The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value

7: America & the Rise of European Dictatorships

7 America & the Rise of European Dictatorships The disappointment with Woodrow Wilson's idealism after the First World War and the parallel resurgence of nativism and elitism had combined with such new doctrines as the irrational nature of man and the impracticability of government by the "common man" to spur a forceful reaction against democratic ideas in the United States. Although most Americans undoubtedly continued to cherish their form of government— however they interpreted it—the twenties and early thirties produced more doubts and despair about democracy than had any other period since the early nineteenth century. Democracy led to "mobocracy" and its attitude toward property was "communistic," declared an official United States Army Training Manual in 1928. Widely used by the War Department, the manual concluded that democracy resulted "in demogogism , license, agitation, discontent, anarchy."1 Popular novels, magazine articles, scholarly monographs, and even official publications of the United States government pointed out the weaknesses and excesses of democracy. One more factor informed the changed attitude toward popular government in the years after World War I. A growing number of dictatorships abroad and a shrinking number of democracies led to disturbing and pressing questions: as the nineteenth century had seen the triumph of democracy, would the twentieth see the triumph of dictatorship? Had democracy failed and was dictatorship alone capable of meeting the problems of advanced industrial society? The bolshevik revolution of November, 1917, inaugurated the new wave. Initially the war situation completely colored America's reaction. Although many were instinctively repelled by communism, most of those who opposed the revolution did so because they feared that the bolsheviks would take Russia out of the war. Those who supported the revolution, 117 THE CRISIS except for the extreme antiwar socialists, thought the bolsheviks would help the allied war effort.2 Without the taint of czarism, many Americans reasoned, the allies were truly a democratic coalition. Arthur Bullard, a pro-war socialist who had dealings with many allied officials during the war, said that he had never heard the bolsheviks condemned for anything but their possible harmful effect on the war effort.3 When the bolsheviks signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in January, 1918, removing Russia from the war, however, few Americans were prepared to defend them. People of all political persuasions bitterly denounced the bolsheviks for treason to the cause of freedom.4 Some accused the bolsheviks of being tools of Germany whose sole purpose was to aid the German war effort. In the fall of 1918 Edgar Sisson, a member of the Committee of Public Information serving in Russia, came into possession of a series of documents that allegedly proved bolshevik complicity in German policy. Clayton R. Lusk, an early communist hunter from New York, continued even after the war to claim that many radicals and socialists throughout the world were "paid agents of the Junker class in Germany," helping in "their program of industrial and world conquest."5 The internal strife that convulsed Russia in the first year or two after the revolution, together with the earlier American image of the bombthrowing radical, helped to fasten an anarchist label on the bolsheviks. The original impression of many Americans was thus far from that of an oppressive dictatorship. "There is slight distinction between the anarchists and the Communists," wrote Arthur W. Dunn, a free-lance journalist, "but it is a distinction without any particular difference."6 Americans hoped for a restoration of order in Russia, and some hailed Lenin's gradual assumption of power as necessary and good. But as order returned to the Soviet Union, it became apparent that it was not to be a democratic order. The bolsheviks had their strong defenders, but few of them liked the political dictatorship that was established in the years after 1918. Opponents abounded. Abandoning the initial charge of anarchism, most critics began calling the new Russian government a tyranny and a despotism. Some compared the rule of the bolsheviks to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The bolshevik idea "of maintaining internal peace," declared an editorial in Outlook, one of the magazines most hostile to the communists, "is not far different from that of the Jacobin committees in France in the first days of the Guillotine."7 118 EUROPEAN DICTATORSHIPS Although the infamous "red scare" of 1919 and 1920 brought criticism and vilification of the Soviet Union to new peaks, Americans continued to attack the...