JF Ptak Science Books Post 2339
Just a reminder that even blattant and bad propaganda has its sub rosa content...
This is a nasty (pronounced nazty) piece of work by the loftily-named League for Constitutional Government, comparing Roosevelt's New Deal legislation and program to an overall regime for world domination under Socialist and Communist dictums/control. Everything is Communist, and whatever wasn't Communist was Socialist, and there really wasn't to much of a distinction in anything, except that under everything else were the Jews. It is rough and bumpy work, not well written, not well thought-out, though there was a lot of action that was taking place between the badly-formed lines, and if you looked a little hard at it everything starts turning up Fascist.
It turns out that the League for Constitutional Government is a tough bit to research from home, with not that much written on the organization itself, though there is a fair amount of what can be learned about it by the company it keeps int eh histories of Right-Wing-Lugnut political movements from that period, and all of that association thus far is Fascist. It appears in lists along with the National American ("America's National-Socialist Party"); "The American Guard, "The White Man's Party"; the German American Bund; America First; local bad boy Charles Pelley of Silver Shirts infamy; and in publications including The Revealer, a Christian News Journal, Social Justice, ( a Reverend T,. Coughlin organ), just to name a few. It is in comfortable splendor with far Christian right organizations like the Christian Patriots (see Mark J, Mozzell, God at the Crossroads, p.209), and evidently worked to gain control of the east coast section of the America First party (found via Ruth Sarlesp's The Story of America First, page 28). There's also quite a spread on Fascist organizations in America that appeared in Life magazine (March 6, 1939, "Fascism in America: Like Communism It Masquerades as Americanism").
And then there is this from the "Anti-Jewish Propaganda Front" issued by the American Jewish Committee in 1937 (here):
I had never heard of this League for Constitutional Government before last night, and had a difficult time making my way through its somehow dense and loosely packed four-page contents--until it dawned on me that what I was really reading was Fascist propaganda--and that was surprising, mainly because it was so early on it the history of Fascist stuff going on in America.
My copy of this document was once owned by H.L. Mencken, who gave the thing to the Library of Congress, which in turn decided it wasn't worth having around (at least in duplicate). I don't need to own it either, though as a piece of quiet-ish political junk it should be somewhere to remind people that even in flaming propagandistic rhetoric there's more reading to be done between the lines.
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