Trump as Radical Right agitator

Digby takes another pass at Donald Trump's demagoguery today in Donald Trump’s campaign of terror: How a billionaire channeled his authoritarian rage — and soared to the top of the polls Salon 08/21/2015

It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s ramblings as the words of a kook. But he’s tapping into the rage and frustration many Americans feel when our country is exposed as being imperfect. These Republicans were shamed by their exalted leadership’s debacle in Iraq and believe that American exceptionalism is no longer respected around the world — and they are no longer respected here at home. Trump is a winner and I think this is fundamentally what attracts them to him:

I will be fighting and I will win because I’m somebody that wins. We are in very sad shape as a country and you know why that is? We’re more concerned about political correctness than we are about victory, than we are about winning. We are not going to be so politically correct anymore, we are going to get things done.

But his dark, authoritarian message of intolerance and hate is likely making it difficult for him, or any Republican, to win a national election, particularly since all the other candidates feel compelled to follow his lead. (Those who challenged him, like Perry and Paul, are sinking like a stone in the polls.) And while Trump’s fans may want to blame foreigners for all their troubles, most Americans know that their troubles can be traced to some powerful people right here at home. Powerful people like Donald Trump.

Still, history is littered with strongmen nobody took seriously until it was too late. When someone like Trump captures the imagination of millions of people it’s important to pay attention to what he’s saying.

Back in 1945, Leo Lowenthal was working with Max Horkheimer's project on prejudice for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), that later became famous especially through the book by Theodor Adorno and other collaborators on the projects, The Authoritarian Personality (1951). Lowenthal co-authored with Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949). I posted on that book in six parts, beginning with Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (1 of 6) 05/14/2011.

In a field report during his research, Lowenthal wrote a memo to Horkheimer dated 10/09/1945, on the topic "Christian Front Meeting in Queens Village, Oct. 8, 1945." (Available on the AJC Digital Archive as "Surveillance report on a Christian Front meeting in New York")

Devices: All speeches proved clearly our previously offered theory that fascist agitation rests on the handling of a relatively small number of stimuli devices which recur ever so often. I enumerate a few of them:

(a) the persecuted agitator (finds no printer; encounters travelling dif[ficulties?]
(b) the agitator as a little guy (wants to go to the movies, have his glass of beer)
(c) the agitator as messenger. "I have to speak because nobody else does it"
(d) the necessity of "awakening" America
(e) the enemies as wolves in sheep' [sic] clothes ("they cry persecution and are the persecutors; they ask for tolerance and are the most intolerant)
(f) indirect antisemitic devices (agitator and his people are "crucified"; the phrase of the Asiatic hordes; the phrase of "anti-something" and so on)
(g) the simple-mindedness of the agitator (difficulty in pronouncing high-falluting and foreign words)
(h) the secret machinations ("a lot of things are going on in this country" etc.)
(i) the veiled threat of violence ("I am strong, I can take it up with everybody", etc.)
(j) direct antisemitic references (Jewishness of the New Deal, Jewish monopoly of mass mediae [sic]: newspapers, radio, movies.

Trump, like all the Presidential candidates, poses as a victim of so-called "political correctness" imposed by the Mean Libruls. (In a crackpot far-right theory, it was actually the Frankfurt School of thinkers around the Institute for Social Research of which Horkheimer was head and Adorno and Lowenthal part of the core group that invented political correctness.)

I usually try to avoid use the "fascist" description for groups operating today. Polemical use of the terms over decades has resulting in its meaning in ordinary political conversation or analysis in the US being considerably more blurred than it was in 1945.

Trump hasn't made even indirect anti-Semitic appeals that I'm aware. But his "threat of violence" is hardly "veiled."

Lowenthal included an unflattering description of the Christian Front speakers in a section called "Physiogonmy of Speakers":

Almost every speaker represented an outspoken or nearly outspoken example of those psychopathic types which can be found in the American as well as the European camp of fascist agitators.

There was Kurtz, the stocky, brutal, pycnio [a rust fungi reference?], maniac [sic] depressive type switching from grinning, clowning, to somber threats and outbursts of yelling. His grin which is always in readiness has an almost psychotic note as can be observed in the facial expression of violent insane maniacs. His whole bodily appearance has a faint resemblance to Goering's body type.

There was Maertz who with his little mustache and the studied fierce looks imitates the Hitler pose. He was by far the most effectful [sic] speaker equipped with the intensive and fanatic voice of the schizoid demagogue. Of all the speakers he was the only one who probably would have the power to create an atmosphere of hate and fury.

There was Kister, a boyish-looking man, the type of thin-lipped fanatical followers of a fanatical leader, a watered-down miniature edition of people like Rudolf Hess.

There was Mrs. Brown and her secretary, homely women of the middle fifties' with nothing to boast but real or imaginary sons, symbols of frustration for corresponding female listeners.

Finally one general observation on the outward appearance of the speakers and their henchmen: almost everyone of them was so-to-say a biological stepchild. Kurtz and his chief aide obese; Kister somehow crippled; the women speakers and their female audience were ugly, most of them wearing glasses; among the male followers a one-armed old man, several short-sighted younger people. It was a "racial elite" in reverse.

Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (6 of 6)

Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949)

Carl H. Mote, testifying in 1945 against the United Nations, then as now one of the great bogeymen of the Radical Right; he was fond of calling its predecessor organization the "Jewish League of Nations"

In elaborating the role of malaise in the context of the agitator, they caution that it is not something that can easily be documented by direct quotes from agitator’s speeches, but rather an analytical judgment: "It is an hypothesis, but it is a highly plausible one, because its only alternative would be to see the maze of agitational statements as a lunatic product beyond analysis."

It speaks for the value of their hypothesis that so much in this book sounds surprisingly and disturbingly current. Even though Muslim terrorism and abortion weren’t issues on the political horizon in the US yet. They describe malaise arising from condition “basic to modern society.” This offers a major explanation of why our present-day advanced societies are perpetually susceptible to such agitation. In a passage characteristic of the Frankfurt School outlook, they write, “Although malaise actually reflects social reality, it also veils and distorts it. Malaise is neither an illusion of the audience nor a mere imposition by the agitator; it is a psychological symptom of an oppressive situation.” And in the same vein:

Malaise is a consequence of the depersonalization and permanent insecurity of modern life. Yet it has never been felt among people so strongly as in the past few decades. The inchoate protest, the sense of disenchantment, and the vague complaints and forebodings that are already perceptible in late nineteenth century art and literature have been diffused into general consciousness. There they function as a kind of vulgarized romanticism, a Weltschmerz in perpetuum, a sickly sense of disturbance that is subterranean but explosive. The intermittent and unexpected acts of violence on the part of the individual and the similar acts of violence to which whole nations can be brought are indices of this underground torment. Vaguely sensing that something has gone astray in modern life but also strongly convinced that he lacks the power to right whatever is wrong (even if it were possible to discover what is wrong), the individual lives in a sort of eternal adolescent uneasiness. [my emphasis in bold] (p. 17)

Löwenthal’s and Guterman's description of the Simple Americans theme of agitation is striking, not least because it is so enduring – although today with call the Real Americans. As opposed to, say, an illegitimate black Marxist Kenyan Muslim President. They write:

The agitator makes no genuine appeal to solidarity. Even when he addresses himself to the vast majority of "American Americans" he suggests that what unites them is the common danger they face in the Jew. By making their precarious situation their major sign of identification, he retains his manipulative power over them. Under the guise of granting his followers identity the agitator denies it to them. He says in effect: If you belong to the common people you need not ask for something else because it is quite enough to be considered one of the common people rather than an enemy of the people. Anything else might expose you. For both he and his audience feel that the cement of our social structure is not love, solidarity, or friendship, but the drive to survive; and in his appeal to his followers, as well as in his portrait of their characters, there is no room for solidarity. There is only fear. [my emphasis] (pp. 108-9)



Them scary intellectuals

The theme of anti-intellectualism is one they discuss under the heading of Simple Americans. So many examples of this abound today that they hardly need mentioning. Though Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin come quickly to mind. They describe this twist:

That the agitator refers to his followers as common folk, a kind of "proletarian élite," might seem offhand to suggest that he seeks to disavow the anti-democratic implications of his discriminatory statements by the use of a well-tested device. But this is also a device which by its very nature often tends to transform democratic psychological patterns into totalitarian ones. Closely related to the common resentment against anyone who dares be different and hence implicitly directed against minority groups, it establishes conformism as a moral principle, a good in itself.

Seizing on the "simple folk" theme as a pretext for fostering an aggressively anti-intellectual attitude, the agitator describes his American Americans as a people of sound instincts and, he is happy to say, little sophistication. He suggests that, on one level, the conflict between his followers and the enemy is nothing but a clash between simple minds and wise guys, level-headed realists and crazy sophisticates. He delights his followers by proclaiming his own lack of intellectuality:

I do not understand political science, as an authority from an academic viewpoint. I am not familiar with the artistic masterpieces of Europe, but I do say this tonight: I understand the hearts of the American people. [quote from Gerald K. Smith, 1936]

[my emphasis in bold] (p. 109)

There is a deeply ambiguous side of this appeal that makes it effective as a form of far-right agitation. In this example, they are assuming an anti-Semitic agitator, but a different target would serve (Muslims, foreigners, bureaucrats in black helicopters):

The agitator, in praising the simple folk, praises only their humble and folksy ways, in which the latent savagery and brutality that is both repressed and generated by modern culture, still manifests itself. He offers them little else.

Attracted by the promise of a new spiritual home, the audience actually gets the tautological assurance that Americans are Americans, and Christians Christians. The simple American is a member of an élite by virtue of birth but in the last analysis, he can only be defined in negatives: he is a Christian because he is not a Jew; he is an American because he is not a foreigner; he is a simple fellow because he is not an intellectual. The only positive means the agitator has of identifying the Simple American is as a follower. The adherent who turned to the agitator in the vague hope of finding identity and status ends as more than ever an anonymous member of a characterless mass - a lonely cipher in an army of regimented ciphers. [my emphasis in bold] (pp. 110-11)

This is why it's so fitting that Sarah Palin, in her acceptance speech for the Republican Vice Presidential nomination in 2008, quoted Westbrook Pegler, an obnoxious old hardcore rightwinger of the sort that Löwenthal and Gutermann studied for this book. Quoted him on the virtue of people in small towns. The Simple Americans. The Real Americans.

Tags: anti-semitism, leo lowenthal, norbert guterman, prophets of deceit, radical right

Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (5 of 6)

Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949)

William Dudley Pelley (1890–1965)

While it may be practically impossible for an active politician to talk about political marketing in such terms, Löwenthal and Guterman are writing as social scientists:

The agitator does not spin his grumblings out of thin air. The modern individual's sense of isolation, his so-called spiritual homelessness, his bewilderment in the face of the seemingly impersonal forces of which he feels himself a helpless victim, his weakening sense of values - all these motifs often recur in modern sociological writings. This malaise reflects the stresses imposed on the individual by the profound transformations taking place in our economic and social structure—the replacement of the class of small independent producers by gigantic industrial bureaucracies, the decay of the patriarchal family, the breakdown of primary personal ties between individuals in an increasingly mechanized world, the compartmentalization and atomization of group life, and the substitution of mass culture for traditional patterns.

These objective causes have been operating for a long time with steadily increasing intensity. They are ubiquitous and apparently permanent, yet they are difficult to grasp because they are only indirectly related to specific hardships or frustrations. Their accumulated psychological effect is something akin to a chronic disturbance, an habitual and not clearly defined malaise which seems to acquire a life of its own and which the victim cannot trace to any known source. (p. 15)

The agitator exploits this condition, not to engage his audience in a program of action that would constructively address the underlying issues, but in a way to win followers in a way that “tricks his audience into accepting the very situation that produced its malaise.” And the rightwing agitator does this by directing his audience to focus not on what is producing this discontent but on who the agitator claims is hurting them. The Jews. The blacks. The Muslims. Liberals. Feminists. Gays. Pointy-headed intellectuals (a George Wallace favorite). The Insiders (a John Birch Society special). Immigrants (a perennial favorite). Unions. Communists.

This is not to say that there are no genuine villains in the world. There are plenty of them, individuals and institutions. But the distinction Löwenthal and Gutermann make with this particular kind of agitator is that they exploit vague feelings by giving their audience a phony villain and then have them focus on hatred of the villain, not on any real solution:

Those afflicted by the malaise ascribe social evil not to an unjust or obsolete form of society or to a poor organization of an adequate society, but rather to activities of individuals or groups motivated by innate impulses. For the agitator these impulses are biological in nature, they function beyond and above history: Jews, for instance, are evil—a "fact" which the agitator simply takes for granted as an inherent condition that requires no explanation or development. Abstract intellectual theories do not seem to the masses as immediately "real" as their own emotional reactions. It is for this reason that the emotions expressed in agitation appear to function as an independent force, which exists prior to the articulation of any particular issue, is expressed by this articulation, and continues to exist after it.

Malaise can be compared to a skin disease. The patient who .suffers from such a disease has an instinctive urge to scratch his skin. If he follows the orders of a competent doctor, he will refrain from scratching and seek a cure for the cause of his itch. But if he succumbs to his unreflective reaction, he will scratch all the more vigorously. This irrational exercise of self-violence will give him a certain kind of relief, but it will at the same time increase his need to scratch and will in no way cure his disease. The agitator says: keep scratching. [my emphasis] (p. 16)

In this context, vagueness is a special virtue:

Here the agitator turns to account what might appear his greatest disadvantage - his inability to relate the discontent to an obvious causal base. While most other political movements promise a cure for a specific, and therefore limited, social ailment, the modern agitator, because he himself indirectly voices the malaise, can give the impression that he aims to cure some chronic, ultimate condition. And so, he insinuates, while others fumble with the symptoms, he attacks the very roots of the disease in that he voices the totality of modern feeling. (p. 16)

Concludes in Part 6

Tags: anti-semitism, leo lowenthal, norbert guterman, prophets of deceit, radical right

Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (4 of 6)

Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949)



Excerpt from a 1936 speech by Gerald L. K. Smith (1898-1976), anti-Semite and founder of groups like the Christian Nationalist Party

Löwenthal and Guterman use these categories they use to describe the various aspects of rightwing demagoguery:

1. The Eternal Dupes: convincing followers that they have been deceived but doing so not with the aim of actually educating them but of making them dependent on the agitator
2. Conspiracy: invoking a deliberate and secret plot of evil groups and individuals, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a classic document of that type
3. Forbidden Fruit: portraying the enemy as indulging pleasures denied to the audience
4. Disaffection: exploiting cynicism about existing political parties and social values
5. Charade of Doom: invoking the fear of an impending catastrophe without offering a meaningful "positive alternative"
6. The Reds: meaning Communists, not Republicans; a perpetual favorite even in 2011, long after the fall of the Soviet Union
7. The Plutocrats: adopting terms similar to leftist class struggle talk but with the intention of focusing it on a narrower group, like Jewish bankers or the Federal Reserve
8. The Corrupt Government: obviously a perennial favorite, used to "play on the inchoate suspicions of his audience that vague impersonal and irresistible powers determine the destiny of the nation."
9. The Foreigner: always a good topic for fear-mongering, it seems
10. Creatures of the Underworld: this involved what Dave Neiwert calls "eliminationist" framing
11. Call to the Hunt: rousing followers to "a cold, abstract, standardized fury that is closer to the paranoiac's destructive rage than to the passion of hatred."
12. The Victim: here is focus is on anti-Semitism, the agitator’s claim being that Jews are persecuted because they deserve to be
13. The Other: defining the enemy group as not-one-of-us
14. The Menace: imputing various threatening characteristics to the enemy
15. Either-Or: here they mean not simply Manichaean thinking, but the process by which the agitator moves his followers to a new set of values while pretending to defend the good old ones
16. Endogamic Community: finding themes like nationalism to bind the audience together as an in-group
17. Housecleaning: part of eliminationist thinking, related to "Creatures of the Underworld"
18. Simple Americans: the same concept as Sarah Palin’s "real Americans"
19. Watchdogs of Order: offering his followers the promise of "sadistic gratification" as future enforcers of order; this gets at the peculiar contrast between rightwingers’ simultaneous reverence for authority and hatred of the government
20. Great Little Man: identifying oneself with the audience while "By his very protestations that he is quite the same as the mass of Americans he smuggles in hints of his exceptional status"
21. Bullet-Proof Martyr: "For all his insistence that he is one of the common folk, he does not hesitate to declare that he is an exceptionally gifted man who knows and even admires his own talent" – and has a special mission for which he is being "singled out by the enemy" but which he accepts as his duty

Since the full text is freely available online, I won’t try to try to explain each of those in more detail. But following are some of the observations that I found particularly striking.

Conservatives and the commentariat have made "malaise" a term of mockery for the Carter Administration, the idea being that Carter believed that there was a generalized feeling of discontent, malaise, that was making people lose confidence in government. Eric Alterman recently invoked the term in Obama’s Awful '70s Show Echoes Jimmy Carter The Daily Beast 04/25/2011. A speech Carter made on July 15, 1979 became known as the "malaise" speech, though he didn't use the term in the speech; he referred to a "crisis of confidence." The "malaise" term for the speech apparently came from the memorandum by Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell that led to the ill-fated speech.

Löwenthal and Guterman make the concept of malaise central to the understanding of how the agitator markets his ideas to the audience that is receptive to it:

The analyst of agitation now faces the problem: are these merely fleeting, insubstantial, purely accidental and personal emotions blown up by the agitator into genuine complaints or are they themselves a constant rooted in the social structure? The answer seems unavoidable: these feelings cannot be dismissed as either accidental or imposed, they are basic to modern society. Distrust, dependence, exclusion, anxiety, and disillusionment blend together to form a fundamental condition of modern life: malaise. [my emphasis] (p. 14)

They do not define malaise here as a passing condition or an individual feeling, but rather "a fundamental condition of modern life." Although it does appear to the individual as a purely personal feeling: "On the plane of immediate awareness, the malaise seems to originate in the individual's own depths and is experienced by him as an apparently isolated and purely psychic or spiritual crisis."

Continued in Part 5

Tags: anti-semitism, leo lowenthal, norbert guterman, prophets of deceit, radical right

Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (3 of 6)

Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949)

Radio demagogue Father Charles Coughlin (1897-1979)

Löwenthal and Guterman devote a chapter to "what the listener heard," in which they attempt to interpret how the listeners receive the massages from the agitator. When one is dealing with fringe groups such as extremist political sects or with cult groups (not at all mutually exclusive categories!), interpreting the vocabulary can be a challenge. Because they often give words and phrases a very different meaning that the larger society assumes them to have, such as anti-Semites using "New York City" as a synonym for "the Jews." Or, another anti-Semitic usage, referring to "German bankers" to mean Jewish bankers. Those not initiated into the particular vocabulary can literally be hearing a whole different message than the agitator’s loyal followers understand.

Löwenthal and Guterman refer to the agitator messaging as employing "a kind of secret psychological language," "a psychological Morse Code tapped out by the agitator and picked up by the followers." For the groups they studied, this coding was so key that they argue, "The themes cannot be understood in terms of their manifest content":

... the distinction between the manifest and latent meaning of an agitational text must be seen as crucial. Taken at their face value, agitational texts seem merely as indulgence in futile furies about vague disturbances. Translated into their psychological equivalents, agitational texts are seen as consistent, meaningful, and significantly related to the social world. (p. 140)

Does this mean that they are saying that the followers are being manipulated by the agitators? Of course. There are all kinds of scamsters in the world, certainly including political ones. And the kinds of agitators they describe are among them:

In all his output, the agitator engages in an essentially ambiguous activity. He never merely says; he always hints. His suggestions manage to slip through the nets of rational meaning - those nets that seem unable to contain so many contemporary utterances. To know what he is and what he says, we have to follow him into the underground of meaning—the unexpressed or half-expressed content of his hints, allusions, doubletalk.

Always, then, the agitator appeals to those elements of the contemporary malaise that involve a rejection of traditional western values. As we have seen in the previous chapter, he directs all of his themes to one ultimate aim: his followers are to place all their faith in his person— a new, externalized, and brutal superego. Except through translation into their psychological referents, it is impossible to understand modern agitational themes.

Legal pressure and social stigma can also contribute to this devious use of language. Even in cases where such a fringe group may be perfectly free to meet and advocate for their cause, and are socially ignored rather than actively stigmatized, they may still perceive themselves to be facing such threats.

Continued in Part 4

Tags: anti-semitism, leo lowenthal, norbert guterman, prophets of deceit, radical right

Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (2 of 6)

Gerald Winrod (1900–1957), radical Christian cleric and notorious anti-Semite

Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949)

Now, political speech is not the same as a scholarly paper designed to be read at an academic conference. Politicians of any kind need an ability to judge their audiences and communicate sometimes complex ideas in accessible ways. Campaigning and political organizing always have an element of marketing; they too frequently don’t amount to much but marketing. However, that doesn’t mean there is no meaningful distinction to be made between political styles, or between the demagogue and a run-of-the-mill politician. Löwenthal and Guterman explain it this way:

When the agitator tells his listeners that they are "pushed" or "kicked" around and are victimized by bankers and bureaucrats, he exploits feelings that they already have. Such stereotypes as "Wall Street machinations," "monopolist conspiracies," or "international spies" are present, however, not as well-defined ideas, but as tentative suspicions about the meaning of complex phenomena. As inadequate reflections of reality, they might serve as starting points for analysis of the economic and political situations.

The agitator proceeds in exactly the opposite way. He refers to popular stereotypes only to encourage the vague resentments they reflect. He uses them not as springboards for analysis but rather as "analyses" themselves - the world is complicated because there are groups whose purpose it is to make it complicated. On a social scale he stirs his audience to reactions similiar [sic] to those of paranoia on an individual scale, and his primary means of doing this is by indefinitely extending the concept of conspiracy.

Where others might speak of the ultimate implications of a political program he sees a deliberate plot: the New Deal is nothing but "good Marxian sabotage to break down the existing order ..."... The B'nai Brith is "a worldwide spy and pressure system" which has "unlimited funds" and "maintains its own Gestapo." … Even such a trivial occurrence as a polemical attack on a senator is sufficient for the agitator to evoke a "secret society" for "smearing of individual members of the senate." Phrases like the "Hidden Hand" or "International Invisible Government" appear in his writings and speeches again and again. (pp. 24-25)

I would add that one signal that a given explanation is based on a conspiracy theory is if it completely disregards human frailties and the not inconsiderable number of times that bad things happen because people in authority make dumb mistakes. Not to get too far off the topic and the time period, but some of the Kennedy assassination theories require assuming such a perfectly executed, intricate plan involving so many people that it would have to have exceeded all known human capacities to actually be pulled off.

Löwenthal's and Guterman's explanation just quoted gets to the "just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you" factor. Bad things do happen. Criminal conspiracies do take place. (See Watergate, Iran-Contra, Jack Abramoff.) Powerful decision-makers do things that affect many people’s lives unfavorably. The difference they point out here is that it's one thing to say, “Wall Street is screwing up” and use that observation to advocate a new regulation to limit the use of derivatives or raise requirement for bank capital. It’s another to use it to promote a vague notion that secret powers are doing bad secret things. They go on to explain how scapegoats eventually get substituted as targets for the anger, fear and hatred the agitator hopes to inspire in his audience. They call it "the process of blurring reality by encouraging paranoiac tendencies." (p. 25)

Continued in Part 3

Tags: anti-semitism, leo lowenthal, norbert guterman, prophets of deceit, radical right

Studies in Prejudice: Prophets of Deceit (1 of 6)

Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949)

The focus of this study by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman was on far-right sect leaders including Leon de Aryan, Court Asher, Charles Coughlin, Elizabeth Dilling, Charles Hudson, Carl Mote, William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Gerald Winrod. Of that unsavory lot, Coughlin, Smith, Pelley and Winrod are often mentioned in referring to the Radical Right of the 1930s. So is Elizabeth Dilling, who achieved new currency recently when Glenn Beck discovered her book The Red Network (1934), gushing about it on-air. De Aryan, Asher, Hudson and Mote have pretty much sunk to the totally obscurity that all of them deserve.

Elizabeth Dilling 1894-1966

Simon Maloy of Media Matters discussed Beck and Dilling in Why is Beck promoting an anti-Semite on the radio? 06/04/2010 and More on Glenn Beck's new favorite anti-Semitic author, Elizabeth Dilling 06/04/2010. Dave Neiwert also provides a good account in Now Glenn Beck loves American Nazi sympathizers: Promotes book by prominent Hitler advocate of the 1930s C&L 06/05/2011. Maloy in the first of those posts calls her “one of the more prolific anti-Semites of the mid-20th century.” Maloy and Neiwert both quotes Glen Jeansonne and writer David Luhrssen from their article on Dilling in Women and war: a historical encyclopedia from antiquity to the present, Volume 1 (2006), Bernard Cook, ed., which gives a good brief summary of the political environment of which Dilling was part:

When World War II began in 1939, Dilling was part of the national network of anti-Semitics, anti-Communists, and Nazi sympathizers such as Father Charles Coughlin, Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, Reverend Gerald Winrod, and William Dudley Pelley. Material generated by Nazi organizations in Germany to inspire race hated and exploit dissatisfaction in the United States found its way into Dilling's publications. She spoke at rallies hosted by the leading U.S. Nazi organization, the German-American Bund, and had traveled to Germany, pronouncing the country as flourishing under Hitler.

Dilling called for appeasing Germany; she blamed the war on Jews and Communists and accused the Roosevelt administration of being controlled by Jewish Communists. ... After Pearl Harbor, Dilling resisted wartime rationing and denounced the Allies.

She lived until 1966:

Dilling spent the remainder of her life publishing broadsides against the north Atlantic Treaty Organization [Old Right isolationists opposed the treaty], foreign aid, the income tax, racial mixing, the fluoridation of water, the Vietnam War, and the war on poverty. She had long been dismissed as a crank before her death in 1966, although some of her literature continues to be cited in right-wing circles.

Löwenthal and Gutermann use the term "agitator" in this book to refer specifically to far-right speakers and groups. That was the focus of their study. They didn't attempt to make comparisons to groups on the left outside the mainstream like the Communist Party. In this summary, I follow their usage of "agitator."

Continued in Part 2

Tags: anti-semitism, leo lowenthal, norbert guterman, prophets of deceit, radical right