Dictators, democracy, and American public culture : envisioning the totalitarian enemy, 1920s-1950s
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Dictators, democracy, and American public culture : envisioning the totalitarian enemy, 1920s-1950s
（Cultural studies of the United States / Alan Trachtenberg, editor）
University of North Carolina Press, c2003
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. [347]-379
Includes index
Contents of Works
- The romance of a dictator : dictatorship in American public culture, 1920s-1935
- The totalitarian state : modern dictatorship as a new form of government, 1920s
- The disappearing dictator : declining regard for dictators amid growing fears of dictatorship, 1936-1941
- The audience itself is the drama : dictatorship and the regimented crowd, 1936-1941
- Dictator isms and our democracy : the rise of totalitarianism, 1936-1941
- This is the army : the problem of the military in a democracy, 1941-1945
- Here is Germany : understanding the Nazi enemy, 1941-1945
- The battle of Russia : the Russian people, communism, and totalitarianism, 1941
- A boot stamping on a human face
- forever : totalitarianism as nightmare in postwar America
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in US 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 US entry into World War II. With the war's end and the collapse of the US-Soviet alliance, however, concerns about totalitarianism lay the foundation for the emerging cold war.
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