March 22, 2026

GIVE ‘EM HELL, HAIRY: Truman Begets Roseannadanna.

A great president in many ways, Truman befouled American rhetoric by his casual use of the word “fascist.” In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, “fascism” referred to a specific mostly-European political/economic philosophy. The term was sometimes applied to Americans who, by and large, were actual fans of actual fascism (e.g., Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund). But in 1948, Truman bleached the meaning out of the word in order to make it an all-purpose left-of-center term for “people we don’t like.” Just before that year’s presidential election, the New York Times ran a headline:

“PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … REPUBLICAN VICTORY WILL THREATEN U.S. LIBERTY.”

Tom Dewey had been a hard-hitting prosecutor and bane of organized crime, but by 1948, he was a bland, inoffensive, Eastern Establishment Liberal Republican. His greatest contribution to American politics was engineering the 1952 Republican candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower—whom Truman had attempted to recruit for the Democratic nomination in 1948. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, labeled the mustachioed Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake.” Post-election, the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote:

“No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.”

Such was the existential threat of Truman’s fevered diatribe.

Truman’s invective simultaneously immortalized the insult and stripped it of meaning. Shamefully, he called Dewey a fascist while the corpses of those slaughtered by actual Fascists and their Nazi allies were still rotting in mass graves. But, with the precedent set, Truman’s successors applied the fascist label to, among many others, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. (Truman narrowly won over Dewey, so perhaps the fascist ploy worked for him.)

Read the whole thing. This clip of Angela Davis in 1972, employing massive amounts of vocal frrrrrryyyyyy, imagines Richard Nixon’s first term as the twilight of Weimar Germany, rhetoric that would be repeated by Kamala Harris in 2024 and early 2025, while simultaneously seeking the endorsement of two previous Hitlers, Dick Cheney, and the aforementioned Dubya: (Davis was and is a big of fan of totalitarian international socialism, of course.)

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll