The Rally We Chose to Forget

In February 1939, more than 20,000 American citizens packed Madison Square Garden to salute a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. This wasn’t Berlin. It was New York City. Outside, police on horseback cracked batons against a sea of anti-fascist protesters. Inside, American Nazis shouted down dissent and raised their arms in unison. The event, orchestrated by the German American Bund, was billed as a “Pro-American Rally.” What it actually was—a public celebration of fascism cloaked in patriotism—has been largely erased from our collective memory.

The national response to the rally was a mix of muted condemnation and conspicuous silence. President Roosevelt declined to speak out. Newspapers editorialized but failed to name the ideology plainly. The discomfort was bipartisan, a reflection of the American instinct to minimize its own extremisms. In the years that followed, the rally disappeared from textbooks, footnotes, and polite conversation. But it did not disappear from history. It remains an artifact of our unresolved flirtation with fascism—one we ignore at our peril.

The Original American Fascists: Pelley, Rockwell, and Coughlin

Before fascism became a European export, it had American incubators. William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, a paramilitary Christian fascist movement, drew thousands into its orbit during the Depression. Pelley envisioned a purified Christian nation purged of Jews and communists. George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, openly lionized Hitler and staged torch-lit rallies modeled on the Nuremberg playbook. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with the ear of 30 million radio listeners, fused economic populism with anti-Semitic vitriol and accused Roosevelt of being a pawn of international finance.

These weren’t marginal figures. They were cultural forces. Coughlin’s paper Social Justice had national circulation. Pelley ran for president. Rockwell attracted headlines and henchmen. They didn’t hide their goals; they shouted them from pulpits and soapboxes. Their platforms mixed white nationalism, anti-communism, religious traditionalism, and contempt for liberal democracy—a cocktail that should feel uncomfortably familiar.

Fascist Tactics: Spectacle, Scapegoats, and Simplicity

The American fascists of the 1930s trafficked in simplicity. They reduced economic calamity to a morality play: righteous Americans versus parasitic elites. Jews were blamed for Wall Street. Blacks were blamed for joblessness. Immigrants were blamed for crime. Their spectacles—uniforms, marches, emblems—weren’t mere aesthetics. They were psychological warfare, designed to seduce the insecure and frighten the uncommitted. Uniformity became unity; fear became fuel.

In this political theater, fascism offered both explanation and belonging. The language was accessible, the enemy clearly marked, the solutions brutal but clear. The promise was not progress but purification. And in a country battered by Depression and disillusionment, that promise resonated, particularly with young, alienated men.

The 1930s Information War

Long before Facebook or Fox News, American fascists weaponized the media of their day. Father Coughlin’s broadcasts bypassed journalistic filters and entered millions of homes as gospel. Flyers, tabloids, and public sermons flooded mailboxes and town halls. What we now call “disinformation” was then just daily bread—rumors about Jewish conspiracies, Catholic martyrdom, and communist plots passed off as common sense.

The resemblance to today’s digital propaganda machines is more than coincidental. Fascism, then and now, thrives on unmediated communication and the flattening of nuance. It prefers passion to policy, echo to argument. The technology has changed. The mechanics have not.

Postwar Amnesia and State Suppression

With the Allied victory in World War II came the convenient myth that America had always been anti-fascist. In reality, fascist sympathies had been widespread—and their suppression was as much a bureaucratic decision as a moral one. The FBI infiltrated groups, shut down publications, and surveilled leaders. Sedition trials under the Smith Act silenced the loudest voices.

But there was no Nuremberg for American fascists. No national reckoning. No truth commission. The postwar consensus was to forget, not to confront. The Silver Shirts disbanded, Coughlin was defrocked, and Rockwell was assassinated. And with them went any sustained public memory of America’s fascist flirtations. We sanitized our past to preserve our postwar pride.

Institutional Complicity, Then and Now

The erasure of American fascism wasn’t accidental. Churches that had once offered Coughlin their pulpits quietly distanced themselves. Newspapers deleted archives. Civic institutions buried the evidence. No apologies were issued. No lessons were taught. And that silence became precedent.

Today, we see a similar complicity. Corporate media gives platforms to demagogues in the name of “balance.” Universities are defunded or vilified for teaching history too truthfully. School boards ban books and muzzle teachers. The same institutions that once sanitized fascism now provide it cover—sometimes through cowardice, sometimes through cash.

The New Right and the Revival of Fascist Forms

The far right today doesn’t reinvent the wheel—it just rebrands it. Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters are spiritual heirs to the Silver Shirts. They echo the same grievances: globalist cabals, cultural decay, feminized men, emasculated Christianity. Their tools may be encrypted chats and memes instead of leaflets and sermons, but the ideological payload is the same.

The January 6 insurrection was not an aberration. It was a climax. The riot’s aesthetics—flags, chants, militarized cosplay—channeled Rockwell and Pelley in digital drag. It was a violent assertion that “real” Americans no longer recognized the legitimacy of pluralism, elections, or restraint. And its aftermath confirmed how little appetite our institutions have for meaningful accountability.

Trump’s First Term: Testing the Waters

Donald Trump’s first term did not invent American authoritarianism, but it reanimated it with startling fluency. He offered no coherent ideology, only instinct and appetite: for dominance, vengeance, purity, and applause. His “very fine people” remark after Charlottesville signaled that white nationalism was no longer a political liability—it was a constituency.

By stoking fears of immigrant “invasions,” demonizing the press as “enemies of the people,” and cozying up to groups like the Proud Boys, Trump mainstreamed a rhetorical style long relegated to militia blogs and AM radio. He turned dog whistles into foghorns. He governed not through consensus, but through spectacle. His legacy is not a set of policies, but a permission structure—a normalization of cruelty and chaos as legitimate tools of statecraft.

The Second Term: Fascism as Policy

Now, returned to office, Trump has shed even the pretense of democratic restraint. His blanket pardon of the January 6 rioters is not merely an abuse of power—it is a declaration of allegiance. Insurrection is no longer condemned. It is canonized.

The militarization of domestic politics has escalated. Marines and National Guard units have been deployed to Los Angeles to “restore order” amid protests, a phrase as chilling as it is familiar. Meanwhile, ICE raids have intensified, with mass deportations targeting not just alleged gang members, but activists and asylum seekers. Detainees vanish into bureaucratic black holes. Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—once an obscure relic—is now a centerpiece of policy.

The judiciary has become a punching bag. Judges who challenge the administration are labeled saboteurs. Universities face budget cuts and ideological witch hunts. The machinery of government is being rewired to reflect the ideological ambitions of Project 2025—a Heritage Foundation manifesto that envisions a Christian nationalist executive branch unconstrained by precedent or pluralism.

This isn’t a slide toward authoritarianism. It is a sprint.

Fascist Style: From Marches to Memes

American fascism has always been performative. Rockwell wore Nazi uniforms because they provoked. Pelley mimicked Mussolini to feel consequential. Today, the same impulses manifest in different costumes: tactical vests, red hats, livestreamed sermons about the godless left. Style is substance.

Figures like Steve Bannon understand this deeply. Bannon’s invocation of “the Fourth Turning,” his disdain for institutions, and his calls for deconstruction align with fascist theories of cyclical collapse and national rebirth. Carlson, with his affect of concern and sotto voce racism, provides the velvet glove. DeSantis offers the bureaucratic muscle: censorship, surveillance, anti-protest laws—all in the name of “freedom.”

Online, the fascist aesthetic has gone algorithmic. Memes do what marches once did: establish solidarity, enforce orthodoxy, glorify violence. Irony has become armor. Satire blurs into incitement. The line between trolling and terrorism thins.

Remembering as Resistance

The enemy is not just fascism. It is forgetting. Forgetting that America has harbored—and harbors still—a taste for authoritarianism wrapped in flags and scripture. Forgetting that fascists don’t arrive goose-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue; they rise slowly, nodding solemnly, quoting Jefferson.

Memory is armor. It is the refusal to let myth swallow fact. The Bund rally happened. So did the Silver Shirts. So did the American Nazi Party. Their heirs are not in hiding. They are campaigning, broadcasting, governing. Charlottesville happened, January 6th happened. 

To remember is to resist—to name the danger before it consolidates. If history is prologue, then let it be a warning, not a suicide note.

---