Lawrence Dennis | |
|---|---|
 Dennisc. 1934 | |
| Born | (1893-12-25)December 25, 1893 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | August 20, 1977(1977-08-20) (aged 83) Spring Valley, New York, U.S. |
| Education | Phillips Exeter Academy |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Diplomat |
Lawrence Dennis (December 25, 1893 – August 20, 1977) was an American diplomat, consultant, and author. He advocatedfascism in America after theGreat Depression, arguing that liberal capitalism was doomed and one-party planning of the economy was essential.[1]
Dennis was born inAtlanta, Georgia. He was ofmixed race (his mother wasAfrican American and his father's race was unknown),[2] but he concealed that as a teenager and insteadpassed as awhite man until his death—even his wife and daughters did not know.[3][4] He was fluent in English, French, and German.[5] Following a notable career as a child evangelist, he was sent toPhillips Exeter Academy, which he graduated from in 1915,[5] and then toHarvard University, which he graduated from in 1920.[5] In between, he briefly served as a junior officer in the American Expeditionary Force in France.[5]
DuringWorld War I, Dennis commanded a company ofmilitary police in France. He graduated from Harvard in 1920 and entered thediplomatic service. He was first posted inBucharest, Romania.[5] The Romanian government awarded him theOrder of the Star of Romania.[5] The highest rank he achieved as a diplomat was that of achargé d'affaires.[5]
The turning point of his life came when he served inNicaragua. He resigned from the foreign service in disgust at the U.S. intervention there againstSandino's rebellion, also complaining of anepotistic and non-meritocratic promotion system.[5] He then became an adviser to the Latin American fund of theSeligman banking trust, but he again made enemies when he wrote a series of exposés of their foreign bond enterprises inThe New Republic andThe Nation in 1930. The exposés propelled Dennis into a national public intellectual career, publishing his first book at the height of the depression in 1932,Is Capitalism Doomed? The book submitted that capitalism was and should be on its death knell, but it warned of the grave dangers of a world devoid of its positive legacy.
He married Eleanor Melisande Brunnhilde Simson, who hadJewish ancestry, in 1933, and they lived together in theBerkshires, Massachusetts.[6] In letters to him, she expressed admiration for the strong gender roles in Germany.[5]
His two later books detailed his sense of the system that was emerging to replace capitalism, which he believed to be fascism.The Coming American Fascism in 1936, detailing the system's substructure, andThe Dynamics of War and Revolution in 1940, on thesuperstructure. Dennis argued that he was merely examining fascism and predicting its coming to the U.S., not actually advocating it. His readers and associates assumed he was indeed an advocate. He never tried to create or join a fascist party.[7]
He viewed Hitler as unimpressive and reliant on political showmanship, preferring more intellectual Nazis such asJoseph Goebbels,Alfred Rosenberg,Rudolf Hess, andHermann Göring.[5] He criticized Nazis' overt anti-Semitism, though seemingly more as a matter of strategy and optics than of genuine anti-bigotry beliefs.[5]
In 1941,Life called Dennis "America's No. 1 intellectual Fascist."[8] In her 2023 book,Prequel,Rachel Maddow wrote of Dennis's visit toNuremberg for the 4th annualNazi party congress on September 8, 1936, "Dennis's biographer, Gerald Horne, would later write 'America's most outspoken fascist symbolically melted into the Nazi mass.'"[9]
He was an isolationist, and therefore expressed staunch opposition to American involvement in a war against Nazi Germany.[5]
Dennis was an editor atThe Awakener for some time. Later, he founded his own publication, theWeekly Foreign Letter, and he wrote forToday's Challenge, published by the pro-German American Fellowship Forum ofGeorge Sylvester Viereck and Friedrich Ernst Ferdinand Auhagen (b. 1899).[10] He tried to join the U.S. Army during World War II,[11] but the Army rejected him after the media ran stories about him.
He often described himself as rational and unemotional.[5]Anne Morrow Lindbergh strongly disagreed, describing him as "sensitive" and having "been badly hurt."[5]
In 1944,he was indicted in a group that ranged from isolationists to pro-Nazi agitators, in a sedition prosecution under theSmith Act. After seven months of proceedings the case ended in a mistrial, after presiding judgeEdward C. Eicher died of a heart attack in November 1944. Dennis co-authored with Maximilian John St. George (1885–1959)[12] an account of thetrial, which appeared in 1946 asA Trial on Trial: The Great Sedition Trial of 1944.[13]
In his later years, Dennis repudiated his views of the 1930s and early 1940s, became a critic ofmilitarism and theCold War, and he propagated his views through a modest newsletter,The Appeal to Reason (not to be confused with the similar namedAppeal to Reason, a left-wing newspaper published in the American Midwest from 1895 until 1922), which maintained a prominent circle of readers, includingHerbert Hoover,Joseph P. Kennedy,William Appleman Williams,Harry Elmer Barnes, andJames J. Martin.[citation needed] His last book,Operational Thinking for Survival, was published in 1969.[14]
Posthumously, his works were reprinted by the far-rightNoontide Press. Holocaust denial writerKeith Stimely also expressed an interest in his life, and wrote an essay on him. Alec Marsh suggests that, "Dennis will find his place in the disenchanted anti-liberal black company ofThomas Sowell,Clarence Thomas, andGeorge Schuyler.[14]
