The introductory Chapter 1 sketches an outline of the book’s object of study: the gray literature produced by American and European intellectuals during World War II in the study of Nazi Germany. I point to two unexpected protagonists, who rose to the challenge of the moment during World War II: Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. I describe the improvised intellectual networks, funded by government institutions, universities, as well as philanthropies and point to Hans Kohn’s career to spell out some of the complexities one encounters while studying the European-American encounter during World War II. The second part of the introductory chapter approaches the memorandum through its fictional rendering in Sinclair Lewis’ Gideon Planish, before diving into the making of one of its most famous texts, the “American Century” by Henry Luce.

Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, this chapter argues that the novel is still valuable for gauging the distinct contours of American fascism. On the one hand, the novel provides a remarkably prescient reading of the complex class dynamics and populist coalitions that remain crucial to understanding white nationalist politics and successful neofascist movements. It also strikingly captures the nature of American fascist rhetoric and how it is registered by those outside the fascist “base.” On the other hand, in projecting white Midwestern farmers as the main site of resistance, the novel shows the serious limitations of the early twentieth-century socialist populism that animated Lewis’s political imagination. The chapter concludes with a reflection on possibilities and constraints of populism as an antifascist political frame.

“Crowd Involvements and Attachments,” analyzes and classifies group affect and other forms of thinking together, such as Heraclitean flows of group thought, sensation, and experience made available through new structures of collective feeling. The chapter counters arguments about the role of the leader with the proposition that the crowd may behave as an assemblage governed by an attractor, figured by characters such as James Wait, aboard the Narcissus, or Stevie in The Secret Agent. The function of Bloom for the crowd in “Cyclops” speaks to the crowd’s management of its anxieties and their effects. The chapter explores the interpenetration of public and private spaces in Sean O’Casey’s plays to understand crowds’ precise attachments to and exercise of design over the histories and semiotics of the metropolis, testing whether and in what manner they gain the sense of a shared life and act as a performative mass body.