The First American Fascists: The Advisory Committee of The Council of National Defense founded August 29,1916. Army Appropriations Act.
Left to right seated: David F. Houston (Sec. of Agriculture), Josephus Daniels (Sec. of Navy), Newton D. Baker (Sec. of War), Franklin K. Lane (Sec. of Interior), William B. Wilson (Sec. of Labor). Left to right standing: Grosvenor Clarkson (Secretary), Julius Rosenwald (Sears Roebuck), Bernard Baruch (Wall Street financier), Daniel Willard (Baltimore and Ohio Railroad), Franklin H. Martin (American College of Surgeons), Hollis Godfrey (president Drexel Institute), Howard E. Coffin (Hudson Motor Company), and W.S. Gifford (President AT&T).
“… selective draft of industry is the logical twin of the selective draft of men. In the next war all industry – the whole economic life of the Nation – as well as human life should be conscripted.” Pg 483, Industrial America in the World War, Grosvenor Clarkson.
Clarkson replaced Gifford as Director of the CND, 1918-1920.
While researching US preparation for the Great War, it surprised me to learn of two things, 1) how involved private-corporations and manufactories were, and, 2) how the military-industrial-complex was actually founded long before we thought, during the Progressive Era. It’s a little unnerving to learn that Eisenhower’s iconic warning came nearly a half-century late, and this seldom discussed era of progress I’d previously thought was filled with non-interventionalists, pacifists, and anti-war activism, was actually the birthplace of American sponsored neo-imperialism. Yet, the historical evidence cannot be more convincing.
When Woodrow Wilson announced US involvement in the Great War on April 2, 1916, he sparked an unprecedented mobilization of both American private-industry and government administration, and he did so under the Progressive banner of Preparedness – To Make the World Safe for Democracy!
So, while many Progressives may scoff at the idea of being founders of world war or supporters of American fascism, the forensic history clearly shows the Progressive Era to be the birthplace, and it’s driven then just as today, by it’s three main tenets: Preparedness, Efficiency, and the Scientific Expert.
When knowing Mussolini’s definition of fascism: corporatism; the totalitarian control of the whole economic life of a nation by a State and large corporate interest groups like: military, agricultural, labour, business, scientific, and guild associations, together shaping society through the negotiation of policy (collective bargaining) on the basis of common interests; it shouldn’t then, come as any surprise at all, that the Progressive of today has so much in common with, and is in so much support of, the very institutions they’ve traditionally protested: corporate monopoly, unregulated capitalist banking, expansionist US foreign policy, the war munitions maker. These still the very cornerstones of modern Imperialism.
Already we see, just in the Council of National Defense Advisory Board above, giants of early American industry: AT&T, Sears Roebuck, Bell Telephones, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, sitting right next to government departments of: agriculture, military, labor; and all them centered around the Lone Wolf of Wall Street, Bernard Baruch. And what are these men doing if not, “together negotiating contracts and policy (collective bargaining) on the basis of a common interest”? The only thing missing is the totalitarian control aspect.
According to his quote above, CND secretary/director Grosvenor Clarkson, the whole economic life of the nation, and even human life itself, was now to be conscripted into a “second line of defense”. The United States was the “last reservoir” of both men and resources, and, in the opinion of the CND Advisory Commission, the single largest challenge during this never-before-seen call to national preparedness wasn’t military inefficiency but the inefficiency of labor. A viewpoint certainly voiced by their not-so-secret advisor and face of Efficiency, Justice Brandeis,
.
.
Clarkson’s, Industrial America in the World War, his own, personal, post-war, telling of how American private-industry mobilized to the national call of war. Clarkson’s only regret was not doing it earlier, “had we been better prepared for war, victory would have come sooner and cost less. As to military preparedness, our army was magnificent and admirably trained. But there was another kind of preparedness which had everywhere been neglected”. The type that “demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with from three to five parts of sweat of the man in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms.” Introduction, Industrial America in the World War.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Master Mason here adorned in Masonic paraphernalia. Member at Matinecock Lodge 806, Oyster Bay, New York. Roosevelt laying the cornerstone for the Pilgrim’s Memorial Monument and the House of Representatives. Roosevelt was the guest of many Masonic Lodges around the world.
Bernard Baruch, Chairman, War Industries Board. Graduated City College of New York, Phi Beta Kappa.
Baruch’s red-brick Washington home was located at 1520 18th Street, NW, one block east and four blocks south of the House of Truth. Interestingly, if Baruch were to walk his poodle to the House of Truth today, there is no way the two couldn’t walk right past the National Headquarters of The Phi Beta Kappa Society, located directly in between.
The call for preparedness wasn’t just in the halls of Washington either, it was everywhere. One week after congress gave the go ahead for war, Progressive president Woodrow Wilson signed Executive Order 2594 on April 13, 1917, creating the Committee on Public Information (the first propaganda division of the US government), and now, almost as if coordinated, a massive push for national preparedness, through all available mediums of the day. Here we see even the consolidation of communication, from the many into one, and the birth of modern media: the spoken word, the painting, the poster, the book, the magazine, the musical melody, and the motion picture – all mediums into one mass media. Us today were born here in this era.
The newspaper, the movie theater and the radio broadcast were awash with the promise of preparedness and efficiency. It was the most aggressive propaganda campaign ever attempted, successfully moving the average American from pacifist to pro-war in less than six months. So successful was the campaign during times of war, they decided to adopt the same techniques post-war, during peace time, here at home – and have never stopped propagandizing the American public since. Wilson had won his second term on the promise of, He Kept Us Out of War, but once in, he was all in, as if hell-be-damned, fueled by an Atlanticist idealism and directed by those around him, especially Brandeis, Wilson soon after election plunged America head first into the cataclysm.
Progressive founder Theodore Roosevelt had long called for a prepared military, and his defeat in the 1912 election wasn’t enough to stop the great evangelizer of Preparedness, with the winds of war swirling Roosevelt, forever the man of action, didn’t hesitate in fanning the flames, publishing two books on the cusp of war back-to-back: America in the World War (1915), and, Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916), both many months before official American declaration of war, and both leaning heavily on preparedness.
In, America and the World War, the word ‘preparedness’ shows up 58 times and ‘prepared’ another 27, while, as if needing to beat the pacifist out of the American people, he one year later publishes, Fear God and Take Your Own Part, in which he cites ‘preparedness’ 90 more times, ‘prepared’ another 33 times, and ‘God’ innumerably.
And who was to govern this national war machine to the needs of a nation in arms? Well, Bernard Baruch of course. After all, he’s a close Phi Beta Kappa fraternal brother of not just: Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann and Woodrow Wilson; but the very founders of Preparedness too: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Henry Stimson, and Elihu Root. The last three all Skull and Bones.
Baruch elected chairman of the War Industries Board in 1917 by executive order. Known as the “Lone Wolf of Wall Street“, the unabashed speculator, now at the helm of the most supreme instrument of military power inside the worlds most powerful nation. Baruch acting as the dictator, choosing priority among the Allied contracts, directing the raw copper from Bisbee and coal from Ludlow to manufactories and refineries in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and abroad. Baruch at the helm of what they themselves even called “a war machine”, a “growing brain of the whole body of war enterprise, deriving power from the user of power, it came to be the head center of the entire economic activity of the Nation”. pg. 482, Industrial America in the World War.
“Wild horses had been tamed” by “an efficient team”, and for the first time in modern history, we see a nation as an army. Pg. 9, Industrial America in the World War.
“A military and industrial partnership which is the sine qua non of the integration of the full military power of the Nation. Such progress, however, will inevitably be restricted …. unless qualified industrial experts from civilian life are allowed to mould the programme of whatever industrial preparedness may be ours …. It was the civilian experts of the War Industries Board who saved this situation from actual tragedy.” Pg. 484,485, Industrial America in the World War.
sine qua non: an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary.
The Earliest Beginnings of the Military Industrial Complex
Now that we’ve established preparedness as a Progressive tenet, what about the origins of the Preparedness movement itself? Where do we get the idea of preparedness from?
Well, the idea of being ready to defend oneself against an existential threat is largely attributed to Theodore Roosevelt*, but many may once again be as surprised as I was to learn that the origins of the Preparedness movement can be traced back to a single New York Times interview published May 30, 1915 with, of all people, Thomas Edison.
Edison’s Plan for Preparedness: The Inventor Tells How We Could Be Made Invincible Without Overburdening Ourselves with Taxes:
“I consider it a reasonable certainty that some day we shall have a war; and I consider it a probability that when that day comes we shall find ourselves unprepared to meet it. I believe it to be the duty of every American patriot to do what he can to see that this does not occur …” Thomas Edison, New York Times. May 30, 1915.
Abracadabra Alakazam! The Industrial Preparedness Committee of the Naval Consulting Board! Founded from a spell and manifested into this realm by the Secretary of Navy Josephus Daniels in September of 1915, nearly two years before official US involvement in the Great War, and, of course, Edison was named president. Officially called the US Naval Consulting Board’s Committee on Production, Organization, Manufacturing, and Standardization (better known as Committee on Initial Preparedness). Thomas Edison presiding over, Howard E. Coffin, the chairman and the Supervising Director, W.S. Gifford; along with two experts chosen from eleven leading scientific and experimental laboratories in the United States.
*Roosevelt’s ‘walk softly and carry a big stick’ policy was an harkening to the older historical idea of ‘might is right’, or even the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.
May 13, 1916, Edison (4) marches in the Preparedness Parade with his Naval Consulting Board. Two members each, representatives from the 11 chosen scientific, engineering companies. Hudson Maxim, the silver bearded man over Edison’s left shoulder is the inventor of smokeless gunpowder, he is the brother of Hiram Stevens Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim gun (the first fully automatic machine gun) and the nephew of Hiram Percy Maxim, inventor of the silencer. Among those walking with and behind Edison are: the president of Ingersoll Rand, the president of Anaconda Steel, the president of Carnegie Institute, the president of Hudson Motor Company, the “father of plastics“, the founder of the GE research laboratory and the field of industrial research, the inventor of the efficient induction motor, the inventor of electrical traction (allowing for electric rail, electric motors, and elevators), the inventor of the phonometer, the developers of the gyroscope, the inventor of the conveyor belt, the inventor of mercury vapor lighting (the fluorescent light bulb), the “father of standardization“, the inventor of retractable landing gear, the “father of modern navigation“, the inventor of the high speed printing press, and so on ….
On June 3, 1916, three weeks after the parade, the National Defense Act is signed, authorizing the massive expansion of the US Army, Navy, the creation of the National Guard all in the name of US national defense planning. The birth of Naval R & D, the first steps of DARPA, and our world has never been the same since. Fear of existential threats now, five generations later, baked into the apple pie.
The signing on August 29, 1916 of the Military Appropriations Act of 1916 (39 Stat. 649), signaled the creation of both the Council of National Defense and the War Industries Board. The two organizing bodies found necessary to coordinate the many divisions of manufacture, transportation, and trade of war. The CND and WIB were, like the newly signed FTC and the Federal Reserve, independent of the government, the CND with it’s Advisory Commission and the WIB the central “clearing house” from inside where the many divisions were coordinated and managed. Baruch, as chairman of the WIB and a member of the Advisory Board, had absolute authority over nearly every aspect from Priorities to the Finished Products Division. The only division Baruch didn’t have iron fisted complete control of, was cost and pricing – and as the records show, its this specific area the Advisory Commission sought Louis D. Brandeis’ counsel the most. How about that? Brandeis advising the Advisors of the CND and WIB. Overseeing the first steps of the military-industrial-complex.
Council of National Defense
And it’s not like there isn’t sufficient evidence, we just can’t get to it without a visit or phone call. At the Brandeis School of Law Library we find being kept, Reel 59 World War 1917-1918, showing much meta-data correspondence between Brandeis and the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense during its formative years – especially in the areas of production costs. Meaning Brandeis is advising from the shadows just like he always does, only this time in the creation of US foreign policy and a new economic model, American Fascism.
Reel 60 World War 1918, reveals even more correspondence withheld behind paywalls, the words of wartime agencies like the Shipping Board and the War Industries Board. It also shows Brandeis even being considered for “peace commissioner” at the Paris Peace Conference(!) A position ultimately filled by the president of the United States.
Brandeis’ massive influence in the efficiency movement, his having coined the term ‘scientific management’, and with his recent foundational work affecting the entire nation on trade unionism, collective bargaining, and regulated competition, along with other, earlier, precedent-setting, national headline attracting, legislation and regulation in labour, common, corporate and constitutional law, he more than seems to be the most qualified here. Frankfurter referred to Brandeis as the “sage advisor to all”, Brandeis setting both his sights on Palestine and the stage for war, 1915. From the embers of war, this is how our modern social contract was first forged in fire.
Remember, Wilson “wanted Brandeis everywhere”, offering Brandeis the position of Attorney General, Secretary of Commerce, the head of Indian Affairs, chair of the Committee on Industrial Relations, first director of the Inquiry, and the ‘peace commissioner’ at Paris – all of which Brandeis officially turned down. Brandeis was, let’s not forget, the very “architect” of Wilson’s successful 1912 New Freedom campaign founding the Federal Reserve and Federal Trade Commission, two giant agencies, independent of government control. pg. 48, Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era.
It was Brandeis’, “opinions on economic questions that he [Wilson] respected above all others”, The only official position Brandeis accepted was his most contentiously fought, confirmed the first Jewish US supreme court justice in 1916. pg. 48, Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era.
And it bears repeating, Brandeis’ close PBK fraternal friendships with Wilson, Baruch, Frankfurter, Lippmann, and the other primary “fathers of preparedness”: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Henry Stimson, and Elihu Root make Brandeis a central figure in not only the initial set-up and coordination of the CND and the WIB, but their direction in the future (just like Harvard Law School and Harvard Law Review), and speak to shadowy special interests observing from above steering the actions of all of these men from an historical and progressive long-view.
“Occasionally, on a Saturday morning in the summer of 1912, Bernard Baruch would walk into the Democratic Headquarters with Woodrow Wilson in tow, ‘leading him like one would a poodle on a string.” Pg. 97, FDR My Exploited Father-In-Law, Curtis B. Dall
The War Industries Board
Officially the War Industries Board was led by a Cabinet committee of prominent private citizens working without pay that included Louis D. Brandeis. Dollar-a-year men made up of several divisions: War Labor Policies Board, the Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet, Price-Fixing, Priorities Committees, and other bureaus all working under cooperation of war. The WIB’s main focus was the coordination and execution of the largest expansion of the US military ever before or since. They went to war to end all war by creating the military-industrial-complex as the ultimate preparation – might is right.
The 1916 War Appropriations Act set in motion for the first time in America, a public/private partnership bringing rail, road, and water transport together with mining companies and industrial manufacturers in the national commandeering of American industry for war time purposes. Many then just as today mark this moment of nationalization as the beginning of the Great Apocalypse as depicted in the Book of Revelation.
Lifting the cover off the WIB, inside we find the War Labor Policies Board. As one might guess, the WLPB was in charge of labor coordination and just like before, we see a bees nest of Brandeisians: Felix Frankfurter as chairman this time, his assistant – a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Mary von Kleek (the president of Russell Sage), and Brandeis’ protege Florence Kelley. All intimate with Brandeis, (FDR eventually nicknaming the quiet but effective little Jew, “Isaiah”). Other members of the WLPB: Max Lowenthal (a student of the Talmud), Julian Mack, Robert Szold, and Benjamin V. Cohen, all hard core Zionists supporters under Brandeis.
Price-Fixing Committee of the War Industries Board. Seated left to right: William Byron Colver (Dir. FTC), Bernard Baruch (chairman), Robert Brookings (Brookings Institution), Hugh Fayne (Labor), F.W. Taussig (modern trade theory). Standing left to right: unknown, John M Hancock, unknown, Lt. Col. Robert H. Montgomery (PricewaterhouseCooper), H.C. Stuart, Harry Augustus Garfield.
Mussolini, National Syndicalism, and the National Fascist Party
The modern definition of fascism, according to its founders, Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini centers on the century of the State, a corporatism through national syndicalism, the trade union, and collective bargaining, a never-ending progress of society under totalitarian rule directly opposed to classic liberalism. Mussolini postulates a total subservience of the individual in the name of the State. A ‘new’ individual is to be forged, one embracing nationalism and being of good utility for the greater good. His/her meaning and purpose found in their devotion to the State.
Leader of the National Fascist Party of Italy, Benito Mussolini. El Duce.
Mussolini: “…. it is right that a large part of the attention of the world should be concentrated upon the activity of [the United States] …. economists of real wisdom and scholars that are outlining the basis of a new science and a new culture. I admire the discipline of the America people and their sense of organization …. The United States is now in the golden age. It is necessary to study these tendencies and their results, and this is not only in the interest of America but in the interest of the world.” Pg. 26, My Autobiography, By Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini admired Taylorism, derived from the book, The Principles of Scientific Management, famously implementing efficiency at the Fiat factory in Turin where it became a symbol of the regime’s industrial focus. Mussolini’s corporatist model which aimed to integrate labour and capital under state control and American Taylorism were a perfect marriage. There is no mistaking an appreciation bordering on a love affair that existed at the time between United States industry and Mussolini in much the same way they would a decade later with Hitler.
American Progressive and US Ambassador to Italy
Richard Washburn Child, was not only the US Ambassador to Italy, he was a close, personal advisor and friend to Benito Mussolini. Child the author of, A Diplomat Looks at Europe, states below the similarities between the Council of National Defense and Mussolini’s model of Corporatism(!):
“Everyone remembers our own National Council of Defense in Washington during the war, with its experts and research bureaus. Mussolini has erected a somewhat similar organization for the purposes of peace …. These groups are made up of the best men to be found as experts and advisers, whether they be laborers, professors, capitalists. The creation of this system is based on the idea that in the modern world the realities of technical, economic and social problems are so complex that their solution cannot be carried on by politicians and orators. Therefore, the state, as well as local administrations, has followed to a marked degree the advice of these nonpolitical unprejudiced Groups of Competence in matters which range from technical army and industrial problems to colonial policy, constitutional reform and educational system.” Pg. 217, 218, A Diplomat Looks At Europe, from the chapter, The New State, Richard Washburn Child.
“favorable comparison of the male students who joined the squadristi [Black Shirts] with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the American Legion, who had glorified wartime patriotism ….”
Katy Hull, The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism, Princeton University Press.
Richard Washburn Child, also Harvard Law School alum, and a propagandist during World War I, was later the editor of the progressive magazine, Collier’s and, The Saturday Evening Post. He was a great facilitator in bringing JP Morgan investment to Italy. He dropped ten million on El Duce right when he needed it most. Child also writing the preface to Mussolini’s autobiography, My Autobiography by Benito Mussolini (1928), after first convincing Mussolini to ‘write’ it; and it was Child’s assurances of US support that led directly to Mussolini’s famous March on Rome in 1922.
Richard Washburn Child, founder, along with Robert LaFollette of the National Republican Progressive Party, the predecessor to Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose Party. Child a staunch American advocate of fascism.
“Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity …. It is opposed to classical liberalism, which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. [Classical] Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.” Pg. 10, 11, The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini
Syndicalism: a movement for transferring the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution to industrial unionism or workers’ unions advancing their interests through actions like strikes. A social ownership where nothing is owned by the individual. Centralism favoring a federal economic organization of society with trade unions being the foundations for a post-capitalist world. What does Fascism mean if not literally trade unionism? Same as Soviet means: a worker’s council, or an advisory board; we see the advance of the expert into the vacancy left behind by the classically liberated individual.
Sergio Panunzio, great theoretician of national syndicalism and Fascism.
Filippo Corridoni speaking at a rally with Mussolini just over his shoulder in white hat.
A newer brand of trade unionists, born from Sorel, were the National Syndicalists, they added a nationalistic, patriotic, and radical fervor to trade unionism (conveniently just in time for war too) and many members were prominent within Mussolini’s cabinet and important in the establishment of his Fascist idealogy.
Sergio Panunzio developed the earliest theories of both national syndicalism and fascism, and stated its importance as a historical development of Marx. Although their beliefs diverged over time, Mussolini largely based his brand on Panunzio’s writings and thoughts.
Angelo Oliviero Olivetti and Alceste De Ambris published the manifesto Facio Rivoluzionario d’Azione Internazionalista (League of Revolutionary International Action), in 1914 from which Mussolini would found his Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria (Leagues of Revolutionary Action).
Agostino Lanzillo, graduating with a law degree from University of Rome, was an outspoken member of Mussolini’s Fascist Party and is considered a founder of Fascism. He was a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, one half of a bicameral Italian parliament.
Filippo Corridoni, a founder of fascism was a close personal friend of Mussolini. This the organization that went into the Great War on the side of the Allied armies.
Black Eagle clutching a fasces. Symbol of Italian Fascism.
A nationalistic, patriotic fervor led by the trade union being introduced in Italy at the same time, and in an unsettlingly similar fashion to, how military preparedness and shop efficiency were being introduced under trade unionism in America all inspired by their Progressive Manifesto, Herbert Croly’s, The Promise of American Life (1909). The word, patriotic mentioned 50 times, efficiency 114, prepared 22.
The first strikes in Italy starting in 1904 led to the formation of the General Confederation of Labour in 1906, (Confederazione Generale del Lavoro).This leading to an unprecedented period of massive industrial growth in Italy by first bringing labor and capital together. This happening at nearly the same time Brandeis is passing his own legislation with the National Consumers League, authoring the Protocol of Peace, and settling national labor tension across the board, clearing the way in America for a patriotically driven manufacture of war machines in defense of national interests.
It turns out, under all the plenary talk of “making the world safe for democracy”, has all along been hidden the economic model of the Progressive, a not-so-subtle fascism based on predatory corporate global expansion, aided by the very same system of military intervention discussed by Smedley Butler in War is a Racket. The military arrives to first clear a path in the region of interest, and once authority has been established the corporations arrive like leaches to reconstruct the landscape from their own will and in their own imagination. All with the goal of world domination.
Fasces on the cover of, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Brandeis coins the term, ‘scientific management’.
Now we see why it was necessary here in the West to flip the definition of Liberalism from Classic to a New Liberalism* advocating for a larger, even more centralized government. Brandeis’ industrial democracy the same as Mussolini’s fascist State. This also opening a crack, the window into why whenever someone speaks of ‘fascism’, they rarely if ever mention Mussolini. It’s for exactly the same reason Marxists never mention J.P. Morgan when critiquing capitalism. It’s a degree of separation within which they can claim plausible deniability if ever anyone caught on. And here we find the answer to why both myths still dominate today, just like Progressivism itself, standing over it all, acting as an umbrella in the rain.
We’ve shown clearly in previous work how the US supreme court justice trifecta: Brandeis, Frankfurter, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., all openly experimented on the U.S. Constitution, they all openly opposed natural law and detested in more ways than one the classic definition of Liberalism. The method everyone in law would adopt, that by its very nature supersedes Constitutional law and tradition is named after Brandeis, the “Brandeis Brief”. We’ve also shown how they used the House of Truth to deliberately alter Liberalism.
A nationalistic, patriotic fervor led by trade unionism coincidentally introduced in Italy at the same time, and in an unsettlingly similar fashion to that of how military preparedness and shop efficiency were being introduced in America, all brought together under the union shop.
An unprecedented period of massive industrial growth coincided in America with similar movements in Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Italy (and China) by first bringing labor and capital together under one roof inside a workers union. This happening at exactly the same time Brandeis was passing his own legislation with Florence Kelley and the National Consumers League and authoring the Protocol of Peace, bringing labour and capital together himself, and clearing the way in America for a patriotic and proud labour force ready and willing to manufacture war machines.
Under all the plenary talk of “making the world safe for democracy”, has all along been hidden the economic model of the Progressive, a not-so-subtle fascism based on predatory corporate global expansion, aided by the very same system of military intervention discussed by Smedley Butler in War is a Racket. The military arrives to first clear a path in the region of interest, and then the corporations arrive like leaches to reconstruct the landscape from their own will and in their own imagination. All with the goal of global domination of resources.
It turns out, in these cases at least, the corporate owner isn’t much different than the dictator. This scheme only made possible through the subjugation of a nation of people into a nation of workers, we were moulded through the amalgamation of trade unionism and national syndicalism into patriotic and prepared, militaristic-minded men and women with materialistic urges and to always be of good utility for the greater good.
This unspoken quid pro quo the spirit of our Western social contract. They removed our reasonable mind and braided the Western heart and soul with the very dendrite of the Pentagon brain making us proudly militaristic.
Just one of several statues of George Washington with fasces hidden under his coat.
In conclusion, as we see, when flipping through the pages of history, Brandeis institutes all the necessary elements of fascism: a patriotism through trade unionism, a public-private partnership between industry and government, an anti-Classic Liberal sentiment, the support of global war in the name of progress, and the creation of the Welfare State. Syndicalism also known as Integralism lining with Fabian gradualism. The only thing left keeping American Fascism from fitting the definition of Mussolini’s Fascism is the totalitarian aspect. A type of societal control that is total in its authority, governing all aspects: economic, social, military, intellectual etc.
Well, just five years ago we all witnessed the type of totalitarianism our government is capable of, and we’ve seen throughout history, emergency wartime measures are the way to temporarily impose such totalitarianism but, and here is the ruse, each time the government does impose themselves, there always remains behind some aspect of that control, usually legislative, meant “for our security and welfare”. And after a century of these events now, from the USS Maine to ‘Covid’, you would have to ask yourself, just how far have these life altering moments that split history into a before and after moved us all from natural law and the definition of Classic liberalism? Well about as far away as possible, we are a total inversion even, a near total opposite. From independent to dependent we’ve become in just over one hundred years.
And as it turns out, just as we still today attribute the origins of propaganda to Goebbels instead who he learned from, American “father of propaganda”, Edward Bernays, we also may have mistaken Mussolini as the founder of Fascism, instead of the man he learned from, the “father of Progressivism”, Louis D. Brandeis.
You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.
