Many familiar with his name and his work would be surprised to find writer and political critic Herbert Croly (1869-1930) listed as a prophet of fascism. Croly is more closely associated with the Progressive era in American politics, but his work had a definate fascist slant to it and it could be better said that he was a pre-fascist thinker.
Croly was considered the dean of American political commentators. Walter Lippman called him, "the first important political philosopher who appeared in America in the 20th century." He authored the influental books The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914) and founded the influential magazine The New Republic. It was in the pages of The New Republic Croly praised and defended Italian fascism, calling it a true "people's community" in which the common good was placed ahead of the private benefit.
Influenced by French Positivism, Croly was an attacker of big capitalist trusts and an advocate of state power for the people. He was a critic of American materialism and capitalism which he claimed were tearing the country apart. He saw individuality as chaotic: "An individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed." In war, he saw the possibility to mobalize society and advance fascism. War to him was a "social tonic," in which the impurities were cleansed at the spirit was reborn.
Croly's influential book The Promise of American Life was one of the founding documents of modern statism. It influenced Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Although it sold a mere 7,500 copies, Croly's opus reached a small but formidable and visonary elite who would provide the brain power behind a gradual statist takeover of the American government. All the hallmarks of fascism are found in The Promise of American Life: social militarism, national regeneration, vangaurd elites, unifying national myths, contempt for parlimentary democracy, a form of national socialism, military expansion, hostility towards individualism and many other themes fascists hold dear.
Like the fascists of the interwar period, Croly believed particularly in the need for national organization that went beyond economic considerations to affect the very souls of a nation's citizens. He saw that capitalism compromised men in their successes as much as their failures; that it reduced them to a common grabbers and denied them a fully realized life. Croly was concerned about the problem of what is today called "atomization," the condition of a teeming, disjointed mass of people who are disconnected from the essential sources of social significance, lost in themselves and their needs and wants. “An individual,” he wrote, “has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” As a result, he believed the U.S. Constitution should be abolished in favor of the will of governing elites.
As a result, Croly, like fascists, saw the need for a national purpose that the nation arose out of unity of purpose, rather than unity of organization. He hated the ideal of limited government, opting instead in favor of a fascist-style combination of elite power in the form of commissions (similar to fascist corporations) to regulate and plan mass democracy. Frustrated with constitutional limits on state power Croly wrote, “It remains ... true ... that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.” For him America’s competitive position in the world required putting affairs of state into the hands of trained managers and scientists under a strong leader.
As stated Croly was an admirerer of Mussolini and Italian Fascism which he saw as the perfect model for America. In January 1927, he wrote an editorial in The New Republic titled, “An Apology for Fascism,” which endorsed an accompanying article, “Fascism for the Italians,” written by philosopher Horace M. Kallen, a disciple of John Dewey and a supporter of progressive pragmatism. In the article Kallen praised Mussolini for his pragmatic approach, and in particular for the élan vital that Mussolini had infused into Italian life. Kallen listed many of fascism's achievements in the field of economics, education, and state administration. Croly's accompanying editorial endorsed Kallen's thesis adding “alien critics should beware of outlawing a political experiment which aroused in a whole nation an increased moral energy and dignified its activities by subordinating them to a deeply felt common purpose.”
Croly also believed that a A rationally planned political order under state administrators would reshape and, to some extent, replace an independent civil society and that such a revolutionary order as the desired conclusion of the historical process. The national state, as he conceived of it, had to encroach on established property rights and social relationships in order to be true to its democratic mission, doing for the people what they otherwise could not do for themselves. "The essence of freedom, and virtue," he proclaimed, "is public service.”
As the great fascist scholar Charles Ciroan wrote, “Often we find fascists in the most unusual places. Herbert Croly is just such a case. One might normally think of him as an enemy of (fascism), in fact, his words show he was one of us in heart and mind.”
