Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9506010032
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: A-7 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: HOWARD FAST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Reeds were active liberals, and that night they took us to an open meeting in the local high school, where writer John Spivac was to be the speaker on the Silver Shirts.
The Silver Shirts were drilled and maintained as an armed military force. The silver shirt - their uniform - was an imitation of Mussolini's Black Shirts and Hitler's Brown Shirts. At the time there were other units training and marching in various places in imitation of the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts. The Brown Shirts, wearing the same uniforms as Hitler's first militia, had several thousand members in Long Island and New Jersey, with a sort of power base in Teaneck, and there they marched, drilled, strutted and raised their arms in the Nazi salute, terrifying ordinary citizens.
But this recollection is of the Silver Shirts, and of the incongruity of hearing about them on that sweet Connecticut evening. Spivac was one of the earliest investigative reporters, a brave and forthright writer. But like so many investigative reporters, he juiced up his material a bit, and when he had finished his report the audience was thoroughly disturbed. They had a vision of thugs in silver shirts marching into the Connecticut byways and looting their homes.
When we returned to the Reeds' home, we sat around the fire and talked about the evening, and I found that my wife was deeply disturbed. She was a politically innocent young woman, and in the pleasant New Jersey town where she grew up, there was no hint of these ugly imitations of fascism. I was only two years older, but I had come out of the New York streets, and I dismissed the whole thing as a hare-brained exhibition of a passel of bums.
Indignantly, she wanted to know how I could laugh off something so threatening. ``There are thousands of them,'' she said.
I reminded her that there were millions of us - some 120 million. I was perhaps not very reassuring, but I was right, and the memory of these various congregations of loonies barely exists today. We have forgotten them, and perhaps that is a mistake.
These odd facts of history should be remembered, and today there is good reason to remember and understand the forces that brought the Silver Shirts into being. We were at the end of nine years of a terrible Depression, and everyone reacted to it in one way or another. The newspapers and journals of the time had not yet uncovered or anticipated the awful nature of fascism, and if we were told that Mussolini had returned national pride to Italy and that Hitler had done away with unemployment in Germany, a good many of us were ready to believe that theirs was a way worth thinking about. Soon enough, the terrible casualty lists of World War II would give all of us an understanding of what Hitler and Mussolini had brewed in Europe.
So when we read today that the various militias on the current scene describe themselves as bulwarks against native fascism, we should be able to see through this rot. The American government is not a fascist government. It is a democratic government, put into power by the voters. Howsoever we may criticize it and grouse about it, it is still the strongest and certainly one of the best democratic governments on Earth.
Fascism comes into being when a democratic government cannot continue to govern without force and violence directed against its law-abiding citizens. A set of circumstances have developed today where a few thousand citizens have decided to take the law into their own hands. Whatever their grievances, it is not the result of a fascist government.
This has happened before and it will probably happen again. Indeed, the essence of democracy is the ability of its citizens to replace men in government. The process is called election. But when this process it set aside in favor of guns, then democracy ceases.
The seeds of fascism and all of its horrors do not reside in our government, but in those who take up the guns. Yet it's worth remembering that while there are a few thousand of them, there are 220 million of us.
Howard Fast is an author, playwright and screenwriter. He wrote this for the Greenwich (Conn.) Time.
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