We have never been Nazis: Forgetting the far right in interwar America

Abstract

During the 1930s, fascist ideologies and organizations were in vogue not only in Europe but also in the United States. Although they did not speak with one voice, interwar American fascist organizations sought to implement a white Christian ethnostate and were often willing to use violence to achieve their goals. The German-American Bund, with at least 100,000 members, was perhaps the best-known among them. Yet today, the history of the Bund and numerous allied groups is little known to Americans. This article seeks to account for this forgetting. Oral histories of Americans who grew up during the interwar period show that many of them still remembered the Bund and its activities when they were interviewed decades later. Analyzing the emotions expressed by these interviewees offers clues as to why many of those who remembered the Bund tended to downplay its significance: they saw it as laughable and believed it posed little real threat to American society. The widespread belief in the deviance of far right activists meant that collective memories of organizations such as the Bund were never institutionalized, and subsequently faded from public life. This forgetting, I argue, has contributed to making the contemporary influence of authoritarian ideas and movements more difficult for Americans to grasp.