Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic’s Fight for Democracy by John P. Enyeart (review)

Louis Adamic, a Slovenian-American writer and political activist, died almost 70 years ago; once prominent, he is now largely forgotten. Adamic’s writings and the issues he addressed, however, are remarkably current. American democracy, he argued, is defined by its opposition to white supremacy, xenophobia, and corporate hegemony. These conditions, he contended, along with a mostly imagined history of past national greatness, are characteristic of fascist countries. Adamic was, as John P. Enyeart’s new biography reminds us, a lifelong and passionate antifascist.

Adamic came to the United States in 1913, at age fifteen, from his native Slovenia, then a part of Austria-Hungary under the Hapsburg dynasty. In December 1916, shortly before the United States entered World War I, he joined the U.S. Army and by 1917 had become a U.S. citizen. In the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary that followed the war, Slovenia was submerged in a multiethnic Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a repressive constitutional monarchy dominated by Serbs. Adamic advocated for a democratic and culturally plural Yugoslavia.

He began to write and publish in the United States as soon as he learned English, producing a stream of periodical articles (more than 500 during his lifetime) and books (13) and gaining an audience. His The Native’s Return, published in 1934 following a stay in Yugoslavia financed by a Guggenheim grant, was a Book of the Month Club selection.

With the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and the coming of World War II, Adamic became an influential antifascist voice. As described by Enyeart, a history professor at Bucknell University, Adamic’s writings and lectures, promoting “a leftist but non-Marxist vision” for the United States (p. 53), were significant in bringing about an antifascist consensus in U.S. society. In January 1942, he dined at the White House with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. But he did not hesitate afterward to criticize Roosevelt for the internment of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast and for racial segregation in the armed forces.

During the war, two major guerrilla groups opposed the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia and competed for support from the Allies: the Chetniks led by Draža Mihailović, previously a general in the Royal Yugoslav Army, whose goal was restoration of the Serb-dominated monarchy, and the Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, the son of a Croat father and Slovene mother and a Communist whose goal, Adamic believed, was an ethnically plural and equal Yugoslav federation. The Chetniks often collaborated with the Nazis, and the Partisans were an effective anti-Nazi force. Adamic’s voice, Enyeart explains, was influential in marshalling public support for Tito, in the Allies’ decision to provide Tito’s Partisans with military assistance, and in their decision at the close of the war to recognize Tito’s government as the legitimate authority in Yugoslavia.

With the advent of the Cold War, however, and the rise of anti-Communist politics in the United States, Adamic’s position of influence disintegrated. His support for a Communist regime in Yugoslavia was harshly criticized even though Tito had staunchly defied the Soviet Union. Adamic’s efforts on behalf of Henry Wallace’s third-party presidential bid in 1948—a bid supported by many Communists—and his public appearances with leftwing singer-actor Paul Robeson doubtless contributed to his fall.

Adamic received the full McCarthy-era treatment. The House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Pat McCarran both named him. Elizabeth Bentley, who administered a spy ring for the Soviet Union before becoming a government informer, charged that Adamic had passed secret information to Moscow through Louis Budenz, an official in the U.S. Communist Party. Budenz, a prototypical ex-Communist informer, said he recruited Adamic for the Communists during the war and that Adamic had sent him a book manuscript for approval before publication. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, while...