Benjamin L. Alpers. Dictators, Democracy, & American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. x, 405. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.The theory of totalitarianism is usually associated with Cold War scholarship and Hannah Arendt’s attempts to link together the analysis of Soviet and Nazi dictatorships. Benjamin L. Alpers reminds us that the theory and the term have, in fact, a longer history. Curiously enough, in the 1920s the term dictator was not entirely derogatory. Americans were fascinated by the machismo of Benito Mussolini; car manufacturer Studebaker called its 1927 model the “Dictator;” Hollywood producer Harry Cohn sympathetically portrayed the Italian uomo forte in Mussolini Speaks (1933). Throughout the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was often seen as a benevolent dictator, although Roosevelt himself always resented the suggestion. While the president’s adversaries feared the possibility of totalitarian New Dealism, some of FDR’s supporters had no such qualms. Thus, liberal Hollywood mogul Walter Wanger and the other “cultural producers” (Alpers’s term) of Gabriel over the White House (1933) imagined a FDR lookalike, president Judson C. “Judd” Hammond, assuming almost dictatorial powers and bringing peace to the country and the world.1 As Adolf Hitler came to power and the tragedy of the 1930s unfolded, admiration for dictatorship waned, and some American intellectuals began to use the term totalitarianism to describe the regimes in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Alpers makes a good case that Duke University economist Calvin B. Hoover was one of the first to apply the term to qualify both regimes. More precise than dictatorship and far less positive than collectivism, in the second half of the 1930s “totalitarianism” was often employed by members of the anti-Stalinist Left who appreciated the term’s ability to connect Nazi and Communist dictatorships. For the same reason, the term was not fashionable among the intellectuals who belonged to the ranks of the Popular Front and were, overall, more sympathetic to the Soviet system. The term’s popularity did not increase during World War II. The theory of totalitarianism fit well the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, but the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 and American entry into the war on the side of the Soviets made it unwelcome in American intellectual and diplomatic circles. The theory of totalitarianism came into its own in the years following the war when the Soviet regime replaced the Nazi regime as the ur-dictatorship. In his final chapter, Alpers lucidly describes not only the work of the “usual suspects” in the theorization and representation of totalitarianism such as Arendt and George Orwell but also their “pessimistic precursors” (p. 255) like James Burnham and Joseph Schumpeter, who saw totalitarianism not just as the defining characteristic of Soviet and Nazi societies but also as an aspect of possible American futures.2 Alpers has made visible an important aspect of American intellectual history in the twentieth century. Perhaps he has also made his story both less and more central to American intellectual history than it really was. On the one hand, concern with dictatorship was not invented in the twentieth century but had animated debates about possible futures of the United States since the American Revolution. On the other hand, the detailed narrative of this book obscures the fact that before 1947 the supporters of the theory of totalitarianism were few and not particularly influential. Its intellectual acumen notwithstanding, Partisan Review was a minority within the American leftist intelligentsia in the late 1930s, and some of its constituency left the fold during World War II. Perhaps these intellectuals did not care. As Alpers suggests in some of his most penetrating pages, the theory of totalitarianism is often pervaded by a genuine distrust for the masses and “a generalized suspicion of popular political activity” (p. 302).3 This book has a commendable wingspan. Alpers dedicates as many pages to Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) as to Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941). This makes sense, since they are both cultural products and the latter was as influential as the former—and perhaps more. Alpers is more at ease with the printed word than with the moving image, and his grasp of Hollywood history is not particularly impressive (Capra’s screenwriter, Sidney Buchman, was hardly a “mainstream liberal” [p. 114]. He was attacked by House UnAmerican Activities Committee and blacklisted). Indeed, Alpers’s analysis of Hollywood films does not examine the cultural and political negotiations accompanying their production, and it rarely goes beyond the plot synopses. This, however, should not distract us from his book’s innovative methodology, which convincingly delineates an exciting intellectual history that has Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin converse with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Joseph Schumpeter.4| Saverio GiovacchiniUniversity of Maryland,College Park | | |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.