Haunted by Hitler : Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States

Although fascism is typically associated with Europe, the threat of fascism in the United States haunted the imaginations of activists, writers, and artists, spurring them to create a rich, elaborate body of cultural and political work. Traversing the Popular Front of the 1930s, the struggle against McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Black Power movement of the 1960s, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s, Haunted by Hitler highlights the value of “antifascist” cultural politics, showing how it helped to frame the national discourse. Christopher Vials examines the ways in which anxieties about fascism in the United States have been expressed in the public sphere, through American television shows, Off-Broadway theater, party newspapers, bestselling works of history, journalism, popular sociology, political theory, and other media. He argues that twentieth-century liberals and leftists were more deeply unsettled by the problem of fascism than those at the center or the right and that they tirelessly and often successfully worked to counter America’s fascist equivalents. Introduction: antifascism and the United States -- European precedents, American echoes: fascism in history and memory -- From margin to mainstream: American antifascism to 1945 -- Beyond economics, without guarantees: faschismustheorie in the United States -- Resuming the people's war: HUAC, Joe McCarthy, and the antifascist challenge of the 1950s -- Brownshirts in the twilight zone: antifascism in the liberal moment of the early 1960s -- United front against genocide: African American antifascism, the Black Panthers, and the multiracial coalitions of the late 1960s -- Queer antifascism: pink triangle politics and the Christian right -- Epilogue: antifascism in strip mall America The threat of fascism in the United States haunted the imaginations of activists, writers, and artists, spurring them to create a rich, elaborate body of cultural and political work. Christopher Vials examines the ways in which anxieties about fascism in the United States have been expressed in the public sphere, through American television shows, Off-Broadway theater, party newspapers, bestselling works of history, journalism, popular sociology, political theory, and other media. Book jacket