Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

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by Benjamin L. Alpers

University of North Carolina Press

Due/Published January 2003, 448 pages, paper

ISBN 0807854166

Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the late 1920s through the early years of the Cold War.

During the early 1930s, most Americans' conception of dictatorship focused on the dictator. Whether viewed as heroic or horrific, the dictator was represented as a figure of great, masculine power and effectiveness. As the Great Depression gripped the United States, a few people--including conservative members of the press and some Hollywood filmmakers--even dared to suggest that dictatorship might be the answer to America's social problems. 

In the late 1930s, American explanations of dictatorship shifted focus from individual leaders to the movements that empowered them. Totalitarianism became the image against which a view of democracy emphasizing tolerance and pluralism and disparaging mass movements developed. First used to describe dictatorships of both right and left, the term "totalitarianism" fell out of use upon the U.S. entry into World War II. With the war's end and the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, however, concerns about totalitarianism lay the foundation for the emerging Cold War.

"A first-rate book. Others have told parts of this story, but no one has put it all together as Alpers does. By considering dictatorship generally, he effectively links the response to particular dictatorships that others have considered separately, and by cutting across the divide between elite and popular culture, he brings together and further illuminates material that others have treated in isolation. His readings of oft-analyzed texts such as George Orwell's '1984' and Hannah Arendt's 'Origins of Totalitarianism' are illuminating and fresh, and he brings to light a good deal of less familiar source material."--Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester