ABSTRACT
The Black Legion may be considered a sort of missing link between classic American nativism and fully developed European fascism. The relationship between American nativism and fascism seems to have been ambiguous. Indeed, fascism in nativist garb could tap a receptive audience, but in so doing inherited the historical burden of the nativist tradition, which included more than proto-fascist proclivities. Purely fortuitous circumstances may also have stymied the development of a full-blown American fascism: e.g., Father Coughlin's political ineptitude and Huey Long's assassination. Directly or indirectly, it spawned a generation of propagandists selling "blood and soil" with Barrès and "integral nationalism" with Maurras in France; a socially conscious authoritarianism with the British imperialist spokesmen of the 1890s; a racist imperialism with a Houston Chamberlain in Germany. In Europe this "reorientation of social thought," to borrow H. Stuart Hughes's term, greatly facilitated the growth of fascism, because it made authoritarian solutions respectable.
