- Lawrence Dennis
Lawrence Dennis (
December 25 ,1893 -August 20 ,1977 ) was an Americandiplomat ,consultant andauthor .Life
Dennis was born in
Atlanta, Georgia . He was ofmixed race , though this was a fact he concealed later on in life. [ [http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2049583,00.html The fascist who 'passed' for white] byGary Younge in the Guardian, 4 April 2007] [cite news |title=Boy Evangelist Here |publisher=Washington Post |page=11 |date=1901-03-14 ] Following a notable career as a child evangelist, he was sent toPhillips Exeter Academy and then toHarvard .During
World War I , Dennis commanded a company ofmilitary police inFrance . He graduated from Harvard in 1920 and entered theforeign service .The turning point of Dennis' life came when he served in
Nicaragua . He resigned from the foreign service in disgust at the US intervention there against theSandino rebellion. He then became an adviser to the Latin American fund of theSeligman banking trust, but again made enemies when he wrote a series of exposes of their foreign bond enterprises in "The New Republic " and "The Nation " in 1930. These exposes 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 thatcapitalism was, and by all right should be, on its death knell, but warned of the grave dangers of a world devoid of its positive legacy. Dennis' two later books detailed his sense of the system that was emerging to replace it, which he believed to befascism . "The Coming American Fascism" in 1936, detailing the system'ssubstructure , and "The Dynamics Of War And Revolution" in 1940, on thesuperstructure .Lawrence Dennis was an editor at "
The Awakener " for some time. Later he founded his own publication, the "Weekly Foreign Letter", and he wrote for "Today's Challenge", published by the pro-German American Fellowship Forum ofGeorge Sylvester Viereck andFriedrich Auhagen . He tried to enlist in the American Army during theSecond World War [cite news |title=Sees His Duty Done |publisher=New York Times |page=10 |date=1942-04-21 ] , but the Army rejected him after the media ran stories about him.Dennis, along with
Charles Beard , led the progressive opposition to the New Deal. In 1944 he was indicted, in a group which ranged from genuine progressives to pro-Nazi agitators, in a sedition prosecution under theSmith Act which ended in a mistrial because the judge died of a heart attack. [Trial on Trial: The Great Sedition Trial of 1944] Dennis co-authored withMaximilian St. George an account of the trial, "A Trial On Trial", in 1946, but put forth his own defense in court.In his later years Dennis continued to propagate his views through a modest newsletter, "The Appeal To Reason", which maintained a prominent circle of readers, including
Herbert Hoover ,Joseph P. Kennedy ,William Appleman Williams ,Harry Elmer Barnes , andJames J. Martin . Dennis' last book, "Operational Thinking For Survival", was published in 1967.References
External links
* [http://www.jackross.net/lawrencedennis/pages/aboutld.htm Lawrence Dennis Biography from ther Lawrence Dennis institute]
* [http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/dennis/dennis_index.html Online text of The Coming of American Fascism (1936)]
* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2049583,00.html "The fascist who 'passed' for white"] , byGary Younge in "The Guardian", 4 April 2007
* [http://www.nyupress.org/books/The_Color_of_Fascism-products_id-4857.html "The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States",] New York University Press webpage for the book by Gerald Horne
* [http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=918 "Tales Of A Seditionist: The Lawrence Dennis Story"] byJustin Raimondo , antiwar.com, 28 April 2000
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.