Slate Academy: Fascism

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Britain and the U.S.: It Could Have Happened Here

In the fifth episode, our Slate Academy looks at the small, but significant, fascist movements that took root in the U.S. and Britain.

Episode Notes

In our fifth installment, we look at the small, but significant, smattering of fascist movements that took root in the United States and the mother country in the time before World War II. We interview Nancy MacLean, historian at Duke University and author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, to find out more about fascism’s hold on the American mind in the 1920s and 1930s.

Supplementary reading for this episode:

• Joe Allen, “When Fascism Was American,” Jacobin magazine, Dec. 29, 2015
• Sally Denton, The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema Chapter 4: “Dictators and Democrats: The Rage for Order”
• Holocaust Encyclopedia article on the German American Bund, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Nancy Maclean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars
Radio Diaries episode on the Bonus Army

About the Show

Join Rebecca Onion, June Thomas, and Joshua Keating for a Slate Academy that travels back in history to examine how fascism looked in the 20th century, then uses that knowledge to examine America and the world today.

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