Born to Slovenian peasants, Louis Adamic commanded crowds, met with FDR and Truman, and built a prolific career as an author and journalist. Behind the scenes, he played a leading role in a coalition ...of black intellectuals and writers, working class militants, ethnic activists, and others that worked for a multiethnic America and against fascism. John Enyeart restores Adamic's life to the narrative of American history. Dogged and energetic, Adamic championed causes that ranged from ethnic and racial equality to worker's rights to anticolonialism. Adamic defied the consensus that equated being American with Anglo-Protestant culture. Instead, he insisted newcomers and their ideas kept the American identity in a state of dynamism that pushed it from strength to strength. In time, Adamic's views put him at odds with an establishment dedicated to cold war aggression and white supremacy. He increasingly fought smear campaigns and the distortion of his views--both of which continued after his probable murder in 1951.
Between May and September 1949, Nevada's ardent anti-communist Democratic senator Patrick A. McCarran chaired a subcommittee created to expose Soviet sympathizers within American ethnic communities. ...They targeted Slovene immigrant and best-selling author Louis Adamic because of his continued support for Yugoslav Communist guerrilla fighter and eventual dictator Josip Broz Tito. Over the previous two decades, Adamic had gained widespread acclaim for arguing that capitalist greed fomented working-class acts of sabotage, challenging Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and detailing the tyranny of the Serbian monarchy in Yugoslavia. By the time of his death in 1951-which his local New Jersey coroner ruled a suicide, but others insist was murder-Adamic had written thirteen books, over five hundred articles, and a number of pamphlets. His works appeared in magazines such as The Nation, New Republic, Harper's, and the The Saturday Evening Post. Academics assigned his books in their classes, Treasury Department officials used his stories on radio programs during World War II to sell war bonds, and presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman met with him at the White House to discuss immigrant patriotism and Tito's regime, respectively. Anti-Communists had no desire to put Adamic's work and activism into perspective. Affiliating with Communists, they insisted, made him a subversive.3. Adapted from the source document.
By the mid-1930s, Louis Adamic contended that Americans suffered from a collective psychological condition that turned them into “shadows,” which made them ripe for fascist exploitation. Jim Crow ...measures and culture along with immigrant exclusion laws and frequent expressions of nativism purposefully sought to discourage ethnics and African Americans from feeling American. The Anglo majority exhibited their own sense of inferiority, Adamic added, because they constantly questioned whether they were living up to the American dream. Believing that material gain determined one’s success led everyone to sacrifice meaningful relationships. Americans, Adamic explained, experienced moments of feeling human by having sex,
Epilogue Enyeart, John P
Death to Fascism,
06/2019
Book Chapter
Since 2016, public interest in antifascism has swelled as world politics have taken a hard right turn. In the United States, discussions and debates about fascism’s reemergence have been directly ...connected to Donald Trump’s campaign for president and subsequent victory in November 2016. On the campaign trail, Trump made racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic statements, mocked a physically disabled reporter, promised to advance corporate hegemony by repealing labor and environmental regulations, encouraged his supporters to use violence against protestors, and expressed a passion for militarism. Pundits predicted that he had no chance at victory. When Trump won the general election,
Throughout World War II, Louis Adamic’s advocacy of cultural pluralism grew more militant. He insisted that the pursuit of ethnic and racial equality lay at the heart of any meaningful antifascist ...activism. Eradicating fascism, as he explained in a letter to a friend, did not mean only defeating Axis forces, it also included confronting imperialists and ultranationalists in Allied nations who subscribed to the same “super-race nonsense” as the Germans.¹ Adamic now insisted that antifascists had to unite globally to advance pluralism—and with it democracy—and he pointed to Yugoslav leftist guerilla leader Josip Broz Tito’s Partisan army as
In an August 20, 1944, nationally syndicated radio debate titled “Peace as a World Race Problem,” Louis Adamic asserted that global hostilities would continue after World War II ended if the United ...States and Britain did not abandon notions of white supremacy. At various points in the discussion, he argued that “colored” peoples throughout the world “are stirring and heaving toward self-improvement” and that “the chief danger” to their success “actually exists within the white people—within ourselves.” Adamic urged the three other panelists and the audience to read “the Negro press in America.” In addition to detailing the struggles
In his 1930 short story “A Bohunk Woman,” Louis Adamic invented Mila Tanasich to represent the South Slav “women in America whose men performed the hard, dirty work in industry, and to whom fate was ...not so gentle.” Early in the story, a fictionalized Adamic learned from a friend about a fifty-year-old Croatian immigrant woman who desperately needed work as a cleaning lady. A freight container had fallen on her dockworker husband and crippled him. Now her family had no income. Serving as the narrator, the imaginary Adamic explained that feelings of pity led him to hire her. Near the
Beginning in 1949, former Ustaši soldiers (Croatian fascists), fearing that they would be persecuted under Josip Broz Tito’s communist regime, gained entry into the United States as displaced persons ...and started threatening Louis Adamic’s life. Soviet agents did too, but Adamic, according to witnesses interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), considered Hitler’s former allies a far greater threat than Stalin’s spies.¹ Both groups wanted Adamic to stop writing what became his posthumously published thirteenth book, The Eagle and the Roots, an account of his visit to Yugoslavia that year. Despite the threats on his life, Adamic continued to
