Harry F. Ward–not the first or the last Methodist preacher with a penchant for Communism–was leader of the A.C.L.U. from its founding in defense of persecuted radicals in 1920 until his resignation in 1940 at the barring of Communist office-holders. Ward was also a central figure of the American League Against War and Fascism, spending much of the 1930s fighting fascism internationally and warning of its dangers in the U.S. Here, he speaks to the specific character of U.S. racial nationalism.

‘Fascism and Race Hatred’ by Harry F. Ward from The Fight Against War and Fascism. Vol. 1 No. 9. July, 1934.

Fascism is not always anti-Semitic. But always its inflated nationalism is joined with race pride. Mussolini rhapsodizes over the virtues and the glorious future of the Italian people. Hitler enters the lists against him, proclaiming in more unctuous tones the superiority of German blood and German character, bolstering his claim by an absurd myth concerning the Aryan race. Wherever the conditioning circumstances are favorable this egoistic race pride necessarily excites race prejudice and then fans that prejudice into race hate.

Old Order at Work

In its broadest aspect Fascism is the convulsive movement of an old order and its rulers in opposition to the coming of a new day. In its effort to halt the future, it reaches back into the past and uses as weapons those blind, evil forces which have so long held back the development of humanity–absolutism, militarism, nationalism and race hate. The oldest of these evil spirits, born in the earliest days of tribal history but still terrible in its destructive power, is racial antagonism–the instinctive fear of the outlander, the man from another place, of other blood. Today, after all the centuries of human acquaintance, when this fear is excited by economic competition or lashed into fury by the threat of an oppressed class rising to power, it drives supposedly civilized men into deeds that are bestial. Both these conditions occasioned the hate and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. Some of them were successful capitalists and some were ardent Communists, and some were neither. These contradictory facts clearly destroy racial responsibility, but as the old proverb has it, any stick will do to beat a dog with. Also exciting crowds to beat innocent victims is an old device of the rulers to distract attention from their own misdeeds and failures.

In this country anti-Semitism will not go so far nor become so violent, except in certain local situations. Here another victim has been historically prepared for the slaughter of a Fascist regime. The Negro has borne the brunt of our pogroms, and will again. It is true that our incipient economic Fascism is being accompanied by a whispering campaign against the Jews. It is mean and vicious, and as conditions grow worse it will gain headway in certain centers, but here the Jew will not be the main object of Fascist terrorism. This country is too big and too cosmopolitan for that, also the Jew has become too much a part of it. The real hate in this country is being expressed against and reserved for “the dirty reds,” the “outside agitators” who are leading the suffering unemployed, the protesting farmers, and the underpaid, company-union, cheated workers. Some Jews will feel this hate and some will express it. It will be used to incite a feeling against the race, but it is not in the record that Jewish bankers in Germany or even Jewish department storekeepers suffered as much as Jewish Communists.

The Target

It is the Negro who is getting and will get the full force of the race hate with which the Fascist reaction incites the perpetrators of its outrages. Jim-Crowed and lynched, segregated and shut out of most of the trade unions, this victim of the white man’s greed, pride and ignorance is now to be feared as economic competitor and as rebel determined to get his rights. The increase in the number of lynchings during the past year, the beating and killing of Negroes by white men who wanted their jobs, the Scottsboro and Herndon cases, are all evidence of the impact of the class struggle upon the racial conflict. The crossing of the color line by the workers in united action at the bottom of society necessarily increases race fear and hate at the top. In those sections of the South where a Negro can be killed for any reason or no reason at all, and his death go unreported or unnoticed by the law, what may we expect when white and black workers together present a real threat to the power of the dominant class! Its answer will be a terror beyond all restraint. This will be the climax of Fascist brutality in the American scene.

Unite Against the Common Enemy

To avert this disgrace from the human record it is necessary for all the sufferers from race prejudice and all who have emancipated themselves from this evil spirit to unite their forces in time. None can save themselves except as they work to save all. Jew and Gentile, white and black, men and women of all colors and creeds, must unite now–before it is too late–against the common enemy. The foe we have to fight is the Fascist state as the organized power of the capitalist economy. Against it we struggle with all our forces, not for ourselves but for the future of humanity, for a human society where all races can live, and build, and grow, together.

FIGHT Against War and Fascism was the monthly newspaper of the broad-based, but Communist-inspired, American League Against War and Fascism formed in 1933 as Nazism came to power in Germany. The paper and the League attracted fairly wide support and hosted many events in the 1930s. In 1937, reflecting the Popular Front turn, the name of the group was changed to the American League for Peace and Democracy and the journal to The Fight for Peace and Democracy. Both the paper and the organization closed in the wake of 1939’s Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/fight/v1n09-jul-1934.pdf