Consider in this light the upper reaches of the workforce. During the 20th century, white Americans monopolized the highest-paying jobs. In 2000, nearly 85 percent of the baby-boom workers occupying the top quarter of occupations (ranked by annual salary) were white.

But, since the beginning of the new century—and as a consequence in part of the demographic decline in the numbers of young whites entering the labor market—the young adults starting these jobs have increasingly been non-white or Hispanic. (These figures are derived from the Census, so I use the Census term “Hispanic” in that context.) Now, one-third of the new job entrants are minorities. That means not just more persons of color with good incomes, but fewer whites in positions of authority—to decide who gets hired or promoted.

But there’s a catch. The minority individuals benefitting from upper-level opportunity are predominantly from recent immigrant backgrounds—they are mainly Asian Americans, both immigrant and native-born, and U.S.-born Latinos. But the share of Black Americans in these good jobs has budged just slightly over time and hovers around 5 percent.

A similar disparity appears in the surging diversity at colleges and universities, which is likewise dominated by immigrant-origin minorities. The 2019 report of the American Council on Education highlights a steep rise in the number of Latino graduates—including a doubling of the annual number earning baccalaureates in 2004-14 alone. Correspondingly, the share of whites among graduates dropped from 73 to 64 percent in the same period. At elite universities, the white share of students has fallen sharply over several decades.

But for Black Americans, the decades of the new century have not brought such good news. Their college graduation rates grew strongly during the second half of the 20th century but have slumped recently. That same ACE report notes that Black students have relatively high rates of dropout from baccalaureate programs, and have the highest level of student indebtedness. At a time of rapidly growing diversity among college students, the stagnating fortunes of Black students are an unacknowledged crisis.

These patterns resonate with U.S. history. During the quarter century following World War II—a period of momentous ethnic change, when mass assimilation ushered previously marginalized eastern European Jews and Irish and Italian Catholics into what had been an Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream—immigrant-origin groups leapfrogged over African Americans.

On a smaller scale, a similar assimilation seems to be happening today.

American society continues to operate in two registers for minority Americans, as it has done historically. The registers, taking the term in its musical sense, refer to the notes, or signals, that people, especially young people, perceive in their everyday environments and in contacts with institutions such as schools and the police.

In one register, bright notes outweigh dissonant ones and encourage many youth to strive for the mainstream. In that register, ethnic and racial distinctions diminish in importance; and there’s a chorus of voices proclaiming that we live in a meritocracy where young can be whomever they want to be. In the other register, the notes are more uniformly somber. The tune here is that only the most exceptional will escape the severe disadvantages of their minority status; everyone else need not try.

The common view holds that this disparity among non-white minorities is connected with skin color. But in reality, it has more to do with the different ways that groups have arrived, either through immigration or through conquest and enslavement. Embedded in the nation’s historical psyche are preferences for immigrants as individuals who have chosen America to improve their lives. But also embedded are prejudices against the descendants of enslaved and colonized peoples—because of the continuing influence of moral justifications used by whites during slavery and conquest. Some immigrants and their children also feel this prejudice, especially those with very dark skin, and those who have been denied legal status despite long residence.

The increasing inclusion of minorities in mainstream settings is now reaching into, and altering, American families. A widely noted trend of recent decades has been the steady increase in intermarriage: Since the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967, the percentage of intermarriages among newlyweds has risen from 3 percent to 17 percent, or one out of every six marriages. The great majority of them unite a white partner with a minority one.

The mixing in families is the most revelatory indicator of the quiet ethno-racial reshaping of the societal mainstream. It is impacting America’s child population in ways that have profound long-run implications. According to my analysis of birth certificates, almost 15 percent of the babies born in 2018 had parents from different ethnic or racial groups, and 11 percent—or one of every nine—had a white parent and a minority one. The most common combination by far involves whites partnering with Hispanics.

The obvious question is where children from multiple backgrounds fit in a still racially divided American society. This question holds particular import for those children with white and minority parentage.

The evidence about mixed minority-white Americans that we have to date, though far from complete, is broadly consistent. It includes census data, large-scale surveys (especially by Pew), and in-depth interview studies. The bulk of these (mainly) young people appear to be participating in diverse social worlds. They have grown up with whites and count whites among their close childhood and adult friends; they have high rates of marriage to whites as well, which is perhaps most telling. In addition, their educational attainment is greater, on average, than would be the case if it was determined mainly by their minority origin.

The self-identities of this growing cohort of mixed minority-white Americans are unusually fluid, but typically incorporate their white ancestry. As the sociologist Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl describes Asian-whites in her insightful study, they feel “white enough,” but not exclusively white.

Americans with mixed Black and white parentage are the hugely important exception. By and large, they grow up in less affluent circumstances and are exposed to more severe individual and institutional discrimination (evidenced by, among many other things, their frequent complaints of mistreatment at the hands of the police). They are more comfortable with Blacks than with whites and usually identify with the Black sides of their family heritage. Yet, despite the racism that impacts their lives, they too exhibit a level of integration with whites that exceeds that of other African Americans: they are as likely to marry whites as to marry Blacks.

The mainstream in many parts of the U.S. is tilting away from exclusive whiteness. The naming of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate is one more indicator of this tilt. But Harris’s background cuts another way, too, and is a reminder of the dual registers of our society. In this century, both major-party nominees of color for national office—the California senator, and President Obama—had an immigrant parent and came from racially mixed families, reminding us of the selectivity of the processes diversifying the mainstream.

As these inclusive processes advance, they may call into question the harshness of racism. But as long as American society continues to operate in the second register, where the individual and institutional processes of racism stifle Black Americans and some other minorities, the country will not succeed in overcoming racism.

The post Who’s Left Out of the New American Mainstream? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Max Greenberger, a U.S.-born, middle-aged father, did not fit into any of the classic stereotypes of name-changers. He was not an immigrant coming through Ellis Island, he was not a young man seeking to escape his Old World roots, nor was he a movie star in need of a stage name. Instead, he was explicitly seeking white-collar jobs for his family members. As he laid out in his petition, “[t]he name Greenberger is a foreign sounding name and is not conducive to securing good employment as a musician”—the chosen profession of his daughter. Additionally, he noted, “the name Greenberger … is not helpful towards securing an appointment as intern in a hospital”—the chosen profession of one son.

Thousands of similar-sounding petitions dating from the 1920s through the 1960s can be found today at the Civil Court (which was created by the merger of the City Court and the Municipal Court in 1962). The people filing these petitions were disproportionately members of a growing Jewish middle class. In their petitions, as well as letters and oral histories, a narrative of exclusion and isolation emerges—and explains why an often-misunderstood generation of Jews in the mid-20th century sought to change their names.

Name changing reflected Jewish American families’ interrelated experiences of upward mobility and antisemitism. Filing a name-change petition was predominantly a behavior of the middle class. This was true in part because it was expensive to change your name officially—you had to hire a lawyer and pay administrative fees, among other expenses. More subtly and more significantly, New York state law in the middle of the 20th century—just like today—made clear that you did not actually have to file legal papers in order to change your name: All you had to do was use a new name consistently and without any intent to commit fraud, and your new name was legal. The decision to file an official petition signaled concern that someone would be or had been scrutinizing your name on paper.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was primarily middle-class people who worried that someone might be scrutinizing their names. Working-class jobs, like domestic service or loading cargo, were more typically given to individuals based on recommendations of family members or appraisals of their bodies; because their names were not being monitored by employers, most working-class men and women who changed their names probably did so unofficially, rather than through official petitions. It was white-collar workers—students seeking to get into professional school, businessmen hoping to impress clients, and secretaries applying to employment agencies—who had to worry about their names, and Jews were beginning to seek out those positions at rates higher than other ethnic groups. While New Yorkers with Slavic, Greek, and Italian surnames also changed their names in City Court during this era, Jews changed their names in numbers far disproportionate to their presence in the city.

Institutionalized antisemitism blossomed in employment and education in the interwar years. Jews were increasingly seen as undesirable in American middle-class society, and those with more Jewish-sounding last names found themselves under an increasing amount of scrutiny. Beginning with Columbia University in 1917, colleges and universities throughout the country began establishing quotas on the numbers of Jews they accepted. In order to limit Jewish students, schools created new, lengthy applications that asked questions about the candidate’s parents’ origins, occupations, and even their names: where was your grandfather born, what is your father’s occupation, what was your mother’s maiden name? The questions were purposely designed to identify and exclude Jews.

The same types of techniques began to proliferate in the work world, just as Jews began to seek white-collar employment. According to one 1937 American Jewish Congress report, 89 percent of large New York companies told employment agencies that they “preferred Christians” as employees, demanding that those agencies use their application process to filter out Jewish candidates. Employers also increasingly posted advertisements throughout the 1920s and 1930s noting that they were “Christian,” “Anglo-Saxon,” or “Christian firms.” Using these techniques, industries such as banking, insurance, and public utilities all maintained small quotas of Jewish employees, while rejecting virtually all other Jewish applicants. These techniques remained consistent, or even increased, throughout World War II and its aftermath.

Petition after petition lodged at the City Court darkly hints at the forces of antisemitism that limited the livelihoods of those who filed them. Dora Sarietzky, a stenographer and typist, testified: “My name proved to be a great handicap in securing a position … In order to facilitate securing work, I assumed the name Doris Watson.” Bertram Levy, president of a mail chute corporation, found that “his name [had] been a hindrance to him in his efforts to gain an entrance to various firms and to secure business from them.” He sought permission from the court to adopt “an American name”: Bertram Leslie. Jews rarely stated openly that they experienced antisemitism, but they made clear that as they sought white-collar jobs and higher education, their names had inspired “embarrassment” and proved to be a “hindrance.”

The intertwined search for upward mobility and experience of antisemitism affected men, women, and children. As they sought pink collar labor in higher numbers, for example, Jewish women faced ugly stereotypes in the workforce that they were “loud and harsh or shrill” or wore over-sexualized clothes or too much makeup, while Jewish teenagers were typecast as “clannish” or as “grinds,” unsuitable for the athletic and social world of college men.

As all members of Jewish families faced discrimination in their efforts to get jobs and education, group name-changing became a phenomenon, with entire families all changing their names in concert, sometimes putting as many as nine people on one petition. Parents like Max Greenberger filed for underage children; adult siblings and spouses filed together. Family members viewed themselves as one economic unit, and they filed name change petitions together to allow the unit to thrive.

Although only a small minority of New York Jews changed their names, the practice became a commonly acknowledged and accepted one. Jews described being counseled to change their names by family members, employers, teachers, and mentors; one New York Jewish author remembered that it had been a matter of course for Jewish college students to change their names upon graduation in the 1930s. A 1950 study of Bronx residents reported that virtually all of the 181 Jews surveyed knew someone who had changed their names. Some of the most famous examples of American Jewish culture of the mid-century—from Jo Sinclair’s Wasteland to Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement to Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar—featured name changing as a basic part of American Jewish life.

Yet, just because name changing had become a part of Jewish life does not mean that it was universally embraced. Indeed, novels and movies like Gentleman’s Agreement and Marjorie Morningstar popularized portraits of name changers as shallow social climbers who hated themselves and other Jews. Memoirs, oral histories, and reminiscences from New York Jews of the era recorded contempt for Jews who changed their names. Physician and author Sherwin Nuland, for example, remembered his gym teacher insistently mocking his newly changed name, while historian Daniel Horowitz remembered his father’s anger at Jews in his neighborhood who had changed their names. The 1950 survey of Bronx residents found that about 50 percent of those 181 Jews defined name changing as “a shame” and a reflection of “a lack of pride.”

In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Jews in New York at least recognized the antisemitism that impelled their neighbors’ petitions to the City Court. Later on, that wouldn’t be the case. Jokes about name changing at Ellis Island (a myth that most historians agree never took place) emerged in the 1960s, as New York Jews moved to the suburbs, farther away from the painful experiences their parents and grandparents encountered every day in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. By the 1970s and ’80s, a decline in institutionalized antisemitism (in part, the result of civil rights laws passed after World War II) led to a substantial drop in the numbers of Jews changing their names in Civil Court, and negative portraits of name changers exploded as American Jewish culture became largely divorced from the real circumstances of antisemitism that had led so many to change their names in the first place.

In a post-Roots era, where ethnic diversity and authenticity was suddenly becoming more valued, popular culture pilloried Jews who seemed to have abandoned their heritage in their quest to “become American.” Popular movies like 1982’s My Favorite Year or 1991’s Avalon portrayed Jewish name changing as an inauthentic effort by Jewish men to fit in, and rarely acknowledged the struggles of native-born American Jewish men, women, and children to find work or education in the middle of the 20th century.

In this new world, name changing became an embarrassment, something that an American official did to your ancestors a long time ago. The challenges faced by ordinary men and women like Max Greenberger and Dora Sarietzky faded from public view, and their painful choices to erase their Jewish names were largely forgotten, hidden inside the stacks of petitions warehoused at the New York City Civil Court.

The post What the Jewish Name Changing Narrative Gets Wrong appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Make no mistake: Understanding what fascism meant in its time, 1920 to 1945, is absolutely crucial to understanding the gravity of our own current national political crisis—as well as to summoning up the huge political creativity we will need to address it. But we won’t get close to that understanding if we keep confusing fascism, the historical phenomenon, with fascism, the political label.

If you grew up as I did, in the United States after the Second World War, everyone seemed to be an anti-fascist, at least at first. America had fought the good fight, and triumphed. I ached at my father’s war stories about the misery of the newly liberated Italians, studied army snapshots of him in front of a mound of corpses at Dachau, and suffered nightmares at learning what the Nazis and the Fascists did to the Jews.

But the picture grew complicated. From my Jewish American mother, a New Dealer and later a communist fellow traveler, I learned that McCarthyism was the form fascism took in America. After my study abroad in Italy during the 1960s, where I had joined student and worker demonstrations against the country’s still-vivid authoritarian streak, I came home rhetorically armed to denounce fascists. America seemed riddled with them—starting with those “fascist pigs” in the Princeton, New Jersey, police force who hauled the Black kids (and my little brothers) into custody for Halloween pranks and held them indefinitely, as if habeas corpus didn’t apply to juveniles. My Smith College dorm mother was a fascist for enforcing fascistic-patriarchal rules in loco parentis, as were a couple of professors who argued that fascism and communism were opposite sides of the same coin. The ranks of the fascists included LBJ for Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger for many reasons, and even my father (who also supported the Vietnam war) for his haywire libertarian politics.

Calling people “fascists” has been as American as apple pie for as long as I can remember. But, after becoming a scholar of fascism, I came to see the phenomenon of fascist labeling very differently.

This is especially true now, 20 years into the 21st century, heading up to the 2022 centenary of Mussolini’s March on Rome.

It’s been 75 years since the coalition of armies—spearheaded by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Great Britain—crushed the Axis belligerents, Germany, Italy, and Japan. And it’s been 30 years since 1990, when the relatively stable Cold War world order, ruled by the two superpowers, broke up with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.

I now see the fascist phenomenon with new context—the crumbling of the liberal norms that were constructed to save the world from a recurrence of authoritarianism after World War II; the social inequities and financial crises arising from globalization; the failures of American unilateralism; and the obsolescence of domestic and international institutions in the face of new challenges, from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, that are posed to wreak even greater global disorder.

In this 21st-century light, fascism and its horrific trajectory in the second quarter of the 20th century look at once inexorable and global, awful and attractive, even understandable. Fascism, its early 20th-century proponents claimed, had all of the answers to the political, material, and existential crises of the British-led imperialist world order in the wake of World War I: It would mobilize the militarism generated by World War I to reorder civilian life. It signaled a third way between capitalism and socialism by imposing harmony between labor and capital. And fascism would establish new racial hierarchies to defend the West against soulless American materialism, Judeo-Bolshevism, and the inexorable advance of Asia’s “yellow masses.” It would knock the hypocritical British Empire off its plutocratic pedestal, destroy the puppet League of Nations, and carve out new colonial empires to let the proletarian nations of the world get their just desserts.

It makes sense that Italy was home to the first fascist takeover. After surviving well enough as a second-order power through the end of the 19th century, the country’s retrograde monarchy eschewed undertaking needed social reforms and instead got swept up in the competition for colonies, empowering a flamboyant young nationalist right. These activists dominated debates in the piazzas and ultimately pushed the country to enter World War I believing it would be richly rewarded with new lands.

But that vision was not to be. Mobilizing at a grand scale to fight the Austrians and Germans unhinged Italy’s political system. The country divided into interventionist and anti-war camps. After fighting ended, the old political class secured a few new territories out of the Versailles Peace Conference, but not enough to satisfy the imperialist expectations of the pro-war factions. Nor could elites deliver a substantial program of reforms that would have made war sacrifices seem worthwhile to the ever-larger, ever-more-exasperated movements of workers and peasants spearheaded by socialist and Catholic opposition parties.

By 1921, the liberal political elite calculated that if it opened its electoral coalition to Benito Mussolini’s burgeoning fasci di combattimento movement, it could coopt this vigorous political upstart, punish the left and Catholic opposition, and shore up its own power.

Who better than the brilliant, unscrupulous journalist Mussolini, a leading socialist turned radical nationalist, to offer a new way? Lover and tutee of brilliant cosmopolitan women, with a facile ear for big ideas and overweening self-confidence in his political intuition, Mussolini claimed to be both a revolutionary and a reactionary—and positioned his anti-party’s armed squads as the only bulwark against the Reds’ advance. Avowedly opportunistic, he seized every moment to bash the opposition, ingratiate himself with the old elites, stymie alternative solutions, and woo the military and the police by stressing their shared struggle to restore law and order against the Bolsheviks.

Called by the king to form a coalition government, Mussolini embarked on a restoration more than a revolution. He established an unshakable political majority by outlawing opposition parties. He revived the economy through austerity measures, outlawing non-fascist unions, and renegotiating war debts to prompt U.S. capital to pour into Italy. He restored national prestige by swagger and bluff, no longer a junior partner to Great Britain in the Mediterranean and East Africa, but a freebooting statesman with the ambition to reestablish Italy’s Roman empire.

Fascists spoke of the state as something alive, with a moral personality of its own, and justifiably predatory to survive in a Darwinian world. They celebrated people as energetic animals—New Men and Women who needed hierarchy and a true leader to harness their vigor. The males could become more virile breedstock, the women more fertile, all for the purposes of the State.

Between 1920 and 1930, as Mussolini turned his one-time radical-populist social movement into a giant party-militia, seized power, and transformed his government into totalitarian dictatorship—in his words, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”—fascism established itself as an international reference point for a wide array of like-minded political entrepreneurs and collaborating movements. With the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, and fascist Italy’s alliance with the Third Reich, fascism would transform into a multi-pronged global force. Militarily, Mussolini conquered Ethiopia and Hitler re-armed, both in defiance of the League of Nations. They intervened to help General Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Second Republic and formed their anti-Bolshevik Axis with Imperial Japan.

Economically, fascism appealed during a worldwide depression because it seemed to have found a winning model to confront it: closed economies, big state spending, and tightly controlled labor organizations and markets to control wages and inflation. Revved up by rearmament spending, Germany was becoming the new engine of Europe and the leading trade partner for most of its neighboring nations. Germany boasted that it had no unemployment, and Italy had at least suppressed the visibility of out-of-work citizens by recruiting them for its ever-growing volunteer militia, sending them back to their rural home towns, settling them in its new empire in Libya and Ethiopia, or offering them assistance through winter help funds. In both regimes, leaders claimed, capital and labor cooperated in the national interest.

Political enthusiasm displayed itself in whole peoples uniformed and integrated into mass organizations, their distinctions effaced, united in their cult of the leader. By 1938, propagandists were speaking of the Nazi-Fascist New Order as the true heir to European culture. It launched a counter-Hollywood in the form of UFA, the giant German-dominated film production and distribution cartel, and financed joint film productions with the Japanese as well as a dazzling film festival at Venice to counter the one at Cannes.

The Nazi-Fascist New Order championed the new sciences of demographics and race hygienics in scientific congresses and exchanges. It fostered debates over how to revive jurisprudence and political science by differentiating between friends and enemies in legal codes and in international law and how to build more totalizing welfare states by incorporating sports and healthy eating, in addition to eugenic measures to prevent “useless” lives from detracting from the social good. And it portrayed itself as a pioneer in geopolitics, striking a new balance so that all of the world’s great powers would have their so-called vital spaces or “lebensraum.” Just as the U.S. would rule Latin America through its Monroe Doctrine, fascist geopoliticians said, Italy would have Eur-Africa, Japan its Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia, and Germany its Ost-Plan for colonizing eastern Europe and Russia. On that basis, fascism had a right to make war and for the winning regimes to re-distribute chunks of colonial empire to the “deserving.”

It’s scary to look at a map of the world in 1941: continental Europe conquered for the New Order, the Nazi war machine at the gates of Moscow; Italy in the Balkans, its armies in the field from Benghazi to British Somalia; Japan occupying much of East Asia. The war was a true crusade, driven by its dictators’ furies, as well as old-fashioned imperialism: for the fascists, winning meant not just territorial conquest, but population elimination including the global eradication of the Jews, wholesale pillage, and capturing prisoners for slave labor. The tyrants had few qualms about immolating their own peoples to salvage their lost cause. Rather than capitulate to the Allies in June 1943, Mussolini abandoned Italy to German military occupation and two more years of bombardment, invasion, and civil war. Refusing to capitulate as Soviet forces encircled Berlin, Hitler summoned his people to continue the “sacrifice” and “struggle,” then killed himself.

Americans may think we know this history, but we have oversimplified its complexity. Boasting about defeating fascism, and declaring it our duty to police the world against any recurrence, we have lost sight of the global crises of the early 20th century, born of World War I and the Great Depression, that fascism was invented to address.

Over time, we have become accustomed to political leaders of both parties turning the history of fascism into a set of political hobgoblins to legitimate new wars. Never again a Munich, where the great powers capitulated to Hitler, to justify intervention in Vietnam. Never again the Holocaust, to justify intervention in the Balkans and Libya. Never would we bow to an Arab Hitler, to justify invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

We also have gotten used to Hollywood turning the U.S. encounter with Nazi-Fascism into mawkish images of good and evil, and to facile evocations of the Holocaust making Antisemitism practically the sole measure of what it meant to be fascist. “Fascinating Fascism” is the term Susan Sontag, the literary critic, once used to call out American culture’s superficiality at being beguiled by fascism’s kitschy aesthetics and by the sadomasochistic pleasure of thinking of fascism as chains and shackles that, once shaken off, reinvigorate the meaning of being whole and free.

By cultivating such a jejune view of what fascism was historically, we have struggled to understand the highly relevant story of why it took two decades between the world wars to develop a coalition powerful enough to fight it. Fascism always had opponents, of course, but they—dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, Catholic centrists, social democrats, communists, and anarchists—were deeply divided. Mussolini got points from his men when, after outlawing the opposition, he brushed off its leaders as “anti-fascists,” meaning they had no program except to contest his.

It is no disrespect to the hard-fought struggles of anti-fascist forces to underscore how hard it was to win, much less sustain, electoral victories once the right in polarized political systems aligns itself with forces identifying with fascism. In Spain, the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front won in February 1936, only to be overthrown by a military coup, backed by international fascism. In France, the May 1936 victory of the Popular Front was reversed in short order as capital took flight for fear of a Red revolution, the economy stalled, and the coalition dissolved.

Most places sought to immunize themselves from fascism by becoming more conservative. Nearly everywhere, the interwar years were a time of nationalism, red-baiting, and eugenics. Antisemitism and race-mongering were normal. There was only one place in Europe that fended off the fascist turn with substantial social reforms: the Kingdom of Sweden, where the Social Democratic party won the vote in 1932. Of course, this solid left regime only could thrive as a neutral power, as a niche at the edge of the New Order, supplying the German war machine with coal and steel.

Ultimately, it was the rising hegemons, the United States and the Soviet Union, which had the strongest interests in battling Nazi-Fascist hegemony: the Soviet Union because it was in the direct line of Nazi aggression; the United States because it opposed German and Italian, allied with Japanese expansionism around the global. But it still took years for New Deal America, the troglodyte British Empire, and Stalin’s walled-off USSR to overcome their differences and forge a functioning antifascist military alliance.

Fascism was not fully vanquished by the military victories of World War II alone. Preventing its revival required a big rethink of economic and political principles around the world. It called for big projects, for huge investments, and for government planning to bring about economic recovery. How could a nation’s subjects be citizens if they were excluded by their poverty, and by caste-like differences in their education, standards of living, and life prospects? How could enhanced productivity, and big profits from new mass-industrial technologies like cars and radios, be more equitably distributed? Capitalism had to accept regulation. Old-fashioned liberalism had to accept labor reform and state spending on social benefits. Europe, if it was to end its warring divisions, had to accept some kind of federalism. The Catholic Church had to resolve its theological ambivalence and champion human rights universally, not only for Christians. Socialism (and communism) had to become more patriotic and reformist. World government had to become stronger, fairer, and more universal.

The substance, then, of fascism, but also of anti-fascism, is what mattered about fascism—not the label of “fascism” that obsesses so many people and dominates our politics today. That focus on substance is what we need now in the U.S. as we face not fascism, but rather a crisis of a kind that historic fascism invented itself to address, in the most awful ways. In this crisis, we need to summon up the terrifying honesty to address our nation’s responsibility for the crumbling of the liberal international order, and, if history serves, to create Popular Front forms of collective action nationally and globally with the power to confront our many challenges—ideally, well short of new wars.

The post What We Don’t Understand About Fascism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The earliest modern experiment in detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals: one who refused to bring camps into the world, and one who did not.

Battles had raged off and on for decades over Cuba’s desire for independence from Spain. After years of fighting with Cuban rebels, Arsenio Martínez Campos, the governor-general of the island, wrote to the Spanish prime minister in 1895 to say that he believed the only path to victory lay in inflicting new cruelties on civilians and fighters alike. To isolate rebels from the peasants who sometimes fed or sheltered them, he thought, it would be necessary to relocate hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants into Spanish-held cities behind barbed wire, a strategy he called reconcentración.

But the rebels had shown mercy to the Spanish wounded and had returned prisoners of war unharmed. And so Martínez Campos could not bring himself to launch the process of reconcentración against an enemy he saw as honorable. He wrote to Spain and offered to surrender his post rather than impose the measures he had laid out as necessary. “I cannot,” he wrote, “as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence.”

Spain recalled Martínez Campos, and in his place sent general Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher.” There was little doubt about what the results would be. “If he cannot make successful war upon the insurgents,” wrote The New York Times in 1896, “he can make war upon the unarmed population of Cuba.”

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and Spanish missions set the stage for relocating vulnerable residents away from their homes and forcing them to stay elsewhere. But it was not until the technology of barbed wire and automatic weapons that a small guard force could impose mass detention. With that shift, a new institution came into being, and the phrase “concentration camps” entered the world.

When U.S. newspapers reported on Spain’s brutality, Americans shipped millions of pounds of cornmeal, potatoes, peas, rice, beans, quinine, condensed milk, and other staples to the starving peasants, with railways offering to carry the goods to coastal ports free of charge. By the time the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898, the United States was already primed to go to war. Making a call to arms before Congress, President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

But official rejection of the camps was short-lived. After defeating Spain in Cuba in a matter of months, the United States took possession of several Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where another rebellion was underway. By the end of 1901, U.S. generals fighting in the most recalcitrant regions of the islands had likewise turned to concentration camps. The military recorded this turn officially as an orderly application of measured tactics, but that did not reflect the view on the ground. Upon seeing one camp, an Army officer wrote, “It seems way out of the world without a sight of the sea,—in fact, more like some suburb of hell.”

In southern Africa, the concept of concentration camps had simultaneously taken root. In 1900, during the Boer War, the British began relocating more than 200,000 civilians, mostly women and children, behind barbed wire into bell tents or improvised huts. Again, the idea of punishing civilians evoked horror among those who saw themselves as representatives of a civilized nation. “When is a war not a war?” asked British Member of Parliament Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in June 1901. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”

Far more people died in the camps than in combat. Polluted water supplies, lack of food, and infectious diseases ended up killing tens of thousands of detainees. Even though the Boers were often portrayed as crude people undeserving of sympathy, the treatment of European descendants in this fashion was shocking to the British public. Less notice was taken of British camps for black Africans who had even more squalid living conditions and, at times, only half the rations allotted to white detainees.

The Boer War ended in 1902, but camps soon appeared elsewhere. In 1904, in the neighboring German colony of South-West Africa—now Namibia—German general Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order for the rebellious Herero people, writing “Every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.”

The order was rescinded soon after, but the damage inflicted on indigenous peoples did not stop. The surviving Herero—and later the Nama people as well—were herded into concentration camps to face forced labor, inadequate rations, and lethal diseases. Before the camps were fully disbanded in 1907, German policies managed to kill some 70,000 Namibians in all, nearly exterminating the Herero.

It took just a decade for concentration camps to be established in wars on three continents. They were used to exterminate undesirable populations through labor, to clear contested areas, to punish suspected rebel sympathizers, and as a cudgel against guerrilla fighters whose wives and children were interned. Most of all, concentration camps made civilians into proxies in order to get at combatants who had dared defy the ruling power.

While these camps were widely viewed as a disgrace to modern society, this disgust was not sufficient to preclude their future use.

During the First World War, the camps evolved to address new circumstances. Widespread conscription meant that any military-age male German deported from England would soon return in a uniform to fight, with the reverse also being true. So Britain initially focused on locking up foreigners against whom it claimed to have well-grounded suspicions.

British home secretary Reginald McKenna batted away calls for universal internment, protesting that the public had no more to fear from the great majority of enemy aliens than they did from “from the ordinary bad Englishman.” But with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine and the deaths of more than a thousand civilians, British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith took revenge, locking up tens of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian “enemy aliens” in England.

Tanauan reconcentrado camp, Batangas, the Philippines, circa 1901. Image courtesy of University of Michigan Digital Library Collection.

The same year, the British Empire extended internment to its colonies and possessions. The Germans responded with mass arrests of aliens from not only Britain but Australia, Canada, and South Africa as well. Concentration camps soon flourished around the globe: in France, Russia, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Brazil, Japan, China, India, Haiti, Cuba, Singapore, Siam, New Zealand, and many other locations. Over time, concentration camps would become a tool in the arsenal of nearly every country.

In the United States, more than two thousand prisoners were held in camps during the war. German-born conductor Karl Muck, a Swiss national, wound up in detention in Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia after false rumors that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Unlike earlier colonial camps, many camps during the First World War were hundreds or thousands of miles from the front lines, and life in them developed a strange normalcy. Prisoners were assigned numbers that traveled with them as they moved from camp to camp. Letters could be sent to detainees, and packages received. In some cases, money was transferred and accounts kept. A bureaucracy of detention emerged, with Red Cross inspectors visiting and making reports.

By the end of the war, more than 800,000 civilians had been held in concentration camps, with hundreds of thousands more forced into exile in remote regions. Mental illness and shattered minority communities were just two of the tolls this long-term internment exacted from detainees.

Nevertheless, this more “civilized” approach toward enemy aliens during the First World War managed to rehabilitate the sullied image of concentration camps. People accepted the notion that a targeted group might turn itself in and be detained during a crisis, with a reasonable expectation to one day be released without permanent harm. Later in the century, this expectation would have tragic consequences.

Yet even as the First World War raged, the camps’ bitter roots survived. The Ottoman government made use of a less-visible system of concentration camps with inadequate food and shelter to deport Armenians into the Syrian desert as part of an orchestrated genocide.

And after the war ended, the evolution of concentration camps took another grim turn. Where internment camps of the First World War had focused on foreigners, the camps that followed—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi Konzentrationslager—used the same methods on their own citizens.

In the first Cuban camps, fatalities had resulted from neglect. Half a century later, camps would be industrialized using the power of a modern state. The concept of the concentration camp would reach its apotheosis in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where prisoners were reduced not just to a number, but to nothing.

The 20th century made General Martínez Campos into a dark visionary. Refusing to institute concentration camps on Cuba, he had said, “The conditions of hunger and misery in these centers would be incalculable.” And once they were unleashed on the world, concentration camps proved impossible to eradicate.

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