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I would bet a barrel of reichmarks that these were real people. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that "Mr. C" is the "saturnine" Lawrence Dennis, a former State
by HillRat 11y ago
I would bet a barrel of reichmarks that these were real people. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that "Mr. C" is the "saturnine" Lawrence Dennis, a former State Department diplomat and Wall Street advisor considered the guiding intellect of 1930s American fascism.
Fascinatingly, Dennis didn't grow up "Southern white trash." No, he actually was a famous African-American child preacher, a background that he did hide successfully (though, reading between the lines of the article, not perhaps to everyone) as he disavowed his family, appeared at Exeter on scholarship, and traveled in the upper reaches of American society and eventually to the far fringes of American, Italian and German fascism. It is a surpassing irony that his hatred of Jim Crow segregation and contempt for the democracy that allowed it led him to be welcomed inside the sanctum of those men who would have imprisoned, shot or gassed him had they known the truth of his background.
- emgoldstein 11y agoNot entirely welcomed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Dennis#Sedition_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Dennis#Sedition_trial
- HillRat 11y agoYep; the other irony was that his prosecutor was O. John Rogge, one of the great liberal crusading attorneys of the day, who insisted on bringin charges in order to drag militant racism into the light of day. So Dennis, spurred by his hatred for American racism, made common cause with thuggish men who would have happily hanged him from a tree, and as a result was prosecuted by a man who otherwise would have been his natural political and moral ally. A complex man, Lawrence Dennis. (There is one biography available, The Color of Fascism, which is a little too clunky to be authoritative, but which is well worth reading. An equally unusual journey is that of Bayard Rustin, an openly gay African American civil rights activist who studied under Gandhi, introduced MLK to the theory of nonviolent activism, and ended up part of the neoconservative movement in the Reagan administration.)