Lawrence Dennis: Black voice in the right wing wilderness

Lawrence Dennis (1893–1977) is a forgotten figure in American intellectual history. He was an articulate isolationist, an independent political and economic commentator, an advisor to Col. Lindbergh and the America First Committee, which hoped to keep the U.S. out of a world war. This work made him an enemy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who put Dennis on trial with two dozen other right-wing opponents to his policies, in “The Great Sedition Trial” of 1944. Although the trial was inconclusive and stopped with the death of the judge, Dennis has been forever after tainted as a “fascist.” Perhaps he was. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, he prophesied fascism in some form was the future of the United States. Dennis believed that the Depression proved that economic liberalism was dead and managed economies inevitable. He called for nationalization of banks, monopolies and schools, and generally, for a country administered by an “elite” imbued with ideals of national service rather then the dreams of private profit at public expense. But The Coming American Fascism is not a hate book. Dennis was not a racist and he was no extremist either; the mark of right-wing extremism is conspiracy theory, which Dennis rejected. Dennis was too savvy for that; for him, politics was a power struggle between elites, not the unfolding of a secret plan. The world could not be dominated by a single group with a comprehensive program, so there are no scapegoats (if Dennis takes shots at any special group it is lawyers), nor does the book make a fetish of military virtue. Dennis was no Nazi; The Coming American Fascism is not Mein Kampf for Americans. He argued for an American fascism that was “scientific and pragmatic,” flexible and open to an elite of talent. He does argue for a single party state and for “the logic and inevitability of a disciplined party organization for effective and responsible action” (CAF 298–9). All in all, he has as much in common with Alexander Hamilton as with Mussolini, and except for his Hobbesian emphasis on the ruthless struggle for national survival, little in common with Adolf Hitler.

In short, Dennis is that rare animal, a right-wing intellectual. Now, thanks to Professor Horne, we learn that Lawrence Dennis was black and only passing as white—something once known but forgotten. Born in Atlanta, he began life as Lonnie Dennis, and gained fleeting fame as a child evangelist, touring the U.S. and Europe with his visibly black mother. It is probably symptomatic of my racial and political naiveté that I was stunned that “the brains of American fascism,” as Harold Ickes called him, was black. Besides, the picture of Dennis on the cover and frontispiece of Gerald Horne’s study shows a manifestly white man with a craggy face and rock-like chin who looks like he could have been the model for New Hampshire’s late lamented state symbol, “The Old Man of the Mountain.” Reading Dennis as black changes utterly the meaning of his anti-liberal, openly elitist message.

Graduated from Exeter and Harvard, Dennis distinguished himself as an army officer in World War I. After the war he served the State Department in Romania, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua, so he saw American imperialism first hand and was not impressed. By his own account, he was “the principle American charge d’affaires in Nicaragua in August 1926, who, at the request of the State Department, sent the telegram asking the Marines to come back to ‘protect American life and property...