Scholarly article on 4'-Bromoacetanilide 103-88-8 from Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie p. 284

Uncritical Portrayals of Fascist Italy

and of Iberic-Latin Dictatorships

in American Political Science

IDO OREN

University of Florida

Historians have documented extensively the fascination of many American in-

tellectuals with the Soviet Union and fascist Italy during the 1920s and 1930s

(Diggins 1966; 1972; Feuer 1962; Filene 1967; Warren 1993). They have also

drawn a compelling analogy between the sympathetic attitudes ofAmerican in-

tellectuals toward Soviet Russia and the sympathy of a later generation of in-

tellectuals towards Cuba, China and North Vietnam (Skotheim 1971: 96–106;

Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). However, little effort has been made to examine

whether the forgiving attitudes toward fascist Italy might also have had a his-

torical analogue in the form of forgiving attitudes toward other, non-commu-

nist, dictatorships.

The reason for this omission might be that fascism, unlike communism, had

lost any respectability as a philosophy or self-descriptive identification. While

numerous postwar regimes raised the red flag, not a single regime openly iden-

tified itself as fascist after the defeat of the Axis powers. Still, during the 1930s

and early 1940s there emerged several dictators whose ideological sympathies

lay with the fascist powers, yet who shrewdly avoided joining the Axis: Fran-

cisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal, Juan Peron in Argentina,

and Getulio Vargas in Brazil. These dictators were strongly influenced by Ital-

ian fascism, but as the tide of the war turned against the Axis they abandoned

their pro-fascist rhetoric and distanced their regimes from fascism. Might there

be a resemblance between the portrayal of these Iberian and Latin American

dictatorships by American intellectuals in the postwar years and the uncritical

portrayal of Mussolini’s Italy before World War II?

I explore this question here with regard to the discipline of political science

My research was assisted by an award from the Social Science Research Council of an SSRC-

MacArthur Foundation Fellowship on Peace and Security in a Changing World. I thank the fol-

lowing individuals (who do not necessarily agree with the views expressed here) for helpful dis-

cussions and comments: Andy Davison, Bud Duvall, Geoff Eley, Jim Farr, Jack Gunnell, Jacob

Heilbrunn, Rogers Hollingsworth, Arie Kacowicz, Peter Katzenstein, John Mearsheimer, Dan

Monk, August Nimtz, Brian Schmidt, an anonymous reviewer, and the editors of CSSH.

87

88 ido oren

in America. During the 1920s and 1930s some leading American political sci-

entists considered Italian fascism a “striking experiment” (Merriam 1931a:9)

whose unabashedly anti-democratic nature did not necessarily preclude learn-

ing from its more positive features; a chief aspect of the fascist “experiment”

that fascinated these scholars was the corporate state. Other leading political

scientists did not see in fascism potential lessons for America, but nonetheless

regarded it as a viable modernizing force for a backward nation such as Italy.

Similar attitudes can be seen in depictions of Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portu-

gal, Peron’s Argentina, and Vargas’s Brazil by American political scientists in

the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas in the 1950s political scientists tended to asso-

ciate these regimes with fascism and totalitarianism, their image subsequently

improved significantly. In part, this improvement reflected a resurgence of in-

terest in “corporatism” within American political science. Some prominent

scholars came to regard authoritarian corporatism as a “potentially viable (if

unpleasant) mode of organizing a [backward] society’s developmental efforts”

(Malloy 1977:3). Other scholars went further, suggesting that Iberic-Latin cor-

poratism “may offer lessons from which we [Americans] may learn” (Wiarda

1981:338). I aim to demonstrate that the characterizations of dictatorships in

Latin America and/or the Iberian Peninsula by these scholars resembled their

predecessors’ uncritical characterizations of Mussolini’s Italy.

A number of preliminary comments are in order before turning to the pre-

sentation of the historical material.

The tone of the academic writings cited below rarely echoed the vulgar pro-

Mussolini pitch that characterized the popular discourse of the time (Diggins

1972). My claim is not that the authors of these texts were unalloyed fascists or

that they favored the installation of dictatorship inAmerica. Rather, I argue that

these texts betrayed, under the guise of objectivity, a fascination with certain

aspects of Italian fascism (with an eye toward emulating them in America) or

an attitude condoning dictatorship in Italy, not America. By the same token, the

later writings on Iberian or Latin corporatist dictatorships did not consist of all-

out endorsements, but rather of subtle legitimations or naturalizations of dicta-

torship, disguised by the idiom of objective analysis.

I should stress that while my essay focuses on scholars, including prominent

ones, who expressed uncritical attitudes toward fascism, other political scien-

tists either registered unequivocal disapproval of fascism or, more typically,

wrote nothing bearing on the issue. Similarly, the later rationalization of Iber-

ic-Latin corporatist dictatorships was articulated by some leading scholars, but

it was not universally shared. I do not claim that the views surveyed below rep-

resented the thinking of the majority of political scientists, but rather that these

views constituted a respectable and legitimate voice within the polyphonic dis-

course of the discipline.

The focus of this essay is not on comparing regimes per se, but on compar-

ing the portrayals of these regimes by two generations of American political

portrayals of dictatorships in america 89

scientists. The important question of the actual similarity between fascism and,

e.g., Peronism, is not addressed here. My aim is to show that the arguments and

language used in the 1970s to differentiate authoritarianism and/or corporatism

from fascism resembled the language and arguments employed earlier to dis-

tinguish between presumably-positive features of Mussolini’s “experiment”

(such as corporatism) and the less pleasant aspects of fascism. Similarly, argu-

ments made in the 1970s about the natural compatibility between authoritari-

anism and Latin American political culture paralleled earlier arguments sug-

gesting that Anglo-American parliamentary democracy did not comport well

with the Italian national character.

the attraction of fascism

Background and Context

Prior to World War I, the discourse of American political science was domi-

nated by the concept of “the state” (see Farr 1995). According to John W.

Burgess, the discipline’s leading theorist, the ideal state possessed sovereign-

ty—namely “absolute, unlimited power over the individual subject and over all

associations of subjects”—at the same time that its constitution provided the

“only foundation and guaranty” of individual liberty (Burgess 1994:56–57).¹

Thus, the ideal state was at once orderly and free.

Burgess (1994:35–38) claimed that only the Teutonic nations, America in-

cluded, possessed the “political psychology” and cultural heritage required for

approximating the ideal state. The “Roman and Latin nations”—shaped by the

legacy of the Roman Empire—had a gift for installing law and order, but lacked

the Teutonic genius for reconciling order with liberty. Similarly, Woodrow Wil-

son (1889:580–81) wrote that the Romans ruled their empire “only by military

force and the stern discipline of subordination,” and that the English were for-

tunate to have inherited the “principle of representation” from the Teutons,

rather than the autocratic legacy of the Romans.

The notion that liberal values were foreign to the “Roman” character would

persist in the profession through the interwar period, and would inspire some

of the rationalizations of Italian fascism discussed below. But the doctrine of

the state declined rapidly in the aftermath of World War I (Gunnell 1995), in

part due to its German origins (see Oren 1995). In the early 1920s the discourse

of the state was eclipsed by lively discussions of “pluralism,” the importance

of “interest groups” in an increasingly complex industrial society, and the need

to restructure political representation along functional economic lines (Barnes

1920; Coker 1921; Ellis 1920; 1923; Frankel 1922; Mott 1922; Sabine 1923;

Tugwell 1921). Harold Laski was instrumental in acquainting American polit-

1

The book was originally published in 1933 as an abridged version of Burgess’s influential text

(1890).

90 ido oren

ical scientists with European theories of syndicalism and guild socialism, which

regarded the state as “only one of the innumerable group units possessing cor-

porate personality” (Shepard 1919:491). But although Laski easily persuaded

his peers that the doctrine of state sovereignty was “an antiquated absolutism”

(Shepard 1922:131), the syndicalist doctrines he advocated were apparently re-

garded as too extreme because of their uncompromising elevation of interest

groups above central government, and their optimism regarding the ability of

groups to live in harmony with each other under a minimalist central authority.

Thus, the central tendency in political science in the 1920s can be described

as a qualified acceptance of the logic of pluralism and its attendant emphasis

on functional group representation. The qualification involved the recognition

that Durkheimian solidarity, retention of “the state as the chief organ of soci-

ety,” and reliance on scientific experts would be necessary to cement society

and mitigate intergroup conflict, especially between labor and capital (Barnes

1920:250).

A parallel intellectual tendency—stimulated by the wartime experience of

public opinion manipulation and the wave of democratic regime breakdowns

that swept the world shortly after the war—entailed a disillusionment with

“democracy” (Purcell 1973:117; Ross 1991:ch. 10). The disillusionment pro-

duced an impulse to tame democracy by subjecting politics to scientific “con-

trol.” Advocates of political control, most notably Charles Merriam of the Uni-

versity of Chicago, continued expressing unwavering support for “democracy,”

but such expressions glossed over an inherent tension between democratic mass

participation and technocratic elite control.

Incidentally, it so happened that Italian fascism professed allegiance, in

rhetoric at least, to ideals that, broadly speaking, were located down some of

the same intellectual paths along which American political science was mov-

ing. Down the path of depreciative, realistic interpretations of constitutional

values laid fascism’s emphatic rejection of individual liberty—perhaps far

down the path, but in that direction nonetheless.²Down the path of functional

interest representation, one might curiously encounter Italian syndicalism and

corporatism; down the path to social solidarity lay fervent nationalism, the hall-

mark of fascism³; and down the path of political control one might encounter

an efficient bureaucracy in a one-party state. This is by no means to say that an

intellectual drift down those paths was inevitable. There were certainly politi-

cal scientists who broadly subscribed to the emerging qualified pluralism and/

2

Indeed, as will be shown below, Charles Beard—who pioneered the attack on the formal sanc-

tity of the constitution (1913)—had a short but intense flirtation with fascism in the late 1920s.

3

This potential “slide” was noted by a contemporaneous critique of Durkheim’s sociology: “out

of the gospel of social determinism which exalted the group or ‘society,’ and minimized the im-

portance of the individual, there evolved a conception of the nation which foreshadowed some of

the principal doctrines of the Militant Action Francaise, of the Italian Fascists, of the Russian Bol-

shevists, and of ‘one hundred per-cent’Americanism” (Mitchell 1931:88).

portrayals of dictatorships in america 91

or social control, and yet displayed no sympathy for any aspect of fascism.⁴

Still, the new theoretical trends combined with older, negative stereotypes of

Italian political culture to produce an intellectual climate in which forgiving at-

titudes towards fascism were respectable.

In the 1930s, this intellectual climate was reinforced by two new develop-

ments. First, the Great Depression prompted many Americans to take a dim

view of their institutions, and to take a keener interest in more vibrant foreign

models. The appeal of fascist corporatism inAmerica was enhanced by the con-

trast between the ostensible vitality of the Italian economy in the early 1930s

and the moribund economic conditions in the United States. The second devel-

opment that, somewhat paradoxically, facilitated a forgiving attitude toward

Italian fascism was Hitler’s rise to power. Although the Nazi takeover, on the

one hand, tarnished the overall image of fascism, on the other hand it set a new

benchmark of racism and brutality that made the Italian regime appear rela-

tively tame. R. Taylor Cole, a political scientist who conducted research in Nazi

Germany, recollected that when he traveled from Germany to Italy he felt that

he “was moving into another world. There were many excesses and abuses un-

der Italian Fascism, but there was a much freer atmosphere there than in Nazi

Germany” (Bear et al. 1991:74). The attenuating effect of Nazi brutality on the

evaluation of Italian fascism is exemplified in the book Fascism and National

Socialism, by Columbia University historian Michael Florinsky (1936). In

Florinsky’s book, a reviewer observed in the American Political Science Re-

view (APSR), “always the fascist lily is gilded while the Swastika comes out

somewhat stained. Granting that the excessive anti-Semitism of the Third Re-

ich has no Roman counterpart, it would still seem that Florinsky’s penchant is

distinctly toward Rome” (Graham 1937:585). Thus, the fact that Italy was

eclipsed by Germany as a paradigm of fascist ruthlessness may help to explain

why some scholars continued to portray Italy uncritically even after 1933.

Mussolini To the Rescue: Normalizing Fascist Dictatorship

In 1918 the Rome bureau of the American Committee on Public Information—

headed by political scientist Charles Merriam—depicted Italy as “a modern and

progressive democracy” that could assist America in spreading Wilsonian

ideals (“Italy’s Political Recognition.” Merriam Papers, box 10, folder 5. Ref-

erences to this collection below are abbreviated “MP,” followed by box/folder

numbers). But the optimism evident in this wartime report was soon dampened

by the “wave” of democratic regime breakdowns that began in Italy in 1922 and

spread across Europe and LatinAmerica (Huntington 1991:17–18).Against the

backdrop of democratic retreat, “believers in democracy” came under sharp

4

For example, Francis Coker of Yale University, who helped shape the emerging qualified plu-

ralism in the early 1920s, sharply denounced fascism in his textbook (1934) in a way that could

have served as a model for other writers.

92 ido oren

criticism for “too often assum[ing] that it is a universal kind of government for

all times and places . . . that it is something to which all people have a ‘right’

irrespective of their equipment for it” (Dickinson 1930:287). Applied to Italy,

this criticism implied that the fascist dictatorship should not be judged byAmer-

ican norms, and that Mussolini’s regime could be made more “normal” (for

Italy, at least) if pre-fascist Italian politics were characterized in terms bleaker

than “modern progressive democracy.” This is precisely what some political

scientists did. They argued that elected governments in prewar Italy were es-

sentially dictatorial, that postwar conditions “required” (Clough 1932:302) au-

thoritarian action to “save” (Schneider 1928:79) Italy from Bolshevik-incited

chaos, and that after seizing power the fascists were “forced” by the opposition

to abandon parliamentarism (Schneider and Clough 1929:140).

To a considerable extent, the “normalizing” of fascism was rooted in the

view—inherited from an earlier generation of political scientists—that the Ital-

ian “national psychology” (Spencer 1932:18) differed markedly from the

American one. A condescending view of Italian political traits was articulated

most conspicuously by Henry Russell Spencer of Ohio State University, prob-

ably the profession’s foremost expert on Italian politics at the time of Mussoli-

ni’s coup (later elected president of the American Political Science Association

[APSA]). The Italians, Spencer wrote (1932:18–19), were “socially indiffer-

ent, unquestioning” by nature; they were “passive subjects rather than active

citizens [who] seem sufficiently happy and contented, unwilling to disturb any

regime, democratic or despotic, if only ‘si lavora e si mangia.’” Thus, the Ital-

ian people lacked the “spirit” essential for the practice of Anglo-American

democracy (Spencer 1927:550).

Other political scientists expressed similar views. Francis Wilson, a promi-

nent political theorist at the University of Washington, wrote that authoritari-

anism was “more suited to the long Italian tradition of government than the lib-

eral system.” The 1848 constitution and the English-style parliamentary system

adopted by Italy “were exotic plants that were not destined to flourish in the

new environment” (Wilson 1936:615). Frederic Ogg of the University of Wis-

consin (longtime editor of the APSR and later president of the APSA) approv-

ingly quoted Spencer’s depiction of the Italians as “passive subjects;” he added

that democracy in Italy “was a tender plant” imported “prematurely” by a na-

tion “ill-prepared by experience, education, and temperament” (1936:808).And

William B. Munro, a Harvard professor and former APSA president, noted that

“although the Italians borrowed the frame of English government, they had not

acquired either the tradition nor the spirit of it” (1931:692).

Henry Spencer and other authors portrayed Italian elected leaders as corrupt

bosses and virtual dictators. In pre-fascist Italy, “statesmanship was reduced to

the exercise of veiled dictatorship” (Ogg 1936:821). Prime Minister Giolliti

was a selfish “opportunist” who “professed democratic sentiment but did not

have any fixed political principle” (Munro 1931:684). His “long dictatorship

portrayals of dictatorships in america 93

(1903–14), veiled under parliamentary forms . . . prepared Italy for accepting

that of Mussolini” (Spencer 1929:141). The Parliament “was always starting

and stopping, never arriving at the solution of problems” (Spencer 1927:540),

and its “degenerate” leaders were given to “prostitution of [their] parliamen-

tary powers.” (Spencer 1932:99).

Contemporaneous political scientists not only rationalized fascist authori-

tarianism as conforming to the normal pattern of the Italian past; in one impor-

tant respect they characterized it as an improvement over the past. The fascists,

some scholars maintained, brought an end to the disorder which gripped Italy

after the war, and their regime saved Italy from the greater evil of Bolshevik

tyranny.

Popular textbooks told the story of the fascist seizure of power in more or

less the following way. “The meteoric rise of fascism,” wrote Ogg (1936:824),

“must be viewed in the setting of chaotic Italian post-war conditions.” The Ital-

ian people “were in a disillusioned and resentful mood because Italy seemed to

have profited so little from the war” (Munro 1931:685). The Italian economy

was “paralyzed”; “Debts were enormous, deficits piling up . . . unemployment

was mounting” (Ogg 1936:824). Quick to capitalize on the situation were the

socialists who, upon “orders from Russia,” used “direct action methods [to]

capture the government of commune after commune” (Ogg 1936:824–5). In

rural areas “Bolshevik” groups imposed a “veritable tyranny,” and in industri-

al centers they fomented a “strike and lockout mania.” The communists en-

gaged in “semi-systematic sabotaging of bourgeois civilization.” “Coercion by

force of arms” was necessary, but “this the government dared not try . . . The

challenge was taken up by the fascists . . . [who] found a cause and made them-

selves popular with the plain citizen by espousing it and showing ardent ener-

gy in its prosecution.” In sum, fascist black shirts “sav[ed] society from its de-

stroyers” (Spencer 1932:75, 77).

Exiled opponents of Mussolini contested the claim that fascism “saved” Italy

from Bolshevism, pointing out that the communist danger had already passed

when the fascists marched on Rome. But in the 1920s political scientists con-

sidered this argument “not very convincing” (Sait 1927:669). The communists

might have been past their peak in 1922, Sait (1927:669) conceded, but “what-

ever the real situation may have been, the people did believe in the existence of

a Red peril.” In 1936, a writer in theAPSR remarked happily that the exiles’ver-

sion of the story had become “now standard” (Zurcher 1936:990). But the re-

mark was somewhat premature, for some scholars clung to the “fascism to the

rescue” thesis even in 1936–37. Ogg (1936:825) claimed that although Com-

munist influence within the Socialist party declined in 1921, many people still

“believe[d] a Bolshevist coup to be only a question of time.” Fascism “was a pa-

triotic reaction to the unpatriotic and revolutionary influence of the communists

and socialists,” wrote Wilson (1936:635). And Herbert Schneider (1937:427)

contended that communism “has set the emotional stage for fascism.”

94 ido oren

Some discussions of the rise of fascism played down fascist violence.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1926), president of Columbia University, described

the fascist “revolution” as “silent and bloodless.” Norman Hill and Harold

Stoke (1935:466) of the University of Nebraska also characterized the fascist

revolution as “bloodless.” John Heinberg (1937:60–62) of the University of

Missouri portrayed the “famous” March on Rome as a “relatively tame affair,”

which had a “tremendous” psychological effect on an “enthusiastic” populace.

Schneider (1928:45) wrote that the Red “parades and demonstrations usually

ended up in general beatings . . . and occasional shots being fired,” but that “on

the whole . . . these ‘bloody battles’and ‘massacres’. . . really turn out on close

examination to be nine tenths noise.” And Spencer (1932:84) likened the “ir-

responsible” fascist methods to the “manner of the English suffragettes in

1912.”

After “com[ing] to the rescue” of Italy, the fascists set up an electoral system

favorable to them in 1923, which Munro (1931:686) described as a “unique . . .

interesting experiment in the art of government.” Blame for the subsequent

hardening of the dictatorship was placed on the opposition as much as on

Mussolini himself. The parliamentary opposition was “sullen and irreconcil-

able . . . determined to provide the majority with every ounce of trouble that

they could manufacture” (Munro 1931:702–3). The opposition’s criticism

was “sterile, negative,” and “it was obvious that they could not conceivably pre-

sent to the country a concrete alternative to Mussolini” (Spencer 1932:109).

Matteotti and Amendola—socialist leaders murdered by the fascists—were

“old fashioned” (read: unscrupulous) and “particularly irritating” politicians

(Schneider 1928:83). In short, “from 1924 to 1926 Fascism was forced by op-

ponents, scandal and intrigue to . . . stamp out all opposition” (Schneider and

Clough 1929:140; emphasis added).

The Lure of Corporatism

Descriptions of Italian fascism as an “experiment” were common in the politi-

cal science literature of the interwar period (e.g., Hill and Stoke 1935:v;

Wilson 1936:611). This word was often prefaced by positive adjectives: “amaz-

ing experiment” (Charles Beard 1929:278); “striking experiment” (Merriam

1931a:ix); “great experiment” (Ogg 1936:809); “unique experiment” (Schnei-

der and Clough 1929:199); a “vital and vivid experiment in social control”

(Buell 1929:363).

Of all aspects of the fascist “experiment,” corporatism appeared to fascinate

American scholars the most. According to Henry Spencer (1932:249), the

“proudest boast” of fascism was that its corporate state was “solving the world-

wide puzzle, how capital and labor may be led out of their sterile, destructive

struggle for mastery at the nation’s expense, to social integration, to orderly

working side by side in the nation’s economic effort.” Although Spencer him-

self was not impressed by this boast (for he regarded fascism as fit for back-

portrayals of dictatorships in america 95

ward Italy more than as a model for the industrialized world), other scholars

took the corporate state seriously, not least of them Herbert Wallace Schneider.

Schneider, one of John Dewey’s “closest” students (Lamprecht to Schneider,

24 February 1924, Schneider Papers), became a chief interpreter of fascism to

American social scientists, before acquiring a name as a historian of philosophy

and religion at Columbia University. Schneider’s research in Italy in 1926–27

was funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), whose chairman,

Charles Merriam, displayed a “kindly interest” in the research and the publica-

tion of the resulting book—the much-cited Making the Fascist State (1928:v;

Merriam to Schneider, 11 October 1927 and Schneider to Merriam, 3 January

1928, MP 39/15; Merriam to Schneider, 13 December 1927, Schneider Papers).

Schneider (1927:161; 1928:151–64) reported that “in theory Fascism has al-

ready given place to syndicalism,” and offered an uncritical review of the new

theory: with Marxism it shared the rejection of liberal atomism as well as the

belief that functional economic interest provided the cement of human associ-

ation; yet in contrast to Marxism, fascist syndicalism maintained that the strug-

gle among nations was paramount to the class struggle, and that the state had

to organize economic classes and bring them to resolve their conflict peaceful-

ly in the common interest of national competitiveness.⁵

Schneider further reported that the “illegalism” of the past had given way to

“a revolutionary experiment in constitution-making”:

[T]he politics of dictatorship . . . are gradually giving ground to the “economic organi-

zation of producers,” the legal and judicial recognition of syndicates, the organization

of national corporations, and finally, the talk about “organic representation” and a syn-

dicalist parliament. The “Fascist state” is being enlarged into the “corporate state” . . .

the fact is clear that the emphasis is rapidly shifting from the fasci and the militia to the

national hierarchy of syndicalist associations as the foundations of the “Fascist” regime

and the essence of the Fascist revolution (1927:161–63, 201).

Schneider recounted uncritically the fascist claims that the liberal parliamen-

tary state was out of step with modern industrial conditions. Modern society

“demands a modern up-to-date state,” under which economic and social groups

are “incorporated into a cultural whole.” Italy was forced by her dire situation

to lead the quest for the modern coordinative order; and her revolution, Schnei-

der quoted the fascists, signals “but the beginning of a transformation of Euro-

pean politics” (Schneider 1928:112–13). As Diggins (1972:226) observed,

Schneider essentially interpreted Mussolini’s corporate state as a pioneering bid

to realize the Durkheimian dream of social solidarity.⁶

5

Political Science Quarterly (PSQ) published a similar comparison between fascist and social-

ist doctrines by a leading fascist theorist. (Gini 1927:104).

6

Schneider continued to regard Italian corporatism favorably in the 1930s. His writings earned

him the “esteem” of the Italian government, as well as an invitation to serve as a visiting professor

in Rome (Misscitelli to Haskell, 22 November 1934; Tullio Gianetti [President of the Fascist Fed-

eration of Industrial Labor] to Schneider, 23 April 1937, Schneider Papers).

96 ido oren

William Y. Elliott of Harvard University—the profession’s earliest and

harshest critic of fascism—commented that “Schneider’s analysis would hard-

ly suggest what appears to be the fact, that the syndicates are under complete-

ly centralized Fascist control” (1929). He criticized Schneider for ignoring fas-

cism’s exiled critics, and for making “few revelations which have not been

made by Mussolini or other Fascist apologists.” But in 1929 Elliott’s unequiv-

ocal anti-fascism was rather unusual, and some of his senior contemporaries

were more charitable toward Making the Fascist State. Charles Merriam wrote

to Schneider that he “found [the book] extremely useful and stimulative” (26

July 1929, MP 39/15), and he reviewed the book favorably in the Journal of

Political Economy (Merriam 1931b).

Charles Beard (1929), the eminent historian and former president of the

APSA, “enthusiastically questioned” Schneider about his experience in Italy

(Diggins 1972:266), and then applauded Schneider’s “realistic and highly im-

portant survey of Fascism.” Beard praised the fascists for their “original”

achievement: bringing about “by force of the State the most compact and uni-

fied organization of capitalists and laborers into two camps which the world has

ever seen,” an organization that allowed labor to make “decided gains.” Beard

further wrote that

the dictatorship is not all under his [Mussolini’s] hat. The powerful corporations of in-

dustry and labor are to some extent representative; the employers’ corporations are au-

tonomous and the labor unions, though strictly centralized under the bureaucracy are in

theory representative in management. For the political parliament just abolished is to be

substituted a kind of “economic” parliament, indirectly elected . . . This is far from the

frozen dictatorship of the Russian Tsardom; it is more like the American check and bal-

ance system; and it may work out in a new democratic direction . . . Beyond question,

an amazing experiment is being made here, an experiment in reconciling individualism

and socialism, politics and technology. It would be a mistake to allow feelings aroused

by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the

Fascist process (as all other immense historical changes) to obscure the potentialities

and the lessons of the adventure.

Beard’s enthusiasm for the corporate state was short-lived. In general, though,

the onset of the depression only heightened Americans’ curiosity about Italian

corporatism as an alternative to the politico-economic status quo, especially in

light of the previously mentioned fact that the Italian economy appeared to

perform comparatively well during the depression’s early years (Brinkley

1995:39).

As economic crisis deepened a pessimistic sentiment was widely setting in,

that “democracy is on the rocks in the United States as well as elsewhere” (Nor-

lin 1934:vi; see Purcell 1973:126–27). This pessimism led some to conclude

that democracy must adopt features of autocracy in order to survive. For ex-

ample, one scholar argued that to “save” its ailing democratic institutions Swe-

den must “imitate before it is too late the virtues—though not the faults—of

their [fascist] opposite” (Sandelius 1934:371). And William F. Willoughby, a

portrayals of dictatorships in america 97

former president of the APSA, urged Americans to “make a searching exami-

nation” of the revolutionary institutions erected in Russia, Italy, and Germany,

“apart from the abuses as may be practiced under them,” with an eye toward

“the possible incorporation in popular government of the advantages of autoc-

racy” (1936:vi, 111).

For Willoughby, autocracy’s chief “advantage” was its administrative effi-

ciency, but other scholars saw corporatism as the main feature of fascism to

which democracy should draw closer. In a very subtle way, this point was made

by E. Pendleton Herring of Harvard (later a president of the APSA and chair-

man of the SSRC). Herring (1930) saw Italy and the United States as occupy-

ing “two extreme positions.” On one extreme was an “organic state, wherein

groups are integers and individuals nothing,” and where interest groups were

formally recognized yet denied “substance.” On the other hand, America clung

to outdated individualism, “neglect[ing] the interests binding men together”; in

America groups may have had substance but no formal recognition by the state.

“Both situations leave much to be desired,” Herring concluded, implying that

the ideal polity was situated somewhere between the Italian and American

poles.

Other scholars were blunter than Herring. George Norlin (1934:39–40),

president of the University of Colorado, wrote that fascism “has its good

points—its virtues. It seeks to wipe out individual and factional strife and

merge all classes in the solidarity of the nation. It is, in the Aristotelian phrase,

vicious only in its excesses . . . The Germans have revolted against the excess-

es of individualism and so have we.” Norlin hoped that America would contin-

ue to evolve toward a “golden mean” between fascist nationalism and “ragged”

individualism. William Welk, an SSRC-funded economist at the University of

St. Thomas, wrote that “the social and economic experiment attempted in Italy

presents certain interesting parallels to that now being tried in the United States

under the aegis of the NRA. Cooperation through authority appears to be the

formula common to both programs.” The corporate state was an “example” of

how a “freely chosen national economic elite . . . inspired by new ideals of so-

cial right and social justice, is ready and able to limit . . . the freedom of the one

in the interest of the many” (Welk 1933:98, 109). Hill and Stoke (1935:495)

also likened Mussolini’s corporative program to the Nazi labor code and the

New Deal’s National RecoveryAdministration, depicting them as “schemes de-

signed to assure economic peace and justice, and to provide economic plan-

ning.”

Interest in fascist corporatism persisted even after it turned out that Italy’s

economy was sinking. Of four scholarly books about Italian fascism that ap-

peared in 1938, only one, by Carl Schmidt of Columbia University, was un-

equivocally critical. Welk (1938) clung to his analogy between fascism and the

New Deal, and although he concluded that Italy’s economic progress would de-

pend upon the return of democracy, a critic rightly found it “hard to see that

98 ido oren

such a conclusion flows out of the study itself” (Schmidt 1939:295). And H.

Arthur Steiner of UCLA, though he too expressed hope that fascism would give

way to democracy, credited fascism with having “performed the historical func-

tion of precipitating a solution of the crisis everywhere apparent in the border

line of politics and economics.” “Democracy should learn,” Steiner wrote, “on

the basis of the extreme example of Fascism, how to reconcile individual lib-

erty with the regulation and control of social affairs necessitated by the gener-

al welfare . . . democracy may yet, with authoritarian examples before it, crown

with success its search for a compatible twentieth-century standard of political

and economic obligation” (Steiner 1938:141). One reviewer called this insight

“intelligent” (Langsam 1939:308), and Fritz Morstein Marx of Harvard Uni-

versity praised Steiner’s “outstanding contribution” (Steiner 1938:Foreword).⁷

Fascist Civic Training

Charles Merriam returned from his service as chief U.S. propagandist in Italy

with a clear sense that techniques of “publicity”—the controlled dissemination

of ideas and manipulation of popular symbols—might be used effectively for

the purpose of fostering civic solidarity (Merriam 1919; Ross 1991:454). The

problem of nation-building (“civic education” in Merriam’s terms) was indeed

at the center of his research agenda between approximately 1925 and 1931. It

was this intellectual concern that aroused Merriam’s interest in Herbert Schnei-

der’s interpretation of fascism as a non-Marxist solution to the problem of the

fragmentation of industrial society.

Merriam—the most influential political scientist of his generation—charac-

teristically framed nation-building as a “control problem” (Merriam to Paul

Kosok, 5 April 1927, MP 33/15). How could social science contribute to

strengthening national cohesion in America, beset as it was by increasing eth-

nic, religious, regional, and economic diversity? Merriam launched a massive

cross-national research project on “comparative civic training.” He instructed

project participants to assess the extent to which public schools, patriotic orga-

nizations, the press, patriotic symbols, etc. served as effective “mechanisms or

devices for the purpose of inculcating civic interest and loyalty” (Merriam to

Clough, 9 April 1928, MP 37/12).

The countries Merriam chose to study included “two of the more modern sys-

tems, the Fascist in Italy and the Soviet system in Russia” (Merriam’s remarks

to SSRC conference, 151, MP 139/1). These two “striking experiments” were

selected because they were “the most interesting [attempts] now in process” of

“creating de novo a type of political loyalty to, and interest in, a new order of

things. The revolution in Russia was, of course, much more fundamental . . .

but the Italian situation is equally remarkable” (Merriam to Schneider, 23 De-

cember 1927, MP 39/15; Merriam to Clough, 9 April 1928, MP 37/12).

7

The third 1938 book that treated fascism uncritically was authored by G. Lowell Field.

portrayals of dictatorships in america 99

Making Fascists, by Herbert Schneider and Shepard Clough (1929), a young

historian at Columbia University, was among the top-selling volumes in Merri-

am’s series on civic training (Donald Bean to Merriam, 7 April 1938, MP 58/3;

Clough 1981:75). Schneider and Clough found that “the Fascist regime has

made an enormous advance over its immediate predecessors in appealing to the

religious imagination of the people and in providing the nation with concrete

symbols and forms for the expression of its political faith” (203–4). Fascist

“rites and rituals” such as “the black uniforms, the black pennant, the Roman

salute . . . may seem artificial and even unreal to a foreigner,” but “even a casu-

al acquaintance with the spirit and inner life of a fascio is enough to reveal the

emotional appeal and imaginative force which all this exerts on the youth of the

nation . . . There is a considerable and undeniable element of religious convic-

tion and devotion in most Fascists, which transcends the limits of political strife

and party tactics” (74–75). The black-shirted militia was “the most striking” of

the special corps which contributed to the nation’s “picturesque character” (119).

The militia was “purified” of its violent elements, becoming a “premilitary train-

ing school of national service,” whose members engaged in useful public works

(122–33). The authors concluded by suggesting that the “methods and ideals of

civic training” employed by the fascists to meet Italy’s postwar emergency “may

serve to instruct those peoples who have as yet evaded such emergencies” (204).

Charles Merriam apparently had no problem with this suggestion. He told

Schneider and Clough that he was “greatly pleased” with their “ground-break-

ing” study (Merriam to Schneider, 27 February 1929, MP 39/15). In The Mak-

ing of Citizens (1931), the book in which he synthesized the findings of the civic

training series, Merriam expressed optimism about the contemporary “scien-

tific tendency” away from the “dogmatisms” of the past toward modern social

control. In this transition, the resort to fear and force as “bases of civic alle-

giance” was giving way to new scientific techniques of “civic education as

means of political control” (349). Merriam acknowledged that Mussolini ruled

with a firm “iron hand” (224), but he nonetheless regarded fascism as a full-

fledged participant in the progressive march toward the end of scientific polit-

ical control. In fact, Italy and Russia had progressed the furthest in the manip-

ulation of symbols for fostering civic loyalty. Along the path to modernity

Symbolism earlier associated with the pomp and ceremony of the ancien regime loses

strength, but new types appear and become impressive factors in the new regime, as is

seen with especial brilliance in Italy and Russia. Builders of political morale in old states

or in new will without doubt continue to employ these methods in the development of

political loyalty and enthusiasm, and will find them useful in the task of magnetizing the

elements of the state (349).

It was easily possible, wrote Merriam, that the “brilliant devices of the Reds

and the Black Shirts, with their array of colorful and inspiring cults and cere-

monies,” would be “woven into the civic education of the future” throughout

the modern world (310).

100 ido oren

In sum, although Charles Merriam disapproved of fascist dictatorship, he

was curious about certain aspects of the fascist “experiment,” and he was per-

fectly open to the possibility of emulating fascist techniques in America. As

Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1956:325) later observed, Merriam

apparently considered “the ‘making of fascists’and the ‘making of citizens’[as]

essentially the same kind of undertaking.”

Other “Achievements” of Fascism

In addition to pioneering the corporate state, Italian fascism was credited with

other “very real and substantial achievements” (Spencer 1927:542). Impressed

with such achievements were both scholars who, like Henry Spencer, regarded

fascism as fit for the “passive” Italians alone, and scholars such as H. Arthur

Steiner, who regarded aspects of fascism as “examples” for the industrialized

world.

Spencer (1932:103) praised the fascists for improving “the general condition

of society” after taking power. “Order had been established, though at the ex-

pense of the Constitution and of law . . . Instead of every man doing that which

was right in his own eyes, there were discipline, authority, orderliness . . . the

trains and trams came and went punctually, the streets . . . became relatively

clean and clear of beggars.” Public life, “by contagion from Mussolini,” had

become more “energetic,” and the state began “marching with quicker, manli-

er step.”

Steiner (1938:137) wrote that fascism effected “wholesome improvements

in the Italian scene.” Mussolini’s boast that “fascist social legislation is the most

advanced in the world . . . contains a kernel of truth.” The regime “maintains

an elaborate system of social insurance, health resorts for young and old, a pro-

gram of slum clearance, and a large scale program of public works to allay un-

employment” (1938:32–33). Steiner also praised the fascists for their “consti-

tutional” ingenuity. Italian jurists devised a better solution than their Russian or

German counterparts to the problem of defining the constitutional relationship

between the party and the state. Furthermore, Fascist jurists successfully laid

“the constitutional and mechanical basis for [the] permanence” of the fascist

regime. Thanks to their efforts, “the Fascist dispensation will not necessarily

pass with the passing of the figure who created it” (1937:229, 242).

Ogg (1936:842) noted the “great [economic] gains” made by Mussolini’s

regime. The fascists put Italians “back to work” and gave them a “rather sub-

stantial degree of national prosperity . . . amid an era of worldwide depression.”

(Such gains were purchased at the price of lost personal freedom, acknowl-

edged Ogg, but he depicted the accusations of the émigrés’ opposition in that

regard as exaggerated [842]). The fascists balanced the budget and “steered

Italy out of a financial mess which seemed hopeless,” wrote Munro (1931:726).

Italy’s finances were sound, wrote Hill and Stoke (1935:493–94), quoting For-

tune magazine, because of the “vigorous” stewardship of Mussolini; the peo-

portrayals of dictatorships in america 101

ple’s “hot faith” in their leader and their “patriotic fervor” were “the psycho-

logical factors that to a large measure determine the credit of any nation. And

in Italy they are strikingly favorable.”

The fascists won praise for turning the Italian public bureaucracy into a mod-

el of “Napoleonic efficiency” (Ogg 1936:842). Lester Born (1927:870–71)

wrote that in reviving the undemocratic but “efficacious” podesta system of lo-

cal administration, “Premier Mussolini has once more appealed to the vigorous

heritage of early Italy to carry on his modern revivification and unification.”

Taylor Cole (1938) described how the fascists successfully “simplified and

refined” the organization of the civil service. Cole (later an APSA president)

commended the fascist regime for allowing government personnel to form syn-

dical unions: “In few countries have the problems of administrative syndical-

ism been more decisively solved” (1157). Even the fascist party itself, remarked

Harold Lasswell and Renzo Sereno (1937), was gradually becoming a “true

bureaucracy” that was recruiting increasingly educated personnel, sometimes

through “rigid competitive examinations.” True, the original party personnel

typically “distinguished themselves” by engaging in “informal violence,”

but presently “civil administration tasks absorb most of their energies.” The

Lasswell-Sereno study illustrates the use of antiseptic language to describe the

less pleasant aspects of Italian fascism. The term “dictatorship” was entirely ab-

sent from the article; fascist party organs were dubbed “public law agencies,”

and the parliament was classified as a “declining” agency, as if its decline was

a mere secular trend.

the attraction of authoritarianism and corporatism

Background and Context

The late 1930s was aptly characterized as a period of “fascist vertigo” (Payne

1987:632). Fascism momentarily appeared to be the wave of the future, where-

as the prospects for liberal democracy appeared gloomy even to its defenders,

let alone to dictators (or aspiring dictators), who detested it to begin with. Fran-

cisco Franco declared that his state would be structured in the mold of Germany

and Italy, modified to fit Spain’s national characteristics (Gleason 1995:29). In-

deed, “from 1937 to 1945 the Franco regime was doctrinally at least a semi-

fascist state” (Payne 1987:629). Antonio Salazar’s “corporative republic” was

not originally inspired by the Italian model, but after 1936 it “participated in

the general tendency toward fascism” in southern and eastern Europe (Payne

1987:633). In 1937, Getulio Vargas “launched his Estado Novo (New State)

regime as the Brazilian version of European fascism and corporativism”; Var-

gas’s constitution was “faithfully copied after European fascist charters” (Szulc

1959:26–27). Juan Peron experienced the fascist vertigo as Argentina’s mili-

tary attaché in Rome, and joined Italian combat regiments during the early

stages of the war (Szulc 1959:109).

102 ido oren

Notwithstanding their pro-fascist sentiments, these dictators had the good

political sense to abstain from joining the Axis. Salazar “was not as opposed to

the Rome-Berlin Axis as he preferred to have it appear after 1943” (Payne

1987:631), but he nevertheless maintained Portugal’s official neutrality, as did

Franco in Spain. Vargas declared in June 1941 that the Western democracies

were “anachronisms,” but later threw his support behind them. Peron and fel-

low officers sought to align Argentina with the Axis, but after seizing power in

1943 they expediently refrained from translating their pro-Axis views into a

formal alliance (Szulc:84, 110–13).

Stanley Payne surmised that “Had Hitler won the war, there seems little

doubt that Franquism would have become . . . more radical and overtly fascist

in form.” Salazar’s regime too “would probably have become . . . more fascist”

(1987:629, 632). But as it turned out fascism lost the war, and those dictators

who were influenced by fascism hastened to dissociate their regimes from it.

Still, in the 1950s American social scientists often continued to identify these

regimes as fascist. Friedrich and Brzezinski, in their classic statement of the to-

talitarian model (1956), described Peron as a “fascist leader” (24), Peron’s

regime as “budding totalitarianism” (139), and Peron’s justicialismo as a “vul-

garization of Fascist corporatism” (86). Seymour Martin Lipset (1960:176) de-

picted Peronism and “Getulisme” (Vargas) as “fascism of the left.”⁸In his fa-

mous textbook, economist Paul Samuelson (1955:728) surveyed the common

characteristics of fascist regimes, “whether in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s

Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, or Peron’s Argentina.” And William

Ebenstein (1954) of Princeton University wrote in his popular textbook that

“fascism is now firmly entrenched” in Spain (78), and that Peron’s Argentina

was a “full-fledged fascist state” (82). He also identified the Salazar and Var-

gas dictatorships as fascist (77). Ebenstein stated that “What the one-party state

with the secret police and concentration camps is to the political side of fascist

regimes, corporatism is to fascism’s social and economic aspects” (74).

But during the 1960s and 1970s, the reputation of these regimes underwent

a rehabilitation of sorts. The fascist origins of Francoism were blurred, and

Spain became a model “authoritarian” regime, characterized by “limited plu-

ralism.” Peronism and “Getulisme” came to epitomize, in the eyes of some po-

litical scientists, progressive “corporatist” regimes, which offered a viable mod-

el for other developing nations, and from which even Americans might have

something to learn. In part, the revision corresponded to objective political

change—Franco’s dictatorship, for example, mellowed over time and shed its

overtly fascistic forms (Payne 1987). But the change also reflected intellectual

trends within American political science and developments external to the dis-

cipline that were remarkably similar to the trends of the 1920s and 1930s: dis-

8

Lipset (1960:130) classified Franco and Salazar as “right extremists” rather than “fascists” of

the right.

portrayals of dictatorships in america 103

comfort with unregulated interest-group pluralism, pessimism about the future

of liberal democracy, and the emergence of harsher dictatorships in LatinAmer-

ica that made past dictatorships appear tame in comparison.

As noted above, American political scientists came to accept the reality of

interest-group politics somewhat reluctantly in the 1920s, feeling that a pow-

erful state authority would be necessary to regulate group competition and pre-

vent parochial interests from gaining undue influence. The suspicion toward

unregulated pluralistic politics abated in the 1950s when classics such as Tru-

man (1951) and Dahl (1956) represented pluralism in unqualifiedly positive

terms, and when “the state” disappeared from disciplinary discourse. But in the

late 1960s the old anxieties began resurfacing, and pluralism—though it re-

mained the dominant paradigm of American political science—came under at-

tack from scholars who sought to rein in “special” interests and “bring the state

back in” as an autonomous actor serving the public good.⁹This intellectual

mood facilitated a revival of interest in the “corporatist” mode of interest-rep-

resentation.

Another aspect of the intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s that repro-

duced the mood of earlier years was anxiety about the prospects of liberal

democracy, stimulated by another “wave” of democratic reversals. As Samuel

Huntington (1991:21) observed (alluding in part to his own work), the global

swing away from democracy in the 1960s and early 1970s produced “pes-

simism about the applicability of democracy in developing countries and . . .

concern about the viability and workability of democracy among the developed

countries.” While since the early 1980s political scientists have been busily

writing about transitions to democracy, one should not forget that a short time

earlier they were still grappling with “the breakdown of democratic regimes”

(Linz and Stepan 1978), and that they altogether failed to anticipate the “third

wave of democratization” that began in the Iberian peninsula in the mid-1970s

(as Huntington 1991:319 candidly admitted).

Critical attitudes toward the Peron and Vargas dictatorships diminished fur-

ther as a result of the rise of harsher military dictatorships in Argentina and

Brazil in the 1960s. The latter regimes were classified as “bureaucratic-author-

itarian” (O’Donnell 1973), and were differentiated from the “populist” author-

itarianism of Vargas and Peron (Collier and Collier 1977:503). This distinction

was justified on analytical grounds (bureaucratic authoritarianism excluded the

working classes while populism incorporated them), but it also implied a nor-

mative evaluation of Vargas and Peron’s dictatorships as better, or less bad, than

their successors. Overall, the norms of repression set by the new dictatorships

seem to have attenuated criticism of their predecessors (or of less repressive

9

See, e.g., Evans et al. (1985), Krueger (1974), and Olson (1982). I cite these sources as ex-

amples of broad intellectual trends in the discipline, not as examples of uncritical attitudes toward

dictatorship.

104 ido oren

contemporaneous juntas such as General Velasco’s in Peru) in a manner simi-

lar to the effect of Nazi brutality on the evaluation of Mussolini’s Italy.

“An Authoritarian Regime: Spain”

Juan Linz arrived at Columbia University from Spain in 1950. Initially, his fel-

low students and professors regarded him with suspicion because Linz did not

identify with the Spanish Loyalists, whom he preferred to label “reds.” Linz

soon learned to use more “correct” terminology, and he went on to become one

of the leading political sociologists of the postwar era (Lipset 1995:3–4). Much

of Linz’s reputation was built upon an influential article (1964) that criticized

the then-prevalent classification of regimes into either democratic or totalitar-

ian types, and which used the case of Spain to develop a third, “authoritarian”

type (Linz also classified Vargas and Salazar as authoritarian rulers). Unlike to-

talitarian political systems, Linz wrote, authoritarian systems are pluralistic, but

their pluralism is “limited, not responsible” (297).

Linz insisted that as a social scientist he should not express value judgments

(338), and the tone of his article was indeed objective. Nevertheless, the piece

is open to interpretation as a subtle defense of the Franco regime. Although

Linz warned that “we may be seriously misled if we study such regimes

through constitutions, laws, speeches,” (291) he relied substantially on the

words of Franco and his confidantes to support his argument. For example,

Linz quoted approvingly from a 1947 text written by Franco’s brother-in-law,

Ramon Serrano-Suner, declaring that “in Spain there has never been anything

that would really look like a totalitarian state” (299). Linz did not mention that

in 1940 Serrano-Suner drafted a law proclaiming the state to be a “totalitarian

instrument,” that Serrano-Suner was even more pro-fascist than Franco him-

self, and that the regime executed at least twenty-eight thousand Spaniards

shortly before his 1947 declaration (Payne 1987:285, 259, 223). While Fran-

co’s speeches were taken by Linz at face value, he discounted the charges made

by Franco’s exiled victims. Quoting a foreign observer of Spain, Linz wrote

that “The picture of Franco’s Spain that is firmly believed by the exiles is dis-

torted and in many respects false. They picture a totalitarian police state that

simply does not exist. They have no idea of the degree of tolerance that Fran-

co permits so long as his position and the security of his regime is not threat-

ened” (316).

Linz played down the repressive nature of Francoism by indicating that even

democratic regimes may apply “terror” during “crisis situations.” He wrote that

the Spanish media enjoyed some autonomy and—again violating his own stric-

ture against taking formal laws seriously—that “as long as one does not make

more than 5 copies of one’s opinion, one cannot be prosecuted for illegal pro-

paganda in Spain” (315–16). In authoritarian regimes, “the equilibrium of

forces on which limited pluralism is based” constrains the level of repression

(316). Repression is further minimized by

portrayals of dictatorships in america 105

the presence in the elite of men who have held power under states of law, and are them-

selves lawyers or, if military, they share at least the military conceptions of law; legal-

ism may not inhibit the repression of the State’s enemies, but it does lead to certain pro-

cedural rules, to an emphasis on actions rather than intentions.

Thus, whereas in totalitarian regimes the police persecuted “potential oppo-

nents” of the regime, Franco’s police harassed only “actual” opponents (317).

Linz attributed the stability of Franco’s regime to its “identification with the

basic values of the society,” more than its suppression of opposition. The pop-

ulation “obeys [Franco] out of a mixture of habit and self-interest, either char-

acterizing the political culture of passive subjects or the parochial” (323–24).

As for opposition groups, in many developing countries they are not “con-

structive” in the sense that “they do not understand the distinction between op-

position and secession” (339).

I would surmise, [Linz wrote] that Franco . . . would fully agree with these arguments

[about the nonconstructive nature of opposition]. And in the case of Spain, one cannot

deny a certain legitimacy to the argument if one considers the behavior of a large part

of the Socialist party in the opposition during the October days of 1934, or that of Com-

panys, the head of the Generalitat of Catalonia during those days, or the activities of the

Basques nationalists, or those of the extreme Right opposition to the Republic. The dis-

tinction between opposition to the government, the regime and even the state, was cer-

tainly not clear to many Spaniards (339).

Linz thus indirectly accepted the claims of Franco and other dictators that na-

tional unity could only be maintained by limiting the scope of partisan democ-

ratic politics.

Linz’s portrayal of Franco’s Spain paralleled earlier accounts of Mussolini’s

Italy in several respects. His discounting of the claims of Franco’s exiled op-

ponents resembled Ogg’s suggestion that the Italian émigrés’ charges were ex-

aggerated, as well as Herbert Schneider’s indifference to the émigrés’ views.

Linz’s description of the mellowing of Franco’s regime (“Staffing the system

with officers and civil servants, rather than the ‘old shirts’of street fighting days

contributes to the growth of legalism” [320]) paralleled Schneider’s claim that

Mussolini’s regime was “rapidly shifting” away from the fasci and the “ille-

galism” of its past. It also echoed Lasswell’s account of the de-fascization and

professionalization of the Italian bureaucracy. Linz’s depiction of the political

culture of semi-developed societies as “passive subject” was similar to Henry

Spencer’s depiction of Italian national psychology, as was Linz’s insinuation

that such culture comported with authoritarian rule. And Linz’s negative de-

piction of the Spanish opposition echoed accounts that placed partial blame for

Mussolini’s dictatorship on the opposition.

If Linz’s primary goal was to magnify the distinction between totalitarian

regimes and “authoritarian” Spain, the thrust of Charles Anderson’s work on

Spanish political economy (1970) was to minimize the difference between

Spain and democratic Western Europe. Anderson, of the University of Wis-

106 ido oren

consin, described the Spanish economic “miracle” of the 1960s very favorably,

noting that Spain’s “economic leadership meets the pragmatic test: it worked”

(237). Under Franco, “Spain apparently has made good at the task which has

singularly engaged the efforts of all Western nations in the postwar period, the

generation of sustained economic growth and development” (5). Writing at the

high tide of Keynesianism,Anderson proposed that in the era of Keynesian cap-

italism

it may be that the paraphernalia of liberal democratic politics is not . . . particularly per-

tinent to economic decision-making. Parliaments, in general, no longer have more than

a residual role in economic choice . . . The center of gravity in the conduct of econom-

ic affairs has shifted from political authorities to central banks, planning agencies and

the economic ministries (8).

The spectacular economic growth of authoritarian Spain confirmed, for An-

derson, this proposition. He noted that the economic role of western European

parliaments was “not totally incomparable” to the role of the cortes (82), and

that “the participatory processes of planning were more vital in Spain than in

France” (182). “The similarities between the policy process in Spain and the

rest of the Western world,” Anderson inferred, “were not due to the fact that

Spain was less authoritarian than conventionally believed, but that the Western

democracies were more so” (244).

Anderson concluded with the statement that “the technical problems of pol-

icy-making apparently still involve the eternal issue of the appropriate balance

between liberty and authority in any political order” (250). Indeed there was lit-

tle in the book to suggest that Franco’s Spain did not strike such an “appropri-

ate balance,” at least not in comparison to the Western democracies.

Peronism, Getulisme, Corporatism

Juan Linz was ambivalent about the “authoritarian” status of Peron’s dictator-

ship, which he depicted as “the most interesting case of a shift toward a more

totalitarian conception from what was originally a military dictatorship”

(1964:337). The task of rehabilitating the reputation of Peronism was thus left

to Jeane Kirkpatrick (1971) of Georgetown University. Kirkpatrick, a member

of a circle of liberal anticommunist political scientists close to Hubert

Humphrey and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s (Ehrman

1995:117), portrayed Peron’s regime as a nonrevolutionary “authoritarian” al-

ternative to totalitarian communism. Peron may have been a demagogue or fas-

cist, but

he is also the man who presided over the participatory revolution in Argentinean poli-

tics. It was he who perceived the masses of barely literate but recently uprooted poor on

the doorstep of the political system and invited them in. If he did not exactly prepare a

place for them, he nonetheless made them feel welcome. And if he did not enter with

them, his wife Evita did, and his own entrance was made more dramatic, more triumphal,

and more definitive and his tenure in office extended by their accompaniment (30).

portrayals of dictatorships in america 107

Kirkpatrick described Eva Peron as “an impressively dynamic, ambitious,

beautiful and talented woman” whose relationship with the masses “was based

more on mutual identification than on rhetoric. Her precise role in the political

structure of Peronist Argentina will never be known, but it is frequently ob-

served that problems multiplied after her death” (31).

Kirkpatrick acknowledged that Juan Peron censored the press, purged the ju-

diciary, and jailed thousands of political prisoners. Yet she insisted that the

regime was not totalitarian since “Peron did not destroy all opposition” (40).

The focus of Kirkpatrick’s book was actually broader than Peronism, as she

set out to investigate “the psychocultural aspects of the mass base of Argen-

tinean society” (4). Kirkpatrick quoted uncritically unflattering accounts of the

Argentine national character as politically “passive.” “The characterization of

the Argentine national character . . . will have a familiar ring for students of

Mediterranean cultures generally. Lack of community is a recurrent theme in

the literature on Latin cultures. In these cultures, family is often described as

the only unit whose members are united by trust, affection, and empathy . . . In-

terpersonal relations outside the family are said to be dominated by mutual sus-

picion and distrust” (118–19). Kirkpatrick’s own survey of Argentine opinion

“confirm[ed] the existence of high levels of mutual distrust, of cynicism about

government, and of lack of agreement about the desirable form of political or-

ganization” (231).

The chief message of the book (later echoed in Kirkpatrick’s famous 1979

article) was that Anglo-American democracy was not natural to “Mediter-

ranean-style” cultures, and that inArgentina democracy was a sham even when

its forms were observed. While the “Anglo-Saxon tradition predisposes us to

think of compromise as the heart of the political process and conflict resolution

as the core political skill,” other cultures place a high value on “rectitude and

deference,” thus rendering political compromise “exceedingly difficult” (232–

33). The book concluded with the observation that “The tendency of Argenti-

na to gravitate repeatedly toward and acquiesce in autocracy might be explained

by the relatively low requirements of autocracy for compromise, conciliation,

and cooperation” (233).

Kirkpatrick’s observation that in Latin cultures the family is “the only unit

whose members are united by trust, affection and empathy” closely resembled

Henry Spencer’s (1932:15) claim that Italian “family life is a bright spot. It is

founded on affection rather than interest or legal bonds.” Kirkpatrick’s depic-

tion of Argentine “passiveness” and lack of civic spirit mirrored Spencer’s (19)

depiction of the Italians as “socially indifferent” and “passive subjects rather

than active citizens.” And her view that Argentine political culture did not meet

the high standards required forAnglo-Saxon democracy echoed Frederic Ogg’s

claim that the Italians were “ill-prepared by experience . . . and temperament”

to properly exercise Anglo-Saxon parliamentarism.

The notion that the political culture of certain societies is “familist,” and

108 ido oren

hence inauspicious to liberal democracy, was applied to Brazil by Philippe

Schmitter (1971) of the University of Chicago. Schmitter argued that Getulio

Vargas’s Estado Novo laid the foundation for an authoritarian corporatist polit-

ical sistema that outlived Vargas himself, and that persisted even when the

Brazilian government was formally democratic. This sistema “can be credited

with” the administrative, economic, and legal unification of Brazil, with Brazil’s

industrialization, and with “the promulgation and partial enforcement of an ex-

tensive set of social welfare policies. Even if none of these transformations re-

sulted ‘from below,’ they form quite a list of accomplishments” (389).

Schmitter criticized scholars who theorized that modernization led to either

democratization or totalitarian revolution, and he maintained that Brazil epito-

mized a third—authoritarian, corporatist—path to modernization (386–92).

The prospects of liberal democracy (or totalitarianism) in Brazil were remote,

in large part because the authoritarian system had “deep roots in the country’s

political culture” (392).

To portray Brazil’s political culture, Schmitter drew heavily on the writings

of F. J. de Oliveira Vianna, an ideologue of Vargas’s corporatist dictatorship

(117). Schmitter acknowledged that “Oliveira Vianna’s political oeuvre is not

studied today, perhaps because of his association with racist and corporatist

thought in the 1920s and 1930s” (49). Nevertheless Schmitter chose to reha-

bilitate Oliveira Vianna’s reputation because “more clearly and insistently than

any other Brazilian social thinker [he] has stressed that the extraordinary con-

tinuity of the Brazilian political culture . . . depended upon the persistent role

of the major, almost unchallenged agent of attitudinal socialization, the fami-

ly” (50). Given the “rigidly patriarchal and authoritarian” structure of the

Brazilian family, “it is no wonder that numerous observers found the Brazilians

humble, obedient, and easy to govern” (55). Brazilians are socialized by their

families into a “faith that one’s leaders will exercise their power for one’s ben-

efit, but without one’s participation, and that such an exercise will be person-

al” (56). This cultural legacy is so powerful that “Brazil has had difficulty re-

placing affective, familistic particularism with a distinctive set of universalistic,

rational orientations toward the political process” (53). In sum, Schmitter en-

dorsed the view, articulated by a Vargas apologist, that because of the authori-

tarian character of their families, Brazilians essentially feel at home in an au-

thoritarian, paternalistic political system.

In an influential article published in a special issue of the Review of Politics

on the “new corporatism,” Schmitter (1974) repudiated his earlier argument

that authoritarian corporatism had deep roots in Brazilian, or, more broadly,

Latin American culture.¹⁰He wrote that “Those who advocated corporatism in

the Iberian and Latin American areas unabashedly and unashamedly imported

10

The special issue was reprinted as Pike and Stritch (1974). Page numbers below refer to this

volume.

portrayals of dictatorships in america 109

their ideas from abroad” (90). Based on the corporatist theory of Mihail

Manoilesco—a pro-fascist Romanian thinker of the interwar period—Schmit-

ter constructed an ideal type of dictatorial “state corporatism,” and he argued

(reversing his earlier view) that the cases of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and other

Latin American corporatist dictatorships conform to this ideal type as much as

the “defunct” cases of fascist Italy, Petainist France, Nazi Germany, and Aus-

tria under Dolfuss (104).

But the other contributors to the volume on the “new corporatism” disagreed

with Schmitter’s claim that Iberic-Latin corporatism and European fascist cor-

poratism were cut of the same cloth. Fredrick Pike (1974), the volume’s co-ed-

itor, insisted that corporatism, and the paternalism it entails, were indigenous

to Hispanic culture. Pike accepted the claim of Franco’s apologists that the

Spanish masses were not ready to escape their dependence upon a paternalistic

government: “The Spanish lower classes seem little concerned with demand-

ing a voice in national decision-making processes, so long as those in power af-

ford them security through state paternalism, and so long as the power wield-

ers make purchasing power available to them” (185–86. Compare this

statement to Henry Spencer’s statement that the Italians were “unwilling to dis-

turb any regime, democratic or despotic, if only ‘si lavora e si mangia.’”). The

Spanish elite indeed “has been amazingly successful in channeling more mon-

ey into the hands of the Spanish masses,” and it has pampered the masses “with

a wide coverage of paternalistic protection.” In terms rather sympathetic to

Franco’s regime, Pike described how “Spain scored spectacular gains in capi-

talist development and simultaneously strengthened the paternalism on which

an elitist, nonliberal, corporate social structure depended” (178). He conclud-

ed that “Spain’s syndicalist or corporatist system is functioning fairly well as a

vital mechanism in bestowing state paternalism upon the laboring classes”

(201–2).

Pike noted approvingly that several Latin American regimes, including the

Pinochet-led junta in Chile, were following Franco’s developmental model:

an increasing number of Latin American republics could conceivably find the means for

accomplishing the goal toward which Spain’s technocratic elite have, with remarkable

short term success, devoted their efforts during the past two decades: accommodation

between modern times and the essential social gestures of the traditional, elitist, two-

culture corporate society. . . . Spaniards can look with satisfaction upon the members of

their raza . . . in the New World, for Spanish Americans seem to have resisted the lure

of Anglo-American models and to have maintained their cultural heritage intact by es-

chewing liberal inorganic democracy based on society-wide diffusion of individualism.

In this situation Spaniards can perhaps find affirmation of their conventional wisdom

that liberalism was never more than a passing sickness (207–8).

Pike himself all but endorsed the view that liberalism was a “passing sickness.”

He wrote that the doubts expressed in the early 1970s about the viability of

Western democracy

110 ido oren

contribute to the tolerance with which North Americans have quite recently begun to

view the nonliberal ways of Spanish Americans. For years, and even centuries, mem-

bers of the more highly developed Western world . . . have been smugly predicting that

eventually Spaniards as a whole would become liberal enough to earn the rights of a

closer association with polite international society. Today traditionalist Spaniards may

with some justification be thinking that eventually the rest of the world will become il-

liberal enough to merit acceptance by them and by the American members of their raza

(208–9).

In sum, Fredrick Pike not only proposed that authoritarian Spain provided a vi-

able model for developing societies; he suggested that Franco’s illiberal cor-

poratism offered a model from which even the United States had something to

learn.

Howard Wiarda—a prolific Latin Americanist from the University of Mas-

sachusetts—was another contributor to the “New Corporatism” volume who,

contra Schmitter, argued that authoritarian corporatism was “natural” to the

Iberic-Latin world, and that it had little affinity with Italian fascism (Wiarda

1974). In the early 1960s, Wiarda supported the Kennedy administration’s Al-

liance for Progress, which promoted U.S.-style liberal democracy in Latin

America. But in 1964–65 Wiarda encountered the darker side of American

liberalism as he witnessed the invasion of the Dominican Republic, where he

was researching his dissertation. As a result of this personal experience, later

reinforced by the events of Vietnam and Watergate, Wiarda became disillu-

sioned with American liberalism and turned into a fervent critic of the notion

that the American liberal-pluralist model was applicable to other parts of

the world, especially Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (Wiarda 1981:

3–10).

Wiarda’s argument against the universality of liberal democracy was cultur-

al. In a book partly based on his dissertation research, he (1969) described the

Dominican political culture as an exaggerated version of Latin American cul-

ture. He wrote that “the Dominicans by and large do not have the kind of am-

bitious, innovational, risk-taking personalities found in other cultures” (85). To

them, “personal integrity is more important than abstract rights and institutions,

and personal honor and dignity tend to take priority over group responsibility”

(82–83). Furthermore, “The pragmatic compromise, the workable solution, the

idea of ‘getting it done’ are not as highly valued in Dominican society as they

are in the Anglo-American culture” (84).

Although Wiarda’s politics differed markedly from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s—

she was a staunch liberal anticommunist, whereas he became a critic of

American liberalism—the latter claim is strikingly similar to Kirkpatrick’s ar-

gument (1971:232–32) that Mediterranean-style cultures lacked “the Anglo-

Saxon tradition [which] predisposes us to think of compromise as the heart of

the political process.” Kirkpatrick concluded that the Latin emphasis on defer-

ence might explain “the tendency of Argentina to gravitate repeatedly toward

portrayals of dictatorships in america 111

and acquiesce in autocracy,” and Wiarda reached a similar conclusion regard-

ing the Dominican Republic:

In this [cultural] context, the building of a democratic society—at least on the British or

U.S. model—would be most difficult. Few of the commonly accepted ingredients of

democracy . . . are present. It may therefore be easier to understand why the country has

vacillated between periods of extreme tyranny and extreme instability. (88)

In subsequent studies Wiarda not only maintained that Iberic-Latin authori-

tarian regimes should not be judged by American liberal standards, he further

argued that the liberal United States had as much to learn from corporatist Iberia

and Latin America as the other way around. These themes were articulated, for

example, in Wiarda’s 1977 study of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, a

regime he dubbed a corporatist “experiment” (xi, 8) and described as the

“‘purest’ of the Iberic-Latin corporative systems” (6).

A case can be made that, in comparison with both the liberal and the socialist alterna-

tives, a number of the Iberic-Latin systems, founded upon corporatist principles, come

out not altogether badly on a variety of indices of participation, social justice and the

management of the twentieth century change process . . . Perhaps terms like participa-

tion and even democratization mean different things in different cultural contexts, and

maybe the indices of electoral participation used by NorthAmerican social scientists are

themselves culture bound. Moreover, given the growing realization that the United

States has not coped very well with, much less solved, its fundamental problems of

poverty, racism, unemployment, alienation, inadequate human services and the like, it

may be that the Iberic-Latin model and practice of dealing with some of these same is-

sues contain lessons from which we can learn (10; emphases original).

Iberic-Latin societies such as Portugal have modernized, Wiarda suggested,

“without sacrificing the sense of community, personalism, moral values and na-

tional purpose which we [Americans] seem to have lost.” Their “adapting to

modernization without being overwhelmed by it may offer instruction con-

cerning our own developmental dilemmas and institutional malaise” (10–11).

I have already noted that scholars who uncritically portrayed fascist Italy fell

into two categories. One group, exemplified by Henry Spencer, viewed fascism

as appropriate for backward Italy, yet an irrelevant model for America. Other

scholars, exemplified by Herbert Schneider, were intrigued by the possibility

of borrowing certain fascist institutions or methods for the purpose of alleviat-

ing the ailments they diagnosed in liberal America. If Jeane Kirkpatrick’s view

ofArgentina and Philippe Schmitter’s (1971) analysis of Brazil echoed the first

of these two views, the attitudes articulated by Fredrick Pike and especially

Howard Wiarda were more analogous to the latter. Schneider belonged to a

generation whose faith in American liberalism was shaken by World War I,

when the Wilson administration used force and repressed dissent in the name

of democracy. The American invasions of the Dominican Republic and Viet-

nam—also in the name of democracy—were to Wiarda’s generation what the

Great War was to Schneider’s: a catalyst for disenchantment with liberalism.

112 ido oren

Many members of both generations of disenchanted intellectuals swung toward

revolutionary socialism, and some of them consequently idealized the brutal

regimes of Stalin or Mao (Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). But in both periods

there were also disenchanted intellectuals like Schneider and Wiarda, who

sought a third, corporatist, path between liberal individualism and socialist col-

lectivism, and who consequently were “soft” on certain unpleasant regimes that

purported to take such a path. Schneider (1927: 201) declared that “The ‘Fas-

cist state’ is being enlarged into the ‘corporate state,’” and he found in Mus-

solini’s corporate state the sense of community and solidarity that he felt

was sorely missing in individualistic America. Five decades later, Wiarda sim-

ilarly claimed that Iberic-Latin dictatorships were more corporatist than fascist,

and that America’s “institutional malaise” might be alleviated by learning how

these regimes modernized “without sacrificing the sense of community, per-

sonalism, moral values and national purpose which we seem to have lost”

(Wiarda 1977, 10).

conclusion

In the 1920s and 1930s—against the backdrop of the Great War’s propaganda

experience, a wave of democratic reversals, and the Great Depression—wide

circles within American political science were permeated by an intellectual

mood that entailed doubts about the workability and universality of democra-

cy, displeasure with the atomism of American society, and a sentiment favor-

ing governmental intervention to foster social harmony. This mood combined

with a belief in the quiescent character of the Italian people to produce a cli-

mate in which the expression of forgiving attitudes toward Italy’s fascist dicta-

torship was an acceptable (though not universal) practice. A number of politi-

cal scientists, including recipients of the discipline’s highest honors, discounted

or rationalized fascist repression and praised various fascist achievements. The

uncritical attitudes of some of these scholars stemmed from a belief that par-

liamentary democracy was alien to the Italian temperament, and that Mussoli-

ni’s dictatorship was a viable modernizing force for undeveloped Italy. Other

scholars were uncritical because they were fascinated with certain fascist insti-

tutions—especially the corporate state—or methods (e.g., of civic education),

and they entertained the possibility of importing such practices, modified to fit

American conditions. None of these political scientists supported the installa-

tion of a fascist dictatorship in the United States. Rather, the point is that they

either condoned fascist dictatorship as appropriate for Italy, or wished to bor-

row what they regarded as positive aspects of fascism, not its less pleasant fea-

tures.

In the 1960s and 1970s—against the backdrop of Vietnam, Watergate, and

another wave of democratic reversals—certain segments of the political sci-

ence profession were again swept by a mood of pessimism about the prospects

of democracy, disenchantment with liberal pluralism, and a yearning for a

portrayals of dictatorships in america 113

greater role for the state in the harmonization of social group relations. These

intellectual currents combined with a lingering view of “Mediterranean” peo-

ple as socially “passive” to produce a climate that permitted a rehabilitation of

corporatist dictatorships previously associated with fascism: Franco’s Spain,

Salazar’s Portugal, Peron’s Argentina, and Vargas’s Brazil. In this essay, I did

not attempt to directly compare these regimes to Mussolini’s dictatorship, but

rather to establish that political scientists’portrayals of these regimes were com-

parable to earlier portrayals of fascist Italy. In the 1960s and 1970s a number

of prominent political scientists repeated their predecessors’ errors, highlight-

ing the achievements of authoritarian corporatist regimes while glossing over

their less pleasant aspects. The uncritical attitude of some of these scholars re-

flected a belief that Latin people lacked the cultural prerequisites for the suc-

cessful practice of liberal democracy, and that authoritarian corporatism was a

viable path to modernization in Latin America. Other scholars were uncritical

because they thought that Iberic-Latin corporatist institutions preserved a sense

of community and national purpose—values that Americans should recover if

they wished to cure America’s institutional malaise. None of the political sci-

entists who expressed uncritical views of Iberian or Latin American authori-

tarian regimes supported the installation of a dictatorship in the United States.

Like their predecessors, they either condoned authoritarian dictatorship as ap-

propriate for Iberic-Latin societies alone, or wished to borrow what they viewed

as positive values associated with Iberic-Latin authoritarianism, not the harsh-

er features of these regimes.

This essay focused on political scientists not because their attitudes were in-

trinsically more important than the attitudes of otherAmericans, but because of

my own affiliation with the political science profession, and my dissatisfaction

with the paucity of historical consciousness and self-reflection in the discipline.

Had political scientists critically examined their past views of fascism, perhaps

they would have been more circumspect in their later portrayal of Iberian and

LatinAmerican dictatorships. Should this essay inspire some political scientists

to take a greater interest in, and reflect more critically about their discipline’s

past, it will have performed a useful service.

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