Fear Itself (80 page)

88
Stefan Zweig,
The World of Yesterday
(New York: Viking, 1943), p. 436.

89
Jan-Werner Müller, “Research Note: The Triumph of What (If Anything?): Rethinking Political Ideologies and Political Institutions in Twentieth-Century Europe” (unpublished manuscript, 2008).

90
This is the perspective offered in Stephen Kotkin’s superb “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,”
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
2 (2001): 111–64.

91
For acute assessments, see Naum Jasny,
Soviet Industrialization, 1928–1952
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Holland Hunter, “Priorities and Shortfalls in Prewar Soviet Planning,” in
Soviet Planning: Essays in Honor of Naum Jasny
, ed. Jane Degras (New York: Praeger, 1964), pp. 1–45.

92
For a pithy statement of this view, see Edward Hallett Carr,
The New Society
(London: Macmillan, 1951).

93
Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 450–51, 453.

94
See http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_military_spending_30.html#usgs.302.

95
Their democracies were more theatrical than real, what Tzvetan Todorov has called “pseudo-democracy” in “Stalin Close Up,”
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions
5, no. 1 (2004): 94–111.

96
Kotkin, “Modern Times,” p. 159.

97
Giovanni Gentile, “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,”
Foreign Affairs
6 (1928): 302–3.

98
Cited in Erik van Ree,
The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 131.

99
Kotkin, “Modern Times,” pp. 129–130.

100
“The Depression triggered among key players in the North Atlantic economy much common watchfulness of one another’s policy moves and a wide array of common responses.” See Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 416–17; Louis Brownlow,
Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937); Peri E. Arnold,
Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1950–1980
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Barry Karl,
The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 156–58.

101
The most compelling overview I know of how the “democratic” dictatorships combined institutional innovations, the arts of ruling, and finding answers to domestic and global challenges is provided in Overy,
The Dictator
. For a discussion of the capacities of democracies, in comparison with the dictatorships, to build military machines, see Talbot Imlay, “Democracy and War: Political Regime, Industrial Relations, and Economic Preparations for War in France and Britain Up to 1940,”
Journal of Modern History
79 (2007): 1–47.

102
Kotkin, “Modern Times,” p. 129.

103
Kiran Klaus Patel,
Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Norbert Götz and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Facing the Fascist Model: Discourse and the Construction of Labour Services in the USA and Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s,”
Journal of Contemporary History
41, no. 1 (2006): 57–73; Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

104
For discussions, see Harvey Klehr,
The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); Fraser M. Ottanelli,
The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). On the popular front, see the account by Earl Browder, the Communist Party’s general secretary: Earl Browder,
The People’s Front
(New York: International Publishers, 1938). In the struggle against Fascism, he wrote, “the camp of progress and peace finds its stronghold in the Soviet Union, the country of socialist prosperity” (p. 19).

105
Walter Duranty,
I Write as I Please
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935), pp. 301–2.

106
Richard Crossman, ed.,
The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950). In addition to Fischer, the contributors were Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Richard Wright, and Stephen Spender.

107
“Soviet Democracy,”
New Republic,
June 17, 1936, pp. 762, 761; Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb,
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization,
2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1935), p. 337. See also Peter G. Filene,
Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

108
He concluded this way: “And if American champions of civil liberties could all think of economic freedom as the goal of their labors, they too would accept ‘workers democracy’ as
far superior to what the capitalist world offers to any but a small minority. Yes, and they would accept—regretfully, of course—the necessity of dictatorship while the job of reorganizing society on a socialist basis is being done.
” See Roger N. Baldwin, “Freedom in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.,”
Soviet Russia Today,
September 1934; available at http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/blog/baldwin.pdf. I thank Robert Amdur for guiding me to this essay. Five years earlier, Baldwin published
Liberty under the Soviets
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1928) in a book series,
Vanguard Studies of Soviet Russia
, edited by Yale’s Jerome Davis, that “is designed to meet the need for reliable, accurate information on the major aspects of present-day Russia” (p. ix).

109
Edmund Wilson,
Travels in Two Democracies
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).

110
See Stephen A. Norwood,
Third Reich in the Ivory Tower
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially chapters 2 and 3, which deal with Harvard and Columbia. See also “Fascism at Columbia University,”
Nation,
November 7, 1934, pp. 530–31; Harry F. Ward, “The Development of Fascism in the United States,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
180 (1935): 55–56; Ido Oren, “Uncritical Portrayals of Fascist Italy and of Iberic-Latin Dictatorships in American Political Science,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
42 (2000): 87–118.

111
Richard Washburn Child,
The Saturday Evening Post,
June 28, 1924, pp. 157–58; cited in W. Y. Elliott, “Mussolini, Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics,”
Political Science Quarterly
41 (1926): 168. For a discussion of the pro-Fascist role of
The Saturday Evening Post,
see John P. Diggins, “Mussolini and America: Hero-Worship, Charisma, and the ‘Vulgar Talent,’”
The Historian
28 (1966): 564–66.

112
Richard Washburn Child, in Benito Mussolini,
My Autobiography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), pp. xi, xv, xix.

113
Lawrence Dennis, “Fascism for America,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
180 (1935): 62.

114
Mario A. Pei, “Freedom under Fascism,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
180 (1935): 13.

115
I draw these distinctions from Edna Ullman-Margalit and Sidney Morgenbesser, “Picking and Choosing,”
Social Research
44, no. 4 (1977): 757-85; and Edna Ullman-Margalit, “Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting” (unpublished paper, Center for the Study of Rationality, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, November 2005). For an account of the history of statistics in terms of the ambition to produce tolerable risk, see Ian Hacking,
The Taming of Chance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

CHAPTER 2
PILOT, JUDGE, SENATOR

1
Mussolini had preceded Balbo as a minister of aviation, one of the many cabinet posts the party leader held, and was fascinated by flight as a symbol of reactionary modernism, a position he held in common with Herman Göring and Charles Lindbergh. Balbo had been fascinated by flying since early adolescence. See R. J. B. Bosworth,
Mussolini
(London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 142–43. For a survey of Fascist political culture, see Mabel Berezin,
Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and for a discussion of the Italian regime’s objectives, see Edward R. Tannenbaum, “The Goals of Italian Fascism,”
American Historical Review
74 (1969): 1183–204.

2
Robert Wohl,
The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 89.

3
“No institution did Stalin’s bidding more than the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court.” See Michael Parrish,
The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), p. 206. Just before the trial opened,
Pravda
editorialized on August 13, “The slightest liberalism towards these filthy double-dealers is a crime against the people, against socialism”; and once the trial had concluded, it signaled, on August 27, that there was more to come, observing, “Unfortunately we still have quite a number of liberals” in the Party. Cited in Jonathan Haslam, “Political Opposition and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932–1936.”
Historical Journal
29 (1986): 417–18.

4
On his early political career, see Vincent A. Giroux, Jr., “The Rise of Theodore G. Bilbo,”
Journal of Mississippi History
43 (1981): 180–209.

5
U.S. Congress,
Memorial Services Held in the House of Representatives and Senate of the United States, Together with Remarks Presented in Eulogy of Theodore Gilmore Bilbo, Late a Senator from Mississippi
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), p. 19.

6
For a rich and multilayered consideration, see Alan Brinkley,
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

7
Time,
June 26, 1933, p. 33.

8
Ibid., pp. 50, 49, 18.

9
Its absence was widely thought responsible for contributing to the economic meltdown of 2008.

10
Time,
June 26, 1933, p. 9.

11
One possibility is that his synagogue would not allow him to appear onstage.

12
Time,
June 26, 1933, pp. 33–34. The Madonna of Loreto is the patron saint of aviators. The priest, Monsignor Carlo Ferrari, also greeted the fliers “with embraces and tears” on their return. “Bishop Paolo Galeazzi of Grosseto held a Te Deum at the cathedral, and the town authorities declared a holiday.” See
New York Times,
August 15, 1933.

13
Balbo strongly encouraged the Fascist identity of the air force. In December 1927, he circulated a paper entitled “Moral and Political Education of Airmen” which urged his men, as exemplars, to speak out for Fascism. See the discussion in the sympathetic biography: Claudio G. Segré,
Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 177. Balbo was strongly influenced by Giulio Douhet, the Italian supporter of air power (and of Mussolini) and a prophet of strategic bombing, who believed that, in future, war from the air could most effectively decimate civilian areas. “The prevailing forms of social organization,” Douhet wrote, “have given war a character of national totality—that is, the entire population and all the resources of the nation are sucked into the maws of war. And since society is now definitely evolving along this line, it is within the power of human foresight to see now that future wars will be total in character and scope.” Cited in Mark E. Neely Jr., “Was the Civil War a Total War?,” in
On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871
, ed. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 33. In 1936, Balbo wrote the preface for a posthumous collection of Douhet’s articles on total war.

14
Benito Mussolini,
My Autobiography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), p. 291.

15
Wohl,
The Spectacle of Flight
, pp. 63, 51.