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Fascism in the United States arose alongside its rise in Europe around the Twenties and has continued to exist perennially, on a smaller scale, through the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Background

Since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, United States society had been underpinned to support fascism, decades before Hitler came to power. In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. The idea of racial superiority was widely accepted. For example, the author L. Frank Baum wrote:"The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. . Whites had used their political and economic power to segregate public spaces and facilities in law and establish social dominance over blacks in the South. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the antisemitic works of Henry Ford, and the identification of Jews with Bolshevism, (a concept used pejoratively in the country) further prepared the American society to naturally accept the nazi phylosophy. Immigration legislation enacted in the United States in 1921 and 1924 was interpreted widely as being at least partly anti-Jewish in intent because it strictly limited the immigration quotas of eastern European nations with large Jewish populations, nations from which approximately 3 million Jews had immigrated to the United States by 1920.

The pre-nazist idea breaks the religion, place of origem and the skin color barrier in California. The 1909 California eugenics law, gave first step towards embracing fascism by allowing for state institutions to sterilize the white Americans deemed “unfit” or “feeble-minded”. The eugenics law in California, by 1921, had accounted for 80% of the sterilizations nationwide. The number of sterilizations began to decrease, largely due to the fallout of Hitler's eugenics movement by the end of World War II. There were about 20,000 forced sterilizations in California between 1909 and 1963.

Interbellum

Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, grew into a mass movement promoting German pride and anti-Semitism, and expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The party early financing is considered to be partially worked by Eckart and with raised money through Beer Hall Parties by Feder, but later Henry Ford provided early financial support to Hitler and the Nazi movement.

In the end of 1922, the New York Times reported that Ford was financing Hitler's nationalist and anti-Semitic movements in Munich. Ford Sr. sent to Hitler a personal monetary "birthday gift" every April 20 until 1944 through Swiss or Swedish banks every year, and, in 1938, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle medal by Hitler. Ford's anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans during the mid-1920s: a time when Ku Klux Klan membership had reached four million and discriminatory immigration policies were enacted favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over other parts of the world. Not only Ford, but many others American companies and personalities offered their support to the ideology and practices associated with the fascism.

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp., a bank controlled by the German nationalist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped bankroll Hitler’s rise to power. The bank was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act because of its ties to Thyssen. Union Banking chairman was E. Roland Harriman, the brother of former New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman were major shareholders of the bank. Both, the Harrimans and Bush were partners of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., an investment firm which handled the financial transactions of Union Banking as well as other financial dealings with several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated during World War II. Similarly, the oil tycoon, Fred Koch partnered with William Rhodes Davis to build the third-largest oil refinery serving the Third Reich, a project which was personally approved by Adolf Hitler. Koch President and COO David L. Robertson acknowledged that Winkler-Koch provided the cracking unit for the 1934 Hamburg refinery that would later supply fuel to its air force, the Luftwaffe Koch joined new partners in 1940 to create the Wood River Oil and Refining Company, which later became known as Koch Industries. Another oil tycoon, Torkild Rieber, the chairman of the Texas Company provided the fuel for powering the squadrons of aircraft on loan from Hitler for bombing the city of Guernica, murdering thousands of civilians, something that was shockingly new during a time.

Beginning in 1930 the Rockefeller Foundation provided financial support to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, which later inspired and conducted eugenics experiments in the Third Reich. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Nazi racial studies even after it was clear that this research was being used to rationalize the demonizing of Jews and other groups. Up until 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation was funding research used to support Nazi racial science studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWIA). Reports submitted to Rockefeller did not hide what these studies were being used to justify, but Rockefeller continued the funding and refrained from criticizing this research so closely derived from Nazi ideology. The Rockefeller Foundation did not alert "the world to the nature of German science and the racist folly" that German anthropology promulgated, and Rockefeller funded, for years after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws.

See also

• Free Society of Teutonia
• German American Bund
• Silver Legion of America
• National Alliance (United States)
• National Vanguard (American organization)
• Hitlerland
• Antisemitism in the United States
• Racism in the United States
• Neo-Nazi groups of the United States

References

1. Nagorski, Andrew (March 2013). Americans for Hitler – The Bund. pp. 15–16. ISBN 9781439191019. Retrieved September 23, 2016. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)

   They (the Nazi) had experienced the humiliation of Germany’s wartime defeat and occupation, and the social and political chaos that reigned there afterward. Many were young, middle-class professionals, and some had participated in street fighting against socialists and communists. Once in America, these fascists formed political groups like the Teutonia Association, founded in Detroit in 1924.

2. "True Americanism": The Rise of America 's Nazis in the Great Depression by Patrick Rodriguez, published by University of Colorado Boulder (2014)

   The German-American Bund was composed of more people than simply Fritz Kuhn and the German Foreign Institute. Living and thinking individuals filled its ranks,... in The Nazi Movement...the United States 1924

3. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States 1924-1941, pg 48.

   The DAI, or German Foreign Institute, played an essential role in the proliferation of early American Nazism. This organization, more than any other, took advantage of the outflow of German emigrants in the 1920s to spread its ideology beyond the borders of Weimar Germany. Most specifically, it targeted Germans leaving for the United States.

4. The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s by Paul V. Murphy

   To some degree, this provincialism marked a significant missed opportunity for the American Nazi movement. Throughout the 1920s, racial suspicion and ethnic nativism permeated American political discourse. One example came in the populist resurgence of Ku Klux Klan, whose chauvinism and violent bigotry against Jews, African-Americans, and other ethnic undesirables stood in stark contrast to the isolated actions of the Teutonia Association. Perhaps if Fritz Gissibl and the rest of the DAI noticed this aspect, American fascism's influence would have grown long before the 1930s.

5. "True Americanism": The Rise of America 's Nazis in the Great Depression by Patrick Rodriguez, published by University of Colorado Boulder (2014)

   The Great Depression played an essential role in the proliferation and consequent prosecution of the German-American Bund. Economic and cultural trauma associated with the depression, combined with ethnic alienation experienced by interwar German-Americans, allowed the appeal of ascism to spread to citizens within the United States. This phenomenon implies that while the American Nazi movement began as an organized attempt by Nazi Germany to spread propaganda internationally,... the Nazi group in a period of United States history that emphasizes popular shifts in radical ideology.

6. Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman

   In the early 20th century, the US, with its vigorous and creative legal culture, led the world in racist lawmaking. That was not only true of the Jim Crow South. It was true on the national level as well. The US had race-based immigration law, admired by racists all over the world; and the Nazis, like their Right-wing European successors today (and so many US voters) were obsessed with the dangers posed by immigration.

7. Van Ells, Mark D. (August 2007). Hitlerland American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power. Vol. 3. pp. 44–49. Retrieved May 13, 2016. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
8. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (Yale UP, 1974) and Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan and Richard Pildes, The Law of Democracy(Foundation press, 1998).
9. "Saturday Pioneer, December 20, 1890"
10. "L. Frank Baum's Editorials on the Sioux Nation" at the Wayback Machine (archived December 9, 2007) Full text of both, with commentary by professor A. Waller Hastings
11. Murphy, Edgar Gardner. The Problems of the Present South. 1910, p. 37
12. Brooks, Michael E. (2014). The Ku Klux Klan in Wood County, Ohio. The History Press. {{cite book}}: Check |first1= value (help)
13. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford University Press, 1998)
14. The International Jew. The World's Foremost Problem. Being a Reprint of a Series of Articles Appearing in The Dearborn Independent from May 22 ... 1920 Dearborn, Mich. Dearborn Publishing Co., 1920-1922
15. Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, "Żydzi w kierownictwie UB. Stereotyp czy rzeczywistość?", Biuletyn IPN (11/2005), pp. 37-42
16. Glen Jeansonne (9 June 1997). Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II. University of Chicago Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-226-39589-0.
17. Laqueur, Walter Ze'ev (1965-01-01). Russia and Germany. Transaction Publishers. p. 105. ISBN 9781412833547.
18. The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics by Edwin Black (2003)
19. Miroslava, C. (2007). "Ja2". Pacific Historical Review.(registration required)
20. "Eugenics in California".
21. Cohen, Elizabeth; Bonifield, John (March 2012). "California's dark legacy of forced sterilizations". CNN.
22. following as the antecedent of the German Workers' Party
23. HISTORY, Education. "NAZI PARTY". A&E Television Networks.
24. Raise, Of Hitler. "Nazi Party is Formed". The History Place.
25. Diner, Hasia. "Ford's Anti-Semitism". WGBH Educational Foundation.
26. Page 2, Column 8. "New York Times, Dec. 20, 1922: "BERLIN HEARS FORD IS BACKING HITLER"". The New York Times.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
27. Ford and the Führer Research assistance provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. by Ken Silverstein, published by "The Nation" (2000)
28. KU KLUX KLAN by Southern Poverty Law Center
29. Top 10 American Companies that Aided the Nazis by Dustin Koski, published by "History In Culture" (2015)
30. Bush bank tied to Nazi funding by The Washington Times on October 17, 2003
31. Documents: Bush's Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler by Foxnews on October 17, 2003
32. Confessore, Nicholas (January 11, 2016). "Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says". The New York Times. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
33. Confessore, Nicholas (January 12, 2016). "Koch Executive Disputes Book's Account of Founder's Role in Nazi Refinery". Retrieved January 13, 2016.
34. The Oilman Who Loved Dictators: How Texaco Supported Fascism by Adam Hochschild published on March 21, 2016
35. J. Howard, Marshall II (1994). Done in Oil: An Autobiography. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 0-89096-533-1. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
36. Majfud, Jorge (June 28, 2016). "Rescuing Memory: the Humanist Interview with Noam Chomsky". Retrieved December 21, 2016.
37. Stevenson, William (1976). William Stevenson A Man Called Intrepid. Skyhorse Publishing. p. 75. ISBN 978-1-62914-360-6.
38. Schmuhl, Hans Walter (2008). Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945. : Springer. p. 87.
39. Black, Edwin (9 November 2003). "Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 20 November 2013.
40. (Gretchen Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)
41. Schmuhl, Hans-Walter (2003). The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927-1945". Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 259. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4020-6599-6.

• History

• Fascism
• Political movements
• Fascism by country
• Political ideologies
• American fascist movements
• Racism in the United States
• History of the United States
• Neo-fascism
• Political history of the United States
• Far-right politics in the United States
• Neo-Nazism in the United States