I introduced this series yesterday by suggesting that the post-Civil War South saw the beginning of a proto-fascist movement in the United States. This is a heavy claim to make and requires quite a bit of legwork. I’ll get right into it, then.

The most interesting thing about attempting to define fascism is that looking for comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis isn’t really a useful place to start. German fascism was very different from Italian fascism and different again from Spanish fascism. They started from different places but ended up in a similar space that we’ve labeled “fascism” ever since.

So we must start by talking about where fascism came from. We can actually get a pretty big clue from the origins of the word itself. The term originated with “fasces,” a Latin word for an ax bundled inside of elm or birch rods. It was a symbol of authority in the Roman Republic. In the late 19th Century the image was appropriated by workers’ parties in Italy, the most famous of which, eventually, was the one run by Benito Mussolini.

In the aftermath of WWI Mussolini and his compatriots were angry with the Italian government for not taking advantage of the end of WWI and expanding Italy’s borders. They believed Italy was the true heir to the Roman Empire and that the key to survival as a nation was to take that heritage in philosophy and action. This is why Mussolini claimed that his ultimate goal was to turn the Mediterranean into a “Roman lake” yet again. In Italy the root of fascism was imperialism. The fascists appealed to a mythological interpretation of Italian history as descending directly from and deserving of the laurels of the Roman Empire.

Spanish fascism, as lead by General Franco and the Nationalists, was a different story. It was rooted in civil war and fear of both communism and anarchism. Franco and the Nationalists declared themselves defenders of Christian civilization against the slavering hordes of communists and anarchists who were trying to destroy Spain.

German fascism grew out of anger. The reparations foisted upon the Germans after Versailles were punitive and impossible. It was, at its core, anti-communist and racist, appealing to a German national identity that we all recognize now as the Aryan supremacy. The attempted extermination of all Jews receives the most attention, but the Nazis were indiscriminate, attempting to exterminate homosexuals, gypsies, and all other undesirable elements in order to create a purified Germany. One of the interesting things about the early years of the Nazi party was that although it was deeply rooted in anti-communist rhetoric it did not support the notions of a wealthy class or unrestrained corporate power.

This was one of the key aspects of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. They believed in a merging of the government and industry and complete mobilization of the citizenry to achieve the national goals of prosperity and strength. This is not all that different from the communist ideal of the workers taking over the means of production and, I believe, one of the many reasons that current discussion of fascism confuses and obliterates the distinction between communism and fascism. The communist ideal was for the workers to rise up and throw off the shackles of their bourgeois oppressors. The fascist ideal was to put the government in charge of the means of production in order to homogenize the actions of the state.

In order to understand American fascism we must look at other aspects of the fascist movements of the 20th Century. Many historians with much better credentials than I possess have tried and failed to come to a universal understanding of fascism so I won’t even try. I only wish to draw in broad strokes.

First of all, the fascists were all deeply nationalistic. Moreover, within that nationalism they were tribal, appealing to a notion of the proper Italian, German, or Spaniard. This notion of the proper person was different and based on the ideal of that particular nation. Having identified a true and proper person they then defined their enemies. Communists were always on the top of that list. Jews were on the list in Germany because of good, old-fashioned antisemitism and the ancient notion that the people were poor because the rich Jewish bankers had stolen all of their money.

Second, they were based on a mythology of power. The Italian fascists pointed back to the Roman Empire as their true birthright. The Nazis were heavily into the idea of an ancient race of perfect humans handing down the perfect forms of government and society.

Third, they required a narrative of stolen glory. The Italian fascists believed the government had sold the Italian people short in the wake of WWI. The Nazis believed they were being victimized by the reparations in the wake of WWI (which, in their defense, they were). In each case, though, the nation was once great and had been destroyed. There was a group or collection of groups that were responsible for that downfall. The failures were emphatically never the responsibility of the state or the right kinds of citizens.

Fourth, fascism itself is, at its core, a cult of personality. Mussolini and Franco were leaders of their parties and drew their followers to themselves as much as, if not more than, the parties they represented. The Nazis chose Hitler as their leader because they saw him as a galvanizing and controlling force over the people. We would not have had the Fascist Party without Mussolini and the word itself would still just be a description of a Roman ceremonial device languishing in the minds and books of professors of antiquity. The Nazis would be a footnote in the history books without Hitler.

This is the core of fascism to which I compare the post-Civil War South. The tribal part of the nationalistic fervor, the mythology of power, and the narrative of stolen glory are key parts of the Southern myth. The actual nationalism is harder to find and the cult of personality is almost entirely missing.

Tribalism in the American South is pretty easy to explain. White Christians were the main tribe, with slave-holders and plantation owners as a sub-tribe. Following the Civil War, the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the advent of Reconstruction the white Christian in the South was beset on all sides by inferiors in the form of freedmen, Northern carpetbaggers, and Southern scalawags.

The mythology of power in the South wasn’t based on any particular ancient tradition. It was simply based on the notion that the Southern man was a gentleman possessed of a true martial spirit. The Southern man could shoot, ride, and fight better than any Northern man.

This culminated in the Lost Cause Myth, which satisfies the narrative of stolen glory. According to proponents of the Lost Cause the South should have won the war. There was no reason for it to fail, really, as the South had all of the courage and martial prowess and the North had none. According to this Southern men like Albert Sydney Johnston, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson were virtuous nobles. Certain Southern generals, James Longstreet especially, were considered betrayers of the South. Longstreet was called a traitor simply because he cautioned Lee at Gettysburg when Lee was pushing too hard against the Army of the Potomac. Northern men like Ulysses S Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan were monsters. The Northern soldier was inferior. The North only won because it could afford to field larger armies.

The Lost Cause Myth is also the source of the greatest lie of the post-Civil War South. The claim that the South only seceded over the issue of States’ Rights originated in the Lost Cause. It’s a rather complicated series of justifications, but it basically goes like this: slavery was a benign institution at worst and beneficial to the African at best because they were a docile, lower creature best suited to be ruled by their betters. The North was engaging in long-term economic aggression to ruin the Southern way of life. The South, then, had to secede in order to maintain its quality of life. This, to some extent, satisfies the nationalism aspect of the definition of fascism. Had the South actually succeeded in seceding they may well have developed a fervent nationalism. It was simply impossible for a true nationalism to evolve in the South due to the fact that the Southern nation was only theoretical. There’s also an aspect that’s harder to explain but that basically says that “nationalism” as we understand it now wasn’t possible in the mid-19th Century American South. The men who fought for the Confederacy saw themselves as Texans or Virginians or Alabamans before they saw themselves as Americans.

The final key is the cult of personality. There were several potential personalities for the post-Civil War South to follow. Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, was about as close as anyone came. The one man who could have unified enough of a movement was Robert E Lee. He, thankfully, wanted none of that and instead chose to retire quietly. He died in 1870 at the height of Reconstruction.

So we have three of the four ingredients necessary to create a fascist movement in America. It was literally impossible for this movement to embrace things like state control over the means of production, as the Industrial Revolution was barely in its infancy and the fights between government, industrialist, and worker were still a few years off. Still, a ripe undercurrent of aggrieved Americans existed in the South. The actual spirit that led to the creation of the Confederate States of America was never actually quashed and, especially after the Republicans sold Reconstruction down the river in exchange for giving Rutherfraud B. Hayes the White House in 1876, allowed free reign. Almost exactly a century after the end of the Civil War certain parts of the Republican Party saw the opportunity to exploit this undercurrent of American proto-fascism and chose to exploit it. All it cost was the last, tattered remnants of the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.

Tomorrow I will continue with how the Southern Strategy gave us a Republican Party that has given itself over to the unrestrained id of the Trump campaign. Please comment below if you have any thoughts. I would also appreciate it if you like and share.