Partial Affinities: Fascism and the Politics of Representation in Interwar America Wilson Kaiser A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Richard Cante (co-director) Federico Luisetti (co-director) Jay Garcia Minrose Gwin Matthew Taylor Abstract Partial Affinities: Fascism and the Politics of Representation in Interwar America (under the direction of Federico Luisetti and Richard Canti) Partial Affinities: Fascism and the Politics of Representation in Interwar America, is grounded in a comparatist sensibility, arguing that American culture can be fruitfully explored in its relation to socio-historical contexts extending beyond the borders of the United States. This is exemplified in the assertion, stemming from my research, that we cannot fully understand American culture without a careful investigation into our past engagements with the question of fascism. Cultural changes between the wars, such as the Great Depression, technological modernity, mass consumerism, and urbanization, all generated points of reflection that served to amplify American self-scrutiny. Americans from across the political and social spectrum mirrored their uncertainties about this period of social turmoil in their contradictory descriptions of fascism. Between the wars, Americans asked about the future of democracy, the feasibility of mass culture, and the difficulties of a diverse polity as they were posed through the fears, hopes, and fantasies that circulated around the notion of fascism. This work explores a wide variety of figures across disciplinary boundaries, as literature, film, radio, and the visual arts intersect in the political/aesthetic representations of the American cultural imaginary. The introduction addresses the scholarship on fascism in order to locate a feasible understanding of fascism for students of American culture. The first three chapters look at the development of social technologies such as mass spectacle (in the New York World’s Fair), radio culture, and the changing notion of the human in the new industrial ecology of interwar America. The final three chapters focus on literary culture and everyday life in the period of fascism. In a discussion of authors ranging from John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway to Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, chapters four and five explore the pervasive concern with fascism in American interwar literature. The final chapter, on the Southern Agrarians and the New Critics, addresses their reaction to fascism as they developed a depoliticized method of literary investigation that still grounds much of our thinking about literature and culture today. ii Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………….. v Chapter Introduction. The Lay of the Land: Fascism and American Studies……………. 1 The Challenge of Fascism: A Review of Fascism Studies……………………. 4 Precursors: The Interwar Engagement with the Question of Fascism……..... 18 Partial Affinities: Interwar American Culture and the Question of Fascism… 31 Conclusions: Closing the Circle……………………………………………... 61 I. Fascist Exhibitionary Culture and the 1939 New York World’s Fair……….. 65 The Mostra di Leonardo da Vinci………………………………………….... 68 Mass Culture in Interwar America…………………………………………... 80 The 1939 New York World’s Fair…………………………………………... 86 Democricity and the End of the Fair………………………………………… 107 II. Humanism, A Dubious Future……………………………………………... 112 New Humanism and the Anti-democratic Ethos………………………….... 114 Critique of Humanism…………………………………………………….... 124 Pragmatism and/or Humanism…………………………………………….. 133 The Irrational Appeal of Fascism: Spectacle and Play between the Wars… 144 Conclusion: A Million Hands, A Million Voices…………………………. 153 III. The Grain in the Vox Populi: The Logic of Radio Culture in Interwar America…………………… 159 iii Radio and the Everyday…………………………………………………. 174 Radio and the Body Politic………………………………………………. 189 Fascism, Radio, Technology…………………………………………….. 199 IV. The Scandal of Fascism: Everyday Politics and Interwar American Literature……………… 204 Malcolm Cowley’s apocalyptic dream…………………………………... 204 The everyday and the regime: Two models of fascism………………….. 207 Finding the “real fascists”: For Whom the Bell Tolls and the ethical challenge of fascism……. 219 When you try to find the people: Dos Passos’ District of Columbia and interwar radio culture…….. 224 V. The Soil-Bound Community and the Pastoral Ideal: The Humanist Legacy of the Southern Agrarians………………… 244 Genuine Humanism: The I’ll Take My Stand Manifesto……………….. 253 Nature as Nature Naturally Is: From the American Review to the New Criticism………………... 262 Diffused and Scattered Creatures: William Faulkner and the New Critics…………………………… 275 VI. Snopesism in the New South: Faulkner’s “Delta Autumn” and The Hamlet…………………….. 282 Breeding and Spawning: Faulkner’s “Delta Autumn”…………………. 286 The Forces of Modernity: Snopesism in The Hamlet………………….. 302 Conclusions: The End of Flem Snopes………………………………… 319 Conclusion. American Culture and the Question of Fascism……………. 322 The Larger Picture……………………………………………………... 326 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………... 329 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Boat Hull ………………………………………………………………. 76 Figure 2: Parachuting Figure …………………………………………………….. 78 Figure 3: Flying Machine …………………………………………………...…… 79 v The Lay of the Land: Fascism and American Studies Americans have a longstanding fascination with the question of fascism.1 We see this in its use as a constant theme for that hallmark of American self-presentation, Hollywood cinema, to the point that it has become its own genre cliché, as Quentin Tarantino has recently emphasized in his remake of the pulp classic Inglorious Bastards. Fascism most likely came to provide a fund of cultural images because World War Two was a defining moment for American consciousness that seemed to contrast democratic freedom against mindless fascist thuggery, providing an important grounding for American identity. The Hollywood treatment of fascism became as serial and formulaic as the Western, as it rehearsed over and again the clean antagonism between American individualism and fascist mindless obedience. The exemplar of the cowboy‘s American values, John Wayne, alternately donned a ten gallon hat and an M1 steel helmet,2 but instead of the cowboy as natural aristocrat and democratic leader struggling against the gangsterism of the black-hatted villain, the American soldier became the emblem of freedom and responsibility against the nameless, faceless Siegfried helmeted zombies.3 The American fascination with fascism began earlier than this, however, and my task in the following pages will be to investigate the prehistory to the post-War 1 There is disagreement about the use of capital or lower case in the term ―fascism.‖ I will be using lower case throughout for ease and consistency, except where a citation uses a capital. 2 Consider, for example, The Flying Leathernecks (1951) or Operation Pacific (1951). 3 I am thinking particularly of Gary Cooper‘s first film in the remake of the classic Western novel The Virginian. Cooper was accused of fascist tendencies in the 1930s when he started a vigilante group called the ―Hollywood Hussars.‖ See Carey McWilliams, ―Hollywood Plays with Fascism‖ (1935). 1 Hollywood-style representation of fascism. The period between World War One and the Second World War was, I believe, extraordinary in American history for its level of self- exploration and uncertainty, all of which provide rich ground for investigating the complexities of American culture. Within that hectic inter-war period there were few topics more constantly and fervently debated than the emergence of fascism in Europe and its relation to the U.S. What I have found, time and again, is that the interwar period which saw the rise of fascism was also a period of intensive uncertainty about fascism in the United States. Far from being an easily deployed category of anti-democracy, the topic was scrutinized from every angle by many of the significant thinkers and cultural figures of the day. By this of course I partly mean that there were groups that emulated Italian fascists and Nazis in the U.S., and that fascism was a constant topic of debate both pro and contra at all levels of American culture; but, more importantly, I also want to signal the multiple cultural affinities that undergirded the American relationship to fascism before the War cleared up these ambiguities in the horrors of what Goebbels called Der Totale Krieg. I will insist on this last element of my project because these affinities were probably the most troubling and intriguing dimension of fascism for Americans between the wars, responding as they did to many of the most pressing questions of the day: Was procedural democracy doomed to failure? How might this gigantic new mass culture be organized? Is the only aim of civilization its capacity for production? These and other questions were at the heart of sincere arguments and discussions about American culture, and each of these concerns was intimately related to the question of fascism in the interwar period. 2 Given the depth of U.S. involvement in the question of fascism, it is remarkable that the only scholarly work to extensively address the breadth of American involvement with fascism in the interwar period is John Diggins‘ Mussolini and Fascism: The