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This isn’t the first time fascism has reared its ugly head in the U.S. Its roots lie in white supremacy, nativism, and violence. It has been here from the start. Ask the indigenous people. Other examples include Jim Crow laws, the eugenicist movement that the Nazi’s eagerly embraced, and hostility toward immigrants e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese concentration camps in WWII. The KKK started in 1865 and after being beaten down rose again in 2015. Sinclair Lewis warned about fascism in the United States 1935 in his book It Can’t Happen Here.
I just finished reading Carol Weiss King: Human Rights Lawyer, 1895-1952 by Ann Fagan Ginger. Carol was a pioneering woman lawyer in New York City who made significant contributions to the law in immigration, labor and constitutional rights from the end of WWI to the Cold War. She won landmark victories that I read about in law school for African Americans, dissidents, labor unions, and immigrants. The FBI had a 1,500-page file on her – fighting for the Constitution was somehow suspect. They never found one thing to charge her with.
Weiss King was the main strategist behind the long-running Bridges campaign to evict this labor leader back to Australia. A supreme court justice Murphy wrote a concurring opinion in one case illustrating the wiretapping, illegal searches and seizures, and other constitutional violations that were employed to try and deport Bridges. The law was that Bridges had the First Amendment right to speak out, but he would be deported for exercising that constitutional right. As Murphy said, that is a mockery of our constitution and of freedom. Murphy said the “aliens” in the country were driven from their homelands by intolerance and violence and to do the same to them here, is a travesty. The Bill of Rights protects us all – not just citizens. Sound familiar?
Carol’s fights included holding the immigration authorities to the Administrative Procedure Act so that the same person could not be arrestor, interrogator, and decider. She won but that victory was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1955. Today we have untrained and biased ICE and Border Patrol agents asking refugees about their level of fear in order to pass the asylum test.
Another one of Weiss King’s fights was for bail for those awaiting deportation hearings. We see that playing out again today especially in the Abrego Garcia case. The U.S. has no case against him, so they want to ship him somewhere, so they don’t have to show their empty hand. Now felon47 wants to undo the elimination of cash bail that discriminates against the poor.
It began at the beginning. The Congress in 1798 passed the first Alien and Sedition Acts with the support of then President John Adams. The Act said he could deport non-citizens who were subjects of a foreign enemy especially if they spoke out against the government. It made criticism of Adams criminal but allowed criticism of Jefferson, the leader of the opposition. Jefferson and Madison went to the Supreme Court which never ruled but Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, let the acts expire, and pardoned those convicted under them. Sound familiar?
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 giving the president powers to detain foreigners during times of war, invasion, or predatory incursion still exists in 50 U.S.C. 21 et seq. The “predatory incursion” is what felon47 is relying on in relation to the MS-13 allegations.
During the First Red Scare set off by the Russian Revolution in 1917, then Attorney General Palmer began what became known as the Palmer Raids. They went after anarchists, communists, and what they considered political radicals, using widespread violations of the law that were widely condemned. They found no widespread plot to overthrow the U.S.
Benito Mussolini was admired in the early 1920s by Italians in the U.S. including Ezra Pound who most of us studied in high school. He was a great admirer and even moved to Italy. In 1925 the first U.S. Fascist Convention was held in Philadelphia. Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest with a radio show in the 1930s, stoked antisemitism nationwide. He remained a priest to the end of his days in 1979.
In 1933, Friends of New Germany, started in New York with the blessing of Rudolph Hess. In 1939 it held a 20,000-person strong rally in Madison Square Garden. The German American Bund founded in 1936 represented the Nazi movement in the U.S. and was headquartered in Chicago. Only in 1939 did Lindberg disavow his America First movement and its support for Nazi Germany.
The purely fascist House Un-American Activities Committee operated from 1938 to 1975. The new Alien Registration Act known as the Smith Act was passed in 1940 and created criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the government by force or violence and required all foreigners over the age of 14 to register. Sound familiar? The Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1957.
The issue then was “are you now or have you ever been a communist” or even supported communists’ beliefs. Today the issue is “are you now or were you ever a supporter of Palestine or the Palestinian people” or “are you of Hispanic origin.” Tomorrow it will be something different. Many of the people arrested then like now had fought in the U.S. military. Many of the people arrested then like now had no criminal record. They even indicted W.E.B. DuBois from the Peace Information Center because the organization had not registered as foreign agents after they signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal against nuclear weapons.
The McCarren Walter Immigration Act passed in 1953 over Truman’s veto. The Justice Department promptly announced they would de-naturalize 1,500 people, deport 22,000 “Reds” and had deported 480,000 Mexicans in six months. It ended the Asian exclusion but kept it very small (100 per year) and kept the national origins quota system focused on family reunification. The quota system ensured that 85% of visas available went to people from northern and western Europe.
Lawyers who represented the people arrested were then arrested themselves for contempt of court and sentenced to prison terms up to six months. Weiss King raced from case to case and court to court upholding legal principles and the Constitution. King helped to create federal power over civil rights violations so Eisenhower could send in the National Guard to Little Rock, Arkansas to integrate the school. She helped develop First Amendment rights that are being sorely tested today. She helped develop civil rights laws under the 14thamendment in the Scottsboro Boys cases. She helped develop labor law and the right to picket without a strike. Her work paved the way for the Freedom of Information Act. Her legacy wasn’t in her won/lost record but in her fighting response and continued faith in the people.
The 1950s were a terrible time for the Rule of Law and the Constitution not to mention African Americans and women. But this false ideal is what the current administration is trotting out as some nirvana. It might have been for rich white men.
By 1959, the bile had burned out of the political/legal system. It’s no wonder we Baby Boomers made such a hash of the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement, anti-war protests, Woodstock, Freedom Summer in the South and the Summer of Love in San Francisco, the resurgence of feminism, and the growth of the lesbian and gay movement. It’s also no surprise the government responded as it did by using the National Guard to kill college students at Jackson State and Kent State, and using the police to beat us at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Neo-Nazism emerged again in the 1970s and has continued with the Atomwaffen Division starting in 2015, the Unite the Right Rally in Charlotteville in 2017, and a number of Aryan groups in 2018. With all these violent groups, the FBI instead investigated the National Lawyers Guild for 40 years never finding the lawyers, of which I was one, guilty of one crime. We do however advocate for the Constitution and democracy! Finally after a half century the FBI had agreed that it was the right wing, not the left wing, groups that were the most danger to the U.S. That is now reversed again like the Red Scare after WWII that resulted in labeling those who had fought against fascism e.g. in the Spanish Civil War as communists. Antifa started in Germany in the 1980s in opposition to white skinheads invading the punk scene after the fall of the Berlin wall. Though they are anti-fascists, that’s who the police now focus on rather than the actual fascists.
In an ABC poll in 2024, 49% of American registered voters considered Trump a fascist. The legal system is one arena of fighting back as Weiss King demonstrated. It doesn’t always work but sometimes little changes result in a big difference down the road. But we must fight in every arena – education, politics, science, health, sports, family, religious, employment, housing etc. Where ever you are. We never know where the ripples of our work go. But like resurrection plants that endure severe dehydration for years and then when exposed to water, spring to life, our actions may be the spark of freedom, of hope, of happiness long after we are gone.
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