The American fascistoid streak runs deep

The American soil germinated fascistic thought and action long before the Europeans “industrialized” it.  And racism was (and remains) the main fertilizer.

Patrice Greanville [print_link]

BELOW: Danny Day-Lewis as “Bill the Butcher” in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York

Many Americans have been brought up in a self-flattering culture that for the most part denies the profound contributions–in thought and example–made by some of their compatriots to Fascist ideology. Fact is, a number of prominent Nazi figures read and adapted many notions advanced in the American antebellum about race, and followed with great attention the blossoming of “eugenics” throughout the Anglo-American sphere in the last quarter of the 19th century. Mussolini, for his part, a voracious reader with a reluctant fascination for things American, took note of the use of street toughs to advance political agendas.  While he did not need explicit lessons about the use of intimidation, some of the lessons he picked up by reading the exploits of William “Bill the Butcher” Poole, a 1850s street-tough nativist/Know-Nothing leader and mobster eulogized in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, reinforced his belief that politics in a fragile democracy could be shaped akmost at will through the deliberate administratioin of muscle.

A less colorful and largely forgotten case of native proto-fascism is that of conservation pioneer Madison Grant, a complex, retiring individual brimming with contradictions. As the Wiki entry reminds us:

Madison Grant (November 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer, historian, racist and anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist. As a eugenicist, Grant was responsible for one of the most famous works of scientific racism, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. As a conservationist, Grant was credited with the saving of many different species of animals, founding many different environmental and philanthropic organizations and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.

A New Yorker, Grant was born to comfortable circumstances. ( Madison Grant Wikipedia entry ) “As a child he attended private schools and traveled Europe and the Middle East with his father. He attended Yale University, graduating early and with honors in 1887. He received a law degree from Columbia Law School, and practiced law after graduation; however, his interests were primarily those of a naturalist. He never married and he had no children….” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Grant ). Again, borrowing from the Wiki’s excellent profile:

Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the “racial history” of Europe. Coming out of Grant’s concerns with the changing “stock” of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a “racial” interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, stating race as the basic motor of civilization. Similar ideas were proposed by Gustav Kossinna in Germany. Grant promoted the idea of the “Nordic race” — a loosely defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia — as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history. As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of “undesirable” traits and “worthless race types” from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable traits and “worthwhile race types” conducive to Nordic society:

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

It was distinguished gents of the Grant coinage that gave the Nazis (and some French fascists of the interwar period) the notion of anchoring a strain of rabid reactionism in racial supremacist pretensions. The fruits of these ideological adoptions were soon to be put to use in the chaos following the First World war, when the plutocratic establishments of many nations saw the specter of socialism emerge from the rubble of the old Europe among a justifiably disenchanted population. Reading Grant’s recommendations closely, it’s obvious that the man anticipated a program of brutal segregationism that eventually would constitute the backbone of Nazi exclusivism and persecution. Of the two, Grant probably cast a longer ideological shadow, but “Bill the Butcher” deserves his place in the pantheon of anarchic hyper-individualists. Repulsive as his nativist notions were, Poole –like his arch-rival John Morrissey, an Irish immigrant of equally proven valor, lived by a Darwinian code in which wanton bravery and cunning mixed in varying proportions. As gang leaders, their physical recklessness, ruthlessness, and saturnine moods were an indispensable requisite for the job, as “softer” images could hardly suffice to keep a troop of ambitious and barbaric criminals —their subalterns in the gang hierarchy—in line. Ruthlessness equals survival in these ambits. Bill the Butcher, for example, became legendary for the apparent pleasure he derived from beating a man’s face to a pulp (both Morrissey and Poole were admired bare-knuckle fighters, as well). And the beatings with fists were often just the beginning: with plentiful knives, chains, hammers and other utensils of their chosen trade at their disposal, the losers in these encounters frequently did not live to fight another day. From that perspective, and although Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York tweaks historical facts with abandon (Poole had been dead almost eight years by the time the “draft riots” took place in 1863), Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of the man, including his personal weaknesses and twisted sense of honor, is simply masterful. Bill the Butcher’s relatively short career (he died at 33, shot through the heart by one of Morrissey’s associates), as well as that of Morrissey, a leader of the Irish-immigrant faction, prefigured the involvement of street toughs in city and even national politics. Morrissey, in fact, died a rich man, having served as a Tammany favorite a couple of terms in Congress, gained the world heavyweight boxing title, and amassed a respectable fortune for the time, more than two million dollars. But I digress. In John Morrissey, Poole’s archenemy, we find a man who, born in extreme poverty in Ireland, rose to make “something of himself” by dint of sheer personal courage and, of course, a little bit of luck. Many of his more dubious moral choices in his youth were apparently dictated by necessity. Throughout his life, however, he endeavored to maintain a fair attitude toward his fellows, and he frequently showed great generosity toward those he thought unduly victimized by fate. His funeral (he died of pneumonia at 47) was attended by tens of thousands of mourners. In the end, it is Poole, however, who leaves the deeper imprint. His character, for one, is harder to decipher. As William Bryk has noted in his fascinating portrait of Poole, he was a man to reckon with, from the moment you cast eyes on him.

“More than six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, William Poole stood out in an age of small men. He began his career in the Bowery Boys, New York’s most important street gang. Unlike today’s gangsters, the Boys were working men–whether laborers or self-employed small businessmen like Poole, who was a butcher by profession as well as avocation. They were also, as Asbury wrote, “the most ferocious rough-and-tumble fighters that ever cracked a skull or gouged out an eyeball.” Here, too, Poole stood out, for he fought like a berserker…”

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