Man as the Measure of All Things

This chapter assesses how, during the depression years, American fascist sympathizers fashioned images of Italy and Benito Mussolini to suggest the kind of country they wanted the United States to be, and the kind of leader they wanted the United States to have. These observers echoed widespread interpretations of the depression as a product of machine-made capitalism, exacerbated by a government that had fetishized technology at the expense of human beings. A silver lining of the crisis, they believed, was that it forced a recalibration of the United States, away from bigness, mass-production, and the metropolis, toward simplicity, the home, and the countryside. In Franklin D. Roosevelt, some fascist sympathizers saw a leader who, like Mussolini, understood ordinary people and wanted, above anything, to help them. And by relaying the apparent successes of fascist policies, American sympathizers argued that the New Deal could succeed in making man, rather than machines, once more the measure of all things.