As I wrote there about an article he did in ZfS 1/1932:
It's cringe-inducing today to see him citing Lawrence Dennis' book Is Capitalism Doomed? (1932). In fairness, in that book Dennis wasn't yet advocating an American brand of fascism to solve the problems he saw in American society, and hadn't yet become the leading intellectual of the Hitler-loving far right in the US. (Lawrence was a thoroughly weird character, an African-American who passed for white and became a leading American fascist, as Gary Younge describes in The fascist who 'passed' for white Guardian 04/04/2007.) And what he quotes from Dennis is a fairly straightforward observation that the displacement of rural farm populations to the cities where they became part of the industrial work force didn't tend to reinforce their devotion to prevailing doctrines concerning private property. (In the 3/1933 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,Gumperz gives Is Capitalism Doomed? a glowing review.)He did an English-language review for the 3/1936 number of ZfS that included a review of Lawrence Dennis’ book that openly advocated a fascist system, The Coming American Fascism (1936). Gumperz commented as followed on the book, it what seems to be in the context a disturbingly neutral tone:
Adherents of Mr. [Lewis] Corey's or Mr. [Alfred] Bingham's ways of thinking, in view of the fascist threat that, in Mr. Dennis' pages, appears as a boon, might find comfort in the latter's statement that it seems „too obvious to need saying that there is little likelihood that within the next four or five years the United States will be transformed into a fully rationalized national state which, in this book, is called fascist."Tags: fascism, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, radical right
The basic ill of the present system, according to the author, is its instability, which is brought about by the financial machinery of the system, which increases the debt burden in a geometrical progression, and therefore operates in the end towards its own annihilation. The remedy is a „debtless economy", which can be achieved by progressive taxation, which, in effect, is equivalent to a cancellation of debts. Politically speaking, such a remedy, however, cannot be applied within the framework of the present political system, but can be brought about only by a fascist dictatorship. The program for such a dictatorship, the changes which it will impose upon present American institutions and ideas, the methods by which such changes can be achieved, the ideology and attitudes that it will have to develop in order to insure its own success, are the chief subjects of this book. „Integration of governmental agencies and coordination of authority may be called the keystone principles of fascist administration. Applied in the Untied States, these principles would mean the end of our federal system, of states’ rights and of the fictions of a functional separation of power as between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government.” To this end the organization of a fascist party which in the Untied States will certainly be called by a different name, and the leadership of the elite, are necessary. „All that will keep the world from going back to a pattern of banditry similar to that which prevailed all over Europe for hundreds of years, and which prevails today in large parts of Asia, will be such changes in the rules of the game as will keep enough of the now frustrated elite satisfied.” [my emphasis]
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