Trump before Trump,” make xv I open with this crude montage of the contemporary Right’s global transactions because, in tracing the global fascist currents passing through the United States between 1914 and 1933, I also offer a history of the present—of the fascist currents that continue to circulate. This dissertation’s investigation of interwar fascism cannot help but itself be haunted by these “spectres of fascism,” as Samir Gandesha names the disparate forms of illiberal politics that have come together, uncannily reminiscent of fascist regimes and movements—if not always in the same ways. 5 I begin by conjuring this haunting not to ward off autocracy but because I believe it is important to locate the following study within its specific historical moment. It is this moment’s vantage which has helped to make visible the constellations I describe and the connections I trace. As Walter Benjamin once reflected on the contingency of writing history: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” 6 Bearing witness to the current circulation of these “spectres” I could only wonder: in what forms did fascist desire circulate as “embryos”? This project emerged from the environment of the Trump years, during and after which “speaking of fascism has come to make sense.” 7 In this confrontation with a perceived “moment of danger”—a moment of danger that, as of the time of writing, explicit, the United States’ prominence warps global discourse, becoming a reference point that is read back into contemporary phenomena. This U.S.-centric perspective poses a danger for historians of U.S. culture as such contextual references always threaten to slide into an imputation of priority. Oliver Milman, “Trump praises ‘genius’ Putin for moving troops to eastern Ukraine.” 23 February 2022. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/23/trump- putin-genius-russia-ukraine-crisis. 5 Samir Gandesha, “Introduction.” Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives. ed. Samir Gandesha (London: Pluto, 2020), 1. 6 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 2007), 255. 7 Geoff Eley, “What is Fascism and Where Does it Come From?” History Workshop Journal 91:1 (Spring 2021), 4. xvi persists—scholars turned toward the contemporary possibility, as well as the real cultural and political history, of U.S. fascism. 8 It was also a moment when the threat of a so-called “nationalist internationale”—implicitly invoked by my opening anecdote—took the spectral shape of Steve Bannon’s “The Movement,” which dissipated before the cameras. 9 Still, over the past six years, across the world, leaders have come to power and popular movements have emerged whose authoritarian and nationalist rhetoric and policies have been named, variously, “aspirational fascism” “(new) fascism,” “late fascism,” and “postfascism.” 10 While this contemporary discussion has informed my research, I engage 8 Some notable work focusing on the U.S. that emerged from these years both for an academic and general audience, includes Jason Stanley How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018), Ruth Ben-Ghiat Strongmen (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020), Frederico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017) in History and A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), and Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of American First and the American Dream (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Furthermore, Wendy Brown, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky contemplated the rise of “antidemocratic political leadership” in Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), while REAL: Yearbook of English and American Literature’s 2018 issue took on the theme of “Democratic Cultures and Populist Imaginaries.” Finally, Radical History Review 38, examining “Fascism and Anti- Fascism since 1945,” arrived just before the 2020 elections in October of that year. 9 Adam Nossiter and Jason Horowitz, “Bannon’s Populists, Once a ‘Movement,’ Keep Him at Arm’s Length,” New York Times 24 May 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/world/europe/steve-bannon-european-elections- paris.html 10 William E. Connelly, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle For Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 4; Nidesh Lawtoo, (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State Press, 2019), xxxviii; Alberto Toscano, “Notes on Late Fascism.” https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism. 2 April 2017; Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (New York: Verso, 2019), 7. In this discourse the figures generally made reference to include: Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and, sometimes, Vladimir Putin in Russia. xvii its objects only obliquely, considering, rather than the “afterlife of fascism,” its beginnings—its origins. 11 11 Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 98-122. 1 Introduction: U.S. Culture | Global Fascism “Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force”—Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist” 12 Fascism was not—and never has been—foreign to the United States. I argue in this dissertation that the culture of the United States, enmeshed with the settler-colonialism and slavery of its founding, developed traditions that crystallized fascist desire, ultimately informing the development of fascist movements in the United States and Europe in the interwar period. The archive that I bring together in this project cuts a broad tranche of U.S. culture from the nineteenth century onward—literary, filmic, and scientific texts, which shaped how fascist desire crystallized in the United States, Germany, and Italy. In the dissertation that follows, I relate these traveling texts to the United States’ specific histories of settler-colonialism, slavery, and immigration to show how, in concert with the consolidation of the structural conditions of late modernity, they crystallized as fascist politics in the distinct contexts of interwar United States, Germany, and Italy. The United States is not exceptional in giving shape to fascism; its specific contributions to the development of fascism might be particular to its cultural history, but it is one of many nations that produced “fascist ideology as a global phenomenon”, Frederico Finchelstein’s term for what has come to be known as “global fascism.” 13 While U.S. culture’s role in this “global phenomenon” is not completely unknown to scholars, the tenacity of the notion of “American exceptionalism” means it remains underexplored. My attempt here to weave together several strands of U.S. culture into this global discourse 12 Félix Guattari, Chaosophy, Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009), 98. 13 Frederico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10. 2 seeks to disrupt Sonderwege—special ways—a term normally used in the singular to describe the narrative of Germany’s Nazism as unique to the nation, but also equally fitting for narratives of American exceptionalism. Indeed, one can say that the mythic constructions of the Sonderweg and American Exceptionalism have stood opposed to each other, the ideological pillars of a Manichean post-1945 worldview that we are still dismantling. 14 This dissertation is thus additive rather than transformative in its participation in de-exceptionalizing U.S. culture. It contributes to the theorizing of U.S. liberalism performed by American Studies by offering in its reception history of U.S. culture in Europe and the United States clear examples of how U.S. culture crystallized fascist politics between 1914 and 1933. It thus contests the boundaries between liberalism and fascism that, for example, Nikhil Singh theorizes in Race and America’s Long War (2017): while democratic liberalism continually reimagines fascism as its monstrous Other, fascism might be better understood as its doppelganger—an exclusionary will to power that has regularly reemerged, manifesting itself in zones of internal exclusion within liberal-democratic societies (plantations, reservations, ghettos, and prison) and in sites where liberalism’s expansionist impulse and universalizing force have been able to evade their own constitutional restraints (the frontier, the colony, the state of emergency, the occupation and the counterinsurgency). (Singh, 109) 14 The opposition between liberalism and fascism structured the Cold War as well, as the concept of totalitarianism collapsed the distinction between fascism and communism. As Nikhil Singh writes in Race and America’s Long War (2017): “The self-image of U.S. liberal democracy was created from partial truths derived from the military defeat of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism in World War II. As “totalitarianism” began to be defined as a Soviet and implicitly anti-Western phenomenon, the origins of fascism within the political culture of Western liberalism became increasingly obscured” (Singh 110). For a classic articulation of American exceptionalism see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition: An Interpretation of American Political Thoughts Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, 1955).For recent criticism, see Geoffrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), and Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For the canonical critique of the Sonderweg, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 3 Furthermore, by showing how this fascism—even prior to its formal existence as such— marked the culture at the center of the U.S. so-called liberal tradition, I ask us to revise our understanding of classic texts. Indeed, while fascism might take place in zones of exclusion, as Singh argues, it lies at the center of the U.S. cultural canon—I trace it through the traditions of Emerson (Chapter One) and Cooper (Chapter Four). While the benefit of naming a literary text or political formation as fascist is a matter of some debate, as I will discuss shortly, the term matters because it does involve logics ultimately distinct from— if contiguous with—liberalism. Blending insights from comparative fascist studies and American studies, I draw out the implications of this circulation of and interaction between culture and politics for the study of U.S. modernisms and global fascism. Though “everyone is sure they know what fascism is,” pace Robert Paxton, at this point, before further proceeding, I need to clarify how I use fascism in this dissertation. 15 While the historical instances of fascism in Italy and Germany need no theory to identify them, to consider the question of fascism in the United States, I need a model capacious enough to move across contexts and be able to describe both media and movements. 16 I do ultimately believe what matters is less “how we define ‘fascism’ as a stand-alone concept,” as Jennifer Ponce de Léon writes, than “how methods and concepts used to analyze concrete social formations either obscure or illuminate the scope, causes, and agents of repressive modes of political management, and whether they account for all people or 15 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), 9. 16 As Geoff Eley writes, “if fascism’s emergence was globally dispersed, taking variable forms and multiple paths, it also settled only gradually and unevenly into generic existence. It developed cumulatively rather than unfolding form an already assembled ground of principles comparable in coherence to liberalism or conservatism and other political ideologies.” Geoff Eley, “Conclusion.” Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right. Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 285. 4 imply that it is only the brutalization of some people that merits recognition.” 17 However, I also find that because of the overdetermination of the concept—the ease with which it slides into, as Michel Foucault wrote, “a floating signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation”—having a model is important for clarity. 18 As a heuristic, then, I use the comparative historian Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”—that is, a form of intense nationalism, which imagines the nation as an organic entity necessarily embattled by Others. 19 (In Griffin’s definition, fascist violence is implicit in the exclusionary nature of ultranationalism and the measures necessary for rebirth from this state of decadence). It is a political modernism, that imagines a new, alternative modernity. Griffin’s definition also, usefully, lends itself to a cultural trope bound up with this diffuse desire for a new modernity—the desire for and figure of the new man, “designed to bring about collective redemption” (Modernism, 8). 17 Jennifer S. Ponce de León, “After the Border Is Closed: Fascism, Immigration, and Internationalism in Ricardo A. Bracho's Puto” American Quarterly (vol. 73 no. 4, 2021), 745. I am similarly sympathetic to Robert Reid-Pharr’s choice to “resist deployment of the term ‘fascism,’ to the extent that it presupposes a distinction, clear or otherwise, between slavery, colonization, forced migration, and the atrocities committed by Germany, Italy, Japan, and their allies.” Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), 41. Too often fascism can serve to whitewash the Western tradition from responsibility for the atrocity committed under fascism’s name. I recognize there has been cruelty and atrocity perpetuated under the banner of U.S. liberal democracy—the genocide of the Native Americans, race slavery, murderous imperialism in the Asia and the Middle East, Japanese- American internment camps, concentration camps on the border, to mention only a few instances. 18 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 97. 19 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, (Routledge, 1993), 8. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: A Sense of a Beginning under Hitler and Mussolini (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 182. 5 While Michael Mann rightly criticizes Griffin’s theory of fascism for not specifically mentioning violence, I see the violence as implicit in the intensity of the ultranationalism. 20 The “ultra-nation,” which Griffin describes as “a supra-individual product of the fascist imagination which can partake of aspects of both the historical ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’, but also of mythicized historical and racial pasts and future destinies,” implicitly demands the elimination of the Other from this continuous organic history that stretches from origin through eternity. It thus becomes the shining ideal that justifies violence—the positive promise of fascism that actualizes its atrocity. 21 Furthermore, Griffin’s expanded definition in Modernism and Fascism mobilizes stronger language with “conquer” and “overcome”—which do imply violence: a form of programmatic modernism that seeks to conquer political power in order to realize a totalizing vision of national or ethnic rebirth. Its ultimate end is to overcome the decadence that has destroyed a sense of communal belonging and drained modernity of meaning and transcendence and usher in a new era of cultural homogeneity and health. (Modernism, 182) In light of Griffin’s definition I use the term “fascist desire” to refer to the desire for rebirth through the elimination of the Other. Meanwhile, a “desire for fascism,” a phrase which I employ rarely, refers to the desire for fascism as a system—where the image of the fascist regime is already in place. This is a particularly important distinction because the majority of the work I engage in this study existed prior to fascism was known as such to its creators or readers. Thus, a “fascist desire” could exist but a “desire for fascism” cannot. 22 20 Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. 21 Roger Griffin, Fascism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018), 46. 22 It bears noting that fascist desires do not always result in fascism. Fascist desire is not incompatible with liberal democracy. As Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics, “liberal democracy and racism are fully compatible….liberal democracy has always need a constitutive Other for its legitimation, an Other who is and is not at the same time part of the polis.” Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Trans. Steven Corcoran, (Durham: Duke 6 The periodization of this study, 1914 to 1933, features both the articulation of and consolidation of fascism. While Mussolini left the Socialist party in 1914 to join the Fascio Rivoluzionario—fascio being at the time nothing more than an Italian mode of Syndicalism—it did not begin to refer to itself as the fascist movement until 1915. 23 Indeed, typically, the beginning of fascism is linked to the organization of the Fascio Italiani di Combattimento in 1919 (Payne, 89). Benito Mussolini came to national power in October 1922 and then declared the world’s first fascist dictatorship in 1925. Hitler followed him at the head of National Socialism with his Machtergreifung of January 30, 1933. In the United States the World War I jingoism of “AMERICA FOR AMERICANS” and “unhyphenated Americanism,” as Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, slipped into the xenophobic and specifically antisemitic Red Scare of the postwar years. 24 This xenophobia, given weight by means of Eugenics discourse, resulted in increasingly restrictive Immigration Acts of 1917, 1921, and 1924, which placed severe limitations on immigration and framed the United States as a white racial state—as I discuss most extensively in Chapter Three. During this time the American Legion promised to “to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy.” 25 The Second Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1915 after D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, as I discuss in Chapter Two, became a national force in U.S. politics, railing against and persecuting, by turns, Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. University Press, 2019) 162. Similarly, Toni Morrison spoke in 1995 about U.S. democracy employing “fascist solutions to national problems.” Toni Morrison, “Racism and Fascism,” The Journal of Negro Education 64, 3, 385. 23 Stanley G, Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Routledge, 1995), 85. 24 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 198, 212. 25 Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), 62. 7 The question of U.S. fascism as a historical phenomenon during this period has already begun to be investigated. The historian Nancy Maclean first offered a serious comparison of the Second Ku Klux Klan to Nazism in The Masks of Chivalry (1994). The cultural historian Sarah Churchwell too has indexed transnational currents in Behold, America (2018), writing of how U.S. newspapers identified the Nazis as “Germany’s Ku- Kux Klan” (Churchwell, 100). And the Europeanist historian Richard Steigmann-Gall has called for a reevaluation of the interwar period in U.S. history in “Star-spangled fascism: American interwar political extremism in comparative perspective”; his essay asks whether “the percolations on the surface of American political life spoke to a deeper ‘fascist moment’ that the United States underwent.” 26 Rather than an investigation of only self- proclaimed fascists, he argues, “it requires an examination, not of a few anointed ‘proto- fascists’ and their intellectual innovations, but rather a broader understanding of which ideological currents, in their complaints as well as their aspirations, provided the antecedents of later fascist thought and action” (Steigmann-Gall, 119). Christopher Vials’s Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism (2014) was already pursuing this work prior to Steigmann-Gall’s call; as a project of cultural history it exceeded Steigmann-Gall’s purview of “American political history” (Steigmann-Gall, 97). While the focus of Vials’s work is the excavation of a neglected archive of U.S. antifascist culture that mobilized the concept of fascism to critique hegemonic U.S. culture, the book also broadened previous engagements with U.S. fascism. Vials highlights a constellation of fascist sympathies among what he calls “the business press,” “the law-and- 26 Richard Steigmann-Gall, “Star-spangled fascism: American interwar political extremism in comparative perspective,” Social History 42:1, 112. 8 order right,” and “socially conservative Catholics.” 27 Thus Vials’s survey of the U.S. cultural landscape in the interwar period, though it mostly reaches beyond this study, focusing on the thirties, goes beyond the usual figures of the anti-Semitic radio prophet Father Coughlin, Nazi-sympathizing newspaper magnate William Hearst, and the fascisti- identifying American Legion, to include Time, the Wall Street Journal, and also the magazine enterprise of the body builder Bernarr MacFadden, whose publications spread “fascist consciousness” (Vials, 41). As Vials argues, “the functional equivalent of fascist movements and fascist currents have been on this side of the Atlantic since the 1920s; these have palpably impacted American culture and individual lives at a number of critical junctures and continue to haunt American politics” (Vials, 3). My approach aligns with Vials insofar as fascism needs to be examined as a cultural as well as political phenomenon. Fascism cannot adequately be engaged as simply a political phenomenon. It takes shape first in culture prior to erupting as politics—which American studies as a discipline has long known. 28 Jack D. Forbes, a scholar of Native American and Indigenous history, argued in a 1982 article, “Fascism: A Review of Its History and Its Present Cultural Reality in the Americas,” “Fascism is not merely political in the narrow sense.” Rather, he contends: “it is more correctly cultural phenomena, 27 Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 42. 28 As Haunted by Hitler’s archive suggests, the work that has sought to articulate fascism in the United States has often emerged from within the Black Radical Tradition, Critical Ethnic Studies, and leftist antifascism. See Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler and Ed. Bill Mullens and Christopher Vials, U.S. Antifascism Reader (New York: Verso, 2020); Albert Toscano: “Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.1; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Cedric Robinson, On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of Resistance, Ed. H.L.T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2019); and Vaughn Rasberry, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics and the Black Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 9 crossing into virtually all spheres of behavior. It may well be said that a fascist movement and a fascist state arise only in a culture which already has fascist tendencies.” 29 Indeed, the historian of fascism Zeev Sternhell would unknowingly echo Forbes a half decade later, in The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (1989/1994), when he declared to some controversy at the time: “fascism, before it became a political force, was a cultural phenomenon.” 30 However, my study traces these “fascist currents” deeper into U.S. cultural history—exposing a genealogy of fascist desire that stretches well beyond the 1920s. One such representative strand can be found in The Education of Henry Adams. Written in 1906, this account of the unfitness of an “American of Americans, with Heaven knows how many Puritans and Patriots behind him” for the twentieth century U.S. resonated upon its 1918 publication, selling 12,000 copies and winning the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. 31 The descendant of two Presidents, Adams himself could be considered the embodiment of nineteenth- 29 Jack D. Forbes, “Fascism: A Review of Its History and Its Present Cultural Reality in the Americas,” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 5.1, 5. 30 Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. The idea that fascism is a cultural phenomenon prior to a political one is no longer a source of controversy. However, that fascism is a cultural phenomenon prior to politics underscores part of the reason that fascism, and Nazism in particular, has been a privileged object of cultural studies. See, for example Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” Trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16:2, 291-312. Their influential argument sets forth Nazism as instantiating “the production of the political as a work of art” (303); even if, at a certain level, it is only a working out of the implications of Walter Benjamin’s dictum on the “aestheticization of politics”—it has been widely taken up by cultural studies approaches. 31 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 238; Ira Nadel, “Introduction,” The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvii). It is rather difficult to square the book’s success with Peter Amann’s complete dismissal of Adams as both “a light-weight” and “without influence.” Amann suggests that Adams and his brother’s “fulminating against ‘the degradation of the democratic dogma’ are easily shrugged off as patrician eccentrics rather than genuine social critics whose ideas made a significant impact.” Peter H. Amann, ‘A “dog in the Nighttime” Problem: American Fascism in the 1930s’,History Teacher, 19, 4 (1986), 576. 10 century U.S. tradition. While historians of fascism have noted Adams as constituting part of “a body of thought that one can call ‘protofascist,’” American Studies has largely tended to consider him as something like “the last republican, situated at a historical point where, after the Civil War, the republic of the founding fathers [in which his ancestors played a fundamental role] was about to be replaced with modern democracy.” 32 Treated as a transitional figure into U.S.’s modernity, named by U.S. political theorists “the great American pessimist,” Henry Adams, along with the images of fascist desire that flash up in The Education, has been uncritically reassimilated into the liberal tradition. 33 “His thematic legacy,” writes William Decker, “has long since entered the public domain and become part of a democratic heritage.” 34 Bernd Herzogenrath holds up the book’s final moment as “almost an emergence of newness from within the text” (Herzogenrath, 224). Adams writes, Perhaps some day—say 1938, their centenary—they might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light 32 Robert Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism, ” Journal of Modern History 70, 1 (March 1998), 12; Bernd Herzogenrath, An American Body |Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Hanover, NE: University Press of New England, 2010), 209. It is not that the fascistic tendencies in Adams have gone wholly unremarked on. In part, it could be, as John Carlos Rowe notes, “Adams has been protected by his ‘literariness’ from critiques of his political attitudes” (Education 170). However, U.S. political theorists have examined him wholly within an American exceptionalist paradigm. For example, James P. Young, Henry Adams: The Historian as Political Theorist (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001) suggests Adams’s critiques were “a lover’s quarrel with his country,” evidence of his “Democratic nationalism” (2). Yet, another source of misrecognition is that he is figured as “the Last American Aristocrat,” as David S. Brown has titled his recent biography. It is as a classical instance of U.S. conservatism, streamed through Tocqueville, that Robert Dawidoff considers Adams’s “alienation from democracy he felt had alienated him” in The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage; High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana (Chapel Hill, NC: 2000), 74. 33 Nolan Bennett, The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 84. Adams crafts images almost compulsively in The Education; as he writes, “images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind craves them” (489). 34 William Merrill Decker, “Autobiography, Education: Henry Adams and the Definition of a Genre,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33:1, 49. 11 of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder. (505) Herzogenrath sees this admittedly beautiful and sentimental passage as resistance to “the machinery of fascism,” which imposes “conformity” (Herzogenrath, 225). And yet, the very thing that does cause Adams to “shudder” is difference. The Education is driven by the search for unity. “History has no use for multiplicity; it needed unity,” writes Adams, “everything must be made to move together” (378). Similarly, he conceives of the nation as a biological entity. His heredity and identity as a so-called American is repeatedly opposed to its perceived, and repulsively rendered, opposite—“a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto” (238). This resistance to multiculturalism extends even to the composition of the text; as William Decker has shown, the text itself shied away from contact with Blacks and Jews. It pays no attention to the thought of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, or Mary Antin (Decker, 58). Rather, as Adams himself wrote, “the sole object of this interest and sympathy was the new man” (500). Bemoaning how “power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom,” Adams records the New York of 1905 screaming “in every accent of anger and alarm” that “the new forces must at any cost be brought under control” (499). For Adams, the old world’s structures cannot channel modernity’s multiplicity and realize its possibilities—“prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor.” The old engine’s conflagration, its “cylinder…exploded,” has irradiated the United States and damaged the American constitution, now “irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.” “As one jolted over the pavements or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at 12 hand,” Adams perseverates, “for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic.” Adams suggests succor can only come from the “new man”—“a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type” (499). Breaking out of Adams’ extraordinary pessimism, then, is an exemplary U.S. instance of the desire for the new man. As Griffin summarizes the dynamic as a sort of hydraulic pressure reaction: “from the weakness of the Last Man to the strength of the New Man” (Modernism, 112). 35 Yet, Adams’s consistent irony frames this new man as an impossible desire. His relation to this new American who will quell the “chaos” emitted by “every municipal election” (499) orients itself to fascism as American Studies long has oriented itself to the subject itself—as a question that has received its answer before it was asked. Until only recently Mark Seem’s encapsulation of Anglo-American attitudes to fascism, in his introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, was all too accurate: “Fascism is a phenomenon that took place elsewhere, something that could only happen to others, but not to us; it’s their problem.” 36 Even early work that looked to fascist sympathies and fascist movements in the United States, like John P. Diggins’ Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1972) or Sander Diamond’s The Nazi Movement in the United States 1924-1941 (1974), often pointed to the foreign nature of fascist movements in the United States, preserving mainstream (Anglo-Saxon) America from fascist desire. Indeed, in Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (1955), the paradigmatic account of 35 See Matthew W. Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 36 Mark Seem, “Introduction,” Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Penguin, 2009), xvi. 13 American exceptionalism, fascism and fascists of the interwar period were seen off by a “national liberal faith which prevented their victory from ever coming” (Hartz, 280). Peter Amann might suggest he narrows Hartz’s liberal tradition, but his explanation for the fascism’s lack of viability in the U.S. is similarly because “the United States was exceptional,” its “liberalism…too solid to invite a serious authoritarian challenge” (Amann, 579). The rise of Benito Mussolini seems to answer Adams’s call. In 1932 Fredericka Blanker offers Benito Mussolini’s prescription for the problems of the United States in The North American Review, the journal that Henry Adams had once edited: “For those many people who have bewailed the lack of a ‘strong man’ to solve our problems,” Blankner writes, “here is Benito Mussolini’s prescription.” Here was Adams’s “New Man,” declaring the economic situation of 1932 “the machine that writers of fiction have been prophesying, a machine grown beyond human control.” 37 Indeed, the reviewer Stark Young praised Adams’s book in 1918 for its distance from the “scrambling vulgarity” of the contemporary world—the same terms in which he later commended Mussolini for preserving Italy from the “greedy and vulgar scrimmage of the modern world.” 38 But Young does criticize Adams for a lack of action: “he wished to use words where words were not the language” (“International,” 632). For John Carlos Rowe, Adams’s final turn into theorization of self and society is an insistence on “the new power of the modern author”: “left only with the fragments of previous systems of interpretation and thus government wrecked by history, the modern 37 Fredericka Blankner, “What a Real Dictator Would Do,” The North American Review, 234, 6, 485. 38 Stark Young, “An International Autobiography,” The Bookman; a Review of Books and Life, 48, 6 (Jan 1919), 632; Stark Young, “Notes on Fascism in Italy Today: I”, The New Republic 22 July, 1931, 260. 14 author could sign his name with the technical virtuosity by which he recomposed these fragments and gave his temporary illusion the formal appearance of truth.” 39 For Rowe, this is the authority of the “new statesman” (Literary, 192). As I will argue in Chapter One, this particular concept of the “representative man” also offers itself in the idea of the fascist dictator, who understands his state as an autobiographical expression of his being. Adams thus not only expressed fascist desires but also offered concepts in which fascist desire did eventually take form—if not at that precise moment in the United States. However, my investigation does not merely reach back in U.S. history—it also stretches beyond national borders. Steigmann-Gall suggests a transnational approach as a means of “decentring [sic] the isolationist assumptions of American historiography of the Interwar period to reveal the deeper global currents that both the nativist American right, and American history more broadly, were subject to—without facilely reducing the fascist presence in this country to foreign influence” (Steigmann-Gall, 97). However, “transnationalizing” is a more radical project that opens up the nation itself. Transnationalizing does not simply return the United States to conversation with other nations—restore it to the League of Nations, so to speak. This would be, as Don Pease writes, an “international” paradigm where “self-enclosed and unitary” nations sit in dialogue. 40 Rather, transnationalizing “prevents the closure of the nation”: “the transnational names an undecidable economic, political, or social formation that is neither in nor out of the nation-state” (Pease, “Introduction,” 5). 41 And, most importantly, it would 39 John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 192. 40 Donald E. Pease, “Introduction.” Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, Ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), 5. 41 See Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. (London: Routledge, 2019) and Winfried 15 not only place the U.S. within global currents, but also situate its movements’ contributions to these streams—as this project does. Furthermore, beyond practical considerations, I also take a transnational approach because I believe, as Paul Gilroy writes in The Black Atlantic, in the “urgent obligation to reevaluate the significance of the modern nation state as a political, economic, and cultural unit.” 42 Though he wrote this in 1993, it remains a pressing enterprise, almost thirty years later—particularly when considering Nazism, which too often remains figured as exceptional. As the social scientist Mahmood Mamdani has written in Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, the discourse over criminality and culpability has obscured “the thread linking National Socialism to other nationalisms.” 43 I submit that examining the culture that produced fascism transnationally is one step toward “decolonizing the political,” that is, “nothing less than reimagining the order of the nation-state” (Mamdani, 36). Such a transnational approach might suggest that the imbrication of U.S. culture and global fascism of the period between 1914 and 1933 began in the Atlantic of the preceding centuries. To look beyond the nation is to see how the routes along the Black and Red Atlantics, as they have since been named, enmeshed with the practices of slavery and colonialism that encircled the globe and conditioned modernity, could offer themselves Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, eds, Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011); For skepticism regarding the disruption of disciplinarity of transnationalism, see Winfried Fluck, "A New Beginning?: Transnationalisms," New Literary History, 42.3, 2011, 365-80. 42 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 7. 43 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2020), 105. 16 as origins of fascism. 44 This knowledge, per Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, has been at the center of “the black radical tradition’s expanded sense of fascism’s historical trajectory and geographical reach”; 45 since the thirties, this discourse has involved the Americas in fascism’s origins, insofar as global imperialism touched upon them. The Trinidadian intellectual George Padmore argued in his 1936 How Britain Rules Africa, where he coined the term, “colonial fascism,” that “the Colonies are the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe to-day”—presaging Albert Memmi’s postwar remarks on this subject in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957). 46 Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950) further developed this theme, pointing to European fascism as the endpoint of colonial practices turned back on the metropole itself—what he called a “boomerang.” 47 In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Césaire’s protégé Frantz Fanon reflected on how “not long ago Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.” 48 Likewise, W. E. B. DuBois, revisiting his feelings about 44 These terms are discussed in greater length elsewhere in this dissertation. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic and Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 45 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten “Plantocracy,” All Incomplete (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2021), 120. 46 George Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 129, 4. Padmore was also among the first to point out the continuity of German atrocity from colony to metropole. It is “no accident,” as Padmore writes, that Goering “addressing his own men at a meeting of ex-colonials in Berlin, ‘solemnly declared them heirs to the traditions of the former German-East African armed colonial force’” (Padmore 3). In Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), he called the colonial experience a form where fascism continued to persist. As “cancer wants only to spread,” this reservoir of fascist practices not only cultivated reactionary attitudes and fascist desires among the colonists, who at all costs wanted to maintain their status: “a pouch of venom liable to poison the entire structure of the homeland.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and Colonized. Trans. Howard Greenfeld (London: Earthscan Publications, 2003), 107. 47 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Trans. Joan Pinkham (New York; Monthly Review, 2000), 36. 48 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 101. 17 fascism in the thirties and forties, wrote in his autobiography of 1968 how fascism was part of a complex of imperial practices: I knew that Hitler and Mussolini were fighting communism, and using race prejudice to make some white people rich and all colored peoples poor. But it was not until later that I realized that the colonialism of Great Britain and France had exactly the same object and methods as the fascists and the Nazis were trying clearly to use. 49 As Aimé Césaire wrote, polemically, in many ways succinctly summing up the thrust of this mid-century conversation, what the European cannot forgive “is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserve exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘[n*ggers] of Africa’” (Césaire 36). Indeed, this is also in many ways the implication of Jack D. Forbes, who, emerging out of Native American and Indigenous studies, argues that fascism “or, at the very least its key elements, originates in colonies or in outlying areas being raided or conquered” (Forbes, 5). There is a temptation to figure these relations as exceptional. Working in relation to this tradition, Paul Gilroy gestures toward the Americas in Against Race (2002), when he articulates the connection between “slave plantation” and “concentration camp,” metonymically conjuring the antebellum United States and Nazi Germany as “exceptional spaces where normal juridical rules and procedures had been deliberately set aside.” 50 Gilroy thus suggests a genealogy of Nazism that might have followed not only from Europe’s African imperialism but also from the projects of colonialism and slavery in the 49 W.E.B. DuBois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois (New York: International, 1968), 305-6. 50 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 60. 18 Americas. However, Alexander Weheliye expands and refigures Gilroy in Habeas Viscus (2014) by adding “the colonial outpost” to this set of spaces and arguing that they, rather than deviating from modernity, undergird it: “the concentration camp, the colonial outpost, and slave plantation suggest three of many relay points in the weave of modern politics, which are neither exceptional nor comparable, but simply relational.” 51 By refusing the language of exceptionality, Weheliye insists that there can be no quarantine of the tradition that produced fascism; it preceded and continues on beyond that particular formation. While scholars might continue to debate the extent of continuity between colonialism and fascism, this sense of global relationality present in the work of Padmore, Césaire, Fanon, Memmi, Forbes, Gilroy, and Weheliye guides this project’s investigation of fascism. To read classic accounts through the global relationality offered by this genealogy of “colonial fascism,” as it is sometimes called, also opens these generally Eurocentric accounts to new geographies; one can see where the Americas’ relationship with fascism already lies latent. 52 It is present in the choice by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947) to use Odysseus as the genesis of modern subjectivity, who more than “the landowner, who has others to work for him” is the explorer, who has others to crew his ship for him. 53 Where Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer could have chosen the self-blinded Oedipus—whom they considered—they 51 Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 37. 52 See Rasberry, Vaughn. “Colonial Fascism: A Syllabus.” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal 7.1.https://manifold.umn.edu/read/ces0701-colonial-fascism/section/4a86d0b0-f1b4- 44f2-b7bd-88237d51470d. 53 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.), 26. 19 chose the crafty and learned explorer Odysseus instead. 54 Paul Gilroy reminds us that “ships also refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and modernization” (Black, 17). And, as Adorno and Horkheimer write, Odysseus’s “adventures bestow names on each of these places, and the names give rise to a rational overview of space” (Dialectic, 38). Through this process of subjectification of the other and the world, Odysseus becomes the modern alienated self who lives by means of instrumental rationality. We thus have the beginnings of the practices of domination in colonialism that recur in the fascism. One could almost call this the “darker side of the enlightenment”—paradigmatically represented by the so-called conquest of the Americas. 55 Such framing has often recurred within the U.S. and the West more broadly. “The occurrence of Fascism has been taken to signify,” as Cedric Robinson characterizes traditional liberal discourse, “the ‘damned’ historical identity which the West almost assumed but ultimately rejected. Fascism was made to signify the “dark” side of Western civilization” (“Fascism,” 152). My project eschews such quarantining of fascism—instead seeing it as part of a long history that goes back beyond Hannah Arendt’s Origins of 54 Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 181. 55 It is with the conquest of the Americas that Europe moves into “a central position in relation to the constitution of the Spanish Empire the expulsion of the Moors, and the success of trans-Atlantic expansion...the Americas become the first periphery of the modern world and part and parcel of the myth of modernity.” Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), xi; “Darker Side of the Enlightenment” refers to a chapter of Mignolo’s Darker Side of Western Modernity where he reads Kant’s Geography, highlighting a “line that will reach Carl Schmitt”: “One of the races (white) and one of the continents (Europe) was the house of the enunciation. The rest were enunciated, but were denied enunciation.” This is the logic of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Odysseus as well. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 201. 20 Totalitarianism (1951), which first brought fascist ideology into direct relation with nineteenth century’s African imperialism. As goes Nicos Poulantzas’s maxim from Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (1970): “He who does not wish to discuss imperialism should stay silent on the subject of fascism.” 56 While I am well aware of the dangers of grand recits, my dissertation, grounded in American Studies, suggests a longer connection—not quite “whoever does not wish to discuss colonialism should stay silent on the subject of fascism,” but that to discuss fascism apart from the history of colonialism is to necessarily exceptionalize it. My project thus contributes to recent work on global fascism by extending its conversation across the Atlantic. While I do work with the traditional genealogy of fascism studies—beginning with the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Neumann, Marcuse) and associates (Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer), then running through Wilhelm Reich, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Theweleit, Sontag, Nancy, Derrida, and Agamben—as well as the comparative historians of fascism (Griffin, Mann, Mosse, Paxton, Sternhell, Traverso), I bring to bear critical traditions developed through American Studies into conversation. It is not necessarily an Einbahnstraße, a one-way street such as Andrew Hewitt suggests in “A Fascist Feminine,” where “the methods of literary criticism…throw critical light on questions of political theory,” but rather that bringing 56 Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, Trans. Judith White (London: Verso, 2018), 17. Poulantzas, himself, is rewriting Max Horkheimer’s maxim from “The Jews and Europe”: “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.” Poulantzas thus frames fascist ideology as belonging to the “imperialist stage of capitalism” and as a “variant” of “imperialist ideology” (Poulantzas 22). For him, per Lenin, this is a shift that occurs around the beginning of the twentieth century. Without access to the colonies of the other European nations, Italy and Germany turned to fascism to economically compete with other nations. Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe” (1938), trans. Mark Ritter in S. Bronner and D. Kellner (eds), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), 78. 21 these disparate discourses in cultural studies, political theory, and area studies into conversation serve to cast new light on each other. 57 This is particularly important because, while recent studies of “global fascism” acknowledge fascism as a global phenomenon whose origin transcends any single national history, the position of the Americas in this discourse remains largely neglected. 58 There is, increasingly, historical work across disciplines that examines continuities and resonances between U.S. culture and European fascism. However, there is more work to be done to explore these relations and draw out their implications for both contexts. 59 My approach to the traditions and texts I examine in this dissertation emerges from my sense of fascism as both a popular and cultural phenomenon. Though my work departs from their psychoanalytic orientation, I do follow Wilhelm Reich, Klaus Theweleit, and 57 Andrew Hewitt, “A Fascist Feminine,” Qui Parle 13, 1, 41. 58 There remain few global or transnational studies of fascism. Three that engage fascism transnationally are Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, ed, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017); Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism. 59 Historical work on U.S. influence on Nazi Germany includes: on racialized legal framework, James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); on Eugenics program and policies, Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Stefan Kuhl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene. Trans. Lawrence Schofer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010); on Manifest Destiny and Nazism’s eastward expansion: David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Blackwell, 2006); Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Janne Lahti. The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2018); Janne Lahti, Ed., German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 22 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in believing “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.” 60 In other words, fascism cannot be considered simply an economic expedient—as Timothy Mason first showed. 61 Rather, the politics of fascism develops from a felt grievance. “No man is forced to turn political fascist for reasons of economic devaluation or degradation,” writes Theweleit in his comprehensive study of the German Freikorps, Male Fantasies. “His fascism develops much earlier, from his feelings; he is a fascist from the inside.” 62 I agree with Theweleit— though I am skeptical of any strict division between inside and outside. The role of culture is important in forming these feelings—or, in other words, focalizing fascist desire. I do not understand fascist desire as something imposed on the audience by media. Rather I see audience and text involved in a dynamic process. Much work on art and politics seeks to root texts’ politics in their style, per Fredric Jameson’s highly influential Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), where he locates Lewis’s protofascism in his “narrative system.” 63 Mark Steven’s Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) or Ian Afflerbach’s Making Liberalism New: American Intellectuals, Modern Literature, and the Rewriting of a Political Tradition (2021) more or less follow Jameson’s approach of examining how texts 60 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Robert Hurley, Helen Lane, and Mark Seem (London: Penguin, 2009), 29. 61 Timothy Mason, Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73-5. For a contemporary example of a Marxian economic approach to describing the genesis of fascism, see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018.) 62 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Vol 1, Trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 380. 63 Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (London: Verso, 2008), 16. 23 “mediate” the social conditions out of which they emerge to consider the interaction between literature and politics. 64 I rather look to the reception history to move beyond Lionel Trilling’s “inevitable intimate, if not always obvious, connection between literature and politics.” 65 I recognize, as Theodor Adorno worries in Aesthetic Theory, that reception histories can threaten to reduce texts to the sum of their historical readings, foreclosing the alternative—for him, utopian—possibilities of the texts. 66 However, my readings of cultural texts in this dissertation are never so final as to reduce their objects to merely what I glean in this dissertation. All of my readings are doubly historically contingent—not only from my current vantage, but also for the readers in their moment. There are other possibilities to be found, but I try to illuminate a line of fascist desire that crystallized in the realm of politics, which takes form in the specific interactions between audience and text that this dissertation describes. My readings of U.S. culture borrow from Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), which draws on Jacques Rancière to urge literary scholars to expand their approach: “rather than asking what artists intend or even what forms do, we can ask instead what potentialities lie latent—though not always obvious— in aesthetic and social arrangements.” 67 My work is not to declare these classic American texts as fascist per say. Rather it is to show that, as a result of their conditions of production, 64 Mark Steven, Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2017), 3; Ian Afflerbach, Making Liberalism New: American Intellectuals, Modern Literature, and the Rewriting of a Political Tradition (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2021). 65 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 12. 66 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: 1984), 196. 67 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6-7. 24 they contain fascist possibilities, or to use Levine’s language, fascist latencies—that readers then crystallized. By engaging the circulation of traditions that coalesced in the nineteenth-century United States, I think about how these fascism-shaping discourses offered logics bound up with the founding of the United States through slavery and settler-colonialism. In a certain way each circulating discourse has to do with a fundamental condition of modernity. Chapter One considers the construction of Emerson’s new (liberal individualist settler) man as a model for Mussolini’s uomo nuovo in his 1928 My Autobiography. Chapter Two’s analysis of Birth of Nation contemplates the racial injury imputed to blackness by U.S. white supremacy as a means of articulating Nazi race war. Chapter Three’s engagement with Eugenics is enmeshed with the racial nature of nationalism. In considering how Deerslayer shaped fascist masculinity in Germany, Chapter Four reflects on the violence of the settler-colonial project. Meanwhile, Chapter Five’s focus on Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain films draws out the imperialism of Manifest Destiny that Nazism reiterated in its ideology of Lebensraum (living space). My readings here, blurring the lines between liberalism and fascism, thus always involve a doubled vision, oscillating between the United States and Europe and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twentieth century, this historical narrative offers itself as a strand in the braid of the “American Century,” as the twentieth century is sometimes called. 68 The United States had become the world’s most powerful political force by the conclusion of World War I. 69 “In Europe, americanisation, Amerikanismus, 68 Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 173. 69 Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (New York: Viking, 2014), 38 25 americanismo signified the new and the idiosyncratic,” writes Victoria de Grazia in “Americanism for Export,” “key words in disputes over the significance of the United States’ economic ‘invasion,’ and the meaning of mass society in predictions about the rise and decay of civilization and cultures.” 70 As de Grazia further elaborates in Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20 th Century Europe (2005), it is during the teens and twenties that the United States sets in place the beginnings of what she has called “the Market Empire” with its “vaunted democratic ethos, democracy in the realm of consumption coming down to espousing equality in the face of commonly known standards.” 71 Yet, the globalizing of Fordism also included the circulation of Ford’s antisemitism in Der Weltkampf, the Nazi Party organ. Der Weltkampf, for example, ran Ford’s warning about what it called “the sickness of our time.” Sitting above the regular column on “World Judaization and Defense,” Ford’s target is not difficult to decipher when he declares “Speculation must not replace production.” 72 While Alfred Rosenberg’s introduction to Ford’s words, noted that he was no fan of Fordism, Philipp Gassert writes in Amerika im Dritten Reich that the Nazis were generally intrigued by Fordism and its possibilities for 70 Victoria de Grazia, “Americanism for Export,” Wedge 7–8 (winter–spring 1985), 74. 71 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20 th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 3, 8. See also Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Victoria de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920– 1960,” Journal of Modern History 61, 1 (March 1989): 53–87; Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-45 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1997). 72 “Produzieren darf nicht mit Spekulieren verwechselt werden” “Worte Henry Fords.” Der Weltkampf. Oktober 1926. 456. Nationales Bibliothek Leipzig. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from are mine. See also Stefan J. Link, Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 26 the Reich’s economic growth (Gassert, 15). As Mahmoud Mamdani writes about the failure of de-Nazification after the war: “to put Nazism…on trial would have revealed that it was not just a German project but also an American one and indeed a global one; a complex of the nation-state and big business” (Mamdani, 108). Along with increased economic and political influence, during this period, U.S. cultural influence also expanded. U.S. culture achieved new prominence and influence with the development of cinema as a form of mass entertainment and Hollywood as the dominant producer within it (Rydell, 5). By the middle of the twenties, three-quarters of the world’s films being shown were made in the U.S.. 73 U.S. literature also gained new cachet. Not only did figures like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound establish themselves among the high Modernist coteries of Europe, but also earlier U.S. literature gained new respect. In 1923 D.H. Lawrence’s Classic Studies in American Literature praised its subject as a literature of modernity that, along with that of Russia, had preceded Europe’s modernisms. 74 And, in 1930, Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize, which well expressed the European recognition of U.S. culture (De Grazia, Irresistible, 19). Yet, as Richard Pells reminds us in Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies and the Globalization of American Culture (2011), this “Americanization” does not always originate in the United States. “Americans have been as much an audience for foreign works of art,” he writes, “as they have been molders of the world’s culture and values” (Pells x). And this is not only the case for artistic but also for scientific discourse. For 73 Richard Pells, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies and the Globalization of American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 209. 74 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1977); Lawrence’s argument precedes recent tendencies in modernist studies to understand the different temporalities of modernity. See, for example, Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 27 example, the modernist discourse of Eugenics, of which the United States would become the world leader in this interwar period, as I discuss in Chapter Three, first came from Great Britain, where Charles Galton, building on his relative Charles Darwin and compatriot Herbert Spenser, first formulated the science. I sketch out these interactions in the period between 1914 and 1933, a central moment of modernism, because it is among these circulating currents that fascism took shape. As Andreas Huyssen writes, fascism was “a formidable crisis of modernist culture.” 75 And yet, fascism is also the new political project to emerge from modernism, or, as Alec Marsh suggests, “fascism is, in fact, a modernist politics.” 76 Thus, along with contributing to American Studies and Fascism Studies, I also address modernism’s relationship with fascism by fleshing out the contributions of U.S. film and literature to its development. 77 Indeed, the constellations I describe in this project both make a case for the 75 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 217. 76 Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 106. See also Griffin, Modernism. 77 Frank Kermode was one of the first to note the relationship between modernism and fascism in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), a “correlation between early modernist literature and authoritarianism which is more often noticed than explained: totalitarian theories of form matched or reflected by totalitarian politics.” Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108; Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggressions: Wyndham Lewis: The Modernist as Fascist (1979) was perhaps the first monograph devoted to exploring the relationship, inspiring a host of studies in its wake: Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Vincent Sherry, Pound, Lewis, and Radical Modernism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Leon Surette, Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, (Toronto: McGill University Press, 2011). A second wave of such studies complicated the relationship between modernism and fascism—with particular attention to the writing of women modernists: Erin Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), Laura Frost, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Annalisa Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Mira Spiro, Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s 28 continuity of modernisms and earlier cultural and political formations and connect the disciplines of American Studies and Modernism Studies, which often keep apart. In the following dissertation, which consists of five chapters and a short epilogue, I show how distinct forms of U.S. culture worked to crystallize fascist desire across national contexts. This dissertation considers five U.S. cultural traditions stretching from the nineteenth century into the period under question in which strands of fascist desire intertwine: the Emersonian tradition, race melodrama, Eugenics, “playing Indian,” and the Film Western. Each chapter offers a reception history of a transnational fascist current circulating globally. Each chapter highlights both how U.S. culture crystallized fascist desire—an instance of “palingenetic ultranationalism”—in the United States, Germany, Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). Within more historically or politically-minded work, there is Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which first thought of Nazism as a modernist project; Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) on French culture, fascism, and modern technology; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), a theoretically-sophisticated reading of futurism and its relations with Fascism; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001) on the intersection of culture and the state apparatus in fascist Italy; and Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Hitler and Mussolini (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). This project also emerges in conversation with scholars who are examining the other politics of modernism, many of whom trace their work back to Michael Dennings, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997). This scholarship include Sarah Ehlers, Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); as well as Mark Steven, Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2017). Work that considers modernism and liberalism includes: John Carlos Rowe, The Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2011); Ian Afflerbach, Making Liberalism New: American Intellectuals, Modern Literature, and the Rewriting of a Political Tradition (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2021); and Gabriel Hankins, Interwar Modernism and the Liberal World Order; Offices, Institutions, and Aesthetics after 1919 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 29 and Italy as well as how it contributed to fascist ideology in the abstract, making visible fascism’s entanglement with other ideological formations that structure U.S. history, such as imperialism, settler-colonialism, race slavery, and nationalism. Chapter One deals with an event that arrives relatively late in the period under discussion, the 1928 publication of Benito Mussolini’s My Autobiography. However, this chapter comes first because it deals with two foundational figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who occupies such a central role in U.S. literary culture, and Mussolini, who first develops fascism in Europe, thus serving as a model for Hitler. 78 Chapter One takes the occasion of My Autobiography’s publication to argue that Mussolini not only was received through the Emersonian concept of the “representative man” but also that the Italian dictator formed himself in relation to the Emersonian idea. Reframing the debate on Mussolini’s interwar reception with a longer view, grounded in Emerson’s reception history in Italy, I show how the Fascist authority of Mussolini could take form in the thought of Emerson and how Emerson’s work on representative men serves as an origin of U.S. fascist desire. I thus offer a revision of Emerson, whose work, I suggest, stands not only at the head of U.S. liberalism but also undergirds a strand of fascist desire. Ultimately, this chapter reveals how Sacvan Bercovitch’s concept of the “auto-American-biography,” a supposedly uniquely-American conflation of nation and individual, always-already was entangled with, in its integration of self and nation, the global concept of the fascist leader. With this reading of the U.S. reception to represent an organic authority that transcended the multivocal nature of modern multicultural democracy, I chart a liberal genealogy of the desire for national rebirth through ultranationalism. 78 As Frederico Finchelstein writes, “without fascism, there would have been no Nazism” (Transatlantic, 26). 30 Chapter Two tracks this desire in the form of the “Ku Klux Klan Idea,” as Béla Balázs named the threat posed by Birth of a Nation in his 1925 review of the U.S. race melodrama. Drawing on the film’s reception history in the United States and Germany, this chapter explores The Birth of a Nation’s melodramatic racial logic—the construction of blackness as a decadence that needed to be eliminated—and its influence on the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and on Nazism in Germany, as it moved from the cinematic screen into a social reality. Following this race melodrama’s evolution from Thomas Dixon’s novels of reconstruction into their filmic renditions, I reconsider Miriam Hansen’s notion of “vernacular modernism,” arguing for how the exportation of U.S. cinema, structured by and intensifying melodrama, also exported the idea of national rebirth through the elimination of the Other from the public sphere. Birth of a Nation, as a U.S. race melodrama, I ultimately suggest, offered a melodrama of race politics that facilitated fascist desire in the formation of Ku Klux Klan-like movements, like Nazism. This chapter’s argument, then, ultimately underscores how fascism articulates itself structurally through the conjuring of the Other. It is the articulation of this Other that lies at the center of Chapter Three, which focuses on the transnational discourse on Eugenics that moved through the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. This chapter clusters around the transnational correspondence of Charles Davenport, the U.S.’s leading eugenicist of the period, to examine how Eugenics inscribed the fascist desire for national rebirth on the entangled human body and national body politic. Placing the United States within a global eugenic discourse, the chapter reads two U.S. political and literary productions, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and The Great Gatsby (1925), as part of a transnational network of fascist desire that sought national regeneration through the elimination of the Other. This chapter 31 thus resists the particularism of the discourse of U.S. nativism and instead reinstates U.S. culture within a global context, revealing its fascist possibilities. Chapter Four offers one image of what this possible fascist futurity could look like. It considers the formation of fascist masculinity, offering one answer to the central question of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies: “By what means is a boy made a soldier?” To answer this question, it examines the first feature film adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s classic novel, The Deerslayer (1841), the German Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook (1920) while also contemplating the more abstract ideological query: to what extent did settler-colonialism serve as an origin of fascism? This chapter roots the male fantasies of the German fascist type, Klaus Theweleit’s “soldier male,” in Cooper’s novel and shows how they return to the United States, under the Boy Scouts’ auspices, to be broadcast as the film, Deerslayer and Chingachgook (1923). This chapter indexes the role of “playing Indian” in cultivating a transatlantic primitive masculinity, represented in Deerslayer’s cinematic body, as a means to overcome modern decadence and revitalize the nation—a rebirth in the form of “Tomorrow’s Men.” Chapter Five contemplates fascism’s promised rebirth, what Griffin calls “the horizon of health.” It focuses on Leni Riefenstahl’s overlapping role as actress in the 1933 Hollywood-Berlin mountain film, S.O.S Eisberg, filmed before and released after Hitler’s Machtergreifung, and as director of The Victory of Faith (1933), her first Nazi propaganda film. It argues that her work makes visible the continuity between the imperialist gaze of the American Western and the fascist desires of the German mountain film. Highlighting the imbricated relationship of the American Western and the German Bergfilm, this chapter reexamines organic precepts of national belonging to the land. It thus reconsiders both U.S. precepts of Manifest Destiny and the Europe-rooted concept of the “fascist feminine”—a 32 seamless reproduction that transcends the divide between nature and civilization as well as culture and politics. Finally, I end with a brief reconsideration of Ezra Pound as both a global and U.S. fascist. Too often his fascism is considered both foreign and idiosyncratic—once again alleviating further investigation into the conditions of U.S. culture that might have helped give shape to his authoritarian and antisemitic credo. However, I suggest that his fascism as a global phenomenon was also typical of fascism as I have discussed it in this project. I thus end by gesturing toward the inextricable entanglement of liberalism and fascism, nineteenth-century and modernist culture, and national and global contexts—important frames for organizing such cultural-historical investigations. While the forms of the texts I engage in this dissertation are various and take part in a variety of discourses, they are what one might call “usual suspects.” I am well aware of Dana Nelson’s criticism of attempts at de-exceptionalizing the United States that entrench the white male canon—but as an object of critique rather than praise. “Does our inability to decenter the white male canon give the lie to our vaunted anti-exceptionalism?” she asks. “How can it be that we seemingly sanction our anti-exceptionalist creds by reaching for the moral legitimation of the canon?” 79 I have considered this very question about my propagation of Adams, Emerson, Griffith, Cooper, and Fitzgerald—names one finds across U.S. film and literature courses over the past century (even if Cooper has largely fallen out of favor). As I look over my core texts, Nelson’s words echo: “We can’t let our familiar attachments go; we can’t stop finding the same thing” (Nelson, 5). 79 Dana Nelson, “We Have Never Been Anti-Exceptionalists, " American Literary History, vol. 31 no. 2, 2019, 3. 33 And yet, I would suggest that the character of my authors is not coincidental. Their positionality is indeed that which I study in this dissertation. That fascist desire runs through the work of white, male producers is no coincidence—but rather fundamental to the etiology of fascism as I explore. Building on Klaus Theweleit, who rooted the development of fascism in misogyny, I show how gender and race are not incidental but essential to the development of the culture that has crystallized fascist desire in the U.S. and globally. Furthermore, that these figures are canonical is also important to my argument. These figures are not at the fringes of the development of U.S. culture, but rather at the center of its supposedly-liberal cultural tradition. It is in the hope to improve this tradition—and eventually move beyond the familiar attachments that I offer the following work—but first we have to reckon with the fascist threads that exist in our present and past. 34 Mussolini: Emersonian Superuomo? It is not possible to draw a portrait of Mussolini, without drawing one, too, of the Italian people. His qualities and his defects are not his own. Rather they are the qualities and the defects of all Italians. —Curzio Malaparte, Muss Il grande imbecille 80 The Meaning of Mussolini “Tell us about Mussolini. What does his presence in world affairs mean?” Richard Washburn Child opened his 1924 article in The Saturday Evening Post, aptly entitled, “What does Mussolini mean?,” reflecting on the many times he had been asked by his fellow Americans to explain the Italian strongman. Since his retirement as the United States’ ambassador to Italy, Child reported, he had constantly encountered the query: “just what does this Mussolini story signify?” “I find that among my own countrymen there is more interest in Mussolini,” Child wrote, “and in what Mussolini may mean to the world than can be attached to any other living personality.” 81 In presenting Mussolini to his U.S. audience as both world-historical and significant, Child figured Mussolini in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s representative men. As envisioned by Emerson in his 1850 book, Representative Men, representative men are Great Men who not only move history forward but also “are…representative; first, of things, and secondly, of ideas.” 82 Writing on six such men— Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Goethe, and Napoleon—Emerson explains, 80 Curzio Malaparte, Muss il gran imbecile (Milan: 1999), 67. 81 Richard Washburn Child, “What Does Mussolini Mean?” The Saturday Evening Post July 26, 1924, 23. 82 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, Joel Porte, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1983), 618. 35 “mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few persons, who either by the quality of the idea that they embodied, or by the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of leaders and law-givers” (Essays, 624). It is through these men, Emerson writes, “we will know the meaning of our economics and politics” (624). In Mussolini’s case, Child declared, he exemplifies a new form of authority: the real story, from which Americans and our own statesmen can draw useful lessons for the future, is a story not of an armed attack upon a flabby democracy which was wheedling and coddling everyone, but a story of leadership and discipline and national unity in the labor of erecting a new government, a new conception of citizenship and a new day. (“What Does,” 23) This chapter begins with this desire for authority in the United States of the 1920s, as it crystallizes around the fascist leader Benito Mussolini and his 1928 My Autobiography. Mussolini’s popularity, I suggest, has much to do with the idea of fascist representation as an organic authority, transcending the multivocal nature of modern multicultural democracy. However, where previous approaches, such as Giorgio Bertellini’s The Divo and the Duce (2019) and John Diggins’s Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1971) emphasized the specific “publicity practices” that the fascist regime used to shape U.S. opinion, I focus our attention on a longer cultural history of desire for organic authority that stretches back to the nineteenth century. 83 Indeed, Child himself is usually considered part of the group of fascist sympathizers credited with shaping Mussolini’s character for the United States, writing multiple articles for The Saturday Evening Post about the autocrat as well as ghostwriting My Autobiography, along with Arnaldo Mussolini, Benito’s younger brother, and Margherita 83 Giorgio Bertellini, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political leadership in 1920s America (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019), 25. 36 Sarfatti, Mussolini’s biographer and sometime lover. 84 In this chapter, I subsume this question of mediation by considering even Child’s attraction to Mussolini symptomatic of a broader desire for organic authority within U.S. culture. Mussolini is not only framed and received as a “Representative Man” but also, I argue, his concept of the fascist leader and the new man emerged entangled with the Emersonian concept. Attending to both the Italian reception of Emerson’s work and the American reception of Mussolini’s 1928 My Autobiography, I trace a cultural history whereby Emerson’s idea of the “representative man” informed conceptions of fascist authority in Italy and returned in the figure of Mussolini to aid in crystallizing fascist desire in the United States. In the absence of Mussolini’s library and his annotated books, which are no longer extant, this chapter cannot offer the scene of reading, where Mussolini first encountered Emerson, and thus chart the exact influence of his encounter with the American writer. However, using the reception of Emerson in Italy through Fascism to ground my reading, I show how the Fascist authority of Mussolini could take form through the ideas of Emerson, and how Emerson’s work on representative men is an origin of American fascist desire. At the core of this chapter are the entwined concepts of authority and representation, which in fascist states collapse into the same phenomenon. Mussolini’s authority is conceived as emanating from his relationship to the people. The chief philosopher of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile, wrote in a 1928 article in Foreign Affairs of Mussolini’s 1923 speech, “forza e consenso,” that the fascist leader must have authority 84 For a recent biographical treatment of Child’s relationship with Mussolini—along with three other fascist sympathizers, including Anne O’Hare McCormick—see Katy Hull, The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). See also Steven Wagler Bianco, “Richard Washburn Child: Italian-American Relations, 1921-1924,” (MA thesis, University of Iowa, 1970); and Daniel E. Fausz, “Richard Washburn Child: America’s Spokesman on Europe and Fascism 1915-1935” (MA thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1985). 37 if he is to guarantee freedom to the populace. There can be no freedom, Gentile argues, without the fascist leader’s authority: The Duce of Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of “Force or Consent?;” and he concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist. 85 Indeed, as Gentile had earlier explained Mussolini’s position as the Duce in 1925, Mussolini is the condition of the Italian state; in him there is no difference between state, party, and movement. The terms in which Gentile framed Mussolini, as “a hero, a providential and privileged spirit in whom thought has become flesh and vibrates constantly to the potent rhythm of a youthful and exuberant life,” not only resonate with, but also I will show, take form through Emerson’s concept of the “representative man.” 86 One sees this concept articulated less poetically in Carl Schmitt’s translation of Gentile’s concept to Germany in his 1933 text, Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, Movement, People). Discussing both Germany and Italy, Schmitt shifts the terrain from a question of authority to that of representation. The fascist leader’s authority is necessary because, as sovereign, it is through him that the people come into being. Representation, for Schmitt, is a co-instantiation: 85 Giovanni Gentile, “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,” Foreign Affairs, January 1928, 303. 86 Giovanni Gentile, Fascismo e cultura (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1928), 47-8. 38 It is symptomatic that every image fails entirely and every fortuitous image is more of a picture or a simile than the very leadership in question. Our concept is neither necessarily nor appropriately an intermediary image or a representative simile. 87 For Gentile and Schmitt, fascist authority emerged co-extensive with the people, because the people are formless without it. Representation is, as Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has written in her landmark book of political philosophy, The Concept of Representation, a paradox: “representation means the making present of something that is nevertheless not literally present.” 88 In its re-presenting, “making present again” (Pitkin, 8), this process makes anew the thing it purportedly represents, thus potentially reshaping it. In other words, one way to understand the fascist potential of Emerson’s Representative Men is to understand to what extent his great men rewrite the identity of the object they purportedly represent. My reading of Emerson in this chapter cuts against the grain of Emersonian Studies, which in recent years has largely turned away from ideology critique toward postcritique and speculative materialism. My approach to Emerson’s work, grounded in his reception in Italy in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century also recovers a critical tradition from the 1990s that has become largely eclipsed in the field. This corpus—which includes George J. Stack’s Emerson and Nietzsche: an Elective Affinity (1992), Cary Wolfe’s The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Emerson and Pound (1993), Christopher Newfield’s The Emerson Effect (1996), and John Carlos Rowe’s At Emerson’s Tomb (1997)—points toward a relation between Emerson and fascism that has yet to be fully explored, precisely because it ran up against the very limits of American literary ideology that Wolfe sought to map out. While current work has insisted on Emerson’s multiplicity 87 Carl Schmitt, State, Movement, People: The Triadic Structure of the Political Unity Trans. Simona Draghici (Corvalis, Or: Plutarch Press, 2001), 48. 88 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 9. 39 that does not easily resolve into the typical narratives of liberal humanism in which he has long been read, it returns, if by another name to an aestheticism that roots Emerson’s politics in his style. Instead of rooting Emerson’s politics in his style, I locate a strain of historical reception that read Emerson’s philosophy to endorse the organic authority he imagined as fascism. In examining how Emersonianism can undergird Fascism, I do not make an argument that Ralph Waldo Emerson willed fascism, but rather that his work contains the spores of fascist possibility that, in the interwar period, could bloom. Hence, my purpose in this chapter is not to generate a new reading of Emerson as such. I read Emerson only to point to the longue durée of fascist desire in American culture. I thus not only expand the narrative of earlier work, such as Benjamin Alpers’ Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (2003), whose focus on the interwar period suggests that American culture’s fascination with authority was merely an interwar phenomenon, but more importantly reframe our histories of fascism and American culture. Moreover, my culturalist approach does not posit an “unmediated rapport between the Duce’s virile image and his American audiences,” as Giorgio Bertellini rightly critiques (Bertellini, 33). Instead, my discussion understands the American fascination with Mussolini as mediated by a longer history of fascist desire in hegemonic American culture—incipient in Emersonianism and, with that, life writing—that extends beyond the scope of Bertellini’s study. Though Bertellini’s focus on the technical processes involved in the formulation of Mussolini’s image as a celebrity can offer valuable insights into the work of media, it also threatens to reinforce the American exceptionalism that haunts all discussions of fascism and the United States. It suggests that Mussolini’s popularity in the United States—and the fascist desire he crystallized—did not emerge from within the American populace and its culture as such but was instead engineered from without. I 40 show, on the other hand, how fascist desire already striated the culture of the United States before the name Mussolini arrived on its shores, particularly in the desire for authority that he is perceived to embody. “The heart of all American fascists” “Here, then, is a book to delight the heart of all American fascists,” Thomas Ford concluded his Los Angeles Times review of My Autobiography. Ford’s review, published on November 25, 1928, acknowledges the presence of fascist desire in the United States, even as he sought to highlight what he perceived as the paradox of the “American fascist.” Ford resisted the book’s account of events, accusing Mussolini of a specious representation of experience: “it is a book that breathes the spirit of materialism, of oppression, of autocracy gone mad, but always protesting that its motives are benevolent and patriotic.” 89 Fascism, that is, “the Italian system,” and democracy, “the American system” are, for Ford, “diametrically opposed”: It originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, so that we may conclude that millions of Americans have read it. I wonder if Mussolini would have permitted the printing in Italy of the autobiography of an American whose views of government were so diametrically opposed to the Italian system as these views are to the American system? (Ford, 32) Ford’s review thus attempts to make the discussion of Mussolini’s Autobiography one less about the man himself, but more about his political system, Fascism. For Ford, the heart of American fascists is deception—either of themselves or others. By emphasizing the incompatibility of the American and Italian system, his review seeks to focus attention on how fascism abrogated (the American) constitutional rights of Italians. 90 89 Thomas F. Ford, “Mussolini Writes Life,” Los Angeles Times, 25 Nov. 1928. C13, 32. 90 Ford’s response to Mussolini is typical of antifascist resistance, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes: 41 Ford’s review is trying to redirect a discourse about the meaning of Mussolini and his fascism that had already coalesced into a robust form, where the competing system of fascism stood for a spontaneous and vital expression of national life that the United States lacked. Mussolini’s My Autobiography arrived in a United States where there had been much already written about him since he seized power on October 28, 1922. Benjamin Alpers in his Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture summarizes the situation as one of charismatic appeal: “By the late 1920s Mussolini had become an authentic American hero.” 91 Giorgio Bertellini further specifies the content of this herodom. “By the mid-1920s, the Duce’s reputation in American public culture was of someone who was more than a forceful foreign politician,” he writes. “Fascism was an experimental political system that could inspire other nations, including democratic America” (Bertellini, 237). However, Bertellini’s account emphasizes the international considerations that shape the American discourse on Mussolini. While this is an important part of the history, I believe that this approach fails to reckon with the desire for unity and authoritative rule that a significant segment of the American population felt. In this section, I offer a reading of the public discourse sympathetic to Mussolini of the 1920s, where I show how the portrait of Mussolini’s fascism and person intertwined with national U.S. concerns. Thus, I emphasize how the figure of Mussolini promised to resolve what is To fascism’s opponents, the idea that it constituted a spiritualistic “return to man” contrasted ludicrously with the repressive and dehumanizing reality of life under blackshirt rule. Yet the notion of fascism as an ethical force proved to be a valuable consensus-building device among Italians. That he resorts to this attempted demystification points to how Mussolini’s supposed ethical rebirth was not only persuasive in Italy but also, at times, in the United States— enough at least to demand Ford’s rebuttal. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 8. 91 Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 20. 42 perceived as a problem of American’s politics—a crisis of American identity—by offering unified representation and absolute authority. When Mussolini’s Autobiography first appeared on May 5, 1928 in the Saturday Evening Post, it not only was flanked by advertisements for masculine-coded products such as “Athletic suits,” Champion spark plugs, and the Hudson Super Six motorcar— “Performance that men watch proudly and Beauty that women admire” (“Hudson”)—but also sat among editorials ins support of President Herbert Hoover and the Ku Klux Klan Congressman Albert Johnson. The Hoover editorial, which ran in the July 21, 1928 issue, explains Hoover “has proved himself an exceptional judge of the choice of attack” because he “is a man not of theory, but of practice. He has little use for hypotheses, but makes diligent use of instruments, human and mechanical.” 92 Meanwhile, the Post urged reelection for Johnson, who had helped to pass the 1924 Immigration Act, “to suppress the bootlegging of aliens into the country, to tighten our naturalization laws, to facilitate the deportation of criminal, defective and otherwise undesirable aliens, and to raise the standard of our foreign-born citizenship, not only for the protection of American labor but for the safeguarding of our national blood stream.” 93 These intertwined desires for executive action and the protection of a living nation-state informed the Post’s support of Mussolini. The Post’s language about nation betrays an organicist conception of the nation— that is, an understanding of the United States not as an artificial and negotiated identity, but as a natural phenomenon. 94 Originating with Kant in 1790, as Pheng Cheah records, 92 “Herbert Hoover, Candidate,” The Saturday Evening Post, 21 July 1928, 201:5, 22. 93 “The Man from Hoquiam,” Saturday Evening Post, 8 September 1928, 201:10, 32. 94 Whereby Hobbes had conceived of society as an “artificial man,” a premise that as Pheng Cheah points out exists only in “the absence of a sharp distinction between the artificial and the naturally living” (Cheah 28) and Rousseau had conceived of a spiritualist “general 43 Schlegel and Novalis elaborated the “organic concept…of the whole, of society.” 95 While Cheah emphasizes the variety of political projects that employed the “organismic metaphor of the social and political body” (59), in this case, the metaphor serves to figure immigrants as foreign bodies, unassimilable and dangerous to the nation’s health. They interfere in the spontaneous concerted action of the nation, the rationality and authority that emerges from the homogenous (and thus healthy) national being. Indeed, concerns about representation stood at the center of the Post’s social and political criticism for most of the decade. The so-called “bible of middle-class America” the Post was the United States’ most popular magazine of the decade, peaking at a circulation of 2,856,996 in the twenties. 96 Yet, it seems, during that moment, its presence felt larger than the numbers convey. Published by the Curtis Publishing Company and edited by George Horace Lorimer, “the National Weekly” has been credited with great influence in shaping public opinion in the 1920s, but certainly it is not merely an imposition of content, but also reflects, at least in some measure, what interested their readership. In a profile of Lorimer, the journalist Benjamin Stolberg wrote in 1930, with what might be some fawning exaggeration, “10,000,000 people read it and the Lord knows how many people look at it.” 97 Leon Whipple similarly indicates the Post’s ubiquity, when he asked and answered in a 1928 Survey article on the magazine, “Who reads the Post?”: will,” it is with the German romantics that the metaphor of the nation as an organism first takes shape. For a history of organicism as a political concept see Cheah (2004) and Coker (1967). 95 Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32. 96 John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741-1990 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 73-93; Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 165. 97 Benjamin Stolberg, “Merchant in Letters: Portrait of George Horace Lorimer.” Outlook and Independent. 21 May, 1930 No. 17,. 116. 44 “Everybody.” 98 The Post cannot be said to represent “Everybody,” but it certainly represented a powerful force of privilege within the United States—“well-to-do white urbanites.” 99 It is this bloc to which and for whom the Post spoke. And the Post’s politics reflected the entrenched privilege of this population. From its publisher Curtis, editor Lorimer, through its writers, conservativism and reactionary politics predominated. Since World War I the magazine had propagated a strong anti-socialist and anti-immigrant line, deriding the idea of Israel Zangwill’s melting pot as a plot against Americanism. Indeed, in 1927’s Money Writes!, Upton Sinclair would denounce the magazine for “militarizing American culture,” serving as “the great central powerplant of Fascism in America…presided over by Colonel George Horace Lorimer.” 100 Though always perfunctorily affirming democracy as a political form, the magazine registered consistent discontent with American democracy in its practice even prior to Fascist Italy’s emergence. 101 Lorimer’s avowed purpose to “work for national unity under our common banner of Americanism” (Cohn, 217) tended to involve spotlighting un- Americanism: the “virus” of Bolshevism; immigrant “contamination; the special interests 98 Leon Whipple, “SatEvePost: Mirror of These States,” Survey Graphic 1 March, 1928, 699 99 Douglas B. Ward, “The Geography of an American Icon: An Analysis of the Circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, 1911-1944,” American Journalism 27:3, 80. 100 Upton Sinclair, Money Writes! (New York: Alber & Charles Boni, 1927), 67. 101 As a January 31, 1920 editorial states, the Post’s “grievances are not against our form of government, which has proved itself the most perfect yet devised, but against the politicians who largely select and run the men who run the Government” (28). The invocation of the party machine not only impugned these politicians behind the “men who run the Government” but also the very concept carried with it the implication that this machine was powered by immigrant voters. “Editorial,” Saturday Evening Post, January 31, 1920, 28. 45 who gave “no thought for Uncle Sam,” the vacillating career and machine politicians, fond of “Too Much Conversation,” as one editorial was entitled. 102 The magazine served as a vessel of the surging nativism that John Higham records in the United States after World War I in Strangers in the Land. Emerging from World War I was a movement against the “hyphenated American” (Higham, 198), the hyphen standing as the image of divided loyalties; these hyphenated Americans failed to conform to the standard of “100 per cent Americanism” demanded by figures like Theodore Roosevelt (Higham, 204). Though there are progressives like Horace Kallen who tried to argue that the United States’ national identity derived from its diversity, such attempts could not prevent the xenophobic and antisemitic Red Scare that came on the heels of the Russian Revolution. The early twenties were a period of strong xenophobia in the United States— especially among the Post’s readers. Within this context the Post’s articles bemoaned the incapacity of the “American public” to take political action. In “Have Populi a Vox?” Samuel Blythe asked on January 3, 1920, “What profits it a people to be articulate politically if they say nothing? And if they have nothing to say?” 103 Sick of the “Old Guard” and the “old Gang” who, “playing the old games, using the old methods, sewing up delegates in the old way” (Blythe, 165), he looked back with some warmth, on the wartime “autocracy”: we become an autocracy overnight to conduct a war, but we are a miserable heterogeneity to handle a peace. We act as one to oppose an outside foe, and we counteract as bewildered and ineffective individuals to fight an inside enemy. Pro Patria is our motto when stirred by external national danger, but pro persona guides 102 Alonzo Engelbret Taylor, “Views of a Layman on Bolshevism” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 3, 1920. 27: 192, 8; James J. Davis, “Jail—Or a Passport: Some Faces and Views on Immigration”. December 1, 1923, 138; Edward G Lowry, “The Special Interests—New Style,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 31, 1920, 61. 103 Samuel Blythe, “Have Populi a Vox?” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 3, 1920, 3. 46 us and controls us, when, unstirred, we face interior political peril and manipulation. (Blythe, 3) Special interests, Blythe complained, are interfering with national necessities. Two years before Mussolini enters the world stage, Blythe here openly pined for an enlightened autocrat who would know the will of the people and the dangers that confront them— particularly their “miserable heterogeneity”—better than themselves. Indeed, in a similar vein, a January 3, 1920 editorial entitled, “Muffing their Mission,” called on the American Legion to intervene in politics because these military men are vital to national character, combating the entangled viruses of Bolshevism and anti-Americanism: “the country needs them as much as the country needed them in 1917, if not more.” 104 The great enemy was, according to the Post, the immigrant lobby. One article, “Special Interests—New Style” dramatized this crisis of representation in the tale of a supplicant before the Senate. After pleading his case, this concerned citizen is asked, “Whom do you represent?” When he responds, “I represent the public,” he is answered with an “outburst of laughter” (Lowry, 5). Congress, the article emphasized, only responded to letters sent by lobbying organizations, mostly comprised of immigrants, who see the government merely as a service (Lowry, 61). “The Poles or the Lithuanians or the Egyptians or what not.” Lowry writes, “‘What are you going to do for us?’ is the burden of their inquiry” (Lowry, 61). The conservative writer, Kenneth Roberts, suggested in 1923 there was a shift in the pronoun attached to government. “No longer does he view it as ‘my Government,’” he argued, noting less than half of Americans voted, “but as ‘your Government’.” 105 As 104 “Muffing Their Mission,” The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 3, 1920, 29. 105 Kenneth Roberts, “The Inarticulate Conservatives,” The Saturday Evening Post, July 21, 1923, 196:4, 25. 47 Lothrop Stoddard, the racist protégé of the racist Madison Grant, mourned the situation in his 1923 “Lo, the Poor American,” the “New Americans” “voice their discontent in positive fashion by seeking to change their American environment and mold it to their liking.” 106 As James J. Davis wrote on December 8, 1923, there is a deep conviction in the minds of most of us that what America needs is homogeneity. Firm in our belief in the rule of majority, most of us look with some apprehension on a theory which would result in the development of a heterogenous collection of clashing minorities, each insignificant in proportion to the whole population. 107 Similarly a 1924 editorial entitled, “They Want Unrestricted Immigration,” expanded on Davis’s argument to suggest that not only is there a clash of minorities, but the new immigrants have even succeeded in making so-called “American” foreign to the hallways of power: “Congress does not understand the language of flowers, but it knows all the languages of voters. Unfortunately, when immigration is under discussion our representatives in Washington hear American less frequently and less forcibly than any other language.” 108 The Post, it should be noted, played an important role in giving voice to the movement that ended up passing the restrictive Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Though excludable categories of immigration had been growing since 1882, when Congress first passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, until 1924, fewer than 1% of non-Asian immigrants were kept out. With the immigration act of 1924, national quotas were instituted, limiting immigration to 2% of the number of so-called foreign nationals in the United States in 106 Lothrop Stoddard, “Lo, the Poor American,” The Saturday Evening Post. January 6, 1923, 195: 28, 58. 107 James J. Davis, “Who are the American People?” December 8, 1923. 196: 23, 29. 108 “They Want Unrestricted Immigration,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 5, 1924, 36. The Post actively sought immigration restrictions throughout the 1920s, not only ardently supporting the passage of the Johnson Immigration Act, but, after its passage, also running editorials arguing for its renewal and reinforcement. (Cohn 195 fn 66) 48 1890. As Mae Ngai argues, with this act, the cultural nationalism that had fueled American nativism transfigured into racial nationalism, and the United States’ conception by them, or better put, America as an ethnostate. 109 Repeated in the Post’s argument for its politics is an appeal to “common sense.” As a later editorial defends the immigration act, it “is discriminatory, in the same sense that every act of a sane man is, whether he is buying an apple or hiring an office boy. It is merely an application of the commonest of all common sense, which tells us to accept the best and reject the poorer.” 110 This is the same argument it had made in an editorial on January 31, 1920, “A common-sense, not a conservative or a radical, party is what Americans need and want.” 111 The Post’s desire for common sense—a feeling that needs not be described, but is always-already known, natural and spontaneous, what Jean-Jacques Rousseau would call the general will—directs us toward the appeal of Mussolini and fascism. Mussolini came to power on October 22, 1922, in the much mythologized March on Rome, supposedly rescuing Italy from parliamentary deadlock. He thus almost seemed a dictator ex machina for the conservatives who complained about the disorganization of American democracy. He was the first party leader, as Hannah Arendt notes, “who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone” (Origins, 325 fn 39). Though the Matteotti affair of 1924, where fascists assassinated Giacomo Matteotti, one of Mussolini’s chief political rivals, posed a diplomatic crisis, in 1925, Mussolini claimed “personal responsibility” for his fascist 109 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 23. 110 “Governor Smith on Immigration,” The Saturday Evening Post, October 13, 1928 200:15, 30. 111 “Editorial,” The Saturday Evening Post. January 31, 1920. 192:31, 30. 49 government and began to rule openly as a dictator. By the time My Autobiography arrived in the United States, Mussolini, with the support of American financiers like Thomas Lamont, who helped broker him over a hundred million dollars of loans, had seized total control of Italy. “The Saturday Evening Post was among the first of the sympathetic interpreters of the Fascist order,” as Isaac Marcosson would write in 1930. “It felt—and the facts warranted it—that the benefits of a unique national advancement merited a friendly chronicling.” 112 Samuel Blythe welcomed “The Latin Cromwell” on February 24, 1923, racializing and admiring Mussolini simultaneously. In this first profile of Mussolini in the Post, Blythe emphasized the spontaneity of Mussolini’s movement. Fascism, he writes, “is the story of youth—youth led by a crusader who admitted no barrier… the story of youth seizing power and fiercely demanding progress” (“Latin” 25). Though critical of some of the techniques of fascism, Blythe frames Mussolini almost as the answer to his earlier call in “Have the Populi a Vox?” to oppose the “internal enemy”: Mussolini set forth no complicated series of policies or principles for his Fascisti. His rallying cry was patriotism. His program was the complete extermination of all socialism, Bolshevism, Communism, and everything that pertained to the Red campaign and campaigners. His plan was to fight fire with fire: to redeem Italy by whatever means were needed. (“Latin,” 98) The anti-immigrant Kenneth Roberts similarly locates fascism’s virtue less in its specific platform than in its authoritative means of representing the national will. In a series of 1923 articles that become the first book about Mussolini’s regime, Black Magic (1924), he opposed Fascism to the Red Threat of anemic “Parlor, Bedroom, Bath and Gutter 112 Isaac Marcosson, “The Dictator Business,” The Saturday Evening Post, March 15, 1930, 4. 50 Bolsheviks.” 113 Fascism “represented square-dealing, patriotism, and common sense…the opposite of wild ideas, of lawlessness, of injustice, of cowardice, of treason, of crime, of class warfare, of special privilege.” 114 It is, he insists repeatedly, a “common sense movement,” this term once again expressing that which emerges naturally from the people. Though a dictatorship, it is “a good dictatorship” and “a national necessity”, brought into power by “a silent majority that wants justice and decency and peace.” 115 In the book that these articles constituted, Roberts goes even further, warning the United States that it too might need fascism: “citizens of the country may one day feel that they must turn to the direct and common-sense action of Mussolini’s Black Magic.” 116 The question of how a “silent majority” expresses itself, how the “vox” of the “vox populi” is heard, is answered in this discourse by its emphasis on the silent speech of action. Richard Washburn Child, in “The Making of Mussolini,” the opening article for the Post’s June 28, 1924 edition, and the first in a series of three articles that extols Mussolini’s “courageous, fearless leadership,” explained Mussolini by declaring, “when a spirited people cannot stand it any longer, they act.” 117 Child then linked action and Mussolini, modifying his previous sentence: “When a people faces an intolerable situation, the real ravenous hunger is not for a program, but for a man” (“Making,” 157). The rest of his article recalls his first encounter with Mussolini, when he became convinced “Benito 113 Kenneth Roberts, Ambush of Italy,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 25, 1923, 197:8, 6. 114 Kenneth Roberts, “The Fight of the Black Shirts,” The Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 8, 1923, 196: 10, 162. 115 Kenneth Roberts, “The Salvage of a Nation.” The Saturday Evening Post, September 22, 1923, 196:12, 142. 116 Kenneth Roberts, Black Magic (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merill Company Publishers, 1924), 218 117 Richard Washburn Child, “The Making of Mussolini.” The Saturday Evening Post., June 28, 1924, 158, 157. 51 Mussolini was the strong leader of the expression of national spirit” (“Making,” 157). For Child, then, Italy was a democratic nation—in spirit, if not in form: I haven’t the slightest idea in these days what the word democracy means to any other man; but if you mean by it an effective expression of the will and willingness of a people, you may be sure there is more in Italy today than there has been since the days of Crispi. (“Making,” 3) Fascism exists as the “strong unity of purposes and leadership,” as he will write that July in “Open the Gates.” 118 It is a unified body politic—its very unity what Child marshals against its critics: “Let its opponents damn it if they will, they cannot deny that it had gladness, hope, loyal service. They cannot say that it did not have the breath of youth and of a great national spirit” (“Open the Gates,” 5). In this understanding of the nation state and democracy, Mussolini appeared as the avatar of the people’s strength and unified action. Implicitly, then Mussolini’s authority in this discourse emerged from his popularity. However, the recurrent “strong” attached to his person also emphasized the authoritative potential vested in him. He was the sovereign—he who is the exception to the law and makes it, the decider. Fascism was thus held up as democracy at it most masculine and efficient. As Child quotes “a writer on Fascismo,” in this discourse “parliamentary rule as we know it is democratic in theory only…..it is always special groups and special interests that get the upper hand in parliament” (“What,” 88). Not only does Child describe him in his series as a “genius of administration” (“What,” 3), but in 1926, the humorist Will Rogers holds up Mussolini as the Henry Ford of government: “Some over home say a Dictator is no good; yet every successful line of business is run by a Dictator.” With only a touch of irony, 118 Richard Washburn Child, “Open the Gates, ” The Saturday Evening Post, July 12, 1924, 5. 52 Rogers writes, “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government; that is, if you have the right Dictator.” “Well,” Rogers concludes, “these folks have certainly got him.” It might seem strange that Mussolini, as an Italian, appealed to a publication and demographic that actively discriminated against Italians with their support for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. And there is, amidst the support for him, a certain racism implicit in the feeling that fascism is good for Italy, because they are a people not yet ready for the democracy of Americans. This is evident from the Post’s earliest coverage of Mussolini, where Samuel Blythe calls him “A Latin Cromwell.” 119 However, Mussolini’s significance for these writers who admired his authority did transcend his race. He belonged in the pantheon of great men of the era. As Child writes: The two preeminent rulers of the world today are not difficult to name. They are Mussolini and Coolidge. Each represents in his particular power of personality the revolt of peoples against unreality and their weariness of parliamentary government. 120 Furthermore, it was not merely in the Saturday Evening Post where Mussolini was received with such admiration and, indeed, desire. The only consistent anti-fascist criticism of the twenties came from monthly publications such as the highbrow magazines, The 119 This tendency also occurs in the writing of Anne O’Hare McCormick and Alice Rohe in The New York Times. Thomas Ford acknowledges the presence of this racist condescension among certain supporters of Italian Fascism in his review of My Autobiography: “It seems that a good many of our countrymen are quite ready to have liberty perish from the earth providing it is not their own liberty” (Ford, 32). Almost diametrically opposed to this support for Fascist Italy, if originating from the same source, was the philosopher George Santayana, who, though he supported fascism as a concept, believed the fascist project to be doomed because Italians were not suited to it: “the trouble with applying Fascism to Italy is that the people are undisciplined….one can say that they are not on a high enough social level to become good Fascists” (Diggins, Mussolini, 19). Samuel G. Blythe, “A Latin Cromwell,” The Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 24, 1923 195:35, 25, 98-102. 120 Richard Washburn Child, “The President, ” The Saturday Evening Post, April 17, 1926, 1. 53 Atlantic and Harper’s (Diggins, Mussolini 25). In the decade, rather, Mussolini proliferated as a representative figure. Anne McCormick, a progressive who developed sympathy for the Fascist regime, presented Mussolini as a test case for autocracy, asking in the New York Times in 1923, “Is he a symptom of the disease of politics that infects civilization, or is he a remedy? Is he autocrat, liberator, or merely demagogue?” 121 The trade unionist, and head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers found Mussolini to be an avatar of action: ‘‘a man whose dominating purpose is to get something done; to do rather than theorize; to build a working, producing civilization instead of a disorganized, theorizing aggregation of conflicting groups’’ (Alpers, 18). From the other side of labor disputes, the Chairman of the United States Steel Corporation also welcomed Mussolini. “The entire world needs strong, honest men,” he declared, adding that America “can learn something by the movement which has taken place in Italy” (Diggins, Mussolini, 147). Diggins argues: “most Americans…admired not so much Fascism as ‘Mussolinianism,’ not the reactionary ideology but the cult of personality” (Mussolini, 68). Indeed, this is similarly the argument of Benjamin Alpers, who notes how Stalin was also in vogue in the twenties. And, repeatedly, Mussolini is held up among the Great Men of the decade. In a survey “Is there a Dearth of Great Men?” held in 1927, Literary Digest discovered that newspapers mentioned Mussolini more frequently than any other figure, including Lenin and Henry Ford (Mussolini, 72). That same year Yale seniors voted Mussolini “the biggest world figure of today.” 122 121 Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Swashbuckling Mussolini,” New York Times, July 22, 1923. 122 “Yale Seniors Put Mussolini First,” New York Times, Mar 21, 1927, 19. 54 However, identifying exactly where Mussolini ended and fascism began is not such an easy task as Diggins’s distinction might suggest. In 1924 the filmmaker D.W. Griffith, proclaimed himself “mad about Mussolini” after a tour of Italy and then went on to declare: “I believe that anything may happen as a result of fascism. I should like to put into a film the remarkable spirit of the fascist.” 123 Indeed, Mussolini is never only himself—but always a symbol, always representative of virile authority as well as his own political practice of fascism. He is always a representative man standing for a direct expression of national will. For example, Julius A. Basche, called by The World Tomorrow, “a leading spokesman for Wall Street,” declared a Mussolini the answer to America’s problems: “a man every country needs. Autocracy is the only solution to the world’s problems; that is, if we could only be sure that every autocrat would be a good autocrat” (Mussolini, 157). Or, as Anne O’Hare McCormick writes, not without some condescension, in a 1923 article in the New York Times, “the Italians love his swashbuckling and blaguer” while noting: In the United States we have a democracy, which means that the majority of the people, acting on motives which often have nothing to do with government, freely elect officers who do not give them what they want. And in Italy a strong minority has elected itself and is giving the country the kind of government the majority want but did not know how to get. In other words, the will of the majority seems to be better satisfied in Italy at this moment than in the United States. The Italians certainly enjoy a personal liberty and freedom from regulation beyond even our conception of liberty. (“Swashbuckling”) Fascism, for McCormick, might have problems, but Mussolini, fulfilling “the hunger for leadership,” stands for a politics that, she attests, has even increased liberty. In authority lies liberation. 123 Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. Daniel Benardi, ed..(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 30. 55 Fascism is not foreign, McCormick argues, because “direct action is intelligible in any language.” She explains Mussolini by likening him to Roosevelt: A nation that thrilled to the Vigilantes and Rough Riders, rises to Mussolini and his Black Shirt Army. They have done more to make Italy understood in the United States than three million Italians coming over to dig ditches or sell terra cotta groups or a million Americans returning from the Forum and the ruins of Pompeii. 124 McCormick was hardly the only writer to link Mussolini with a prior American tradition of Great Men. While Ezra Pound will make the case in his 1935 tract, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, that “the heritage of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, old John Adams, Jackson, Van Buren is HERE, NOW in the Italian peninsula at the beginning of the fascist second decennia,” the New York Times scooped his news in 1925. They pointed out that Mussolini’s political philosophy had “many points in common with that of the men who inspired our own Constitution—JOHN ADAMS, HAMILTON, WASHINGTON. The uninformed will of “the many” is to be “balanced” by the experience and the wisdom of “the few.” 125 In this case, Mussolini, the Times wrote, “stands for the principle of authority.” One can emphasize how Mussolini’s American likeness was promoted by special interests, which sought to present Mussolini as an American figure for geopolitical interests of the state as well as private financial considerations. Diggins points out the possible economic motivations of the self-interested softness of journalists who were “donated…a friendly hour of conversation,” as he quotes one newsman describing the dynamic (Mussolini, 47). But also, the Fascist regime subsidized newspaper wire rates and made a concerted effort to win the favor of the American journalists in Rome so as to secure 124 Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Old Woman in the New Italy,” The New York Times, Jul 15, 1923, BR6. 125 “Revolution in Italy,” New York Times, Oct 11, 1925. 56 positive coverage. Furthermore, as Diggins and Bertellini note, allies of Mussolini, such as Thomas W. Lamont, chief executive of J.P. Morgan, and the American financier Otto Kahn, worked in concert with the Italy America Society, a lobbying group, to keep press coverage positive (Bertellini, 211). American financial forces were invested in Mussolini’s Italy—seeing it as a bulwark against Communism and a regime whose ambitions for development could ultimately benefit American corporations. Harding’s Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, though initially skeptical of Mussolini’s regime, declared his affection for the Italian regime in 1924, lauding its stability and unity at a banquet for the Italy-American Society. 126 That same year, Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon praises Mussolini’s Italy as an ally against Socialists and for the cause of laissez-faire economics and the free circulation of capital (Migone, 56). Mellon worked with Secretary of Commerce and future President Herbert Hoover in enabling the Morgan loan that stabilized Italy after the war (Diggins, Mussolini, 268), pursuing this extension of credit with an assiduity noticeably lacking in regards to the previous democratic governments of Giolitti (Migone, 33). Indeed, though Congress was less predisposed to Mussolini’s Italy than the executive branch, involving some criticism of Mussolini’s regime, it had, with the encouragement of Mellon and Hoover, voted overwhelmingly to pass a bill in 1926 that favorably fixed Italy’s debt and proffered them a generous loan (Diggins, Mussolini, 275). And yet, while economic interests and international politics certainly did play a part in the construction of this narrative, this discourse on Mussolini still was articulated in a particular way. For example, when the financier Kahn publicly gave support to Mussolini 126 Gian Giacomo Migone, The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 49. 57 in speeches, he called Mussolini “not a dictator in the usual meaning of the word, because he exercises his power with the explicit and overwhelming consensus of the people” (Bertellini, 220). He too framed him as the expression of the people’s will. This consistent approach to present Mussolini as “widely popular” can be seen as a strategy to justify American support for an antidemocratic regime, as Giorgio Bertellini argues (Bertellini 217). But this recognition of Mussolini as a representative man is also only one way these intermediaries could have justified his rule. Indeed, for one, the former ambassador Child had from his beginning in public life, as a writer in the teens, emphasized the virtue of virile, authoritative leadership, naming, for example, Theodore Roosevelt in 1916 as one of the “two greatest living Americans.” 127 In one article Child tells Mussolini that he avoids the potential diplomatic contretemps of giving his “approval to Fascismo” because “I will state principles which were Roosevelt’s and which were mine, and which I believe were American long before the word ‘Fascisti’ was in existence. If these are principles which Fascistic can approve, then it is not a diplomat approving of Fascisti ideas, but a diplomat stating ideas which Fascisti can commend” (“What Does”, 87). This is to say that the desire for an organic resolution to a crisis of will did not emerge first in the interwar period. Furthermore, to return to Ford’s opposition of American and Italian systems—though they might be distinct, some of the desires that are entwined within them might not be so opposed at all. Child’s desire is the inheritor of a long history in American culture, stretching back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. And, as I will argue in this next section, Mussolini himself emerges through this cultural history, finding form as one of Emerson’s “Representative Men” even before he writes himself for an American audience. 127 Richard Washburn Child, Potential Russia (Dutton, 1916), 6. 58 “A great admirer of Emerson” “Intellectual contacts have grown up between our two peoples,” proclaimed Benito Mussolini on January 1, 1931 in an American radio broadcast: The Italians fully recognized the contribution made by the United States to modern progress. The name of Edison is familiar to us all. So in the field of letters and philosophy are those of Longfellow, Whitman, Poe, Mark Twain and William James. I myself am a great admirer of Emerson and James. 128 In this official address where he sought to establish transatlantic cultural connection between the United States and Italy, Mussolini emphasized his personal affinity with Ralph Waldo Emerson. While Mussolini’s praise was certainly calculated to win favor with his American audience, it was also an extension of the Fascist regime’s general position on the poet. (The fascist regime mandated Emerson’s work in its official high school curriculum. 129 ) However, Mussolini’s suggestion of a personal relationship with Emerson also, I suggest, points toward the heart of fascism, or at least its head—to the origins of the concept of the fascist leader. Though often overlooked in histories of Fascism and disavowed in studies of Emerson’s reception in Italy, Emersonianism stewed and bubbled in the cauldron out of which Mussolini’s Fascism emerged and, indeed, served as a means of expressing fascist desire throughout the Fascist regime. Emerson’s idea of the “representative man,” I argue, offered a form through which the Mussolini could come to conceive himself as a fascist leader. 128 Arnaldo Cortesi, “Mussolini, on Radio, gives Speech Pledge,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 1931, 1. 129 When Fascism reformed the school system with Giovanni Gentile’s “Regio Dicreto” in 1925, Emerson became recommended reading for philosophy students and set texts for English exams. Giorgio Mariani, “Read with Mussolini: The Italian Reception of Emerson under Fascism” in Emerson at 200; proceedings of the International Bicentennial Conference, Rome, October 16-18, 2003 (Roma: Aracne Editrice, 2004), 129. 59 When considering the possibility of Emerson as an origin of fascist thought, the repeated insistence is that these can only be misreadings. F.O. Matthiessen’s foundational work, American Renaissance, first traced a genealogy from the center of American culture to European fascism in 1941. “Saadi became Zarathustra,” he wrote of the migration of Emerson to Europe, “the ideal man of self-reliant energy was transformed into the hard- willed Übermensch, whose image was again to be altered and degraded into the brutal man of Fascism.” 130 Matthiessen’s descent of Emersonian thought into fascist brutality cannily inserted Emerson into A.O. Lovejoy’s argument, delivered the year before, in “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas,” that fascism emerged from a constellation of romanticism’s interests in Eigentumlichkeit (diversitarianism), die Ganze (organicism), and Streben (dynamism or voluntarism) typified by Emerson’s disciple, Nietzsche—whom I will discuss in greater detail shortly. However, while Matthiessen recognized the global and transnational cultural diffusion that led to fascism, he still could only discuss Emerson’s implication in fascism as something that was a failure of Emerson’s readers: “the observable effects of Emerson’s green wine on natures less temperate than its maker’s” (Matthiessen, 365). There could not also be authoritarian tendencies in Emerson. 131 130 F.O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 365. Benedetta Zavatta notes the political implications of Matthiessen attempting to divorce Emerson from Nietzsche, suggesting he emphasizes “Emerson’s mild and gentle temperament and his innocent, childlike way of looking at the world as reasons enough to exclude any rapprochement between his thought and that of Nietzsche, seen by Matthiessen as the fanatical theorist of the Superman” Benedetta Zavatta, Individuality and Beyond; Nietzsche Reads Emerson, Trans. Alexander Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Ch. 1 en 22. 131 Matthiessen’s insistence on Emerson’s democratic sensibilities was very much in keeping with the priorities of Cold War America. For more on how this cultural climate informed Matthiessen’s American Renaissance see Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: 60 This same resistance to exploring in good faith what the fascists see in Emerson carries over to more recent scholars as well. Seventeen years later, in a 1958 survey on Emerson’s Italian reception, Rolando Anzilotti noted, “there was a moment in which Emerson risked becoming popular in Italy: the Fascist Era.” “Of course,” he added, “not for the right reasons.” 132 Beniamino Soressi, discussing Mussolini’s protofascist forerunner, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and his reading of Emerson, writes of his “radical corruptions”: “D’Annunzio and Mussolini’s selective sampling of Emerson missed his widest context and deepest presence, his “Over Soul.” 133 And, even Giorgio Mariani, whose work on this subject has been foundational for this chapter—and who himself questions Anzilotti’s “right reasons” quip—similarly affirms a specious and essential Emerson through his choice of verbs: “there is no doubt that while some critics might have found in Emerson an anticipation of the doctrine of the Superman, others understood quite well the democratic, potentially anti-Fascist implications of his thinking” (Mariani, 126, emphasis mine). And yet, Emerson’s work is famously contradictory. Eduardo Cadava likens Emerson’s prose to the weather, whose caprice, of course, is now cliché, in Emerson and the Climates of History: “like the weather, whose variable and unpredictable nature makes it difficult to circumscribe, the gestures of his writing…resist, from the very beginning, all our efforts to bring together or stabilize whatever we might call his ‘thought.’” 134 And, American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 132 “Forse ci fu un tempo in cui Emerson rischiò davvero di diventare popolare in Italia: il tempo fascista. Naturalmente no per le guste ragioni.”Rolando Anziolotti, “Emerson in Italia,”Rivista di letterature modern e comparate (Vol. 11), 79. 133 Beniamino Soressi, “Europe in Emerson and Emerson in Europe”. Mr. Emerson’s Revolution, Jean McClure Mudge ed.(Open Book Publishers, 2015), 364, 366. 134 Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1. 61 even at mid-century, during the heyday of Emerson as the poet and philosopher of the free American subject, Perry Miller, who insists on Emerson’s ultimate democratic sympathies, notes that Emerson’s conception of the natural necessity of great men positioned him “frequently on the point of making democratic naturalism signify an open, irreconcilable war between genius and democracy.” 135 There was, Miller writes, “everything in Emerson’s philosophy to turn him like Carlyle into a prophet of reaction and the leader- principle” (Miller 38). This is all to say that it also requires a certain squaring of Emerson’s thought to make him only into Harold Bloom’s “Mr. America,” the avatar of liberal individualism, bard of “the single self achieving a total autonomy, of becoming its own cosmos without first having to ingest either nature or other selves” (Bloom). As Cary Wolfe recently acknowledged in his contribution to The Other Emerson (2010)—a collection that, in many ways, consolidated the turn away from ideology critique to a focus on reparative reading in Emersonian studies—to read Emerson from within American Studies involves “a very familiar set of assumptions about politics—how it is related to questions of ethics and agency, how individuals are related to social institutions, and so on—that has been endemic to American studies and methodological commitments…almost since the inception.” 136 135 Perry Miller, “Emersonian Genius and American Democracy.” The New England Quarterly, 26:1, 36. 136 Cary Wolfe, “‘The Eye is the First Circle’: Emerson’s ‘Romanticism,’ Cavell’s Skepticism, Luhmann’s Modernity,” The Other Emerson. Ed. Branka Arsic and Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 275. Far from Jonathan Levin’s characterization of Emerson’s “pervasive formal or stylistic restlessness” as “a core dissatisfaction with all definite, definitive formulations, be they concepts, metaphors, or larger formal structures” that serves to suspend authority, I would suggest that Emerson’s philosophy establishes Nature as the great authority. Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism and American Literary Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), x. 62 But the recent turn to celebrating Emerson’s polyvocality and polyperspectivality as political in itself—particularly as practiced by new formalist approaches to Emerson— strikes me as politically naïve. 137 As Thomas Sorenson exemplifies in his recent Arizona Quarterly article, “Between Emerson and his Several Voices”, the political becomes a merely textual realm that does not reckon with the social as well as political world into which Emerson’s work must enter for its politics to matter. Sorenson writes, “Emerson teaches: his critical reception cannot afford to isolate what he writes from how he writes it.” 138 However, the critical reception also cannot afford to isolate the “how he writes” from the “where and when it is read”—an element crucially missing from Sorenson’s argument. Though Sorenson offers a nuanced reading of Emerson that shows how “we can no longer take for granted that the Emersonian self assimilates external realities into a unified, autocratic I” (Sorenson, 115), his new formalist belief that “a painstakingly detailed analysis of aesthetic form” can yield “the text’s political consequences” is misguided. Emerson’s politics do not inhere in the text, but in its readers’ response to it—which the text’s aesthetics only partially inform. Sorenson divulges only one of the many possibilities of Emerson’s work. I turn to history to highlight how these possibilities have become actualized. Italy’s reception of Emerson takes place within a larger European reception where Representative Men is his most popular work. As Gustavo Strafforello noted in 1884 in La letteratura americana, the first history of American literature to appear in Italy, while 137 One can see this tendency in the anthology The Other Emerson (2010), as well as Theo Davis, “Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity,” American Literary History (Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2019, 369-394. 138 Thomas Sorenson, “Between Emerson and his Several Voices,” Arizona Quarterly 76:4, Winter 2020, 115. 63 Emerson was not yet well known in Italy, he was very popular in England and Germany. 139 The first of his essays to be translated were the excerpted Essay über Goethe und Shakespeare from his Representative Men in 1857. His first series of Essays followed in 1858 (translated by G. Fabricus), while his second collection of Essays arrived in 1876, translated by Julian Schmitt (Stack, 42). Often called the “American Goethe,” he rose to prominence around the time of the appearance of Strafforello’s text because of growing interest in instinct and the irrational (Zavatta, 4). By the time Strafforello was writing his text, there had been three printings of The Conduct of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870) had already enjoyed two editions in Germany. It would be printed again in 1885. Between 1894 and 1907, 18 translations of Emerson’s work appeared, including a complete critical edition of his work in paperback published in 1903 to mark his centenary (Zavatta, fn 6, 7). By the turn of the century, Emerson and Mussolini stood together as part of an eclectic set of philosophy called “new humanism,” heralding a new man for the new century. In Germany, Emerson was broadly conceived as a philosopher of nature and instinct, as an antagonist to the philosophical Positivism and materialism that, carried forward as if by the turbines of the Industrial Revolution, had become the predominant philosophical ideologies (Zavatta, 4). 140 Regis Michaud framed Emerson in his 1910 Autor d’Emerson, as a preeminent philosopher of superiority (Zavatta, 5). Furthermore, the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck prefaced his edition of Representative Men— 139 Gustavo Strafforello, Letteratura americana (Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1884), 78. 140 Richard Hofstadter also includes Emerson alongside the figures Nietzsche, Sorel, and Bergson, as an “anti-rationalist” thinker in Anti-Intellectualism in our Time. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in our Time (New York: Library of America, 2020), 10. 64 which was to be translated into German—by suggesting Emerson illuminates “the science of human greatness…the strangest of sciences.” 141 While some writers of the period did note the relationship between Emerson and Nietzsche, their projects were grouped together even by figures who were unaware of the line of influence. 142 Yet, Emerson was an important—if not the most important—influence on Nietzsche, as George Stack has argued in Emerson and Nietzsche: an elective affinity (1992). “Emerson,” Nietzsche wrote in his notes “I have never in a book felt myself so much at home and in my home as—I dare not praise him.” 143 “In Emerson,” he wrote to Franz Overbeck on December 14, 1883, “I find a brother soul” (Stack, 60). 144 No other writer was so important to Nietzsche for so long, as Zavatta affirms (Zavatta, 195). Nietzsche rarely travelled without his copy of Emerson’s Essays (Stack, 44). Stack argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch “owes more to Emerson’s poetic-philosophical sketches of ‘transcendent’ human beings than it does to any other single cultural or intellectual source with which Nietzsche was familiar” (Stack, 8). What Stack refers to as Emerson’s “poetic-philosophical sketches” is nothing less than Emerson’s Representative Men. Indeed, he argues, with some brio: “The template for the image of a man-beyond-man was originally manufactured in America by Emerson” (Stack, 9). Stack traces Nietzsche’s Übermensch to Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” where Emerson calls for a new type of American scholar. In any case “both the Emersonian and the Nietzschean ‘superman’ were perceived at this time,” as Benedetta Zavatta writes of 141 Maurice Maeterlinck and Montrose Jonas Moses, On Emerson: And Other Essays (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912), 33. 142 For example, George Biedenkapp (1902) and Regis Michaud (1910) do link the two, though Biedenkapp is dismissive of an American’s capacity to philosophize. 143 George J. Stack, Emerson and Nietzsche: an elective affinity (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992), 44. 144 “ich Emerson wie eine Bruder-Seele empfinde.” (Stack, 60) 65 turn-of-the-century Europe, “as placing high value on force and strength, defending the primacy of instinct over reason, and adopting an affirmative attitude to war and to the values and virtues of the warrior” (Zavatta, 5). There is a strong strain in the reception of Emerson in Italy that follows this line as well, drawing out the elements of his work that emphasize natural hierarchy and mastery. Though some of the earliest responses to Emerson worry “he will guide humanity too much to contemplation,” by 1884, Strafforello presented Emerson as a figure who could reshape the world. In his La letteratura americana Strafforello described Emerson as “like Adam in Eden, who seeks to give his own names to what he sees.” 145 This invocation of Adam followed Emerson as a theorist of the United States and its new man. Around the turn of century, Emerson was discussed as a figure who incarnated the force of American culture and gave the nation its form—a philosopher of the future. By 1903, for example, Arnaldo Cervasato could write of Theodore Roosevelt, “the Roosevelt is a good student of Emerson…in his conception of individual duty and of the force with which every energy must be constantly tempered to be and affirm the highest works.” 146 And indeed, Emerson was becoming popular enough in Italy that, that same year, the positivist Ulisse Ortensi felt the need to attack him in “Letterati contemporanei: Emerson.” This critique of Emerson in a rival general interest magazine, Emporium, ridiculed Emerson’s mere irrationality. The oversoul, he writes, with biting irony, blighted Emerson’s work: “[it] passed over him, over cultivated fields, destroying and consuming everything. Neither supersoul (“super- 145 In 1847, Giuseppe Mazzini wrote to Margaret Fuller, “ma temo che egli guidi o guiderá l’umanità troppo alla contemplazione.” (Majo 45). Gustavo Strafforello: “come Adam nell’Eden, vuol dar lui I nomi suoi propri a quello che vede” (Strafforello, 79). 146 “il Roosevelt è ben scolaro dell’Emerson...nella concezione del dovere individuale e dello sforzo cui ogni energia deve esser di continuo temprata per essere e affermarsi nelle alte opere” Arnaldo Cervasato, La Nuova Parola, n. 6, giugno 1903. 66 anima”), nor super-man (“super-uomini”). They are the true nonsense of the history of human thought.” 147 As Ortensi criticized Emerson’s contradictions and spirituality, he insisted on Emerson’s relationship with Nietzsche, using the terms “super-anima” and “super-uomini” to describe Emerson’s “oversoul” and his representative or great men, a the latter a term which more commonly figured in Italian translations of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. 148 Nietzsche is an important figure in the Italian reception of Emerson not only because he carries forth the Emersonian tradition—in refracted form—but also because he becomes the means through which Italy reads Emerson. While Emerson might never have become truly popular in Italy until the Fascist period, Nietzsche, propelled forward by the zeal of the famous writer and influential antecedent to fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio, came into vogue in the 1890s. 149 The Emerson of late-nineteenth-century Italy, present both in Nietzsche and then read through the German philosopher, is thus a duplication and emphasis of Emerson’s interest in Representative Men, not always readily apparent in the canonized American tradition of reading him. Jeffrey Schnapp writes of Nietzsche’s “Italian style”, “the first Italian Nietzsche is not a philosopher, but a poet; the poet, in fact, of the pre-Fascist and Fascist eras” 147 “sopra campi coltivati, distruggando e rovinando tutti. né super-anima, né super-uomini. Sono I veri non-sensi della storia del pensiero umano” (Ortensi, Emporium, ottobre 1903) 148 My reception history of Emerson in Italy is heavily reliant on the cataloguing of Maria de Majo, “La Fortuna di Ralph Waldo Emerson in Italy (1847-1963)” Studi Americani. 12. 1966, 45-87; and Rolando Anzilotti, “Emerson in Italia,”Rivista di letterature modern e comparate. 69-80. 149 This is especially ironic because more of Emerson was translated into Italian than Nietzsche. However, D’Annunzio’s reading of Nietzsche in French ultimately resulted in an Italian vogue of the philosopher. Mario Sznajder. Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 240. 67 (“Nietzsche,” 249). 150 It is through this “Italian style,” a Nietzschean style, that Emerson then becomes read in Italy from the 1890s onward. One can see Nietzsche’s specter first arrived in Italy with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s “The Beast who Wills,” published in Il Mattino in the Sunday-Monday edition of September 25-6, 1892. It is in this article—where D’Annunzio calls for the rise of a poet from within the state to redeem it from decadence— that Nietzsche’s name is first mentioned in Italian literature; D’Annunzio’s appeal is couched “according to the doctrine of Friedrich Nietzsche.” 151 However, even in this article that bemoans “notions of good and evil as defined by slave morality” (D’Annunzio, 276) one can see how D’Annunzio’s Nietzsche returns Nietzsche to his source, Emerson. D’Annunzio, I should underscore, read Nietzsche and Emerson side by side. Even his extant library, which contains primarily works gathered after 1910, as his earlier library was then auctioned off, contains three volumes of Emerson’s work—Uomini Rappresentativi (1904), Les Forces Éternelles et Autres Essais (1912), and the 1917 pocket Italian translation, Eterne Forze—all of which are extensively dogeared; the full-sized volumes also contain many textual annotations. The signs that D’Annunzio was already reading Emerson as he wrote about Nietzsche are not hard to find. When D’Annunzio writes how “while Nature tends to multiply all differences without limit, Democracy tends instead to render all men equal: to imprint a precise stamp upon each soul as if upon a social implement, to manufacture human heads as if they were simply pinheads” (D’Annunzio, 274) he almost reproduces a quote from Emerson’s essay, “Politics” exactly. There, Emerson, disillusioned with the corruption and venality of the politics he witnessed, 150 Jeffrey Schnapp, “Nietzsche’s Italian Style: Gabriele D’Annunzio,” Nietzsche in Italy, Thomas Harrison, ed. (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1981), 249. 151 Gabriele D’Annunzio, “The Beast who Wills,” Nietzsche in Italy, Thomas Harrison, ed. (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1981), 276. 68 wrote, “nature is not democratic, nor limited monarchical, but despotic, and will not be foiled or abated of any jot of her authority, by the pertest of her sons” (Essays, 560). In that essay, Emerson imagines a politics that is the natural extension of Great Men, founded on “a sufficient belief in the unity of things” (Essays, 570). Arguing against the idea that “laws make the city,” he declares “the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen” (Essays, 559). In other words, “governments have their origin in the moral identity of men” (Essays, 566). Or to put it another way, the State must form through the character of the Great Men, Nature’s deputies. In “The Beast who Wills,” however, D’Annunzio grounds his future poet in the “founding law of Nature,” which is “force”: The world can only be founded on force, no less in times of civilization than in primeval epochs. Nature is unjust. We are the products of this Nature. As a result, we are unable to aspire to justice, rebelling against our very origin. (D’Annunzio, 275) Even as D’Annunzio seemingly enters a more Nietzschean vein, prophesizing a “new aristocracy…beyond good and evil” where “mankind will be divided into two races…the superior race, lifted up by the sheer energy of its will” and “ the inferior race” will deserve “little or close to nothing,” Emerson can still be heard. As Emerson writes in “American Scholar,” men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is, to say,—one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,—ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. (Essays, 66) Emerson’s attitude lies there entwined even in D’Annunzio’s proclamation of Nietzsche. Three months later in Il Mattino on January 30-31, D’Annunzio recalls Emerson’s “The Poet,” explicitly invoking Emerson to place the poet at the center of society—as the “representative man”: “The artists of the future…will be the representative men, to use 69 Emerson’s phrase: they will be, like Leonardo, the exemplar interpreters and messengers of their time” (Soressi, 363). His Il trionfo della morte (1894) (The Triumph of Death) meditates on Nietzsche’s Übermensch—its preface announces, “we prepare in art with secure faith the coming of the Übermensch, the Superman”—and is filled with recurrent images of the masses that repulse his great man of a protagonist. D’Annunzio’s gaze, though, steadily fixates on politics. Six years later, in 1899, D’Annunzio conceived the people to be waiting for the poet to assume authority: “The people are thirsty for poetry, they wait for the poet, the great dramatic poet, as a liberator. The future belongs to the poets” (Soressi, 364). D’Annunzio’s idea of the poet as the representative man also suggests a way in which the representative man rewrites his world and the people he represents. “A man is a god in ruins,” Emerson’s orphic poet writes: Man is a dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. (Essays, 45-6) Translating this poetic credo into the political, D’Annunzio thus envisioned the “poet- Duce,” where the poe t would not only redescribe the world imaginatively but also in deed. This, of course, will not ultimately be D’Annunzio’s task but that of Mussolini. Mussolini received D’Annunzio’s Nietzsche to an extent. 152 As Mussolini wrote in his long 1908 article about Nietzsche, “La Filosofia della Forza,” “for some time the artists of every country, from Ibsen to D’Annunzio, have followed Nietzsche’s footprints,” so did 152 See also Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich eds., Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 70 Mussolini follow D’Annunzio. 153 Naming Nietzsche “the recognized leader of these new men” and “the most discussed man of our day,” Mussolini describes “the Nietzschean hero” in the similar terms as D’Annunzio’s new aristocracy: “the wise and implacable warrior.” 154 His reading of Nietzsche also focuses on the two classes of man: “the superman—who will overcome man like man has overcome the ape—will have to fight against two enemies: the masses and God.” 155 And yet, it should be noted that Mussolini does end his discussion of Nietzsche by retreating into the realm of the aesthetic. He declares the Übermensch “a symbol…the representative of this distressing and tragic period of crisis that the European conscience is going through in the search for new sources of pleasure, beauty, and ideals.” The superman, he writes, “is the acknowledgment of our weakness, but also at the same time the hope for our redemption…the dawn.” 156 In 1908, Mussolini was still a socialist journalist. While he obviously admired Nietzsche, he had not yet appointed himself the bringer of the dawn to a decadent Europe. One can presume that Mussolini also learned of Emerson from D’Annunzio. It is certain that throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Mussolini publicly professed a special affection for Emerson. In a 1927 interview with Fredericka V. Blankner in Forum, he declared, somewhat patronizingly, “the United States has already given us great minds,” 153 “Per qualche tempo gli artisti di tutti i paesi, da Ibsen a D’Annunzio, hanno seguito le orme Nietzschiane.” Benito Mussolini, Il Mio Socialismo (Firenze: La Fenice, 1983), 35. 154 “Nietzsche è…l’uomo più discusso dei giorni nostri…l’eroe Nietzschiano il guerriero saggio e implacabile” (Il Mio, 38). 155 Ma il superuomo — questo essere che «supererà» l’uomo come l’uomo ha «superato» la scimmia — dovrà combattere contro due nemici: la Plebe e Dio.” (Il Mio, 48) 156 “Il superuomo è un simbolo, è l’esponente di questo periodo angoscioso e tragico di crisi che attraversa la coscienza europea nella ricerca di nuove fonti di piacere, di bellezza, d’ideale. È la constatazione della nostra debolezza, ma nel contempo la speranza della nostra redenzione. È il tramonto — è l’aurora. E soprattutto un inno alla vita — alla vita vissuta con tutte le energie in una tensione continua verso qualche cosa di più alto, di più fino, di più tentatore...” (Il Mio, 49). 71 opening his list with “‘Emerson,’ (pronounced with perfect accent in the midst of energetic Italian)” before listing “Longfellow, Mark Twain, Edison.” 157 Similarly, in a 1926 radio address, he lauded the “spiritual activity” of the United States visible in “the glories of Longfellow, Cooper, Whitman, Emerson, Poe, London, Twain, James.” 158 Furthermore, his attending physician attested to conversations between the two of them “on Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Emerson and other philosophers” (Soressi, 365). Whatever the exact provenance of Mussolini’s knowledge of Emerson, under his regime Emerson was endorsed and heavily translated. 159 Representative Men was issued as three distinct translations between 1922 and 1943—twice as a new translation; it remains the period of time when Emerson’s text was most translated into Italian. In 1927 Guido Ferrando produced the first translation under Fascism in his Rappresentativi Uomini. Two years later, in 1929, Maria Pastore Mucchi’s 1904 translation was reissued. Then, in 1934, Angiolo Biancotti’s translation came out, Gli Rappresentativi Uomini—the addition of the “Gli” itself indicating a certain elitism (“The Representative Men”). Biancotti’s 1934 translation of Representative Men represents the apotheosis of this tendency to emphasize natural mastery—the dominance of this new man—in Emerson’s thought. Where Mussolini had declared fascism “an aristocracy of thought and deed,” Angiolo Biancotti called Emerson’s philosophy “a true aristocracy…of thought, dominated 157 Fredericka Blankner, “Ourselves and Italy: An Interview with Benito Mussolini,” Forum, May 1927, 641. 158 “Duce Greets America Over W-G-N Radio.” Chicago Daily Tribune. Dec. 15, 1926. Proquest. 159 With Fascist educational reforms having added Emerson to its official reading lists, three separate texts of Emerson’s writing for high school students were released. In 1931 alone La presenza di Dio (God’s Presence), Lorenzo Brezzo’s R.W. Emerson: Three Essays, and Giuseppe Marino’s translation of Emerson’s “Napoleon” were published (Mariani, 129). Further testament to his popularity was that Il libro dei Mille savi (“The Book of a Thousand Sages”) included more quotes of Emerson than any other non-Italian but Victor Hugo and William Shakespeare (Mariani, 130 fn 8). 72 always by a conception of the total predominance of the Oversoul, of the Hero, of the Representative Man, of the Superman.” 160 He describes this figure as “the one who thinks for all, directs the vacillating will, simplifies the chaos that is in us into a few definitive lines” (Biancotti, 32). 161 Reading Emerson thus through Nietzsche Biancotti offers a condensation of Emersonianism’s emphasis on the great man. The book’s very name, Representative Men, is commonly considered Emerson’s democratic rejoinder to On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840) by the committed monarchist Thomas Carlyle. 162 As Perry Miller argues, Emerson levels genius: “the genius is great not because he surpasses but because he represents his constituency.” 163 However, Biancotti, suggesting the “adjective, representative” is, per John Stuart Mill, usually a “syllogistic sofism,” argues rather that representation demands superiority: “he is no representative who wants to be or who we want to be. One must be distinctly superior to represent something.” 164 Biancotti’s reading of Emerson has rarely received close attention because its rhetoric is overblown—and it does contain some minor biographical errors about Emerson. As Anzilotti dismisses the translation in his article, “it does not seem very successful; and the long introduction is inaccurate (the father of Emerson is said to die on the day of the 160 R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157; Angiolo Biancotti, “Introduzione,” Gli Rappresentativi Uomini (Turin, 1944), 31. 161 “Ecco dunque sorgere la necessità dell’Uno che pensi per tutti, indirizzi le volontà vacillanti, semplifichi il Caos che è in noi, in poche line definitive, almeno per un certo periodico, ein determinate circostanze e disicpline 162 For a cameo reading that exemplifies this tendency see Nolan Bennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 108-109. 163 Perry Miller, “Emersonian Genius and American Democracy.” The New England Quarterly, 26:1, 42. 164 “Non e rappresentativo chi vuole esserlo e chi desideriamo che lo sia. Bisogna essere nettamente superiori per rappresentare qualcosa. L’opera rappresenta l’abbozzo che il genio acresce sviluppandola.” (Biancotti 30) 73 birth of the writer, May 25, 1803) and quite confused.” 165 However, Biancotti’s explication of the fascist possibilities of the “representative man” is hardly the outlier that Anzilotti, writing in 1958, and still very much under the shadow of the Fascist regime, would like to suggest that is. Biancotti’s reading, though more extreme than most, picks up on an element that American scholars have recognized, even if the field of American Studies and the subfield of Emersonian studies rarely investigated it in a sustained manner. Even Anzilotti’s contemporary, Perry Miller, notes there was “everything in Emerson’s philosophy to turn him like Carlyle into a prophet of reaction and the leader-principle” (Miller, 38). Though Miller’s 1953 article, “Genius and American Democracy” did flag Emerson’s struggle with and seduction by the desire for organic authority, during the Cold War the topic was generally not of interest for the discipline of American Studies that sought to use culture to explain the United States’ democratic impulses. Maintaining American exceptionalism, the field largely shied away from this topic of inquiry. It is perhaps, then, little surprise that attention to the troubling position of authority in Emerson’s thought returned with the end of the Cold War and the renewed engagement of ideology critique in the nineteen-nineties. While authority is not the focus of Cary Wolfe’s The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson (1993)—it is an investigation of private property as the central organizing structure in the work of Emerson and Pound—he does recognize the potential in Emerson for domination. For Wolfe, Emerson’s spiritualism alleviates “the disturbing possibilities for practice contained in the ideology of Emerson,” which Wolfe 165 “Non ci sembra molto felice; e la lunga introduzione e inesatta (il padre di Emerson vien fatto morire il giorno della nasci dello scrittore, 25 maggio 1803) e piuttosto confuse” (Anzilotti, 78). 74 understands Pound’s fascism to actualize. 166 Wolfe locates a paradox in Emerson— between complete subsumption in Nature and radical individuality. The threat of the individual self to constantly be subsumed by nature creates the possibility for an eruption of violence to police the self’s boundaries: “one way for the radically atomistic individual not to be so isolated and alienated is to enforce its truth as the truth for all selves, to build, through material practice, a world adequate to itself” (Limits, 228). This is what Wolfe sees as Pound’s credo that leads him to fascism: the enforcement of a singular truth. However, Wolfe understands Emerson’s spiritualism to protect him from ever endorsing such a vision. Emerson’s work goes to what Wolfe sees as the limit of American literary ideology. While Wolfe’s text gestures at the fascist possibilities of Emerson, it thus remains blinkered by a certain American exceptionalism that conceives fascism as beyond the limit of American literary ideology. Christopher Newfield also recognizes this problem that Wolfe engages. However, he reframes Emerson’s spiritualism as an attempt to safeguard insecure personhood through a corporate conception of individualism in his Emerson Effect (1996). Emerson, for Newfield, sees the individual not as “isolated or autonomous but…dependent upon a system of forces,” a node within a network of force that can make man ready for authoritarianism. 167 For Newfield, Emerson’s “reconciliation” of the competing tendencies at the heart of liberal individualism—“private freedom and public order, liberty and union”—ends up reducing all and producing a corporate individual, with paradoxically both greater freedom and less control, always-already submissive. He is “submissive,” as 166 Cary Wolfe, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Emerson and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 8. 167 Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5. 75 Newfield puts it, “without having a discrete superior to make submission obvious” (Newfield, 38). Emerson’s individual is always submissive to his nature—to the force of nature: his genius. This poses a conceptual problem that John Carlos Rowe engages in At Emerson’s Tomb. Rowe’s argument extends in certain ways that of Newfield, highlighting how Emerson’s “self-reliance” and his “representative man” stand opposed to each other. This conflict is at the center of the paradox that preoccupies Rowe, how Emerson’s seeming progressivism contrasts with his twentieth-century legacy, wherein his ideology has justified reactionary causes. Rowe highlights how Emerson’s ideology either results in constantly sparring individual interests, or the singular rule of the “representative man,” who manifests the general will. Reflecting on Emerson’s desire for action on slavery in “American Civilization,” where Emerson writes, “I wish I saw in the people that inspiration which, if Government would not obey the same, would leave the Government behind and create on the moment the means and executors it wanted,” Rowe sees a Schmittian declaration of sovereignty. He writes, in this instance, “Emerson carries this second option to an extreme that verges on fascism. 168 168 John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 36. Donald Pease has critiqued Rowe’s argument because he finds that Rowe’s opposition between “self-reliance” and the “representative man” assumes that Emerson’s “self-reliance was interchangeable with the possessive individual who was the constituent subject of the discourse to which [he] made it conform” (“Experience,” 136-7). Pease opposes to what he see as Rowe’s reading of the unified liberal subject in Emerson, the call of “genius,” which becomes that which interrupts “the processes of identification, interpellation, and internalization associated with liberal institutions” (“Experience," 137). However, while Pease conceives Emerson’s “genius” as working against liberal institutions, the idea that nature unsettles, or even dominates the individual self hardly contravenes the main drive of Rowe’s contention. Rather, it offers an extension of Rowe’s argument in that Emerson’s thought not only can endorse a certain Schmittian sovereign during moments of exceptional crisis, but also that his very concept of genius yokes the individual to a dominating force. Genius might interrupt, but it can also dominate. Donald E. Pease, “‘Experience,’ Antislavery, and the 76 Indeed, I venture that contrary to Newfield’s argument, Emerson’s writing does slyly postulate an embodied superior to the always-already individual: the Great Man, the naturally-emerging genius. Emerson’s writing privileges the Great Man as the ultimate expression of nature, that is, the Romantic Genius. It is a short distance, I argue, from being submissive to nature to being submissive to nature’s privileged emissary—the Great Man. 169 Or rather, Emerson sees the qualities of great men extending over the populace in “The Uses of Great Men”: “this is the key to the power of the greatest men,—their spirit diffuses itself” (Essays, 631). I will close this section of the chapter by examining considering Representative Men, in particular the essay on Napoleon, a privileged text in Fascist Italy, where it was a recommended text for high school English and philosophy classes. It is a text wherein Emerson offers a figuration of organic authority and corporate personhood that lends itself as a form for Mussolini’s fascist state. However, before I discuss Emerson’s essay on Napoleon, I wish to touch on Emerson’s organicist conception of Nature which undergirds it. Emerson’s repeated desire is for nature to speak itself. Emerson’s idea of language argues for a correspondence and immediacy with nature: “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language, new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which Crisis of Emersonianism” in The Other Emerson. Ed. Branka Arsic and Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 137. 169 In considering Emerson’s concept of nature and the Great Man as naturalizing fascist authority, it is worthwhile to hold in mind Herbert Marcuse’s argument that “liberalism…‘produces’ the total-authoritarian state out of itself, as its own consummation at a more advanced stage of development.” Emerson’s thought exemplifies the easy slippage between the natural laws on which liberalism stakes its authority and the irrational naturalism of fascism, where “nature, as original, is simultaneously the natural, genuine, healthy, valuable, and sacred.” In this context “that which is beneath reason elevates itself, by means of its function ‘beyond good and evil’, to what is beyond reason.” Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (MayFly, 2009), 13, 3,3. 77 are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.” In other words, a healthy society recognizes the “immediate dependence of language upon nature” (Essays, 22). Emerson exemplifies this in “Self-Reliance,” where he envisions the correspondence as an “iron string” in “Trust thyself! Every heart vibrates to that iron string.” As Emerson continues, “no law can be sacred to me but that of my nature” (Essays, 262). This statement of seeming individualism rather constrains all to follow natural law, as Newfield posits. The individual wills only that which his nature enables him to, only what Nature wills. In his Essays: Second Series, Emerson repeatedly argues for how Nature is the ultimate arbiter of existence. In this collection’s “Nature,” he writes of how humans “cannot bandy words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny” (Essays, 554). Rather, he argues that humans can find the capabilities of nature within them by “instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel the soul of the workman stream through us” (554). For Emerson, there should be a transparence between actor and nature. This is the content of his famous fantasy of the “transparent eye” in Nature. Great Men, for Emerson, also take form in this transparence. In “The Method of Nature,” Emerson suggests that Great Men are the formal extension of Nature. “A man,” he writes, “a personal ascendency is the only great phenomenon. When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it” (Essays, 123). Refashioning Carlyle’s concept of “the Great Man…as lightning out of Heaven,” Emerson positions the Great Man as 78 Nature’s emissary: “the channel through which heaven flows to earth” (Essays, 125). 170 He is the means by which Spirit enters the world. As Emerson writes in “The Divinity School Address,” “the man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach” (83). Yet, Spirit only chooses a select few. Emerson reiterates this thought in “Character,” the essay from which Nietzsche drew his idea of the Zarathustra, “I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world” (506). Indeed, Emerson understands greatness as a natural quality: “He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others” (617). Thus natural, to be great is to have accepted one’s specific place within the natural ecosystem: “is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed” (617). The representative man’s representativeness is further rooted and, indeed, racialized by Emerson’s engagement with the vocabulary of botany as he likens the great man to a purebred fruit: “a sound apple produces seed,—a hybrid does not.” Only then can man be “a centre for nature, running out threads of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, material and elemental” (Essays, 618). The Great Man is a natural phenomenon—an extension and representation of nature’s will—that gives human history form. 171 170 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), 77. 171 Allied to this praise of the Great Man is a certain disgust for the mass. Even as Emerson insists on there being no such thing as the common man, he still writes, “enormous populations are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas” (Essays, 615). Emerson describes the common man in terms of insecthood, the bugs he has previously so abjected. Urging his audience to “be another” in Representative Men, Emerson orders his audience: “serve the great…be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth” (629). He argues that this service will eventually result in individuation and independence—just like a “wheel-insect…becomes two perfect animals” (629). Yet, even if they can learn from a Great Man, they seem unable to leave behind their essential being of lesser animality. As Emerson writes in the final essay of Representative Men, on Goethe, the “wheel-insect” is the least sophisticated of all beings: 79 However, while the Great Man emerges from nature, Emerson’s vision of this naturally occurring figure is underwritten, as Toni Morrison reveals in Playing in the Dark, by the material practices of slavery and colonization that enabled and structured the existence of the United States. 172 Napoleon is Emerson’s new American given an army. “The self-reliant Napoleon conquered Europe,” notes Lawrence Buell, perhaps obscuring the imposition of the will involved in this procedure, “by instilling Self-Reliance in his soldiers.” Or, perhaps, better put, the concept of self-reliance carries with it the traces of the colonial and slaveholding practices against which it was constructed. It is a concept of it is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures: the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. (Essays, 761) 172 For Emerson, the place of man is bound up with his race. As Morrison famously has argued, the elaboration of the new white man, the new American, only can occur “backgrounded by savagery” (Playing, 44); this gleaming ideal maintains an Africanist presence as its shadow. Indeed, though Representative Men does not elaborate as fully Emerson’s ideas on race as his later English Traits, race is an unavoidable element of Emerson’s men of genius. As Emerson writes of Swedenborg, he was not only “Born into an atmosphere of great ideas” but emerges from a “a race of athletic philosophers (667). In his discussion of Montaigne, Emerson writes, “the word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind in all ages,” before suggesting that Race functions as a synonym: “What can I do against the influence of Race, in my history?” (705). This approach, later expanded more fully in “Fate,” accords with Emerson’s own writings in his journals, which, as Cornell West shows, are littered with moments where he affirms the superiority of the white race. For example, around the time he was writing nature, he had in mind a clear racial hierarchy: “Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance” (West 29). Furthermore, as Emerson writes about these geniuses, we should remember how he sarcastically comments in his journal about African-Americans vulgarizing the term, “I notice that Words are as much governed by Fashion as dress, both in written & spoken style. A Negro said of another today ‘that's a curious genius.’” (Emerson in His Journals, 44). Whereby white men could be geniuses, that was not a word for African-Americans to bandy about—or rather, as Cornell West notes, the fact of their use showed how much it had degraded from denoting the men of whom Emerson writes (West 29). 80 will predicated on the domination of the others—the capacity to bend others to one’s will. 173 Napoleon, Emerson tells us, is “never weak and literary” but rather “acts with the solidity and precision of natural agents.” Emerson describes Napoleon as “a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops” (730), who is, in a section that Gabriele D’Annunzio marks in red, “not merely representative, but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds” (728). He thus acts not from without but from within his people—as the force that moves them. For Emerson, Napoleon’s greatness lies in “the extraordinary unity of his action” (Essays, 732), which emerges from his intimate and inextricable relation with the people he governs. In one passage that D’Annunzio marks, Emerson quotes Napoleon approvingly as a fully integrated being. “‘My hand of iron,’ he said, ‘was not at the extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my head.” 174 To express this relation Emerson employs an analogy to the body that fixes Napoleon and his subjects in organic relation: Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best known, and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg’s theory, that every organ is made up of homogenous particles; or, as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of 173 For example, D’Annunzio marks in the introduction of Les Forces Éternelles, this quote from “Self-Reliance,” “Mais ainsi—vous causerez peut-être de la douleur á vos amis? — Oui, mais je ne puis vendre ma liberté et ma puissance pour épargner leur sensibilité.” [But in this, would you perhaps cause pain to your friends ? Yes, I cannot sell my liberty and my power to spare their sensibility.] (K. Johnston, “Introduction,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Les Forces Eternelles et Autres Essais Trans. K. Johnston (Paris : Mercure de France, 1912), 20). “But Christopher Soressi suggests that D’Annunzio’s enthusiasm for this fragment of “Self Reliance” underwrites his later catch phrase “Ma ne frego” (“But I don’t care”), which became a fascist rallying cry (Soressi 363). Not to make an anachronistic leap, but one can see this notion of refusing to compromise one’s own liberty as animating the contemporary alt-right as well. 174 “‘La mia mano di ferro’ diceva, ‘non era all’estremità del mio braccio; era immediatamente unita all amia testa’” (Uomini Rappresentativi trans. Maria Pastore Mucchi. 200) D’Annunzio marks this on the left-hand side with a red line. 81 similars; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, &c. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, is it because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons. (Essays, 732) Emerson here propounds an explicit organicist understanding of politics and the state, wherein the state is understood as a living relationship between ruler and ruled. In this configuration Emerson transforms Thomas Carlyle’s doctrine of ethical submission of low to high into a natural relationship that fixes the people in unchangeable relation to their representative. Where Carlyle holds that “no nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man” (Carlyle, 11), Emerson naturalizes this domination and subservience in an organic relationship. Every “whole” might be “made of similars,” but it is the “whole” that gives its name to all the “similars” of which it is made. Furthermore, Emerson’s conception of Napoleon, though explicitly indebted to Swedenborg, also owes something to Abbé Sieyes, who articulated the political-theoretical rationale for the revolution that ultimately brought Napoleon to power, and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, which Emerson’s description of Napoleon also echoes. This idea of the nation state incarnated in a person owes itself to the combination of these two figures. Hobbes’s “unity of the representer—that is, the sovereign” becomes, as Richard Wokler writes, the modern mandate “that the represented—that is, the people as a whole—be a moral person as well.” 175 In this condition, the “populace,” writes Wokler no longer “have any political identity except as articulated through its representatives, who by procuration had been granted authority to speak for the electorate as a whole” (Wokler, 176). 175 Robert Wokler, “The Enlightenment, the Nation-state and the Primal Patricide of Modernity,” Enlightenment and Modernity, Ed. Norman Geras and Robert Wokler (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 178. 82 Yet, as Wokler warns, this condition of speech means that the electorate has no voice—the organ of speech lies with the representative. Indeed, Mussolini describes himself and great men who he sees to also be practicing “superstatesmanship” like himself, as My Autobiography calls it, with the Emerson’s rhetoric about Napoleon. In a 1917 speech, he describes the task of fascism in terms that echo Emerson’s description of Napoleon as a worker of men: The Italian people is a mass of precious mineral. One needs to mold it, to smelt it, to work it. A work of art is still possible. One needs a government, a man, a man who has, when it is necessary, the delicate touch of the artist, the hard hand of the warrior. 176 Similarly in a 1920 article, Mussolini uses the same turn of phrase to consider Lenin as a great man: “Lenin is an artist who has worked with human beings as other artists work with marble and metals.” 177 Emerson’s organicized conception of Napoleon as composed of “little Napoleons,” like a liver is composed of little livers, prefigures fascist theories of representation. Emerson’s conception of identical organs all the way down is repeated in Schmitt’s concept of the fascist sovereign in State, Movement, People. In describing “the new triadic image of the whole political unity,” brought about by Hitler’s Machgreifung on February 9, 1933, Schmitt notes that the conditions he theorizes are “recognizable in the State of the German National-Socialist Movement, as it is in the Fascist State” (Schmitt, 13). Describing the conditions that allow for a lawful fascist leader, rather than an arbitrary tyrant, he emphasizes “both the continuing unerring contact between leader and following as well as their reciprocal loyalty are based on identity of species.” In another translation, this passage 176 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000) 221, fn 17. 177 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol. 15 (Florence: La Fenice, 1951-1963), 93. 83 reads as “an absolute ethnic identity between leader and following” (Schmitt, 48). In both cases, there is a shared biological identity—also present in Emerson’s conception of Napoleon. Marcuse describes this as zoological, while Agamben writes, “his power is…the all the more unlimited insofar as he is identified with the very biological life of the German people.” 178 For Agamben, this is a break with Hobbesian conceptions of the King as Leviathan: Here the traditional distinction between the sovereign’s political body and his physical body…disappears, and the two bodies are drastically contracted into one. The Führer has, so to speak, a whole body that is neither private nor public and whose life is in itself supremely political. (Agamben, 184) Indeed, so is Emerson’s Napoleon presented as “the unity that unifies the parts, a unity which is the precondition for the fulfillment and completion of each part” (Marcuse, 13). It is a question of how Emerson’s conceit works “if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, is it because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.” It is not that Napoleon is a big Jean, but rather that they are a little him. It is Napoleon who gives his name to “little Napoleons,” the liver whose name redescribes the organs that compose it. This theory of the leader’s representativeness recurs in Giovanni Gentile’s Origins and Doctrine of Fascism. Gentile, the leading philosopher of Italian fascism, describes the fascist state as “a democratic state par excellence”: Every citizen shares a relationship with the State that is so intimate that the State exists insofar as it is made to exist by the citizen, Thus, its formation is a product of the consciousness of each individual, and thus of the masses, in which the power of the State consists. (Origins, 28). For Gentile, the State is then embodied by Mussolini such that “the thought and will of the solitary person the Duce becomes the thought and the will of the masses” (Gentile, Origins, 178 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 184. 84 29). Where Schmitt had insisted on species unity, an organicist relationship, Gentile affirms a similarly organicist relationship between the leader and the masses whom he represents. Fascism becomes another name for democracy, wherein the leader represents the people because his will is intimately and inextricably intwined with theirs. Emerson’s Napoleon becomes a natural phenomenon who emerges inevitably from Europe’s elemental being; possessing both “mineral and animal force,” Napoleon, in a line marked by D’Annunzio, “combined the natural and intellectual power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher” (Essays, 730). 179 Here, Emerson’s desire in “The Uses of the Great Man” to “know the meaning of our economies and politics” is answered. Where in that essay, Emerson demands, “Give us the cipher, and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, lest us read off the strains,” Napoleon produces and makes legible his own meaning. Emerson seeks that nature speak for itself. In “The Uses of Great Men,” Emerson writes how “man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason” (Essays, 619). Emerson’s desire that “unpublished nature will have its whole secret told” is realized in Napoleon, who is nature personified, writing itself into history. Similarly, Mussolini’s My Autobiography is an autobiography that takes such an approach to its subject. As his lover and biographer, Margaret Sarfatti writes of the dictator: His eloquence, resembling the bulletins of Napoleon, is not that of a man of letters, accustomed to seek at his writing-table the nuances of expression. He is a true man 179 “Ma Bonaparte aggiunge a questa forza minerale ed animale, l’intuizione e la generalizzazione, così che gli uomini videro in lui combinate la Potenza naturale e la Potenza intellettuale, come se il mare e la terra avessero preso carne e si fossero messi a calcolare” (Tr. Mucchi, Uomini, 199). D’Annunzio underlines “animale” and then on the right-hand side, marks the passage in red on the right with an underscoring forming an “x” with this sideline and underscoring “forza minerale.” 85 of action, living through in his own experience the experiences of history and touching the heart of a people through its imagination. 180 Where in this section, I have discussed the context in which Mussolini read Emerson, as well as excavated the images of fascist authority in Emerson’s work, in the next section I will discuss how Mussolini’s My Autobiography returns Emersonianism as Fascism to the United States. “The movement and its leader are one” “The reality of experience is far more eloquent than all the theories and philosophies on all the tongues and on all the shelves.” 181 On May 5, 1928, the voice of Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke to millions of American readers from an unlikely source in The Saturday Evening Post: the first chapter of Benito Mussolini’s serialized autobiography. Not only did this first installment implicitly ground its authority in the promise of relating the Italian Fascist’s lived “reality of experience,” but also mediated its narrative of the dictator’s rise to power through Emersonian refrains. Even the title of this subsection, “the Book of Life,” echoes Emerson’s declaration in “The American Scholar” that “life is our dictionary” (Essays, 61). As Emerson wrote in that essay, “books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made” (Essays, 62). However, while life might be a dictionary, Fanny Butcher of the Chicago Tribune encountered few of its words in Mussolini’s bound book, released by Charles Scribner & Sons in October 1928—only “cold politics…a clammy subject.” Her review addresses “those who have been waiting tremblingly for Mussolini’s autobiography,” warning them 180 Margherita Sarfatti, Life of Benito Mussolini (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), 302. 181 Benito Mussolini, “Youth,” The Saturday Evening Post, 5 May 1928, 118.. 86 that if they “have an idea that it will tell them anything about Mussolini the man, they may as well be disillusioned immediately.” For her, the promise of lived experience, suggested by its title, My Autobiography, is specious. “Mussolini,” she argues, “has not in any sense written an autobiography.” The book is, rather, only propaganda—“an official document.” “Assured an enormous circulation, through its publication in a weekly magazine,” Butcher writes, “[Mussolini] seized a unique opportunity of stating his case to the world.” The emphasis of her review is that it “might better have been called the autobiography of Fascism, for it is the story of that movement alone, and the movement and its leader are one.” 182 Where Mussolini declares he sings Emersonian experience, Butcher cries propaganda. The source of the trembling of “those who have been waiting tremblingly for Mussolini’s autobiography” lies at the center of this chapter as well as considerations of the United States’ relation to Mussolini and fascism more generally. Is the U.S. public shaken from without, manipulated into accepting fascism dressed up as something else? Or do these tremors reveal fascist desire welling up from within U.S. culture? Of course, one way of thinking about this text’s arrival in the United States is to emphasize how it was produced with an American audience in mind. As John Diggins has argued: By a curious process of human perception, self-projection of native values, and journalistic adulation, Americans re-made Benito Mussolini into the image and likeness of their own domestic heroes. The story of Mussolini’s popular acceptance in America is, unfortunately, a study of how to make respectable a dictator to a democratic people. 183 182 Fanny Butcher, “‘My Autobiography’ by Mussolini is story of Fascism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 27, 1928, 17. 183 John Diggins, “Mussolini and America: Hero-Worship, Charisma, and the ‘Vulgar Talent,’” The Historian, 28:4, 584-5. 87 However, as I have shown, the figure of Mussolini emerged already in conversation with the idea of the “representative man.” The figure of Mussolini who arrives in the United States might indeed be a creation of public relations and advertising, but he was always- already an American concept. Even as Butcher cries propaganda, she cannot help but treat Mussolini in the mold of the Emersonian figure. Mussolini, she suggests, is never only himself, but inextricable from his movement; his autobiography, she criticizes and confirms, is an autobiography of fascism. Indeed, the autobiography is truly a biography written by his movement—the production of his brother, Arnaldo, Margherita Sarfatti (his sometime lover and author of his biography, Dux), and Richard Washburn Child, former American ambassador to Italy. Examining the reception of My Autobiography in 1928, I show how it not only performs the idea of Mussolini, in his conception of the new man of Fascism, as a representative man, but also, in the corporatism of the autobiography, returned the imbrication of individual and nation that Sacvan Bercovitch conceived as typically American as conducive to Fascism: “the celebration of the representative self as America, and of the American self as the embodiment of a prophetic universal design.” 184 First we must begin with the genesis of the book. It not only reflects the organicist conception of Emerson’s Napoleon thematically, as I will show, but also in the very mode of its creation. In presenting itself as an autobiography it lays claim to that interrelation of private and public that Emerson notes in Napoleon, wherein he is so intimately bound up with his people that their very physical bodies are entangled. My Autobiography, as mentioned earlier was ghostwritten by Mussolini’s brother, Arnaldo, with help from Margherita Sarfatti, and the former American Ambassador, Richard Washburn Child, who 184 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 136. 88 also translated the text and provided the foreword. By claiming to be the autobiography of Mussolini, rather than his official biography, these figures abdicated their independence from Mussolini. Rather than a simple act of ghostwriting, they become, by writing as him, little Mussolinis, to recall Emerson’s description of Napoleon’s relationship with his subjects. They write as if they were him—truly taking up their position as part of the organic body of the fascist state. He, in turn, writes through them and rewrites them. The autobiography similarly insists on this relationship between fascist leader, movement, and state. Mussolini argues that his autobiography and the history of the nation are inextricable. Situating himself opposed to Italy’s liberals, a group he considers but a “shrewd organizer of political schemes,” 185 he insists on how his plans emerge from within the Italian people. “In this, my Autobiography,” Mussolini writes, “I have emphasized more than once the fact that I have always tried to weave an organic and coherent character into all the fabric of my political work” (Autobiography, 282). He argues that his actions are not his own alone: It is absurd to suppose that I and my life can be separate from that which I have been doing and am doing. The creation of the Fascist state and the passing of the hungry moments from sunrise to the deep profundity of night with its promise of another dawn eager for new labors, cannot be picked apart. I am lock-stitched into this fabric. It and myself are woven into one. Other men may find romance in the fluttering of the leaves on a bough; as for me, whatever I might have been, destiny and my own self have made me one whose eyes, ears, whose every sense, every thought, whose entire time, entire energy must be directed at the trunk of the tree of public life. (Autobiography, 241) His autobiography, he suggests, in relating his political life thus becomes a romance of Italy, a foundational fiction of the fascist state that is coming into being. In Ethnic Modernism, Werner Sollors considers My Autobiography as a type of “coming-to-America” immigration narrative. Sollors emphasizes how it fulfills the generic 185 Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 137. 89 expectations of an immigration story: hardscrabble start, a formation through dedicated work and travel, and then ultimate success in a new land. “Was Fascism simply one way of realizing the American ideal,” Sollors asks, “as Mussolini’s autobiography seemed to suggest?” 186 This text, though, is not merely in conversation with immigrant narratives, but also with the American tradition of autobiography—of which Emerson stands as one of the central figures. Sacvan Bercovitch writes of this conflation of self and nation in the tradition of life writing that he calls “Auto-American-Biography.” In this autobiographical form of writing that emerged with the Puritans, the individual and the nation found themselves figured in each other. “Auto-American-biography meant simultaneously a total assertion of the self,” Bercovitch writes, “a jeremiad against the misdirected progress of the ‘dead’ present, and an act of prophecy which guaranteed the future by celebrating the regenerate ‘Americanus’” (Bercovitch, 184). For Christopher Newfield this is symptomatic of a corporate conception of personhood, unifying “private property” and “national providence” (Newfield, 65). In this conception, there is neither sacrifice of personal wealth for public good, nor does public good have to be sacrificed at the altar of private accomplishment. Rather, the two undergird each other. As Sacvan Bercovitch writes of this tendency of life writing as incarnated in Emerson: “characteristically, the self he sought was not only his but America's, or rather his as America's, and therefore America's as his” (Bercovitch, 165). Mussolini presents not only himself as embodying the state, but also the entwined nature of his relation with state and movement governs all individual relationships. He 186 Werner Sollors, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 85. 90 writes, “a new sense of justice, of serious purpose, of harmony and concord guides now the destines of all the peoples and classes of Italy…In every class, among all citizens, nothing is done against the state, nothing is done outside the state” (Autobiography, 241). In a later passage, he redescribes this as ultimately the same relationship that he has to the collectivity—a break from the liberal American conception of the isolated individual: the citizen of the Fascist state is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti- social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity. The Fascist State with its corporative conception puts me and their possibilities into productive work and interests for them the duties they have to fulfill. (Autobiography, 280) Here we have the idea of Mussolini as the leader of a nation of Mussolinis. The individual is no longer apart from the state but rather only a part of the state. Each individual and “all their possibilities” exist not in rebellion but, Mussolini argues, only in this homogenous “Collectivity.” Mussolini’s text thus presents fascism not as satisfying the current American ideal—per Sollors’s reading—but rather emphasizing the newness present in the very concept of the American. For Bercovitch, Emerson’s distinctiveness as American romantic philosopher has to do with the fact that rather than, like Germans, whose “sense of destiny led them back to the origins of the race, to cultural antiquities,” he reads national destiny “through the double focus of prophecies accomplished and prophecies unfolding” (172). Mussolini’s Autobiography sounds this note of newness in his text. “America, a land harboring so many of our emigrants, still calls to the spirit of new youth,” writes Mussolini in his first chapter, “Youth.” Mussolini links this renaissance to the masculine and martial ethos of the Great War campaign at Carso: I look to her youth for her destinies and the preservation of her growing ideals, just as I look to the youth of Italy for the progress of the Fascist state. It is not easy to remember always the importance of youth. It is not easy to retain the spirit of youth. It was fortunate for me that in the trenches of the Carso…I did not leave my own youth behind. (“Youth”, 121) 91 In finding inspiration in America’s youth, Mussolini is heeding Emerson’s demand of “The Young American.” Speaking to and of this figure in his 1844 lecture, Emerson declares that the nation should inspire the entire globe: It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the Future. From Washington, proverbially ‘the city of magnificent distances,’ through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations. (Essays, 217) Mussolini credits this spirit of the United States in inspiring his fascist movement. He writes, “the American people, by their sure and active creative lines of life, have touched, and touch, my sensibility” (“Youth,” 121). Could these be the same lines that Biancotti will credit to Emerson’s “Representative Man” in his introduction? However, where the Emersonian tradition remains within the text, in My Autobiography this imbrication of personal self and identity of the nation becomes literalized in Mussolini’s fascism. “Deeds and actions, more than any useless subjective expressions,” Mussolini declares “write my true autobiography—from 1922 till 1927” (Autobiography, 206). Mussolini here seems to refract Emerson’s “The Poet,” where Emerson writes, “Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words” (Essays 45). In recounting his ascension to the Italian premiership, which would soon become the seat of his dictatorship, Mussolini writes, an existence wholly new began for me. To speak about it makes it necessary for me to abandon the usual form of autobiographic style; I must consider the organic whole of my governmental activity. From now on my life identifies itself almost exclusively with thousands of acts of government. Individuality disappears. Instead, my person expresses, I sometimes feel, only measures and acts of concrete character; these do not concern a single person; they concern the multitudes, they concern and permeate an entire people. (Autobiography, 199) Thus, Mussolini’s true autobiography becomes not this written document, but rather the nation of Italy itself. It is in the nation that he, Emerson’s Poet, Emerson’s Napoleon, writes 92 his opera d’arte—working with the materials of the world. Where Emerson’s vision “annihilated division” (Bercovitch, 173), Mussolini’s acts forcibly imposed unity. Another way of stating this is to argue that not merely is Mussolini’s autobiography a form of Bercovitchian auto-American-biography but that fascism itself is, insofar as it emanates from Mussolini as leader. Bercovitch writes, “against the felt dichotomy between Me and It….Emerson chanted the representative self—a ‘feudalism’ that excludes the alien or unknown—personal and national identity twined in the bipolar unity of auto-American- biography” (Bercovitch, 179). Mussolini’s Fascism also appears as a unity that knows no foreign Other. While Bercovitch attempts to prevent such a reading by arguing that his genre “advances a mode of personal identity designed as a compensatory replacement for (rather than an alternative to) the ugly course of actual events” (Bercovitch, 177), the many similarities between this liberal and supposedly-American form of discourse and fascism highlights the continuity between the two. In suggesting this continuity, I am, of course, ventriloquizing the contention of the Frankfurt school, who argue that fascism emerges from within liberalism. 187 In one such articulation, Herbert Marcuse argued in 1934 that “a new image of man” emerged in the interwar period as a response to the hypertrophy of humanity under capitalism (Marcuse, 2). In his account, this new humanism emerged specifically in Germany—even though he does reflect on Italian fascism as well—from “the age of the Viking, German mysticism, the Renaissance, and the Prussian military” (Marcuse, 2). He argues that this figure has become the emissary of “life”—a force “‘beyond good and evil’…seen as the force that actually ‘makes history’” (Marcuse, 2). For him this is the exposure of the contradictions 187 See also Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (London: Verso, 2013); and Agamben, Homo Sacer. 93 in liberalism, which is also underpinned by natural laws—“the evasive justification of a contradictory social order” (8)—that “liberalist rationalism already contains preformed, those tendencies that later….take on an irrationalist character” as the economic and social situation change (Marcuse, 9). Indeed, he argues that the recognition of nature in liberalism easily slides into an affirmation of domination—ending in authoritarianism: It is all too readily prepared to acknowledge ‘natural’ privileges and favors. The idea of the charismatic, authoritarian leader is already preformed in the liberalist celebration of the gifted economic leader, the ‘born’ executive. (Marcuse, 12) In the account I have provided in this chapter, I have suggested a genealogy slightly different from that of Marcuse, one which, though drawing on German romanticism—who were, after all, great influences on Emerson—passes through the United States and emerges through its figuration of the new man. However, much of Marcuse’s description of how fascism emerges from liberalism’s natural laws, becoming a celebration of natural processes that set forth great men to lead the organic national unity, does seem to also describe how Emerson could undergird fascism. Indeed, to turn to the response to Mussolini’s My Autobiography in this last part of this section is to witness an affirmation of Marcuse’s description of the age’s fascist aesthetic: the model of man projected by today’s heroic realism is of one whose existence is fulfilled in unquestioning sacrifices and unconditional acts of devotion, whose ethic is poverty and all of whose worldly goods have been melted down into service and discipline. (Marcuse, 21) This heroic realism is evident even in the critical reviews with which I begin. Even as the reviews disdained Mussolini’s book, they still seemed to admire his person. Though Hiram Motherwell largely criticized the book in his review for The New York Times Book Review, he places Mussolini in the pantheon of great men. Motherwell, who translated Mussolini’s 1908 novel, The Cardinal’s Daughter, finds the book to lack “self-revelation” and only “an enhancement of the Mussolini omnipotence legend,” but still praises how it 94 offers “something—not much—to fix the quality of a personality who has achieved a conspicuous political success almost unapproached since the days of Napoleon.” 188 The antifascist Arthur Livingston, surprisingly more enthusiastic about the book than Motherwell, likewise lauds the book for how it showcases Mussolini’s undeniable energy, “the thing that holds one is this Herculean gymnastic, of which the book is the record— this free motion of a personality in a world as solid as fluid as ether, where kings count for little and Popes for nothing at all.” 189 “It is auto-revelation, auto-inspiration, auto- intoxication at the highest pitch. It has all the violence of the great ‘ondata’ that engulfed Rome,” Livingston writes for the New York Herald Tribune, “It has all the vehemence of the Duce’s demiurgic personality” (“Duce,” K4). Daily Boston Globe dismissed the book as “more political credo than a self- portrait,” but still found “the power, the fire and the inspiration that has [sic] dominated Italy during the last years are a part of [it].” 190 Similarly, Forum, which considered the book unlikely to redeem Mussolini’s reputation as “one of the world’s worst novelists”— here referring to The Cardinal’s Daughter, translated by Motherwell—still described the Mussolini who emerges from his memoir as a figure of dynamic force (and perhaps not coincidentally, a representative of the class of human that Napoleon also represented—the businessman): “typically the man of action, the dynamic executive, the man who takes events as they come and bends or breaks them to his will.” 191 188 Hiram Motherwell, “Mussolini reviews his career in imperial accents,” The New York Times Book Review, October 28, 1928, 5. 189 Arthur Livingston, “The Duce’s Genesis.” New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 28, 1928, K4. 190 “Mussolini Writes his Autobiography,” The Boston Daily Globe, Oct. 31, 1928, 13. 191 “Self-Portraiture,” Forum, Jan. 1929, VI. 95 Indeed, the more positive reviews offer an explicit endorsement of Marcuse’s fascist-heroic worldview. These reviews identify with Mussolini, finding him to be an already American character, perceiving in their own desire his own American heritage as a concept. For example, the Hartford Courant declares, We feel that only in the United States can men like Secretary Hoover and Governor Smith come up from the soil and compete for the presidency; yet here in ‘outworn’ Europe came another man from the soil to create a virile nation of a kingdom which was well on the way to become another Red Russia. 192 The review concluded by declaring, “this Benito Mussolini is a real man. We realize the fact when we are told that he has been too busy to amass wealth for himself and his family.” It thus aligns itself with Marcuse’s concept of the new heroism, bringing the representative man, the man who shows men what masculinity truly is, into line with this new conception of total duty. Mussolini is framed in a similar position in the Baltimore Sun’s review, which asks, without irony, in its review of My Autobiography, “what can be said in moderation of the abounding vigor of mind and body, of the iron courage of this most masculine of all men?” 193 For the Sun, Mussolini might be like some Americans— “Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson come the nearest to his form. They had the like courage and the like energy”— however they “had neither the desire nor the gift to turn the country topsy-turvy.” Rather, Mussolini, the review declares is a “many-sided genius, raised from rags to sit with kings” 192 “Benito Mussolini’s Autobiography is the Story of a Great Career,” The Hartford Courant, Oct. 28, 1928, E8. This use of “virile” is typical of fascist discourse. Barbara Spackman’s Fascist Virilities argues that “virility” is the “master term” within Italian fascism, which can encompass all of fascism’s desires for a new civilization. The virile signifies the good, and the effeminate stands for all that is abjected and must be cast out. Its presence here helps us see how this Autobiography has inflected (or, one could say) infected American discourse. Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xii. 193 Samuel Dennis, “Raised from Rags to sit with Kings,” The Sun, Nov. 11, 1928, 6. 96 (Dennis, 6). Indeed, one sees how the United States too partakes in the ideology of heroic realism, this new humanism, that undergirded the production of the new fascist man in Italy and relied so heavily on Emerson’s own conception of the representative man. Mussolini might become an American hero, but this hero is not a figure merely of masculine strength and authority—he also takes place within a fascist worldview. Emerson has returned as the auto-American-biography of Fascism. “As a liberal by deepest conviction” “Curiously enough,” Mussolini’s biographer, Emil Ludwig, told the dictator in 1933, “in the course of my travels I have found you more popular in America than anywhere else” (Alpers, 18). As I have argued in this chapter, this seemingly curious incident might not be so curious after all. The desire for organic authority is a longstanding one in American culture, reaching back through Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, as I have shown, the figure of Mussolini took form through the work of Emerson, as Emerson’s “representative man.” His concept of his national mission in My Autobiography and, indeed, in his fascist rule, acquired the shape of what Sacvan Bercovitch has called “auto-American-biography.” In other words, he answered a desire already present in American culture when he first entered the world scene in a shape informed by American culture and already legible to the United States. However, this desire for organic authority within liberalism is hardly unique to the United States or American culture. As Giovanni Gentile wrote to Benito Mussolini in 1922, when he joined the ranks of the Fascist party, after having worked in Mussolini’s government: as a liberal by deepest conviction, I could not help being convinced in the months which I had the honor to collaborate in the work of your government and to observe 97 at close quarters the development of the principles that determine your policies, that liberalism as I understand it, the liberalism of freedom through law and therefore through a strong state, through the state as ethical reality, is represented in Italy today not by the liberals, who are more or less openly your opponents, but to the contrary by you yourself. Hence I have satisfied myself that in the choice between the liberalism of today and the Fascists, who understand the faith of your Fascism, a genuine liberal, who despises equivocation and wants to stand to his post, must enroll in the legions of your followers. (Marcuse, 6) This is to say that American culture shared a fascist possibility and a fascist desire twined in its liberal ideation. Here, Gentile suggests the best way to honor liberal values is to become a fascist. Marcuse points to this to highlight how liberalism and fascism are “entirely at one with the new worldview in its fight against Marxian socialism” (Negations 7). While that might overstate the case only a little, this quote highlights the desires of the U.S. fascists, who hardly saw fascism as “diametrically opposed,” as Thomas Ford hard written, to U.S. culture and politics. Rather its lauded “common sense” had to do with how it emerged from the same sources as canonical U.S. culture, speaking in the same language as Emerson, not because it took this language on to disguise itself, as Giorgio Bertellini suggests, but rather because through Emersonianism, Mussolini’s fascism had found form. 98 Die Ku-Klux-Klan Idee: American Race Melodrama and German Fascism “When American fascism is finally understood, it will be found, I believe, that The Birth of a Nation is its archetypal text.”— Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema” 194 Americanization and the Ku Klux Klan Idea "The motion picture will Americanize the world.” This promise of the so-called “father of film,” D.W. Griffith, made on the eve of Birth of a Nation’s postwar exportation, felt to Lester Walton like a threat against his personhood. Walton, the drama critic of New York Age, New York’s leading Black newspaper, worried about the film’s exportation of a mode of racialization that cast Blacks as subhumans. As he explained in his June 7, 1919 column, “when Mr. Griffith speaks in such glowing terms of the ‘American man’ and ‘American womanhood’ he does not have in mind the colored American.” “No more sinister emissary of Anti-Negro propaganda,” he wrote, “could be sent across the waters.” 195 Indeed, when Béla Balázs saw the film in Vienna on January 13, 1925, so concerned was he by its threat to introduce a new mode of racism and racial violence, that his review transformed into a petition for the censor to ban the film. Refusing to reproduce a shred of narrative detail, he called the film but a “glorification of the Ku Klux Klan Idea.” 196 By 1925, Balázs’s appeal was, however, too late; not only was Birth of a Nation already wildly popular in Austria, but also conservative currents in Germany had seized on the film’s race melodrama as a form through which to narrate their own national history and, in the soon- 194 Taylor, “Re-birth,” 30. 195 Lester Walton, “World to Be Americanized by Such Films as Birth of a Nation.” New York Age. 7 June 1919. 196 Béla Balázs, “Die Geburt einer Nation. Eine Frage an die Zensur.” Schriften Zum Film. Vol. 2, (Berlin: Henschel, 1984), 334. 99 to-become notorious phrase, “nationalize the masses.” 197 While I will engage Balázs’s response to the film more fully later in this chapter, his formulation of the film’s work as disseminating the idea of the Ku Klux Klan not only echoes Walton’s fear about the film’s capacity to export U.S. racism to the world but also offers the contours of the film’s Americanization: Birth models not only a mode of mass racialization, in its rendering of Blackness, but also of reaction, in its heroized and justified Klan violence. Balázs’s phrase then orients this chapter beyond the usual analogies between Klan and Nazism to consider instead the influence of the Klan on Nazism. Balázs’s phrase emphasizes how the Klan could travel—a concept a film could disseminate across the globe, a feeling that could adopt new forms and affect new bodies, an idea that could inform Nazism. 198 It points toward the central claim of this chapter: one of the ways that Nazism took shape is through the Ku Klux Klan idea. My argument thus contributes to the strong link between film and fascism, that “the Nazis were,” as Eric Rentschler puts it, “movie made,” or, as Hans Jürgen Syberberg 197 Friedrich Schönemann, “Nationale Propaganda der amerikanischen Filmindustrie.” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung. 16 Juli 1924, 2; Though it must be noted fascism would not recognize itself as a “mass movement.” The mass was all that fascism was not. Fascism was made up, rather, of the already-nationalized mass: the Volk. Ishay Landa, Fascism and the Masses (New York: Routledge, 2018), 16. 198 I am indebted to Nancy Maclean’s Beyond the Mask of Chivalry (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), which first acknowledged the interconnectedness of the second Klan and European fascism. However, since her work, which argued that the Klan was “not a movement sui generis,” if there is acknowledgment of European fascism, it serves only as an analogy, as in Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017). Most scholarship, while offering nuanced accounts of the movement’s political, social, and cultural dynamics within the United States, focuses on its contiguities and continuities with earlier U.S. movements and organizations—like the first Ku Klux Klan. This diachronic perspective threatens to reify the popular sense that the Klan was a unique and endogenous U.S. phenomenon. See also Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s. (Chicago: U of Chicago P: 2017) and Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009). 100 declared, “fascism is cinema …an entire political system as film.” 199 However, I argue in this chapter that Nazism took the form of a genre that existed prior to film and yet whose traits cinema intensified: American race melodrama. It is first in the United States that film not only offered a site to crystallize aspects of fascist desire, but also crystallized an entire fascist vision, a complete fascist organization, down to its very uniforms. In this chapter, I suggest then, that the Ku Klux Klan idea constituted part of the modernist sensorium of not only “mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation,” as Miriam Hansen writes in “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” but also the missing link in her triumvirate: the mass movement. 200 In other words, Birth of a Nation’s race melodrama crystallized a politics of race melodrama that could manifest as fascism in the United States and Germany: the Ku Klux Klan idea. Though the Ku Klux Klan idea has taken different shapes, at its core, it is the idea of national rebirth through the elimination of a faceless racial threat by a masculinist military movement. 201 As my syntax suggests, it works negatively, summoning forth a force to “rescue” the nation from the Other whose very existence threatens the nation’s future. In this configuration, the Other becomes so important because it stands for all that the nation is not, a disavowal that is not merely exclusionary but definitional. 202 For 199 Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002); Steve Wasserman, “Interview with Hans-Jürgen Syberberg,” Hans- Jürgen Syberberg, the Film Director as Critical Thinker. Ed. R.J. Cardullo. (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017), 71. 200 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity, 6. 2. (1999), 59. 201 This concept recalls Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as a political ideology “that seeks to conquer political power in order to realize a totalizing vision of national or ethnic rebirth.” Modernism, 182. 202 For this reason, this chapter is deeply entangled with Chapter Three, which engages the scientific construction of the Other, thinking with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s elegant Toward a Global Idea of Race, whose argument this sentence recalls. The other must be constructed in order for the imperialist (and later fascist) national subject to exist as Ferreira da Silva 101 example, Thomas Dixon’s novels of Reconstruction, The Leopard’s Spots: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1902) and The Clansman (1905), which first articulated the idea, and become 1915’s Birth of a Nation, portrayed the race struggle as ultimately a war over the fate of the world. As The Leopard’s Spots responds to its own refrain, “Shall the future American be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto?”: “the future of the world depends on the future of this Republic. This Republic can have no future if racial lines are broken and its proud citizenship sinks to the level of a mongrel breed of Mulattoes.” 203 Just these three sentences highlight how the Ku Klux Klan idea works through a politics of melodrama, as it first suggests that Blackness, figured as a bodily contagion, endangers the very future of the entire world. And thus it places its movement within a binary moral economy where it is “a virtuous and innocent victim of villainous action,” as Elisabeth Anker describes in Orgies of Feeling. This chapter thus extends recent work on American melodrama that highlights how its promise of freedom can undergird political oppression. 204 In its initial form, the Ku Klux Klan idea, which manifests as a national movement after the release of Birth of a Nation, involved a violent dynamic that emerged from the structure of the United States’ specific race relations. The Ku Klux Klan idea offered its “army of Protestant Americans” the promise that the nation could be redeemed by expelling Blacks from the nation’s social and political life (MacLean, 12). And yet, even in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan idea altered through the 1920s as it expanded into the writes about the racial logic of the imperial United States at the turn of the twentieth-century, “the other of Europe had be produced as such in representation, as an always already affectable thing, so that it would not be impossible to place the U.S. subject and social configuration in transparency.” Silva (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), 218. 203 Thomas Dixon, Jr. The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865- 1900. (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), 161, 201. 204 Elisabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014), 3. See also Jonna Eagle, Imperial Affects (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2017). 102 North and became not merely a regional but national political force; its avowed aim, the “regeneration of the soul of mankind,” was now an operation that involved a social, political, and at times physical purification of the threat of immigrants, Catholics, and Jews as well as its original victim: Blacks. 205 Similarly, I argue, as the Ku Klux Klan idea migrated to Germany, its emphases likewise changed. However, its structural dynamic remained constant. Inflicting death—social, political, and/or physical—on the Other, whose very presence wounded the nation, was the Ku Klux Klan idea’s constitutive and constituting premise. American race melodrama is the genre that makes the injury inflicted by the Other legible and justifies the subsequent violence of the Ku Klux Klan idea, not only in the United States but also beyond its borders. As Linda Williams argues in Playing the Race Card, the most sustained engagement of the “black and white melodramas” of interest to this chapter, “melodrama is the alchemy with which white supremacist American culture first turned its deepest guilt into a testament of virtue.” 206 However, where Williams understands race melodrama to be “neither an inherently racist nor an antiracist form,” (Playing 300), I argue that it takes part in a nineteenth-century tradition of reinscribing the embodiedness of the Other conducive for fascism’s appeal. 207 Promising freedom, American race melodrama is the performance of suffering victim-hero against a sadistic 205 William Simmons, The Klan Unmasked (Atlanta: Wm. E. Thompson Publishing Co, 1923), 105. 206 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001) 44. 207 For example, Williams proposes “two central and opposed ‘moving pictures’—the vision of a black man beaten by a white and the responding ‘counter’ vision of the white woman endangered or raped by the emancipated and uppity black villain” (Playing 5). However, these recurrent “moving pictures” Williams opposes both revolve around the inextricably bodily nature of blackness, a conception that Uncle Tom’s Cabin most famously crystallizes in the popular consciousness. 103 tyrant-antagonist. Presenting a virtuous victim who is then injured, deprived of her innocence by evil, melodrama makes a visceral, emotional appeal to its audience for action by displaying the injury of the victim-hero (pathos), which must be remedied (action). This chapter extends recent work on U.S. melodrama that highlights how its promise of freedom can undergird political oppression. 208 By focusing specifically on the race melodrama that emerges in the United States with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Times Cabin (1852), it illuminates how the genre’s reification of the bodily reality of race lends itself to a worldview conducive for the race war that emerges in Birth of a Nation; Linda Williams calls this phenomenon, “the uniquely American yoking of melodramatic form to a dialectic of racial pathos and antipathy” (Playing, 100).” 209 This chapter charts the emergence of this fascism-structuring injury, attributed to the racialized body, through American racial melodrama and its migration to Europe, where it becomes the ideological underpinning of German anti-Semitic fascism. With Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin close to hand, I read Thomas Dixon’s repurposing of Stowe' melodramatic logic in The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905) to its realization of its fascist potential in Birth of a Nation’s Ku Klux Klan idea, which manifests itself as an embodied movement not only in the United States but also in Nazi Germany. Although Joseph Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Friedrich Nietzsche also 208 See Anker, Orgies of Feeling and Eagle, Imperial Affects. 209 While there are moments when Williams recognizes that the tradition she describes is “fundamentally white supremacist melodrama of black and white” (Playing, 70), she does not emphasize what this logic might mean because “for our purposes…the lesson seems to be there is no pure and authentic representation of race free of the ‘contaminations’ of either the ridiculing or the melodramatizing lenses of mass culture” (Playing, 70). Thus, she reverts to considering the “melodrama of black and white” as a capacious and neutral medium, whereby race can replace class as the site of melodrama’s social struggle, thus enabling the “emergence of new versions of racial victimization and vilification” (Playing, 5). 104 offer notions of injury done to whiteness that influence the shape of Nazism, it is in the U.S. context that, like Athena from the skull of Zeus, fascism emerges from this wound fully formed. I offer this chapter as a supplement to and expansion of the longstanding critical consensus that the cultural origins of Nazism were not limited by the borders of Germany. While analogues between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany abound, the question of American cultural influence on the expression of Nazism’s race war has been largely left unexplored, perhaps still the casualty of a lingering belief in American exceptionalism. 210 Aimé Césaire’s demand in Discourse on Colonialism, a demand articulated in 1950, still must be fulfilled in our new century: “to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon” (38). It is worthwhile to remember that Césaire later follows up this statement by specifically indicting the mid-century United States as the pinnacle of racial cruelty: “the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, only surpassed—far surpassed, it is true—by the barbarism of the United States” (Césaire, 47). This chapter charts a genealogy of this barbarism that, before manifesting itself in Hitler, emerged in U.S. culture during the nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, coming into being through the conventions of melodrama that, as 210 See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944), Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” The Journal of Southern History. 58, 4. (Nov., 1992), 667-694. Approaching the question from a slightly different angle, Wolfgang Schivelbusch,The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, Trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Picador, 2000) compares the postwar South and Weimar Germany, implicitly highlighting a similar fascist potential. 105 Linda Williams argues in Playing the Race Card, have had a critical role in structuring race relations in the United States (8-9). Thomas Dixon’s Melodramatic Politics The “Ku Klux Klan idea” of Birth of a Nation is first rehearsed in Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and then The Clansman (1905), the two novels that the film condenses and remediates. In these novels, Dixon offers a vision of the United States that, as Walter Benn Michaels notes, is “constituted or prefigured by the Klan, which offers racial identity as a kind of rehearsal for the collective identity required by the new modes of national citizenship.” 211 However, this situating of the Klan as instrument of national salvation and, indeed, the prefiguration of the nation, demands the prior articulation of the injurious threat of Blackness. This configuration is a melodramatic one, as it depicts white Southerners suffering under the tyranny of Blackness unleashed by Radical Reconstruction, justifying the inevitable white revenge. But not only are these novels melodramas, but they also explicitly model a melodramatic politics, imagining a postbellum United States whose ideal of national identity is not only racial, as figured in The Leopard’s Spots by a parliamentary appeal to whiteness, but also martial, as The Clansman articulates in its idealization of the Ku Klux Klan. These racial and martial origins offer a script for the crystallization of fascism in The Birth of a Nation. This melodramatic configuration wherein the white majority is presented as minoritized, belittled, and traumatized by Blackness, responds not only to contemporary concerns about the declining power of Southern white masculinity, but also to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel of fifty years earlier, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). While forming 211 Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 22-3. 106 part of the masculinist backlash against nineteenth-century feminine sensibility that Ann Douglas describes, as a rejection of Stowe’s legacy, Dixon’s novels remain ensconced in Stowe’s world of race melodrama, repurposing its logics toward fascist ends. 212 Even if Dixon had not been explicitly responding to Stowe’s novel—though he was, for he began to write The Leopard’s Spots only after watching a staged version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin— he would have still had to engage race melodrama (Playing, 101). Melodrama has been, as Linda Williams argues, the primary genre through which the United States has negotiated race in its popular culture since Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Playing, 44). “Melodrama,” Williams writes, “may prove central to who we are as a nation, and black and white racial melodrama may even prove central to the question of just who we mean when we say ‘we’ are a nation” (Playing, 44). As Williams’s quote suggests, the United States is often said to have a special relationship with melodrama. Daniel Gerould exemplifies this critical tendency when he claims, “the United States and melodrama came into existence at almost the same time— the late eighteenth century—and for much the same reason—the democratic revolution in thought and feeling.” 213 As Peter Brooks argues in his foundational The Melodramatic 212 See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). Jane Gaines discusses Thomas Dixon as emerging from within a melodramatic world that links him with Stowe, “a shared conceptual structure that governs lives, that is shaped through, by, and as the popular cultural production which has its lived as well as its literary and cinematic forms.” Jane Gaines, “Thomas Dixon and Race Melodrama,” eds. Michele Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, Thomas Dixon, Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 151. 213 Daniel Gerould, “Introduction,” American Melodrama: Four Plays, Daniel Gerould ed. (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), 7. Williams herself takes part in this critical consensus, offering, in her 1998 “Melodrama Revised,” a definition of melodrama as “a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action" (42). See also David Grimstead. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) and Bruce McConachie. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992). 107 Imagination, melodrama’s historical origins do lie in the emergence of European democracy. For Brooks, melodrama originated with the French Revolution and replaced the hierarchal world of stage tragedy with its more egalitarian vision of universal access to virtue—“a democratization of morality and its signs.” 214 Engaging an uncertain, disenchanted world, melodrama soothed fears about the breakdown of order by staging a play of integration where, in the end, virtue always triumphed. Ben Singer reformulates Brooks’s argument in explaining melodrama’s popularity in the United States: “it would be more apt to say instead that melodrama manifested the powerful new populist consciousness. Melodrama was a cultural expression of the populist ideology of liberal democracy.” 215 For whatever reason, the United States quickly adopted melodrama as its preeminent popular entertainment, and melodrama adapted to the United States. Gerould explains its popularity through its emphasis on visual gesture, as opposed to verbal dialogue, which made it not only spectacular but also accessible to an unlearned America (Gerould, 9). Christine Gledhill notes that the European play of class antagonisms were soon transposed into country versus city, dramatizing and reconciling the Jefferson- Hamilton divide that has long been an American preoccupation. 216 However, it was with 214 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 44. Matthew Buckley, in “The Unbinding of Melodrama,” calls this Brooks’s “myth of melodrama.” Buckley argues that melodrama did not originate with the French Revolution, as Brooks would have it, but rather is a result of theatrical trends occurring under the Ancien Regime across the whole of the eighteenth century. He thus puts into question one of Brooks’ triumvirate of the form’s democratic associations. Matthew Buckley, “The Unbinding of Melodrama” in Melodrama Unbound. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 19. 215 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 132. 216 Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987), 24. 108 Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 that, as Gerould argues, “American melodrama came of age with a purely native-born triumph” (Gerould, 14). It is with race melodrama that the American audience came to attend to their own melodramatic productions, rather than those that had originated in Europe. It is with race melodrama that American melodrama became so influential that it, as Lawrence Levine writes in his preface to David Grimstead’s 1968 Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850, “transmitted ideas so pervasive and so apparent to nineteenth-century Americans that we often find them hard to identify as ideas.” 217 Williams describes this melodrama as typified by five central characteristics. 218 1) It begins and seeks to end in a place of innocence. 2) It focuses on the victim-hero and making this hero’s virtue legible through physical suffering. 3) It involves a dialectic of pathos (coded as passive female suffering) and action (coded as active male salvation). 4) It borrows from realism to amplify this dialectic of pathos and action. 5) It personalizes its central moral conflict of good and evil in characters. Before I briefly describe how Dixon’s two novels manifest these characteristics, with the exception of the question of realism, which is not particularly of interest to this project (especially since, as Williams notes, realism often borrows from the codes of melodrama), I first need to elaborate melodrama’s dialectic of pathos and action. After I discuss these formal features, I can then proceed to argue how these elements prove conducive to the fascism these texts envision. Through the 1990s within the academy, and to this day in lay usage, melodrama has been used to refer to films or plays that engage domestic or family situations, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However, melodrama has also often historically referred to sensational 217 Lawrence Levine, “Preface,” in Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Berkeley: University of California, 1987), xiii. 218 See 26-44 in Williams, Playing the Race Card. 109 male-oriented action narratives, such as The Leopard’s Spots or The Clansman. 219 While all melodrama must involve pathos, where the victim-hero suffers, melodrama can also structure spectacular acts of vengeance. Aggression is constitutive of all melodrama. It is either released on a suffering victim-hero (pathetic melodrama) or on both the victim-hero and the tyrant-villain, where there is retribution for the hero’s suffering (action melodrama). Melodrama’s narrative structure can enact a Nietzschean ressentiment, “a moralizing revenge upon the powerful achieved through a triumph of the weak in their very weakness” (Playing, 43). However, it can also feature suffering that justifies any violence that the hero perpetrates, as it does in Westerns such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. Jane Tompkins describes this melodramatic dynamic as a victimization that allows the hero to be “so right (that is, so wronged) that he can kill with impunity” (Eagle, 153). As Ludwig Lewisohn wrote with some disapproval in The Nation in 1920, “melodrama…brings into vicarious play those forces in human nature that produce mob violence in peace and mass atrocities in war.” 220 In both novels the melodramatic structure repeats in small and large arcs—and The Clansman itself repeats and refines the structure of The Leopard’s Spots. In both novels innocence is already lost, as they both begin mourning the Civil War as nation’s fall from Eden. However, the more specific loss of innocence in both plots is wrought by Radical Reconstruction, which empowers the newly-emancipated Black man, unleashing, as Dixon 219 For a characteristic text engaging the former, see Christine Gledhill, ed, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987). Tania Modleski, who contributes to this important edited collection that brings much feminist theory to bear on melodrama, also offers a paradigmatic turn to the adventure film with her 2010 article, where she exposes the melodramatic structure in male-coded films with strong, stoic characters. “Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies” American Literary History 22, 1. 136-158. 220 Ludwig Lewisohn, “The Cult of Violence,” The Nation, January 24, 1920, 118. 110 writes, an impersonal and diffuse “Black Peril” over the land (Leopard, 385). In The Leopard’s Spots, set in “North Carolina, the typical American democracy” (Leopard, 5), evil is personified by Simon Legree, Stowe’s scurrilous Northern slaveowner remotivated as a carpetbagger, and Archibald McLeod, both of whom support the impersonal Blackness that the novel calls “Negro dominion, or Negro deification…being rammed down their throats with bayonets” (Leopard, 137). Under this “reign of terror” (Leopard, 110) the protagonist, Charles Gaston, must watch his childhood home be repossessed, and his mother die from the shame. Though the Klan rides to rescue the town from “Negro troopers” (Leopard, 126) after the attempted abduction of a white woman during her wedding, Gaston’s suffering is doubled in his adulthood as the Republicans return to power and enable Blacks to seize control of Gaston’s town once more and, this time, to not only attempt to abduct a white woman but rape her. 221 Having suffered and witnessed his fellow whites suffer (pathos), Gaston has proven his virtue and, wronged by Blackness, is justified to act. The novel, though, ends not with physical but political death. 222 It ends with a white supremacist politics as Gaston gives a rousing speech at the State Convention that unites the white population against Blackness and makes him Governor, ending the so-called terror. 221 The repeated rapes in Dixon’s novels not only are an appeal to male panic, but also seem to respond directly to Stowe’s targeting of women through her pathetic appeal. The sympathy for blackness for that Stowe’s novels seek is nothing less, Dixon suggests, than, as Mary Ann Doane describes the experience of pathos in melodrama for the woman audience in The Desire to Desire, a “kind of textual rape.” Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 95. 222 And yet, as Foucault argues, “political death” is still a violent act, a “form of indirect murder.” Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003, 256. 111 The Clansman begins after the war in Washington, D.C., under a benevolent Lincoln. It is with his assassination that the novel locates the national fall from innocence, and the beginning of the Radical Reconstruction that, in a typical form of melodramatic punishment (Brooks, 51), locks up both the father and son of the Cameron family. The man behind reconstruction is the Republican Congressman, Thaddeus Stoneman, but the book makes clear that it is the mulattos, Silas Lynch and Lydia Brown, who are the real agents of oppression in Piedmont, South Carolina where the main events take place. 223 There, Lynch’s government arms a Black League that carries out another “Reign of Terror” (Clansman, 187) and which culminates in the rape of a young girl who has a crush on Ben Cameron, and her subsequent suicide with her mother. After experiencing all of this pathos, Cameron and his father are confirmed in their virtue and justified in eliminating the Black threat. They thus can ride forth as the Clan into action to crush the Black League. However, these novels not only possess the structure of melodrama but also more specifically map a melodramatic politics. Elisabeth Anker elaborates this genre of politics in Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, where she argues that melodrama migrates from art to politics as a form that the United States has increasingly employed to justify violent action since the Cold War. This discourse, she writes, serves to “legitimate dramatic expansion of state power aiming not to support the flourishing and freedom of people’s lives but to extend oppression over exploited populations in the name of freedom” (Anker, 86). This mode of politics constitutes “melodramatic political subjects” by casting “politics, policies, and practices of citizenship within a moral economy that identifies the nation-state as a virtuous and innocent victim of villainous action” and 223 As Linda Williams argues, “’Blame the mulatto’ would seem to be one part of his racial melodrama.’ ‘Blame the mulatta’ is its other part’” (Playing, 108). 112 justifies “an aggressive performance of strength in the national political sphere” (Anker, 2- 3). In other words, melodramatic politics promises subjects that it can constitute the “ability to overwhelm what is overwhelming and therefore recapture their sovereign agency” (Anker, 18). The overwhelming enemy in both of these novels is Blackness, conceived as a proliferating miasma from the first pages of The Leopard’s Spots. While the invasion ultimately occupies both the national space of government and the intimate bodies of white womanhood, the oppression of whiteness begins with the simple fact of a Black body that is not enslaved. Dixon describes what the South fights against as the transformation of “Chattel” into “Beast”: “In every one of these soldiers’ hearts, and over all the earth hung the shadow of the freed Negro, transformed by the exigency of war from a Chattel to be bought and sold into a possible Beast to be feared and guarded. Around this dusky figure every white man’s soul was keeping its grim vigil” (Leopard, 5). A paradigmatic scenario involves a Southern reverend being told to “Git outer de road, white man; you’se er rebel, I’se er Loyal Union Leaguer!” In response to this encounter, which the novel describes as, “his first experience with Negro insolence since the emancipation of his slaves,” the reverend considers the movement of Blackness to be a contagion that has been unleashed by emancipation: “Gradually in his mind for days this towering figure of the freed negro had been growing more and more ominous, until its menace overshadowed the poverty, the hunger, the sorrows and the devastation of the South, throwing the blight of its shadow over future generations, a veritable Black Death for the land and its people” (LS, 33). It is “a blight worse than drought, or flood or pestilence brooded over the land, flinging the shadows of its Black death over every home” (LS, 110). 113 In this novel, Blackness, emanating as it were from the surface of Black bodies, becomes, it seems, aerosolized, a germ spreading across the South. The superficies of the Black body becomes its defining moral feature, an oddity within melodrama, which, as Peter Brooks writes, came into being promising to restore depth and meaning in a world where the Sacred had been liquidated by the French Revolution (Brooks, 14). The melodrama of the French Revolution promised to reveal through the body a world of metaphysical significance. It relied on characters in extraordinary physical states to communicate moral and emotional conditions: “as well as mutes, there are blind men, paralytics, invalids of various sorts whose very physical presence evokes the extremism and hyperbole of ethical conflict and manichaeistic struggle” (Brooks, 56). “The constant goal of melodrama,” Williams writes, is “to make visible occulted moral distinctions through acts and gestures that are felt by audiences to be the emotional truths of individual…personalities” (Playing, 40-1). This is, she continues, “what is truly modern about melodrama…its reliance on personality—and the revelation of personality through body and gesture—as the key to both emotional and moral truth” (Playing, 41). 224 224 As we think about melodrama as, ultimately, a political form, it is worthwhile to attend to how Williams’s description of the work of melodrama resonates with Paul Gilroy’s discussion of how contemporary politics perpetuates the theatricalization and aestheticization of fascist politics that Benjamin critiqued: “Our politicians routinely manipulate their physical appearances with cosmetic procedures, groom their televisual images, and massage our response to them through their command of elocution and their constant attention to the powerful communicative dynamics of bodily gesture and posture” (Against Race, 151). In other words, Williams allows us to see Gilroy’s critique of the fascist character of contemporary politics as ultimately the political adoption of a melodramatic mode, where the audience seeks truth through body and gesture. And Gilroy points out how melodrama was an integral element of the theatrical fascist politics that Benjamin critiqued. 114 However, the Black body that Dixon represents remains resolutely superficial and impersonal. The interior it points toward is the exterior, only the color of the skin. 225 White men have “souls,” but Black men, a “dusky figure.” 226 And yet, this conception of Blackness hardly begins with Dixon. Hartman points out how the racial melodrama of Uncle Tom’s Cabin complements a tradition of minstrelsy that reifies Blackness as the body in pain. Rather than the “occulted moral distinctions” that melodrama’s personification promised, American racial melodrama, which began with Stowe, served to further reinscribe the Black body as an opaque sign whose superficiality is the sum total of its significance. 227 Dixon’s idea of Blackness is certainly more nefarious than that of Stowe, 225 One could argue that characters with disabilities must also contend with an existence too often defined through the supposed limitations of their bodies, but, as Patrick McDonagh argues, melodrama exploits the audience’s desire to understand the “secrets” behind the disability. Patrick McDonagh, “The Mute’s Voice: The Dramatic Transformations of the Mute and Deaf-Mute in Early-Nineteenth-Century France,” Criticism, 55: 4, 2013, 671. Meanwhile in the context of black slavery, as Hartman, Warren, and Fanon argue, there is no such secret, but only, as Anne Anlin Cheng writes, “pure surface.” Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13. For more on disability and melodrama see “Melodramatic Bodies” in Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2004). 226 As Fred Moten notes, in “The Case of Blackness,” it is into such a world that Fanon also finds himself in “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” entering “anxious to uncover of the meaning of things” only to be told he is “an object among other objects” (Fanon 89): Fanon writes of entering the world with a melodramatic imagination, as Peter Brooks would have it—one drawn toward the occult installation of the sacred in things, gestures (certain events, as opposed to actions, of muscularity), and in the subterranean field that is, paradoxically, signaled by the very cutaneous darkness of which Fanon speaks. That darkness turns the would-be melodramatic subject not only into an object but also into a sign—the hideous blackamoor at the entrance of the cave, that world underneath the world of light that Fanon will have entered, who guards and masks “our” hidden motives and desires. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, 50, 2 (Spring 2008), 181. 227 Why is this figuration of blackness so exceptional? The substitution of race for class might not seem to be a break with previous melodrama, but only a logical progression, as Hannah Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism that nineteenth-century European discussions of class already suggested a tendency toward “evolutionist” thinking even 115 but it merely makes more explicit the logic of Stowe’s work that Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection highlights, wherein Blackness is constituted by “affect, gesture, and a vulnerability to violence” (Scenes, 20). In Dixon’s novels, the wound that Blackness perpetrates against the nation is existential. For Dixon, the merest mixing of feeling presents a threat to national identity: “One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passion. The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life” (Leopard, 244). To integrate Blackness would make the nation into something that is no longer consonant with itself. It would, as Charles Gaston’s speech makes clear, make the nation foreign to its own being. Charles Gaston’s final speech in The Leopard’s Spots at the North Carolina state convention is a moment where he constitutes white melodramatic subjects against this idea before they became explicitly racial (Origins, 180). However, as Frank Wilderson III argues, racial slavery involved the articulation of a new episteme. “The Black, a subject who is always already positioned as a slave” he writes, “is the very antithesis of a Human subject.” Frank Wilderson III, Red, Black & White: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010), 7, 9. In other words, melodrama’s turn to the black slave, a figure whose zone of existence outside of melodrama is also limited to the body, flattens the depths that bodily suffering are supposed to signify in melodrama. As Saidiya Hartman argues, melodrama simply ontologized the master’s expectations of the black slave under the conditions of slavery as black nature. “In these moral dramas, the battle of good and evil was waged at the site of the tortured and chaste black body,” Hartman notes, “suffering announced virtue.” While suffering seems to index an interior virtue for blackness, what Hartman draws forth is that rather than grant depth, the emphasis ultimately lies less on the black body’s virtue than on the equation of blackness and physical suffering. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though it made whiteness susceptible to feeling for blackness, also simultaneously amplified blackness’s status as black bodies, bearers not of agency but of affect. Stowe’s novel thus formed a new sympathy within whiteness for blackness, militating against slavery, and yet reinforced slavery’s ultimate logic, that black bodies served white purposes—what Hartman calls “the facility of blackness in the other's self-fashioning.” Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 28, 20. 116 of overwhelming Blackness. Articulating Blackness as a “corruption…of the body politic” (Leopard, 442), and “the body of a festering Black Death” to which he and his fellow white men are “chained” (Leopard, 440), he declares, “the hour has now come in our history to eliminate the Negro from our life and reestablish for all time the government of our fathers” (Leopard, 437). Gaston finds North Carolina oppressed and degraded by the fact of Black men holding office, or even participating in its democracy: “our city governments are debauched by his vote” (Leopard, 440). “His insolence threatens our womanhood, and our children are beaten by Negro toughs on the way to school,” Gaston renders white dependents vulnerable to Black abuse both in private and public life: “shall we tolerate the arrest of white women by Negro officers and their trial before Negro magistrates?” (Leopard, 440). In perhaps Dixon’s most brazen rhetorical maneuver, Gaston here recasts Black emancipation as white slavery. After thus rendering the overwhelming oppression that whites face, Gaston makes an appeal to “race and race pride…the ordinances of life” (Leopard, 445). Asking, “who shall deliver us from the body of this death,” Gaston calls on the “men of my race, Norman and Celt, Angle and Saxon, Dane and Frank, Huguenot and German martyr blood!” (Leopard, 441) to do so, amalgamating these fictional whitenesses against Blackness into a single white “Anglo-Saxon” supremacy: “the Anglo-Saxon is entering the new century with the imperial crown of the ages on his brow and the scepter of the infinite in his hands” (Leopard, 439). 228 The United States, he declares, is “a white man’s government, conceived 228 In Race and Manifest Destiny, which links the dominance of a notion of the “superior American Anglo-Saxon race” with both the desire for and justification of Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman points out that this racial idea only emerges in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Dixon’s alternation between “Anglo-Saxon” and more specific categorizations of whiteness seems to be de rigeur follows the logic of that century’s usage of this term as Horsman describes it. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 6. 117 by white men, and maintained by white men through every year of its history” (Leopard, 446). Gaston’s speech receives total affirmation from the Convention, as the melodramatic structure enables their anti-Black desires to crystallize and generates a shared sentiment of white nationalism: “with one common impulse they sprang to their feet, screaming, shouting, cheering, shaking each other’s hands, crying and laughing” (447). Dixon underlines that this call to a collective ethnonational identity is not positively but negatively defined, what Shawn Michelle Smith later calls “inverted sentiment,” with his final sentence describing this scene: “what power could resist their wrath!” (Leopard, 447). 229 Whiteness becomes constructed only against Blackness, its sympathy only emerging as a backformation, built through anti-Black racism. The logic here that turns whiteness into virtue is the receipt presented of its suffering. As Anker writes, “goodness is identified only after one suffers at the hands of evil” (Anker, 32). This white national sympathy founds itself upon the injury committed against them by and in the prospect of wrath against the Other. 230 The melodramatic politics of Dixon’s follow-up novel, The Clansman, realizes this wrath in the violent action of the Ku Klux Klan. “The first assault on one of their 229 Lynching photos, Smith argues, offers a formal encapsulation of this dynamic: “the bodies that are the vehicles of a devastating physical power are represented over and over again with the victims of their wrath. As white subjectivity is foregrounded against a black corpse, these photographs make very clear that the power of whiteness is not only invisible and dispersed but also particular and embodied in U.S. culture.” Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 139. 230 This conception of whiteness in relation to wrath resonates with Scott Romine’s notion of how whiteness forms in these novels—“not as essence, but as action…as purification.” “First we are being beaten,” Romine writes, ventriloquizing the position of whiteness in the text, “and then we are beating.” Scott Romine, “Thomas Dixon and the Literary Production of Whiteness” in Michele Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, ed. Thomas Dixon, Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 126, 130. 118 daughters,” writes Dixon, articulating melodramatic logic, “revealed the unity of the racial life of the people” (Clansman, 341). One can see this play out in the official document, “General Order No.1,” which states: “the Negro Militia now organized in this State threatens the extinction of civilisation. They have avowed their purpose to make war upon and exterminate the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation which is now the sole guardian of Society” (Clansman, 327). The novel records how the “the white people of Piedmont read this notice with a thrill of exultant joy” (Clansman, 328). It is this joy that signals these whites have constituted themselves as melodramatic subjects. In the Klan, they see an extension of themselves, a political entity that is able to overcome the threat that Blackness supposedly poses to civilization. In the Klan they see their desires expressed. From this recognition emerges what can only be described as a fascist politics of a single will that approaches fascism’s organicist ideal (discussed in Chapter One): “society was fused in the white heat of one sublime thought and beat with the pulse of the single will of the Grand Wizard of the Klan at Memphis” (Clansman, 343). Dixon frames this entity of a “single will” as the origin of the contemporary United States, a promise of reinvigoration. “Within a few months,” Dixon writes, “this Empire overspread a territory larger than modern Europe” (Clansman, 342). The constituents of the Klan, “the backbone of the South,” this “race,” he continues, “led our Revolution, peopled the hills of the South, and conquered the West” (Clansman, 342). This war prosecuted by the Klan leads to a “a gale of chivalrous passion and high action, contagious and intoxicating, [that] swept the white race” (Clansman, 341). In the words of Foucault, the novel presents this “war not only as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race…but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race” (“Society” 257). The Clansman’s melodramatic politics justifies an ethno-state larger than Europe that is brought into being through race 119 war. Or rather, its conception of the ceaseless threat of Blackness means that its melodramatic politics ultimately arrive at “the objective of the Nazi regime”: “politics had to lead to war, and war had to be the final decisive phase that would complete everything” (“Society,” 259). The possibility for fascism derives not merely from Dixon’s romanticization of the historical Ku Klux Klan, which the historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, argues might comprise the world’s first fascists. “It is arguable,” he claims, “that fascism (understood functionally) was born in the late 1860s in the American South” (“Five,” 12). He writes that the first Ku Klux Klan “offer a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe” (“Five,” 12). However, the Ku Klux Klan as constituted in the nineteenth century was a regional, Southern phenomenon; even though it became a subject of national discourse, its ambitions were invariably local, often pettily so, as Elaine Frantz Parsons notes in her book, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction. Only the “sometimes-embodied ‘idea’” it spawned became a nationalized concept. 231 She describes “the abstract idea of the Klan as it was presented in public discourse” as “a composite notion of the Klan that defined the white southern men committing the violence as organized, powerful, mysterious, bizarre, and almost undetectable, their victims as passive and helpless” (Parsons, 10). Though Reconstruction-era Northerners might have disapproved of the Klan’s actions, the idea of its existence both was of sensational interest and reaffirmed their belief in white supremacy. What Dixon does is take this “abstract idea” and make it not merely a regional movement, but into the national defender of whiteness and Americanness. However, it is D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation that, enacting this 231 Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 20. 120 movement against Blackness on the screen, produces the embodied and national Ku Klux Klan. The Movement of the Klan “A big, degraded looking Negro is shown chasing a little golden-haired white girl for the purpose of outraging her; she to escape him, goes to her death by hurling herself over a cliff.” Recounting perhaps the most notorious and sensational scene from Birth of a Nation, the Black writer James Weldon Johnson turns to the readers of the New York Age to ask them, “Can you imagine the effect of such a scene upon the millions who seldom read a book, who seldom see a drama, but who constantly go to the ‘movies’?” In this March 4, 1915 column, Johnson worries about the escalating power of Dixon’s work to endanger Black Americans as it moves across media: “The Clansman did us much injury as a book, but most of its readers were those already prejudiced against us. It did us more injury as a play, but a great deal of what it attempted to tell could not be represented on the stage.” The film, Johnson warns, able to render “every minute detail of the story,” presents a novel threat: “a stupendous moving picture play that seriously attempts to hold the American Negro before the whole country as a degraded brute, and further, to make the object of prejudice and hatred.” 232 Birth of a Nation, argues Johnson, not only possesses a broader reach than previous mediations of The Clansman, but also presents a new spectacular mode of perception, and with it, a new danger for Black Americans. Writing on March 4, 1915, he does not know that the film was going to constitute the second Ku Klux Klan, announced with a burning 232 James W Johnson, “Views and Reviews,” New York Age, 4 March 1915. 121 cross on a Georgian hill on November 25, 1915 by William Simmons. 233 However, he rightfully worries about how it might function to crystallize new anti-Black subjectivities. In focusing on this sensational scene where Gus pursues Flora, a critical scene of Birth of a Nation’s “sexual fascism,” Johnson flags the importance of movement in this “moving picture play[‘s]” crystallization of anti-Black desire. 234 Scott Romine condenses the structuring melodramas of Dixon’s narratives to a formula, “black masculinity violates white womanhood; white manhood revenges itself upon the black body” (Romine, 127), and he illustrates his point with a line from The Leopard’s Spots—“He ran into the girl, jostling her roughly, and the young white man knocked him down instantly and beat him to death” (Leopard, 414). The violation that these works revolve around has to do with mobility. Indeed, worrying about the effect of this scene of Black masculinity violating white womanhood, Johnson’s concern focuses on the novel and film’s specter of the Ku Klux Klan’s final ride. Movement’s intensification of the affect of race melodrama constitutes part of what Miriam Hansen calls the “new sensorium” of film’s vernacular modernism. While “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism” treats specifically “classical” film between 1920 and 1950, in Birth of a Nation we can see the origins of the hallmarks of this classical cinema, “faster cutting rate, closer framing, and the breakdown of diegetic space” (Hansen, 61). 235 Birth of a Nation takes part in the 233 Maxim Simcovitch, “The Impact of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation on the Modern Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Popular Film: 1, 1, 46. 234 It is through scenes like these that, Clyde Taylor observes, “rape culture justifies its unspoken commitment to rape through the symbolism of protection against a primitive, rapacious Other…a latent and incipient social pathology always awaiting exploitation by opportunistic politicians and filmmakers” (Taylor, 30). Or, as Michael Rogin writes, “white supremacists invented the black rapist to keep white women in their place” (Ronald, 207). 235 Linda Williams’s essay, “‘Tales of Sound and Fury,’ or, The Elephant of Melodrama,” argues that the novelty Hansen ascribes to the cinema, particularly classical Hollywood 122 production and globalization of this “new sensorium,” ushering forth the embodiment of the Ku Klux Klan idea. In turning from how the Ku Klux Klan moves from riding against Birth of a Nation’s representation of Blackness on the screen to becoming an embodied political force off of it, we can start to see how Birth of a Nation, as part of Hollywood, “constituted, or tried to constitute, new subjectivities and subjects” (Hansen, “Mass” 71). We can see how its cinematic racial melodrama functioned not to manipulate the masses, but to offer a situation where they could release their desires. Dixon himself was highly conscious of cinema’s power to intensify his melodrama, beginning an unsuccessful color production of The Clansman with the Kinemacolor Corporation in 1911 before readily agreeing to D.W. Griffith’s proposal in 1914. 236 Dixon writes in his autobiography that through film he could better convince the nation of his vision, the medium offering a “new process of reasoning by which the will could be overwhelmed with conviction.” 237 In particular, he saw it as a way to move his audience, not for, but against: “We can make them see things that happen before their eyes until they cry in anguish” (Southern, 311). He wrote the screenplay of Birth of a Nation, he said, “to create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored cinema, in its production of vernacular modernism, is already preceded by the melodramatic stage tradition (210-1). However, Williams cannot deny that while cinema might share a mode of sensation that derives from melodrama, its technological apparatus does provide for an intensification of the tradition that comes before. Melodrama might be the “ur-mode of popular (vernacular) modernism,” and yet it is in cinema that it has reached its greatest influence as “the dominant form of popular moving-picture narrative” as Williams’ focus on film acknowledges (Playing, 23). 236 Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 72-4. 237 Tom Dixon, Jr, Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas Dixon (Alexandra, VA: IWV Publishing, 1984), 296. 123 men…to have all Negroes removed from the United States.” 238 Yet to produce anti-Black antipathy is also to unite whites in what the film’s director, Griffith, called “oneness of sentiment.” 239 As Griffith explained his film’s purpose to the press, it is the counterpart to Dixon’s cultivation of anti-Blackness: to bind together the United States through white sympathy. “There can exist no unity,” Griffith said, “without sympathy and oneness of sentiment” (Rydell, 131). The film, which combines and condenses Dixon’s two novels, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, is told in two parts, beginning, tellingly, with America’s fall from innocence with the arrival of the first slave: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” As Vachel Lindsay quipped in his 1915 The Art of the Moving Picture, rather than The Birth of a Nation the film “could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule.” 240 In other words, its focus is on the supposed menace to be defeated rather than the future nation. The first part of the film establishes its national interests, offering a narrative of the Civil War centering on the Northern Stoneman and Southern Cameron families. The second part focuses on the effects of Reconstruction on Piedmont, South Carolina, ancestral home of the Cameron family and where the Stoneman family comes to live. As with the novels, affronts against whiteness accrue under Reconstruction, until the Klan mobilizes after a white woman dies during an attempted 238 Charlene Regester, “The Cinematic Representation of Race in The Birth of a Nation: A Black Horror Film,” Gillespie, Michele, and Randal L. Hall ed., Thomas Dixon, Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 174-5. 239 In his introduction to the recent collection, The Birth of Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, Michael T. Martin argues that the antiblackness in the film must be understood to be directed and for its white audience. Griffith, Martin maintains, intended for the film to demean and traumatize whites so as to prompt them into unified anti-Black action. Michael T Martin, “Revisiting (as it were) the "Negro problem" in The Birth of a Nation: looking back and in the present,” The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, Michael T. Martin ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 7. 240 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 47. 124 rape. Ultimately, the Klan rides to the rescue to save Piedmont and, by extension, the nation. The film ends with the Klan’s ride becoming a parade and then a final tableau of God bestowing peace upon the world, which sacralizes the Klan’s ride as not only being about the salvation of the nation but of the world. 241 There are two primary ways in which the film depicts the threat of Blackness. The first is that of rape: Gus chasing Flora or Silas Lynch attempting to marry Austin Stoneman’s daughter, Elsie. In these sequences, even as the camera looks at Flora from Gus’s perspective, there is no access to his subjectivity. Rather, as Manthia Diawara’s use of the passive voice in his analysis of this scene indicates, there is only “unseen danger”: “being watched unawares here connotes not the lures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, but danger, and equates Gus, intertextually, with the unseen danger that stalks the innocent in many thrillers and horror movies.” 242 These sequences cultivate instead an identification with suffering white femininity, which becomes trapped, bound and gagged, in a room, as is the case of Elsie, or at the edge of a precipice, where Flora pauses, before she leaps “through the opal gates” to escape Gus, whose otherness is captured by Variety critic’s Mark Vance harrowing 1915 characterization as “that brute in human form.” 243 These 241 Enzo Traverso describes Nazism as differing in kind from the colonial ideologies that preceded it in its understanding of race war as a world clash between civilization (Kultur) and civilization’s enemy (Zivilisation) (Origins 75). However, this specific sense of the spiritual and historical is also present in Birth of a Nation, where the successful outcome of the race war allows God to bless the world with eternal peace. 242 Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Black American Cinema, Manthia Diawara ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 217. Charlene Regester expands on Diawara’s insight in “The Cinematic Representation of Race in Birth of a Nation: A Black Horror Film.” 243 This abject antiblack formulation resonates with recent work in Afropessimism where blackness is theorized as always serving as the constituent idea of the antihuman, or as Calvin Warren argues, “introduced into the metaphysical world as available equipment in human form.” Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 6. 125 moments of entrapment and enclosure recall the earliest melodrama, which revolved around wrongful imprisonment. 244 While these moments call forth sympathy from the audience for white suffering, the film also enacts this sense of enclosure in the second way it depicts Blackness: as the mass that blocks the screen. This is a translation of the abstracted superficial Blackness of the novels, variously “the black Peril” or “the black Death.” Indeed, these undifferentiated masses telegraph the insignificance of individual Blacks to this film’s world. 245 In Birth of a Nation, this characterization becomes masses of undifferentiated Blackness that occupy the entire screen—particularly apparent in the shots of the town during the ride of the Klan. 246 Though long shots, they do not offer a promise of a horizon or openness. The agitated crowd blocks the audience’s view, literally interrupting and interpolating itself during the ride of the Klan. 244 Peter Brooks finds René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s Latude, ou Trente-cinq ans de captivite to exemplify melodrama’s tendencies. Its narrative, perhaps self-evident from the title, is that of Latude, who is imprisoned for thirty-five years (because he is found with poetry that satirizes a lady of rank during the reign of Louis XV—though this cause is incidental). Indeed, his sentence continues even after the original poet of these verses has died. It is the reformist minister who eventually frees him, bringing his body out of the claustrophobia of prison and the strictures of the Ancien Regime toward the new world of liberty that the Revolution will herald. As Brooks writes, it is a play of “virtue as innocence, as guiltlessness, in its purest melodramatic form,” wherein for most of the play, the body is shackled, and “unable to assert its nature as innocence” (51). 245 Blacks could only be inessential decoration, extras, in Griffith’s cinematic worldview. As he explained, “on careful weighing of every detail concerned, the decision was made to have no black blood among the principals.” Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan and Other Episodes of Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 224. 246 In its depiction of masses, the film exhibits its ambitions to operate not merely as an anatomo-politics but as a biopolitics: “so after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing, but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species. After the anatomo-politics of the human body established in the course of the eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo- politics of the human body, but what I would call a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race” (Foucault, ‘Society’ 243). 126 While cinema enables a new intensity of this depiction of “swirling…mad negroes,” in the words of one reviewer, this blackfaced embodiment of the Other emerges from a longer tradition of American racial melodrama and minstrelsy. 247 As Cedric Robinson argues in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, contesting the previous cinematic histories of Thomas Cripps and Donald Bogle, there is a continuity between the “grotesque representations of Blacks between nineteenth-century dramatic and vaudevillian theater, humor magazines, postcards, children’s books, the new social sciences, and historical works, on the one hand, and twentieth-century popular culture.” 248 This “manic impersonation of Dixon’s race consciousness,” as Robinson calls Griffith’s filmic treatment of Blacks (Forgeries, 102), is nothing less than a racial animatedness that derives from nineteenth-century racial melodrama. The “manic” nature that Robinson notes is the “affective ideologeme of animatedness” that Sianne Ngai locates in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which plays a central role in cultivating and epitomizing the affect that “foregrounds the degree to which emotional qualities seem especially prone to sliding into corporeal qualities where the Black subject is concerned, reinforcing the notion of race as a truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body.” 249 As masses on screen, at simply a formal level, the Black bodies constantly overflow; they seem to threaten everything with disorder. In their constant movement, they offer the 247 Ward Greene. “The Atlanta Journal.” The Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffith, Director. Ed. Robert Lang. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994), 30. 248 Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 89-90. See also Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mammies, Mulattoes, and Bucks: an interpretive history of Blacks in American film (New York: Continuum, 1989). 249 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005), 95. 127 “exaggeratedly expressive body” as “a spectacle for an ethnographic gaze” (Ngai, 97) that reinforces the notion that their existence only takes place at the level of the body. Again and again, these bodies play out in their unruliness the warning: the uncontrollable body is all that Blackness is. It is ironic, of course, as these figures also doubly embody Ngai’s second definition of this affect: “controlled by an invisible other” (Ngai, 99). These Black bodies fall under Griffith’s direction, used for his racist ends. Furthermore, almost all these Black bodies are acted out by white actors in blackface, which, as Saidiya Hartman writes, is “just an extension of the master’s prerogative.” 250 Ward Greene’s disturbing response to the film on December 7, 1915, from Atlanta, Georgia, the Klan’s birthplace, offers a sense of the impersonality of this Blackness, as well as a feeling of real injury: the land of the lost cause lies like a ragged wound under a black poison that pours out upon it. Loathing, disgust, hate envelop you, hot blood cries out for vengeance. Until out of the night blazes the fiery cross that once burned high above old Scotland’s hills and the legions of the Invisible Empire roar down to the rescue, and that’s when you are lifted by the hair and go crazy. (Greene, 30). There is a clear oscillation for Greene between a sense of being buried “under a black poison that pours out” and then being “lifted by the hair” out this mire. Vachel Lindsay, even as he writes against the bigotry of the film, what he calls its “Simon Legree qualities,” cannot help himself admiring “the pictures of the rioting Negroes in the streets of the Southern town, mobs splendidly handled, tossing wildly and rhythmically like the sea” as 250 Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle, 13, 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), 187. Refuting the central contention of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which finds in blackface an anxious and subversive attraction of blackness, Hartman writes, “the illusory integrity of whiteness facilitated by attraction and/or antipathy to blackness was ultimately predicated upon the indiscriminate use and possession of the black body” (Scenes, 32). 128 well as the “White Anglo-Saxon Niagara” that washes the Black waters away (Lindsay, 49-50). In this cross-cut sequence, flipping between charging white Klansman and writhing Black mass, the camera’s eye becomes the deanimating vision of the fascist as described by Theweleit: As if magnetically attracted, their eyes hunt out anything that moves. The more intense and agitated the movement, the better.*** When they spot such movement they narrow their eyes to slits (defense), sharpen their vision of it as a dead entity by training a spotlight on it (deanimation), then destroy it, to experience a strange satisfaction at the sight of this "bloody mass." (Male 1, 217) These Black bodies must be deanimated so that white desire can flow unimpeded once more. The audience celebrates the mass lynching happening on screen. 251 Indeed, these white reviewers record a feeling of Aufbruch, an opening, a relief, a new beginning. Siegfried Kracauer describes Aufbruch in From Caligari to Hitler: “a departure from the shattered world of yesterday towards a tomorrow built on the grounds of revolutionary conceptions.” 252 It is the feeling that opens the audience to cinema, the conditions of cinema’s possibility, and also the conditions that cinema itself constitutes, particularly the feeling which this scene of “faster cutting rate, closer framing, and the breakdown of diegetic space” creates—Hansen’s new sensorium (Hansen, “Mass,” 61). And, as Roger Griffin argues, this sense of “casting off” is also the feeling that gives fascism its impetus (Modernism, 10-11, 350-1). 251 As Amy Louise Wood argues in Lynching and Spectacle : Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press; 2009) Birth of a Nation’s melodrama transmutes the barbarism of a lynching into a heroic act of protection. 252 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Leonardo Quaresima, ed (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), 38. 129 In the film itself, the ride of the Klan shifts almost seamlessly into a parade, from war into ceremony. The Klan ride off from the cabin where they saved the “former enemies of North and South…reunited again in common defense of their Aryan birthright” to the next scene in the town square where Black men drop their guns and sprint, stooped over, from the frame, making no claims to masculinity or honor. As soon as the Blacks abdicate the public sphere, the scene cuts to the parade streaming forth to general white jubilation. White desire is unimpeded and the Ku Klux Klan no longer must charge, but can forever process forth. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch speculates on the similarities between the motivations of the Klan and the Fascists, as movements that felt victimized: “Perhaps the longing for, or more precisely the drive to reclaim, motion is so central to the psyche of the vanquished because they experienced their defeat as a sudden and deadly halt.” “The same energy,” he suggests, “may be at work in those revolutionary groups that since the nineteenth century have been referred to not as parties but as movements.” 253 Yet, while many white critics registered a feeling of expansion, Black critics recorded a sense of constriction and diminishment. 254 The Indianapolis Freeman argued 253 Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, Trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Picador, 2000), 200. 254 Birth cannot be treated as just another film, which I believe is the problem with the conclusions Melvyn Stokes draws from his admirable and extensive historical work. Making the case about the fundamental misguided nature of the NAACP boycott, he notes, “the Liberty Theater was careful to avoid admitting blacks to the film—and had a group of private detectives on hand to forestall any hint of trouble—there was little danger of any real threat to social peace.” Furthermore, he suggests that there was little recognition of the film’s racism at the time. “Most white audiences who watched the film became enthusiasts for it” he writes, “even men and women who were usually supporters of the NAACP found it hard to understand what all the fuss was about.” And yet, in his dry historicism, Stokes neglects the affective dimension of the film, how it had, by banning them from the cinema, succeeded in eliminating Black Americans from the polity the film addressed. By eliminating them from the audience, these theaters confirmed the film’s desire to eliminate Black citizens from the nation whose birth the film proclaimed. The elimination of Black audiences from the screen and in the audience was only the first steps towards their elimination from the United States itself. Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a 130 the film spreads “civil death” that will turn certain “members” of the American society “dead and useless.” It describes the film as “fastening about us” “the coil of restriction…pressing us to civil death.” 255 Other articles even claimed the film led directly to physical death. One piece in the Cleveland Gazette, engaging this line of argument, declared “the film has done far more than ‘arouse prejudice against the Negro,’” but concretely has “caused the death of an Afro-American school boy in Ft. Wayne, Ind., who was shot on the street by an enraged white man who had just left a theater in which he had witnessed the infamous photoplay.” 256 However, as W.E.B. Dubois wrote, retrospectively, though a direct connection is difficult to make, there is a clear association between the film and increased anti-Black violence: “In 1914, 60 Negroes were lynched; in 1915, 99; in 1916, 65, and the number of lynchings per year kept on at the rate of at least one per week from 1915 until 1922. More Negroes were lynched in 1915 than any other year since the beginning of the century.” 257 Perhaps this ominous threat of violence informs the Gazette’s later headline for a frontpage October 5, 1918 article about banning the film: “THE INFAMOUS FILM Nation : A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time, (Oxford University Press, 2007), 140. Cara Cadoo’s work argues that the protests were not merely about the images, but the entire structure: “for the black men and women who protested the film, The Birth of a Nation was more than projected image. It was part of a fast-growing racially exclusive industry promoted by white supremacists and exhibited, for the most part, in segregated theaters that were protected by the police.” Furthermore, she notes, the resistance to the film was often bound up with campaigns against state violence. Cara Cadoo, “The Birth of a Nation’s long century” in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, Michael T. Martin, ed (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 42. 255 “The Birth of a Nation.” Freeman, 1 May 1915, 4. 256 “The Infamous Film ‘The Birth Of A Nation’,” Cleveland Gazette, 3 Mar. 1917, 1. 257 Jane Gaines, Fire & Desire : Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 233. 131 WORSE THAN POISON GAS!” 258 Indeed, this discourse that Birth is “worse than poison gas” highlights the film’s physical impact on the Black community. By declaring Birth worse than poison gas, the Gazette underlines the sensational damage of its melodrama to the Black audience. Poison gas was among the most terrifying of the new weapons of World War I. As Achille Mbembe writes of the conditions of World War I that set the stage for fascism, “gas attacks transformed the atmosphere itself into a deadly weapon” (Mbembe, 120). And for the Black community, the way in which Birth of a Nation became a sensational national fixation must have felt like one could not escape from the violent structure of feeling it brought forth. 259 If the film created an affective cloud of feeling that felt to Black men enervating like poison gas, to the future Klansman it felt like, as its Imperial Wizard William Simmons wrote, “the reincarnation among the sons of the spirit of the fathers” (Simmons, 22). Film was the first line of the Klan’s reproduction. It showed the audience how to act out the anxious anti-Black feelings it crystallized. As Walter Lippman wrote about watching the film in a book published in 1922, The shadowy idea becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Klu Klux Klan [sic], thanks to Mr. Griffith, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a Nation. Historically it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a pernicious shape, but it is a shape, and I doubt whether anyone who has seen the film and does not know more about the Klu Klux Klan [sic] than Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those white horsemen. 260 The film historian Terry Ramsaye linked the film and the movement even more tightly in his film history of 1926. Not only did the film incarnate the “Klu Klux Klan” as the avatar 258 “The Infamous Film Worse Than Poison Gas! Director Mc Reynolds Writes That The Government Is,” Cleveland Gazette, 5 Oct. 1918, 1. 259 Ben Singer’s Melodrama and Modernity (2001) also points out a link between melodrama’s sensational affect and the trauma and shell shock of World War I (124). 260 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 92. 132 of good, but the society offered an outlet for the spectators to fulfill the film’s fantasy of purification by assuming the robes of the organization: “the society made the customers all actors in costumes.” 261 The Klan not only placed its first advertisements next to those publicizing the film, but throughout the teens and twenties recruited outside screenings and sponsored their own screenings of the film. They promised, “It will make a better American of you.” 262 Birth of a Nation thus served as a way for the Klansman to extend their sympathetic community. 263 Birth became an essential part of the media environment, along with the Klan’s newspapers, pamphlets, radio stations, and Cavalier Motion Picture production company, that spread its “intense emotionality” and chauvinist structure of feeling across the United States (Gordon 48, 53). Indeed, one can see evidence of just how readily American audiences responded to the film’s affect in James Weldon Johnson’s account of watching the film in New York among an audience comprised of Irish and Jewish people. Attentive to how the audience, moved into identification with Birth of a Nation, identified with the KKK, Johnson remarks on how the film can produce this response when the Klan would only have seen in these people other enemies to be eliminated: “It is a wonder to me that protests against this picture has been left almost entirely to the Negro…the audience was 261 Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926), 638. 262 Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 107. 263 By virtue of recruiting outside the screening locations and thus setting up channels to divert the newly crystallized desire of spectators, the Ku Klux Klan was able to pave the gap that Linda Williams notes between “what we think” and ‘what we feel at the ‘movies’”: melodrama is by definition the retrieval of an absolute innocence and good in which most thinking people do not put much faith. However, what we think and what we feel at the ‘movies’ are often two very different things. We go to the movies not to think but to be moved. In a postsacred world, melodrama represents one of the most significant, and deeply symptomatic, ways we negotiate moral feeling. (“Melodrama,” 61) 133 made up very largely of Jews and most likely a large number of Irish people, and all wildly applauded the riding of the Ku Klux Klan, regarding them, no doubt, as chivalrous knights of mercy, and not knowing that the revived Ku Klux Klan is as much anti-Jewish and anti- Catholic as it is anti-Negro.” 264 Paul McEwan would like to disavow the excitement of this ride as purely emotional manipulation rather than consider how it might merely organize a situation that enables its audience to feel desires that in other situations are disavowed; he writes, the sequence of the ride of the Klansman “is a central exhibit in Hollywood cinema’s ability to elevate emotions over critical thinking.” 265 Or rather, Birth offers images that writers like Johnson and McEwan would like to believe move their audience rather than crystallize the audience’s latent beliefs. And yet, as Michael Rogin notes, “the blacked-up white body unified the body politic and purified it of black physical contamination.” 266 Excluding real Blacks, Rogin argues, blackface reified a Black-white binary that Americanized new immigrants under the banner of whiteness (Blackface, 71). Racism enabled these new immigrants to whitewash themselves as white Americans. As Tom Rice notes, it is facile to declare that “a single film engineered one of the most prominent social and political organizations in American history.” 267 And yet, the film allowed for a crystallization of feelings and desires in circulation at the time, fashioning them into an exhilarating and moralistic narrative in which the spectators could take part. The film promised a release from the blockage of desire, particularly appealing to the anxieties of middle-class white men, who became the organization’s core 264 James W. Johnson, “Views and Reviews,” New York Age, 14 May 1921. 265 Paul McEwan, The Birth of a Nation (London: BFI, 2015), 9. 266 Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 43. 267 Tom Rice “‘Damage Unwittingly Done’: D.W. Griffith and the Re-Birth of the Ku Klux Klan.” A Companion to D.W. Griffith. Ed. Charlie Keil. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 464. 134 membership (Gordon, 5). It fostered a melodramatic politics, promising its petit bourgeois membership to help them overcome the overwhelming experience of modernity: the threats that the immigrant, the new woman, and the new man posed to their self-worth and, in some cases, livelihood (MacLean 62, 73). Birth offered the promise that their endangered masculinity could be recovered and their nation redeemed through the extirpation of the national enemy. The Ku Klux Klan that reemerged in Atlanta, Georgia in 1915 adopted the visual iconography of the filmic Klan (Rice, “Damage,” 466). Inspired by news of the film, the grifter William Simmons led a group of men to plant “the fiery cross of Old Scotland’s hills” (Griffith), a ritual that Dixon had pinched from Walter Scott, on Stone Mountain on November 25, 1915 (Simcovitch, 46). The aim of this group, who called themselves “an army of Protestant Americans” (MacLean, 12), was to maintain a social vision of a homogenous Anglo-Saxon “America” that they traced back to Thomas Jefferson. 268 Nancy MacLean names the Klan’s combination of economic populism with the desire to dominate Others, a “reactionary populism” (MacLean, xi), which she suggests that the Nazis too shared. The Klan’s beliefs have clear resonance with European fascists. Declaring themselves the defenders of “pure Americanism” and “one hundred percent Americanism,” the Klan saw themselves as, in the words of their founder, Simmons, “making a last stand for America as the home of Americans and Americanism” (Simmons, 118). As with this declaration of Simmons, the appeal of the Klan to the American people had to do with the threat of injury that Blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants posed to 268 Not only does Ezra Pound suggest Mussolini is the heir to the spirit of Jefferson in his anti-FDR pamphlet, Jefferson-Mussolini, but also the Americanist and Nazi Propaganda official, Friedrich Schönemann suggests a link between Germany’s “new democracy” and the original spirit of Jefferson. See Friedrich Schönemann, Amerika und der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Junker u. Dünnhaupt, 1934) and Epilogue of this dissertation. 135 the true American people. In his 1923 book, The Klan Unmasked, the Klan’s founder, William Simmons, presented a United States in the clutches of a foreign threat. Characterizing immigration as, along with the presence of U.S. Blacks, one of the “two crushing blows” that American civilization had received (Simmons, 230), Simmons worried about the passing of white supremacy, and the rise of a multiethnic community— a “conglomeration out of which it is impossible to build a nation” (Simmons, 240). “If alien populations are permitted, as in the past, to flood our land, colonize in our great cities, and propagate their kind with such amazing rapidity” Simmons argued, “then our country is lost and everything the fathers strove to build for posterity will sooner or later be wiped out” (Simmons, 109). As Hiram Wesley Evans, who succeeded Simmons as Imperial Wizard in 1922, wrote in 1925, the Klan had to protect U.S. “fundamentals,” which were in such “danger” that “toleration becomes a vice” (Gordon, 22). 269 Citing eugenics, Evans declared the melting pot a failed project; the time of integration had given way to the need for expulsion. “We who are the heirs of the American tradition are called upon to act,” Evans declared, to take the part of “the plain people of America, who believe in an American nation, built on that unity of mind and spirit which is possible only to an homogenous people, and growing out of the purposes, spirit, and instincts of our pioneer ancestors” (Evans, 807, 814). Their appeal to an injured white America culminated in six million Klan members across the United States by 1925, including 75 members of the United States Congress of 1923 (MacLean, 10, 17). The Klan used its political power to successfully prevent the presidential nomination of the Catholic Governor of New York, Al Smith, at the 1924 and 1928 Democratic National Convention (Gordon, 217). Perhaps its most damaging legacy 269 Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan: Defender of Americanism,” Forum 74, 807. 136 are its successful campaigns for various eugenic laws as well as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which severely restricted non-“Nordic” immigrants; indeed, Albert Johnson, the senator whom the Saturday Evening Post so praised for engineering the bill, was himself a Washington State Klansman (Gordon, 238). The Klan of the Twenties did make explicit its similarities with European fascists, calling itself “the Mussolini of America” (MacLean, 178-9). The California Klan claimed that its movement was kin with the “Black Shirts of Italy and the Grey Shirts of Germany” (MacLean, 179). However, both Gordon and Maclean, while recognizing the family resemblance, state that the Klan did not seek the authoritarianism of Mussolini or Hitler’s fascism. And yet, as a male organization with a martial discipline, constructed around an organicist nation, that sought the political, social, and, at times, physical death of the Others whom it deemed not sufficiently American, the Ku Klux Klan offers something very close to a fascism (MacLean, 19). It is worthwhile to remember that Mussolini and Hitler also came to power through democratic systems, and that the Klan did want to change who qualified to partake in this system (Gordon, 251). It did want to control the political system. To believe only in “the success of universal, white, male suffrage,” as Simmons declared was the founders’ intentions (Simmons, 106), was also the National Socialists avowed aim: a “new type of…Democracy.” 270 Furthermore, though the second Ku Klux Klan might not have been as deadly as the first, it still perpetrated terrorist acts. By 1921, New York World documented 150 instances of violent Klan vigilantism (MacLean, 5). In Athens, Georgia, for example, 270 The Americanist and Nazi propaganda official, Friedrich Schönemann calls Hitler’s National Socialism a “neuartige deutsche Demokratie” in Amerika und der Nationalsozialismus. Friedrich Schönemann, Amerika und der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Junker u. Dünnhaupt, 1934), 14. 137 MacLean recounts that Black residents accused Klansmen of tying Blacks to cars and dragging them through the street, driving them out of their homes, and confiscating their belongings (MacLean, 151). Georgian Klansmen fired on Black houses and beat pregnant Black women unconscious (MacLean, 154). The Northern Klan too was known to burn down Black homes (Gordon, 116). Echoing the logic of Birth through legislation and vigilantism, the Ku Klux Klan imagined a rebirth of the nation through the elimination of its Others. It might not have realized a fascist state, but the Klan was full of fascist desire. Indeed, when the Nazis came to power, The New York Age suggested that they had learned from the KKK in a July 29, 1933 article: the tactics that they are now employing against the Jews and other so-called inferior classes of the population resemble greatly the practices of that American body of night riders and pillow case wearers known as the Ku Klux Klan. It might be that the present Chancellor, Hitler, served an apprenticeship at some time in Atlanta, under the tutelage of William J. Simmons, as a subordinate Kleagle or something of the sort. 271 Though involving a mocking tone, the article is acute in noting the potential mobility of the Ku Klux Klan idea, for the Klan’s inspirational text, Birth of a Nation, is itself comprised of at least two transitive racial substitutions. Cedric Robinson highlights that Griffith had rehearsed this anti-miscegenation screed in his thirty-plus Westerns that recognized the “superiority of white womanhood” and often featured the savage lust of the Native American (Forgeries, 112). 272 Furthermore, Robinson points out that Birth borrowed elements of Mary Phagan’s 1913 rape to portray the attempt on Flora. Not only 271 “Rebuking the Nazis,” The New York Age. 29 July 1933. 4. 272 See also Daniel Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness,” wherein he shows how Griffith’s Biograph films rehearse the threat to white womanhood across American and international contexts. Daniel Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness.” The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, Daniel Benardi, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 119-124. 138 does the film’s Piedmont, South Carolina resemble the Georgia of Phagan, but also, the plot changes from the original novel, where a mother and daughter commit suicide jointly, to this scene that depitcs the attempted rape of a lone Southern maiden—reminiscent of the scenario that had been in the newspapers. However, rather than have the violator be the Jewish Frank, in Birth, the film substitutes the Black Gus—who has also been reformed from the novel’s Black officer to a more slovenly and shiftier drifter—for the venal Jew; in this, Birth heeds the alternative story presented by Frank’s defenders, that Jim Conley, the janitor who admitted under duress to helping Frank move Phagan’s body, was the true murderer (Forgeries, 114). Thus, one can understand this scene of primal violation to already be transitive; the bad Black occupies the position of the Jewish murderer of 1913. The violation could not help but carry a trace of that recent memory with it. Perhaps, this trace is part of what informs Madison Grant’s figuration of the Jew in The Passing of the Great Race, which he modeled on the position of the Negro in the South. 273 Miriam Hansen’s argument about how American cinema’s vernacular modernism travelled is equally true of Birth of a Nation and the Ku Klux Klan idea: “it did so not because of its presumably universal narrative form but because it meant different things to different people and publics, both at home and abroad. We must not forget that these films, along with other mass-cultural exports, were consumed in locally quite specific, and unequally developed, contexts and conditions of reception” (Hansen, “Mass,” 68). In other words, the enemy against whom the film marshals its audience is not irreducibly particular. Indeed, as a member of Griffith’s crew said about the later World 273 Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America: 1900-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 37. 139 War I propaganda production Hearts of the World (1918): “Here was his story, the story he had used so effectively time and time again, played right before his eyes: his famous run to the rescue. Only this time it was not a handful of desperate people but a typical Griffith production on the most gigantic scale: all Europe under the iron heel of a monstrous enemy, with the rescue now coming from the massed might of America” (Rogin, Ronald, 230). This is all to say that the affect of abhorrence is an abhorrence against an Other—not limited to Blacks—as well as the subsequent demand to annihilate. Birth of a Nation’s structure of feeling and antagonistic dynamic traveled beyond the worries of Lester Walton with which I opened this chapter, about how Birth eliminated Black personhood from the United States. It was not merely to reenact the anti-Black violence done in America, but to offer a model to justify the future violence of Nazism. The “Ku-Klux-Klan Idee” in Germany “The great director Griffith, with the great actress Lillian Gish, has made this film,” Béla Balázs begins his review on January 13, 1925, after watching Birth of a Nation. “Even greater and more penetrating, though, was the vileness that it presents.” The film, advertised as “the “struggle [Kampf] of the white with the black race” at the Kino Wienzelle in Vienna where Balázs saw it, so alarmed him that, as previously noted, he eschewed the conventions of a review—describing the plot, the performances of the actors, the camera work of the directors—to focus solely on the threat of the film as, using a term associated with the Austrian far right and the rise of Nazism, “race protector hate propaganda” [“rassenschützlerische hetzpropaganda”]. Opposing how Blacks are “presented as dangerously evil, naturally subaltern animals, as ‘black Shame’ [‘schwarze Schande’],” the 140 socialist critic refuses to describe the film further: “I do not want to discuss the details of this glorification of the Ku Klux Klan Idea” (Balázs, “Die Geburt,” 334). Instead, his article, aptly entitled, “Birth of a Nation: A Question for the Censor,” presents a series of questions about and to the powers who have enabled this film to be developed and distributed. “Do the gentlemen [who imported this film] want to further cultivate our European race prejudices” he asks, “of which we already hold quite enough, just for business?” 274 He finds the film’s screening to be a failure on the part of the censor, arguing, perhaps naively, that its anti-Black racism far exceeds any permissible antisemitism: “Would the concerned men also have launched a film that included antisemitism to this extent? I would not like to get personal, but even if these men were the most fanatic Aryans they would not have done so. They would not have done so because our wise, good, Christian censor would not have approved it.” He ends his review with an appeal to the Austrian censor office to ban this “inhuman, malicious propaganda film”: “Did it not strike any of the gentlemen [on the Censor board] that this movie is more immoral than any brothel scene could be? Will the censor not take steps to at least belatedly prohibit this hate movie?” Its questions proliferating, Balázs’s review has a real urgency; it gives the sense that Balázs was deeply concerned about the effect of this “hate propaganda” on Europe to both cultivate new prejudices and strengthen the growing rassenschützlerische tendencies. According to him, this film released into the public sphere something that would exceed even the National Socialist Movement and its rabid strains of Aryanism growing on the German-speaking Right. It is, he argues, a “hate movie” that carries the “Ku Klux Klan 274 “wollen die Herren zu unseren europaischen Rassenvorurteilen, die wir zur Genüge besitzen, noch ein neues züchten, um damit ein Geschäft zu machen” 141 Idea,” bringing the American racial melodrama to Europe, wherein the Other’s existence is in itself the threat against whiteness. In its “hate propaganda,” in its racist feeling, it carries the “idea” of the race-motivated fascist avantgarde, across the ocean. 275 It makes a case for the necessity of incessant Rassenkampf, race war. However, Balàzs’s review not only addresses a belated censor but itself also comes too late. Birth had already been circulating in Europe for at least six years at the time of his review, and in Austria for over a year. 276 Its “Ku Klux Klan idea” had already become part of European discourse, a charged fear of the left and a hope of the right. In particular, conservative currents in Germany had already seized on Birth’s race melodrama as a form through which to narrate their own national history, while the left wrote with anxiety about the powerful “propaganda film.” As Laura Heins notes, Balàzs even lost his position as film critic at Vienna’s Der Tag due to the strength of the Austrian public outcry against his negative review. 277 And yet, though Balàzs decamped to Berlin, the very discourse he had hoped to foreclose was waiting for him there. Indeed, even in his critique, Balàzs was not prepared for what was to come. As Heins writes, “Bálázs could not imagine that the 275 Though Italian fascism, as discussed in Chapter One, developing from a vitalist conception of the nation, always entailed a racialist conception of the world, that does not explicitly emerge until its 1936 war with Ethiopia. Birth of a Nation articulates earlier what becomes the Nazi credo of national regeneration through race war. 276 The film factory and distributor, Micheluzzi & Co., (Micco Film) had obtained the rights in 1923 and had premiered the film on December 14, 1923, with a preview in the middle of August. “Micheluzzi & Co. Das Kino Journal. 7 July, 1923. p. 9; “Was Der Filmbote Bringt” Der Filmbote. 30 June 1923. No. 26. p. 17. It played on December 14, 1923 as well as September 12 and 16, 1924. “Die neuen Filme erscheinen:” Der Filmbote. 19 April 1924. No. 16. p. 109. 277 Laura Heins, “The ‘Psyche of the White Man’ and the Mass Face on Film: Béla Balázs between Racialist and Marxist Physiognomics,” New German Critique 127, 43:1, 69. Not only was Balàzs fired, but also, that May, the film returned to Vienna. Playing on two consecutive days, on May 11 and 12 th at the Park Kino, it was given the subtitle, “Rassenkampf” (“Birth of a Nation: Race War”), and, in the German nationalist newspaper, Freie Stimmen, described as “the American freedom war in eight acts.” “Villacher Nachrichten.” Freie Stimmen 11 Mai 1925, 3. 142 uncritical reception of Griffith’s film would be a preview of the horrors to come in the next decade” (“‘Psyche,” 69). Many of the details of Germany’s reception of Birth of a Nation are unclear. The first extant account of Birth’s reception in Germany is by Griffith booster and biographer, Seymour Stern, who repeatedly made the claim that Birth of a Nation “scored its greatest European success in Germany, where it reached large segments of the German population in the years following World War I,” first in a 1945 Sight and Sound article, a strange attempt to rehabilitate Griffith’s reputation after World War II, and later in his 1965 book on the film. 278 More recently, the respected historian of the U.S. South, Leon Litwack, writes that Birth of a Nation was particularly popular in Germany and South Africa, suggesting an affinity between the film’s racism and the notorious racism of the Nazi and Apartheid regimes. 279 Though she makes no claims for its impact, the film historian Deniz Gokturk writes that Birth of a Nation circulated through Germany in 1924. 280 Meanwhile, the film critic J. Hoberman and the political scientist Michael Rogin both declare Birth of a Nation a favorite film of Hitler and Goebbels. 281 Indeed, Rogin even goes so far to claim that Birth of a Nation was the direct model for the Nazi regime’s most infamous film, Jud Süss (1940) (Blackface, 5). And yet, at this point in time, it is not certain that there was a public screening of the film in Weimar Germany. Archival evidence shows the film circulated with German intertitles; it premiered in German-speaking St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1920 and then had 278 Seymour Stern, Griffith I: Birth of a Nation, Part I (New York: Film Culture, 1965), 72. 279 Leon Litwack. “Birth of a Nation.” Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. Ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 136. 280 Deniz Gokturk, “Moving Images of America in Early German Cinema.” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel. (Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 96. 281 J. Hoberman, “The Fascist Guns of the West,” Aperture 110 (Spring 1988), 64. 143 several showings in Vienna, Austria from December 1923 through 1925. 282 However, the extant periodical record suggests that Birth of a Nation was not shown in Germany until after World War II, when it was released as part of a campaign to Americanize Germany. 283 The publicity for these releases claimed that Birth had never been shown in Germany before because, after World War I, the German film industry had blocked its entry, worried about the competition the blockbuster would have provided. 284 While it is certainly conceivable that this was the reason that this film was not shown, all the rest of Griffith’s major work during this period—including Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Orphans in the Storm, Way Down East, even America—was screened in Germany during the Weimar Republic. 285 With this explanation not particularly compelling, and in the absence of formal records of a ban, one can only speculate as to why the film was not released. One is led to 282 “American Cinema,” Publicity Poster, 26 Oct. 1920, Schriftgut Archiv, Deutsche Kinemathek. 283 Ironically, this campaign coincided with the erection of Jim Crow-like conditions by American troops across Army Bases and, even, cities in West Germany (Fenner 238). 284 Der Kurier on November 26, 1952 explains why it has taken so long for “the First great Masterpiece of American films” to arrive: “Berlin bekommt ihn erst jetzt zu Gesicht. Seinerzeit, während und nach dem ersten Weltkrieg, verhinderten Blockade und dann Inflation den Import des epochalen Werkes, mit dem ein entscheidende Periode der neuen Kunst eingeleitet wurde. Und später sah man Hollywood als den gefährlichen Rivalen für Babelsberg an.” Walter Kaul “Die Geburt einer Nation,” Der Kurier, 26 Nov. 1952. 285 Fanny Ward played in Berlin on September 1919. “Ward, Fanny” Film Kurier 27 Sept. 1919. Judith of Bethulia was screened on January 2, 1920 at Berlin’s Sportpalast- Lichtspiele (Frank. “Judith Von Bethulien.” 04 Jan. 1920). Orphans in the Storm (Zwei Waisen im Sturm der Zeit), advertised as the “first major Griffith film in Berlin,” opened in June 1923 at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast. “Vom Film.” 4. Berliner Börsen-Zeitung. 3 May, 1923; “Von Film.” 4. Berliner Börsen-Zeitung. 22 June 1923. Way Down East was shown on January 22, 1924 at the Tauentzien-Palast. “Mädchenlos” Film Kurier. 22 Jan. 1924. Broken Blossoms was shown on March 14, 1924 at the Tauentzien Palast (W.H. “Eine Blüte gebrochen”. Film Kurier. 15 Mar. 1924. Intolerance was shown in at least five cinemas in Munich, including the Fern-Andra-Lichtspiele, on November 4, 1924 (Adelt, L. “Intoleranz”. Film Kurier. 05 Nov. 1924) and then had its Berlin premiere at the Bafag Theater on November 28, 1924. W.H., “Intoleranz”. Film Kurier. 29 Nov. 1924. That Royal Girl opened at Ufa-Palast am Zoo on September 9, 1926. “Die Tat ohne Zeugen” Film Kurier. 10 Sept. 1926.. The Sorrows of Satan played on June 20, 1927 at the Gloria- Palast. W.H. “Lord Satanas.” Film Kurier. 21 June 1927. 144 wonder if the Ku Klux Klan idea seemed to present too great threat to the stability of the Weimar Republic—as it did ultimately prove to be. Even if the film itself did not directly reach a wide audience, the Ku Klux Klan idea that it spawned was very much a part of German periodical discourse, informing desires of the right and fears of the left. Though perhaps these records are not “conclusive,” Birth of a Nation’s influence in and on Germany is far more than merely, as Melvyn Stokes would have it, “suggestive” of the film being a model for The Black Shame, a 1921 anti-Black and anti-French feature film. 286 Birth of a Nation’s influence reached beyond its influence in film as it was discussed not so much as a work of art, but rather as a mode of sociopolitical intervention. In Weimar Germany, Birth of a Nation served to mobilize a way of feeling about race and nation—the Ku Klux Klan idea—that pointed towards the cinematic racial melodrama of Nazism. The German press, from the first time they mention it, refer to Birth of a Nation as a “propaganda film.” In one of the earliest German articles to mention Birth, a 1919 essay on major U.S. productions, “amerikanische Grossfilms,” subtitled the “American flood,” U.S. films’ general belligerence comes in for criticism. Within this discussion of how U.S. films are too fascinated with war, the prominent Danish-German director Urban Gad names Birth a “rightly uninteresting film for Europeans.” 287 Der Kinematograph’s overview of Swedish cinema agrees with this dismissal, finding “the mood is against this warmongering America here, so one cannot take any special joy in the coming into being of this nation.” 288 A 1926 roundup of Hollywood news, “The Trust Marches on,” in Der Kinematograph, 286 “D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, Michael T. Martin, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 94. 287 Urban Gad, “Der amerikanische Grossfilm,” Licht Bild Bühne, 15 March 1919, 15. 288 L.A Hermann, Der Kinematograph 2 Oct 1919, No. 613, 12. 145 notes how Birth “probably unknown in Germany…has very much dissatisfied in England” before going on to condemn the film’s future prospects: “it will bore the European continent because it is so one-hundred-percent American, that one must be American to find pleasure in it.” 289 However, the supposition that both of these articles seem to make, that Birth is “too American,” echoes how the film was originally discussed in an U.S. context as too Southern. In the United States, Northern periodicals first discussed the film as potentially too much about the South for the North to be interested. However, Stokes points out how, ultimately, when the Northern public had the chance to see it, “northern spectators cheered the Klan on just as enthusiastically as Southerners did” (D.W. Griffith, 127). Could it have been that these reviewers also worried that German audiences would thrill with the film’s “Ku Klux Klan idea”? The Kinematograph’s dismissal of the film as “too one-hundred-percent American” was a coded way of declaring the film too fascist. By 1923, within the U.S. context, as Sarah Churchwell records, the term “one-hundred-percent American” had come to “parenthetically define” the Ku Klux Klan and Fascists (Churchwell, 274). At the end of 1922, the Klan had announced plans to ally with Mussolini’s Fascists and open a Klan in Italy (Churchwell, 275). Left-leaning Germans were worried about the Ku Klux Klan idea taking root in Germany, a concern implicit in their repeated references to Birth as “propaganda.” A 1923 article titled, “Kukucksbund” (The Ku-Klux-Klan), in Berlin’s leading newspaper of the left, Berliner Tageblatt, exemplifies this tendency. It reads the film and the Klan’s obsession with being “hundertprozentige Amerikaner” next to the growing movement of National Socialism in Germany. The article makes no comment on 289 “Der Trust marschiert,” Kinematograph, 24 Oct. 1926, No. 1027, 12. 146 the quality of the film, but suggests it might be useful to understand Germany’s own racist vanguard: at the time when the National Socialist movement, with all its leaders and supporters, strives—happily unsuccessfully—to undermine the German nation by fostering a struggle against French militarism and to raise public interest in its publicity-addicted leader through a flood of public events, it pays to have a look into the machinations of those people who seek to undertake the same anti-social attempts to “save” America by trying to win over America’s philistines to support a social distinction between “real” and “other” Americans. 290 After describing how “the second part of the film shows the Klan members in the full magnitude of their demented and mysterious cult,” the correspondent details “the white robe, which covers the mounted Klansmen to his feet, the white masks with its black eye- slits, the tall pointed cap,” before declaring with some irony: “This is the costume of that ambitious and industrious youth who have vowed death and annihilation to American coloreds and their related foreign rabble.” Furthermore, he points out, the film’s depiction of the Ku Klux Klan resonates with the homegrown German Fascists, although they mobilize swastikas rather than crosses: “Does not this remind one of our folk, God knows from where, who proudly display the sign of Buddhist attachment in brilliant ignorance of the sacred symbol?” This article serves as a reminder about how it is only in hindsight that the Klan can seem, as MacLean puts it, “a historical curiosity whose doom was foreordained” (MacLean, 184). As Nancy MacLean writes, “as late as the elections of 1928, the Nazis took only 2.6 percent of the total vote and were seen as ‘a minor, and 290 „in der Zeit, da die nationalsozialistische Bewegung mit alle ihren Führern und Anhängern bestrebt, aber erfreulichweise erfolglos bestrebt ist, die deutsche Nation in ihrem Abwehrkampfe gegen den französischen Militarismus zu beinträchtigen und durch eine Flut von Veranstaltungen das öffentliche Interesse auf seinen reklamesüchtigen Anführer zu lenken, verlohnt es sich noch einen Blick in das Treiben derjenigen Leute zu werfen, die gerade dabei find, in Amerika dieselben volksfeindlichen Zersplitterungsversuche zu unternehmen und die amerikanischen Spießer für eine soziale Unterscheidung zwischen ‘richtigen’ und anderen Amerikanern zu gewinnen suchen.“ “Ku-Kucks-Bund,” Berliner Tageblatt, 6 Feb. 1923, 61, 5. 147 declining splinter party” (185); on the other hand, during this period time the Ku Klux Klan were making and breaking political candidates at national conventions. Regularly German newspapers ran notices on the Klan. The Neue Hamburgische Börsen-Halle of 18 March 1923, under the banner of “The Ku Klux Klan and American Politics,” describes how “two men were brutally tortured and eventually killed” by the Klan in Louisiana (“Ku Klux Klan”). 291 The next year, the Hamburger Nachrichten reported that the Klan had “carried off remarkable success” in the 1924 elections, “their candidates” having won “the elections to the Senate in Oklahoma and Colorado and were voted in as Governors in Kansas, Indian, and Colorado.” The year after, Der Weltkampf, a central Nazi publication under the editorship of Alfred Rosenberg, noted its kinship with the American group, publishing the September 23, 1924 speech of the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard, which declared an American race war; he editor, Alfred Rosenberg, declared the speech “fundamental” reading. 292 This is all to say, the Klan—at turns, odd, threatening, and alluring—was a frequent subject of the German press, with coverage peaking in 1925 when the discovery of a splinter “Klavern,” the secret Knights of the Fiery Cross, among the far-right Freikorps, instigated a brief panic among the Left in Weimar Germany. 293 Though Ethel Payne, writing for the socialist Berliner Volkszeitung dismissed the Klan in October 1921 as but “the most telling symptom of the odd American enthusiasm for clubs,” a November 28, 1922 article in the newspaper, titled “Ku Klux Klan in Congress,” presents the Klan as a 291 “Bei diesem Verbrechen wurden zwei Männer in bestialischer Weise germartert und schließlich ermordert.” 292 “Vom Ku-Klux-Klan,” Der Weltkampf 2:1, 19. 293 See Richard E. Frankel, “Klansmen in the Fatherland: A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right Wing Political Culture,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 7.1 (2013), 61-78. 148 much more serious issue. 294 It tells how the Louisiana Governor had appealed to President Harding for help in corralling the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which “is already so established that, this society of Knights with white hoods, obedient only to their sworn oath, are ever more openly disregarding the rule of law.” 295 Indeed, the newspaper notes, “according to the most read political editor in the United States, Arthur Brisbane, not less than 60 of the new members of Congress belong to the Ku Klux Klan.” Evoking the possibility of an armed coup, the newspaper notes, the Louisiana Governor was not going to apply for “military help” from the federal government but merely for “moral support,” as he would only “fight them through legal means.” Meanwhile, on the same page, the newspaper discusses Hitler and his band of “Bavarian fascists,” to which the newspaper presents as “answer”: “the breakup of the group and the expulsion of their Fuhrer from German soil.” 296 To read horizontally, across this newspaper, it seems like the Volkszeitung urged these measures against the early Nazis that were not currently possible in the United States, in whose politics the Klan had taken root. The Klan haunts the newspaper’s suggestion that the Bavarian fascists be quickly dispelled. This sense of equivalence is further heightened by a 1924 article in Hamburg’s Altonaer Nachrichten by the German-American writer and translator, Herman George Scheffauer. He notes that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, while maintaining the “ridiculous 294 Ethel Payne, “Der Ku Klux Klan,” Berliner Volkszeitung, 24 Oct. 1921; “Ku-Klux- Klan im Kongress,” Berliner Volkszeitung, 28 Nov. 1922. 295 “Es schon so weit gekommen, dass sich die mit weißen Kapuzen bekleiden Ritter der Gesellschaft, gehorsam dem Eide, den sie geschworen, immer offener über Gesetz und Recht hinwegsetzen.” “Ku-Klux-Klan im Kongress.” Berliner Volkszeitung. 28 Nov. 1922. 296 “nach dem meist gelesenen politischen Leitartikler der Vereinigten Staaten, Arthur Brisbane, gehören nicht weniger als 60 von den neuen Mitgliedern des Kongresses zu Ku- Klux-Klan. Im Gegensatz zu den Zeitungsmeldungen leugnet Mr. Parker allerdings die Absicht, in Washington militärische Hilfe gegen die Mitglieder der Geheimgesellschaft zu fördern” See “Ku-Klux-Klan im Kongress,” Berliner Volkszeitung, 28 Nov. 1922. 149 ceremonial hocus pocus” of the Reconstruction Klan, has a distinct purpose from its original iteration—trading a “defensive attitude” for “an offensive one.” This “melodramatic” movement, he writes, arises, in part, from America’s “appetite for new sensation.” Translating the movement into a European context, he tells his German readers “One can understand the whole movement as a kind of American fascism.” 297 This threat of translation contributed to Birth of a Nation’s ban in France. While the film was met with “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on its full release in France in 1923, the French government banned the film later that year because of fears about the film’s ideological force. 298 Along with concerns about its direct impact on Black-white race relations, which were also increasingly strained by an influx of racist U.S. tourists, as Melvyn Stokes notes, the film’s publicity so closely tied the film to the Klan that it alarmed French authorities (“Race,” 26). Indeed, in July 1923, the police searched for a member of the Klan who had “papers bearing the ritual and laws of the Ku Klux Klan.” On August 19, when the film was banned in France, the New York Herald discussed how some American businessmen had been plotting a Paris Klan (“Race,” 26-7). However, France’s ban of the film in the occupied Rhein territory is even more revealing because the fear was not merely about the importation of the Klan, but also because of how the film could crystallize Germany’s burgeoning fascist desire. The French military banned the film in the German Rhineland territory it occupied because it believed it would amplify the anti-French and anti-Senegalese sentiment that the burgeoning 297 “Seine Ziele sind auch andere geworden, au seiner defensive Einstellung ist eine offensive geworden—man darf die ganze Bewegung als eine Art amerikanischen Faszismus [sic] auffassen.” Herman George Scheffauer, “Der Ku Klux Klan,” Die Altonaer Nachrichten, 24 Dec. 1924. 298 Melvyn Stokes, “Race, Politics, and Censorship: D. W. Griffith's ‘The Birth of a Nation’ in France, 1916-1923,” Cinema Journal 50, 1 (Fall 2010), 24. 150 National Socialist movement was attempting to foment. 299 Since 1918 there had been a widespread “campaign” against France’s use of Black colonial troops in their forces occupying the Rhineland. 300 While, predictably, the most vigorous outcry emerged from the right, Wigger notes that a narrative of the “Black Shame” stretched across class and, with the exception of the far left, across political associations to unify Germany against this so-called violation (Wigger, 4). This campaign echoed the logic of Birth in defining whiteness through the desire to eliminate the Other, and, during its peak between 1920 and 1922, inspired protests in the United States as well as South Africa against the Black Horror, “die schwarze Schmach” (Wigger, 9, 33). As Stokes noted earlier, in 1921 a film was produced of that name, Die schwarze Schmach. Though, though there is a similarity in the theme to Birth of a Nation—Die schwarze Schmach deals with the violation of white womanhood by Black masculinity—the structure emphasizes pathos rather than action. It ends with German women pleading to the camera for help from foreign audiences. 301 The Nazis excoriated the film because of its appeal for help rather than action. A fascist who had been involved in its production, wrote, broaching a dynamic that this chapter has discussed, “This certainly is a propaganda film, yet it is not clear to me whether it is a propaganda film for or against German suffering” (Roos, 80). According to the Nazis, it failed to fulfill the spirit of the novel on which it was based, whose foreword read: “Love 299 Georges Sadoul, Histoire Gé né rale du Ciné ma: Tome III: Le Ciné ma Devient Un Art (1909–1920): Deuxiè me Volume: La Premiè re Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Editions Denoë l, 1952), 19. 300 Iris Wigger, The “Black Horror on the Rhine”: Intersections of Race, Nation, Gender and Class in 1920s Germany (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017), 1. 301 Julia Roos, “‘Huns’ and Other ‘Barbarians’: A Movie Ban and the Dilemmas of 1920s German Propaganda against French Colonial Troops.” Historical Reflections / Ré flexions Historiques, 40, 1, (Spring 2014), 79. 151 for our neighbor, our fellow-citizens, imperatively demands hatred for their tormentors and abusers. … this national hatred is what we need.” 302 Birth of a Nation offered a lens through which to understand this “hatred,” as its Austrian subtitle read: “Rassenkampf,” race war (Freie). A September 8, 1923 Hamburger Nachrichten article, “White and black Negroes,” finds France’s ban of Birth of a Nation incontrovertible evidence that the nation had become “negrified.” 303 Reflecting on its seemingly paradoxical title, the article declares that Negro not only signifies “black skin” but also as “we all know from the Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley, and many thousands have personally learned from the experience of French captivity, the description Negro was coined there for the French.” 304 To “let the world know the rightness of this description,” it discusses the French’s ban of Birth of a Nation. This film “deals with the history of the American Civil War, wherein the American Negroes in accordance with the facts play a not very flattering role.” 305 Despite its historical verisimilitude, the French decided, the article recounts, “to ban the film as a threat to racial peace although American negroes hardly live in Paris in large numbers and thus France should hardly have to consider them.” 302 Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino (München: Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2009), 169. “Die Liebe für unseren Nächsten, unsere Volksgenossen verlangt gebieterisch den Haß gegen ihre Quäler und Schänder. … Dieser nationale Haß ist es, den wir brauchen” (Nagl cf. 58 169) 303 “Weiße und schwarze Neger,” Hamburger Nachrichten, 8 Sept 1923, 8. 304 “Daß es auch weiße Neger gibt, wissen wir alle aus dem Rheinland, aus dem Ruhrgebiet, und viele Tausende haben es am eigenen Leibe schmerzlich in französischer Kriegsgefangenschaft erfahren, dort ist auch die Bezeichnung Neger für die Franzosen geprägt worden, und diese bemühen sich seitdem mit Erfolg, der Welt die Richtigkeit dieser Kennzeichnung zu beweisen.” 305 “Die Geburt einer Nation, der die Geschichte des amerikanischen Bürgerkrieges behandelt, wobei die amerikanischen Neger wahrheitsgemäß eine für ihren Kulturstand wenig schmeichelhafte Rolle spielen. Das genügte der Französischen Regierung, den Film als den Rassefrieden gefährdend zu verbieten, obwohl amerikanische Neger kaum in großer zahl in Paris leben wurden und Frankreich auf sie kaum Rücksicht zu nehmen brauchte.” 152 Indeed, “the judgment of the white Negro for their black brothers against other whites is a consequence of the French’s race betrayal in the World War and then in Rhineland.” 306 Thus, the reaction to Birth of a Nation reveals France’s true race. Vachel Lindsay had called Birth of a Nation “a Crowd Picture in a triple sense,” explaining that in the United States, “on the films, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon's poisonous hatred of the negro” (Lindsay, 152). Yet, this reaction, the Nachrichten suggests, also reveals the true race of the audience. According to the Nachrichten‘s logic, Birth of a Nation was a race film in a double sense, not only about race but also racing its audience through their reaction to it. France’s refusal to embrace the whiteness of the film reveals its non-white nature. France is an enemy of true whiteness in the worldwide race war, which threatens to spread from the colonies. The author selectively quotes from the Pan-African Congress of 1921, “The Negro has only a wish, that namely all foreign races leave African soil,” suggesting that this is but the beginning stages of a conflict between races, wherein France has chosen the side of the Blacks, training them in the “arts of war” for these “mercenaries’ to then “pass through Africa and incite hate against all Whites, not least against the French.” 307 France’s reaction has revealed it to be a nation of the “morally and physically degenerate white Negro” that “will soon realize its ultimate fate”—that is annihilation. “Even the [black] Negro is a healthier race than” the French, the article concludes, “as the South of France already provides evidence.” 308 306 “Die Stellungnahme der weißen Neger für ihre schwarzen Brüder eben andere Weiße ist eine Folge des Rassenverrats der Franzosen im Weltkrieg und danach im Rheinland.” 307 “ihre entlassenen schwarzen Söldner Afrika durchziehen und eine Hetze gegen alle Weißen betreiben, nich zum wenigsten gegen die Franzosen” 308 “Die Neger sind aber eine gesündere Rasse als die physic und moralisch degenerierte Weiße Neger, die daher das verdiente Schicksal schon erreichen wird, wofür Südfrankreich schon genug Beweise liefert” 153 But not only do ethnonationalist German publications suggest Birth of a Nation can help to identify the enemy, but the film also promises to unify the nation against this foe. The conservative Americanist, Friedrich Schönemann, a Professor at Ludwig Maximilien Universität in Berlin, who would become in 1933 a representative of the Reich’s Propaganda Office, made the case for Germany to develop its own Birth of a Nation in a 1924 article for the right-wing Berliner Börsenzeitung, “The American Film Industry’s National Propaganda.” 309 Though deeply critical of what he sees as America’s lack of culture (“their life motto is: it pays!”), he desires Germany to develop a cinema like that of the United States. In his account of America, which he proposes as a model for Germany, “cinema” replaces “church” as site of “public culture, a type of people’s academy and people’s art.” “The American film industry has not only understood how to make itself popular but also to fulfill a certain national mission,” Schönemann writes with grudging admiration. 310 Extolling its capacity to cultivate the spiritual relationship between land and people, he prophesizes, “the influence of the cinema on the people will only become greater.” 311 In thus lauding the possibilities of U.S. cinema, Schönemann praises Birth of a Nation in particular. Calling it a “landmark in film history, but also in the national film propaganda of America,” he offers only praise for the film, which he idiosyncratically 309 Friedrich Schönemann, “Nationale Propaganda der amerikanischen Filmindustrie,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, 16 Juli 1924, 2. 310 “Die amerikanische Filmindustrie hat es nicht nur verstanden, sich volkstümlich zu machen, sondern auch eine gewisse nationale Aufgabe zu erfüllen.” Schönemann, “Nationale Propaganda der amerikanischen Filmindustrie,” 2. 311 Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970), fn 19. As George Mosse writes in Germans and Jews, within the Volkish ideology that produced fascism “the soil, the native landscape provided constant inspiration, and the inner-directedness of man’s individual soul [that] was thought to be analogous to the soul of the Volk” (35-6). 154 translates as “Werden der amerikanischen Nation,” that is, literally, the “Becoming of the American Nation.” Schönemann unknowingly thus echoes D.W. Griffith, who claimed not only to be representing the nation’s “birth,” but that his film itself birthed the modern U.S. nation (Rogin, Ronald, 192). Schönemann’s translation emphasizes the active process that film activates—not merely an origin, but a welding together of the populace, of the masses, into a nation. For Schönemann, Griffith’s film offers a template to solving Germany’s “greatest problem”: “the Nationalization of the Masses.” Schönemann’s phrase, “the Nationalization of the Masses,” is an unusual term and especially telling because not only does he echo D.W. Griffith, but he also prefigures Adolf Hitler, whom, George Mosse writes, coined this term in 1925 in Mein Kampf. 312 As Mosse argues in The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich, the “nationalization of the masses” was a central ideal of German fascism, which “attempted to draw the people into active participation in the national mystique through rites and festivals, myths and symbols which gave a concrete expression to the general will.” 313 The annihilation of Blackness that the film proposes is, for Schönemann, a necessary part of this nation building. He sees it only as a film that illustrates the power of cinema to wield together a nation. Indeed, his telegraphic description of the film suggests that there might even be some familiarity with the film among his readers. “When the film 312 A search among available digitized German newspapers between January 1, 1923 and January 1, 1926, a period of time attempting to capture the discourse surrounding the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, there were 209 mentions of “Nationalisierung” (Nationalization) other than Schönemann’s phrase, not a single one spoke about the “Nationalization of the Masses” (either “Nationalisierung der Massen” or “Nationalisierung der Volksmassen”). 313 George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), 2. 155 was shown in Winter 1914/15, it took all of America by storm.” Schönemann writes, “This is explained by its great subject matter: the Civil War, Lincoln’s murder, the mad Reconstruction politics of the North—to which the mad peace of Versailles is terrifyingly similar—the tenacious resistance of the South and finally the rescue of the White southerners with the melodramatic ending: one people of brothers!” 314 In his reading of the film, Schönemann evinces a complete identification with the white Southerners. Presaging the work of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, whose The Culture of Defeat (2000) locates this similar sense of grievance in the postbellum South and interwar Germany, Schönemann cannot watch Birth of a Nation but see his own situation. “One would like to hope as a German,” he writes, “that our film industry also had a similar understanding of our national problems and our rich and grand history, a similarly lively public spirit and an equally great historicity and yet unassuming humanity so as to influence the masses to good purpose.” Schönemann’s understanding of the film thus confirms everything that Walton fears the film’s export will achieve. Blackness is invisible to him. The nation he sees the film forming is made up only of whites. 315 Though he does not focus on the film’s racial politics, in his great enthusiasm for this film, and his proposition that it is the model par excellence for a national German 314 “Wahnsinnsfrieden von Versailles geradezu erschreckend ähnelt, die zähe Abwehr des Südens und endlich die Befreiung des weißen Südens mit dem melodramatischen Schluß: ein einzig Volk von Brüdern!” Schönemann, “Nationale Propaganda der amerikanischen Filmindustrie,” 2. 315 Uncle Tom’s Cabin had turned blackness into a language of whiteness, a way to feel the injury that the practice of slavery had done to whiteness. However, as Dixon’s description of the South’s pain here records, a pain that he describes in his novels as a result of the Northern scalawags, but which takes form as the blight of the “Black death,” Birth of a Nation eliminates blacks. It is an ongoing derogation of blackness. As Steven Martinot and Jared Sexton write: “the derogatory term does more than speak; it silences. That ability to silence derives from the fact that, in turning its hegemonic position to account, it turns the racialised other into a language for whiteness itself.” Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities 9:2, 174. 156 cinema, he accepts the fundamental “political antagonism” of white and Black that the film proposes, as essential to this project of nationalization. 316 In other words, not only does the Ku Klux Klan idea offer a solution of unity to a nation grieving a disastrous defeat, but also does cinema offer a means of nation formation. In Hitler’s National Socialist regime, Germany found both. The fundamental script for Hitler’s fascist film is Mein Kampf, whose two parts he wrote in 1924 and 1926, which adapts the Ku Klux Klan idea to a struggle between Aryans and Jews. Hitler had long been interested in U.S. race relations. He proudly proclaimed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which during his life had shifted from a book that engendered sympathy for slaves to one that was more often used to justify German colonization, to be one of his favorite books. 317 Philipp 316 As Jared Sexton expands in his article, “People-of-Color-Blindness”: “This point is developed by Wilderson with reference to the distinction between political conflict (involving a demand that can be satisfied by the end of exploitation or the restoration of sovereignty) and political antagonism (involving a demand that cannot be satisfied through a transfer of ownership or organization of land and labor) or, in related fashion, between contingent forms of suffering (state violence incurred by breaching the modality of hegemony) and structural forms of suffering (state violence experienced as gratuitous, a direct relation of force). The former designation in each case encompasses a wide range of exploitation and exclusion, including colonization, occupation, and even extermination, while the latter indicates the singularity of racial slavery and its afterlife, the lasting paradox of a sentient and sapient being “sealed into crushing objecthood.” Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28:2, 43-4. 317 Timothy W. Rybeck, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life, (New York: Knopf, 2008), 5. Even prior to Birth of a Nation’s arrival in Germany, the idea of American racial melodrama circulated. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been popular since its arrival in Germany in the 1860s. Though originally cultivating sympathy for black slaves, by the early-twentieth century it was invoked, by progressives as well as conservatives, as proof of black inferiority and as a justification for colonization. A 1911 introduction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin describes how, “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.” Robert Münchesang, “Volkherausgegeben,” in Onkel Toms Hü tte. Harriet Beecher Stowe, (Reutlingen: Enßlin und Laiblins Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911), 3. German accounts of visits to the United States not only approved of lynching but had come to long for slavery, citing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Heike Paul argues, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had become in Germany—even before Gone with the Wind—“a cipher for the peculiar sentimental public feeling of Gemütlichkeit.” Heike Paul, “‘Schwarze Sklaven, Weiße Sklaven’: The German Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The 157 Gassert tells a different history of U.S. exportation than Rob Rydell or Victoria de Grazia. Gassert notes that Hitler was a fanatical reader of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, which he called “seine Bibel.” 318 Furthermore, Hitler paid close and careful attention to the propaganda of World War I, considering the allies to have a better understanding of its mechanics of manufacturing consent (Schivelbusch, 299). It is very possible that it is as he returned to U.S. propaganda that he came across the scheme of American racial melodrama used to demonize the Germans (Roos, 70). Though perhaps apocryphal, Hermann Rauschning’s memory of the German dictator in conversation seems to suggest that Hitler agreed with the film’s depiction of the Civil War, that his sense of U.S. history emerges from it. “Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the Americans have been in a condition of political and popular decay.” Rauschning presents Hitler’s remarks, “In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered.” 319 This idea of America being conquered during the Civil War certainly squares with Hitler and Goebbels’ unmitigated enthusiasm for Gone Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book, Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 211, 213. Bettina Hofmann notes that in the editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one sees the entrance of mixed blood terminology into the German language, one that echoes the language of Nazism. However, she writes, in a footnote, “it would be an anachronism to accuse Stowe of having paved the way for Hitler’s thoughts on race.” Still, it remains a possibility. Bettina Hofmann, “Uncle Tom's Cabin in Germany: A Children's Classic,” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik. 53.4 (2005): 356-7 fn 10. 318 Phillipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda, und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), 96. 319 Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam & Sons, 1940), 68. 158 with the Wind, which was supremely popular in Nazi Germany. 320 (Georges Sadoul did write that Griffith’s greatest influence in Europe was through his disciples (Sadoul, 17)). Mein Kampf follows the structure of the film’s race melodrama, transplanting the Ku Klux Klan idea to German soil. Presenting the German nation as “embattled Aryan humanity,” “broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world,” Hitler dramatizes the suffering of the German nation at the hands of the “international world Jew [who] slowly but surely strangles us.” 321 The German people have become profoundly unfree, effectively a département of France: “without the recovery of our external freedom, however, any internal reform, even in the most favorable case, means only the increase of our productivity as a colony” (335). There is but a “last flicker of the national instinct of self-preservation” as Germany succumbs to “the progressing pacifist-Marxist paralysis of our national body” (Hitler, 329). For Hitler, Germany has been the victim of France and all of the world. The movement of National Socialism has arrived to restore a sense of motion the nation. He thus legitimates Nazism as a justified uprising of the oppressed. The German people only want “confidence in the possibility of regaining its freedom” (Hitler, 411), a freedom so cruelly denied by their enemies under the leadership of the Jews. It is fundamentally a defensive struggle, hallowed, as is Dixon and Griffith’s narrative, by God: what we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe” (Hitler 214) 320 John Haag, “Gone with the Wind in Nazi Germany,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 73.2, 294. 321 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 640, 411, 465. 159 It has become a movement so wronged that all actions it takes in the future can only be right. Its enemies must be eliminated. Whereby Dixon had offered the choice between Anglo-Saxon and the mulatto, likewise, Hitler declares no possibility of coexistence of Aryan and Jew, “there can only be the hard: either—or” (Hitler 206). While the Jew is Hitler’s primary enemy, it is not merely a substitution of antisemitism for anti-Black racism. Rather, the two fuse. Blackness becomes one way to see the Jew, who Hitler declares, is often “the invisible wirepuller” (493). In this script he describes how Blacks are the visual manifestation of the Jew: “It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master” (Hitler, 325). Mein Kampf maintains the structure of race melodrama as it interweaves Francophobia, anti- Black racism, and antisemitism: France…which is becoming more and more negrified, constitutes in its tie with the aims of Jewish world domination an enduring danger for the existence of the white race in Europe. For the contamination by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe is just as much in keeping with the perverted sadistic thirst for vengeance of this hereditary enemy of our people as is the ice-cold calculation of the Jew thus to begin bastardizing the European continent at its core and to deprive the white race of the foundations for sovereign existence through infection with lower humanity. (Hitler, 624) Hitler’s easy conflation of anti-Black racism and antisemitism in a logic that makes the Aryan race into victims—and makes Black and Jewish bodies into contaminants— highlights the threat of Birth of a Nation that extends beyond its representation of its American narrative to cultivating a broader racist melodramatic sentiment. American race melodrama, which Williams calls, “the best example of American culture’s (often hypocritical) attempt to construct itself as the locus of innocence and virtue” (Playing, 17), becomes a rationale for European fascist violence. 160 Melodramatic Fascism or Fascist Melodrama? In From Fascism to Populism in History, Frederico Finchelstein analyzes Borges’s “Deutsches Requiem,” a short story about the execution of a former concentration camp director: “in this early analysis of populists in history, Borges stressed how their leaders turned politics into lies. Reality became melodrama. They twisted everything into fictions ‘which can’t be trusted and were believed’.” 322 For Finchelstein, his offhand reference to melodrama is merely to point toward an unreal reality. Taking the term more seriously, Linda Williams has suggested the presidency of Donald Trump is. rather than “tragedy,” a serial melodrama—because “melodrama, not tragedy, is the dominant form of our contemporary mass culture.” 323 Williams suggests that in the melodrama of Trump, the “most important quality” is how melodrama cultivates “the suffering victim entitled through suffering to become a righteous-action hero” (“Trump”). Furthermore, Williams argues, melodrama structures “the Trumpian backlash against educated elites as well as Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and women.” This has been the argument of this chapter, that this idea of the “suffering victim entitled through suffering to become a righteous-action hero” is the logic of fascism. However, where Finchelstein mentions melodrama alongside fascism but does not explore it any further, Williams, while exploring in some detail melodrama in relationship to Trump, a figure who frequently attracts fascist comparisons, does not invoke fascism, or consider the potential interrelation between fascism and melodrama in any of her other work. Both Finchelstein and Williams approach broaching that fascism operates as a melodrama. Yet neither does. 322 Frederico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), xl. 323 Linda Williams, Trump: An American Serial Melodrama.” Debordements May 19, 2018. 161 For Peter Brooks, the truth in, and perhaps also the truth of, melodrama is like a “love that cannot speak its name” (Brooks, 73). It is a silent text, a body that must be read, “the not-to-be-named,” as Jonathan Goldberg evocatively calls it. 324 The idea that fascism is a melodrama has long been, in the tradition of melodrama, also a silent text, which dared not speak its name, but toward which there have been repeated gestures. 325 It has been a contorted body, constantly misread—and indeed a distasteful concept for the dominant trend within contemporary studies on melodrama, which by and large seek to rehabilitate the genre, long coded as feminine and other, from its marginal position and resituate it at the center of film, and indeed, media studies, as perhaps the structuring mode of modernity. 326 And, yet because of the importance of that project, and the importance of melodrama to modernity, it is ever more important that the work of melodrama in facilitating fascism is recognized. Fascism, after all, is the single new political project that emerged from modernism (Modernism, 348). And, even within Williams’s understanding of the form, melodrama can serve many masters (Playing, 300). Melodrama’s relationship to fascism is more than incidental, though it does bear further investigation. The French Revolution, which stands at the origins of melodrama, and is part of Peter Brooks’ narrative about its “radical democratic” tendencies (Brooks 324 Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), xi. 325 In the collected volume Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945, there is not a single treatment of the relationship between melodrama and fascism. Indeed, in my research only Simonetta Zampioni-Falesca thinks about fascism functioning as a melodrama; she writes about the rhetoric used by Mussolini. 326 Perhaps beginning with Peter Brooks, this recovery project has been led by Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, most recently in their edited volume, Melodrama Unbound. And yet, this recovery project itself threatens to turn into a typical pathetic melodrama where, as Matthew Buckley has noted, scholars “present the form's recuperation as the rightful restoration of an innocent drama sheltered in the homes of the poor, exiled to the margins by an evil band of elitist villains” (Buckley 177). 162 15), also “stood at the beginning of a democratization of politics which climaxed in twentieth-century fascism,” as George Mosse, the great twentieth-century cultural historian of German fascism, notes. 327 Indeed, in a later book, Mosse suggests that the Jacobinism of the French Revolution is similar to Fascism because of its fundamental melodramatic nature, that “through the use of myth and symbol man becomes part of the nation and nature.” 328 It is from the French Revolution, Mosse argues, that Fascism inherited its “political style” (Confronting 66). 329 However, it is not merely the style of fascism that takes place through melodrama. The structuring elements of fascism occur itself within a racial melodramatic imagination. In his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton offers a definition of the political movement, which he argues has, rather than an ideology, “mobilizing passions” that “form the emotional lava that sets fascism’s foundations” (Paxton, 41). Among them is “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external,” “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions,” and “the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary” (Paxton, 327 George Mosse, “Fascism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 24: 1 (Jan. 1989), 15. 328 Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 66. 329 Laura Heins and Lutz Koepnick particularize this observation of Mosse in their readings of Nazi filmic melodrama. Filmic melodrama, they argue, served to suture the fascist subject to the fascist nation. As Koepnick writes: Koepnick writes: “melodrama helped essentially build bridges between the ideological and temporal disjunctures of Nazi politics. As a genre of excess and operatic intensity it ameliorated the ‘fuzzy totalitarianism’ that characterized fascist modernism.” Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 96. 163 41). These seem very much like the conditions for the structure of feeling within the cinematic race melodrama I have discussed in this chapter. The concerns of Lester Walton about the exportation of Birth of a Nation—with which I began this chapter—offer a final opportunity to test this notion. Walton saw the export of Birth of a Nation as nothing less than the United States disseminating an instrument of violence overseas. When Birth was first touring the United States, Walton criticized the Chicago Tribune, which in bemoaning the film’s ban in Chicago, had described the film as “the greatest piece of work done for film by American producers.” Walton argued, however, that the terms of this argument were misguided. The film’s framing of Blacks could not be discussed in aesthetic terms without fundamentally mystifying its purpose. 330 Rather, the film should be classified as a weapon, a novel technology of violence—along with “submarines”—and engaged as such: In Germany the sinking of the Lusitania by a submarine is regarded as “the greatest piece of work done since the advent of the submarine.” But do we Americans share the views of the Germans? Some stilettos are artistically carved and very pretty, as are some revolvers, but notwithstanding their artistic value they are dangerous and objectionable, and so is ‘The Birth of a Nation’. 331 Walton’s description of the film confronts his readers with the question of whether it is possible to experience aesthetic pleasure in the process of one’s own destruction. Can one marvel at the technology that is the instrument of one’s own obliteration? From a vantage of two decades prior Walton thus presaged Benjamin’s critique of the futurist and fascist 330 Walton’s article indicts the lie on which so much film history, centering Griffiths, is built, which Anne Everett characterizes as how “formalist assessments of Birth of a Nation have been successful in extricating the film’s structural and aesthetic advancements from its troubling ideology of white supremacy and racial hate.” Anne Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 70. See also Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema.” 331 Lester Walton, “Chicago Tribune Laments over Barring of Photo Play,” New York Age. 3 June 1915. 164 aesthetic in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” Walton here suggests that it is only possible for Black men like him to contemplate the aesthetics of Birth of a Nation if they, as Benjamin wrote about the futurists, “can experience their own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.” 332 However, while Benjamin’s description of film suggests a congruence in the gaze of humankind and its object in his description of the self-alienation that allows for aesthetic pleasure, Walton’s articulation of the conjuncture of weaponry and aesthetics renders only the gaze of others looking at him. 333 Benjamin conceives of the fascist state of twentieth- century humanity as able to witness its destruction from afar: “humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself” (Benjamin 4:270). Walton’s vision of film operating like a submarine’s torpedo highlights a fissure to which Benjamin’s essay, for all its perception, does not attend. Even as Walton rhetorically includes himself among “we Americans,” writing for a Black newspaper, the New York Age, Walton cannot so easily conceive himself within an undivided humankind. Benjamin’s observation that because fascism gives expression to the masses without giving them rights it inevitably leads to war—the only way to fully utilize society’s technology without altering its property relations—is only partially true. Fascism does lead to war, but it is because it grants the masses the right to express themselves against the Other. 332 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 270. 333 Susan Buck-Morss calls this equivalence between spectator and spectacle in Benjamin’s reading of fascism, a “double role”: “It was the genius of fascist propaganda to give to the masses a double role, to be observer as well as the inert mass being formed and shaped.” Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October, Vol. 62 (Autumn, 1992), 38. 165 This is not to discount the material conditions that need to be present for fascism to manifest itself as well, in particular the social and technological conditions that make possible mass politics (Paxton, 42). And yet, Benjamin’s famous essay, with all of its attention to the material conditions, neglects an essential affective dynamic to fascism. Its depiction of fascist violence is completely abstracted, evacuated of human bodies and human volition. The only object of fascist war is a relentless death-production: Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches, instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and in gas warfare it has found a new means of abolishing the aura. (Benjamin, 4:270) Even as Benjamin argues that “fascism seeks to give [the masses] expression,” he is silent on what they yearn to express (Benjamin, 4:269). Human volition and desire are absent from his account of the technological conditions that enable fascism—as well as antifascist resistance. Walton thus offers a necessary supplement to Benjamin. In his response to Birth of a Nation, Walton argued that the Chicago Tribune declared “the sin of the film is its effectiveness.” Walton, however, disagreed. It was not merely that it was an effective piece of propaganda but also its hateful spirit: “We say the sin of the film is its viciousness—its distortion of history and uncalled assault on a race” (Walton, “Chicago”). Indeed, Benjamin’s abstraction of fascist violence highlight its perfect machinery, its oiled death- production. But fascism achieves this death-production through a targeted viciousness—a viciousness guided, as Walton makes clear, by race melodrama. 166 Bloodlines, Borders, and Bodies: The Transnational Correspondence of Charles Davenport, The Great Gatsby, and the Eugenic Racket “The violent men who are always on hand when there is someone to be dispatched, the lynchers and clan members…the human being irresistibly attracts them, they want to reduce him or her to the body, nothing shall be allowed to live.” —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment 334 “The only politician who can implement eugenic measures” On July 19, 1929, Professor Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, a German anatomist, anthropologist, and the nation’s leading “race hygienist,” wrote to his American counterpart, his “very honored and dear colleague” Charles Davenport about the need to invite Benito Mussolini to their organization’s annual meeting in Rome. The American Davenport was President of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, the leading international association of eugenicists, a position he would hold until 1933, when, after Fischer declined the role, Fischer’s compatriot, the psychiatric eugenicist, Ernst Rüdin would claim it. “Such a chance to explain our thoughts to a statesman will never happen again,” wrote Fischer to his president, who ultimately encouraged Fischer to write the dictator. “He is the only politician who can implement eugenic measures—and perhaps will.” 335 There is an unsettling irony in reading this letter almost one hundred years later, lying as it does between Davenport’s successful shepherding of the United States’ 334 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 195. 335 „Eine solche Gelegenheit, einem Staatsmann unsere Gedanken klar zu machen, wird es niemals wieder geben. Und er ist der einzige Politiker, der eugenische Maßregeln wirklich durchführen kann und vielleicht will.” Letter from Fischer to Davenport, 19 July 1929 (Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG) I. Abt., Rep. 3, Nr. 23) 167 Immigration Act of 1924 with sympathy and support from government officials and Hitler’s rise to power over Germany in 1933, where Eugenics would structure national politics. Far from this moment being the singular chance for Eugenics to shape the political world, as Fischer here presents it, Eugenics had already legally framed the United States as a racial state and was preparing to realize greater power for more terrible ends. National Socialism would explicitly invoke Eugenics as the source of its politics, naming itself, as its functionaries variously ventriloquized, “nothing but applied biology” or “applied race science.” While Eugenics did not necessarily produce fascism, it did serve to crystallize fascist desire. 336 It located the fascist fantasy of palingenesis, rebirth, in the human body itself, promising a future in which “degeneracy” would be eliminated. 337 While Fischer might write in his seventeen point guide for Mussolini’s domestic policy, “the rebirth of the West can only come through the renewal of the family,” this renewal was not a question of culture but rather biological matter; it could only come from, as Davenport wrote Fischer, by increasing “the differential birth rate—the high birth-rate of the intellectually and physically better blood lines.” 338 336 Max Weinreich, Hitler's Professors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 34. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 64. Even Richard Weikart—a fellow of the Discovery Institute, which promotes Intelligent Design—who has spent his later career rooting Nazism and even the contemporary far right in evolutionary ideals must admit in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism (2004) “Nazism was not predetermined in Darwinism or Eugenics, not even in racist forms of Eugenics” (Weikart 4). And there were socialist eugenicists, such as, for example, the American socialist Herman J. Muller, a frequent correspondent of Davenport, who also helped the Soviet Union start their short- lived Eugenics program (Weiss 34). For more about non-fascist politics and Eugenics see Richard Cleminson. Anarchism and Eugenics: An Unlikely Convergence, 1890-1940 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019). 337 See Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, 15. 338 “Die wiedergeburt des Abendlandes kann nur aus der Erneuerung der Familie erwachsen” ((MPG I. Abt., Rep. 3, Nr. 23); Letter from Davenport to Fischer, 3 August 1929. (MPG I. Abt., Rep. 3, Nr. 23) 168 Rooting the revival of the white European West in families and translating future possibilities into a matter of blood—that is, biologizing identity–Eugenics sought to play a central role in regulating the constitution of bodies and politics across the globe in the interwar period. Davenport stood at the center of this process, both within the United States and across the Atlantic. This chapter revolves around his transnational correspondence in order to explore how eugenic discourse crystallized fascist desire in the United States as well as Europe. In this chapter I trace how this transnational eugenic discourse shaped the Immigration Act of 1924 and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). With these two examples, I show how this discourse crystallized the fascist desire for national regeneration through the elimination of the other, presaging Nazism. As Walter Benn Michaels has pointed out in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), the vocabulary of “blood” and “family” became central terms in rearticulating American identity in this period, when, as he argues, “family becomes the site of national identity” and thus “nationality becomes an effect of racial identity” (Our America, 8). However, Michaels’ narrative only captures a siloed section of this story. U.S. national identity did become more biological, but it offered itself as a bounded national organism—of blood and germplasm—within an international racial family of white nations jointly fighting degeneracy. In Bios (2008), Roberto Esposito argues that the idea of degeneracy was included in “Nazi biopolitics” as the result of several “cultural mediations”: “from Italian criminal anthropology to French hereditary theory, to a clear- cut racist reconversion of Mendelian genetics.” 339 In this chapter, I suggest that U.S. culture also played a role in engaging degeneracy as a biological threat to the blood of United 339 Roberto Esposito, Bios, Trans. Timothy C. Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 112. 169 States as a racial organism, thus developing not only its own (proto)fascist discourse of health but also contributing to that of National Socialism. As Stefan Kühl and Edwin Black have shown, American eugenicists collaborated with, and often led the way, in developing this science that the Nazi regime declared it was implementing. 340 And James Q. Whitman has illuminated how U.S. eugenic statutes served as blueprints for later fascist policies. 341 Eugenics functioned as a dominant discourse in this period, which shaped the possibilities of the political and literary fictions that could be written—and indeed was itself influenced by these new articulations. I thus begin from the understanding articulated by Daylanne English in Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (2004), Ewa Barbara Luczak’s Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination (2015), Laura Doyle’s Bordering on the Body (1994) and Michaels’ Our America. As English writes: Eugenics, the science of breeding better human beings, saturated U.S. culture during the 1920s. It seeped into politics. It permeated social science and medicine. It shaped public policy and aesthetic theory. It influenced the nation’s literature. It affected popular culture. Eugenic thinking was so pervasive in the modern era that it attained the status of common sense in its most unnerving Gramscian sense. 342 However, where these earlier scholars hew to a U.S.-centric perspective, my transnational lens enables us to see how this eugenic discourse is not merely the 340 See Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2003). 341 See James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Mode (Princeton University Press, 2018). 342 Daylanne English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina, 2004), 1. For example, Luczak concurs, but makes a more limited claim for Eugenics place in American culture of early twentieth-century: “Eugenics was not only a nativist medical and social discourse referred to sporadically and erratically in creative literature but that it was a reservoir of imagery, metaphors and plots and, as such, a motor propelling numerous literary works.” Ewa Barbara Luczak, Breeding and Eugenics int eh American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 6. 170 “paradigmatic modern American discourse” (English, 2), but also a global conversation. 343 In the following section, I establish the inter- and transnational dimensions of eugenic discourse that moved through the United States in the early twentieth-century and ultimately came to inform European fascism. Then, in the subsequent two sections, I resituate the political and literary documents I examine in this chapter—the Immigration Act of 1924 and The Great Gatsby, respectively—within this transnational discourse. Seen through these multiple lenses, U.S. nativism reveals itself to be a dynamic part of the transnational circuit of desire that crystallized fascism, as a local expression of the global concept of a “racist international,” which Stefan Kühl describes in his For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (2013). 344 My approach thus extends Denise Ferreira da Silva’s argument in Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) that the “articulation of the U.S. American subject as a transparent ‘I’” occurred through a global rather than national discourse. 345 The hegemonic white Anglo-Saxon subject articulated itself against the so-called internal minorities of Black Americans and indigenous people, whom da Silva names “the other of Europe” (da Silva 218), to bridge the distance with Europe by “writing the white (Anglo-Saxon) body as a signifier of a European consciousness” (da Silva 199). This self-conception consolidated 343 Laura Doyle is the exception here as she does consider Eugenics within transatlantic Anglospheric approach to modernism—though largely within a comparative approach and not necessarily one that takes into account an active transnational exchange. Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 344 The original German title makes its claim clearer—"Die Internationale der Rassisten,” “The International of Racists.” Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene, Trans. Lawrence Schofer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 345 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2007), 199. 171 itself in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, or National Origins Act of 1924, which prepared a path toward a fascist United States that did not arrive, but did ultimately undergird the fascist states of Europe. This law, as Mae Ngai writes in Impossible Subjects (2004), linked the idea of American heredity with that of Northern Europe, establishing the United States as a racial state: “the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not white” (Ngai, 25). However, there is an important opacity in the creation of this transparent subject, who could be the subject of history and write itself “as an expression of European consciousness” (da Silva 201)—the matter of blood and germplasm, both essential to the discourse, and the constitution of the healthy European, and yet not immediately visible. Eugenics is a necessary discourse neither for racism nor for fascism. However, as Nancy Ordover has written, “Eugenics gave racism and nationalism substance by bringing to bear the rationalizing technologies of the day. 346 ” “Race,” as Tavia Nyong’o writes in Amalgamation Waltz, “is a theory of history.” 347 Eugenics, which as a discipline sought only to turn theory into practice, claimed to enact this history as biology—and be able to make visible the occulted blood and germplasm that contained within it the destiny of the nation and the globe. Eugenics served as a powerful technology of biopolitics, helping to construct the United States as a racial state before further intensifying in and as Nazism; as Sheila Faith Weiss writes in The Nazi Symbiosis (2010), in Nazi Germany Eugenics and politics “served 346 Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. 347 Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11. 172 as ‘resources’ for each other” (Weiss, 18). There is a tendency to treat Nazism’s engagement with Eugenics as exceptional. Nazism, writes Roberto Esposito, took “life” as its “transcendental” with “its subject race, and its lexicon biological.” However, it might be overstating the case to suggest that “only the Nazis identified their vision with the comparative biology of human races and animals” (Esposito, 112). 348 Similarly, Agamben in his discussion of fascism’s biopolitical production of the homo sacer—the figure who might be killed without cost—in the state of exception, exceptionalizes fascism, suggesting it transcended preexisting racial discourse. “Nazism and fascism,” he writes, “transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle” (Agamben, 10). Fascism’s “spiritualization of zōē and the biologization of the spirit” (Esposito 142) has a history. The fascist focus on the regulation of life—as Michel Foucault writes in “Society Must be Defended,” “what must live and what must die” (Society, 254)—began prior to fascism, partaking in, as Alexander Weheliye reminds us, an always-already racializing discourse in dialogue with colonial and imperial enterprises. 349 This chapter follows the transnational correspondence of Charles Davenport to offer both a history of U.S. culture’s contribution to the Eugenic discourse that undergirded fascism and a more critical argument about how the discourse produced an organic conception of the racial state that crystallized fascist desire. Though, due to issues of access 348 Roger Griffin echoes Esposito when he names the National Socialist regime a “biopolitical modernism”: “here the term is not just referring in its conventional meaning to the application of biological racism, Eugenics, and racial hygiene to state politics. Instead it denotes the marked degree to which the Nazis conceived the creation the Third Reich as the product of a new form of politics shaped by and grounded in the forces of life itself, by a revolution conceived biologically” (Griffin, 317). 349 As Weheliye writes, invoking Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state- sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death,” there can be no such thing as life that is unmarked by racism. “The biopolitical function of race is racism; it is the establishment and maintenance of caesuras, not their abolition” (Weheliye, 55-6). 173 in the pandemic, the chapter is far from a full engagement with his voluminous exchanges, it organizes itself around figures with whom he interacted. In the United States this includes the racist conservationist Madison Grant, the eugenic historian Lothrop Stoddard, the eugenic lobbyist Harry Laughlin, and the Klansman Congressman Albert Johnson; in Germany, the eugenicist researchers Ernst Rüdin, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz; and in Norway, the eugenicist physician Jon Alfred Mjöen. Their work together ultimately prefigured and shaped the genocidal polices of Nazi Germany. My first step in this chapter, before I turn to the Immigration Act of 1924 and The Great Gatsby, is to redescribe U.S. nativist discourse as a transnational collaboration, responding to global fears of degeneracy. I thus resituate U.S. political desire beyond nativism, as a local expression of transnational currents that U.S. culture both was shaped by and gave shape to. In this section, I begin to focus on how the rhetoric of blood and germplasm figures the alien not so much as difference but as sickness. American Nativism, World Eugenics, and the Threat of Biological Degeneracy If we are successful in raising the necessary amount of money, we shall be in a position to bring over from the other side some of the most eminent anthropologists, who can lay before us the racial problems, which confront even old established countries like France and England. The great war has broken down the barriers of isolation and the floods of aliens into not only America but France and England as well will affect the blood and the morale of these countries. These problems will be the chief concern of the forthcoming Congress. 350 Madison Grant, the New York socialite author of a founding tract of scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race, enclosed this fundraising letter to Charles Davenport as they collaborated on the Second International Eugenics Conference, which would take place in New York City on September 22, 1921. In this letter, Grant, whom the historian John 350 Letter from Grant to Davenport 12 April 1921 (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant— Correspondence, Folder 3, 1920-21). 174 Higham called “intellectually the most important nativist in recent American history” (Higham, 155), set out his hope that the conference would deal with the “flood of aliens” that threatened to dilute the “blood” of not only the United States but also “even old established countries like France and England.” The letter underscores not only that American nativism, undergirded by Eugenics, was in dynamic international conversation about degeneracy but also the terms by which it animated this concern, transforming the peoples of the world into nothing but “blood” and “germ plasm.” In this section, I consider how the international discourse on Eugenics enables us to reposition U.S. nativism as part of world Eugenics. I thus provide a short overview of the dynamics in the early international Eugenics community before turning with a more argumentative lens to Davenport and his correspondents. Then, I perform a reading of Davenport’s correspondence, specifically as it relates to Madison Grant’s history of European development, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and Lothrop Stoddard’s eugenic account of world politics, The Rising Tide of Color against White World- Supremacy (1920), to reveal how this discourse articulated degeneracy as a disease of foreign etiology—producing “blood” as a fetishized entity—that threatened the related health of the family of white nations. Richard Steigmann-Gall has recently argued “that ‘nativism’, defined in its essence as a product of American particularism, was—as the product of social, political, cultural and economic forces parallel to those in Europe—not particularistic at all” (Steigmann- Gall, 97). He thus echoes the earlier argument of Walter Benn Michaels who, defending his influential notion of “nativist modernism” against Marjorie Perloff’s criticism that such an approach reproduced the isolationism of his subjects, suggested that “modern American nativism” was equivalent but distinct from the interwar currents in other nations. “Although 175 it is true,” Michaels wrote, “that the emergence of modernism is linked almost everywhere to the rise of race-based modes of social organization, it does not follow that these modes were everywhere the same.” 351 While this might be true, Michaels overlooks how there might be discourse among these different modes across national and geographic boundaries—which is what I explore in this section. Not only were nativism’s concerns not particularistic, but also these concerns were worked out in transnational dialogue. The very idea of nativism as a historically-mobile concept emerged from an U.S. history deeply in thrall to the exceptionalism of the nation. Though it has recently migrated to other historical discourses, the term was coined from the 1840’s “Know Nothings.” Meanwhile, Erika Lee’s recent America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (2019) conclusively shows that xenophobia could have functioned just as well in its place. 352 John Higham’s original 1955 preface to Strangers in the Land, which came out the same year as Louis Hartz’s classic American exceptionalist argument, The Liberal Tradition, offers his findings as provisional: “this book attempts a general history of the anti-foreign spirit I have defined as nativism” (Higham, xi). He describes it as “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., “un- American”) connections…while drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and ethnocentric judgments, nativism translates them into a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctively American way of life” (Higham, 4). With nativism motivated by national sentiment since the nineteenth century—“through each separate hostility runs the connecting, energizing force of modern nationalism” (Higham, 4)—Higham maintains this 351 Walter Benn Michaels, “Response,” Modernism/modernity, vol. 3 no. 3, 1996, 121. 352 Lee does suggest that nativism and xenophobia are distinct terms, with xenophobia encapsulating nativism, which has a specifically American valence. Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019), fn 16. 176 as a consistent feature of the so-called American experiment. It thus is placed not only geographically but in a temporally different dimension than the modernist (European) phenomenon of fascism with which my project aligns it. Yet, even as nativism might in broad strokes remain the same, its content changed as the discourse of Eugenics arrived from outside the United States—“the new science of heredity came out of Europe” (Higham, 150). And with this new discourse, Higham acknowledges that “nativist intellectuals” began “to think of European races a biological threat or to associate national survival with racial purity” (Higham 149). Though there has been much research on eugenic exchange, this work has not been thoroughly integrated into a transnational discourse dealing with U.S. nativism—even as it is in this period in the United States that nativist concerns become translated into the global language of Eugenics: race. 353 Originating in England, Eugenics represents the apex of the scientization of Social Darwinism. The Englishman Herbert Spencer first applied biology to explain society in Social Statics (1850), a decade prior to Darwin. Indeed, Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest”—later associated with not only Darwinism but also Eugenics. 354 In the United States Spencer’s ideas had been enthusiastically adopted by robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie—later the bankrollers of Eugenics research—who found it justified their own business practices. As Carnegie wrote of Spencer’s maxim in an article for the North American Review with the serene confidence of a millionaire, 353 For example, Desmond King might acknowledge “there were international dimensions to this project” in Making Americans, but his focus is on national developments. Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origin of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) 131. 354 Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82. 177 “while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.” 355 Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, coined the term, “Eugenics,” in England in 1883, drawing from the Greek for “well born.” Building on the work of his relation, as well as Spencer—with whom he was friends—he defined Eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” 356 Race here was not specifically defined, but Galton operated with the racial and class prejudices of his patrician position in imperial Britain. In a 1904 address to the British Sociological Society that was printed in the American Journal of Sociology he summarized the aims of Eugenics as “to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation” (Galton, 3). He worried particularly about civilization’s degeneration due to insufficient reproduction of the upper classes: “it seems to be the tendency of high civilization to check fertility in the upper classes” (Galton, 3). Along with offering a definition of the “science” and mapping out areas of further inquiry—to chart genealogies, calculate the “civic usefulness” of different social classes, determine the conditions conducive to thriving families, and isolate the social influences on marriage—Galton introduced a theme that was to be central to the Eugenics movement. He argued that Eugenics needed to engineer national sentiment to engineer biology. “It must be introduced into the nation’s conscience,” he said, “like a new religion” (Galton 5). 355 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 47. 356 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 7; Francis Galton, “Eugenics, Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,” The American Journal of Sociology 10,1 (1904), 1. 178 His speech ended on a note both optimistic and, given the history that would follow, ominous: the first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of the nation; which will gradually give practical effect to hem in ways that we may not wholly foresee. (Galton, 6) The first Eugenics society in the world appeared in Germany in 1905, with the German Society for Race Hygiene (Kühl, Betterment, 14). The German physician Alfred Ploetz founded the society after reading Galton—establishing what, with England and the United States, was to be one of the world’s most active eugenic communities, though Germans used the term rassenhygiene rather than Eugenics. Ploetz argued that “racial hygiene” had to prevail over “individual hygiene”—wherein race here meant “an entity of human beings living over generations with asset of physical and mental characteristics” (Turda, 20). Where Galton noted the failure of the upper classes to reproduce Ploetz similarly worried that “the protection of the weak” was dooming humanity to a future of decline (Betterment, 14). In particular, he was concerned about the “Nordic-Germanic race” as locked in a “difficult struggle for existence against the other races, a struggle seen by many others as hopeless” (Betterment, 15). Ploetz was the first to envision international relations. He set up the International Society of Race Hygiene in 1907, hoping to create an association among those he considered the world’s white countries—Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Russia, Finland—as well as the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, which he saw as racially embattled (Betterment, 15). The international organization’s founding document insisted on subordinating individual to racial aims. Not only did it declare its mission to promote “scientific, racial, and social biology, including racial and social hygiene,” but it also required its members to pledge that they were 179 willing to regulate their own lives in accordance with the motives of the Society – firstly, by earnest efforts to keep themselves in good condition in body and mind; secondly, by pledging themselves to ascertain before marriage, according to the directions of the Society, whether they are fit for it, and if unfit, either to remain unmarried or to refrain from parenthood; thirdly, by promoting the individual and racial well-being of the rising generation. (Turda, 23) While this first attempt at an international eugenic organization came to involve Danish, Norwegian, and French researchers, the British Eugenics Education Society, established in 1907, resisted reorganizing into a subgroup of the international organization. It would begin to establish its own Eugenics international community with the first International Congress on Eugenics, hosted in London in 1912. Over these first years, Eugenics’ emphasis shifted. While Galton had begun Eugenics believing in Lamarckian evolution—that is, the inheritance of acquired characteristics—by the turn of the century the models of Auguste Weissman and Mendel had displaced it. Weissmann, a German embryologist—and member of Ploetz’s International Society for Race Hygiene—insisted on the “continuity of the germ-plasm,” that is, that the germ-plasm was unaffected by individual action during a lifetime (Weiss 24). The rediscovery of Mendel’s experiments, where he tracked the reoccurrence of yellow seed shells among typically green pea plants, seemed to show that the predisposition for yellow shells could exist without it being expressed. He thus formulated ideas of recessive and dominant genes (Kühl, Betterment, 26). Together, these two ideas offered the foundation for the twentieth-century Eugenics movement’s social interventions. It de- individualized its possibilities—almost returning it to a Calvinistic ethos of predetermination—as hereditary material determined the possibilities of a population prior to birth. Eugenics became the only means of intervening in this occulted realm. As German eugenicists were to write about the state of the field in 1921—the individual has become 180 discounted completely: “all organic adaptation goes ultimately not to the raising of the individual but rather to the race.” 357 The Eugenics movement arrived in the United States around 1900. In 1903, the Mendelian-inspired American Breeders’ Association was formed and declared both practical agricultural and theoretical academic aspirations—an appropriate source of an ideology that would undergird the fascist “gardening states.” Three years later, in 1906, Davenport, at the time a professor of zoology at the University of Chicago, led the formation of a Eugenics Section with the charge “to investigate and report on the heredity in the human race.” 358 Davenport was the son of a genealogically-obsessed father who had traced the family’s heritage through the Puritans back to the Normans (Higham, 151). He had spent a sabbatical year in England with Galton and Galton’s protégé, the statistician Karl Pearson, where he had developed his interest in the science (Weiss, 25). Just as the work on crops sought to increase yield, this Eugenics division looked to shape American social organism, making its racist presumptions clear in its second driving ideal to “emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood” (Jacobson, 157). Even as it was just establishing itself, Eugenics was already using the potent metonym. Humans were becoming vectors of “germ plasm” and carriers of blood. Davenport was to establish, almost singlehandedly, the United States’ Eugenics infrastructure. In 1904, he set up the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, which was to become the central institution for eugenic research in the United 357 “Alle organische Anpassung geht letzten Endes nicht auf die Erhaltung des Individuums, sondern auf die der Rasse” Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz. Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (München: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1921), 285. 358 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1916 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 157. 181 States. In 1910, with the support of Mary Harriman, the widow of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, he established the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), later to become part of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. With its generous endowment, the school trained students in Eugenics and sent them out to document the American population for signs of degeneracy. In March 1913, at its second board meeting, it drew up an official document of its mission, declaring its purpose as a transnational endeavor: “to promote research in Eugenics that shall be for the utility of the human race.” 359 The utility foremost on the mind of eugenicists was that of forestalling human degeneracy. The first International Congress of Eugenics in 1912 called for attendance by announcing “a growing danger for the future of the entire human race” because there now existed “selection in favor of the inferiors” (Betterment, 18). Its tone echoed that of the leading British eugenicist, Karl Pearson, who borrowed the American sociologist Edward Ross’s idea of “race suicide” in his The Problems of Practical Eugenics (1912): the attempt to improve the racial fitness of the nation by purely environmental reforms, the removal of child and mother from unhealthy surroundings, and the provision of the weak and the suffering…have failed in promoting racial efficiency, because they overlooked great all-mastering biological laws. After 60 years of philanthropic effort unparalleled in any European country, we find ourselves as a race confronted with race suicide; we watch with concern the loss our former racial stability and national stamina. 360 At the congress, presenters from the United States and Great Britain would agree that immigration was a source of degeneracy—as the immigrants were found to have more children than the so-called native population (Betterment, 21). Sterilization, which by this time had been implemented in law in Indiana, Washington, California, and Connecticut, was promoted by Bleecker van Wagenen, an officer in the Eugenics section of the 359 “Eugenics Record Office.” American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27— Charles Davenport. “Eugenics Record Office”). 360 Karl Pearson, The Problem of Practical Eugenics (London: Dulau, 1912), 36. 182 American Breeders Association—as well as major financial supporter of the Eugenics Record Office—as a necessary practice to enable a proper population differential between the fit and unfit (Betterment, 21). The subsequent year the Permanent International Eugenic Committee met for the first time in the French Central Statistical Office in Paris. France joined the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, whose national eugenic organization predated the London meeting, along with Italy, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium, who had inaugurated eugenic organizations after the 1912 international meeting (Betterment, 23). This 1913 committee assembled a platform that was to guide this international cohort of eugenicists. Eugenics was to be institutionalized in each country as a discipline and taught to students. It was to develop itself as science, standardizing its methodologies (according to those first set forth by the U.S., U.K., and Germany), exchanging data, and cooperating across research centers. And they were to strive to influence policy, educating their home populations against alcohol and tobacco use in the hopes of eliminating them as well as sex-related diseases, which were supposedly damaging to the undefined white race to which its documents referred (Betterment, 24). Furthermore, the committee resolved to isolate “mentally ill, epileptic, and similarly physically and mentally crippled individuals” as well as “alcoholics, habitual criminals, professional beggars, and those who refuse to work”—with the caveat that sterilization, in accordance with American demand, would be used only in exceptional cases (Betterment, 25). This new international council also began to increase the visibility of eugenicists in their home countries. Davenport’s major early publication, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), was very much in conversation with these concerns. Since 1908 he had been in correspondence with German eugenicists such as the racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who was at the 183 time working on studies regarding the results of so-called racial intermarriages, and the psychiatric geneticist, Ernst Rüdin, who complained to him about a lack of genealogical studies (Weiss, 36). Davenport’s book does offer a few short genealogies, but a considerable portion is spent tracing the character of the United States to the “germ plasm” from which it sprung. This book was an inspiration for Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Davenport’s text speaks less of the history of human beings than of “blood” and “germ plasm.” Among his foundational national protoplasm are the “royalist refugees” who offered “a germ plasm which easily developed such traits as good manners, high culture, and the ability to lead in all social affairs, traits combined in remarkable degree in the ‘first families of Virginia.’” 361 Then, Davenport tells of the Dutch who landed in New York: “little wonder that such blood, under the favorable environment of an admirable location, has created the commercial center of the western world” (Heredity, 208). There is something almost alchemical about Davenport’s description—irrigate the American soil with Dutch blood and there appears New York City. He even considers immigration as an inborn desire proving worth: “the most active, ambitious and courageous blood migrates. It migrated to America and has made her what she has become” (Heredity, 211). However, while this might be true for these Anglo-Saxon and Dutch men, it is not the case for the new immigrants—whom he describes as biological “influx.” “Unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed,” he writes, “the population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached 361 Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: H. Holt and co., 1911), 207. 184 to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy than were the original English settlers” (Heredity, 219). Davenport’s awkward prose, given to ungainly listing, overwhelms its briefly-mentioned subjects, the “population” and “settlers,” with all the effects of the “blood.” In Davenport’s eugenic perspective the actual human life is lost in the inexorable, if rather hazy, link between blood and germ plasm and its expression as social phenomenon. Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race built on Davenport’s text. Though Davenport had been in touch with Madison Grant since 1904, when Grant involved Davenport in the New York Zoological Society, their correspondence about eugenic matters intensified after Davenport published his book. 362 Grant’s response to it, including some criticism, was relayed by a mutual friend and not without apprehension. However, Davenport appreciated the attention even if he, as a scientist, disagreed with some of Grant’s more polemical claims. 363 Grant built on the national racisms of Arthur de Gobineau, Ernst Haeckel, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and mixed them with the discoveries of Eugenics, to offer a seemingly more scientific taxonomy. Jonathan Spiro calls him the originator of “scientific racism”; in his day, he was named “the Moses of race hatred in the United States” (Spiro, 222). Trained as a lawyer, Grant had joined the Immigration Restriction League in the early twentieth-century, and, like many of his colleagues, educated himself in the recent science 362 Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press, 2008), 126. 363 See letter from Davenport to Grant 14 July 1914 (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant— Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) 185 of Eugenics, drawing on the work of German eugenicists Alfred Ploetz and Ernst Rüdin, the British Galton and, of course, the work of Davenport (Spiro, 126). Grant’s Passing went beyond Davenport’s tracing of immigrants’ bloodlines. With his text, he offered a eugenic history of civilization—or, as Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Natural History Museum, would describe Grant’s projec: European history has been written in terms of nationality and of language, but never before in terms of race; yet race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government. 364 The book promised, generally, “the solution of many of the problems of race” but its primary concern was the changing composition of the United States. 365 Grant insisted that the United States “must be regarded racially as a European colony” (Grant, 83). The original colonists “were not only purely Nordic, but also purely Teutonic”—the latter a term he would remove in the next edition, once the United States entered the Great War. If not for the Civil War, whose casualties included “the best breeding stock on both sides,” the American Nordic would have developed into “a distinct type” (Grant, 80). However, though Grant’s motivating concern is the condition of the United States, the focus of his argument is Europe. There he develops three types of European—Nordics, Mediterraneans, and Alpines—that will distinguish among northern, southern, and eastern Europeans. The Nordics emerge from Scandinavia to rule the Alpines, who had Asiatic roots, and the Mediterraneans, who extend down to North Africa—as Grant writes, “neither of them can be considered as exclusively European” (167). Grant mourns World War I as 364 Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Preface,” The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), vii. 365 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), xx. 186 it is a war fought among Nordics, “from a race point of view… essentially a civil war” (Grant, 230). With the dead also goes the aptitudes that only the Nordic race possesses. The book ended by bemoaning “the Melting Pot” and appealing to his fellow (white) Americans to reshape the United States according to the new science of race: We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo. (Grant, 263) This text changed the character of the Eugenics movement, for, as Spiro asserts, “Madison Grant’s major contribution to Eugenics…was to advance it from a skirmish against individuals who were socially unfit into a war against groups who were racially unfit” (Spiro, 138). However, as we have seen, Davenport and international eugenic discourse was already speaking in racial terms. Still, Grant’s work honed some of the vocabulary that increasingly came to delineate the borders of racially-conceived national communities. As Osborn would write in the preface, Grant’s purpose was to “rouse his fellow Americans to the overwhelming importance of race” (Osborn, xii). One man for whom this did succeed—and who would adopt Grant’s vocabulary of race—was Adolf Hitler, who would later write to Grant, praising the book as his “bible” (Guterl, 67). “I have finished your book and am enthusiastic about it,” Davenport wrote to Grant on February 10, 1917. “When I read a book like that, my first reaction is what can be done about it. What can be done to secure our nation against ‘the greatest danger which threatens the American Republic today’ of which Osborn speaks at the end of his introduction? 187 Perhaps the passage of the Immigration Bill, even with its defects, will help some.” 366 Davenport even offered edits on Grant’s second edition of The Passing of the Great Race, with Grant driving out to visit Cold Springs Harbor during an Easter vacation so that the two of them could go over the text together. 367 Grant’s book did not receive much attention in the United States upon its release— though it would become very influential in the coming years. In one letter to Davenport, he bemoaned the lack of support for his book from American biologists, suggesting that it is because “they all seem to be either afraid of [Franz] Boas or impregnated with Socialism.” 368 Indeed, it took about five years before Grant’s book truly reached a public audience (Higham, 201). However, Grant did note how popular his work was abroad. “I have had unqualified endorsement and support from the foreign biologists, especially the English,” writes Grant. “I have some splendid letters from Haddon, Woodward, and especially Elliott Smith. These problems seem to be better understood abroad than here.” 369 The international discourse was to help center the problem of immigration for American eugenicists—as well as inform their framing of the problem. During the teens and twenties, eugenicists discussed immigration measures as a matter of world collaboration. In a 1928 survey of what he calls “The Population Problem,” the economist A.B. Wolfe noted that, in the years after the first world war, there was “a pronounced 366 Letter from Davenport to Grant, February 10, 1917. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) 367 See Letter from Grant to Davenport, Nov. 20, 1917. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) and letter from Davenport to Grant, Nov. 22, 1917. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) 368 Letter from Grant to Davenport, February 16, 1917. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) 369 Letter from Grant to Davenport, February 16, 1917. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) 188 tendency to regard the regulation of migration as an international matter.” 370 Indeed, calls for a Nordic international appeared in these years so as to preserve the racial stock. Alfred Ploetz worried about the “sick hereditary deposits” that “permeated” the “people of the modern culture lands” and, reanimating his original dream of white race hygienic cooperation, called for “a confederation of states of linguistically and racially related peoples” (Kühl, Betterment, 50). Jon Alfred Mjöen also proposed setting up an “All-Nordic Institute” that would “protect the interests of the Nordic peoples in a racial biological sense” (Betterment, 51). Prescott Hall, a founder of Boston’s Immigration Restriction League and correspondent of Davenport, whom I will discuss further in the next section, also worried about “diluting and supplanting good stocks” with “inferior stocks.’” 371 He proposed immigration restriction as “a method of world Eugenics” in The Journal of Heredity in 1919 (Hall, 125). Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy took its cue from Hall. The book, with its global frame of reference (as its title makes clear), achieved national popularity. President Warren Harding cited the book in a Birmingham, Alabama speech where he proclaimed “whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on The Rising Tide of Color must realize that our race issue in the United States is only one phase of a race issue the whole world confronts.” 372 In this screed, the Harvard-educated eugenic historian Lothrop Stoddard, warned of “the supreme crisis of the ages,” arguing that not only are “red,” “yellow,” “brown,” and “black” peoples 370 A.B Wolfe, “The Population Problem since the World War: A Survey of Literature and Research (continued),” Journal of Political Economy 36, no 6. December 1928, 672. 371 Prescott Hall, “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity no. 10, vol 3, (March 1919), 125. 372 Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), 59. 189 outnumbering the “white” but also that globalization has allowed them all to intermingle “and the inevitable result will be the supplanting or absorption of the higher by the lower types.” 373 Stoddard offers a biologistic view of human history where “civilization of itself means nothing”: “It is merely an effect, whose cause is the creative urge of superior germ- plasm. Civilization is the body; the race is the soul” (Rising, 302). Stoddard’s text thus brought the thematic of blood and “germ-plasm” that recurs across these texts to a crescendo. Here, germ-plasm becomes the soul of man—a spiritualization of biology and biologization of the spirit that Roberto Esposito suggests was unique to the Nazis. As Esposito writes, “the name assumed by such a superimposition is that of race, which constitutes both the spiritual character of the body and the biological character of the soul” (Esposito, 142). Stoddard’s text also anticipated the Nazi’s fetishization of blood—which he lauded as “one element…fundamental to all the compoundings of the social pharmacopoeia”: “clean, virile, genius-bearing blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of heredity, which, in anything like a favorable environment, will multiply itself, solve our problems, and sweep us on to higher and nobler destinies” (Rising, 305). Stoddard’s text calls for a white international family. He focuses less on the United States than on the white race as a whole. His demands are the revision of the treaty of Versailles, return of imperial lands in non-white areas to dominated peoples, and curtailing of non-white migration so as to maintain white supremacy. He quotes journalists who worry about how “the family of nations is taking on a new meaning” (Rising, 297) and reframes Edward Ross’s national discussion into an international one: “what is the good of 373 Theodore Lothrop, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 300, 302. 190 practising prudence in the family if hungry strangers may crowd in and occupy at the banquet table of life the places reserved for its children?” (Rising, 261). He ends by arguing for a global allegiance to race that surpasses “national or cultural consciousness”: As the years pass, the supreme importance of heredity and the supreme value of superior stocks will sink into our being, and we will acquire a true race- consciousness (as opposed to national or cultural consciousness) which will bridge political gulfs, remedy social abuses, and exorcise the lurking spectre of miscegenation. (Rising 309) Indeed, Stoddard quotes Prescott Hall’s description of undesirable immigrants as a form of sickness—bacteria: Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat, where its own multiplication in a limited area will, as with all organisms, eventually limit its numbers and therefore its influence. (Hall, 126/ Rising, 260-1) In such statements, one sees another source for the rhetoric of Nazism, which Roberto Esposito argues is less a biopolitics than a “zoopolitics, one expressly directed to human animals. Consequently, the correct term for their massacre—anything but the sacred ‘holocaust’—is ‘extermination’: exactly the term used for insects, rats, and lice. Soziale desinfektion” (Esposito, 117). Davenport responded to Grant about Stoddard’s book as he had about Grant’s Passing. His letter begins by praising his friend: “The book is interesting, important and stimulating. I like your introduction immensely and am impressed by the range of your knowledge of races and their past history. Stoddard hasn’t got that by any means.” And then, as with his previous response to The Passing of the Great Race, Davenport turns to the practical matter of how to solve the problem it raises. “Can we build a wall high enough around this country, so as to keep out these cheaper races, or will it only be a feeble dam which will make the flood all the worse when it breaks?” Davenport asks, figuring 191 immigrants as a polluting stream. After reflecting on whether his descendants shall have to seek asylum in New Zealand—seemingly long a place of white nationalist fantasy— Davenport provides an answer to his own question. “I am inclined to think that the thing to do is to make better selection of immigrants.” 374 It is this selective desire that is the subject of the next section. However, before we arrive there, I want to attend to an exchange between Davenport and Jon Alfred Mjöen, a Norwegian pharmacist, that casts further light on the transnational discourse occurring in the interwoven world of Eugenics and racist nationalisms. On December 5, 1921, Davenport wrote him, asking him to pass on his greetings to the German eugenicist, Alfred Ploetz. The Germans had not been invited to the Second International Conference of Eugenics because of the political situation after World War II; the French refused to participate if the Germans were also invited, as they had yet to repair the damage of the war. So, with recourse to the League of Nations not yet accepting Germany as a full member, Davenport explained the absence of an invitation to the German race hygienists to the conference. But he declared himself “especially glad to see the new Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene,” the recent publication of Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fitz Lenz, the Eugenics textbook that was to become known simply as Baur-Fischer-Lenz. 375 This textbook consisted of two parts. The first section dealt with the theoretical principles of heredity (Baur), anthropological differences among the world’s races (Fischer), and then inherited sicknesses and talents (Lenz). The second volume focused 374 Letter from Davenport to Grant, 3 May 1920. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 3, 1920-21) 375 Letter from Davenport to Mjöen, 5 December 1921. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Jon Alfred Mjöen—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1918-1923) 192 specifically on race hygiene—and was wholly composed by Lenz. In this volume Lenz cited numerous American eugenicists—Davenport as well as his field researcher, Arthur Estabrook, and their predecessor Richard Dugdale—to make the case for the necessity of social selection (Lenz, 61). He also wrote of the need to maintain the “Nordic soul,” which was in danger of dying out (Lenz, 182). “Race consciousness,” he noted, was “strongest in North America” due to the influence of Madison Grant: “America is on the way to a social consciousness of the Nordic race, especially since Madison Grant in his impressive way has drawn attention to the menace of its decline.” 376 He writes that the United States had even been campaigning before the war for a union of white nations—and that this would be a great way of encouraging increased international race consciousness. “However,” he notes, with disappointment and hope, “the time of the blond international has not yet come.” 377 Thus, in 1921, the United States’ eugenic program and, as I will discuss further, in the next section, its nativist movement to restrict immigration, was very much an ongoing discourse with the rest of the world. It was not an endogenous American development, but rather a dialogic project, developing a discourse of blood and germ plasm to describe the problem of degeneracy. Michaels’s sense of siloed national systems located his concept of American nativism as protected from the ideology that produced Nazism, preserving a certain American innocence, even as he indicts it of a tyrannical cultural pluralism that retains ultimately racial roots. And yet, Michaels leaves untroubled the pretext for Tavia 376 “Am stärksten ist das Rassenbewußtsein heute in Nordamerika lebendig...in Amerika ist man den auch ganz offenbar auf dem Wege, zum Bewußtsein der Gemeinschaft der nordischen Rasse zu kommen, besonders seit Madison Grant in eindrucksvoller Weise auf ihren drohenden Untergang aufmerksam gemacht hat.” Fritz Lenz, Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene (München: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1921), 183. 377 “Die Zeit der blonden Internationale ist freilich noch nicht gekommen” (Lenz, 183). 193 Nyong’o’s assertion a decade later: “Nazi Germany is our idea of a racial state; our preferred self-image is of a nation founded in liberty but unfortunately burdened with a peculiar institution it has been our genius to destroy” (Nyong’o 10-11). Indeed, even as Michaels does critique the United States, his myopia hides the familial relations articulated in the discourse between the United States and Nazi Germany, where eugenicists identify themselves as part of an extended Nordic bloodline, creating racial states that were to be part of a “blond International.” The National Origins Act and the American Body “The idea of a ‘melting pot’ belongs to a pre-Mendelian age,” Davenport wrote to fellow eugenicist Joseph F. Gould on February 17, 1914, dismissing the notion (Kevles 47); his concept of the nation was not a dish, but rather a biological organism, the living expression of blood and germ plasm. The question was, as Davenport had written three years earlier in Heredity in relation to Eugenics, “How can we keep out defective germ plasm while we admit that which is strong?” His answer was to reduce immigrants to vectors of genetic material: “The proper way to classify immigrants for admission or rejection is on the basis of the probable performance of their germ plasm” (Heredity, 247). Thus following the logic laid out by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, where “the focus of all pollution symbolism is the body,” U.S. nativist discourse represents the nation as an organic body threatened with pollution. 378 The discussion of “blood” and “germ plasm” intensified leading up to the bill that became the Immigration Act of 1924, lauded by the international eugenicist community as the American turn toward “race purity 378 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2001), 173. 194 and uniformity” (Betterment 62). Influenced by this transnational discourse discussed in the last section, this law crystallized fascist desire by taking part in imagining the United States as a nation unpolluted by “defective blood.” It promised to redeem the United States by eliminating the other. It would make explicit the United States’ conception of itself as a racial state. The Immigration Law of 1924 was simply the final iteration in an increasingly restrictive set of immigration laws passed in Congress since 1917, when the Immigration Act of 1917 marked a distinct shift in the United States government’s relationship to immigration. As Erika Lee notes, “the law increased the government’s emphasis on immigration restriction and not just immigrant regulation” (Lee, 129). Not only did it increase the cost of entering the United States to $8 per immigrant and institute a literacy test, but it also expanded the list of undesirable immigrants, incorporating various eugenic categories for the first time—including “persons with abnormal sexual instincts…[and] defective delinquents.” It also extended the earlier Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting immigration from all of Asia but for Japan and the Philippines (Lee, 129-30). The subsequent Emergency Quota Act of 1921 targeted reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe. It prescribed a limit on total immigration for the first time in the nation’s history—355,000—and restricted immigration from any single nation to no more three percent of American residents from that nation of origin in 1910 who had been born there (Lee, 132). Finally, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, or the National Origins Act, further restricted immigration, tightening the radius of whom could become an American citizen. It lowered the annual immigration limit to 155,000 immigrants while also reducing the cap 195 on immigration from any nation to two percent of the foreign-born population as of 1890 (Lee, 133). These three laws all emerged from this transnational discourse that I broached in the past section and continue to explore in this section—which was to later culminate in National Socialism. Focusing primarily on the correspondence leading up to and after the Second International Eugenics Conference, I track the discourse revolving around eugenicists and immigration restrictionists in conversation with Davenport. Randall Hansen and Desmond King argue that U.S. “Eugenics was not, at its core, a racist attempt to eliminate other races; the motivation was to improve the lot of white North Americans.” 379 However, that division, especially at the level of desire, is an impossible distinction. In this section, I want to argue that desire for exclusion was a fascist desire of national rebirth through the elimination of the other—a desire that figured the nation as a Nordic body. Central to this articulation was the Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston on May 31, 1894 by the scientist Robert DeCourcy Ward, and the lawyers Charles Warren and Prescott Farnsworth Hall (Lee, 108). While it preceded the Eugenics movement in the United States, it quickly became interested in and an outlet for Eugenic thought; eventually, as Stefan Kühl writes, eugenicists “dominated it” (Betterment, 62). Even prior to U.S. Eugenics, the IRL had warned about the “alien degradation of American character” in their “Various Facts and Opinion Concerning the Necessity of Restricting Immigration,” an 1894 pamphlet (Lee, 117). Grant soon joined the group. His work 379 Randall Hansen and Desmond King, Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10. 196 reflecting on the “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race” is not atypical of its articulations: the man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals. (Grant, 91) When Davenport wrote to Grant after reading Passing of the Great Race to suggest that he gather together some men, including Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History to lobby Congress to pass what would become the 1917 Immigration Act, Grant responded, “I have been Vice President of the Immigration League for upwards of 20 years and have been told that my book played a very important part of the final passage, over Wilson’s veto, of the restriction bill.” 380 Indeed, Davenport too had direct intercourse with this group; Hall had been a classmate of his at Harvard and he was in touch with them prior to World War I (Kevles, 327). At a January 19, 1920 meeting of the Eugenic Research Association, in which Grant was also active, having served as President in 1918, Davenport had drawn up a proposition for immigration reform based on eugenic principles, beginning with the presumption that “the protection of the germ-plasm of the nation is of prime importance for the future of the United States as a place in which to live and bring up families. 381 In another letter to fellow eugenicists later that year, Davenport makes explicit what the nation’s “germ-plasm” needs to be protected from. “Congress is now considering new immigration laws,” notes Davenport. “It would be well if societies that are interested in eliminating defective blood 380 Letter from Grant to Davenport, February 16, 1917. American Philosophical Society Library (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant—Correspondence, Folder 1, 1904-1917) 381 “Committee on Immigration.” Eugenics Research Association. Charles Benedict Davenport Papers. (Mss.B.D27) American Philosophical Society Library. 197 from our immigrants should write to the immigration committee of Congress.” He suggests that fieldworkers, trained in the techniques of the Eugenic Records Office, conduct interviews overseas. “Only by knowledge of defective strains,” he writes on May 3, 1920, “can we hope to eliminate the cases of potential mental weakness.” 382 Davenport’s own rhetoric crosses the line that Esposito suggests collapsed in Nazism: every division collapses between politics and biology. What before had always been a vitalistic metaphor becomes a reality in Nazism, not in the sense that political power passes directly into the hands of biologists, but in the sense that politicians use biological processes as criteria with which to guide their own actions. (112-3) Davenport was not dictating the law, but he did exercise great influence over its passage. And his desire is clear—to eliminate defective blood, to guard the national germ plasm, to maintain the integrity of a national body that was composed not of people but of fluids. It was in the service of this conception of the United States that Davenport began to regularly correspond with the Klansman Congressman Albert Johnson. He had been in touch with Johnson since 1915, when Johnson contacted Davenport about a bill that was attempting to abolish the Fahrenheit system and institute centigrade. For Davenport, this seemed a desirable goal, responding that he hoped the United States would join “the majority of the civilized nations of the world [that] have abandoned all scales for the centigrade.” 383 While this effort failed, in 1921 Davenport was once again flying the flag of civilization, sending Johnson “statistical studies of the population of the United States” that would show how immigration threatened the nation. He explained, “immigrants help use up the available food supply; hasten the saturation point and are responsible, thru [sic] 382 “Selecting Immigrants,” Eugenics Research Association, Charles Benedict Davenport Papers (Mss.B.D27), American Philosophical Society Library. 383 Letter from Davenport to Johnson 3 November 1915 (Mss.B.D27, Albert Johnson— Correspondence) American Philosophical Society Library. 198 the economic pressure that hey bring, for most of the restriction in size of families of the native stock.” 384 Johnson, a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, who had made his name with his antipathy toward organized labor, was receptive to eugenic logic. He had been in touch with the Immigration Restriction League since 1914—and sought justification for his racist beliefs (King, 202). Davenport’s right-hand man, Harry Laughlin, the director of the Eugenic Records Office since its inauguration in 1910, was to be Davenport’s proxy in the campaign for immigration restrictions. Johnson met Laughlin when the superintendent brought him a petition in 1920. Johnson subsequently appointed him “Expert Eugenical Agent” of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, a position he would hold until 1931 (King, 173). For Johnson, immigration restriction was necessary “to not have this country in the way Europe went, break up into conglomerations of people various languages and hating each other” (King, 202). However, Laughlin explained the problem in biological terms. Beginning in 1920, he presented the question of immigration restrictions as a scientific matter. “The character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities,” he declared. “That is, by the heredity physical, mental, and moral or temperamental traits of its people” (King, 174). He translated the racial logic of Clinton Stoddard Burr—“Americanism is the actually the racial thought of the Nordic race, evolved after a thousand years of experience” (Burr 208)—into the vocabulary of the horticulturist. In his “Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot,” Laughlin told Congress in 1922, “we in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy, or the equality of all men, that we have left out of consideration 384 Letter from Davenport to Johnson 27 January 1921 (Mss.B.D27, Albert Johnson— Correspondence) 199 the matter of blood or natural inborn hereditary mental and moral differences.” 385 For Laughlin the nation was an organism: “No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing, as you know” (Analysis, 733). As he would later justify sterilization, “the racial hygienist as a biologist regards the development of eugenic sterilization as the effort of the state ‘organism’ to get rid of the burden of its degenerate members.” 386 Ultimately, the “degeneracies and hereditary handicaps” of immigrants “are inherent in the blood” (Analysis, 752). As Laughlin lobbied in Congress, Davenport crowed over the development of the Immigration Act of 1924. “I am delighted with this bill.” Davenport wrote to Johnson on December 24, 1923. “It seems to me nearly as perfect as can be, taking into account existing conditions.” In particular, he notes, “I am glad to see in section 13 on page 19 that provision is made for deporting an alien at any time.” This purifying desire is also present in his question about whether it was possible to exclude “alien negroes.” 387 The bill that Johnson had enclosed to Davenport, and which went before Congress, employed the language of Eugenics to call itself “The Selective Immigration Act of 1924.” With Davenport’s support and Laughlin’s testimony, Johnson was able to pass the Johnson- Reed Immigration Act of 1924—or the “National Origins Act.” The law, partially written by Madison Grant, proclaimed its purpose “to limit the immigration of aliens and for other purposes,” though it avoided explicitly racial language, makes plain its overriding eugenic 385 Harry Laughlin, Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, November 21, 1922, 733. 386 Harry Laughlin, “Die Entwicklung der gesetzlichen rassenhygienischen Sterilisierung in den Vereinigten Staaten," Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, 21 (1929), 262. 387 Letter from Davenport to Johnson 24 December, 1923 (Mss.B.D27, Albert Johnson— Correspondence), American Philosophical Society Library. 200 logic in its provision about criminality, poverty, and madness. It demanded knowledge of a potential immigrant’s history—“whether ever in prison or almshouse; whether he or either of his parents has ever been in an institution or hospital for the care and treatment of the insane”—in order to be able to deny them entry. Furthermore, its language of “national origin” rather than nationality, as Mae Ngai notes, was a functionally eugenic reading of politically-constructed identity, biologizing borders (Ngai, 25). The law formalized a new conception of the United States. In the words of Johnson, speaking for those who identified as Nordics: “the United States is our land…the day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.” 388 As Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel note, with the 1924 National Origins act, “the biological hierarchy of races trumped all other medicalized rationales for shutting the doors to the foreign born” (Markel, 768). In 1926, André Siegfried, a French eugenicist who met with Charles Davenport in Paris to establish the Permanent International Council on Eugenics (the forerunner of the IFEO), declared that the law had finally put to rest that “old theory of human equality, racial equality, and the possibility of educating a man of any race” (Kühl, Betterment, 62). “The nervous reaction of the original American stock against an insidious subjection by foreign blood,” as Siegfried would describe it, could now cease. 389 Only so-called American blood would run in the nation’s veins. Lothrop Stoddard would later reveal the fascist desire that crystallized in this law by characterizing its passage as the realization of a “last chance of national salvation” (Re- 388 Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society.” The Milbank Quarterly , 2002, Vol. 80, No. 4 (2002), 767. 389 André Siegfried, America comes of Age: A French Analysis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1927), 3. 201 Forging 193). Through the elimination of the other it was a chance at redemption. Hans F. K. Gunther, a German race anthropologist whom Grant’s writing had influenced, praised the law for discriminating against specific ethnicities and individuals deemed degenerate— barring them from the United States (Nazi 26). And Hitler lauded the 1924 Immigration Act in his unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, as an attempt to purify the body of the United States, keeping out the “foreign body” of “strangers to the blood” (Whitman, 46). In 1931 Fritz Lenz described Adolf Hitler as “the first politician of truly effective influence to make race hygiene a central goal of all politics, and set himself to put that powerfully into effect” (Turda, 94). Calvin Coolidge had preceded him in invoking “biological laws”—even if he did not necessarily place Eugenics at the center of his politics. Still, the election of Warren Harding to the presidency and Coolidge as his vice- president was celebrated by eugenicists; Wilson, though racist himself, had been resistant to some of their conclusions. Coolidge suffered no such doubt. As he wrote in “Whose Country Is This?” in Good Housekeeping, immigration had to be carefully regulated because of biological imperatives: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully.” 390 With the Immigration Act of 1924, the United States would proclaim itself a fundamentally white nation. The time of the blond international had not yet arrived, but the United States was proclaiming early membership—offering an organic conception of itself that was to become a model for the future eugenic state that Lenz imagined. 390 Calvin Coolidge, “Whose Country Is This?” Good Housekeeping 72.2 (February 1921), 14. 202 The Great Gatsby’s Racket Society '"Civilization's going to pieces, ’broke out Tom violently. ‘I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard?” 391 This dinnertime pronouncement of The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan, misnaming and misattributing Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1920), not only interrupts the light banter of Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker, and his wife, Daisy, but also situates the events of the novel before race war. While this moment has been at the center of numerous treatments of Eugenics in the novel, rarely is Tom’s pronouncement taken seriously in its discourse of “civilization” rather than merely integrated into the ongoing scholarly conversation about the novel’s relationship to the self-conception of the U.S. and nativism. Unlike Benjamin Schreier and Walter Benn Michaels, who focus on whether the novel is “deeply committed to racializing the American (Our America, 13), my reading decouples civilization and nation to push beyond nativist readings of The Great Gatsby and instead to consider the novel’s relationship with the emergence of fascism. 392 I position F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as a site of reception of Eugenics discourse, where 391 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2022), 13. 392 Benjamin Schreier, for example, begins his chapter on the novel with the questionable declaration: “it’s impossible to read The Great Gatsby for Jay Gatsby without also reading it for America.” Benjamin Schreier, The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 116. And yet, eugenic discourse and the discourse on civilization was a discourse occurring with as much reference to world events as to national politics. Indeed, the novel is not only interested in nation as a totality, but can be read for currents moving through the U.S. Even excellent recent criticism, such as Meredith Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in the Great Gatsby,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 443-468, and Joseph Vogel, “‘Civilization’s Going to Pieces’: The Great Gatsby, Identity, and Race, from the Jazz Age to the Obama Era.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. 13.1 (2015): 29-54 still looks to the novel as taking part within a wholly national discourse. 203 Eugenics intersects with fascist desire. This novel was once described as “a flamboyant racketeer's attempt to recapture the upper-class girl who threw him over”; 393 by approaching it through the transnational discourse of “racket theory,” I read The Great Gatsby as depicting a splintering society that has lost faith in mediation. Within this scheme, Eugenics serves to justify the claim of the upper classes represented in the novel by Tom. While the novel holds Tom’s enthusiasm for Eugenics up to ridicule, it is unable to suggest an alternate vision that does not endorse the racial presuppositions undergirding Eugenics. Thus, Fitzgerald’s depiction of a fractious, fragmenting U.S. points both toward the incipient fascism of such a postliberal society—embodied by Tom—as well as back toward the shackles of the U.S.’s racial imagination bound up with its story of its settler- colonial origins. In keeping with this chapter’s organization, I should first note that Fitzgerald was connected, if tenuously, with Charles Davenport. From October 1922 through April 1924, during the eighteen months that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, Mary Harriman Rumsey was Fitzgerald’s landlady—a short drive away from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor. 394 Harriman Rumsey had been a student of Davenport’s in the summer of 1905 when she spent part of it at the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Springs Harbor that he directed (Kevles, 54). Her mother was the founding donor for the Eugenics Record Office—a relationship that Harriman Rumsey orchestrated (Kevles, 55). Just before Fitzgerald moved into her home, she had served on the General Committee of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921—and would serve on the Advisory 393 Matthew Bruccol, “Introduction,” New Essays on the Great Gatsby, Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), 2. 394 Horst H. Kruse, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary Harriman Rumsey: An Untold Story” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 13, 2015, 147. 204 Council of the American Eugenics Society until her death in 1934. 395 This connection is merely historical and pretextual; I do not suggest Fitzgerald shared Harriman Rumsey’s perspective on Eugenics. All evidence shows that he was critical of Eugenics as a science, even as he did subscribe to many of its presumptions. This is to say, that though he might have been against Eugenics as a codified discourse, he still thought in its terms. 396 Similarly, Fitzgerald was aware of racism, ridiculing it as “provincial” and “philistine”— but still gave voice to it. 397 395 Horst H. Kruse, The Making of the Great Gatsby (University of Alabama Press, 2014), 83. 396 Fitzgerald’s writings include numerous satires of Eugenics (English, 63). And yet, Betsy Nies suggests Fitzgerald is inextricably tethered to “eugenic logic”: “he always returns to the same site to find an anchor for the meaning of identity, a point that suggests the difficulties of escaping the body as a textual ground for identity.” Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920’s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 103. Where this is for Luczak evidence of Fitzgerald’s “inconsistency” (8) regarding Eugenics, Fitzgerald is remarkably consistent in voicing his disdain for Eugenics while continuing to think with its concepts. A clear example of this tendency can be found in a review of Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat. Fitzgerald argues that U.S. troops were not motivated by patriotism, but rather prompted forward to heroism by their superior bodies: they were sustained by something else at once more material and more magical, for in the only possible sense of the word they were picked men—they were exceptionally solid specimens of a healthy stock. No one has a greater contempt than I have for the recent hysteria about the Nordic theory, but I suppose that the United States marines were the best body of troops that fought in the war. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Under Fire,” The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, 26 May 1923, 715 in F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1996), 88. 397 Fitzgerald’s letters do contain racism articulated in the terms of Eugenics. “God damn the continent of Europe,” writes Fitzgerald to Edmund Wilson in 1921. “It is only of antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter…My reactions were all philistine, anti-Socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.” Joe Cleary, Modernism, Empire, World Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 196. 205 The Great Gatsby, in particular, as I shall show, appears to disavow Eugenics but nevertheless participates in its logic. Eugenics and racism figure prominently in the racket society that Great Gatsby describes. The racket is a term borrowed from U.S. organized crime of the twenties, which Max Horkheimer coopted for his first “theory of a post- bourgeois society.” 398 Thorsten Fuchshuber, further developing Max Horkheimer’s work on this subject, defines the racket society as one in which the belief in a shared social and ethical order has broken down. All that remains is the power of special interests; the social world becomes an arena of warfare as the mediation of the totality disappears. Indeed, so does the individual’s sense of self, as he comes to identify himself wholly with the band of which he is part (Rackets, 512-522). In this context, Eugenics supplies a key discourse through which rackets bind their people together: race, in this case, defines community and that which lies outside of it. For Fuchshuber, “the racket theory is essentially the attempt to answer the question of why antisemitism in Germany could develop into an annihilating antisemitism.” (Rackets, 476). 399 While it is not inevitable that Jews become the target, it is given that within a racket structure such enmity strengthens the in-group (Rackets, 499). As Horkheimer writes, this configuration “raised up this opposition between the inside and the outside everywhere, so a human being who did not belong to a racket was on the outside in a radical sense, and as such the human being was doomed” (Rackets, 501). Eugenics, as a discourse of regulation, facilitates the production of this difference—and, as the novel suggests, becomes a racket in itself. 398 “Die Racket-Theorie ist die Theorie der nachbürgerlichen Gesellschaft.” Thorsten Fuchshuber, Rackets: Kritische Theorie der Bandenherrschaft (Freiburg, 2019), 513. 399 “Die Racket-Theorie ist der wesentliche Versuch einer Antwort auf die Frage, weshalb sich der Antisemitismus in Deutschland zu einem Vernichtungsantisemitismus entwickeln könnte.” 206 The Great Gatsby does not endorse Tom’s eugenic beliefs, but it does conceive of society fragmenting into rackets in a way that ultimately repeats eugenic logic. Tom’s use of Eugenics is famously inaccurate; he not only misnames Stoddard’s text but misattributes it to another eugenicist, Henry Goddard (Luczak, 3). One might even see here a subtle dig at Tom’s intelligence, considering that the New Jersey-based Goddard had used IQ test scores to declare immigrants “feeble minded” (Kevles, 82). Tom proudly declares himself one of the “Nordics”—and yet his superior intelligence falters when attempting to capture the finer points of civilization. “The idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are,” he pontificates, only to then be unable to explain what is so special of this world that needs protecting: “and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that” (Great, 13). Daisy might ridicule him, by saying “we’ve got to beat them down” while “winking ferociously,” yet she accurately parrots his message of society as having become one of violent tribalism (Great, 13). As Tom says, “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (Great, 13). Nick, though, sees Tom’s use of Eugenics as itself being a symptom of the fact that society is coming apart. Nick, finding Tom’s intellectual attempt “pathetic” (13), suggests Tom’s use of Eugenics is evidence that “something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart” (GG 18). Similarly, Daylanne English reads Tom’s invocation of Eugenics as an attempt “to bolster his social position” (English, 75). For Fitzgerald, Tom’s attraction to Eugenics turns into the symptom of a problem of society’s own decline; Eugenics becomes not the solution to degeneracy, but a symptom of the twentieth-century economic society’s new instability. 207 Where Eugenics in the novel represents an attempt to secure a position of dominance, gangland rackets challenge society from below. Jay Gatsby, né Gatz, operates as the frontman within the bootlegging and racketeering operation of Meyer Wolfsheim— a figure modelled on the actual gangster Arnold Rothstein, who had fixed the 1919 World Series. 400 Stephen Brauer writes, “the gangsters of the 1920s as represented in the novel by Wolfsheim and Gatsby, are a new type of entrepreneur, willing to use ‘savage violence ’to win in the marketplace” (Brauer, 56). The situation of Tom’s friend “Walter Chase” exemplifies this new marketplace. He is a man of Tom’s circles who has to resort to working with these gangsters. Where Gatsby points out that Chase “came to us dead broke…very glad to pick up some money, old sport,” Tom underscores the coercion involved. “Wolfsheim scared him,” he declares, “into shutting his mouth” (Great, 87). This emergence from below is emphasized through Nick’s first meeting of Wolfsheim. The Jew literally comes into view out of the darkness of an underground cellar dark enough that Nick is still “blinking away the brightness of the street outside” when he meets the gangster (47). Nick renders Wolfsheim as a classic Jewish countertype (Nies, 97), recording his emergence from in this crepuscular speakeasy with unrestrained repulsion: “A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril” (Great, 47). Nick is barely able to see, but he can still describe in minute detail Wolfsheim’s nose—which Peter Gregg Slater suggests is a projection of Jewish stereotyping rather than an accurate representation of Wolfsheim’s visage. 401 Indeed, Nick’s repulsed description figures the Jewish racketeer as 400 Stephen Brauer, “Jay Gatsby and the Prohibition Gangster as Businessman,” Vol. 2 (2003), 57; Thomas Pauly, “Gatsby as Gangster,” Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1993, 227. 401 Peter Gregg Slater, “Ethnicity in the Great Gatsby,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1973, 56. 208 almost a rodent: “After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness” (Great, 47). Thus, while the novel ridicules Tom’s belief in Eugenics, it does not ridicule his concept of the postwar world as a contest of natural violence. As A.E. Dyson once wrote, Tom might be “the most unpleasant character in the book” but he is “one of the sanest.” 402 Such a vision of society emerges when Nick is trying to think of people he can invite to Gatsby’s funeral. He looks through Gatsby’s desk, trying to find personal connections, but “there was nothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from the wall” (Great 106). This “forgotten violence” is the “legal device” pursued by Ella Kaye of the Cody family, which served to bilk Gatsby out of the $25,000 that his mentor had bequeathed him (Great 66). The use of “violence” highlights the novel’s deep pessimism about the functioning of U.S. society. The law, which is supposed to avoid the use of force by mediating disputes, here becomes simply another means of the imposing the power of the rich on poor. In other words, the law is just another instrument that a racket—the racket of the wealthy—can use. Perhaps Nick’s initial description of Gatsby typifies this poorly-hidden violence of society; he describes him as “an elegant young rough-neck” (Great, 34). Gatsby might be the cultivated front of a gangland operation, but he was originally a soldier—dogged by rumors he “killed a man once” (Great, 31). Entwined with the racket and its racket, Gatsby “rose up to his position in the East,” as Gatsby’s father describes his trajectory (Great, 108). And one of the moments when Gatsby most convincingly wins Nick’s sympathies is when he shows him his wartime medal from “little Montenegro!” (Great, 45). 402 A.E. Dyson, “The Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six Years After,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1961, 38. 209 Violence may have facilitated Gatsby’s rise; it takes immediate shape in and as Tom Buchanan, who, as Nies notes, is the image of the Nordic ideal (Nies, 95). Tom is Madison Grant’s “blond barbarian”—a figure decried by Margaret Bradshaw as representing the “the aristocracy of physical force” (Guterl, 38). Enormously wealthy, he is also enormously muscled: “not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body” (Great, 9). Nick describes him as having “a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body” (Great, 9). It is not only that he conceives of society as a battle, but also that he is willing to use violence himself. We witness the aftereffects of his “great, big, hulking physical specimen” on Daisy’s finger: “the knuckle was black and blue” (Great, 12). We watch him with “a short deft movement” break his mistress’s “nose with his open hand” (Great, 27). The violence of Tom aligns him, in the novel’s logic, with Wolfsheim—the true force behind Gatsby. Where Tom’s muscles index his belligerence, Wolfsheim’s capacity for violence is illustrated by his acquisition of another body part—his “cuff buttons” of the “finest specimens of human molars” (Great, 49). Nick’s final record of Tom links the two, creating an equivalence that links Tom’s ideal Nordic body with its degenerate countertype in the Jewish Wolfsheim. Nick writes of Tom going “into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons, rid of my provincial squeamishness forever” (Great, 116). Even the reflection on “squeamishness” recalls Nick’s state in his first meeting with Wolfsheim—who, Nick notes, consumes his meal “with ferocious delicacy,” declaring “I have enjoyed my lunch” (Great, 48, 49). Meanwhile Nick does not even seem to remember if he ate anything; he is simply “staggered” by the revelation that Wolfsheim fixed the World Series. His stomach back then, when he first encountered the 210 molar cufflinks, is delicate, as it is now—now, when Tom might be about to acquire his own set to match his position as orchestrator of hits, head of the racket of the upper class. In this final meeting, Tom explains to Nick how he arranged Gatsby’s end. He first attempts to suggest that he had been forced into giving Gatsby up by the distraught Wilson. “He was crazy enough to kill me,” is Tom’s first response, “if I hadn’t told him who owned the car” (Great, 115). But then, he shifts the blame onto Gatsby, as a “tough one”: “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car” (Great, 115). In this move, Tom draws from a set of rationales that are both specious and typically fascist. Above all, he cites the threat of violence that necessitates a reaction—in which case the ultimate violence was simply self- defense. Nick recognizes this: “I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified” (Great, 115). “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Nick narrates, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money” (Great, 115). While Tom, might see “himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization” (Great, 84), the novel’s final sentence about and of him suggests his limited vision. Or rather, Nick misreads his violence for carelessness. In Tom’s vision of society, he must destroy the Other to maintain “civilization.” Within this fracturing society, Tom approaches something like the role of the fascist. It is not only that he takes the form of the soldier male of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies—as William Cain writes, “his money is embedded in a proto-fascist mass of muscle”—and is so involved in the novel’s various acts of violence. 403 The idea of Tom 403 While Cain notes this as a matter of characterization, he does not pursue this line of thought, even in a novel that, as he acknowledges, “brims with violence”: 211 as a vessel overbrimming with fascist desires also resonates with his role in orchestrating Gatsby’s end in the murder-suicide that the novel calls a “holocaust” (Great, 104) and that Carlyle Van Thompson, for one, suggests “prefigures and personalizes” the later Shoah. 404 While this Thompson suggests a tenuous connection at best, Tom’s sense of Gatsby’s disposability is linked with his interest in and disdain for Gatsby’s origins. “Who is this Gatsby, anyhow?” (Great, 71) is Tom’s concern from the moment he meets Gatsby. At first it is framed in terms of class: “a lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know” (Great, 71). However, his animus turns racial as he suggests that Daisy’s involvement with “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” is the first step toward “intermarriage between black and white” (Great, 84). Tom’s willingness to patrol these limits thus highlights him as a figure who embraces a “racket” morality. Indeed, by the novel’s end, the vision of society does, in its outlines, follow Tom’s eugenic notions. “Racist characters do not make a racist book,” argues Benjamin Schreier against Walter Benn Michaels. “Though ‘race’ almost certainly operates for Tom and others as a self-evident category, it doesn’t necessarily do so for the text” (Schreier, 127). However, ultimately, as Joe Cleary notes, the novel ends with all of its lower-class (and thus eugenically suspect) figures cast out (Cleary 218); While Myrtle is hit by his wife We hear about the Civil War, the Great War, race-war (Tom Buchanan’s panic that “Nordics” soon will be overwhelmed by “the colored empires,” 12–13), Myrtle’s broken nose, the rumor that Gatsby’s “killed a man” (44, 49), car crashes, murder (a man who “strangled his wife,” 62), suicide (a man “who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square,” 63), a “dead man” in a hearse (68), a murder by a criminal mob (70), suspicious death (that of young Gatsby’s patron, Dan Cody, 100), child abuse (Gatsby’s father “beat him,” 173), and Wilson’s killing of Gatsby. William E. Cain, “American Dreaming: Really reading The Great Gatsby,” Society 57, 454, 468. 404 Carlyle Van Thompson, The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 100. 212 Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, Tom orchestrates the situation that leads to George and Gatsby’s death. The novel does mourns the violence that occurs within it, particularly by opposing Nick’s gentler, less conflictual vision of society to that of Tom. From the novel’s beginning he announces his neutrality—how he learned from his father to “reserve all judgments”— which is also, as he adds “a matter of infinite hope” (Great, 3). He comes out of the Middle West, the so-called American Heartland. He moves among and mediates between the world of Gatsby and Wolfsheim and that of Daisy and Tom. Where Tom speaks in terms of dominance and might, Nick speaks of rights. As he reflects upon the death of Gatsby, he acknowledges his responsibility; he has to take charge of the funeral arrangements, because that is his social duty: “it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right in the end” (Great, 105). This is, though, a rather belated sense of responsibility. It is only with Gatsby’s death that Nick takes care of Gatsby’s Lutheran father—“Henry C. Gatz…from a town in Minnesota” (Great, 107). Nick too had earlier flagged Gatsby’s difference. His first question of “Who is he?” turns into a question of origins and roots: “Where is he from, I mean?” (Great, 35). Gatsby is clearly somehow marked as Other for Nick to admit he would have “accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York” (Great, 35). And yet, he is still contiguous with whiteness in a way that the Jewish Wolfsheim is not—as Nick’s relationship with the father comes to prove. (After all, Daisy Buchanan in her “white girlhood” can fall for the young Gatsby, believing him to be a suitable love object). 213 Because Henry Gatz “was on the point of collapse” Nick “took him into the music room and made him sit down while” Nick tried to get him to eat something (Great, 107). Indeed, Nick’s arranging of the funeral and caring for Gatsby’s father is contrasted to the conduct of Wolfsheim—Gatsby’s “closest friend” (Great, 110)—who will not even come to the funeral as well as Daisy and Tom whom Nick cannot even reach by phone or mail. Nick’s sympathy for Gatsby’s father can be seen in the scene of consumption—or rathe refusal of it. Where Wolfsheim—whom Edith Wharton called Fitzgerald’s “perfect Jew” (Crack-Up, 309)—eats with relish while describing the death of Rosy Rosenthal, Gatz “wouldn’t eat, and the glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand” (Great, 47, 107). While Nick tries to offer him “coffee”, this man declares he does not “want anything” (Great, 107). As opposed to the rapacity of the Jew—who needs to consume—or the belligerence of the protofascist—who demands an object to act against—Gatz is presented as attempting to embody self-sufficiency. Gatz’s lack of desire is an important element in enabling this sympathy. At this point, Gatsby no longer represents a challenge to the status quo. Gatsby too earns sympathy because he is now, like Gatz, not staking any kind of (in his case implicitly unnatural) claim on the nation’s economic or sexual resources. His absence is requisite for the novel’s melancholy conclusion, one that gestures toward the possibility of a rejuvenation of society away from modernity’s “racket.” Nick, about to finally leave the East, surveys the land and has a vision that returns to first impressions—when he felt himself “a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler” in West Egg (Great, 7). Allowing Gatsby’s mansion to “melt away” among the “inessential houses,” Nick has a vision of “America”: “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors ’eyes—a fresh green breast of the new world.” If Gatsby is a sacrifice, as the term "holocaust” implies, it is that with his death, organic unity can 214 come into view once more. For Walter Benn Michaels, this vision of Nick’s is one that “prefigures Stoddard’s lament for ‘our vanished America’” (Our America, 41). However, this is not merely a moment of nostalgia. It is a more radical rejection of the social fragmentation of modernity—and a desire to recover an insular, organic whole. This is the supposed wholeness of the European settler, who can escape civilization. As Nick had begun the novel, these events precipitate a retreat from the social world: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his reams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short- winded elations of men” (Great, 6). Indeed, this “foul dust”, in the novel’s logic, is nothing less than the powder into which the “pieces” of “civilization” Tom first invoked have disintegrated—even if it is not splintering for the reasons Tom supposes. The novel bemoans social fragmentation and the “racket” society in a way that demands an organic alternative that can get beyond civilization. Thus, while the novel recognizes the possibility of violent racial hygiene in a world unsettled by the market, its gentler solution—and escape from a global problem—is an organic state still reliant on racial demarcations. Even as the novel seeks to condemn Tom’s incipient fascism, it ends up reaffirming the conditions that justify this violence. While rejecting the explicit Eugenics of Tom, the novel still lapses into a racial configuration of nation. Nick’s vision of the social order might be gentler than Tom’s regime of violence, but it also presumes, from the very beginning, that peace can only come through the absence of the Other. The novel thus continues the logic of racial nationalism that will extend beyond the United States and on toward catastrophe. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” also ultimately signifies “So we drove on toward death in the cooling twilight” (Great, 88). 215 Rosenberg’s American Model In 1925, the same year that The Great Gatsby was published, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was translated into German. Der Weltkampf, the chief ideological organ of the National Socialists, included it in its Bücherschau, its roundup of new books. Alfred Rosenberg, the movement’s chief idealogue, who edited the periodical and produced most of its content, wrote of Grant’s history, “it is considered a huge hit, a foundational work of racial thought, which has also done great service to [his fellow racial anthropologist Hans K.] Gunther’s work.” Rosenberg follows up this assessment with a declaration that is, in retrospect, terribly ironic: “this book will contribute more to the project of world peace than all of the democratic peace congresses.” Included in Rosenberg’s roundup was Lothrop Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman, also translated that year: Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung von Unten. “We hope,” Rosenberg writes, “that these works will be of use for future German law.” 405 It was clear to Rosenberg that Eugenics had redescribed the United States. It had served to crystallize certain desires that enabled laws to be passed—and offered a vision for Germany now to imagine its pure racial being. The United States became both object of fascist desire and an important interlocutor in its production through eugenic discourse. The commitment to biology as the master discourse of history seemed to promise Rosenberg a clear and natural hierarchy of the world—perhaps such as one envisioned by Harry Laughlin, who imagined his work pushing for immigration restriction as push for 405 “Das erstgenannte ist als ein ganz großer Wurf zu bezeichnen, ein grundlegendes Werk rassischer Geschichtsbetrachtung...wird einstmals mehr zur ‚Weltbefriedung‘ beitragen als alles Gerede auf demokratischen Friedenskongressen....wir hoffen, daß diese Werke auch für eine künftige deutsche Gesetzgebung ausnutzbar sein werden.” “Bücherschau,”Der Weltkampf, 2, 16 (November 1925), 765. Nationales Bibliothek-Leipzig. 216 world peace. In 1924 he applied for the inaugural Edward W. Bok Peace Prize with what can only be called speculative fiction for a new world order. He proposed what he called a “democratic” world government with a parliament that would be able to settle all disputes without allowing for war. However, in a perverse echo of the original U.S. constitution, in this parliament, the vote of a white European would count ten times more than that of an African. The United States, Canada, and Northern Europe would have a permanent majority in perpetua (Betterment, 50). Eventually, Laughlin’s immigration testimony would help provide the framework for Nazi Germany’s Hereditary Health Law, a national registry of the so-called unfit that would see two million sterilizations in its existence (Ordover 30). In part for his work on this law, Laughlin would receive in 1936 an honorary degree from the Nazified University of Heidelberg (Nazi 87). Even Mussolini justified his racial turn of 1938 as a result of U.S. Immigration policies (Cagliati 476). But the focus would soon shift from the United States. In the coming years Germany would further develop its eugenic infrastructure. In 1927 the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Race Hygiene was inaugurated with Charles Davenport present at the ceremony. Eugen Fischer became the director of the institute and its representative in the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations. That fall, he presented his memorandum to Benito Mussolini on September 27, 1929. As Davenport’s English translation of Fischer’s letter read: we pray that what was denied to earlier cultures may here be achieved in grasping fortune’s wheel and controlling and turning it! Quality as well as quantity! The urgency brooks no delay; the danger is imminent. 406 406 “The Meeting of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations,” Eugenical News 14, 11 November 1929, 154. 217 Nazi Germany seized that wheel. It would not be long until the U.S. Eugenics community looked to Germany to resolve this “imminent danger.” “One may condemn the Nazi policy generally,” discussed The Eugenical News in 1933, “but specifically it remained for Germany in 1933 to lead the great nations of the world in the recognition of the biological foundations of national character.” This call was met by Hitler and his plans of Rasse und Raum (Race and Space). For Hitler, the state was not the end but rather “a means for the ‘conservation of the race’” (Origins, 357)—which needed space to grow. In 1934, Emmanuel Levinas wrote a critique of Nazi Germany’s “new conception of man”: The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart…man no longer finds himself confronted by a world of ideas in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sovereign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to a certain number of these ideas, just as he is linked by birth to all those who are of his blood. 407 For Levinas, what is at stake with this biologization and tethering of possibility to race, is the question of “the very humanity of man” (Levinas, 71). And yet, what Levinas saw taking form in Germany was merely an intensification of a global discourse had already reduced man to blood and germplasm. Lapouge wrote to Davenport and Grant about their critics in 1927: “That which makes these people sick is that they cannot denounce us as clericals or reactionaries….we are more advanced than they in politics, taking as we do our principles of action from Biology.” 408 While it is not quite true to say that Hitler was simply implementing the ideas that had been worked out the decade before, in the praise for him and his proclamations there is a clear echo of the 407 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Trans. Seán Hand Critical Inquiry 17: 1 (Autumn, 1990), 69. 408 Letter from Grant to Davenport 8 March 1927 (Mss.B.D27, Madison Grant— Correspondence, Folder 5, 1925-28), American Philosophical Society Library. 218 discourse that had centered on the United States in the twenties. Fritz Lenz echoed the correspondence of Lapouge, Davenport, and Grant in 1931 when he had praised Hitler as “the great German doctor” taking “the final step in the defeat of that historicism and in the recognition of values that are purely biological.” 409 Many of the steps of that advance followed a path through the United States. 409 Fritz Lenz, Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene (München: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1931), 417-8. 219 Regeneration Through Violence: The Fascist Masculinity of “Going Deerslayer” The vulgar Marxists keep no watch over primitiveness and utopia, the National Socialists owe their seduction to them, it will not be the last. Both hell and heaven, berserkers and theology, have been surrendered without a fight to the forces of reaction. —Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times 410 “The Ideal of our Boyhood Years” “He is truly risen, the ideal of our boyhood years,” wrote the future fascist Fritz Olimsky on September 16, 1920. “I can testify because I have seen him with my own eyes, him and his wildly romantic world.” 411 Olimsky, who would later serve in the Reich Film Chamber, described Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook—the first feature film adaptation of the classic nineteenth-century American novel, The Deerslayer—as an almost religious experience; he titled his review in the conservative newspaper, Berliner Börsenzeitung, “Lederstrumpfs Auferstehung”—“Leatherstocking’s Resurrection.” The review rhapsodized the re-appearance of James Fenimore Cooper’s white Indian on screen: “Luna [Film Production Company] is now presenting the very Leatherstocking of our youth, the excitement of our childhood, which we could only enjoy then from tattered tomes, in true reality, and letting arise before the body’s eyes what one could hitherto only dream.” 412 410 Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley, CA: Polity, 1991), 60. 411 “Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden das Ideal unseres Bubenjahre, ich kann es bezeugen, denn ich habe ihn mit eigenen Augen gesehen, ihn und seine wild romantische Welt.” Fritz Olimsky, “Lederstrumpfs Auferstehung,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, 16 Sept 1920, 4. 412 “Die Luna ist nämlich eben dabei, den Lederstrumpf, das Entzücken unserer Kinderjahre, den wir seinerzeit nur aus oft schon recht zerfetzen Schmökern genießen konnten, unserer Jugend in naturgetreuer Wirklichkeit vorzuführen und ihr eine Welt vor den leibhaftigen Augen erstehen zu lassen, von der man bisher eben nur träumen konnte.” ibid, 4. 220 The messianic title and hyperbolic tone suggest that Olimsky’s celebration of the film is not only about the remediation of a favorite childhood character—though its reincarnation has restored new unity and reality to this character who he felt was only weakly embodied by degenerating books—but also about something more: “we observed the attack of a whole tribe of mounted Indians. Ladies and gentlemen, I can only assure you it was terribly beautiful.” 413 Thrilling to such onscreen violence, Olimsky saw in the Wild West an antidote to the “cultural bolshevism” he would later denounce, the “countless immoral films” that made “the general public, even in the smallest village...familiar with the dregs of the city and with [its] dolled-up pseudo-culture.” 414 While in 1932 he would praise “Dr. Arnold Fanck’s mountain films” as the prescription for Weimar Germany’s degeneration, in 1920 this shining ideal of redemptive masculinity was the first iteration of Lederstrumpf: Deerslayer (“Film Bolshevism” 250). Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook’s resurrection of Olimsky’s “ideal of our boyhood years” offers one vision of how the German reception of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel and its eponymous character crystallized fascist desire. Taking this film as this chapter’s object, I will show how Deerslayer, a foundational character of U.S. literature once called by R.W.B. Lewis a “fully-fledged fictional Adam,” came to model the violent masculinity of the “soldier male” in Germany as well as the United States. 415 In this chapter, I will chart the evolving dynamics of Deerslayer’s reception from 413 “Dann beobachteten wir die Attacke eines ganzen Stammes berittener Indianer, meine Herrschaften, ich kann nur versichern, es war schauerlich schön.” Fritz Olimsky, “Lederstrumpfs Auferstehung.” Berliner Börsenzeitung. 16 Sept 1920, 4. 414 Fritz Olimsky, “Film Bolshevism,” The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, Eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 250. 415 R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 91. 221 his 1841 German translation through his remediation on film in Weimar Germany and, finally, as the Boy Scouts of America’s vision of “a real man” in the organization’s 1923 U.S. version of the German film: The Deerslayer and Chingachgook. 416 I argue that this phenomenon is less a matter of adaptation and cooption, wherein Deerslayer was remotivated, but rather an activation of what was always-already bound up in this character—the “myth of the essential White America,” as D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1923, the year Deerslayer and Chingachgook was released in the United States: “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” 417 In this chapter, then, I track how this “myth of essential White America”—the story of Deerslayer’s first war-path—shaped masculinities that crystallized the fascist desire to create the self through the destruction of the other in the United States and Germany. At a moment when, as Gail Bederman notes in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995), “intellectuals from Max Nordau to Madison Grant preached the dangers of racial degeneracy and the decline of civilization,” Deerslayer offered an image of rejuvenating masculinity for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. 418 As a novel about “emerging into manhood,” The Deerslayer: or, The First War-Path lends itself to discourses about masculinity—offering 416 Presumed lost until the 1990s, there are currently two extant versions of this film—a 2006 Alpha-Video DVD copy of the print archived at the George Eastman House (59 minutes) and a YouTube version (provenance unknown; 43 minutes www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OQO8_vO8Gg.). While the former offers the more complete narrative of The Deerslayer, the latter contains the Boy Scout dedication and campfire framing as it existed according to newspaper reports (see “Boy Scouts” and “Dedicated to Boy Scouts”). In this chapter, I draw on both versions to reconstruct the film closest to its 1923 form. I refer to the DVD as Wellin AV and the Youtube video as Wellin YT. 417 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 69. 418 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 88. 222 one answer to a central question of this chapter: “by what means is a young boy made a soldier?” (Theweleit, Male 2, 143). The novel frames its protagonist, known then as Natty Bumppo as well as Deerslayer—and in Cooper’s sequels as Hawkeye and Leatherstocking—as a model of masculinity. 419 It narrates how Deerslayer violently earns his adult moniker, Hawkeye, as he helps his Mohican companion, Chingachgook, rescue Chingachgook’s beloved, Wah-ta-Wah, from the Hurons and, then, protects the Hutter family from this same tribe. In Cooper’s 1841 preface to the then-completed set of The Leatherstocking Tales, he framed his text as giving shape to the “beau-idéal of [its] characters,” in particular the protagonist: “a character that possessed little of civilization but its highest principles as they are exhibited in the uneducated, and all of savage life that is not incompatible with these great rules of conduct” (Cooper, 490). In other words, Bumppo, Leatherstocking, Hawkeye, or Deerslayer—as I will refer to him throughout this chapter—offered his readers an ideal self cultivated by means of adopting certain traits of the American Indian. 420 As a character, Deerslayer contributed to performances of “Indianness” in Germany and the United States. In Germany, Deerslayer helped to initiate Germany’s nineteenth- century “Indianthusiasm”: “a yearning for all things Indian, a fascination with American Indians, a romanticizing about a supposed Indian essence.” 421 Meanwhile, in the United States, the Deerslayer served as model for “playing Indian”—that is Philip Deloria’s term 419 James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales II (New York: Library of America, 1985), 489. 420 I use Native American when referring to the indigenous inhabitants of North America and (American) Indian to refer to their essentialized representations. 421 Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters & Projections. Ed. Chris G. Calloway, Gerd Gemunden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 168. 223 for masquerading as an Indian to access a real self—and for “going native”—Shari Huhndorf’s name for the adoption of indigenous identity “to resolve widespread ambivalence about modernity,” achieve “the regeneration of racial whiteness,” and offer “self-justifying fantasies that conceal the violence marking European America’s origins.” 422 However, I argue, by adopting Deerslayer—a colonizer living like an American Indian—as their ideal, readers like Olimsky did not “go Native” or “play Indian.” Instead, they “went Deerslayer.” The title of this chapter, “Going Deerslayer,” highlights how a fascist masculinity might be envisioned as a certain form of “going native”—that is, acting as the colonizer who has embraced (a fantasy of) savagery. Deerslayer, I argue, offered a model of the masculine primitive—a masculinity in which a primal virility is believed to be essential to true manliness. 423 Within this model, to be a real man, one had to slough off the “slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization” to release “the caveman within us,” as the social scientist, William F. Fielding, titled his 1922 book. 424 Fielding thus presaged Ernst Junger who would write in War as Inner Experience (1925) about how in battle “the cave-dweller, sallies forth naked as ever, with all the savagery of his unfettered instincts” (Theweleit, Male 2, 20). The transatlantic emphasis on the necessity of recovering the “savage” in the “civilized,” while locally inflected by distinct national concerns, forms part of a broader transnational discourse that aimed to serve as an antagonist to degeneration, to relocate the 422 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3. 423 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 227-232. 424 John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 17. 224 virility lost to the Other in the Nordic white man. 425 Constituent of this discourse, the image of Deerslayer operated within a racialized visual field whose iconography of race and manliness is legible across American and European contexts. This chapter thus contributes to the field of masculinity studies by showing how Klaus Theweleit’s type of the “soldier male,” a violently misogynistic mode of masculinity that policed the borders of the male body and the nation, was a transatlantic production. 426 While George Mosse and Klaus Theweleit acknowledge that the masculine primitive undergirded twentieth-century masculine stereotypes that climaxed in fascism (Mosse, Image, 155), they largely neglect the transatlantic imaginary that produce their objects of study. And although Mosse gestures toward how the “German education in manliness,” occurs, in part, through Karl May’s narratives of “Indians of North America” where “the hard and domineering manly posture is maintained” (Image, 139), his neoclassicism- centered narrative largely occludes the role of indianthusiasm in shaping Germany’s image of the male body—or how this imaginary was imported into European discourse. Similarly, 425 Gail Bederman explores the relationship between race and gender most extensively in the American context, also see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2 nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). In the German context, beyond George Mosse. The Image of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Vol. 1 and 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989); see Christopher Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Benjamin Maria Baader et al. Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012) and Thomas Kühne, “Introduction: Masculinity and the Third Reich,” Central European History 51 (2018), 345-366. 426 For a recent reconsideration of Male Fantasies see Laura Marks, “Which Came Frist, Fascism or Misogyny? Reading Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies.” Spectres of Fascism. Samir Gandesha, ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 109-119. 225 Theweleit considers this phenomenon of the “soldier male” to be only part of “European history” (Male 2, 163). My account of the transatlantic influence adds to rather than displaces the current history of German fascism. I am not contesting that the Freikorps were German soldiers who refused to demobilize after World War I and pursued a campaign of terror against communists, socialists, and Jews, becoming core members of the National Socialist movement (Ehrenreich ix)—and thus specifically the products of the Wilhelmine military academies. Becoming “men of steel,” as Ernst Junger describes the form of the ideal soldier (Male 2, 160), they violently refused feeling, waging war on the “desire to desire,” and conceiving their enemies as embodiments of desire itself (Male 2, 7). However, as I will argue in this chapter, the idea of the Deerslayer, as, in the words of Richard Slotkin, “a man who knows how to think and fight like an Indian,” shaped the content of their fantasies— particularly their belief in the transformative potential of violence. 427 This work following the circulation across the Atlantic of the image of Deerslayer—whom Leslie Fiedler calls a “white European refugee from civilization”— brings me into discourse with the developing corpus of scholarship on the constellation of the Red Atlantic, which is concerned with, as Jace Weaver writes in The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (2014), “how whites, particularly Europeans, defined themselves in relation to Western Hemisphere indigenes.” 428 Building on the work of H. Glenn Penny’s Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (2013) and Frank Usbeck’s Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of 427 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 16 428 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Dell, 1966), 167; Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 249. 226 Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology (2015), which chart the transatlantic reception of images of American Indians in Germany, I show how this “transatlantic culture from colonial encounter” (Fulford 6), where one sees “modernities evolving on several fronts simultaneously and at several, nonsychronic speeds” (Flint 25), also became a conduit for fascist desire. 429 However, where Penny and Usbeck orient themselves exclusively toward the German reception and production of representations of Native Americans, my work ultimately reflects on the culture of the United States in addition to that of Germany. This chapter thus ends by considering Deerslayer’s return to the United States, where he served as model of masculinity for the Boy Scouts of America in the 1923 film, Deerslayer and Chingachgook. It shows how Deerslayer, within this context, reinforced jingoism and xenophobia. Ultimately, then, in charting how the ideal of the Deerslayer, as a guiding male fantasy, shaped fascist masculinity, I am also making a case at a level of greater abstraction for how fascism could emerge from settler-colonialism. The scholar of Native American and indigenous history, Jack D. Forbes, has argued, like Aimé Césaire before him, that “fascism, or at the very least its key elements, originates in colonies or in outlying areas being raided or conquered”—and then returns to conquer the metropolis (Forbes 5). Thus, rather than locate fascism as originating in Europe, he points to the Americas as a central site of its genesis, suggestively renaming “Jacksonian Democracy,” which resulted in the expulsion and genocide of countless Native Americans, as “Frontier Fascism” (Forbes 429 Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6; Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 25. 227 16). 430 This chapter then not only builds on David Blackbourn, Caroll P. Kakel III, Kristin Kopp, Janne Lahti, and Edward B. Westermann in arguing that the imagination of Manifest Destiny and the genocide of the Native Americans was an important precursor to the ideology of Nazism—it also contributes to my larger contention in this project that U.S. culture served as an important source for global fascism, crystallizing fascist desire throughout the United States and the world. 431 The Deerslayer’s Logic of Violence “Out from the time of our youth [Jugendzeit] ... legends and fairy tales beckon, friendly, mild, reddened by dream and desire...and wild, strong, breathless Indian stories gallop through the open heart and unbounded world of the imagination—tomahawks, scalps…” wrote the Film-Kurier on June 24, 1920, in anticipation of Robert Heymann’s Der 430 Similarly, Ward Churchill’s essay, “It Did Happen Here: Sand Creek, Scholarship and the American Character” not only echoes Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel about an American Fascism, It Can Happen Here, but also draws parallels between the United States’ campaign against the Cheyenne and “gruesome performance in eastern Europe during World War II” of the “Waffen SS.” “Racially oriented invasion, conquest, genocide and subsequent denial are all integral, constantly recurring and thus defining features of the Euroamerican makeup,” Churchill writes, “from the instant of the first boat load of self- ordained colonists set foot in the ‘New World.’” Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1998), 25. For further parallels see David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust. 431 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature Water, Landscape, and the making of Modern Germany. London: Blackwell, 2006; Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. New York: Palgrave, 2011; Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011; Lahti, Janne. The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2018; Ed. Lahti, Janne. German and Untied States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016 228 Wildtöter, which was to be released that fall. 432 These childhood fantasies developed, the article declared, from “the good Fermimore [sic] Cooper [who] built an enchanting Wild- West in our fantasies.” 433 In its preview of the film, the Film-Kurier writer waxed lyrical about how the film would animate the dreams of his “Jugendzeit.” Yet, while the writer welcomed these boyish memories as “friendly,” the reminiscence breaks off, so overcome by excitement, at the edge of war: “tomahawks, scalps.” This overwhelming excitement was part of the effect of the novel, whose reception and popularity has long been linked by scholars with its promise to revive German readers from Europamüdigkeit, “Europe tiredness”—that is, a dissatisfaction with the social and political conditions of Germany after the Napoleonic wars. 434 However, in this section, I show how the promise of new energy, of regenerating the nation and eliminating Europamüdigkeit, also became linked with violent desire, offering through the figure of Deerslayer a model for fascist masculinity. In other words, where Leland Person has noticed how “Male Fantasies does offer some intriguing parallels with Cooper's fantasmatic representation of manhood”, I will argue that Cooper’s “fantasmatic representation of manhood” actually informed the 432 “Aus der Jugendzeit…Sagen und Märchen winken herüber, freundliche, milde, von Traum und Wunsch gerötete...und wilde, starke, atemlos durch offenes Herz und unbegrenzte Vorstellungswelt galoppierende Indianergeschichten, Tomahawks, Skalpe— —” “Die Erschließung von Wild-Ost.”Film-Kurier. 24 Juni 1920. 433 “Wild-West…Der gute Fermimore [sic] Cooper baute ein verzaubertes Wild-West in unsere Phantasie.” Die Erschließung von Wild-Ost.”Film-Kurier. 24 Juni 1920. 434 Karlheinz Rossbacher, Lederstrumpf in Deutschland: Zur Rezeption James Fenimore Coopers beim Leser der Restaurationszeit (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 92; H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians Since 1800 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 35. 229 shape of the male fantasies that Theweleit examines, beginning with the childhood wish “to play Red Indians” (Male 2, 64). 435 Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales occupies an important position in nineteenth- century Germany’s cultural history. Glenn Penny places the 1826 translation of Cooper’s The Pioneers at the origin of Germany’s Indianthusiasm. While there had been novels about Indians prior to Cooper, Cooper’s work brought about a new level of interest in subject. Penny names the 1841 translation of The Leatherstocking Tales, wherein all five novels are gathered together, a “classic of German literature, familiar to the literate classes in all German states across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (Penny, 2). Indeed, by the time that Deerslayer appeared in German translation, completing The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper had already supplanted his original inspiration, Walter Scott, as Germany’s most widely-read foreign novelist. 436 Karlheinz Rossbacher’s Lederstrumpf in Deutschland (1972), which is still the most complete account of Cooper’s reception in Germany, offers the idea that the interest in Indians and reading Cooper stemmed from a “search for new clothing for their selves.” 437 In this section, I illustrate a current of Deerslayer’s reception history where the clothing found in The Deerslayer was the noble savage’s garb of war. It is clear that the desire for change in Germany is central to what brought readers to Cooper. The nineteenth-century literary historian Julian Schmidt, for example, diagnosed the interest in Cooper as merely an expression of resistance to the status quo: 435 Leland S. Person, “Historical Paradoxes of Manhood in Cooper’s The Deerslayer”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 32:1 (Autumn 1998), 80. 436 Preston A. Barba, “Cooper in Germany,” Indiana University Studies 21 (15 May, 1914), 56. 437 “die für die Dauer der Lektüre und darüber hinaus gewünschte Identifikation mit dem völlig Neuen vollzieht sich als Suche nach einem neuen Kleid seiner selbst” (Rossbacher 87) 230 “the dark feeling of the sickness of our own situation drives us over the ocean rather than a specific consciousness of what we are actually searching for.” 438 However, there was also a positive desire expressed to experience the creation of a new world and society. Cooper’s novels “bring before the eyes…a society in the midst of being born,” wrote one reviewer. 439 Similarly, Ludwig Börne described his attraction to the novel and its protagonist by writing of Deerslayer that he is one of these “young virginal men, fresh and virginal like nature.” 440 That these responses to Cooper’s Deerslayer elide the novel’s violence to focus on its promise of spiritual revival, highlights how the novel’s representation of violence was understood as natural, necessary, and, ultimately good. “In the pages of Cooper's frontier novels,” suggests Barton Carl Beebe, “Germans could imagine, however unrealistically, an American Eden of pristine landscapes and uncompromising self-reliance.” 441 And yet, the content of this “uncompromising self-reliance” is ultimately violence—as D.H. Lawrence, Richard Slotkin, and Philip Fisher have enumerated at length. As Richard Slotkin writes, “Cooper makes two contributions to the mythologization of American history: he puts the Indian and the matter of racial character at the center of his consideration, and he represents the historical process as essentially a violent one.” 442 Deerslayer tells the story of Deerslayer’s emergence into manhood through killing. The novel’s very title, as Philip Fisher argues, brings “into focus…murderousness itself,” 438 “das dunkle Gefühl von der Krankhaftigkeit unserer eigene Zustände nicht ein bestimmtes Bewusstsein über das, was wir eigentlich suchen, triebt uns über den Ozean” (Rossbacher, 48) 439 “gemischten Zustand einer werdenden Gesellschaft…vor die Augen zu bringen” (Rossbacher, 43) 440 “In Coopers Romanen handeln frische, jungfräuliche Menschen, frisch und jungfräulich, wie die Natur es ist.” (Rossbacher, 45) 441 Barton Carl Beebe, “The Search for a Fatherland: James Fenimore Cooper in Germany,” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1998), 3. 442 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 88. 231 being not only one of the protagonist’s many names, but also the name of his gun, “Kill- deer.” 443 Indeed, its subtitle, “or the first War-path,” underscores how war is the focus of this novel. It could have also been subtitled as the story of the rescue of Chingachgook’s bride to be, Wah-ta-Wah, the first adventure of Deerslayer and Chingachgook, or even the defense of the Hutter family. However, the subtitle is rather about the first war-path and the violence that entails. In Fisher’s reading, the novel presents the Jacksonian policy of Indian Removal as a predestined fait accompli. This policy, which banished Native Americans from living east of the Mississippi, led to the death marches called the Trail of Tears, during which almost half of the Cherokee involved died (Stannard, 124). Fisher hears echoes of these policies when Deerslayer’s rejected lover, Judith Hutter, thanks him after he takes part in the massacre of the surrounding Indians, for “clearing this region of the Hurons” (Cooper, 1022). This emptiness is emphasized by Deerslayer’s final return to the site of the battle, fifteen years later, where now there are only “human bones bleaching in the rains of summer” (Cooper, 1028). The novel, according to Fisher, thus offers a “pre- history…marked by beginnings stained with violence” (Hard, 86) both for the nation and the legend of Leatherstocking; it offers an instance of what Jack D. Forbes calls “frontier fascism” in perpetrating what David Stannard has called the “American Holocaust,” the settler’s genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas (Forbes, 5; Stannard, 124). Yet, through this action, Deerslayer, newly unencumbered by enemies, gains not only “radical freedom” but also a new start—it is here, that, in Fisher’s words, “his history begins” (Hard 86). 443 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 36. 232 Killing, which could otherwise be known as Indian Removal, is indeed the only way Deerslayer can become the Hawkeye that the readers of 1841 novel have already experienced in previous instantiations of the series, such as 1823’s The Pioneers or 1826’s The Last of the Mohicans. It is only through violence that Deerslayer earns his sobriquet of Hawkeye, receiving the name from the mouth of the Indian he kills: “eye, sartain— finger, lightning—aim, death. Great warrior, son—No Deerslayer—Hawkeye— Hawkeye—Hawkeye” (Cooper 602). This battlefield christening—what Theweleit calls a “baptism of fire”—offers a fascist logic: “the fascists destroy others to create themselves” (Male 2, 382). Deerslayer does take pains to present this violence as a necessary violence, explaining he killed not because he wanted to but because he had to: “I did’n’t wish your life, red-skin…but you left me no choice atween killing, or being killed. Each party acted according to his gifts, I suppose, and blame can light on neither” (Cooper 603). As Fisher notes, such justification is the settler-colonial logic of the novel, which understands Deerslayer’s “killing as an act brought about by its victim” (Hard, 60). This is ultimately the fascist logic that one of Cooper’s closest readers, Karl May, reproduced in his own novels of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. May read Cooper while in prison for impersonating a policeman, time that he later suggested was actually spent in the United States, gathering the material for his stories (Weaver, 250-1). 444 While he had claimed to be traveling, May’s research took him only to Gabriel Ferry’s Courer de Bois, John Heckwelder’s Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations (1819), which had been Cooper’s source on Indian culture, and Cooper’s Deerslayer and 444 Also see Richard H. Cracroft, The American West of Karl May, (Master Thesis, University of Utah, August, 1963) and “The American West of Karl May,” American Quarterly 19.2: 249-258. 233 Chingachgook, on whom he modeled his famous duo—down to the very focus on describing noses (Weaver 251-2; Rossbacher 77). May’s cowboy novels, beginning with Winnetou (1878), transformed the Anglo Natty Bumpo into the Teutonic Karl, who would violently earn the moniker Old Shatterhand. A consistent refrain in May’s novels is that Shatterhand, despite emigrating from Germany, is more a man of the West than the Westerner, more Indian than the Indian. As one American remarks in shock in Winnetou: “So you are a perfect greenhorn. And yet you talk as if you were the ancestor of all the Indians and had lived here for thousands of years.” 445 Shatterhand’s Germanic essence is also Indian—they are, if not one and the same, then intertwined enough to be indistinguishable. The contemporary German—Old Shatterhand’s adventures occurred in the US West after the Civil War—contained within himself the character of the Native American. This was a central tenet of Indianthusiasm, a fascination that was sparked—per Penny’s contention—by Cooper and then set ablaze by May’s extraordinarily popular novels. In Germany, the dual nature of Deerslayer, as settler and Indian, spoke to a Germany that was negotiating its national identity through the invocation of a primitive tribal nature. Central to cultivating a sense of shared history was Publius Cornelius Tacitus’s Germania, a Roman account of the German tribes, recovered by Johann Gottfried Herder in the eighteenth century (Penny, 31). Though research has shown that the text treated the Germanic tribes as generic barbarians, nineteenth-century German nationalists took its descriptions as insights into the originary character of the German nation. 446 From 445 Karl May, Winnetou: A Novel (New York; The Seabury Press, 1977), 11. 446 Frank Usbeck, Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity and Nazi Ideology in Germany (Berghahn Books, 2015), 60. 234 this Roman text, nationalists extracted an idea of the Germanic tribes as people of nature, courage, strength, truth, independence, and hospitality, though also given to cruelty, gambling, and beserking in war (Usbeck, 59). In short, it figured “Germanic tribesmen” as—to quote Lutz, who first articulated the relationship between the Germanic tribesman and the Native American—“the noble yet bloodthirsty savage” (Lutz, 173). It is the recovery of the Germania that began the tribesman motif in German culture. For example, in 1772 Herder wrote, if not for the Romans, “we Germans would still, like [Native] Americans, live quietly in our forests, or rather still roughly war and be heroes in them” (Penny, 31). Thus, while the figure of the Native American had always been ambivalently appropriated in the United States, due to the necessities to maintain an enmity to justify settler colonialism (Deloria, 4), this was not the case in Germany. The Native American resonated with the conception of the German Volk originating as a people of noble savages, what Frank Usbeck calls “Norsetalgia” for how it not only drew on the Germania but also from the Edda songs, creating a pan-Scandinavian heritage for Germany (Usbeck, 3). Together with the consolidation of the medieval Nibelungenlied’s tale of dragon slaying as a national epic, these texts offered the nation a means of articulating its own unique character—that of the noble savage. Germany was a nation born of tribal impulses: “honesty, unwavering and selfless loyalty, courage, self-restraint and reliability” (Lutz, 174). As Lutz writes, May’s work resonated with a recently unified Germany that was in the midst of inventing its own usable mythic past designed to make the nation’s existence not merely arbitrary and accidental but a biological and necessary (Lutz, 170-1). To play Indian was then to access true Germanic character and become, as Penny writes, “a more complete man” (Penny, 223). While Native Americans became the image 235 of the original German, Deerslayer and his descendant, Old Shatterhand, offered a means for Germans to conceive of their own identity as harboring the primitive within. As Lisa Bartel-Winkler wrote in 1924, “In Winnetou Karl May delineates the Indian drama. It is also the German drama…Who has grasped the meaning of the Indian drama has also grasped the meaning of the German drama” (Weaver, 254). May himself ultimately reveals his own identification with Old Shatterhand in Winnetou IV (1910), when May receives a letter in an envelope for “May. Radebeul. Germany” with a note made out to “Old Shatterhand” inviting him to “Mount Winnetou” (Weaver, 250). And yet, despite May’s pacifism in his real-world politics, he could only become Old Shatterhand through violence—just as is the case with Deerslayer who can only become Hawkeye through war. The fictional Karl earns his name by knocking out an enemy with a single punch: “They should call you Shatterhand since you can knock down a man as tall and as strong as a tree with a single blow” (May, 132). As one cowboy responds to Indians who inquire of Shatterhand, “Is he already a warrior? Has he already made a name for himself?”: He’s a strong warrior among his people…His bullet never misses the target and he is so strong that he can knock down his enemy with a single blow of his fist. That’s the reason why the white men of the West have called him Shatterhand. (May, 119) While Shatterhand does make attempts to avoid violence, it is only through violence that he can become the figure that the reader comes to the text looking for—a legend. Thus by translating the promise of rebirth in young Deerslayer into the transformation of Karl into Old Shatterhand, May’s novels help to underscore both German identification with the Native American and how that identification cultivated a violent mode of masculinity in the period leading up to World War II. For this reason, Klaus Mann pronounced May “the cowboy mentor of the Führer” and named “the Third Reich…Karl 236 May’s ultimate triumph, the ghastly realization of his dreams.” 447 Similarly, Godfried Bomans linked May to the extermination camps, declaring “it smells like gas in Karl May” (Usbeck 31). Usbeck, though, declares such links simplistic, arguing that these “interpretations easily obscure the difference between May’s intentions, the interpretation of his writings, and the deliberate appropriation of his legacy” (Usbeck 31). However, Usbeck elides the fact that May’s novels did fashion future fascists prior to fascism. Usbeck himself notes that the Freikorps had a relationship with Indianthusiasm. He records the use of “Stammesgenossen,” that is “fellow tribesman,” multiple times among the Freikorps (Usbeck, 54 fn 113). Furthermore, Usbeck reflects on Klaus Theweleit’s work as a whole to argue “his emphasis on ancient, primitive drives as new factors in German identity-formation at that time supports the analysis of Indianthusiasm in Germany” (Usbeck, 44). He quotes from Ernst Junger to show how these men conceived of themselves as primitives: “There is still a lot of animal in him…when the sine curve of life swings back to the red line of the primitive, the mask comes off” (Usbeck, 44). For Usbeck, such instances like Junger’s passage “portray German violence as an inherent national trait and also hint at an affinity of these Germans in a furor to similarly warlike Indians of the German imagination” (Usbeck, 44). However, closer inspection of Theweleit’s Male Fantasies reveals a more intimate relationship between the Freikorps and the legacy of Deerslayer and Karl May than Usbeck acknowledges. May appears in Male Fantasies as Theweleit describes the typically adolescent illusion that a single moment can produce a “longed-for redemption,” which will, in turn, reveal “the meaning of life”—such as the hopes attached to a first love. For 447 Klaus Mann, “Karl May: Hitler's Literary Mentor,” The Kenyon Review, vol. 2, no. 4, 1940, 400. 237 Theweleit this maps onto a larger German fantasy of creating “the meaning of life…through a single act” (Male 1, 376)—and thus redeeming oneself and the nation in one fell swoop. Illustrative of this for Theweleit is Franz Schauwecker’s journal entry: We began to daydream about heroic deeds and far-off lands where we were the dragon-killers; about future days of honor and glory; and about women (just a little and always on the sly), whom we steadfastly regarded from a distance as goddesses with burning secrets in the folds of their garments and unnerving smiles—smiles that were sweet and terrifying at the same time. Behind our drawn swords, we all fell in love with one little girl who had a white sash-dress covered with tiny, pink and blue appliquéd flowers, and pigtails that were as thick as arms and reached down to the hollows of her knees. After playing Indians under the pine trees and the junipers by the lake, we would dream about touching this girl’s hand, then shudder, laugh a bit, and stare at her full, red lips…we would never have admitted this; in front of our friends, we laughed out loud about ‘the whole tribe’ of girls. We bent over our Kary [sic] May and buried ourselves in adventures, until such time as we once again ensnared by our big, grown-up goddess with her knowing, frightening, blissful smile…she looked like a lady and was forever unattainable. (Male 1, 376) Schauwecker’s journal thus links May with creating impossible ideals and unattainable desires. For Theweleit, May fits merely within “the youthful dreams of the youth movement’s boyish romanticism” (Male 2, 64). This boyish romanticism, however, has specific, practical consequences. As the Nazi officer Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz remembered, through May he cultivated his violent desires: [In the military], the boyish dreams of our Karl May days became reality: sneaking up on each other, shooting from ambush, surprise attacks and beatings. The silver oakleaves we wore on our collars took the place of feather headdresses. The only thing we couldn't find a practical substitute for was scalping. (Male 2, 64) Where May identified so much with the Deerslayer that he created the German Indian, as old Shatterhand, here Heinz took this one step further. Where May was a pacifist in real life and only violent in his imagination, Heinz took the violence of the imagination and looked for applications in reality—through the Prussian military, as a member of the Freikorps, and ultimately as a member of the Nazi Sturmabteilung. Together, these two 238 readings—Schauwecker’s sense of the potential to redeem life in a single act and with Heinz’s violence—offer a fascist ideal: redemption through violence. This is to say that while it is true that the National Socialist regime did, as Usbeck argues, remotivate May for propaganda purposes, exploiting his popularity to shape Germans into ruthless warriors, May was an important figure in the cultivation of fascist masculinity prior to this appropriation. Indeed, the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps— while it offers a reductive reading—is not altogether wrong to point to the transformational nature of violent action in May’s work as it seeks to fashion the rank-and-file into soldiers. This official journal valorized the independent spirit of May’s world, emphasizing how through their strength, Winnetou and Old Shatterhand molded their morality: In his settings, the law of the jungle prevails, his characters are not subject to any civil code, but solely to the unwritten law of the wilderness. There is no state that intervenes in the plot with its authority, the heroes set out against the villains only out of their own persuasion, and their moral strength eventually gives them the upper hand. (Usbeck, 31) Only strong action, masculine action, suggested the SS, creates morality, appealing to May’s West with its “fixed peculiar laws…an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood” as its authority. Only through obeying “the unwritten law of the wilderness,” that is, violence, could the “heroes” defeat “the villains” and Germany be saved. Thus, while Usbeck’s argumentative line about May’s multivalent significance is true—the novels do indeed contain more than merely Nazi propaganda—history also highlights how these texts did serve to crystallize a fascist desire that did not remain only in the realm of culture. While May’s texts do offer more than the “law of the jungle,” this law was always-already present in his novels of Winnetou as the legacy of the model of Deerslayer. The logic of violent transformation and regeneration through violence was not 239 picked up by every reader. However, nevertheless, it was present, and an element that Der Wildtöter’s reimagining on film as Lederstrumpf 1. Teil would only intensify. Der Wildtöter’s Body Politics When the Lederstrumpf 1. Teil was released in November 1920, the left-leaning Berliner Tageblatt’s review of the film on November 14 registered a deep ambivalence. The Tageblatt was the only periodical to express disappointment with the experience of watching the film. Whereas the periodical Der Film, declared in its review that the film reawakened the yearnings of childhood—“half-forgotten boyish memories are awakened, gaining new life” 448 —the Tageblatt found something missing from the film’s representation of the Deerslayer: “[The screenwriter] Robert Heymann has left little of Cooper’s Indian tale in his film, and what captivated us as children and even today as adults about Leatherstocking’s Deerslayer, his love for his fellow man [Menschenliebe], exists in the frame only in faint colors.” 449 According to the liberal newspaper, the script had left out Deerslayer’s essential and gentle affect—Menschenliebe, philanthropy. However, the review declared that what “gives the film substance, worth, and quality is its acting”—particularly that of Emil Mamelok, who solved the script’s flaws 448 “Halbvergessen Knabenerinnerungen werden geweckt, gewinnen neues Leben. Eines der wenigen populären Bücher, das jetzt erst seine Verfilmung erlebt, obgleich die Naivität seiner Geschehnisse, das Primitive seiner Art durchaus auf Filmeignung hinweist und obgleich ein großes Publikum sicherer Interessent ist.” P.L. „Lederstrumpf I.“ Der Film. 13 November 1920. 32. 449 “Robert Heymann hat von Coopers Indianergeschichte nur wenig in seinem Film gelassen, und das, was uns allen als Kinder und auch heute als Erwachsene noch an den Wildtöter im Lederstrumpf gefesselt hat, die Menschenliebe dieses Mannes, steht nur in schwachen Farben in dem Rahmen des Films.” “Neue Filme.” Berliner Tageblatt, 14 November 1920. 6. 240 with his presence: “where the role gives him too little, he gave to it with his personality.” 450 As Deerslayer, Mamelok captured what the review calls “that which lives of Leatherstocking in the dream of every boy: the frequent coarseness [Derbe] but constant goodness [Gütinge] of this ideal children’s character.” 451 In other words, faced with an insufficient script, Mamelok’s body silently supplemented this lack, providing Deerslayer’s Gütinge and his Derbe: coarseness, toughness, roughness, primitive strength. However, his body could not deliver the Menschenliebe that the script left out. In this section, I analyze Mamelok’s body—a body without love for his fellow man—in relation it to the body politics of the Weimar Republic. I argue that this reimagining of Deerslayer through the body of Mamelok intensified the logic of fascist masculinity that readers had located in the novel by flattening the novel’s representation of and discourse on masculinity. My analysis of the German film is limited by the fact it does not exist as an extant whole. Rather, because Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook (1920) only exists as frames in the later U.S. film, The Deerslayer and Chingachgook (1923), my analysis in this section examines these frames from the extant U.S. versions of the film. After sketching out a general politics of the body and body politic in Weimar Germany, I place Mamelok’s representation in relation with Cooper’s descriptions in The Deerslayer and then with Weimar Germany’s politics of the body (and body politic) to discuss how this film intensified Deerslayer’s fascist masculinity discussed in the previous section. 450 „Das aber, was dem Film Wesenheit, Wert und Note gibt, lebt in der Darstellung. An ihrer Spike steht Emil Mamelok in der Titelrolle. Das, was ihm die Rolle zu wenig gibt, gab er ihr mit seiner Persönlichkeit.“ “Neue Filme.” Berliner Tageblatt, 14 November 1920. 6. 451 „Das, was von dem Lederstrumpf in dem Traum eines jeden Knaben lebt, das oft Derbe, aber immer Gütige dieser idealen Jünglingsfigur, das gab er dem Wildtöter.“ “Neue Filme.” Berliner Tageblatt, 14 November 1920. 6. 241 Annalisa Zox-Weaver writes about the body under fascism: “the body, most specifically the body of the fascist, was scrutinized in many formats, its potent spectacularization making it a ready subject of investigation and rendering its projections and articulations a central image in modernist visuality” (Zox-Weaver, 5). This was also the case in the early years of the Weimar Republic, when national concerns coalesced around bodies. Calls from the Right and Left to reform the social, political, and economic life of Germany after the war often took form through desires to reshape individual bodies as well as the collective body politic that these bodies comprised. 452 As Mosse notes, the stereotype of masculinity, a standard concept of the ideal man, which developed concomitantly with modernity, had come to have an obvious national significance by the nineteen-twenties—and so did the countertype, which represented the nadir of male abjection, all that the nation could not integrate. As if a return to the Renaissance’s Platonism, the “ideal of manly beauty…symbolized virtue” (Image, 5); the image of man spoke to the state of masculinity within the nation—and the state of the nation itself. Theweleit sums up the lingering feeling of World War I veterans as follows: “The Kaiser should have died at the head of his capitulating army” (Male 1 108). The abdication and flight of Kaiser Wilhelm had left the body politic headless. Instead of dying at “the head,” which, at the least, would have left the body politic intact, enabling a new unity through a collective period of mourning, the Kaiser’s abdication dismembers the body politic, demanding a new form of German political life and forcing Germany to confront the contingency of its shape as a nation-state. Yet the nation’s reconstitution as a republic did not resolve this crisis of the body politic for its male citizens. When, on August 21, 1919, Friedrich Ebert was sworn into 452 Erik N. Jensen, Body by Weimar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. 242 office as President of the Weimar Republic, supposedly reviving Germany’s body politic, the near-naked torsos of Ebert and defense minister Gustav Noske that were exposed to the public eye in that week’s Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung belied any new vitality. As Jensen observes of the public response, clad only in swimming trunks, chubby, and middle-aged, they seemed the embodiment of the “nation’s perceived softness” (Jensen, 3). Their bodies articulated degeneration rather than renewal. Likewise, the circulating Dolchstoßlegende, “the legend of the ‘stab in the back,’” a right-wing fiction of the Weimar Republic’s founding, motivated a violent language of the body to describe a sort of unholy birth. This myth preserved the German army’s invincibility—and its masculine honor—by declaring the failure of World War I not to be the failure of military might but rather the invidious success of socialist, Jewish, and women saboteurs who had supposedly poisoned the German body from within. 453 The photographic image in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the mythic image which emerged from this legend, that of women and Jews exuberantly sinking knives into the backs of the soldiers on the front, partook in what Richard McCormick calls “a discourse of castration,” a response to economic and political changes that relocates the phallus of power from the German male to countertyped others: the socialist, the Jew, the woman (McCormick 21). The image of the German nation that developed out of these narratives was ultimately incoherent, finding stable form neither in the person of Ebert, whose softness signified abjection, nor in the zombie spawned by the Dolchstoßlegende, where the corpse continued to march on as the Weimar Republic but with its flesh rotting from poison and the pricks 453 Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and ‘New Objectivity’ (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 21. 243 of the sabateurs. Germany marched on but without muscular integrity, without direction, without the phallus. The Right’s sense of emasculation was even echoed, in part, on the Left as the worker’s movement failed to take power, the revolutionary vitality of its workers unable to unsettle even these soft administrators of the center-left (McCormick 23). Furthermore, women’s suffrage challenged men’s total command of the voting lever while working- women, denigrated as “masculinized” by conservatives, contested male domination in factories (McCormick, 24). By 1927, the ongoing shift in political and economic relations seemed to manifest itself in an androgynous visual culture, where the phallus could not be easily located. As one observer put it: “There appears to be only one ideal type: the thin, sinewy, tall, and boyish body” (Jensen, 135). This blurring of categories was anathema to the Freikorps, as Theweleit’s Male Fantasies emphasizes. Maintaining order and difference was essential to the Freikorps imaginary because, psychically fragmented, they were in constant fear of losing their own borders. “His constant goal,” Theweleit writes of the Freikorps soldier, “is to avoid the experience of fragmentation by fusing himself into a unity in which he remains on top” (MF 2 98). This meant the Freikorps were invested in a rigid social hierarchy to preserve the shape of the body politic. When the Freikorps denounced communism—as a violation of nature—their political imaginary made recourse to the body and gender as immutable facts: “the body’s interior is not external man is not woman” (Male 2, 76). Indeed, where degeneracy was understood as “festering growths,” the nation was an extension of the soldier male body—his “character” (Male 2, 84). The Freikorps shaped the character of Lederstrumpf 1. Teil by taking part in the filming; as they had played “Red Indian” as children, so they played the Indians on camera. 244 “The daring horsemen” whose “sharp attack…made the heart shudder” and prompted Fritz Olimsky to gleefully relate how they advanced upon their enemies—“then down from the horses and with curved scalping knife on the hated mortal enemies!” were actually fierce anti-Bolsheviks of the White Russian Army. “It is also interesting that the Indians, who romped around unbelievably wildly—like daredevils!— on their unsaddled horses, were,” wrote Olimsky, “some German soldiers but mostly Russian officers from the Bermondt Army.” 454 This army, which once had numbered 50,000 men (only 10,000 of whom were White Russians), led by the anti-bolshevist and anti-semite Pavel Bermondt, had captured Riga in 1919 and attempted to establish an anti-communist Germanophile government before its defeat by the English and Latvian armies. Theweleit’s Male Fantasies treats the very men involved in this campaign; he describes how the German soldiers of the Iron Division had joined the war in Latvia with what would be the Nazi promise of the wild East: settlement (MF 2 363). Indeed, when, after the army’s defeat, the Weimar Republic refused to argue for the land rights of these soldiers—soldiers who had, it should be mentioned, overthrown that very government—many of the soldiers defected to Bermondt’s army (MF 2 363). Right-wing circles in Berlin privately paid for the troops to remain. Historians have pointed to this campaign as an essential moment in which the Right was gathering its strength for the Kapp Putsch of 1920 (Lenz, 25). Bermondt would ultimately serve in the National Socialist regime (Kellogg, 78). In this way, the Freikorps logic of the film was literalized by supporting members of the cast. 454 “Interessant ist es auch, daß die Indianer, die unglaublich wild und tollkühn auf ihren ungesattelten Pferden herumtobten, teils Reichswehrsoldaten, großenteils aber russische Offiziere von der Bermondt-Armee waren, die zurzeit noch im Wünsdor interniert sind.” Fritz Olimsky, “Lederstrumpfs Auferstehung.” Berliner Börsenzeitung. 16 Sept 1920, 4. 245 Mamelok’s Deerslayer likewise extends the film’s Freikorps logic by endowing the film with a strong character. Deerslayer evokes a masculine sublime which, transplanted from frontier America, stands as the “enemy of cities”—as Leslie Fiedler calls him—to cloak the castration anxiety of the German Right. 455 He banishes prior film images of anxious and decadent figures like that of the town-bound Cesare, slender and feminine, that haunted The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released earlier that year. In the film, his unrivalled physical presence, that is, his “personality” stands as his “goodness”—which is also his “coarseness.” Indeed, Mamelok’s Deerslayer appears very different than the Deerslayer of Cooper’s novel: in the novel, Deerslayer is defined against Harry March, the other white man, who towers over him. Harry, “a man of gigantic mould” (Cooper, 497), “exceed[ing] six feet four,” exudes animal force, possessing “a noble physique” (498). Cooper writes that he is captivating: “it would not have been easy to find a more noble specimen of vigorous manhood” (498). However, Harry is also captive to his body, “dashing, reckless” and possessed of a “physical restlessness that kept him...constantly on the move” (Cooper, 498)—a man composed of constant action. Where Harry is the “tall pine” (Cooper, 633), Deerslayer is the “sapling” (503). The description of Deerslayer emphasizes that he is “very different...in appearance, as well as in character” (Cooper 498). He is not six feet four but “about six feet in his moccasins” and his frame “comparatively light and slender, showing muscles, however that promised unusual agility, if not unusual strength” (Cooper 498). Physical dominion, power through overwhelming strength, is not the immediate possibility for him that it is for Harry. Rather, 455 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Dell, 1966), 187. 246 the exceptional quality of Deerslayer, the visible aspect that renders his person “remarkable,” is his face, which offers an “expression…of guileless truth…and a sincerity of feeling” (Cooper 498)—the virtues Cooper’s preface finds essential to his character, what the Tageblatt reviewer called Deerslayer’s “philanthropy.” His capacity for honest feeling differentiates him, a mode of feeling that tends not only toward violence, but also toward peaceful relations with others—a mode of feeling encouraged by Deerslayer’s pronounced physical limitations. From this opening description, Deerslayer is set apart as different from Harry, defined not by his tendency toward action against—but rather by feeling for—others. In canonical readings of the novel, this opening comparison signals, as Richard Slotkin writes, “a profound difference in their moral make-up, which is revealed through their subsequent actions in the book.” 456 This comparative description provides a glimpse into the different qualities of Deerslayer and Harry’s inner beings. As R.W.B. Lewis notes, the novel is the story of how Deerslayer becomes “secure in his characteristic virtues: largely by opposition to the habits of the others around him” (Lewis, 105). Most recently, for Leland Person, the physical differences between Deerslayer and Harry undergird the distinct masculinities they perform and propose. In Person’s reading of Deerslayer’s negotiation of nineteenth-century masculinity, Deerslayer is Cooper’s attempt to foreclose on the overly violent figure of Harry, whose manliness is predicated on physical strength and the capacity to dominate. For Person, Cooper is trying to move toward a “kindler, gentler masculinity” whose violence can be assimilated into nineteenth-century American culture, a figure who first tries to coexist 456 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 500. 247 with others. Person believes Cooper’s intention is to humiliate and exile the masculine ideal represented by Harry in order to bequeath the novel to Deerslayer whose courage is “a function of his character” rather than his “body” (Person, 82). However, the film wholly reimagines the novel’s project of comparative masculinities—at least from how Person sees it. Mamelok’s Deerslayer now possesses the muscled body of the masculine primitive, of the soldier male. Theweleit describes this soldier male as “a man whose physique has been machinized, his psyche eliminated—or in part displaced into his body armor, his ‘predatory’ suppleness” (Male 2, 162). As if an oblique illustration of this image, next to this page in Male Fantasies is an image of Joseph Thorak’s “Comradery” (1937), which features two naked, muscled men, clasping hands. The final scene between Deerslayer and Chingachgook prefigures this image. They too clasp hands, their arms taut, and stare off into the distance. Figure 1: Josef Thorak, "Comradery" (1937) 248 Figure 2: Deerslayer and Chingachgook say goodbye with a V-shaped handshake In this film, it is only Deerslayer and Chingachgook, the masculine primitives, who represent the only possibilities of a positive masculinity. Deerslayer stands upright in still after still of the film. Meanwhile, the other figures of masculinity serve as countertypes. "Hurry Harry” March, Tom Hutter, and the Native Americans all skulk close to the ground. Deerslayer’s virtue inheres in his body, a body as straight as the rifle he wields. Where Harry had been an image of a savage masculinity that no longer had a place in American culture, in this film, Harry’s representation has degenerated. Despite the difference in years, Harry and Tom Hutter, dubbed the “falling hemlock” in the novel (Cooper 633), almost look interchangeable in the film. Both are inferior specimens of manhood, whose bearded visages seem attempts to assert the virility that the Deerslayer’s bulk so effortlessly emits. On film, Harry tends toward an anti-Semitic caricature. Noticeably swarthy, long nosed, and carrying his head in front of his neck as if a hunchback, his representation approaches Germany’s Jewish countertype that Mosse describes as characterized by “flat feet,” “waddling gate,” “neckless body” and “swarthy color” (Mosse 64). Considering the frequency with which Jews were portrayed as possessing inordinate desire—particularly 249 for Aryan beauties such as Judith Hutter, born as we later learn from noble stock (Mosse 70)—Harry’s Jew-coded appearance might be the film’s punishment of the character for his excessive desire for Judith. 457 Confirming his degeneracy, Harry is hardly ever presented as an erect human. When we first encounter him in the film, he sits cross-legged, Indian-style, gnawing on a bone, below Deerslayer, who kneels like a chivalric knight and tends the fire. Situated always beneath Deerslayer, Harry’s staging in the film highlights his spiritual and physical inferiority. The filmic images’ conflation of Harry and Deerslayer—two figures that represent Person’s masculine primitive and the supposed attempt to foreclose this type—produces only one singular image of the good among the white men. No longer is there the divided masculinity of Cooper’s work, where muscle is pitted against feeling, action against restraint, virility against justice—what Person calls Deerslayer’s “paradoxes of mid- nineteenth-century masculinity, the contradictions of a gentle manhood founded on violence” (Person, 79). Rather, these contradictions collapse. Deerslayer’s virtue becomes visible in his immense frame as the film’s depiction of masculinity falls into a simple aesthetics: the good-looking is the good; the virile is the manly. Through Mamelok’s image, Deerslayer is remade. His “personality,” his physical presence, reworks Deerslayer into a man of the body, a man of force. The law of the jungle that ran from Cooper through May makes its way back onto the Deerslayer’s filmic body. Consistent with his new body, this filmic Deerslayer betrays a love of fighting, as Mamelok makes visible in the pleasure Deerslayer experiences fighting “Mingos.” When 457 While Person suggests that Harry is Cooper’s analogue to the soldier-male because of his muscular body and predilection toward violence, Harry’s relationship with desire figures him as a countertype to Theweleit’s soldier-male, who lives to fight against his own desiring-production; rather, Harry is unmanned by his desire for women—even fleeing the potential scene of battle after Judith rejects him. 250 Deerslayer sees American Indians in the film, his mouth and eyes reflect the same satisfaction as when he sees his rifle, Killdeer: his eyes widen, he bares his teeth. They are the objects and instrument of killing, which is what Deerslayer lives to do—even if he professes not to love it. When Deerslayer is rescued from burning at the stake by Chingachgook, the sight of his rifle and the prospect of battle result in a rictus of pleasure that threatens to split his face. It is a striking difference from the composure and impassivity that characterizes prior stills of Deerslayer’s visage as he confronts torture. All that command breaks upon seeing his weapon. This is his unique purpose, what his body was made for, his unique pleasure. Theweleit’s characterization of the soldier male’s release in battle could not more aptly describe Deerslayer’s wild grin: “he is out of control and seems permitted to be so” (Male 2, 192). 458 Figure 3: Deerslayer cannot hide his love for his rifle 458 The Weimar authorities did not think Deerslayer was permitted to be “out of control.” In 1920, the German censor removed parts of two battle scenes from the film’s second part, Last of the Mohicans (Der Letzte der Mohikaner), because the film took too great joy in battle and reveled too baldly in the details of gruesome deaths (Zulassungkarte). And, later, in Rhineland, the French occupying force banned the film due to fears that its ferocity might incite anti-French violence (Kessler 39). 251 This promise of release exists in the promotional film poster for Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter. It featured a Deerslayer bound at the stake, arrows, tomahawks, and knives jutting out from it. Deerslayer’s sculptural face is immobile, positioned at a three- quarter turn, refusing to grant his torturers the satisfaction of an interruption of his perfectly composed heroism. Slotkin argues that Deerslayer’s “submission to captivities” is a “way of ameliorating his masculine force as a predator, of domesticating or at least restraining it within the moral bounds set by the feminine symbols of civilized culture” (Regeneration, 502). However, this poster does not contain Deerslayer, but rather promises his release— his release from the still poster on the moving screen. The ropes that double up on themselves to hold Deerslayer are clearly under strain to keep his body, whose size dominates the movie poster, from breaking free. In this image, Deerslayer might be bound, but he is hardly defeated. He is ready to turn on the taunting Indian—the diminutive Huron behind him, who waggling his spear, seems to play on the history of the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab in the back—and the suggestion of teepees behind, which his enormous body already dominates. Deerslayer is bound, but one day, he will emerge to dominate; his body, as well as the fact that it is an advertisement for a motion picture, promises it. He is the soldier-male who waits for the release of battle against his enemies, where he can lose his shackles and “lose [his] boundaries” (Male 2, 204). 252 Figure 4: Promotional poster for Lederstrumpf, Teil 1: Der Wildtöter The depiction of Deerslayer and Indians on this poster highlights the strange doubleness—the overdeterminedness—of the figure of the American Indian for interwar Germany. On the one hand, these Indians represent both German-backed anti-Bolshevists, seeking to colonize the East on the behalf of Germany. On the other, they are also Slavs— who had, at times, also been figured as Indians, the natives from whom the same right- wing figures dreamt of taking the land. In the figure of the white Deerslayer, the European Native (American), under siege from the Indian Other, this poster seems to encapsulate Glenn Penny’s description of the “Nazis’ own vision of themselves as indigenous people under siege,” assuming like Deerslayer “the mantle of both noble savages and noble colonizers against people they managed to cast as both ignoble savages and ignoble colonizers” (Penny, 241). In this situation, however, Deerslayer’s soldier male body promises a simple solution to this ambiguous complexity—a simple solution that brooks no love for his fellow man: regeneration through violence. This drawn poster, still and unmoving, promises its viewer that, in the cinema, the Deerslayer will enter into motion 253 and break free. He will set the land right, eliminating the Indians, and laying claim to the white space behind him—reproducing the attempts of the Freikorps in Latvia and prefiguring the future expansion of the Nazis. A Model Barbarian “That, fellows, is the tale of a MAN. Deerslayer’s was the heart of a real scout” (Wellin, AV). So closes the film Deerslayer and Chingachgook, as a Scoutmaster finishes his retelling of The Deerslayer by emphasizing to his charges assembled around the campfire how Deerslayer’s body is the body of a real scout—and his actions the actions of an ideal man. In 1923, the Mingo Pictures Corporation imported to the United States Lederstrumpf 1. Teil: Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook, combining it with its sequel, Der Letzte Mohikaner, to make The Deerslayer and Chingachgook. Working in collaboration with the Boy Scouts of America, Mingo Pictures reframed Cooper’s novel as a Scouts’ campfire tale and inserted an intertitle that proclaimed the film’s pedagogical aspirations: The literature of this nation presents no other character that possesses, for the youth of the land, the beguiling charm and attraction of Deerslayer; nor is it likely there could be found in the literature of the world a character whom the American youth could better take for their inspiration. (Wellin, YT) This desire to shape boys, what the film calls “that Mighty Band of Tomorrow’s Men,” in the likeness of Deerslayer, is a desire, I argue, to create soldier males to combat the United States’ perceived degeneracy. The film’s narrative returned the fascist masculinity of Male Fantasies, earlier informed by Cooper’s The Deerslayer, to the United States. The Boy Scouts of America was the most prominent of the many organizations in the teens and twenties that sought to restore to white middle-class youth its lost manliness, 254 importing Robert Baden-Powell’s British scheme as a solution to the problem. 459 An organization “dedicated specifically to character building for boys,” as David Macleod explains, the Boy Scouts conceived their duty to their members as according to a standard model, inculcating “strength and virtue of a conventional sort rather than personal distinctiveness”(xiii). Chief Scout Executive James E. West, writing the year of Deerslayer’s release, framed the Scouts’ involvement in film as a means of shaping scouts: “Citizenship training is my hobby, as it is that of every Boy Scout Leader, and I believe the ‘movie’ is potentially at least a great factor in this training.” 460 Some scholars, like Julia Adenay Thomas have suggested that this could represent a fascist “desire to annihilate individuality (despite lauding heroes) [that] turned people into ideal national types’ such as ‘the youth’”—yet that is too broad a claim to make. 461 As Ishay Landa argues, both fascism and liberalism can oscillate between prizing and annihilating individuality. 462 Rather, the question of fascism inheres in the content of the type that the Boy Scouts sought to cultivate with this film. As an organization, the Boy Scouts sought to inculcate their charges in what Theodore Roosevelt, honorary Vice-President of the movement, called “the barbarian virtues ” (Bederman, 101). Roosevelt understood these virtues as necessary to counteract 459 As David Macleod writes the Boy Scouts “virtually exploded onto the American scene, growing from nothing in 1910 to 361,000 boys and 32,000 Scoutmasters by 1919.” Indeed, their ranks counted 432,995 boys in 1922. Even more persuasive of the Scouts’ broad reach is the great percentage of American boys who were involved in the organizing. David Jordan notes that between 1910 and 1930 1 in 6 American boys of eligible age had been involved in the Boy Scouts. David L. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) xi, 54, 32. 460 James E. West, “The Public Should Help Not Sneer”. Exhibitors Trade Review. 6 Jan 1923. 13.6, 291. 461 Julia Adenay Thomas, “Introduction” in Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley, eds.. Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 13. 462 Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 255. 255 the “over-sentimentality” and “over-softness,” which he considered “the great dangers of this age” of civilization (Bederman, 101), and wrote adventure novels modeled on those of Cooper to counteract (Slotkin, Gunfighter, 33). 463 The American founders of the Boy Scouts of America, Daniel Carter Beard and Ernest Thompson Seton, first created their own organizations based on their visions of the “masculine primitive” because they, as Philip J. Deloria notes, understood “Indians and pioneers not simply as historical role models, but as points of entry into a magically transfiguring mimetic play for children” (98). Seton, accusing the nation of having grown “degenerate” because of its “money grubbing, machine politics, degrading sports, cigarettes….false ideals, moral laxity, and lessening church power, in a word ‘City rot’” (Macleod, 32)—founded the Woodcraft Indians in 1902. He hoped that American boys, by acting like Indians, could thus be saved from degeneracy (Macleod, 131); Seton’s boys were to learn to live in harmony with nature and be free to act out their natural drives (Macleod, 131). Meanwhile, Beard, modeling his organization on the pioneer, started his nativist Sons of Daniel Boone in 1905, so that its members could, in his masculinist words, “learn to emulate our great American forebears in lofty aims and iron characters” (Macleod, 133). Seton’s autobiographical introduction to The Boy Scouts of America Handbook illustrates how the figure of Deerslayer, uniting Indian and pioneer, stood at the origin of the Boy Scouts: When he first found Fenimore Cooper's books, he drank them in as one parched might drink at a spring. He reveled in the tales of courage and heroic deeds, he gloated over records of their trailing and scouting by red man and white; he gloried in their woodcraft, and lived it all in imagination, secretly blaming the writer, a little, for praising without describing it so it could be followed. “Some day,” he said, “I shall put it all down for other boys to learn.” 464 463 Yet, Cooper goes unmentioned in Bederman’s account even as his work serves as the cultural ur-text for much of the phenomena she discusses. 464 Ernest Thompson Seton, “A Message From the Chief Scout,” Boy Scouts of America Handbook (Boy Scouts of America. 1911), 1. 256 Transcending mere personal inspiration for Seton, Deerslayer became the trail guide for all future Scouts. The vision that the organization of 1923 offered their charges was one with emphasis less on Deerslayer’s peaceful woodcraft than his wartime scouting—in line with the more jingoistic tendencies of Beard and West’s Boy Scouts in the years surrounding World War I. 465 By 1923, the Boy Scouts of America’s chauvinism and martial tendencies had become constitutive of the organization. Despite an initial attempt on the part of Seton to decouple the organization’s form from its martial British origins and instead to emphasize play and romance, by the film’s release it had been eight years since Seton had been ousted from the movement, declaimed as not sufficiently “A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN” (Deloria 110). The U.S.’s entry into World War I had prompted the Boy Scouts’ embrace of One Hundred Percent Americanism—a credo it shared with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Fascisti (Churchwell, 274); the organization also adopted the motto of Baden-Powell, the British hero of Mafeking who started the “Boy Scouts” movement in England: “Be Prepared.” This motto, as Baden-Powell once told Seton, when the latter asked what the preparation was for: “Frankly, War.” 466 The Boy Scouts of America Handbook also spoke to the Scouts in the vocabulary of war. The contribution of Colonel Roosevelt, as the Handbook dubs him, particularly 465 Beard’s role in this production of new men is somewhat ironic as he illustrated A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where Hank Morgan’s man-factory ultimately produces a “holocaust.” 466 Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 179. At least one prominent Scout supporter urged West to ally the organization with the Ku Klux Klan. West, though declining to affiliate because of concerns about religious tolerance, declared that both organizations did share the value of One Hundred Percent Americanism. Benjamin René Jordan, Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910-1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 110. 257 emphasized the Scouts’ belligerence, deploying military analogy to describe the “practical citizenship” of the Boy Scouts: “The boy scouts must war against the same foes and vices that most hurt the nation.” 467 According to Roosevelt, the movement would abdicate its masculine responsibility to its charges if it did not educate them in violence: “a Boy Scout who is not trained actively and affirmatively that it is his duty to bear arms for the country in time of need is at least negatively trained to be a sissy.” 468 And, indeed, during World War I, Boy Scouts not only started to actively train with firearms, but also were recognized by the federal government as part of the American military apparatus. 469 When in 1923, Dorothy Parker called the Nazis’ first attempt at taking power (the failed Beer Hall Putsch), “Hitler’s little Boy Scout show” (Churchwell, 268), she not only was poking fun at Hitler, but also highlighting the militarism and fascist potential of the Boy Scouts. Indeed, George Fisher offers a clarification of the centrality of war to the organization’s sense of purpose when he declared in 1928, with recruitment numbers lagging: “we must find a moral substitute for war.” 470 While the Boy Scouts, ethically predicated on war, had to find new motivating principles for peacetime, Deerslayer and Chingachgook offered the possibility for the 467 Theodore Roosevelt, “Practical Citizenship,” Boy Scouts of America Handbook (Boy Scouts of America, 1911), 355. 468 Leigh Ann Jones, From Boys to Men, Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity. (Urbana, IL: Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2016), 53. 469 Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 127. The Act of Congress of June 3, 1916 prohibited all non-military personnel from wearing uniforms that could be confused with those on active duty, except for the Boy Scouts, which it specifically exempted. Furthermore, a congressional charter signed that month granted the Boy Scouts of America legal ownership of the term, “Boy Scouts,” and required that all scoutmasters be American citizens. William D. Murray, The History of the Boy Scouts of America (New York: Boy Scouts of America, 1937). 94. 470 Mischa Honeck, Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 60. 258 moral urgency of the war. On screen, it could be as if war never ended. Deerslayer and Chingachgook—edited by George M. Merrick and Max Cohen, who had worked together since 1917, when Cohen produced America is Ready and The Fury of Civilization, films propagandizing for American involvement in World War I—combined the two German films, Der Wildtöter and Der Letzte Mohikaner, into a single work, “Dedicated to and Accepted by the Boy Scouts of America” (“Mingo” 258). 471 While this composite film largely kept to the plot of The Deerslayer, telling of Deerslayer’s wartime initiation into manhood, it accentuates the righteousness of anti-Indian violence and, resituating the novel’s plot within the French-Indian war of The Last of the Mohicans, makes the narrative into one of wartime revenge and redemption for Deerslayer and for the Anglo-American proto-nation state. The film massages the source material to structure the story around personal and national vengeance. As in the novel, Deerslayer and Hurry Harry meet the March family, composed of Hetty, simpleminded but purehearted; Judith, beautiful but of suspect character; and their father, Tom, who harbors a murderous hatred of “Injuns,” as he calls them. The film, unlike the novel, justifies this hatred by explaining that Hutter’s wife was killed by the very Chief Rivenoak whose tribe of “Mingos” currently endangers the settlers. Rivenoak’s presence in the film is then not only an accidental hazard as in the novel—a tale of the Hutter’s floating house being in the wrong place at the wrong time—but a longtime existential threat. As in the novel, Deerslayer has come to the lake to help his best friend, Chingachgook, recover Wah-ta-wah, who was kidnapped by the Hurons, while Harry has come because of desire for Judith. When Tom and Harry get captured making a 471 George N. Shorey, “America is Ready,” Motion Picture News, 10 Mar. 1917.; “Mingo, New Firm, Completes Picture,” Moving Picture World, 20 Jan. 1923, 258.; “New Films,” New York Clipper, April 1917. 259 nighttime journey to scalp the Hurons, Deerslayer kills his first enemy and earns the name Hawkeye. After ransoming Harry and Tom with a trinket found in the Hutter’s home, Deerslayer and Chingachgook rescue Wahtawah only for Deerslayer to be captured by the Hurons. Released for a day’s leave before his execution, Deerslayer returns to the Hutter’s boat house but, when the family comes home to transport Deerslayer back, they are caught unawares by an ambush, when Tom is killed. Tom’s death, in a way, confirms his worldview: the Indians of the film are a terrible menace. Additionally, the film’s second, historical plot, which it borrows from The Last of the Mohicans, further exacerbates this threat to the Anglo-American settlers. In a departure from the source text, as these events transpire on Lake Glimmerglass, the film cuts to the Hurons conquering Fort William. This conquest heightens the stakes of the events occurring on the Lake: no longer a mere skirmish among skirmishes but an important event in a war of pitched battles, the Lake is a site of British redemption in the war against the French-sponsored Indian invaders. The massacre that ends the film becomes an act of revenge—and a redemption not only of the Deerslayer and his companions who were once held captive but of the national loss of Fort William. Even as it deals with Indians, the film adopts a nativist logic along the lines of its promotional ads: “INDIANS—FIGHTS—MASSACRES.” 472 The presence of Indians creates the threat that turns into fights with and then massacres of the Indians. The Indians thus become the immigrants and “our hero, the Deerslayer, an orphaned boy, [who] had been adopted and raised by a tribe of Delaware Indians” along with his companions become the real natives (Wellin AV). Indeed Deerslayer, his whiteness implicit, truly appears here 472 “For the Smart Independent Buyer,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review. 13.24. (New York, Exhibitor’s Trade Review Inc) Lantern, 8. 260 as Lewis’s “American Adam,” a hero “emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched an undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race” (Lewis, 5). The Hurons, the bad Indians, thus trespass into Deerslayer’s Eden. Hunched over figures, they are the images of degeneracy—easily allegorized as the immigrants against whom the Immigration Act of 1924 will target (Higham, 324). The presence of the Indians in the film requires that Deerslayer defend himself and his companions, giving him an opportunity to showcase the two traits that one of the opening intertitles highlights: “his physical courage brought him fame, his moral courage wrapped him in an aura of glory” (Wellin AV). In certain ways, the film then follows David A. Gerstner’s observation in Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early-American Cinema that film of this era promoted “masculine democracy” by “project[ing] an ideal self through the terms of realism” that went beyond “simply that of a mirror reflection of a manly body” but served “in the production of…abstract ideals” (Gerstner 20-1). For Gerstner, these filmic images empowered men across racial and class divides to take part in the political life of the nation. While Deerslayer did function according to this “democratic” aesthetic—it focused its attention wholly on the Scouts. Even the film’s advertising in trade journals is about the Boy Scouts coming to see the film. 473 The specific targeting of this film toward the Scouts tempers a claim like that of Gerstner, meaning that rather that offer a true democratic masculinity Deerslayer can only be said to take part in shaping a limited, Herrenvolk democracy of masculinity; this film is not for Others. 474 473 Mingo Pictures advertises the film to “51,000 Boy Scout Troops” (“For the Smart”). As Al C. Werner wrote in Moving Picture World in 1924: “As this one was dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America, tied up with this organization and did a surprisingly good business during the hottest spell in years.” Al C. Werner, “The Deerslayer.” Moving Picture World. Vol. 70. 20 Sept. 1924, 226. 474 1001 films: A reference book for non-theatrical film users (Chicago: Moving Picture Age, 1920) lists 9 shorts of “Boy Scout Work,” a 2-reel film called “American Heritage” 261 Aligned with this particular vision of a limited polity of masculinity, the film especially dramatizes the threat to white womanhood. The sequence depicting the attack on Fort William and then a subsequent raid on the defeated soldiers and expelled townspeople ends with an Indian grappling with a white woman. As he chases her and raises his weapon, the scene fades to black and cuts to the scout leader reading from the novel—as if the film cannot bear to show what comes next. In a similar vein, when Rivenoak demands that Tom Hutter justify his attempt at murder, standing before his daughter Hetty, who has come to the Indian camp to plead for her father’s life on religious grounds, Hutter can point to his wife’s murder In the novel, Hutter has no moral stature, admitting the “province had bid high for scalps” (Cooper, 676). However, in the film, Hutter at least able to crudely justify his actions: “Your tribe killed this girl’s mother. Ask yourself what brought me here” (Wellin, AV). Indeed, Hetty herself dies “pierced by arrows” (Wellin, AV) as opposed to the “rifle bullet…passed through her body,” which could have been friendly fire, of the novel (Cooper 1008). The Indian thus threatens white futurity—occupying the same position as the immigrant in a tract by Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant. Purity is thus a central preoccupation of the film, which Deerslayer must solve by illustrating his two courages, moral and physical. When the Hurons propose to a captive Deerslayer that he marry one of their women rather than face execution, Deerslayer that functions as filmic Boy Scout handbook, as well as the 4-reel “Knights of the Square table,” a 1917 film named “the best Boy Scout propaganda photoplay that has ever been produced,” which showed “boy gangsters and embryo thieves at war with the police and the boy scouts.” It is a play of integration where the “Wharfrats-Motherless-Knights-Erring-of-the- Square-Table,” a group of lower class white boys defined by their violent resistance, transform into model scouts (1001 films, 32). Though this film offers class integration, it was not until the late twenties when the Boy Scouts literature began to broaden its representation beyond largely middle-class white boys (Honeck, 134). 262 emphatically rejects their proposal. The film’s intertitle literally underscores how violently Deerslayer rejects the proposed marriage, a rejection that braids together his whiteness and masculinity: “I AM A WHITE MAN…I shall marry no Indian!” (Wellin AV). As Mark Rifkin notes, the threat presented in this type of proposal is “a kind of boundarylessness, which cannot be accommodated in/ by the nascent (white) nation.” 475 Leslie Fiedler notes that this proposal in the novel threatens a “loss of freedom” so extreme that it would be “a kind of emasculation” (Fiedler, 211). Indeed, the intensity of Deerslayer’s response is representative of a soldier-male mentality. The film even introduces a moment of temptation that Deerslayer does not face in the novel, which dramatizes how desire threatens to unman. Deerslayer admits to Chingachgook that he is struggling with his desire for Judith. The Delaware places his hands on the dejected Deerslayer’s shoulders and reminds his best friend “be true to your own best nature” and resist the entreaties of Judith, “whose fickle heart, they say, is as the bowstring, stretched by any arm that will” (Wellin AV). In response, Deerslayer leaps up and holds Chingachgook’s hands tightly, in an embrace that is more of a grapple. In this moment where they stare into each other’s eyes, their arms flexed, their jaws set, their masculine comradeship is able to head off the prospect of heterosexual desire. These grappling muscular bodies are built for war not love. To put it another way, Deerslayer’s best nature is not to stretch Judith’s “bowstring” into violence but to pull the trigger of his own rifle. This resistance to the desire for Judith, enabled by Deerslayer’s comrade-in-arms, follows Freikorps logic. Desire threatens Deerslayer’s “best nature,” his masculine—and indeed white—nature. Theweleit writes 475 Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85. 263 that “anti-production”—killing—emerges through “a process that consolidates prevailing prohibitions on the flowing of the stream of desire” (Male 2, 358). As Misha Honeck writes of the Boy Scouts, the organization “offered the means by which boys and men might be ‘clean’ and ‘strong,’ experiencing male power while proclaiming the purity of their intentions” (Honeck, 34). As a model, Deerslayer must, as the Boy Scout’s of America Handbook urges, conserve his “sex fluid.” 476 While “the temptation to wrong habits will be very powerful,” the Handbook warns, “to yield means to sacrifice strength and power and manliness” (Fisher, 233). And it is this warrior nature, this “physical courage,” this anti-production, that the film demonstrates in its final battle scene where the Hurons—rendered an indistinct, faceless swarm—invade the screen. Where the camera captures only the Hurons’ backs, it makes the faces, and thus personhoods, of Deerslayer and Chingachgook visible to the audience. As when the Hurons capture Deerslayer earlier in the film, overcoming him by sheer mass—he succumbs carrying a pack of enemies on his back—this mass, filling the screen, threatens to overcome the audience. Into this alien horde Deerslayer, Chingachgook, and their British allies advance; coming to the audience’s rescue. These figures of order approach the camera, their faces visible and distinguishable, scattering the Hurons before them. And yet, even as they kill their Indian foes, Deerslayer’s courage is linked with that of Chingachgook. These two men appropriate each other’s weapons to the same end: to slay. Where Chingachgook clubs a man with Deerslayer’s rifle, Deerslayer strike down another with Chingachgook’s tomahawk, showcasing “the Freikorps spirit,” which, as one Major said, “could be amply 476 George J. Fisher, “Health and Endurance.” Boy Scouts of America Handbook (Boy Scouts of America. 1911), 233. 264 demonstrated by the butt of a rifle” (Male 2, 282). Their clubbing of “Red Indians” is almost a visual pun on Freikorps officer reports on the violence they committed against socialists: “his men had thrashed the Red’s skull to pieces” (Male 2, 282). The film further intensifies the novel’s violence by filling in its silence about this final massacre. As Philip Fisher writes: “the military massacre that concludes The Deerslayer is left undescribed. It is covered by the sort of narrative ellipsis usually used for sexual moments in the novel” (Fisher, Hard 59). On screen, though, this scene of battle extends over an intertitle that proclaims “Revenge for Fort William!” (Wellin, AV), an orienting term for the soldier male, who exalts in “fascist revenge,” which Theweleit writes, “is vast and expansive; it devastates the earth and annihilates human beings by the millions” (Male 2, 367). The scene ends with nothing left beneath the teepees but a field of immobilized corpses. It is an illustration of the fascist dream of “an empty space,” that “the forces of terror aim to create…an empty square, an empty space.” In these corpses, the viewers see how fascist “desire reaches its destination” (Male 2, 34). This protofascist image, though, is bound up with Deerslayer’s “physical courage.” This courage of Deerslayer, this scene emphasizes, is a masculine primitive courage, which draws from the good Indian’s virility to exterminate the bad “Mingos.” Indeed, while the novel attempts to circumscribe Deerslayer’s violence as a relic of the past, the film recuperates this violence for future use. The novel ends with a century- spanning elegy for Deerslayer and the forgotten characters of the drama, gesturing toward Deerslayer’s ultimate obliteration as an aged Deerslayer returns to the site of his adventures to find only bones at the battlefield, a “picturesque ruin” where the Hutter’s home was, but not the graves of Hetty and Tom—“either the elements had obliterated their traces, or time 265 had caused those who looked for them, to forget their position (Cooper, 1029). The novel still offered a possibility of differentiation in, as Walter Benjamin writes, an engagement with death and a recognition of one’s own aliveness—a situation of specific difference between the life represented within the novel’s pages and that of the experience of the human reading the text. 477 However, as opposed to the novel’s Deerslayer—a figure of irredeemable pastness whose violence is safely foreclosed on—the film ends with a campfire of youths, glowing images of futurity to reproduce Deerslayer. Instead of the sense of ultimate destruction suggested by ruins—“our endings…present in our beginnings,” as William Kelly writes—the filmic Deerslayer’s story continues into the future in the form of “Tomorrow’s men.” 478 At the film’s end, the Scoutmaster proposes that the Scouts “lift a monument of granite rock to his memory.” This task, however, is never represented. The task of monumentalizing was, rather, left to the audience to perform—an audience that the publicity materials emphasize was interchangeable with the boys on screen, who are simply “Troop No. 8 of Elizabeth, NJ”, one of 51,000 Boy Scout Troops. 479 The boys in the audience, future Scouts and future men, were to model themselves on this soldier-male Deerslayer and build the nation as a monument. These boys were to build this monument after watching this film—not with stone but with their bodies. They were to sculpt it 477 In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin argues that the novel’s significance is found “not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 101. 478 William P. Kelly, Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 183. 479 “Dedicated to Boy Scouts,” Los Angeles Times, 22 Jul. 1923, X3, Proquest Historical Newspapers. 266 through their own persons, in their own flesh, in the state of the nation to come, by assuming for themselves the fascist masculinity of Deerslayer. Theweleit describes such a practice as typical of a protofascist mentality: “reality, robbed of its independent life, is shaped anew, kneaded into large, englobing blocks that will serve as the building material for a larger vista, a monumental world of the future” (Male 2, 218). Theweleit sees this monumental world of the future as the “Third Reich” (Male 2, 218). For the Chief Scout Executive West, on the other hand it meant something very different. “Such a beautiful pictorial presentation of our Scouts,” he predicted, “will do a lot of good for our movement” (“Dedicated”). However, in both these futures, the monumentalized world of the Third Reich or of the Boy Scout movement, there are no others to speak of—but only the movement and the nation. The so-called Indians are all dead and gone. Barbaric Futures As a film that knows no historical closure, Deerslayer and Chingachgook (1923) enacts the line that William Carlos Williams will write two years later about Daniel Boone, a line which also serves as the epigraph of Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence: “Far from dead, however, but full of a rich regenerative violence he remains, where his history will be carefully reported, for us who come after him to call upon him.” 480 In the case of Deerslayer and Chingachgook, this is not the consequence of some lingering American mythology but rather the powerful effect of filmic technology—it was ready to be played again and again in cinemas across the nation; “Film was the first to store those mobile doubles that humans,” writes Friedrich Kittler, “were able to (mis)perceive as their 480 William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1925), 130. 267 own body.” 481 Deerslayer and Chingachgook sought to reproduce itself through the bodies of its Boy Scout audience. The Boy Scouts did not ultimately create a phalanx of the Freikorps by “going Deerslayer.” However, the idea of “going Deerslayer,” as an acting out of a certain noble savagery, often dubbed barbarism, did have currency in the United States in the thirties. Fascist appeals to an idea of the masculine primitive did appear in U.S. discourse. The U.S. fascist Lawrence Dennis called on “vigorous barbarians of the new order,” who were living on “the outs,” to “capture the state and the government” in The Coming American Fascism. 482 The avowed fascist sympathizer Bernarr McFadden demanded a national exercise regime to return the nation’s bodies to their masculine primitive prime so that they could continue to exercise dominion over weaker races (Vials, 42). Raymond Gram Swing, worrying about the possibility of fascism in the United States in Forerunners of American Fascism, wrote of fascism as a movement of “the primitive instincts.” 483 Though the United States never became quite the totalizing, administered culture that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer feared and predicted, they did note the recurrence of figures who reproduced Deerslayer’s masculine primitivism in American media. “The celebration of paragons of vitality, from the Blond Beast to the south-sea islanders, culminates ineluctably in the ‘sarong film,’ the advertisements for vitamins and skin cream,” they wrote in 1947, “which are only stand-ins for the immanent goal of publicity: the new, big, beautiful, noble human type—the leaders and their troops” 481 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16. 482 Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), 200. 483 Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York: Julian Messner, 1935), 18. 268 (Dialectic, 194). Adorno and Horkheimer saw film (re)producing “the murderer the killer, the brutalized colossi who are used by the ruling powers, legal and illegal, great and small, as their clandestine enforcers” (Dialectic, 194-5). For Adorno, this phenomenon had its roots in The Deerslayer: “Reading popular novels a hundred years old like those of Cooper,” he writes, “one finds in rudimentary form the whole pattern of Hollywood.” 484 For Adorno, Deerslayer is kitsch—a “structure of invariables” that always stay the same: “nothing in them must change, since the whole mischief is intended to hammer into men that nothing must change” (Minima, 147). Indeed, “Going Deerslayer” could be considered a part of the reaffirmation of the status quo. It is playing out an essentialized role, taking on the type of the noble savage and ascribing to him the characteristics one wants to lay claim to. And yet, it is also taking on the guise of the native, wrongly ascribing the violence of the frontier to him—what Forbes calls “frontier fascism”—and taking that as license to pursue violence in turn. While it thus does affirm preexisting cultural stereotypes, it also served to cultivate a violent mode of masculinity that came to, as the Freikorps show, undergird fascism. 485 484 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 147. 485 Indeed, Hitler’s embrace of the term “barbarian” has been echoed by Steve Bannon. “They refer to me as an uneducated barbarian,” Hitler is supposed to have said, “Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians, it is an honored title to us. We shall rejuvenate the world” (Rauschning 87). More recently, Steve Bannon has employed this same term to describe his American ethnonationalism: “The country was thirsting for change and [Barack] Obama didn’t give them enough. I said, we are going for a nationalist message, we are going to go barbarian, and we will win.” “The Future of Bannonism,” The Economist, 25 Aug. 2017. 269 The Feminine Frontier of Fascism: The Transatlantic Landscapes of S.O.S. Eisberg and The Victory of Faith The Western situates itself characteristically in the desert because the desert seems by its very existence to affirm that life must be seen from the point of view of death…it chooses the desert because its clean, spare lines, lucid spaces, and absence of ornament bring it closer to the abstract austerities of modern architectural design than any other kind of landscape would. The Western deifies nature—the nonhuman—and yet the form of nature it chooses for the site of its worship is the one most resembling man-made space: monumental. —Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (76) The Wonder of the Land “What I saw in Nuremberg belongs among the most impressive experiences that I have ever had.” On September 6, 1933 Leni Riefenstahl described her time filming that year’s Reichsparteitag rally, what would become her later-disavowed film, The Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens). “The endless forest of flags and standards,” she declares, “the pride and the joy that lit up all the faces of the participants filled us over and over again with admiration [Bewunderung].” 486 The interview was featured in publications across National Socialist Germany, from special interest periodicals, like the Licht Bild Bühne, a Berlin film weekly, through general interest newspapers, such as the Hamburger 486 „Das, was ich in Nürnberg sah...gehört zu den eindrucksvollsten Erlebnissen, die ich je erfahren habe...Der unabsehbare Wald der Fahnen und Standarten, die bei den Veranstaltungen zu sehen waren, die reiche Ausschmückung der ganzen Stadt, der Stolz und die Freude aus allen Gesichtern der Teilnehmer wie auch der Nürnberger Bevölkerung leuchteten, erfüllten uns immer wieder mit Bewunderung.“ “Imposante Wochenschauberichte.” Licht Bild Bühne. 6 September 1933. Also see Leni Riefentshal, “Wie der Film zum Reichsparteitag gedreht wurde,” Hamburger Nachrichten, 8 September 1933, 3. 270 Nachrichten. Riefenstahl gushes about how “the indescribable beauty and greatness of the impression made any and all difficulty worthwhile” and how “for [her cameraman Sepp] Allgeier it was the most magnificent experience as he was a passenger in the Führer’s car.” 487 “ Everything was so exciting and magnificent,” pronounces Riefenstahl, “that I could not compare it with anything that I had experienced in my artistic career.” 488 Yet, not a week before publishing parts of this interview in its pages, the Hamburger Nachrichten had carried an account of Riefenstahl’s summer in Greenland, where she had acted in her final film under Arnold Fanck, the Universal Studios-backed S.O.S. Eisberg, and which she describes in similar terms. 489 Naming Greenland “a magnificent experience!” the excerpts from her 1933 autobiography Struggle in Snow and Ice (Kampf in Schnee und Eis) describe another scene of wonder: “How surprised I was there, when I saw the wonder [Wunder] of the North with my own eyes!” 490 “ My first thought at first sight of the virtually indescribable and majestic beauty of Greenland,” she writes, “was that hardly any setting like those that nature had created on our beloved earth 487 „Alle Schwierigkeiten wurden gelohnt durch die Großartigkeit der Eindrücke und der unbeschreiblichen Schönheit alles dessen, was sich dem Auge bot. Für Algeier war es das herrlichste Erlebnis, als er im Wagen des Führers mitfahren und von dort aufnehmen konnte.“ “Imposante Wochenschauberichte,” Licht Bild Bühne, 6 September 1933. 488 "Daß alles war so packend und grandiose, daß ich es mit nichts, was ich in meiner bisherigen künstlerischen Tätigkeit erlebt habe, vergleichen könnte.” “Imposante Wochenschauberichte.” Licht Bild Bühne, 6 September 1933. 489 Though I will usually translate titles and include the original German in parentheses, because of its production history, in which two distinct films were made, with final cuts under two different directors—S.O.S. Eisberg, directed by Arnold Fanck, and S.O.S. Iceberg, directed by Tay Garnett—I will refer to the German version with the German name and the American version with the English title. I used S.O.S. Eisberg, S.O.S. Iceberg (Kino Lorber Home Video DVD)—which contains both films. 490 „Wie überrauscht war ich daher, als ich das Wunder des Nordens mit eigen Augen sah!“ Leni Riefenstahl, “Grönland—ein herrlisches Erlebnis,” Hamburger Nachrichten, 1 September 1933. 271 was so singularly overwhelming as this.” 491 As she further elaborates this feeling in her full autobiography: “the wonder is not something I can explain, as all true wonders are inexpressible. Wretched reason can only guess at it and fails.” 492 Riefenstahl’s rapturous insistence on the unspeakable transcendence of Nuremberg’s Nazi rally and Greenland’s landscape does more than merely exemplify Siegfried Kracauer’s critique of the “mountain film” (Bergfilm), in which “the idolatry of glaciers and rocks was symptomatic of an antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize”; 493 Riefenstahl is doing the capitalizing. As an actress, she was a figure whose success could not be extracted from the “glaciers and rocks” amidst which she starred. As a director, she translated this relationship with the land into the National Socialist aesthetic. Her work served to offer an image of Nazi Germany that made the nation into a natural formation that sought to constitute the Volk analogous to how the mountains and wilderness shaped the men who attempted to climb them. This ground, of course, has all been explored before. Where this chapter charts a new course, however, is that I resituate this vision of fascist nation formation in relation to the landscape of the cinematic American West, realizing the potential for fascism implicit in Manifest Destiny’s imperialist vision. 491 “Der erste Gedanke beim ersten Anblick der geradezu unbeschrieblichen und majestätischen Schönheit Grönlands war daher der, daß kaum eine Szenerie, wie sie die Natur an vielen Stellen unserer geliebten Erde geschaffen hat, so einmalig und überwältigend war, wie diese. Hier war dem Film, das fühlte Ich sogleich mit unbedingter Gewissheit, ein Wirkungsfeld gegeben, das schon rein bildhaft von hinreißender Großartikeit sein mußte.” Hamburger Nachrichten. 1 September 1933. 492 “Ich glaube, dieses Wunder ist nicht zu erklären, da alles wirklich Wundersame unaussprechlich ist. Der armselige Verstsand rät daran herum und versagt.” (Kampf 113) 493 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Ed. Leonardo Quaresima. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004), 112. 272 This chapter makes the case for two continuities that have been underexplored in the scholarship on the mountain film as well as on the formation of German fascism: between S.O.S. Eisberg and Riefenstahl’s National Socialist propaganda films, particularly 1933’s The Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens), and between the American Western and the German mountain film. Where previous accounts of Riefenstahl’s propaganda films have focused on The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht) as the key to Riefenstahl’s later work for the Nazi Regime because it was her first directorial effort, I suggest that we should more closely consider her experiences with S.O.S. Eisberg when examining her later work. 494 While it is after Hitler saw The Blue Light that he famously proposed to Riefenstahl, “once we come to power you must make my films,” she came to the production of S.O.S. Eisberg not only as a director, contemplating her next film, but also in the midst of reading Mein Kampf and reproducing images of Hitler. 495 It was during the filming of S.O.S. Eisberg that she was actively engaged in thinking through the tenets of National Socialism and about how to frame Hitler. Furthermore, a closer look at S.O.S. Eisberg not only reframes Riefenstahl’s future propaganda, but also begins to disrupt the notion—itself rooted in a certain reflexive 494 See Eric Rentschler, “A Founding Myth and a Master Text,” in Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism, Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel, & Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey, eds (New York: Continuum, 2008) and Annalisa Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Chapter 1. 495 Andrew Marton, the director of North Pole Ohoy!, a comedy filmed in Greenland that has since been lost, was a member of the S.O.S. Eisberg expedition. Speaking to Peggy Ann Wallace in the 1970s, he claimed Riefenstahl carried around photographs of Hitler with her wherever she went in Greenland: She had with her several large photographs of Hitler—some 8 x 10 and some two feet by three feet big. She spent all her spare moments, when she wasn't shooting, re-photographing these photographs of Hitler against the icebergs, against the fjords, surrounded by the Greenlanders and against a whale that was being dissected in the back ground. . . . She guarded these negatives and took them back. (Wallace 455) 273 romanticism—that the mountain film is an “ur-German genre,” as Thomas Doherty reaffirms an epithet first articulated by Siegfried Kracauer in 1947. 496 The U.S. production history of S.O.S. Eisberg—a film that Lill-Ann Körber calls “the peak and, simultaneously, the collapse of the German Bergfilm”—works against such cultural narratives of Sonderweg, or exceptionalism, making visible the influence of the American Western on the mountain film from its beginning. 497 Resituating the genre within a dialogic history that spans the Atlantic, this retrospection makes visible how the imperialist ideology of Manifest Destiny, which structures the Western, could shape the fascism with which the mountain film is entangled. The mountain film, I argue, represents a reaction to, an adaptation of, and an intensification of the Western’s imperialist desires. Sharing roots in German-U.S. nineteenth-century traditions of romantic landscape painting, they developed by means of the addition of plots to landscape view films. However, the mountain film is also a reaction to and adaptation of the ubiquity of the U.S. Western in German cinemas after World War I. While both are driven by the desire for new territory, the Western eradicates the visible other while in the mountain film the protagonist must eradicate the other within; the violence of the mountain film takes place off screen. They both offer, as Rey Chow, extending Susan Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” has described the promise of 496 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 294; Kracauer, 110. 497 Lill-Ann Körber,“‘See the Crashing Masses of Death…’: Greenland, Germany, and the Sublime in the ‘Bergfilm’ SOS Eisberg.” Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic. Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstå hl Stenport, eds. (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 150. 274 fascism: “an idealized self-image through a heartfelt surrender to something higher and more beautiful.” 498 This chapter examines how Germany developed its equivalent filmic tradition to the “Film Western” in the “mountain film,” shifting focus from the masculine struggle with the Other to the constructive force of the environment in this production, where nature is conceived as feminine. “Not every piece of land is a landscape,” writes Béla Balázs, Leni Riefenstahl’s screenwriting collaborator on her directorial debut, in The Visual Man (Der sichtbare Mensch). “Landscape is a physiognomy, a face that all at once, at a particular spot, gazes out at us, as if emerging from the chaotic liens of a picture puzzle.” 499 Or, in the words of Richard Slotkin: “an environment, a landscape, a historical sequence is infused with meaning in the form of a story, which converts landscape to symbol and temporal sequence into ‘doom’ a fable of necessary and fated actions” (Fatal, 11). In this chapter, I trace how this racialized and gendered face comes into being, from the mountain films in which Riefenstahl starred to her own propaganda films, subtending the principal of organicity that is critical to the vision of the National Socialist nation. The history that this face discloses is the intertwined history of the mountain film and German fascism. The mountain films celebrated a German relationship with their peaks, “a cult of mountains” that remakes the mountains into an extension and mirror of male German contemplation. 500 They are the site of the contemplation of the sublime as well as sublime contemplation itself. 501 And yet, as Terry Eagleton reminds us in The Ideology of the 498 Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity—Reading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 26. 499 Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, Erica Carter, ed., trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 53. 500 See Steven C. Ascheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 501 See Christian Rapp, Hö henrausch: Der deutsche Bergfilm (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1997). 275 Aesthetic, his book’s cover featuring the image of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Over a Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) (1818), itself a paradigmatic image of this cultural tendency, the aesthetic is “born as a discourse of the body.” 502 The male-coded sublimity of thought is predicated on the abjected female-coded body. The White Hell of Pitz Palu (Die Weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü) (1929), where under the magisterial mountain lies the body of a dead woman—whose presence there is foundational to the mountain’s deadly allure as well as the film’s narrative as a whole—offers itself as an apt allegory for the ideological structures of thought coalescing at that moment in Weimar Germany. As Claudia Koonz describes the National Socialist ideology of gender, “the separation between masculine and feminine spheres, which followed logically and psychologically from Nazi leaders ’misogyny, relegated women to their space—both beneath and beyond the dominant world of men.” 503 In other words, underneath its conception of the Fatherland, undergirding endless rows of soldier males, was an unacknowledged motherland. 504 Riefenstahl’s place behind the camera and her later specious claims to apolitical art are symptomatic of this position. 505 As a woman she was 502 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 13. 503 Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 7. At one of the first sessions of the Nazi party’s leadership committee, they passed a unanimous resolution declaring that a woman could never be accepted into the leadership of the party and into the governing committee. Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 267. 504 National Socialism preached a doctrine of separate spheres in accordance with the organic essentialism of their chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. Curt Rosten’s The ABC of National Socialism exemplifies how, under National Socialism, the woman’s place was the home: “Our opponents sought to bend women to their dark purposes by painting frivolous life in the most glowing colours and portraying the true profession allotted to woman by nature as slavery” (Fest, 268). 505 To this day there remain scholars sympathetic to her argument. For example, Rainer Rother, in his Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius, goes so far as to suggest that Riefenstahl has been ill-treated: 276 not the subject of the camera herself—she was situated outside of the political sphere. And yet, it was the very pretense of the non- or pre-political that lies at the heart of her work as a fascist propagandist, which asserted its representation of the world as natural. Despite fascism’s undergirding misogyny and its rhetoric of male virility, the fascist state, through its insistence on reproducing the soldier male, positioned itself as feminine. There exists a strain of theorizing fascism where, as Alice Kaplan notes, “fascism itself is a woman, a new mother.” 506 As she writes, “we need to realize how dependent the phallic fascist is on mother-nation, mother-machine, mother-war” (Kaplan 11). This is to understand the masses not as controlled by the male dictator, but rather finding solace in fascism, locating in it an “oceanic feeling” (Kaplan, 11). Or, as Andrew Hewitt reads Jakob Johan Bachofen, in proposing his concept of the “fascist feminine,” fascism theorizes itself as a natural, and thus matriarchal society: “the social order would be grounded in something pre-social—in a universal order that nevertheless drew its power from the figure of woman as ultimate mater” (Hewitt, “Fascist” 37). In other words, this idea of a fascist feminine order would be constructed around “the homogeneity of a dominant idea” (Hewitt, “Fascist,” 41). It is this world of a single dominant idea—“singularly overwhelming”— that Riefenstahl’s work as an actress and director makes visible, focusing attention on the natural world as this idea’s source and guarantor. the intensity with which her critics clung and continue to cling to the demonic image of her cannot be explained only by Riefenstahl's strategy of keeping quiet about awkward events and insisting that she bore no personal responsibility. She can, after all, claim never to have been a member of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers—or Nazi—Party), never to have committed a crime and not to have vilified minorities in her films. She acquired her share of the blame through tacit connivance, suppression and not wanting to know—like so many other Germans. Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius (New York: Continuum, 2002), 6. 506 Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10. 277 This chapter makes its case in three sections. It begins by considering S.O.S. Eisberg as the culmination of Riefenstahl and Fanck ’s collaboration on the mountain films, consolidating an identification between Riefenstahl and the land. Contrary to prevailing scholarship that argues for her “disruptive” presence, I highlight how Riefenstahl promised unity. The second section engages the U.S. influence on the production of S.O.S. Eisberg to think through how the mountain film internalizes imperialism. Finally, I conclude this chapter by turning to Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, emphasizing how she used techniques that she became acquainted with through her work on the mountain films. Though always claiming a nonpolitical status, her work gave birth to “politics, that is,” as the eugenicist Otto Freiherr von Verschuer once described it, “giving form to the life of the people.” 507 Trained through the mountain films in which she took part, Riefenstahl thus gave the people the form of the seamless, organic monument of fascism. The Elemental Force of (Feminine) Nature Figure 5: Leni Riefenstahl on cover of a promotional Illustrierter Film Kurier 507 Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Rassenhygiene als Wissenschaft und Staatsaufgabe (Frankfurt, 1936), 6 278 On the cover of a special 1933 promotional issue of the Illustrierter Film Kurier, Leni Riefenstahl stands resolute, taller than the iceberg behind her. Behind her left shoulder there is a polar bear on the top of an iceberg. Below her right hand is a dog stranded on an ice floe. Clad in a fur jacket and wool pants, all in shades of monochromatic blue gray that fade into the ice and water behind her, she seems to emerge out of the arctic itself—as well as soften its hard surfaces. Her face is tilted back, lips parted, eyes raised. She is focused, attentive to something the reader cannot see. While she looks to the horizon, letters stand in front of her and subtly relegate her to the background of the film they advertise: SOS Eisberg. No other actor within this pamphlet is so embedded in the landscape. In the interior pages the collage technique through which they are composed is evident. The images of men almost uniformly depict them in aggressive action against nature—and their tight but evident cropping cannot hope to reproduce the seeming organic totality presented by this monochrome image of Riefenstahl on the ice. The visual rhetoric of this cover establishes Riefenstahl as a natural attraction, along with the icebergs and polar bears, for this film—and, indeed, for the mountain film more generally. Eric Rentschler’s seminal work on the mountain film, “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm” first focused attention on “the female presence” in the mountain film and has largely shaped discourse since. 508 He reads Riefenstahl’s presence as intrusive 508 Erich Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,” New German Critique 51 (1990), 137-160. Work that builds on Rentschler without reexamining the original reception history of S.O.S. Eisberg includes: Nicholas Baer, “Natural History: Rethinking the Bergfilm,” in “Doch ist das Wirkliche auch vergessen, so ist es darum nicht getilgt”: Beiträge zum Werk Siegfried Kracauers, Jörn Ahrens, Paul Fleming, Susanne Martin, and Ulrike Vedder, eds. (Springer, 2017). 279-306; Alexandra Ludewig, Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2011); Nancy Nenno, “Projections on blank space: Landscape, nationality, and identity in 279 in S.O.S. Eisberg as well as in the previous mountain films, ostensibly relying on the reception history to make his case. However, the Berliner Tageblatt review on which his argument turns in framing woman as “the primary disruptive agency” in the mountain film is not actually representative of the reception and promotion the film; in contrast to this reviewer, who writes, “in the midst of a horizontal setting larger than life, this romantic silliness struck one as unbearable kitsch” (“Mountains,” 152)—which Rentschler characterizes as “how the actress Leni Riefenstahl undermines the film’s monumental impact”—Riefenstahl was largely praised for her work in S.O.S. Eisberg. Closer attention to the promotion of and reception of S.O.S. Eisberg recasts and recalibrates Rentschler’s narrative. Rather than “embody a spirit potentially inimical to male images, be they Fanck’s imposing vistas or the inner landscape of his heroes” (“Mountains,” 153), Riefenstahl in S.O.S Eisberg come to represent the ideal complement of the hero, an ideal bound up with Greenland itself. The surge of pro-Nazi tendencies during the pre-Hitler period could not better be confirmed,” writes Kracauer, “than by the increase and specific evolution of the mountain films” (Kracauer, 257). Riefenstahl’s Hella is a case in point; in her, one sees the final evolution of Riefenstahl’s female presence, from a disruptive to an ultimately unifying force, whose identification with the land supports the ideological goals of the National Socialist regime that came to power on January 30, 1933. Beyond the Berliner Tageblatt, the reviews of Riefenstahl’s performance are generally flattering, even as they do note that the film’s nature cinematography is the real star. For example, the Licht Bild Bühne begins its review, emphasizing the complex and colossal nature of the film’s production, “there are three groups of Stars: “one is called the Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg,” The German Quarterly 69, 305–21; and Annalisa Zox- Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (2011). 280 elemental force of nature, the other, technology, and the third, music. Together they produce the expansive painting of ‘SOS Eisberg, ’making the epic as well as the drama whose object are the humans.” 509 It notes that the actors are “of secondary significance: they go modestly behind nature,” characterizing them generally as “dogged, tough, energetic” while criticizing the pilot Ernst Udet for “false nonchalance.” Of all the actors, the review spends the most time on Leni Riefenstahl, who, “as the only woman…has not much to say or do here.” However, it adds, “in her scenes she is impressive.” 510 Meanwhile, the Film Kurier goes further, declaring “the brave Leni Riefenstahl as Hella Lorenz put herself in the thousand dangers of the Arctic, is particularly praiseworthy.” It continues, “you believe this trained Sportslady, who in every moment is the opposite of a star, the faithful, suffering love to her sick, broken scientist husband.” 511 As the Nazi film historian Oskar Kalbus would reflect in 1935, two years later, betraying a casual misogyny in his supposed compliment: “Among these men Leni Riefenstahl fits excellently. Her performance is concise, matter of fact, almost manly.” 512 By S.O.S. Eisberg Riefenstahl has become a natural feature in these masculine mountain films. The plot of S.O.S. Eisberg repeats and culminates the story of Riefenstahl’s 509 “In diesem mit Unterstützung der Dänischen Regierung und unter dem Protektorat Knud Rasmussens gedrehten Universal-Dr. Fanck-Grönland- Expeditions-Film (Paul Kolmer- Produktion)…gibt es drei Star-Gruppen: die eine heißt Urgewalt der Natur, die andere Technik, die dritte Musik. Sie miteinander ergeben das breite Gemälde von “SOS Eisberg,” sie schaffen das Epos ebenso wie das Drama, dessen Objekte die Menschen sind.” mich, “SOS. Eisberg,” Licht Bild Bühne, 31 August 1933. 510 “Als einzige Frau Leni Riefenstahl: sie hat nicht viel zu sagen und zu handeln hier. In ihren Szenen ist sie eindrucksvoll.” (“SOS. Eisberg” Licht Bild Buhne. 31 August 1933. 26, 205. ) 511 “Man glaubt dieser tranierten Sportlady, die in jedem Augenblick das Gegenteil eines Stars ist, die treusorgende Liebe zu ihrem kranken zerbrochen Forschergemahl.” “Film- Kritik: S. O. S. Eisberg.” Film-Kurier. 31 August 1933. 15, 204. 512 “Zu dießen Mannern paßt Leni Riefenstahl ausgezeichnet. Sie ist im Spiel knapp, lachlich, beinahe männlich” Oskar Kalbus, Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst 2. Teil, 1935. 281 previous mountain films—but with a difference: it is set in the arctic. As Riefenstahl writes in her memoir of the filming, “the first time that Dr. Franck [sic] leaves the mountains.” 513 Though the plot is rudimentary—it was so undeveloped that Universal dispatched the screenwriter Tay Garnett to give the project form—it revolves around a search and rescue mission based on Alfred Wegener’s final expedition, which resulted in his death. The Arctic scientist-explorer, Dr. Karl Lorenz, is stranded, believed dead, when his compatriots—Johannes Krafft, Fritz Kummel, John Dragan, and Jan Matushek—receive evidence that he is still alive and set out to rescue him only to also end up similarly marooned on the iceberg where they find him. Using their radio, they send out an S.O.S. call that, transmitted across the world and taking the form of a frontpage newspaper headline, reaches the scientist’s wife, Hella Lorenz (played by Riefenstahl). On learning that her husband remains alive, Hella immediately flies to the North to rescue him, but though she locates the stranded group, her plane crashes upon landing. She too becomes trapped on their iceberg. With the iceberg having begun to calve and break apart, the famous flyer, Ernst Udet, comes to their rescue, securing help from a village of kayak- paddling Inuit. Hella reprises the role that Riefenstahl played across her filmography—indeed Riefenstahl had also been “Hella” in 1930’s Storm over Mont Blanc (Stürme über dem Montblanc). In S.O.S. Eisberg Hella is not supposed to be on the expedition, but she is drawn to it. Like Riefenstahl herself, she is an interloper in a man’s world. In Riefenstahl’s first film, Holy Mountain (1926), Riefenstahl’s Diotima is captivated by the exploration of a mountain climber, asking question after question. When he goes missing, she is the only 513 “Zum erstenmal verläßt Dr. Fanck die Berge.” Leni Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1933), 79. 282 one who dares to hike to the cabin of the alpinists to alert them. Similarly, in The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Riefenstahl’s gaze falls on the Pitz Palü in the same way that the mountain-obsessed alpinist, the so-called “Ghost of the Mountain” sees it. And when her fiancé goes to climb the mountain, she insists that she must accompany him and the “Ghost,” “You have to take me with you.” And, most recently in the mind of moviegoers, Riefenstahl had played a scientist in 1930’s Storm over Mont Blanc, who after noticing that her beloved has not sent his usual message, notifies Ernst Udet to fly there and also ultimately ascends herself to bring succor. When Hella Lorenz is introduced to the audience through a cut from the finger of Krafft tracing out her husband’s journey, one knows that she will embark on her own journey to the North. The question of Hella’s journey is predestined, determined from her first scene. Just as the audience will do, she will follow this route, traced by this finger, to find her man. 514 But also because she is, as she has always been, drawn to this land. As Riefenstahl’s doomed love of Holy Mountain says to her, “You are like nature to me. And that is why I love you so much.” However, as the Licht Bild Bühne review articulated, nature far outshines any other star in S.O.S. Eisberg. The Film-Kurier notes, “Human events are wiped out by the gigantic play of natural force.” 515 In this film, as with all mountain films, the power of the territory is the “Hauptsache,” “the main thing” (Kalbus). As Paiman’s Filmlisten notes, “Nature is dominant here” 516 The Morgenpost’s review is fixated on the splendor of the ice: “This 514 The trope of Riefenstahl as stand-in for the audience has been explored by Nancy Nenno, “Postcards from the edge”: Education to tourism in the German mountain film” in Light motives: German popular film in perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 61-83. 515 “Film-Kritik: S. O. S. Eisberg,” Film-Kurier, 31 August 1933, 15, 204. 516 “S.O.S. Eisberg,” Paimann’s Filmlisten, 20 October 1933. 283 film is a work of culture that opens up to us a world to which our gaze is otherwise obstructed—ghostly and fearsome in its deadly beauty. Ice fields wherever the eyes look.” 517 This expectation is engendered by how Fanck and Riefenstahl emphasize the power of the landscape in the promotional materials to which they contributed. 518 In his memoir about the filming, for example, Fanck emphasizes the sublimity of the landscape. Icebergs resist even the most powerful of modern technology, he discovers: “In Greenland we soon realized that one can make little impact on an iceberg even with dynamite.” 519 As an extract from Arnold Fanck’s memoir in Filmwoche explains, S.O.S Eisberg was a shift from a struggle with “ice and snow” to “ice”: “the ultimate visual and dramatic intensification of this subject of ice, obviously in the ice of the Arctic or Antarctic.” Trying to explain the splendor of this visual, Fanck’s grammatic structure breaks down into a series of verbless phrases: 517 “Dieser Film ist eine Kulturtat, den er erschließt und seine Welt, in die uns der Blick sonst versperrt ist, phantastisch und fürchterlich in inher toten Schönheit. Eisfelder, wohin das Auge schaut.” “SOS Eisberg.” Morgenpost. 1 September 1933 518 The quantity and quality of promotional materials for the film even earned its own publicity in film periodicals: The result is a whole line of documents and brochures, even a book, of great appeal and lasting value, that is not only for the German theater owners but also for the whole circle of anyone who will see the film to receive. It is not promotional material that suggest itself with heavy-handed pushiness but rather traces the experience of the film itself. “Das Ergebnis ist eine ganze Reihe von Schriften und Broschüren, sogar ein Buch, die nicht nur für den deutschen Theaterbesitzer, sondern auch für den großene Kreis derjenigen, die diesen Film zu sehen bekommen werden, von großem Anreiz und von bleibendem Wert ist. Es ist Propagandamaterial, das nicht in plumper Aufdringlichkeit empfiehlt, sondern das den Besuch des Films von selber nach sich zieht.” “Künsterlische Werbung für ‘SOS. Eisberg’”. Licht Bild Bühne. 1 September 1933. 26, 206. 519 Arnold Fanck, S.O.S. Eisberg: Mit Dr. Fanck und Ernst Udet in Grönland (München: Verlag F. Bruckmann, 1933), 42. 284 Not only with ice on peaks, like in the alps—not only here and there a beautiful ice wall, like there, but rather—ice, massive, sparkling ice—entire mountains of crystal-clear ice—and above all, ice in the water—a fully new visual subject. 520 For Fanck Greenland is a culmination of his exploration of “ice and snow.” “On the mountaintop we see only, as it were, in miniature,” he writes, “what Greenland offers in large scale” (Fanck 11). Yet, where Fanck presents Greenland as the heightening of a conceptual theme, Riefenstahl’s discourse emphasizes a more instinctual connection to Greenland in her publicity tour. “She said, with regard to Greenland, that she considered it the most beautiful land in the World,” writes Fritz Olimsky in the Berliner Bӧrsenzeitung. “Nowhere is nature greater and colors more splendid. Even the constant changes in character of the landscape are indescribably great.” 521 Riefenstahl’s discussion of Greenland contrasts it against the city. “No streets, no men.” The Eskimos are, she describes in classically imperialist terms, “like children.” 522 The Eskimos are noble savages in her account: “they do not complain. They know hardly any suffering” (“Grönland”). Riefenstahl frames the North as an Edenic space. She explains in her autobiography that the “Eskimos” are protected by the Danish government against “damaging southern civilization [Zivilisation]” (Kampf, 80). Riefenstahl’s description 520 „Die letzte bildliche und dramatische Steigerung dieses Themas: “Eis”, liegt aber selbstverständlich im Eis der Arktis oder Anti-Arktis…Nicht nur mit EIs überzogene Gipfel, wie in den Alpen—nicht nur hier und da einmal eine schöne Eiswand wie dort, sondern—Eis, massives, funkelndes Eis—ganze Berge aus kristallklarem Eis—und vor allem Eis im Wasser—ein vollig neues bidliches Thema. Arnold Fanck, “Warum ‘S.O.S. Eisberg’?” Filmwoche, 23 August 1933, 34. 521 “Sie erzählte von Grönland, das sie für das schönste Land der Welt hält, nirgends sei die Natur großartiger und nirgends der Farbenzauber prächtiger, schon der ständige Wechsel im Charakter der Landschaft sei unbeschreiblich großartig.” Fritz Olimsky, “Leni Riefenstahl erzählt Filmabenteur,” Berliner Börsenzeitung [undated], Schriftgut Archiv. 522 For a further discussion of colonialist characterizations of the Inuit, see Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 101-104. 285 echoes the eugenic ideology where Greenland’s arctic partook in the Nazi fascination with the racial purity of Norway and its fjords. 523 As she reflects on her experience among the icebergs in Greenland, to be there is to “suddenly see, feel different”: “time, and with it our life, is gifted to us anew” (Kampf, 113). 524 The film emphasizes Riefenstahl’s connection to this land. Fanck’s camerawork makes connections across Riefenstahl’s oeuvre and aligns Riefenstahl with the environment in which her character finds herself trapped. He naturalizes her presence in the Arctic. Indeed, as Hella waits for rescue on the iceberg, she sits at its peak, looking over the ocean. Though there is depth to the shot, revealing the sparkling ice-strewn sea behind her, Riefenstahl is not overwhelmed by her setting. She is the image’s focus. Then, there are several shots of water, of Johannes Krafft swimming in the water, as well as of an unnamed pilot on a sinking boat. In contrast to Riefenstahl, these men are captured with wide shots that reduce them to specks amidst the Arctic’s vast grandeur. But when the camera returns to Riefenstahl, gazing out into the horizon, she is again undwarfed, in focus at the center of shot. Perched on the peak, she is not at war with the landscape, but rather elevated by it. Figure 6: Hella elevated by the Arctic landscape 523 See Despina Stratigakos. Hitler’s Northern Utopia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 524 “Die Zeit, und damit unser eigentliches Leben, wird uns wiedergeschenkt” (Kampf 113) 286 This shot could not help but recall for viewers a similar image from Riefenstahl’s directorial debut, The Blue Light, from the previous year. In that film Riefenstahl embodied Junta, an ostracized mountain girl who has a spiritual connection with the mountain and its blue crystals. She is so identified with the mountain, which she can scale, when all the men who try fall to death, that the villagers believe she is a witch. When, after her beloved learns from her how to scale the mountain and shows the villagers, they mine the blue crystal from the cave at the mountain’s peak. Junta, upon discovering the cave stripped of its blue crystal, is so distraught that she finally falls from the mountain to her death. As Rentschler writes of Riefenstahl’s recurrent character: “her mountain girl was made to measure for soldier males.” In these films, she becomes a figure that reproaches the image of the Zivilisation, of the city, instead, standing as an icon of and for nature and Kultur: the beautiful soul, purity of desire, a self-effacing, purpose-free essence. Her body is yearning and image. In the connotations of the age it becomes a monstrous surface for fascist propaganda, erected against the equality of the sexes, against prostitution in the big cities, against the “degeneration” of the modern woman. (“Founding” 167) Hella Lorenz is not identical to Junta. Junta poses a danger to men that Hella does not; indeed, Hella takes part in the imperial project of imposing man’s will on the landscape that Junta opposes. And yet, they share an affinity with the land. In both these sequences the camera looks to Riefenstahl and then water, and then returns to the contemplative Riefenstahl. This series of shots updates the association between water and femininity from Holy Mountain whose opening scene of her dancing crosscut with the breaking waves, as Eric Rentschler writes, “activates and animates her as an essence whose home is the ocean” 287 (“Mountains,” 154). Yet, while in Holy Mountain Riefenstahl was a figure of the ocean who stared at the mountain, as Junta, she is a figure who stares from the green mountain at the water that falls from the mountain. In The Blue Light the water mingles with the mountain, irrigating the pasture. However, it is in S.O.S. Eisberg that the water takes form as the mountain, crystallizing as ice. Riefenstahl sits on ice and looks at the water. Where Diotima was water, Hella has crystallized as a mountain figure, as ice. 525 Or, as the anti- fascist, if not exactly feminist, writer Carl Zuckmayer proposes in 1942—unknowingly inverting Rentschler’s equivalence between mountain and maiden—Riefenstahl was known in Germany as “the Reich’s glacial crevasse.” 526 S.O.S. Eisberg does take place not only on an iceberg but also in a cave within it. As opposed to the previous mountain films where all of the scenes of the stranded parties on the mountain were shot in exposure, in S.O.S. Eisberg, the stranded party on the iceberg makes a home in an ice cave. This was at the direction of Tay Garnett, the Universal Studios screenwriter and director of the U.S. production, who determined the Greenland scenes did not have enough dialogue. However, the cave’s presence creates for the first time in Fanck’s films a domestic space in the wilderness. It is here that Riefenstahl’s Hella tends to her starving husband, holding his head in her hands. Overwhelming nature not only 525 In the United States, the film’s association of Riefenstahl with the land is made clear by the gendered advertising copy, in which glaciers “mothered”: “See a lone woman trapped on a melting and crumbling iceberg with five desperate men! See the birth of an iceberg – a mountain of ice exploded into the sea – mothered by a gigantic glacier! Icebound! Blizzard-Lashed! Facing Unknown Terrors! Facing Death itself – Not Once, but a Thousand Times – All to bring you this picture! The Screen’s Supreme Adventure!” (“SOS Iceberg.”) 526 Bill Niven, Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 53. 288 threatens but also protects. In other words, the flows have crystallized as a formation of ice: Nazism. 527 Though produced prior to the National Socialists ’assumption of power, the film was bound up with the new government. 528 Reporting on film from Berlin on November 20, 1933, The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the film was a “dramatic example” of the new character of National Socialism’s German cinema. “In the new film,” the newspaper summarized a speech of Joseph Goebbels, “the human hero or heroine will sink into insignificance beside the force of nature or of a popular movement.” 529 Discussing the film alongside official productions of the regime such as “Hitlerjunge Quex,” “Leise flehen meine Lieder,” and, despite its cancelled premiere, “the other great National Socialist film, ‘Horst Wessel,’” S.O.S Eisberg received breathless praise from the newspaper, particularly for its landscapes: “It is significant that the greatest applause was for the photographic brilliance of crashing icebergs or quiet ice floe-drifts in a lonely sea, and not for the human drama.” And yet the review insists, this is not because there was a lack of human drama. Rather, “breath-taking risk, courage of the highest order against odds, were shown time after time.” Indeed, it continues, “one must praise unstintingly the acting,” spotlighting Walter Kimml, the pilot Ernst Udet, and Leni Riefenstahl for accolades. 527 Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s critical film, Hitler: A Film From Germany, engages Nazism’s fascination with ice. 528 The Nazi control of the film industry involved a project of Aryanization. Though the reviews praised the Jewish composer Paul Dessau, by the time of the film’s release, he had emigrated to France (Rother, 46). 529 In Goebbels ’1933 address on November 15, he argued for Nazi art that began from the premise, “everyone is subordinate to the state, from the first to the last,” an art that would be “bearing witness to the vigilant cultural will of young Germany if it is firmly and inextricably rooted in the fertile native soil of the Volk.” Joseph Goebbels, “Speech at the Opening of the Reich Chamber of Culture,” 15 November 1933, Third Reich Sourcebook. Anson Rabinbach, ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 457. 289 As part of a lineage of Fanck’s mountain films, S.O.S. Eisberg could hardly claim to represent a radical break with the pre-Nazi past. Goebbels’s diary entry about the film on September 5, 1933 suggests he does not see it as part of his new cinema: “Film ‘S.O.S. Eisberg. ’Magnificent nature shots. Treatment pallid. Leni Riefenstahl seems terribly conventional. This is not a success for her.” 530 And yet, the film would become part of the regime’s propaganda apparatus; S.O.S. Eisberg, along with Storm over Mont Blanc (Stürme über dem Montblanc) and The Blue Light, would even play at the 1934 Heroes Commemoration Day (Niven, 57). Goebbels’s focus on Riefenstahl rather than Fanck in his diary entry is telling. The integration of the S.O.S. Eisberg into the fascist propaganda apparatus is not only a result of its “anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments,” but also has to do with the specific actions of Riefenstahl. 531 As Goebbels writes in his diary on June 12, 1933 about Riefenstahl, “she is the only one of the stars that understands us.” 532 It had been during the filming of S.O.S. Eisberg that Riefenstahl fully committed to Hitler. 533 Ernst Sorge, a geologist on the film expedition, remembers in his memoir, Riefenstahl erected shrines to Hitler in their camps during their time in Greenland: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was never out of her hands. She studied it with the utmost interest, and openly declared herself fully to agree with its conclusions. She found a visible means of expressing her great admiration for Hitler by hanging up 530 Joseph Goebbels, Oktober 1932-März 1934 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Saur, 2013). 531 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 96. 532 David Culbert, “The New Goebbels Diary Entries (2006) and Leni Riefenstahl,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 27:4, 554. 533 Riefenstahl writes about reading Mein Kampf: “I read it in the train, on the set, by the mountain streams and forest. It made a tremendous impression on me. I became a National Socialist after reading the first page.” Peggy Ann Wallace, An Historical Study of the Career of Leni Riefenstahl from 1923 to 1933, Dissertation Manuscript (University of Southern California, 1975), 414. 290 his picture, framed in sealskin, both in her tent and now in this new habitation. (Sorge 235) Indeed, the initial departure of the film expedition even had to be delayed several days to accommodate Riefenstahl’s first meeting with Hitler (Wallace, 454). Furthermore, S.O.S. Eisberg’s publicity campaign was bound up with Riefenstahl’s work making her first Reichsparteitag-Film, The Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens). Advertisements for and articles about the release of S.O.S. Eisberg alternated with pieces on Riefenstahl’s filming of this new propaganda film in the pages of the Film-Kurier. In the Licht Bild Bühne on 25 August, there was an interview with Riefenstahl about her new official film. She explains that she is going back and forth between Berlin and Nurnberg because the Premiere of S.O.S. Eisberg is in the middle of planning her documentary. 534 Hitler lent her a plane so she could appear at the premiere and return to Nuremberg in as short a time as possible. At the premier in Berlin on August 30, 1933, with the Jewish producer, Paul Kohner, in the audience, Riefenstahl heiled Hitler from the stage (Rother, 45). That Riefenstahl arrived in Hamburg before the expedition and in Berlin for the premiere by Nazi plane is an important element of this history. The Nazis’ use of planes was central to their capacity to conduct rallies across the nation. They spoke of making Germany “air-minded” and rebuilding Germany’s military through air dominance. 535 534 “Leni Riefenstahl übernimmt künstl. Leitung des Reichsparteitag-Films.” Licht Bild Bühne 25 Aug 1933. 26, 200. Similarly, an August 30 announcement of Riefenstahl’s visit to the capital conflates her work as an actress on S.O.S. Eisberg with her directing of the Reichsparteitag Film: “Um 9.45 Uhr wird Leni Riefenstahl, die weibliche Hauptdarstelerin des Films, jetzt durch den Reichsparteitag-Film besonders in den Vordergrund gerückt wie schon gestern in der ‘LBB” berichtet…” “Welturaufführung: Heute ‘SOS-Eisberg’ im Ufa- Palas.’ Licht Bild Bühne, 30 Aug 1933, 26, 204. 535 Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 186. See also Wilfried Wilms, “Regaining Mobility: The Aviator in Weimar Mountain Films. Continuity and Crisis in 291 Fanck’s recruitment of Ernst Udet, a celebrated World War I pilot, for his films contributed to this fascination with the air. As Nancy Nenno writes, the presence of Udet in Fanck’s films offers “a military subtext to the dramas” (“Projections,” 312). S.O.S. Eisberg ends with sublime German machinery triumphing over the landscape. While there are scenes of the Inuit coming to rescue the Lorenzes stranded on the iceberg, in Fanck’s writeup it is with Udet’s arrival that the film ends. It is with Udet’s plane, the arrival of the modern European machine in male control, that all is resolved: There growls again a modern European motor in this eternal silence of the Sea…a man— —a lord over the tamed explosive force— —a great, modern Expert of his sphere— —a warm, feeling man as lord over steel and ice and storm— — —Udet, a comrade comes to his comrades ’aid! 536 This is what Riefenstahl sees on the cover of this Illustrierter Film Kurier—Udet’s plane. The composition of the frame is slightly different in the film, as there is only Riefenstahl and, in the background, a blurry iceberg, their forms mirroring each other. However the pose is identical with the Illustrierter cover. It shows us the moment before she sees Udet and smiles broadly, waving the plane down. If she was once dangerous currents, tidal waves, here Riefenstahl’s Hella, waving down this plane, has become a sort of supportive ice—no longer a source of dangerous flows—but rather an iceberg that carries her man along through treacherous waters. She does not act as a source of division and disruption, as Rentschler argued, but rather unity, German Cinema, 1928-1936,” Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936, ed. Barbara Hales. Mihaela Petrescu and Valerie Weinstein (Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 167- 186. 536 „Da brummt noch einmal ein moderner europäischer Motor in dieses unendliche Schweigen des Meeres. — — Und ein lebendiger Mensch lenkt mit eiserner Ruhe seine in rasendem Tempo über das allesverschlingende Eis hinwegbrausende Maschine, — — ein Mann— — ein Herr über gebändigte Explosionskräfte— — ein großer, moderner Könner aufseinem Gebiet — — ein warm empfindender Mensch als Herr uber Stahl und Eis und Sturm — — — Udet. Ein Kamerad kommt Kameraden zu Hilfe!“ Illustrierter Film Kurier, No. 2003, 15. 1933. 292 letting sky and earth meet, bringing together the modern European machine and the eternal ice—a sort of fascist mother earth. In the sequence of shots that show her waving at Udet from various angles, some on the ground, and some overhead, she becomes a silhouette on the top of the iceberg—her figure becoming an appendage of the landscape as Udet’s plane dances over her, as if embodying Béla Balázs’s idea of the “flirtatious relationship between man and the landscape” (Balázs, Béla, 53). Riefenstahl’s role in S.O.S. Eisberg resolves the conflicts of male and female that plague the earlier mountain films. On this iceberg, she transcends the binary of “summit and valley, height and depth, towering and streaming” (MF 1, 287) that Theweleit identifies in fascist writing and scholars like Nicholas Baer note earlier mountain films exemplify (Baer, 291; Rentschler, “Relocating” 156). She has added no danger to this film. Rather, smiling on celluloid, waving from the iceberg’s peak at this metal bird, she proposes a connection of land and sky, machine and human. She is not at the center of this film’s resolution—she does not bring it about as she does in Storm over Mont Blanc—but she is a welcoming and necessary conduit of it. Nancy Nenno has written “while Fanck’s mountain world is overlaid with a veneer of masculinity, Riefenstahl’s romanticized and mythologized Alpenscape is strongly associated with feminine imagery which Riefenstahl subtly eroticizes” (“Projections,” 316). I would like to suggest that S.O.S. Eisberg disrupts this binary. Similarly, Nenno suggests that “narratives of polar possession are distinctly de-eroticized,” contrasting them against “narratives of the colonization of the American West, which have been characterized as constructing a ‘fantasy of erotic discovery and possession’” (“Projections, 315). As I have shown in this section, S.O.S. Eisberg not only departs from the pattern of previous mountain films but also does not follow the pattern of previous German polar 293 narratives. Through Riefenstahl’s identification with the ice, the film gives to the land the “fantasy” that Nenno claims it lacks. However, this play of associations whereby this erotics is produced did not emerge only out of the German soil but rather through transnational discourse. This eternal ice, this figure of the fascist feminine, took form amidst the cultural flows of the Atlantic. The Manifest Destiny of the Mountain Film “As you probably have read in the news columns,” The New York Times reported in its film roundup on January 24, 1932, “Dr. Fanck has been engaged by Universal to make a mountain climbing film in America.” 537 The Times, though, had reported no such thing. This was the first mention of the film in the newspaper, which did not note until April of that year that this film was not to take place in the United States of America, but rather in Greenland. 538 There were not even to be any mountains, but rather icebergs. However, Trask’s statement, while erroneous, is not false. U.S. expectations informed the film. Riefenstahl was cast at the expressed request of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios. 539 Fanck filmed under the shadow of a previous failed U.S. expedition to make a 537 C. Hooper Trask, "A GRAPHIC WAR FILM STIRS BERLIN: THE BITTER NEW PICTURE IS CALLED "NO MAN'S LAND" AND PRESENTS WAR FROM A UNIQUE ANGLE—OTHER RECENT FILMS," New York Times, Jan 24, 1932, 1. 538 Chapin Hall, "HOLLYWOOD IN REVIEW: HOLLYWOOD IN REVIEW," New York Times, Apr 17, 1932, 2. 539 “No woman had ever been on an arctic expedition.” Arnold Fanck tried to appeal to verisimilitude to convince Laemmle that she was not necessary, he wrote in his 1973 memoir. If a woman were to be included, it would have to be a female pilot, and he would rather have cast the actual famous pilot, Elly Beinhorn. However, Laemmle wanted to reproduce the dynamic that had made The White Hell of Pitz Palu such a success. He insisted on Leni Riefenstahl. She had become, as much as the mountain of the mountain film, a generic feature. And, Fanck, interested in the financing only Universal could provide him for this expedition to Greenland, relented. Arnold Fanck, Er führte Regie mit Gletschern, Stürmen und Lawinen: ein Filmpionier erzählt (München: Nymphenburger 294 Hollywood film in the Arctic. 540 Indeed, the U.S. influence extended to its editing and initial ending. Ultimately, S.O.S. Eisberg’s Greenland became a type of “America” after all. Furthermore, because it is a mountain film that exists without mountains, taking the Arctic as its object, and recording a movement that is not vertical, but rather horizontal, a journey across a map rather than into the heavens, S.O.S Eisberg helps to make the relationship between imperialism and the mountain film visible. I extend the recent work of Lill-Ann Körber, who argues that S.O.S. Eisberg works within a history of “imperialist representations of blank spots on the map—of which the Arctic, with its imagined infinite whiteness, might be the most literal one” (Körber, 150) and Wilfried Wilms, who suggests that the mountain films of the 1930s could function as an inscription of “Lebensraum.” Attending to the U.S. production, promotion, and reception of the film as a way to better understand the German reception in this section, I consider the film through the lens of the Western to show how the film envisions not only an imperial imaginary, but also an “American” one. Verlagshandlung, 1973), 253. There is an unfortunate historical irony that the Jewish Laemmle granted Riefenstahl her one opportunity to work in Hollywood. 540 In his memoir about the filming, Fanck tells how when he was first pitching the idea in Los Angeles, he met a man who had failed in the task. “There was once, to be precise, an American film director, who also wanted to film a film in the Arctic and on Icebergs. He came with a ship of his own and about 1300 men—and returned home with only 22 survivors. And without the ship” (S.O.S. 19). Later, as his expedition explores the icebergs, he writes, “In these days over and over again through my head what would the aforementioned American film director say if he could see how we walked on our icebergs” (S.O.S. 22). “Es war nämlich einmal ein amerikanischer Film-Regisseur, der wollte ebenfalls einen Film in der Arktis und einen Film auf Eisbergen drehen. Er zog aus mit einem eigenen Schiff und etwa 1300 Mann—und kam heim mit 22 Überlebenden. Und ohne Schiff.” (Fanck, S.O.S. 19) “Immer wieder ging es mir in diesen Tagen durch den Kopf, was wohl besagter amerikanischer Regisseur sagen würde, wenn er uns hier zusehen könnte, wie wir auf unseren Eisbergen spazieren gingen” (Fanck, S.O.S 22) 295 From its initial announcement, Fanck’s “climbing film” is framed as a bid for new territory. When the New York Times informed its readers that it was to be shot in Greenland, it called it: “a hitherto unphotographed locale” (Hall). Partaking in the early-twentieth century construction of the Arctic as the “new and perhaps last frontier,” as Shari Huhndorf elegantly describes the location (Huhndorf, 84), the film was framed as extending the vision of its audience to new lands, literally, as the New York Herald Tribune reported in 1932, “an expedition film…with an exploring party;” according the Tribune, S.O.S. Iceberg was part of a trend where “the novelty of the foreign locale, of foreign costumes, of foreign types and viewpoint will be evidenced as never before.” 541 It is itself an exploratory expedition into the viability of exploratory expedition films. This desire to explore, according to Adrian Brunel, the British film director, in a 1932 article for Harper’s Bazaar, is the motor of the adventure film. He explains the genre as emerging to satisfy the desire of the “army of armchair travelers.” 542 The film works alongside “advertisements of the railway, steamship and tourist companies” for “luxury tours offered to almost every uninhabitable part of the globe” (Brunel, 42). Exemplifying how travel films, as Jennifer Lynn Peterson writes, were “inextricably linked to discourses of empire,” Brunel lauds the cinema as “the greatest medium of propaganda” and a “potent incentive to travel and adventure” (Brunel, 42). 543 Brunel declares that he is personally acquainted with “young friends,” who, from being “film fans” became adventurers; “I like 541 “Foreign Locations to be Utilized by Cinema Producers: Universal has Expeditions to Arctic, Tropics and Spain on its Schedule.” New York Herald Tribune, May 15, 1932, 1. 542 Adrian Brunel, “The New Film Heroes are Adventurers, Explore Rs and— Heroes” Harper's Bazaar, vol. 3, no. 6, 1931, 42. 543 Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 2. 296 to think,” Brunel writes, “that their enthusiasm to venture forth was partially inspired by what they saw on the films of other adventurers like Scott and Shackleton” (Brunel 42). Brunel’s article offers a taxonomy of the adventure film. There are four types, he writes. There is the travel picture, which is a nonfiction “expedition through a given territory” as well as the historical travel-adventure, which takes a historical subject, like Sir Walter Raleigh or Christopher Columbus. There is the “impressionistic” or “day-in- the-life-of formula,” of films as various as the city symphony, Berlin, and the ethnography, Nanook of the North (Brunel, 43), and, finally, there is the fictional adventure—typified by the western, but which also includes, he writes, Arnold Fanck’s The White Hell of Pitz Palu and Storm over Mont Blanc. Brunel’s category, “fictional adventure,” is capacious. However, the similarity between mountain film and Western is evident enough that S.O.S. Eisberg could be discussed, as it was in a Variety review, as an atypical Western. Noting Riefenstahl’s limited role in the film, the review reads, “Riefenstahl, the only woman in the film bears the same relationship to the story as the heroine in a standard Western.” 544 Furthermore, the similarity between the mountain film and the Western has been pointed out in scholarship. Anton Kaes, for example, suggests that they occupy parallel places in their national cultures: As the Western is considered to be prototypical American genre film, the mountain film appears in view of the twenties as characteristically German insofar it stands for subjection of the subject to the force of the elements, for the tragic experience of life and the disappearance of politics and history in the face of the greatness of nature and the cosmos. 545 544 “S.O.S. Iceberg,” Variety, 31 December 1932. 545 Anton Kaes, “Film in der Weimarer Republik” “Film in der Weimarer Republik,” Geschichte des deutschen Films, Ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1993) 76. Wie der Western als prototypischer amerikanische Genrefilm gilt, so erschien der Bergfilm in der Sicht der zwanziger Jahre als charakteristisch deutsch, insofern er für die 297 And yet, as Alexandra Ludewig notes, because most scholarship on the mountain film looks forward toward fascism, work on its potential precursors and exploration of this relationship between the mountain film and the western has been largely neglected (Ludewig, 86). Beyond Kaes’s mention, there is Lutz Koepnick’s The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood (2002), which locates thematic similarities between the Western and the mountain film in their explorations of the tension of between humankind and nature, modernity and myth: “Westerns mediated natural shapes and melodramatic story lines, sublime wonders and human conquests…allowed the audience either to create powerful myths of modernity or contest the mythic attractions of modern culture” (Koepnick, 108). 546 More recently, Lars-Olav Beier and Hilmar Schmundt, noting continuities between the film crew of the “mountain films” and the later German Westerns of the sixties, propose that “mountain films” be understood as “vertical Westerns, in which the heroes do not go toward the West, but rather toward the sky.” Arnold Fanck, they write, “tells about difficult attempts to conquer new territory, centimeter by centimeter, through courage and defeat and heroic idealism. 547 Unterwerfung des Subjekts unter die Gewalt der Elemente, für das tragische Lebensgefühl und die Verflüchtigung der Politik und der Geschichte angesichts der Größe der Natur und des Kosmos steht. 546 David Hinton also compares the western and the mountain film in The Films of Leni Riefenstahl. However, he overlooks the existential stakes of the mountain film, suggesting that the Western is about “sheer survival” while the mountain film it is for “for amusement…for creation, or to prove something about themselves” (Hinton 16)— completely overlooking the existential stakes for the men and women involved with scaling the mountains. 547 “Fanck glorifizierte den Berg als den letzten extremen Erfahrungsraum, berauschend schön und ebenso tödlich. Seine Filme waren vertikale Western, deren Helden nicht gen Westen ziehen, sondern gen Himmel. Er erzählte von den zähen Versuchen, Neuland zu erobern, Zentimeter für Zentimeter, von Mut und Niederlage und heroischem Idealismus.” Lars-Olav Beier and Hilmar Schmundt, “Der vertikale Western,” Der Spiegel 2 December, 2007. 298 The motivations of the two genres are similarly a desire for expansion—for territory and experience both within and without the film. They are the descendants of a filmmaking tradition that takes place in the outdoors and is rooted in the realism of their setting—the early landscape, or view film. Positioning the spectator as tourist, these view films provided a continuous view of a scene, as Tom Gunning argues, “placing natural or cultural sites on display, but also miming the act of visual appropriation, the natural and cultural consumed as sights.” 548 Beginning with a static camera, eventually, this type of film came to be shot through a moving vehicle. This “phantom ride” genre allowed the consumer to take in, and extend his power, over more of the landscape. Fanck’s famous plane sequences in Storm over Mont Blanc, White Hell of the Pitz Palu, and also in S.O.S. Eisberg reemploy this originary filmic device. Indeed, as Udet searches for Riefenstahl in S.O.S. Eisberg, there are moments where the camera films from the plane ’s wings or captures the landscape and horizon from the plane’s undercarriage to look at the ice dotted sea. As Fatimah Tobing Rony writes, “within the context of imperialism and entrepreneurial prospecting, panoramic views condition viewers to see other lands precisely as places to be explored and inhabited by Europeans.” 549 The Western developed first. Beginning with internationally-feted panoramic films shot by Harry Buckwalter in 1902 and 1903, what became the Western was originally view films shot in the Rocky Mountains, as an advertisement for the land around Denver, Colorado. Andrew Brodie Smith’s Shooting Cowboys and Indians discusses how the American Western develops out of landscape films that were financed by railroad 548 Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the 'View' Aesthetic” The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism. Ed. Jonathan Kahana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 26. 549 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The third eye: Race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 82. 299 companies, produced to advertise Colorado to tourists and migrants. 550 These early films, produced by William N. Selig and directed by Harry Buckwalter, often shot from the railroad, exemplified a tension between glorifying the othered natural world and also underscoring the possibility to develop them. Even as they added robbery plots, Buckwalter insisted that, these nascent Westerns were a “vehicle to get attention paid to the scenic surroundings” (Smith, 22). Even after Buckwalter stopped directing for Selig Polyscope, because of his aversion to the violence that was to become standard western fare, specific and new landscapes for each film remained a key generic feature, a way to differentiate itself from thematically-similar films shot on the East Coast or in Europe (Smith, 31). As one critic wrote in Photoplay Magazine in 1913: Out in the broad West, where nature has provided thousands and thousands of acres of natural scenery, with the ever blowing breeze to inspire life to the scene, is the place to produce the realistic pictures, under God’s broad canopy, where there are no flaws in the background, foreground or balance. 551 Where once it was land for homesteads, it is now land for filming that is available. Or, in other words, as Nanna Verhoeff writes: “the wilderness…is vanishing as it is visually opened up. The look is one of a virtual reservation: looking replaces being” (Verhoeff, 309). Meanwhile, a decade and a half later, Fanck’s early films emerged from this desire to explore new territory, navigating in a cinematic world shaped by the western. His earliest film effort shows its interests, its title including the camera as simply another tool in the adventure of mountaineering: First Ascent of Monte Rosa with Film Camera and Skis 550 Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (University Press of Colorado: 2004), 14. 551 Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 188. 300 (Erste Besteigung des Monte Rosa mit Filmkamera und Skiern) (1913). 552 Indeed, as David Hinton notes, Fanck’s initial interest was in the land rather than the film; he bragged that he had filmed his first film before he had seen one (Hinton 1). However, as Fanck devoted himself to filmmaking after World War I, adopting more sophisticated modes of filming and editing in The Miracle of Skiing (Das Wunder der Schneeschuhs) (1920) and The Struggle with the Mountain (Im Kampf mit dem Berge) (1921), before shooting his first fictional film with The Mountain of Destiny (Der Berg des Schicksals) (1924), he was confronted by the predominance of American westerns at the Berlin theaters he attended regularly. 553 A 1933 New York Times article on the “advance of the photoplay,” offers a short history of cinema. It characterizes the period when Fanck is becoming a filmmaker as follows: Indians and horse thieves trail across the screen with the ranch king’s beauteous daughter in their fiendish power. They lash her to the blasted pine, they heat the branding iron. They little know that noblehearted cowmen heroes are dashing down the gulch at a break-neck gallop—only three miles, two miles, a half-mile away. But we know, out in front, and our cheers loosen the ceiling. The Westerns have arrived. The intelligentsia of Europe call the flood of fiction of which they are born ‘the only distinctive American contribution to literature. ’With their hard-riding he-men, their great open spaces and their last-minute rescues, they dominate the photoplay for ten years. 554 552 Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 248. 553 David Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl. 3 rd Ed (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2000), 1. Richard Abel notes in Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914 that while the Western was wildly popular in Europe in the teens, it suffers a dip in popularity right before World War I (Abel 122). However, it does return as a popular genre in the twenties. 554 L.H. Robbins, “THE MAGICAL PAGEANT OF THE FILMS: ONE MAY FOLLOW IN AN EXHIBITION AT THE PUBLIC LIBRARY THE FANTASTIC PROGRESS OF THE CINEMA SINCE THE FIRST DRAMA FLICKERED FOR A NICKEL THIRTY YEARS AGO MAGICAL MARCH OF THE FILMS THEIR FANTASTIC PROGRESS SINCE THE FIRST PLAY." New York Times, May 07, 1933, 2. 301 As this article notes, the American western flooded foreign cinemas. Not only did approximately 30% of all dramatic films in the German market come from the U.S., but also Westerns were heavily represented therein (Thompson 37). Deniz Gökturk writes of how the censorship records detail widespread circulation of the episodic Broncho Billy films as well as two-reelers of D.W. Griffith before World War I (Gökturk, 96). Siegfried Kracauer writes of how in Weimar Germany “Americanism…seems to advance like a natural force.” 555 In 1924 the German film director Fritz Lang praised Fanck as an antidote to the “naï ve sensational films, such as American Wild West films, [which] show us contemporary people in a fairy-tale-like primitivism of sensibility,” of course overlooking that Fanck himself was often accused of the same tendency. 556 In the face of the exportation of the American West, German mountains became a way of nationalizing Germany’s cinema—what Jennifer Lynn Peterson has called a “scenic nationalism” (Peterson, 239). While German films did create a “wild Ost,” the wild east, where the German film industry began to produce their own westerns (Goktürk, 98), it also sought landscapes that could serve as metonyms for Germany as the West did for the United States. Both, as productions of German cinema, reaffirmed German nationalism. With UFA’s 1918 nonfiction film, Alpen, the German film industry translated onto celluloid the image of the Alps which, from the late-eighteenth century, when Carl Hackett engraved coppers in their image, had stood as a recognizable and reproducible visual icon of German identity (Nenno, “Projections,” 310). 557 Within Germany the “Hochwelt” 555 Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 42. 556 Fritz Lang, “Kitsch—Sensation—Culture and Film,” The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933, Eds. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan. trans. Alex H. Bush (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 212. 557 See also Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism 1933-1945 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995), 130. 302 fascinated. As a 1924 review of the second The Miracle of Skiing (1924) in Die Meraner Zeitung revels in the film’s imagery of the “world on high,” a breathless rush of nouns: “mountains, snow, sun, snow, mountains — — peaks, valleys, ravines, ice-covered brook, snow-powdered trees and bushes.” 558 And, indeed, in the United States it had its allure too. For example, a Washington Post review of The White Hell of Pitz Palu, framing the film as “primarily a travelogue of the Swiss alps,” is struck by their force: “against the towering snow-capped Alpine peaks, dotted with infinitesimal man endeavoring to pit his feeble strength against the titanic forces of nature, a tense human drama is here unfolded.” 559 Yet, even as they set their sights on exploring a unique national wilderness, these national spaces of exploration had already come into being transatlantically. After all, to paraphrase W.J.T. Mitchell, landscape is not given, but a process. 560 The West, as Edward Buscombe notes in an article that argues for how the paintings of Frederic Remington prefigured the cinematic western, was “a nineteenth-century invention;” cheap reproductions of these images carried this idea of the West nationally and internationally. 561 And Sabine Wilke has written about the influence of Caspar David Friedrich on artists such as Albert Bierstadt, whose images of the West framed the way early films represented it. As Wilke writes, “the New World seen through painterly eyes trained in the scopic regimes 558 “Berge, Schnee, Sonne, Schnee, Berge — — Gipfel, Täler, Schluchten, Bäche unter EIsdecken, welchgepuderte Bäume und Büsche.” “Das Wunder der Schneeschuhs,” Meraner Zeitung, 29 Jan 1924, 4. 559 W.A. Whitney, “Rialto: ‘White Hell of Pitz Palu,” Washington Post, May 26, 1930, 16. 560 W.J.T. Michell, “Introduction, Landscape and Power. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1. 561 Edward Buscombe, “Painting the Legend: Frederic Remington and the Western,” Cinema Journal , Vol. 23, No. 4, 1984, 25. 303 of the Old World results in a bird’s-eye view of a theatrical stage… a sublime drama of hyperbolic visual excess and panoramic and telescopic detail.” 562 Or, to put it differently, it creates an exciting filmic landscape. However, it was not only the scopic regime, but also the very practices by which these wildernesses that were maintained, that were the subject of transnational discourse. Though there remained significant differences in their practices, nature conservationists from each country looked across the Atlantic to contemplate the substance of nature and how to preserve it. 563 In certain ways, one could say that Germany looked to America for its views, while America looked to Germany for technique. However, it was not a strict exchange of precise elements, but an ongoing and dynamic circulation of notions. This is all to say that there was no unmediated, purely national vision of the landscape at any time in the nineteenth century for these new cinematic traditions to reproduce. They were always promiscuous in influence and hybrid in heritage. Furthermore, it must be added, S.O.S. Eisberg does take part in a tradition even more localizable than the Western—that of the U.S. Northern, which was a Selig Polyscope microgenre of the teens, mostly set in Alaska and shot in California, that sought to reiterate the Western but with a difference—dogsleds replaced horses, and the Inuit replaced the Native Americans of the Southwest. 564 Indeed, most recently prior to S.O.S. Eisberg’s production, there had been a 1923 John Ford-directed film starring the famous cowboy 562 Sabine Wilke, “How German is the American West?: The Legacy of Caspar David Friedrich’s Visual Poetics in American Landscape Painting,” Observation Points: The Visual Poetics of National Parks, ed. Thomas Patin (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 117. 563 Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 184. 564 Russell Potter, “Facts and Fiction in ‘Northerns’ and Early ‘Arctic’ Films,” Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic, Ed. Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstå hl Stenport (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 126. 304 Tom Mix, North of Hudson Bay, which The Los Angeles Times called “a drama of the frozen wastes….packed with spinal chills.” 565 Although the film was set in Canada, it was actually shot in Yosemite during winter (“Drama”). In S.O.S. Eisberg the American West can be said to meet the German Alps; the high desert weds the ice in the middle of the Atlantic and produces the Eiswüste, the ice desert, the frozen wastes where Riefenstahl is at home. The U.S. response to these images of Greenland even echoes contemporary ideas of how the first settlers must have seen the Americas. Where F. Scott Fitzgerald had written in 1925 ”man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent….face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to this capacity for wonder” (Great, 116), so Edwin Schallert describes the film in the Los Angeles Times as a “spectacle filled with magnificence, awe and glacial wonders—the final fulfillment of a long, difficult expedition to Greenland.” 566 The Washington Post is rapturous in its September 30, 1933 review: “there can be no overstatement of the visual wonder of ‘S.O.S. Icebergs. '[sic] Its pictorial glories are unprecedented…its suggestion of the marvels and the terror of a continent of ice is overpowering and its footages authentic to the last inch.” 567 However, the move from the mountains to the ice fields caused, seemingly, some confusion in Germany. Because there was no single ascent, the film’s impetus was opaque to some German reviewers. The motivation up was seemingly self-evident in Germany, but the motivation out or across felt muddled. As the Licht Bild Bühne declared, “Dr. Fanck 565 “Drama of Frozen Wastes is Packed With Spinal Chills: North of Hudson Bay,” Los Angeles Times, 24 October 1923, WF3. 566 Edwin Schallert, “Feud Flames Up Between Maurice and Jeanette; News and Gossip of,” Los Angeles Times, Sep 18, 1933, A8. 567 “Rialto Opens with a Film of Great Beauty,” Washington Post, September 30, 1933, 11. 305 has made here a cardinal mistake, which in a mountain and glacier film would have been directly addressed (because there the men are more subjective [sic]: they all want to ascend the peak, they all dream of mountain climbing glory).” 568 However, as Riefenstahl’s Hella murmurs in her first scene, when Johannes Krafft asks her what could possibly have possessed Karl to head off alone—her husband’s “dream”: “Karajek.” The rationale for the film could have been put forth by the film’s inspiration, Alfred Wegener, in the American Press. Wegener, the arctic explorer on whom Karl Lorenz was modelled, had provided his rationale for exploration as part of Universal’s promotion of the previous mountain film it distributed, 1929’s The White Hell of Pitz-Palu. 569 In a 1929 article in Universal Weekly, the official publicity organ for the studio, Wegener explains his ambitions in words whose ecstasy recalls that of Klaus Theweleit’s Freikorps in contemplating combat. Wegener’s purpose, to extend man’s power over the landscape, his dominion over the world, can only be called imperial, partaking in what Mary Louise Pratt terms a “planetary consciousness” 570 : It is one goal and one alone…that pulls us into the frozen wastes: the joy of battling with the white death. Vast expanses of earth are still closed to mankind by barriers of ice and snow. It is our mission to open these tracts and conquer the forces of nature, bending them to our will. 571 568 “Dr Fanck hat da einen Kardinalfehler gemacht, der in einem Berg- und Gletscher angegangen wäre (weil da die Menschen subjektiver sind: sie alle wollen die Gipfel ersteigen, sie alle träumen vom Bergsteigerruhm)” „SOS. Eisberg” Licht Bild Buhne. 31 August 1933. 26, 205. 569 In the American version of the film, the opening scene, set within the “Institute for Arctic Research,” involves two old men gazing longingly at portraits of explorers— “Wilkins, Rasmussen, Wegener”—with the camera lingering on Wegener’s representation. 570 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 2007), 16. 571 “Amazing Thrill Picture to Be Shown by Universal,” Universal Weekly, 19 April 1930, 31:11, 8. 306 Lorenz’s dream of the landscape, of a single glacier he seeks to reach, spoken demurely by Riefenstahl, as if a spiritual calling, in Wegener reveals its ravenous appetite. The film, as a journey “into the frozen wastes” seeks to “open these tracts” and, implementing man’s will, extend man’s vision. In the Western, this desire to open tracts always involves the struggle with the Other. For example, in John Ford’s 1924 epic, The Iron Horse, a film which, depicting the construction of the transatlantic railroad, exemplifies Patricia Limerick’s argument that “conquest was a literal territorial form of economic growth,” initially sets itself up to be about a conflict with the land itself. 572 An early scene shows the protagonist, Davey Brandon, a “dreamer” of the transcontinental railroad, and his father riding off west, small figures in a snowy expanse, the difference in their respective sizes already suggesting a narrative tension. As a young Abraham Lincoln watches them ride off, the intertitle reads: “he feels the momentum of a great nation pushing westward—he sees the inevitable.” However, the next intertitle declares “And others see—but face it in defiance,” before showing the Comanches who are to be the film’s antagonists. Indeed, this dynamic is played out in miniature when Davey’s father has him look at a picturesque Western scene, a canyon that needs to be bridged. “Look, lad! Some day there’ll be a railroad through that pass—it’s two hundred miles shorter than the Indian trail.” However, no sooner does the audience begin to contemplate the work involved in this, than do the Comanche kill (and scalp) the father. To move west, and realize the American dream of manifest destiny, America must vanquish and vanish the Native American. 572 Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988) 28. 307 In S.O.S. Eisberg the Other is internalized. It becomes a question of man surviving within nature and with his nature. The educated German scientist, Johannes Krafft, must reconnect with his aboriginal nature to swim through the ice cold water to reach the Inuit village whose inhabitants can save the stranded party. The film draws out this difference in its climax, what Edwin Schaller of the Los Angeles Times calls—referencing a sequence that was the same in the initial U.S. and German versions—a “sensational finish, fashioned after the old and reliable Griffith style of the race to the rescue” (Schallert, A8). “It portrays a lone swimmer’s struggle,” writes Edwin Schallert in the Los Angeles Times, “through icy waters to secure aid for an explorers ’party marooned on an iceberg” (Schallert, A8). However, compared to Griffith’s ride to the rescue in Birth of a Nation, the threat against which Krafft and the Eskimo rally is not of the racial Other, but of the natural world. Nature occupies the structural position of the racialized Other—who was always-already excluded from the frame of this film. 573 The mountain film represents thus both an extension of the logic of the western’s staging of a conflict in the wilderness and also a path that the western does not take. The relationship between westerner and nature is almost always mediated in the Western by the figure of the Indian. In the mountain film, the violence is internalized. Nature might pose an external threat, but it serves to activate the resources of the mountain climber, of the adventurer, of the explorer. Nature is a harsh and demanding mother. 573 As Kracauer suggests as much when he describes the alpinists’ scorn for those who did not ascend mountains. They do not deserve to be represented on screen: “Full of Promethean promptings, they would climb some dangerous ‘chimney’, then quietly smoke their pipes on the summit and with infinite pride look down on what they called ‘valley pigs’— those plebeian crowds who never made an effort to elevate themselves to lofty heights” (Kracauer, 111). 308 In highlighting how mountains figure as “the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self” (Sontag 77), Sontag points toward the subjection involved in these films. Richard Dyer writes of how the mountain film takes part in an association of Aryan identity with the mountains, as emerging out of the cold. 574 It is an ancestral and atavistic space in which these characters find themselves—and they must become worthy to survive in it. Though the struggle takes place within nature, madness is the repeated threat in the mountain films—an uncontained reversion to atavistic nature. It is on the mountain where The Friend lashes out at Vigo in Holy Mountain when he learns his friend is also in love with his fiancé. Meanwhile, in The White Hell of Pitz Palu, the young Hans, the fiancé of Riefenstahl’s Maria, who suffered a fall during the ascent, must be tied up to prevent him from leaping to his death. In S.O.S. Eisberg, Draga lets one companion be killed by a bear and fights the other because he has lost his mind to the arctic expanse. It is no accident that Draga is the member of the expedition who is coded as foreign. He is the financier, his German accented and staccato. He is not fit to survive the climate. He possesses neither the German character nor the doctoral degree of the others. The mountains are, as Eric Rentschler notes, also a reflection of the mental state of the film’s protagonists (“Founding Myth” 158). Martin Heidegger’s “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” is often cited to convey a sense of the male German alpine imagination—“that simple, rough existence up there.” 575 And yet, while Heidegger writes of “the gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees” in his argument for why he 574 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 21. 575 Martin Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago, IL: Precedent Publishing, 1981), 29. 309 resigned the Freiburg rectorate and retreated to the Black Forest, there is a way in which his mountain retreat also operates as a womb space with a strange amniotic fluid: “all of this moves and flows through and penetrates daily existence up here” (Heidegger, 27). He is enclosed in these mountains, “projecting our whole existence out into the vast nearness of the presence [Wesen] of all things” (Heidegger, 28). Central to his experience of the provinces are his visits by an old woman, who “approaching death,” speaks with him and passes on knowledge “lost to the spoken language” (Heidegger, 29). Calling upon Nazi Germany to listen to this life—“only then will it speak to us once more” (29)—he urges a return to something beyond language, the messages of the “mountains and forests and the farmlands” (29). Heidegger demands a return to the ancestral landscape—to the mother earth of the fatherland. In this space, where the mountaineer is pervaded by the mountain, indigeneity is also recast. In Holy Mountain and White Hell of Pitz Palu, the veteran mountain climber makes the choice to die. (A previous mountain dweller, Hella’s father, also dies in Storm over Mont Blanc. However, in this case, it is an accident). In Holy Mountain, both The Friend, whose realm is the mountains, and Vigo die. However, in The White Hell of Pitz Palu, the mountain native dies so that the younger generation might live. The death of the mountaineer on the mountain, the explorer on the journey, becomes foundational, a relocation and reactivation of the idea of the vanishing American and of the founding father. The final scenes of the original version of S.O.S. Eisberg end with such a monumentalization of the dead. Its Berlin premiere ended, the censor card reads, with a scene no longer in the German film: “49. On Deck, Hella, Lorenz and Krafft. 50. They look into the distance and behold on the rocky coastline ghostly shadows of Kummel, Draga 310 and Matushek. 41. Hella, Lorenz and Krafft look at them, shocked.” 576 The film ends with a memory of the dead, and, in the extant American version of this scene, a recitation of their names “Kummel, Matushek, Draga,” and the incantation, “Wherever they are, I hope they know that they have not died in vain.” Their deaths have been in the name of the spectacular and the spectacle—for the dream of Karajek, the dream of Arctic exploration. And yet, the way these “ghostly” images of the fallen men are superimposed, they take on a corporeality. Even as their spiritual bodies fade into the rock, they stand tall and upright. Though there is an evident opacity to their bodies, the clear contrast with the mist, clouds, and sea, frames them as part of the landscape—an image that suggests a sort of Arctic Mount Rushmore. They are monumentalized. Though there is no direct association of this image with Mount Rushmore, the ending was still criticized in the German press as too American. The German film press decried this ending as diverging from Fanck’s intentions. “Dr Arnold Fanck has sent a letter to the editors today (that is, too late), in which he polemicizes against the ending taken from the American version.” 577 The Licht Bild Bühne argued, “the originally intended German end of the film would have been more artistic: a scene in which the saved expedition members see the iceberg in the distance break apart.” 578 Similarly, Film Kurier 576 “An Deck Hella, Lorenz und Krafft. 50. Sie schauen in die Ferne und erblicken an der felsigen Küstenlandschaft geisterhafte Shcatten von Kueemmel, Dragan und Matushek. 1. Hella, Lorenz und Krafft schauen erschüttert drein.” Annerkennungskarte for SOS Eisberg. 28 August 1933. Schriftgut Archiv. Berlin. 577 Indeed, it seems, most writing on S.O.S. Eisberg has not thoroughly read through the periodical record and so assumed that the extant form of the film was its original form, which it was not. See, for example Lill-Ann Körber (2015). 578 “Dr Arnold Fanck hat den Redaktionen heute—d.h. zu spät—ein Schreiben gesandt, in dem er gegen diesen der amerikanischen Fassung entnommenen Schluß polemisiert. Wir empfinden sein Verhalten als unrichtig; wir stehen jedoch auf dem Standpunkt, daß der ursprünglich beabsichtige deutsche Schluß des Films künstlerischer gewesen wäre: eine Szene, in der die gerettet Expeditionsteilnehmer den Eisberg in der Ferne zerschellen sehen. ” “SOS. Eisberg,” Licht Bild Bühne. 311 writes, with some derision: “The ‘three musketeer reminiscence ’at the end must be removed.” 579 As Oskar Kalbus complained two years later: “The plot deals only in sensation. America wants for its money to see and experience something like its magazine stories.” 580 This difference over the final scene, between the Hollywood version and Fanck’s intention, highlights a primary difference in the conceptions of landscape between the Western and mountain film. At its most reductive, the Western ultimately sees the land as the site of its characters ’struggle, while the mountain film sees the land as the dominant force. In short, at this point in their development, there remained a divide between setting and character. 581 And yet, this final shot, despite German resistance to it, ultimately offers a synthesis of these treatments of the land. It gives the land a human face—or, rather three human faces—in the form of a soldier male fantasy: reabsorption into the land and the mother. Here on the frozen wastes, birthed out of death are these “ghostly shadows” of men, who have now become part of the Arctic, forever enwombed in the fascist feminine. Klaus Theweleit writes of the Freikorps that they were unable to individuate and become separate selves. This repressed final scene offers a vision of that relationship: the men who only could be as part of the land, could only exist through the nation. This moment of remembrance gestures toward the body politic of fascism, which as Andrew Hewitt writes, 579 “Die Drei-Musketier-Reminiscenz am Schluß muß gestrichen werden.” “Film-Kritik: S.O.S. Eisberg” 580 “Die Handlung spielt immer nur in Sensationen. Amerika will etwas für sein Geld sehen und erleben, wie in seinen Magazin-Stories.” (Kalbus) 581 Ultimately, as European directors came to the U.S., the techniques of the mountain film became integrated into later Hollywood productions. For an early example of this, see Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr’s discussion of Victor Sjostrom’s The Wind in Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr. Ride Boldly, Ride: The Evolution of the Western (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 38-58. 312 is a zombie body, an attempt to recover and reinstate the damaged unity of the body politic that was undone by bourgeois subjectivity: the masculinity is mythic. It predates the regime of différance that the patriarchal text inaugurates and posits a fantasy of masculinity without gender. The key is not to ask what these bodies ‘stand for, ’but to marvel that they stand at all. (Hewitt, “Fascist,” 52) In a similar vein, one snarky Newsweek critic responded to the end of S.O.S. Iceberg, where Lorenz declares, “Wherever they are, I hope they know that they have not died in vain,” “if that is not dying in vain, it would be interesting to know what is.” 582 While this ending marks an area where the visions of Hollywood and Fanck diverged—seemingly satisfying neither the U.S. nor German audience—this image was to recur in Riefenstahl’s later work. It shows the force of the landscape, of the environment, to shape men—both dead and alive. In Riefenstahl’s Victory of Faith, this logic reaches its apotheosis in the birth of a nation from the environment her film creates. “A Source of Strength” When Joseph Goebbels sent his greetings to the nation from the Reichsparteitag of 1933 he declared, “1933 is the coronation of 14 years of self-sacrificing political struggle, the final part of a development of the group from the party to the Volk.” 583 Carried in newspapers across Germany, this statement of Goebbels presents the Nazi party celebration as the end of a gestation, the rebirth of the National Socialist German Workers Party as the Volk. Indeed, the Nazi newspaper, Angriff (Attack), echoed Goebbels’s pronouncement in its review: This film is a contemporary document of inestimable value. It documents the transition of the Party into a state…. Its triumphant coherence, its exemplary 582 “S.O.S. Iceberg: Arctic Expedition Meets Tragedy in Thrilling Picture,” Newsweek, Sep. 30, 1933, Vol. 2, No. 9, 46. 583 “1933 ist die Krönung des 14 jährigen opfervollen politschen Kampfes, die Endetappe einer Entwicklung von der Gruppen über die Partei zum Volk” 313 photography, its power and scale make this film more than just a documentary: it is a source of strength for the people as a whole. (Rother, 53) Riefenstahl’s film is more than a document, producing “strength for the people as a whole.” Indeed, Riefenstahl’s “more than just a documentary” can be said to produce the Volk. Where Arnold Fanck had transformed the arctic he was filming into a city, when speaking with the Hartford Courant—“icebergs as plenteous as skyscrapers in New York”— Riefenstahl’s film opens by accomplishing this reverse transmogrification: she makes Nuremberg into a natural landscape. 584 Where Eric Rentschler had described the Bergfilm as “the Straßenfilm’s double,” the mountain film the double of the city film, under Riefenstahl’s gaze they fuse together and the city itself becomes organic (“Mountains” 152). 585 Riefenstahl sought to translate “the indescribable beauty and greatness of the impression” of the event to her cinematic audience—her “creative concept” was to grant “every German” this “experience.” 586 Translating the techniques of the mountain film to Nazi propaganda, Riefenstahl stages Nuremberg as the site of the birth of the Volk, the womb of fascism, the “lobby” of the Third Reich. 587 584 "Director to Lead Band to Greenland to make Picture: Projected Film Will be Melodrama of Party Stranded on Iceberg," Hartford Courant, Apr 17, 1932, 1. 585 Rentschler, discussing Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (Der verlorene Sohn), writes, “A single shot, a matched dissolve between the Dolomites and Manhattan skyscrapers, illustrates how Alpine reaches and urban edifices are mirror images. The Bergfilm, in short, is the Straßenfilm’s double” (“Mountains” 152). 586 “Experience,” Film-Kurier, No. 239, 11 October 1933. 587 George Seesseln writes, “Leni Riefenstahl’s films do not describe fascism, but rather the ‘lobby’ to fascism. Riefenstahl’s constant blindness is the blindness of pop to all consequences. The threshold before the ‘actual’ space is not crossed (in her memoirs this image returns repeatedly—the refusal to enter the “actual” space).” As the room through which one enters another building, the function of the lobby in Seesseln’s description seems to also serve as the womb—the threshold of life. George Seesseln, “Blood and Glamour.” Trans. Neil Christian Pages.” Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism. Ed. Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel, & Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey (New York: Continuum, 2008), 23. 314 On August 25, 1933, the Film-Kurier announced Riefenstahl’s responsibility as “artistic director” of the Reichsparteitag film. Riefenstahl’s position was contested by Arnold Raether, who had previously been the Nazi party’s chief film propagandist. After this announcement Raether suggested that Riefenstahl was Jewish, which, though false, and officially addressed in September, would ironically trail Riefenstahl throughout her life. 588 But despite the rumor, on September 1 filming began with Riefenstahl as “the artistic director,” which the Film-Kurier specified, was “by suggestion of the Fuhrer” (“Die Filmarbeit”). The disgruntled Raether writes to another party official, denigrating Riefenstahl’s involvement in producing her films: “Her landscape films—or rather, the films made by good cameramen—were also put together for the sole purpose of business” (Wieland, 236). However, it is precisely Riefenstahl’s work on “landscape films” that structures 1933’s The Victory of Faith. The Victory of Faith is a 61-minute-long film of the Nazi rally. 589 It follows Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg, his procession through the city, and his four speeches before crowds of supporters. The film opens with a sequence that establishes the city as a natural landscape. From mist shrouded skies the camera pans toward earth, revealing the contours of a town, steeples and chimneys emerging from the clouds. In the distance, one can see a few tendrils of smoke stretching from these chimneys into the clouds, connecting the sky and city. The city takes shape against the mist, its background obscure. It is as if this city was born from the mist—the ineffable becoming concrete. This is not the extended journey through the clouds of Triumph of the Will, where the viewer 588 Karin Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives, Trans. Shelly Frisch (New York: WW Norton & Co, 2015), 235. 589 As there are several circulating versions of this film, I need to specify that my reading refers to Deutschland: Reichsleitung der NSDAP Abteilung Film, 1933. (DVD. Hot Town Music-Paradiso 2008). 315 becomes, through Hitler, a god coming down to earth. But this movement from the heavens to earth flags The Victory of Faith’s ideological ambitions, a visual signal for how “when fascism took power it took charge of the Imaginary,” as Alison Kaplan writes (Kaplan, 34). Riefenstahl’s camera lays claim to the space that exists under the cloud, to the images that materialize before her camera. Furthermore, this opening sequence establishes the primacy of place. Where later in Victory of Faith, Nazi dignitary after Nazi dignitary will declare Nuremberg an “Ur- German city,” they only affirm what the initial parade through empty city streets has already asserted. The restless camera—Riefenstahl claimed to have introduced the traveling shot to documentary—moves through empty streets, gazing up at and on the façade of stone buildings, which blot out a sky that only appears at the edges of the frame. 590 While the shots of the figures on the fountain recall the statues to the fallen in Riefenstahl’s Blue Light, the effect of the moving camera is closer still to the opening credits of S.O.S. Eisberg where Fanck also uses traveling shots to set his scene in Greenland. As with that film, Riefenstahl’s Victory of Faith is about the power of land— the power of space to shape one’s most intimate being. Indeed, the Hamburger Nachrichten, reporting on the premiere, emphasizes how immersed the viewer is in Nuremberg, “the venerable German city with monuments from its centuries-spanning history, stands in its entire beauty before our eyes.” 591 These shots of the empty city partake in constructing a fantasy of utopia: a city that is also, as Klaus Theweleit writes, “an empty space” (Male 2, 34)—the object of the soldier 590 Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren 1902–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1990), 224. 591 “Nuremberg, die ehrwürdige deutsche Stadt mit den Denkmälern aus einer über Jahrhunderte sich erstreckenden Geschichte, ersteht in seiner ganze Schönheit vor unseren Augen.” “Sieg des Glaubens,” Hamburger Nachrichten, 2 December 1933. 316 males’ campaign of terror. Where Theweleit conceives of the soldier male as pre- individual, never able to detach from the mother, in Sexuality and Mind, Janine Chassaguet-Smirgel offers a complementary fantasy in her discussion of the pathology of Nazism: “a primary desire to discover a universe without obstacles, without roughness or differences, entirely smooth, identified with a mother’s belly stripped of its contents, an interior to which one has free access.” 592 In other words, Riefenstahl’s empty Nuremberg, to be filled with soldier males and penetrated by the gaze of the camera and her audience, is “the empty container [that] represents the unfettered pleasure” (Chassaguet-Smirgel, 77). The Nuremberg of Victory of Faith is the fantastic possibility of the return to the womb— of the soldier male into Nazi Germany—that is also the frontier to be settled. Thus, Victory of Faith’s first scene with humans—the scene of building the stadium where two of the rally’s three speeches will take place—serves an important function in the construction of this wombspace. It both avows and disavows the constructedness of Riefenstahl’s film. It seems to show the documentary truth behind the rally—revealing the rally’s seeming artificiality—but only serves to itself to mystify the film’s own constructedness. Repeatedly, Riefenstahl claimed to only document events: “what I make with Triumph of the Will is normally like newsreels but I make it in my artistic way.” 593 Though she might have had to, as Film-Journal writes on November 19, 1933, operate within the constraints of a preplanned festival, by 1934, she herself writes that she helped to plan the structure so that it was most conducive for her film: Preparations for the congress were fixed in conjunction with preliminary work on the film-that is to say, the event was organized in the manner of a theatrical 592 Janine Chassaguet-Smirgel, Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and Mother in the Psyche (Routledge, 1986), 77. 593 “Leni Riefenstahl Interviewed by Gordon Hitchens, October 11th, 1971, Munich,” Film Culture 56–57, 102. 317 performance, not only as a popular rally, but also to provide the material for a propaganda film. . . . Everything was decided by reference to the camera. 594 While Riefenstahl did not have the same power over the events in Victory of Faith—in Triumph of the Will, as Albert Speer remembered there were even scenes restaged after the fact, when footage was damaged—it offers the same sort of constructed truth. 595 Riefenstahl offered as Amos Vogel wrote, “the creation of an artificial universe that looked entirely real,” an effect which this scene of building is critical to constructing (Virilio, 54). This sense of reality is further emphasized by Riefenstahl’s figuration of a naïve audience—another element from Fanck’s film that she restages. In Fanck’s film, the arrival of Ernst Udet’s plane awes the “Eskimos,” transforming the entire village—as well as their dogs—into spectators. Alternating shots of the plane with those of the villagers—with a special emphasis on amazed children—and their dogs, all of whose heads swivel with the plane’s motion, the plane’s auratic power is emphasized. It is written on their faces. Likewise, in Riefenstahl’s Victory of Faith, the response of children and animals— seemingly non- or pre-ideological beings—underscores the power of the Nazis. A shot of the marching troops, who appear spontaneously on a countryside road, receives complementary reverse shots of children hailing the procession and even of a cat looking on, anticipating the “famous shot” in Triumph of the Will, as Rainer Rother calls it (58). Where the German machine entrances the “Eskimo” village, Nazism becomes the machine that entrances the nation. 594 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 66. 595 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Macmillan, 1970), 62. As Riefenstahl tells the Film-Kurier about her process in 1933: “the main difficulty lies in creating a fluid sequence out of events which are basically of a repetitive nature: in achieving a heightening effect, in finding transitions: in short, in giving rhythmic form to the great film of this movement” (Rother 52). 318 Spectacle creates the condition for power. Where this procession of uniformed soldier males leads to Hitler’s speeches, the advent of the plane in S.O.S. Eisberg and the fascination it exercises over the “Eskimos” leads to their obedient reception of Krafft’s speech, where he directs them to rescue the Lorenzes. A cameraman, Luggi Foeger, in remembering the scene he shot for Fanck, even likens Krafft to Hitler: I'll never forget how he [Fanck] had his hero swim through the ice . . . and then let the Eskimos find him. Very dramatic . . . He lets them get to the shore. They are safe and then he [Fanck] has him [Rist] get up on a rock and make a speech to the Eskimos! I said, “My God, this is exactly the way Hitler must have started—and Mussolini.” To give a big speech after coming out of nowhere—it ruined the whole thing. If he had just had him touch shore and pass out (like a normal man)…the shot would have been ten times better. He just killed me. And I had plenty of arguments with him about it. (Wallace, 454). Though Foeger’s recollection could be colored by the history that occurred between 1932 and when he related this account to Peggy Ann Wallace in 1974, Riefenstahl’s film reproduces the grammar of Fanck’s, wherein spectacle creates the ground for authority, where spectacle interpellates its naïve audience. Hitler is the central figure of interpellation in Victory of Faith. From the moment his plane lands, the teeming crowds take shape before him, giving the fascist salute. They are called into being as fascist subjects by his presence, a visualization of Althusserian interpellation. In Althusser’s conception, it is only through God that Moses can become a subject. Yet, here, rather than God, or Althusser’s state, one has Hitler—providing the only mode of recognition the film allows. As Glen Coulthard notes in Red Skins, White Masks, Althusser’s idea of interpellation was presaged by Frantz Fanon’s idea of colonial subjection. 596 Sepp Allgeier’s camera in the back of Hitler’s car captures most dramatically how Hitler’s power ripples through this city. Alternating between footage of a heiling 596 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 32. 319 Hitler and the rapturous crowd repeating his gesture, this sequence presents Hitler’s transformation of Nuremberg. The empty streets through which the camera first travelled now are peopled with living statues, arms outstretched, mouths open. They have assumed the pose of Hitler, become photographic reproductions. Annalisa Zox-Weaver argues that Triumph of the Will is more Hitlerian than Nazi propaganda. She writes, “if Riefenstahl was promoting anything in her documentary, it was not Nazism but Hitler’s corporeal appeal” (Zox-Weaver, 14). Yet, the question Zox- Weaver begs is where Nazism begins and Hitler ends. In Victory of Faith this distinction does not truly exist. At the climax of Hitler’s speech to the Hitler Youth, he declares that the Hitler Youth “are not an empty formalism, an insipid plan.” “No!” Hitler beats his chest, “you are blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, life of our life. You are the continuation of our people. May the future who lives in you to be praised!” Panning across the crowd rhythmically chanting “Heil,” thrusting their hands and banners into the air, the image slows down, entering a new space and time, fading to black. As an image returns to the screen, it reveals a hand in the fascist salute, an arm that is connected to the body of Hitler, who now stands in his car and salutes a new crowd in the streets of Nuremberg. This transition identifies Hitler’s body with the new Germany being hailed, repeating this identification when his saluting hand also closes this segment of procession. With this salute, which Riefenstahl has declared is her only concept of fascist aesthetics—“I have no concept of fascist aesthetics unless it be the Hitler salute or the fascist salute with the raised right hand”—Hitler welcomes the new Germany and, framed by Riefenstahl’s camera, stands before the film’s audience as the embodiment of National Socialism. 597 597 Ray Müller, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). 320 Hitler’s four speeches become sites of mass interpellation. However, this interpellation is not in the form of individuals. Rather, as Hitler proclaims in his first outside speech, “You, my functionaries (Amtsleitern), are answerable to God and history to accomplish through the political education of all Germans that they become one people, one idea, and one expression of a single will.” During this proclamation, the camera alternates between Hitler’s gesturing figure and the rows of unmoving men, only the camera moving above them and the flags waving in the wind. With Hitler’s words as the soundtrack, these rows of men seem to be called into being by him. The crowds are models for the future nation. As Hitler tells the 65,000 Hitler Youth, “You will be one people as tightly bound together as you are now.” The reaction shots of the crowd, both as a mass and as individual members, serve both to constitute the men as members of this volk, but also to reaffirm Hitler’s capacity for interpellation. The film thus enables an environment in which it is possible to approach Hitler. As Bill Niven observes, “during the party rally itself, Hitler was for most of those attending a remote figure. Thanks to Riefenstahl’s use of the camera, cutting as it does between close-up images of Hitler and images of his followers, this remoteness is overcome for the cinema” (Niven, 68). There is an irony, as Klaus Theweleit highlights how Riefenstahl’s use of montage works against Eisenstein’s intention, “a technique originally conceived to disrupt the grotesque harmonies of the ‘factual’, as a means, precisely, of re-establishing harmony” (Male 2, 416). Indeed, these instances of construction of natural power, organic obedience, rely on the machinations of filmic techniques. Matthew Smith’s description of Triumph of the Will is also true of Victory of Faith, “at once fervently in pursuit of ‘organic ’totality and profoundly reliant upon cutting-edge techniques of mechanical production, Triumph of the 321 Will must rigorously hide all of the techniques on which it relies.” 598 Béla Balázs, Riefenstahl’s erstwhile collaborator, reminds us about the taxidermizing (and originally American) quality of cutting. The one-time collaborator of Riefenstahl writes, The first, radical change in distance was produced by the close-up. It was without doubt a daring stroke of genius when Griffith first severed his characters ’heads and spliced them one by one, full-size, into scenes of human interaction. For this did not simply bring the characters into closer proximity within the same space; it removed them from the space altogether and transposed them into an entirely different dimension. (Balázs, Béla, 100) This different dimension in Riefenstahl’s film is the realm of myth. There are some shots of Hitler and the members of the crowd that are so cropped that the sky is reduced to grey background, that really could take place in the Deleuzian “any place whatsoever.” It is discussed as a “symphony,” and the Reichsfilmblatt describes it not “as a reportage” but rather “more like a historic, monumental painting.” 599 Nuremberg becomes, naturally, a monument to National Socialism. Nowhere is this clearer then when the Rushmore-like ghosts of the dead recur in a scene toward the end of Victory of Faith. “The flags are not merely outward signs but represent a living obligation,” declares Hitler, as the camera pauses from its relentless movement among the ranks to settle on three soldiers. In these three seconds where the camera holds these men in its gaze, Hitler proclaims, “hundreds and hundreds have died for you.” In this moment where Riefenstahl remembers the sacrifice of the dead she also recalls S.O.S. Eisberg, whose premiere she had just watched. Where the rows of troops become themselves a landscape, these three are, in the rare dignity of their stillness, erected as a monument. George Seeseln writes, “the simple mythology of Riefenstahl’s films and 598 Matthew Wilson Smith, The total work of art from Bayreuth to cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007), 93. 599 “Sieg des Glaubens,” Reichsfilmblatt, No. 49, 1933. 322 images, from the Alpine films to the Nuba photographs, is the search for the ‘savage man,’the man who becomes a warrior” (Seeseln, 20). And yet, he describes a process of perverse birth in Riefenstahl’s films, “human being becomes the body, the body becomes a sculpture, the sculpture is made into a war monument, the monument becomes an eternal repetition of the man as the masses, which then leads from the masses to the Führer” (Seeseln, 21). Seeseln tells of a birth where the human becomes inanimate matter, transforming into sculpture. In The Victory of Faith, its interpellative reproduction ends in a space beyond humanity. Riefenstahl ends this rally focusing on the heiling hands of the crowd to Hitler’s words, “We are mortal, but Germany must live.” She cuts to a flag waving in a clouded sky. The film returns to the heavens, a place not only without humans but also deadly to them. As in the desired German end of S.O.S. Eisberg, which ends contemplating the iceberg tipping into the sea, The Victory of Faith’s final image is not of a person, but of nature—what Ernst Bloch calls “the National Socialist mist…a deep unconscious of an early, even prehistoric kind” (Bloch, 55). The film returns to the misty skies where it began, reaffirming the natural process of which National Socialism, as its flag waves, is the culmination. It declares that though men might die on the land, National Socialism shall colonize the heavens. Its flag, this “living obligation” shall stand at the edge of the clouds, which, as Samuel Weber writes, “bridge the gap between the world of finite space and time—world of the figure—and the beyond.” 600 And it is into this “beyond” that National Socialism, this movie signals, shall ascend. It does not speak of the death and suicide to 600 Samuel Weber, “Clouds: On a Possible Relation of Terror and Terrorism to Aesthetics,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 88:3, 347-8. 323 come, but imagines only the glory, made possible by the totalizing, natural vision of the fascist feminine—translated from the mountains to the city and into the sky. Nazism ’s Manifest Domesticity “The movie shows the Germans’ dedication to the idea of National Socialism” (Wieland, 243): Die Filmwoche’s description of The Victory of Faith insists on Riefenstahl’s film as a transparent record of an upsurge of populist fascist desire. It insists on this vision of the fascist feminine—the organic state making its presence known—even as the state circulated the film across Germany, as “an object lesson in how a National Socialist needs to behave” (Wieland, 243). Both Filmwoche's description and the German state’s use of the film belies the vision through which this moving image of fascism was produced—that is, by means of the mountain film and the frontier. Riefenstahl’s propaganda certainly does extend the völkisch logic of the mountain films whereby“ the soil, the native landscape provided constant inspiration, and the inner- directedness of man’s individual soul was thought to be analogous to the soul of the Volk,” as George Mosse writes (Mosse, Germans 35-6). Yet it also marks a new development in that logic. By bringing her work from the frontier—in the mountains and on the ice—into the city, Riefenstahl’s Victory of the Faith transplanted the techniques used to survey the edges of the National Socialist imaginary into its center. Riefenstahl’s work thus repeats a movement that many theorists of fascism describe as fundamental to fascism’s genesis. For example, Jack D. Forbes writes, “when fascism occurs in the metropolis (the center of the empire) it is essentially the bringing into that center of the politics and values of the colony or the periphery” (Forbes, 5). Of course, Forbes and other scholars who so describe fascism are thinking specifically of the return of the violences exercised on the frontier in the 324 processes of imperialism and colonization. 601 However, Riefenstahl’s film shows no violence. Rather, in making the city into a natural, organic environment—the wombspace of the fascist feminine—it places the sublimity supposedly experienced on the frontier’s edge, in the new land, at the center of the nation. The frontier becomes the source of the city's revival—fascism is given life from the land—by means of the fascist feminine, whose mediating role is disavowed. In order to monumentalize Nuremberg, then, Riefenstahl had also to domesticate it. In The Anarchy of Empire, Amy Kaplan describes a similar movement that occurred within the rhetoric of nineteenth-century U.S. expansion—a movement that she calls “Manifest domesticity.” To Kaplan, “manifest domesticity” described how, on the one hand, the national rhetoric mobilized the language of domesticity to conceive of national expansion, while on the other hand, rhetoric of the domestic sphere and the sentimental novels set therein started to employ the rhetoric of imperialism. In other words, imperial expansion is a process of domestication that also brings foreignness into the domestic space: domesticity…refers not to a static condition, but to a process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. ‘Domestic ' in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing…domestication implies that the home contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed; domesticity monitors he borders between the civilized and the savage as it regulates the traces of savagery within its purview. 602 Fundamentally, Kaplan argues that the idea of “separate spheres” breaks down at this time, in that there is both “the extension of female influence outward to civilize the foreign” and 601 See also Enzo Traverso, Origins of Nazi Violence, Trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2003), 54-62 and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Trans. Joan Pinkham (New York; Monthly Review, 2000). 602 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 25-6. 325 “anxiety about the opposing trajectory that brings foreignness into the home” (Kaplan, 32). The so-called woman’s sphere, Kaplan argues, is “not a retreat from the masculine sphere of empire building” but rather “both reenacts and conceals its origin in the violent appropriation of foreign land” (Kaplan, 50). Kaplan’s concept of “manifest domesticity” offers itself as an apt description of the filmmaking involved in Riefenstahl’s propaganda. Though Riefenstahl largely disdained the domestic, Riefenstahl’s films do formally carry out this process of domestication. They make choices about what fits within the frame: specifically, excluding Others from the camera image and thus from the nation. And, Riefenstahl—making the choice prior to its representation, a representation that then appears before the camera as unmediated, natural and given—thus acts as the figure of the “fascist feminine”: culture as natural, culture as undivided from nature. In short, Victory of Faith performed upon the Nuremberg population what Riefenstahl had earlier taken part in with regards to the Arctic—domestication, that is, nationalization. Just as those glaciers became an extension of German mountains, incorporating the bodies of German men, so too did Riefenstahl’s Nuremberg film, rather than reflecting the “the Germans’ dedication to the idea of National Socialism,” make the German people into National Socialists. There is a fundamental instability in this vision of a domestic National Socialism. Described through the techniques of S.O.S. Eisberg as a positive ideal of purpose and unity, this vision of National Socialism thus reveals itself to be reliant on the frontier for the visual vocabulary through which it has become legible. The force of the National Socialism that she captures is predicated on the idea of territorial conquest that the mountain films depict. 326 This instability resembles very closely the thrust of Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic “Frontier Thesis” as put forth in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), whereby the United States experienced “perennial rebirth” through “this expansion westward” and thus created “the forces dominating American character.” 603 Adolf Hitler, too, famously subscribed to such a view of national character, proclaiming in 1941 that “the Volga must be our Mississippi.” Only then, Hitler argued, would Germany recover its “feeling of the wide open spaces.” “Where would we be,” he asked, “if we did not have at least the illusion of the vastness of our space” (Blackbourn, 293). In 1933, The Victory of Faith already makes visible National Socialism’s inextricable reliance on Manifest Destiny. However, the logic comes into being on screen not as the prelude to the brutal violence that eliminates the Other, but rather as a fait accompli—a vision in which the Other already does not exist and no one can tell where the land ends and the Volk begins. Riefenstahl’s trajectory that this chapter has discussed—through the mountain films, across Greenland, and behind the camera—thus serves to reveal and reinscribe the logic of erasure and expansion at the heart of National Socialism, which links it with earlier ideologies of imperialism, and prepared the way for the violence that had thus became necessary and inevitable as the condition for the absolute community of the fascist feminine that The Victory of Faith envisions. 603 Frederick Jackson Turner, History, Frontier, and Section: Three Essays (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 60. 327 s Epilogue: U.S. Modernist | Global Fascist “The heritage of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, old John Adams, Jackson, Van Buren is HERE, NOW in the Italian peninsula at the beginning of fascist second decennio, not in Massachusetts or Delaware.” 604 Ezra Pound began to write Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’idea statale; or Fascism as I Have Seen it—from which this line comes—after meeting Benito Mussolini on the day that Adolf Hitler assumed power in Berlin: January 30, 1933. 605 He wrote it for the recently-elected U.S. President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to whom he dedicated and sent his treatise. 606 Published in 1935, it represented Pound’s first direct attempt to intervene in U.S. politics, which he thought needed a “vigorous realignment” so that the “driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren” might once more “FUNCTION” (Jefferson, 104). Pound proposed Mussolini as “stimulus” to redirect “American history, as Lenin has entered into world history” (Jefferson, 104). Yet, if Pound hoped to persuade Roosevelt, he certainly made strange choices—including consistently referring to the President as a “weak sister” (Jefferson, 103). Unsurprisingly, Pound never heard word back (Marsh, Ezra, 136). As Roosevelt never responded to the book Pound sent him, Pound’s attempted intervention never translated into politics as I have discussed it in this dissertation; unread, the text could not crystallize fascist desire and take on embodied form in the U.S. political sphere. However, this missive from Fascist Italy does offer us a vision of Pound’s self- conception as political actor. While Pound’s relationship with fascism has concerned modernist and Pound studies for decades, as Matthew Feldman has argued in Ezra Pound’s 604 Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley Nott, 1935), 12. 605 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume II, (Oxford University Press, 2014), 137. 606 Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound (London: Reaktion, 2011), 127. 328 Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945, his study of Pound’s propaganda, scholars need to stop subordinating his politics to his aesthetics: “it is high time to start taking Ezra Pound’s fascism seriously.” 607 Pound is the only of the U.S. cultural producers that this dissertation has examined who would have identified as a fascist—though, as mentioned in Chapter One, Griffith did express his admiration for Mussolini. Thus, rather than treat Jefferson and/or Mussolini as a “quirky” curio, I read it as a document of the imbrication of U.S. cultural traditions and global fascism that converged in the figure known as Ezra Pound. 608 In other words, Ezra Pound, so often written about as a figure of “Global Poetics,” who, as Ira Nadel has recently argued, “embodied [Modernism’s] literary cosmopolitanism,” should be reconsidered as equally a figure of “Global Fascism.” 609 This dissertation has traced how fascist desire took shape through U.S. culture, bearing the traces of earlier political and social formations, and informing the development of interwar fascism. In following these global circuits of fascist desire through the United States, Germany, and Italy, I have described a constellation of culture extending through the nineteenth century and moving across media and disparate U.S. cultural traditions. I have shown how U.S. traditions of Emersonianism, race melodrama, Eugenics, “playing Indian,” and the film Western crystallized as fascist desire in the U.S., Germany, and Italy 607 Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), viii. See also Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1984); Robert Casilllo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul De Man (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1996); Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Also see the work of the political historian, Victor Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism,” The Journal of Politics 17:2, 173-197. 608 Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (University of Alabama Press, 1998), 1. 609 Ira Nadel, “Ezra Pound’s Global Poetics,” Literature of the Americas no. 7 (2019), 202. 329 as twentieth-century actors engaged them. Ezra Pound is one such figure, poet and propagandist, bringing to a head the nineteenth-century tradition of American populism as an American fascism and interweaving it with Italian Fascism and Confucian Fascism— offering himself as an exemplary node in the network of global fascism. As the mid-century political scientist Victor Ferkiss has written, Pound figures into a long tradition of U.S. populists. Pound, as Ferkiss writes, wanted to “purify American democracy by returning to the ideals of the American republic, ideals which in Pound’s view are most explicitly expounded in the twentieth century in the fascist ideology.” 610 Indeed, contrary to many literary scholars, who wish to suggest that Pound’s fascism developed from idiosyncratic aesthetics, Ferkiss highlights how Pound’s fascist desires emerged through the tradition of U.S. populists and were shared by Charles Coughlin, Gerald K. Smith, and Lawrence Dennis. 611 Its tenets consisted of, Ferkiss writes: attacks on finance capitalism, the hatred of social democracy and socialism, the belief that representative democracy is a mask for rule by a predatory economic plutocracy, and that a strong executive is essential for the creation and preservation of a middle-class society composed of small independent landowners, suspicion of freedom of the press and civil liberties generally as the shields and instrumentalities of the plutocracy, ultra-nationalism, antisemitism (both latent and active), and, finally, a peculiar interpretation of history which sees in events a working-out of a dialectic which opposes the financier and the producer. (Ferkiss, 174) 610 Victor C. Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism,” The Journal of Politics (17:2), 191. 611 For example, Leon Surette suggests Pound’s fascism to be a matter of his refined aesthetic sensibility: “the social and political views of Lewis, Eliot, and Pound were not primarily motivated by a hope to establish any particular social or political model—at least not initially—but rather by distaste for the social and cultural status quo in which they found themselves” (Surette, 3). Similarly, Cary Wolfe divorces Pound’s politics from his agency: “Mussolini promised to make a political reality of the social and economic truth that Pound's aesthetics already knew” (Limits, 212). In this vision, Pound’s politics were an inevitable consequence of his poetry. 330 In other words, for Ferkiss, Pound was not, despite the protests of the Poundians, unique. Similarly, Alec Marsh has insisted that Jefferson and/or Mussolini is “a book not nearly as odd or ‘un-American’ as its title suggests” (Marsh, Money, 1). It is worthwhile to remember that it is, in large part against this tradition of populism that Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, which arrived as a much more successful intervention in U.S. politics than Jefferson and/or Mussolini in 1935. 612 The tirades of Doremus Jessup, which insist that fascism threatens the United States, draw on the U.S. populist tradition as evidence of its possibility: Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition— shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! 613 However, where Lewis points to the populist tradition to express his concern about the possibility of dictatorship, Pound fetishizes Jefferson as this very precedent. “What did he really do?” Pound asks before answering himself: “he guided a limited electorate by what he wrote and said more or less privately” (Jefferson, 15). For Pound, Jefferson imposed his “WILL” on the United States (Jefferson, 16). Pound’s Jefferson “saw like a shot that a new system and new mechanisms MUST come into being to meet it” (Jefferson 62). While Pound insists that he does not “‘advocate’ fascism in and for America” (Jefferson, 98), his description of Jeffersonian government evacuates this caveat of 612 The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune both named It Can’t Happen Here Lewis’ “best novel since Dodsworth,” while the Los Angeles Times called Pound’s book “petulant nonsense.” Benjamin Stolberg, “Sinclair Lewis Faces Fascism,” New York Herald Tribune, 20 Oct. 1935; John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” 21 Oct. 1935; M.M., “Petulant Nonsense,” Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1936, C7. 613 Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, (Penguin, 2017) 17-18. 331 meaning. He explains his vision of government through an “analogy” he calls “very technical”: “The real life in regular verse is an irregular movement underlying” (Jefferson, 94). In other words, it is not the structure but the men that make government. Only certain types of men could make up a government for Pound. For Alec Marsh, Pound’s antisemitism was a way of compensating for his cosmopolitanism—“a way of indicating to his readers that he himself was not Jewish” (Ezra, 56). In other words, even Marsh’s (overly) generous reading of Pound’s antisemitism highlights how it served to delineate his membership in community. Indeed, Pound’s conception of the United States is as a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon nation. “We descend from the pilgrim ‘farvers’” (Jefferson, 17), he writes, repeating the same sentiment he propounded in 1913’s Patria Mia: “The static element of the Anglo-Saxon migration is submerged and well nigh lost in the pol of races which have followed them.” 614 In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he records a perceived degeneration of national stock. “T. J. had a feeling of responsibility and he knew other men who had it,” Pound writes in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, “it didn’t occur to him that this type of man would die out” (Jefferson, 19). As he writes in Patria Mia: “the type of man who bult railways, cleared the forest, planned irrigation, is different from the type of man who can hold on to the profits of subsequent industry” (Patria, 21). Prefiguring the later “ideology of racial destiny” that, as Alec Marsh highlights, Pound elaborated in correspondence with the white supremacist crank John Kasper in the 1950s (Marsh, John, xiv), this new type was, for Pound, the Jew, who, “alone can retain his detestable qualities, despite climatic conditions” (Patria, 52). Indeed, this figure of the Jew, which emerged out of both Pound’s suburban antisemitism and populist anticapitalism, would eventually 614 Ezra Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony (London: Peter Owen, 1962), 21. 332 become a structuring enemy of theological proportions—the decadence that had to be purged. 615 For Pound, Italian Fascism promised such regeneration. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he celebrates the movement’s efficacy, listing its accomplishments with great gusto: “grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restorations, new buildings, and, I am ready to add off my own bat, AN AWAKENED INTELLIGENCE in the nation and a new LANGUAGE in the debates in the Chamber” (Jefferson, 73). Pound suggests that Italian Fascism is the twentieth century’s Manifest Destiny, offering the “transposition”: “What would Benito Mussolini have done in the American wilderness in 1770 to 1826?” (Jefferson, 23). He sees Mussolini as “Artifex,” a modernist builder like Brancusi, from whom “no error emerges, from whatever angle one looks at them” (Jefferson, viii). Pound sees Italian fascism as a modernist political and cultural project, driven by Mussolini’s “will toward order” (99). “I don’t believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction,” Pound writes, offering the example of his grandfather building “a bit of railway across Wisconsin” (Jefferson, 33). Pound thus situates Mussolini’s revival of Italy as an equivalent to the settlement and colonization of North America; of the Native Americans and victims of Fascist violence, Pound makes no mention. As he wrote, accepting the violence, the fanaticism of fascism’s followers “does not come from merely starting a boy-scout movement” (Jefferson, 27). The third braid of Pound’s fascism is a Confucian authoritarianism. Considering government “a matter of the DIRECTION OF THE WILL,” Pound writes, “brings us ultimately both to Confucius and Dante” (Jefferson, 16). Pound saw Confucianism as a 615 For a discussion of Pound’s antisemitism, see Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 147-191. 333 philosophy of totalizing order. As Christopher Bush has shown, Pound, conversant with Japanese Fascism, considered Japanese fascism to be the proper incarnation of Confucian principles. 616 However, Pound’s Confucian dictatorship also had echoes in Chinese fascists who “distilled Confucianism into a ‘national spirit’ that anchored national belonging across time and space,” as Maggie Clinton has shown; indeed as Pound invoked Confucius as a symbol of order writing out “La rivoluzione continua” in ideograms (Jefferson 113), Chinese fascists also looked to Fascist Italy for its martial unity. 617 Out of these traditions—both distinct and always-already in conversation with each other—emerged in Pound what can only be called a global fascism. The nature of Pound’s fascism is often held up as idiosyncratic and thus somehow less serious than the national fascisms of Germany or Italy. Consider the insistence of Alec Marsh, a leading Pound scholar on Ezra Pound’s idiosyncrasy. “Ezra Pound’s politics are a unique alloy of Jeffersonian populism, Chinese Confucianism, and his heterodox interpretation of fascism,” he writes. 618 However, in his monograph on Pound’s life, he opens by suggesting that Pound’s true political leanings are not bound up with his fascism or antisemitism, but can be rediscovered as liberatory: “it seems that the essence of Pound’s politics—not the surface effects that are too easily called ‘fascism’, and not his anti-Semitism, but the essence which wants to be Confucian—shows us the way towards a better, sustainable way of living” (Marsh, Ezra,, 10). This, I fear, is a dangerous practice, trying to isolate the 616 Christopher Bush, “I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan,” Ezra Pound in the present: essays on Pound's contemporaneity, Eds. Josephine Nock-Hee Park and Paul Stasi, (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2018), 96-97. 617 Maggie Clinton, “Subjects of a New Visual Order: Fascist Media in 1930s China,” in Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley, eds.. Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 23, 28. 618 Alec Marsh, “Politics,” in Ira Nadel ed., Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96. 334 essential Pound and discard the chaff. Indeed it is the very practice that Pound praises in Mussolini as his “EDITORIAL eye and ear,” able to “see through [the] bunkum” (Jefferson 74). The fascisms—or global fascism—completely entangle Pound’s thought. Pound saw himself in the lineage that he describes in Jefferson and/or Mussolini. He figured himself as Jefferson, justifying his own writing of this text. “Jefferson participated in one revolution, he ‘informed it’ both in the sense of shaping it from the inside and of educating it,” writes Pound. “He tried to educate another. It wasn’t technically and officially his business…but being Jefferson he couldn’t help himself” (Jefferson, 14). In this discussion of two revolutions, there is also an echo of how Pound saw himself as participating in Mussolini’s Fascism—he had just met with Il Duce (who had told him that his poetry was “divertente”) 619 —and, with Jefferson and/or Mussolini, about to influence FDR and the United States. As Alec Marsh writes of Jefferson and/or Mussolini, “it seems obvious that Pound is conflating Jefferson, Mussolini and himself” (Critical, 128). Indeed, when his Italian translator Carl Izzo read the text, he stated “Please don’t hurl your thunderbolts—I have found specimens galore in your book—at pore me. The fact is I consider ‘Jefferson and/or Mussolini’ chiefly a study in personality: yours.” 620 Jefferson and/or Mussolini suggests Pound saw himself as an organic agent of history. He establishes the historicity of the text by opening with Mussolini’s “continual gentle diatribe against all that is ‘anti-storico,’ all that is against historic process.” This idea of “storico”—that is, history—he makes clear in the following lines where he discounts the “parliamentary system” as “exotic” and “imported” (Jefferson, v). Politics must emerge 619 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1950), 202. Canto XLI: “‘Ma questo,’/ said the Boss, ‘e divertente.’ / catching the point before the aesthetes had got there.” 620 Massimo Bacigalupo, Ezra Pound, Italy, and The Cantos (Clemson University Press, 2020), 93 335 from the “blood and bone of the Italian people”—as, Pound suggests, fascism does. “Mussolini has never asked nations with a different historical fibre,” Pound writes, “to adopt the cupolas and gables of fascism” (Jefferson, v). Fascist history—which, after all, is what Pound is both relating and creating—understands itself as organic. Thus when Pound announces that “Jefferson was one genius and Mussolini is another” (Jefferson, 19), more than creating an analogue he is highlighting the very heritage he sees in Italy. Pound places “genius” on a spectrum with “instinct” as “the analogous completeness of knowledge, or intelligence” to “the flying ant or wasp or whatever it was that I saw cut up a spider at Excideuil….acting with remarkably full and perfect knowledge” (Jefferson, 18). In particular, it emerges as the capability of “dealing with NEW circumstances” (Jefferson, 18). Pound understood himself not only as poet but also as politician, his writing guiding the world with the incision of his wasp. Pound would explain to Alexander Raven Thompson of the British Union of Fascists that this 1935 text was also an attempt to create a transatlantic connection: “my Jeff/Muss was an endevour [sic] to break down idiotic prejudice AGAINST the Italian de facto organism” (Marsh, Ezra, 129). In this same vein, Pound would write wartime propaganda for the British Union of Fascists and the Nazis as well as the Italians (Feldman, 4). In this dissertation, Pound figures as an agent of history too; he is the figure who represents the shift from fascist desire to a desire for fascism—Jefferson and/or Mussolini is a text of fascist desire and desire for Fascism. He is also a figure who bridged Fascism and the postwar period. He linked up with American right, consorting and conspiring with the Neonazi and segregationist John Kasper. 621 He has also served as the inspiration for the 621 See Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound. 336 contemporary CasaPound. 622 Indeed, he was unrepentant for his fascism, notoriously giving the fascist salute when he returned to Italy in 1958. 623 The fact that he was an American fascist, an Italian Fascist, and a Confucian fascist does not make him any less any of the others. Ferkiss found him to be an American populist of typical concerns. And, when his Italian translator Carl Izzo read Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he found little idiosyncratic about its depiction of Mussolini and Italian Fascism: “your book was written chiefly for foreigners and an Eyetailian may either agree or disagree with your views but hardly find, not only in your book but anywhere else, something new on the subject” (Bacigalupo, 94). These threads exist braided into and reinforcing of each other. As Frederico Finchelstein has written, fascism is a “global ideology undergoing constant transformation…a traveling political universe” (Transatlantic, 6). To read Jefferson and/or Mussolini as a document of global fascism is to witness—to see through Pound’s praise—a vision of fascism as a metamorphosing mode of domination that erupts across the world and across time periods. Pound’s organic description of the will presages Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of fascism as a metastasizing “cancerous body” (Thousand 251). Similarly, although Pound celebrates fascism while they deplore it, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten could be describing Pound’s sense of fascism’s long historical reach when they recently asked, “if fascism is back…when did it go away?,”: “In the 50s, with Apartheid and Jim Crow? In the 60s and 70s? —not for Latin Americans. In the 80s? — not for Indonesians or Congolese. In the 90s? —the decade of intensified carceral state violence against black people in the United States?” (Harney, 120). 622 For a discussion of Casa Pound, see Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, “CasaPound Italia: ‘Back to Believing. The Struggle Continues,’” Fascism 8.1 (2019), 61-88. 623 Ira D. Nadel, Ezra Pound: A Literary Life (Springer, 2004), 172. 337 The presence of fascist desire has a longer history than Fascism. This dissertation has sought to chart it as it circulated through U.S. culture from the nineteenth century through the interwar period. And Ezra Pound is but one name for the constellation of global fascism entangled with U.S. culture during this period—if perhaps the most notorious and synonymous. He figures as but a microcosm of the larger global network—not a unique case but rather a symptom of the larger complex that this dissertation has discussed. There are more lines to trace, more connections to examine, more texts to follow and scenes of reading to describe. For example, it seems to me that the U.S. naturalist tradition— particularly the work of Frank Norris and Jack London—could be a productive site for future investigation; despite London’s socialist views, the shared social Darwinism of Norris and London could certainly serve to crystallize fascist desire as I have described it here: a regeneration through the elimination of the Other. I have concluded this dissertation with Ezra Pound in an attempt to situate him amidst the dissertation’s broader and longer conversation about fascism in U.S. culture. His fascism is not only a modernist phenomenon, but also a U.S. phenomenon—which is also a global phenomenon. I began writing this dissertation curious about the global relations and transactions of culture. Borne out by this research I write now with the abiding conviction that we cannot disentangle the national from the global, because culture does not stop at borders. However, there is also no hope to extricate fascism from the liberal tradition. We can only—and must—continue to attend to the braid. 338 Bibliography 1001 films: A reference book for non-theatrical film users. Chicago: Moving Picture Age, 1920. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2005. ________________. “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. 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The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Gentile, Giovanni. Fascismo e cultura. Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1928. ______________. Origins and Doctrine of Fascism. Trans. A. James Gregor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. ______________. “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism.” Foreign Affairs. January 1928. 290-304. 356 Gerstner, David A. Manly Arts, Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gledhill, Christine. “The Melodramatic Field,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI, 1987. Goebbels, Joseph. Oktober 1932-März 1934. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Saur, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110957297 Web ________________. “Speech at the Opening of the Reich Chamber of Culture.” 15 November 1933. Third Reich Sourcebook. Ed. Anson Rabinbach. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Goldsmith, Meredith. “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in the Great Gatsby,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2003) Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. “Governor Smith on Immigration.” The Saturday Evening Post. October 13, 1928. Vol. 200. No. 15. 30. Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916. Griffin, Roger. Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018. ____________. Modernism and Fascism: A Sense of a Beginning under Hitler and Mussolini. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ____________. The Nature of Fascism. Routledge, 1993. 357 Guattari, Félix. Chaosophy, Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009. 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Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene. München: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1921. _________. Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene. München: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1931. Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. 365 Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism and American Literary Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levine, Lawrence. “Preface.” Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800- 1850. Berkeley: University of California, 1987. Lewis, R.W.B.. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Lewisohn, Ludwig. “The Cult of Violence,” The Nation Vol. 110, No. 2847 (January 24, 1920): 118. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. 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