Lawrence Dennis: The Father of American Fascism

Lawrence Dennis charted a singular course within Depression-era American proto-fascism. A veteran of the foreign service and an Ivy League graduate, Dennis stood as a respectable and dignified intellectual in the midst of frothing anti-Semites such as William Dudley Pelley and James True. His respectability resulted in Dennis being taken seriously in broad circles, and he gained a reputation as the “theoretician” of American fascism. Dennis managed to survive the mass sedition trial of 1944 debacle with his status intact, emerging in the postwar period as an influential Cold War spokesperson for noninterventionist conservatives. Dennis's supporters, however, did not know that the same man who met with Charles Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler began his life as a “famed, globe-trotting Negro child preacher” (p. xxii). Before entering Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennis began “passing” for white—a facade he maintained until his death. Gerald Horne places that racial conversion at the heart of The Color of Fascism, the first full-length biography of Dennis.