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The Isolationist as Collectivist: Lawrence
Dennis and the Coming of World War 11*
by
Justus
D.
Doenecke
Departmenr of History, New College of the University of
South
Florida
To most historians, and to much of the general public as well, the name of
the late Lawrence Dennis has long been associated with American "fascism."
Arthur S. Link calls him "the intellectual leader and principal adviser of the
fascist groups." Charles
C.
Alexander sees him as "the leading intellectual
fascist in America." When Dennis's thought is treated in depth, it is usually
in the context of anti-democratic political philosophy and elitist theory.'
Beginning in the sixties, some commentators have started to refer to
Dennis in slightly more appreciative terms. In 1960 Arthur
M.
Schlesinger,
Jr., while arguing that Dennis's formulas were both authoritarian and
romantic, claimed that "his analysis cut through sentimental idealism with
healthy effect." In 1969 Frederick L. Schuman, a "popular front" advocate
who had debated Dennis in the 1930's, went much further, declaring that his
pleas for isolation "would probably have contributed more to the welfare,
health and survival of the human race than the course which Washington
policy makers did in fact pursue
. . .
since 1917." Then, beginning in 1972,
historians started to find Dennis a forerunner of Cold War revisionism, with
Ronald Radosh calling him America's "earliest and most consistent critic of
the Cold War." To Radosh, Dennis's stress on market factors alone shows
the man's perception.'
Despite such fresh examination, scholars have not yet described, much
less explained, Dennis's reaction to the rise of the Axis powers, and to the
outbreak of World War 11. Yet it was his posture toward the totalitarian
nations, Germany in particular, that led to much notoriety and in 1944 to
indictment for sedition. The unique nature of Dennis's arguments, so unlike
those of many isolationists, enabled Secretary of the Interior Harold L.
lckes to find him one of the "Quislings who, in pretended patriotism, would
cravenly spike our guns and ground our airplanes in order that Hitlerism
might more easily overcome us." Dennis's rationale also allowed columnist
*
The author
is
grateful to
Lea
RibuiTo
for
generous
advice
and aid
192
THE JOURNAL O F LIBERTARIAN STUDIES
Dorothy Thompson to call him the "braintruster extraordinary to the forces
of democratic defeat," and expos6 writer Avedis Derounian. whose pen
name was "John Roy Carlson," to refer to him as "Liberty's chief hang-
man."' Yet, if such stereotypes still remain with us, they are more indicative
of the political culture of the 1930's than of Dennis's own position, one
which was in many ways
sui generis.
Dennis began his career on the lower rungs of the American establish-
ment. Born in Atlanta in 1893, he received his formal education at Phillips
Exeter and Harvard, and during World War
I
served overseas as an infantry
officer. Then came several years in the foreign service, followed by employ-
ment abroad with
J.&W.
Seligman and the National City Bank of New
York. In 1930, Dennis began to attack the overseas activities of American
investment banking, publishing his broadsides in such liberal journals as
The
Nation
and
The New Republic.4
Soon Dennis began to offer sweeping solutions for the Great Depression,
solutions that increasingly centered on a corporate state. Like F.A. Hayek
and Joseph Schumpeter, he saw the coming world as a collectivist one, but,
unlike them, he welcomed this world vigorously. His world was always much
closer to George Soule or Stuart Chase than to Ludwig von Mises. In 1934,
as associate editor of a right-wing tabloid called
The Awakener,
he attacked
the "half-way" measures of the New Deal and called for more centralized
economic controls. His "fascist" reputation, however, was rooted in his book
The Coming American Fascism
(l936), as well as in a series of articles
written in the mid and late thirties for such journals as
The American
Mercur.~,Social Frontier,
and
The Annals
uf
the American Academy
of
Political and Social Science.
The industrial countries, he said, faced inevitable collectivization. Fas-
cism, communism, even the American New Deal were all parts of a historical
process so mechanistic that individual rulers counted for little. Capit a
I'~
sm-
once nourished by extensive geographical frontiers and rich world
markets-was
no longer workable; the New Deal, a mere step on the
collectivist road, had little to offer but deficit spending and make-work
projects. Given the need for a thoroughly collectivized society, Dennis found
America facing the choice of fascism or communism. Of the two, he claimed
that fascism was preferable, for-unlike the Soviet system-it offered class
unity, utilized the market mechanism, and retained skilled managerial
elites.5
Dennis, in fact, claimed to be describing "a desirable fascism." He used the
example of Huey Long as "our nearest approach to a national fascist leader"
and spoke of gaining initial power through control of varied state govern-
ments. A militarized party organization would then compete in national
elections. Assuming power legally, the new ruling elite would call private
enterprise to "the colors as conscripts in war," reorganize the Congress on
LAWRENCE DENNIS
193
vocational lines, and replace the two-party system with a single party
"holding a mandate from the people." (If the scenario reads a bit like
Sinclair Lewis's
It
Can't Happen Here
(1935), one wonders who Buzz
Windrop would be.) Specific economic measures included nationalization of
banks and major monopolies, redistribution of wealth and income through
progressive taxation, and subsidization of small enterprises and farming. In
the new society, all institutions-press,
radio, cinema, schools, and
churches-would have to foster a "national plan" designed to coordinate the
entire economy.6
The question of Dennis as a "fascist" proponent depends upon how the
term is defined. Dennis would use the noun interchangeably. At times he
meant any kind of centralized economy that was not communist. At other
times he was referring to the political and economic systems of Germany and
Italy and to them alone. At still other times he was outlining his utopian
vision for America. Dennis long denied that he was ever a fascist, declaring
that he had never joined a fascist movement or backed a fascist cause.
Rather he was a neutral observer, trying to analyze events without ideologi-
cal bias.'
If fascism combines a one-party state with strident nationalism, continen-
tal autarchy, and centralized economic controls that mould private owner-
ship to public will,-in short, a truly corporatist and organic society
transcending localized interests-then Dennis's system might be fascistic. If,
however, one defines fascism as involving a clear-cut
Fiihrerprinzip,
a terror
system, and permanent purge so often associated with Nazi Germany, then
Dennis was not a fascist. He adhered neither to the racism of an Alfred
Rosenberg or a Vidknn Quisling; rather his politics centered on the twin
poles of economic corporatism and rigid isolationism."
Isolationism in fact developed naturally from Dennis's corporatism. Den-
nis argued that a self-sufficient and disciplined United States would not have
to venture outside the Hemisphere. In contrast to the fascist powers of
Europe, the United States could sustain full employment without the need
for additional markets and territory overseas. Dennis was far from being a
pacifist, and in 1936 his foreign policy included control of the Panama
Canal, "naval parity with the greatest power, a professional army of at least
four hundred thousand men fully equipped, and universal compulsory
military service." The United States, by maintaining a strong war potential,
could "rope off a large section of the globe within this hemisphere as
territory in which outsiders may not come and fight." Far better, Dennis
believed, to construct a Fortress America than to fight "another holy war"
that could only result in "world revolution and chaos."Y
Despite the unconventional nature of some tenets, Dennis did not always
have a bad press. Several reviews of
The Coming American Fascism
were
quite respectful, with
The Times Literary Supplement
of London claiming
194
THE JOURNAL O F LIBERTARIAN STUDIES
that the hook had "substantial value as a fresh and penetrating analysis of
the present situation." Such critics as Ernest Sutherland Bates and Dwight
Macdonald denied that Dennis was advocating a European form of fascism.
What Dennis meant by fascism, said Macdonald, appeared to he "a kind of
Technocracy and not at all what Hitler and Mussolini meant." As late as
June 1940,
The New York Times
covered his addresses before foreign policy
groups, always referring to him as a "banker," "econon~ist," or "former
member of the diplomatic servicem-never as a fascist.lO
Even in 1940 and 1941 Dennis was not entirely excluded from mainstream
political forums. True, Harper and Brothers. finding Dennis 'too hot' a
property, dropped sponsorship of a Dennis volume that they had intended
to publish, and Dennis had to publish it himself. However, Dennis addressed
the prestigious Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia in
1940. The next year
The Nation
featured a debate between Dennis, Freder-
ick
L.
Schuman, and journalist Max Lerner on the forces acting in the
wartime order, and
Fortune
magazine welcomed his participation in a
roundtable forum on the world economy.]'
It was only, however, after the fall of France that Dennis was opposed by
the very groups that had once tolerated, and at times welcomed, his views,
and it is doubtful whether any isolationist except Colonel Charles A.
Lindbergh so aroused the interventionists' ire. Such opposition might have
been inevitable, for as Germany, Italy, and Japan began to assault the
Versailles system, Dennis devoted increasing attention to foreign policy. In
The Dynamics
of
War and Revolution
(1940), and in a privately circulated
bulletin entitled
The Week,v Foreign Letter
(1938-1942), Dennis pro-
pounded the doctrine that wars of conquest were inevitable. The British
Empire, now a status quo power, had been founded by "pirates, slave-
traders and fighting men"; the United States had stolen its territory from the
Indians. As aggression was rooted in human nature and in the world's
unequal distribution of goods, it was folly to think in Wilsonian terms of a
"war to end wars."l2
Even before the outbreak of World War 11, Dennis had placed himself
squarely on the side of the so-called "have-not" nations. The breakdown of
world capitalism, he said, forced the "socialist" nations-Germany, Russia,
Italy, and Japan-to conquer territories and to develop economies totally
independent of traditional trade and financial networks. The Munich pact
was therefore an act of rationality, a "realistic attempt" to secure "peaceful
change." If, in the process, it made Germany master of all Europe, it avoided
a general war and the accompanying triumph of communism.lJ
By the same token, Dennis found England's guarantee to Poland, made in
late March of 1939, sheer stupidity. The British, having just given Hitler the
keys to eastern Europe, were suddenly forbidding him to use them. Not only
was it the height of folly to fight the world's greatest military power without
LAWRENCE DENNIS
195
a n alliance with the Soviet Union, but Britain's action delivered the small
Baltic nations over to "the tender mercies of Moscow."'4
Once hostilities started, Dennis gave several reasons why he believed that
Germany was bound t o win. First, he claimed that the Reich, unlike the
Allies, possessed dynamic leadership. Dennis called Roosevelt "a semi-
paralyzed country squire," one who lacked the toughness necessary t o lead a
major war effort. Such policymakers as Secretary of State Cordell Hull,
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Secretary of War Henry
L.
Stimson
were superannuated and confused, America's military and naval heads
"mostly gold-braided senior Civil Service clerks." Winston Churchill, as
incompetent as Roosevelt, was "a senile alcoholic who [had] never been a
success at anything except writing alibis for his failures." and most of
England's parliamentary leaders were equally inept.15
Dennis found Hitler, however, a man of "genius." Rather than vying to be
"the darling of American women's groups," the
Fuhrer
had dismembered
Czechoslovakia, isolated Russia, and secured food from eastern Europe for
his "eighty million German bellies." Later evidence of Hitler's brilliant
leadership, said Dennis, could he seen in his ability to unite the "have-nots"
against "the capitalistic pluto-democracies.%
Second, Dennis asserted that only the totalitarian nations possessed the
6lan vital
necessary for victory. He said that the British and the French,
unlike the Germans, lacked "the willingness to die by the tens of thousands."
True. Germany's armed manpower, industrial mobilization, and geographi-
cal location contributed to its superiority, but there was more as well. While
the American laborer would strike to secure benefits, the Nazi worker-
knowing that the industrialists were being (according to Dennis) equally
disciplined-willingly accepted low wages and long hours.'-
Third, Dennis asserted that the totalitarian states had more attainable war
aims. He always denied that Hitler sought world conquest; rather Germany
merely wanted additional
lebensraum
in eastern Europe. By integrating the
agricultural Balkan states t o an industrialized Reich, a prosperous continent
could remain independent of a n Anglo-American commercial system. Such
German domination of Europe, Dennis maintained, preserved-not
threatened-the world balance of power. Fragmented continents, packed
with small sovereign states, were economically unworkable; world prosper-
ity of necessity depended upon continental blocs. Here Dennis envisioned an
expanded Russian zone, an Asia dominated b y Japan, a somewhat reduced
British Empire, a Western Hemisphere controlled by the United States, and
a Europe run by Germany. The Americas were in no danger, he main-
tained, for German or Japanese efforts t o extend their domain overseas
would be ruinously costly.'"
By contrast Dennis claimed that Allied war aims were both Carthaginian
and messianic. Britain, anxious t o preserve world hegemony, offered Ger-

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