Seward Collins, editor of The American Review (formerly The Bookman), champion of American Fascism, believes that for their own good the Jews of the United States should prepare for the rise of Fascism in this country.
“The disaster which has overtaken German Jewry,” he said, “presents a pitiful picture of the inevitable fate of the Jew after a regime of the ‘liberal’ doctrines of assimilation and full equality.
“As in days prior to the ascension of Adolf Hitler to power the Jews were misled by the illusion of liberalism, so today in the United States they are becoming victims to the same unreasoned liberalism. Unless the Jews themselves take steps to prevent the Fascist wave which is sweeping in the wake of an impractical democracy from taking a cruelly archaistic turn, they are almost certain to suffer here as they have in Germany and so many times before. And their fate is likely to be worse here than in Germany: Americans are notoriously more given to extremes and less amenable to orderly measures than the German people.”
Collins, convinced that the “economic degeneracy” of the American democracy must give way to sterner methods of control of the nation’s resources and their distribution, believes that the trend toward radical changes in our government has only begun. He predicts a struggle between greatly strengthened forces of Communism, Socialism and Fascism, and believes that Fascism, representing the revolt of traditional Western man against both capitalism and Marxism as the enemies of the home, the family, and property, as an essential of liberty, will win out eventually.
THE ALTERNATIVES
“Our American plutocracy,” he said, “must give way to the revival of monarchistic and aristocratic principles which we find in Fascism, if the economic muddle into which the country has plunged headlong is to be dissolved. We are offered our choice of Communist collectivism or personal liberty under Fascism.
“American Jews,” he said, “have ample opportunity now to correct many conditions which might be used as a foil against them in the future. The main need is to follow those Jewish leaders who speak against the possibility or the desirability of ‘assimilation’ and urge Jewish solidarity. This in practice would result in a measure of separatism, and would lead Jews to curb their ambitions in public life and in certain professions and businesses, where their presence in large numbers creates friction with the main body of citizens. They should also cooperate with non-Jewish spokesmen for the same ideas, rather than resent them as is too often the tendency. The field for cooperation between men of good will in both groups is fortunately large; but unless it is taken advantage of there will be disaster.”
NO SYMPATHY FOR PELLEY
While he recognizes the growth of such organizations as the American Silver Shirts, commandeered by the arch anti-Semite, William Dudley Pelley, as being symptomatic of what American Jews will have to contend with in the future, he expressed no sympathy with any Fascist movement thus far created.
“The American dictator,” he observed, “has not yet identified himself. Pelley cannot succeed, because his movement is essentially anti-Semitic and embraces none of the constructive elements required to improve the economic and political status of the country. With the group that runs The Awakener, the other Fascist magazine, I cannot see eye-to-eye because they are too lenient to capitalism. They have many sound ideas, but much of their language sounds like a plea for the ‘rugged individualism’ of unhappy memory.”
Collins does not believe that, as anti-Semite leaders contend, Jews are the masters of the economic life of the country. Nor does he take seriously the notion that “International Jewry” is a scheming world-wide machine awaiting the day when it may shatter Christian civilization and make the entire universe the domain of Israel.
“The truth buried in these charges,” he remarked, “and la others of the kind, is that not only are Jews a race distinct from those in which they are fated to dwell–which in itself creates enormous difficulties–but they have in addition a trait with the most tragic consequences: a disproportionate number of them, especially when they become detached from traditional Jewish ways, gravitate toward activities which the ‘plain man’ of European traditions regards as unhealthy and destructive. By this I mean not only such things as Socialism, Communism, pacificism, atheism, anarchism, feminism, psycho-analysis, and so on, but–at the other end of the social scale, so to speak–monopolistic and highly concentrated form of business such as trusts, chain-stores, department-stores, international finance. And in between, those methods of capitalizing on human needs and passions which the ‘plain man’ dislikes and feels he has reason to associate particularly with Jews.
UNHEALTHY POSITION
“Such a condition is unhealthy for the Jew. When the ‘plain man’ turns in revolt against these things he feels to be hostile to his ideals and to his ancient way of life–and in my opinion Fascism is essentially just such a revolt–not only are the Jews who figure in these enterprises destined to suffer, but, if Jews are represented in them out of proportion to their numbers, the whole Jewish community suffers as well.
“So it seems to me that the growth of Fascism gives Jews the choice of voluntarily achieving solidarity and a certain amount of separation, relinquishing some of the forms of participation in national affairs temporarily won for them by liberalism and turning more for their happiness to themselves and to the immense spiritual stores of Jewish traditions, or having this outcome forced on them in strife, agony, and bloodshed.
“I hope, naturally, that the Jews will see the inevitability of the choice and act in time. American Jews have the great advantage of living in a country where the crisis is developing more slowly than in some European countries, giving them several years of perspective and of warning. They can, in other words, if they want to, help so shape the approaching wave of Fascism and prevent it from being accompanied by racial bigotry with its suffering and bitterness. All–both Jews and non-Jews–who oppose Fascism and refuse to cooperate with its forces are, as I see it, the real anti-Semites.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
