Anti-Fascism

ANTI-FASCISM. Appearing first in Europe in the 1920s, anti-fascism opposed the rise of far-right, nationalist, and racist movements and leaders in Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Spain. It soon developed into one of the most important and certainly the most popular policies of the American Left. Since then, anti-fascism has intermittently inspired broad coalitions of liberals or non-political people and an agile Left against extreme right-wing movements and politics in the United States.

For a period from the middle 1930s to the middle 1940s, anti-fascism reached a peak, with mass organizations such as the American Slav Congress and leading personalities from the political and cultural worlds rallying supporters and popularizing the central ideas. For a time, and especially during the replacement of the Communist Party with the “Communist Political Association” (1943-1945), it gave American communists an unprecedented respectability. Soon enough the axe fell: appeals to anti-fascism met deaf ears, and Communists found themselves defined as “the enemy within,” purportedly the servants of a cause every bit as bad as fascism.

Anti-fascism actually began more than a decade before the announcement of the Popular Front, in the Italian-American response to Mussolini’s 1922 seizure of power. Communists, socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies sought to combine in local coalitions to propagandize against fascism and to mobilize against local pro-Mussolini demonstrations. These coalitions proved difficult to maintain (as did their sister movement, the Sacco-Vanzetti mobilizations of Italian-Americans), owing to internecine differences. Yet a range of participants, including Carlo Tresca and Arturo Giovannitti, as well as many local Italian-American Communists, managed a rough working relationship through much of the 1920s and 1930s. More directly, Italian American anti-fascists, as individuals or in groups, especially around militant unions, confronted local fascist paraders with fists and clubs, driving them in many cases into private meetings. A parallel but much smaller movement emerged with the seizure of power in Hungary by Miklos Horthy and his followers, fascist in fact if not name. Hungarian Americans, or at least the considerable segment influenced by the Left, braced themselves and began to create a wide alliance.

American socialists urged anti-fascist mobilizations, especially from the inception of Hitler’s regime, but Communists in their ultra-Left phase (1928–1933) generally resisted cooperation and even engaged in sectarian sniping at socialist events. With the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 and the articulation of a global anti-fascist policy, significant changes began. For a few years, Communist sectarianism continued to hold back appeals to fellow immigrants, to liberals, and (more pointedly) to their socialist rivals for anti-fascist solidarity. By 1936–1937, anti-fascism had acquired a defining purpose and a distinctive rhetoric.

When fully adopted, the appeal worked brilliantly. In virtually every Eastern European community, anti-fascism gathered fresh support behind the Communists. Across the intellectual and arts worlds, it gave Communists and their supporters a battle cry. The Spanish Civil War provided, for the moment, the epiphany. But the broad spirit of anti-fascism also acutely identified anti-racism, anti-Semitism, and various xenophobic internal enemies of democracy in the United States as the local variants of fascism. Important figures within the Communist movement, such as artist Hugo Gellert, threw their energies into ethnic activity and became great figures within their communities. Celebrities heretofore indifferent to presenting themselves as anti-fascists, such as the Hungarian Bela Bartok and Bela Lugosi, took symbolic positions in the Hungarian National Front. They would be joined by a great wealth of personalities on the stage and screen, actors such as Lucille Ball, Katherine Hepburn, Fredric March, Danny Kaye, Will Geer, Ingrid Bergman, John Garfield, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, and even Ronald Reagan, after the US entry into World War II. The presence and even guiding role of Communists was no secret in these efforts.

Anti-fascism had three great failings for the Left. First, it placed antiwar sentiment into abeyance and discredited the widespread mobilization in the early to mid-1930s against war-profiteer capitalists and against the system that made them possible. This popular view, once eroded, would be difficult to resurrect. Second, anti-fascism as practiced seemed aimed at the preservation of the Western democracies in a world of non-whites still largely oppressed by colonialism and neocolonialism. Communists seemed to place aside the anti-imperialist clarion call so obvious in earlier years. Black nationalism within the United States, once seen sympathetically, was viewed as an obstacle to needed unity. Third, as a consequence of these and other shifts, the necessity for a socialist transformation tended to disappear from Communist plans and rhetoric. Once discussed unrealistically as a short-run possibility, socialism now all but vanished as an American prospect in the foreseeable future in favor of a future, more advanced New Deal that would lead somehow, but without many specifics, to a higher form of society.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact reversed virtually all these policies, but only briefly and incompletely. Anti-fascist mobilization fell to others, such as the Socialist Workers Party, able to call successfully for demonstrations against mass meetings of the German-American Bund in New York and elsewhere. Few intellectuals or others, deserting Communist ranks, found other sites for a concentrated Left anti-fascism.

Anti-fascism reached its apparent apex during World War II. Communist Party’s cooperation with the war effort in the United States proved especially important in many ethnic communities. In the glare of anti-fascist solidarity, Communists helped to erect new sweeping alliances and revive old contacts. Here, the earlier success of Communists in leading CIO unions, for instance among Slavs in steel factories and steel-centered communities, found a political, social and cultural counterpart. Radio broadcasts in native languages acquired a new political value. Marshall Tito, already popular among Slovenians and Croatians, emerged as the savior of a nation. Among American Jews from across the Pale and beyond, the appeal of anti-fascism melded with support for the Soviet Union, the crucial American ally, reaching an apex with the ghetto uprisings, the Russian victory at Stalingrad, and the heroic and often doomed efforts of the Partisans to fight behind enemy lines. Quasi-communist groups became part of ethnic federations including Jewish city federations for a few years, a high perch of prestige and funding.

Anti-fascism found vivid voice in wartime Hollywood films, battle scenes to the realization on the home front that the war had to be fought and (at least sometimes) that prejudice, anti-semitism and racism had no place in an anti-fascist world. Casablanca (1942), Watch On the Rhine (1943), The Moon Is Down (1943), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Back to Bataan (1945), Pride of the Marines (1943), Destination Tokyo (1943), Objective, Burma! (1945), The Story of GI Joe (1945), and the notoriously propagandistic Mission to Moscow (1943) are only the best known of a genre with Leftwing writers or directors and huge popularity from 1942 to 1946. Never again would anti-fascism have so much glamour.

But anti-fascism arguably found a still warmer media home, part of daily routines and closer to the intimate family life of Americans, on the radio. In this medium, the Radio Writers Union was organized and led by the Left, a detail responsible in part for the verve of more directly political productions. As in Hollywood, anti-fascists faced businessmen uninterested in politics or actually conservative, and Congressional red-baiters. As in the case of films, only the Pearl Harbor attack made anti-fascism respectable, but by the middle of 1942, the mood had opened for leftist writers and a handful of anti-fascist voice actors to make the political effort and advance careers that very often carried back and forth from film scriptwriting. Anti-fascism, becoming a form of patriotism, opened the door wide to a barely disguised leftwing creativity.

Norman Corwin, one of the most beloved radio producers of the day, quietly allied himself with the Hollywood Left, as did the more mercurial Orson Welles, before leaving radio for film. Among others close to the Left or soon to be accused of Communist affiliations, Arch Oboler, William Robson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Millard Lampell, Arthur Miller, Arthur Laurents and Allan Sloan (the last two became “Friendly Witness” in a later day) drove home to millions the messages that government agencies, network and advertising executives accepted or even welcomed, at least for the time being.
By 1942, the War Writers Board thus began to create and distribute monthly scripts to local stations, intended to help the nation confront the enemies and win the war. With plenty of leftwing content and titles like “Foreigners Settled America” and “Hate, Incorporated,” patriotic themes merged with anti-Nazism, broadly democratic in ways pleasing to anti-fascists in particular. Collaboration with the distinctly leftwing Hollywood Writers Mobilization led to a series produced by Oboler, “Plays for Americans,” parallel to Corwin’s series “This Is War,” with the same essential messages. By 1944, the message had shifted to the problems of the returning GI to a nation that needed to offer something better than the country he or she had left.

Strictly commercial radio series like the Lux Theater meanwhile also hired left-leaning writers and actors. Some of the most effective programs enrolled the men in uniform themselves, on leave for the work. Others highlighted genuine artistic achievements, as leftwing poet Edna St Vincent Millay’s “The Murder of Lidice,” that is, martyrdom in Czechoslovakia, a long poem written at the request of the WWB. The grandest of the “ballad opera” productions, “The Lonesome Train” by Millard Lampell, set to music by Earl Robinson, reached the airwaves in 1942, as an elegy to the body of Abraham Lincoln carried across the nation in 1865, but its resonant anti-fascist undertones were unmistakable. The program would be heard repeatedly, most especially in the months after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

Wartime radio drama also allowed writers, producers and actors to get ahead of the nation in urging a greater degree of equality for working people, women and minorities in the framework of anti-fascism. The networks were just as happy to suspend the hopes (or illusions) as the victory was won, or even before. Two writers destined for the blacklist, Arthur Laurents (who escaped by testifying) and Arnold Pearl (who outlived the blacklist, writing scripts for television and for most of the film Malcolm X, before an early demise), had prepared notable wartime plays dealing with race. These projects were cancelled in 1945, along with plays about the need for jobs for veterans. The issues had become inconvenient. No less than Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the influential volume The Vital Center (1949), named Norman Corwin as a Soviet sympathizer, suggesting that his radio plays were typical Popular Front fare, artistically terrible as well as red-tainted. Corwin, never himself a Communist, went on to the blacklist.

The return of Republicans to congressional control in 1942 had meanwhile anticipated the emergence of a conservative-liberal consensus that equated anti-fascism with free-enterprise “Americanism” and linked Stalinism to Hitlerism. The new Union for Democratic Action, founded in 1942 by prominent anti-communist liberals, pointed to the future and to the reorganized Americans for Democratic Action, formed in 1945 with more prestigious figures such as Schlesinger on board.

The decisive weakening of anti-fascist sentiment just following World War II foreshadowed the isolation and destruction of the Left. Communist efforts to point to the integration of erstwhile Nazi officials and collaborators into the governments of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries and the European agencies of the Central Intelligence Agency made little popular impression outside Jewish circles, and even here the empowered Cold War liberals stoutly ignored the implications. Newer European immigrants to the United States, including many Nazi collaborators or sympathizers, helped reverse the tide of ethnic support built in anti-fascist days. US investigative agencies by this time included anti-fascist organizations, present and past, under the rubric of Communist fronts. Spanish Civil War veterans, already known as “premature anti-fascists,” were considered as nothing more than Communists or Communist dupes for opposing a dictator who became a staunch Cold War ally of the United States. The issues of anti-fascism, if anywhere, might be found in Hollywood action dramas or romances that touched on the politics of fascism (or even the Holocaust) more or less in passing. The subsequent surge of films and television dramas about the Holocaust, especially those produced in the United States, did surprisingly little to return Partisans and anti-fascists to favor.

A new anti-fascism emerged in the United States of the 1980s, in part imitating the mobilization of young anti-racists in Britain employing Punk themes and explicitly as “Anti-Racist Action.” The word “fascism,” however, was not much used at the time. Posing themselves against the appearance of neo-Nazi skinheads in the Midwest and elsewhere, the activists confronted the youthful fascists with fistfights so as to break up events. The movement all but disappeared during the 1990s and became an increasingly distant memory until the election of Donald Trump.

“Antifa,” a vague entity with no membership, and other similarly-inclined groups emerged after 2016, evidently inspired by European responses to avowed neo-fascism. The elusive reality of Antifa first appeared mostly from within social media itself, through the spontaneous “doxxing” of perceived fascists, and in public, with disruption of alt-right demonstrations where possible. The identifying public presence of anti-fascists included hiding faces with masks or helmets, also chanting, shouting, forming a human chain and carrying signs with slogans. For these demonstrators, unlike others, pacifism was not an ideal or a practice, making them sometimes highly unpopular, in the accusations from liberals and sometimes sections of the Left, for literally inciting the police to violence. There were a few notable exceptions. Cornell West notoriously thanked Antifa for saving his life during the Charlotte, North Carolina right-wing riot of 2017.

The claims of “Antifa terrorism” coming from Fox News amplified as well as exaggerated the role of people identifying themselves with Antifa activities during the tumultuous Summer of 2020 following a series of police shootings of Black men. Anarchists and others who did not identify with Antifa nevertheless sometimes found grounds for cooperation, such as physical fights with the Proud Boys. The Right would preposterously blame Antifa for interfering in the 2020 elections, helping to cheat Donald Trump of his rightful victory.

No one could say with assurance whether Antifa represented a few hundred or a few thousand youthful activists and whether any degree of coordination across the country actually existed. In all, the original connections to anti-fascist movement in Europe became blurred if not lost entirely. Antifa activists had become associated with a certain range of militant anarchists, but also with the impulse toward affinity groups rather than highly organized movements.

Blue, Howard. Words at War:World War II Radio Drama and thePostwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Crimethinc and Going Down, anti-fascist websites