Elizabeth DILLING, the Steve BANNON of the 1930s - "America First"

Last edited Sat Feb 4, 2017, 02:55 PM - Edit history (2)

I inserted all the &quot sic)"s into the author's uses of the words "populist" and "inspired". And I'm itching to gift the cited book, "Women of the Far Right" to a supposed friend of thirty years. We were co-workers in a helping profession and I assumed all of us were generally in accord about politics, which we didn't really discuss. But after retirement she came out as a hateful wingnut (redundancy). To salvage whatever our "friendship" was I made a pact not to discuss politics. But before that in one squabble I said she should refuse her pension, Social Security, and Medicare since those are all Democratic initiatives. She pounded out, "I *PAID* for those things and those are FOR EVERYBODY!1" Uh, yeah, but she wouldn't have them if her wingnuts had been able to stop them when they were Democratic initiatives. (O.K., I'm including PENSIONS here, correct me as needed.)

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/04/she-was-the-steve-bannon-of-the-great-depression.html
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[font size=5]She Was the Steve Bannon of the Great Depression[/font]
Elizabeth Dilling screeched ‘America First!’, oozed hatred, and inspired (sic) Sinclair Lewis. In the era that saw the rapid rise of populists, she became famous on the back of hatred for minorities, Jews, and foreigners.

Gil Troy

.... In a twisted salute to womanpower, this Chicagoland matron competed with the populist (sic) demagogues Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith in denouncing what they called Franklin Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal” and Communism as an international Jewish conspiracy. Born in Chicago as Elizabeth Kirkpatrick in 1894, married to a wealthy lawyer Albert Dilling in 1918, this anxious, frustrated woman exploited the era’s anxieties, trying to make everyone else as miserable as she was. ....

With money from her inheritance, her husband, and fellow haters like the misanthropic auto magnate Henry Ford, Elizabeth Dilling ran a one-woman crusade as a “professional patriot” – paralleling other populists (sic) who were also using the Great Depression to stir ugly bigotry. She was perpetually on the road and on the radio. Her third book The Octopus was so anti-Semitic even she realized she needed a pseudonym for that one. ....

Dilling was so prominent—and shrill—she inspired (sic) the novelist Sinclair Lewis’s character “Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch” for his 1935 novel—and current best-seller—It Can’t Happen Here. Gimmitch, a prickly “political Mae West,” helps catapult America into Fascist hell.

The fight over America’s entry into World War II gave Dilling’s hatred new inspiration – and resonance. As isolationist fears grew, so did Dilling’s fame. She helped lead the “Mother’s Movement,” expertly chronicled by Glen Jeansonne in Women of the Far Right, claiming that as mothers, women particularly hated war. Naturally, she weaved these pacifist arguments into her usual patchwork quilt of anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, anti-New Deal, and anti-British patriotic sounding claptrap. ....

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