Dennis, Lawrence

Source:

 African American National Biography

Dennis, Lawrence

(25 Dec. 1893?–20 Aug. 1977),

diplomat, preacher, and author, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Sallie Montgomery. Nothing is known of his biological father. His mother, however, was an African American, and Dennis was of mixed race parentage. In 1897 he was adopted by Green Dennis, a contractor, and Cornelia Walker. During his youth Dennis was known as the “mulatto child evangelist,” and he preached to church congregations in the African American community of Atlanta before he was five years old. By the age of fifteen he had toured churches throughout the United States and England and addressed hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite his success as an evangelist Dennis had ambitions to move beyond this evangelical milieu. In 1913, unschooled but unquestionably bright, he applied to Phillips Exeter Academy and gained admission. He graduated within two years and in 1915 entered Harvard.

Dennis's decisions to attend these schools signaled both a departure from his evangelical career and a shift in his racial identity. Born into the African American world of the South, he now “passed” into white America and constructed a new racial identity for himself. By becoming “white” he opened up opportunities previously beyond his reach. Although many former acquaintances knew his secret, and subsequent ones suspected, as a recent biographer, Gerald Horne, has written, there was a widespread “don't ask, don't tell” policy. In later years, despite keeping company with white supremacists, he distanced himself from their views, and opposed segregation.

Dennis availed himself of these new opportunities almost immediately. As a student he received military training and during World War I served as a first lieutenant in France. After the war he graduated from Harvard and in 1921 entered the U.S. Foreign Service. He served in Haiti, Romania, Honduras, and Nicaragua. His most notable assignment was in 1926 as chargé d'affaires in Nicaragua, where he presided over a peace conference between warring liberals and conservatives. Dennis resigned his position in 1927 and joined J. W. Seligman and Company, a banking firm, to be its representative in Peru.

In 1930, as the Depression deepened, Dennis left the world of international finance and was soon writing articles and commenting in public forums on American foreign and economic policy. His earliest articles criticized American interventionism in Latin America. In his first book, Is Capitalism Doomed? (1932), he broadened his scope to analyze the sustainability of the American economy. He criticized businesspeople as incapable of providing the spiritual leadership needed to reinvigorate a now moribund capitalism, and he called on the state to find a solution to unemployment.

While the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 mollified many Americans, Dennis condemned what he called the “planless Roosevelt revolution.” In 1933 he became associate editor of the Awakener, a right-wing semimonthly publication, and entered the camp of far-right critics of the New Deal. By 1936, with the publication of his book The Coming American Fascism, Dennis made his reputation as a theorist of “fascism,” or what he called an “authoritarian executive state.” He believed that Americans would either descend into chaos with the Depression or select some form of “totalitarian” system, such as communism or fascism. Liberalism had failed and fascism was the only likely and desirable choice for Americans. In 1933 Dennis married Eleanor Simson; they had two daughters before divorcing in 1957.

Dennis left the Awakener in 1935 and joined E. A. Pierce and Company, a New York brokerage firm, as an economist. Along with a partner in the firm, he traveled to Europe, where he met Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He then traveled around the United States for the company, speaking on political and financial issues to groups of businesspeople, where he established a reputation as an expert on these matters. He left his position in 1938 to publish his own subscription newsletter, the Weekly Foreign Letter.

In his newsletter Dennis combined investment advice with analysis and opinion on global political developments. Although Dennis rejected the most explicitly racist aspects of Nazi ideology, he argued that it was inevitable that America would have to adopt fascist ideas in response to the continuing economic crisis. Walking a fine line between explanation and affiliation, Dennis would later claim his writings were based purely on an objective assessment of the times. Though anti-Semitic, this did not constitute an important part of his writings and his views were widely shared among contemporary American elites. He did,-however, fight against American involvement in Europe. He denounced intervention as part of a “religious” war waged for an ideology of “internationalism.” An outspoken isolationist, he found himself censured in 1941 by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes as an appeaser and “the brains of American fascism.”

Dennis published his most ambitious book, The Dynamics of War and Revolution, in 1940. No longer using the controversial term “Fascist,” he now argued that a “Socialist” world revolution was occurring and that democracies suffering from historical stagnation would “go Socialist.” This would happen in the United States, he suggested, in the process of fighting a futile war against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Dennis achieved a new level of intellectual respectability with this book, which was widely reviewed in political and academic journals. Yet with the outbreak of war, Dennis found that his reputation as an advocate for fascism and isolationism created serious legal problems. The army denied him a commission and considered removing him from the East Coast for security reasons. The postmaster general banned The Dynamics of War and Revolution from the mail, and in early 1944 the Justice Department charged Dennis and twenty-nine codefendants with sedition.

The charge against Dennis, conspiring with the Nazis to cause insubordination in the military, could not be sustained by the prosecution. The so-called Mass Sedition Trial ended after seven months, when the presiding judge died of a heart attack, and by 1947 the indictments were dismissed. In 1946 Dennis coauthored a scathing account of the episode, A Trial on Trial: The Great Sedition Trial of 1944.

The trial and Dennis's identification as “America's Number One Fascist” made him a political pariah. After World War II he retired to his Becket, Massachusetts, farm, where he resumed publication of his newsletter, renamed the Appeal to Reason. Though he was outspokenly hostile to communism, Dennis continued to endorse isolationism. He opposed cold war confrontations in Korea and Vietnam and condemned political persecution in the guise of McCarthyism. In 1959 or 1960 he married Dora Shuser Burton; they had no children. Dennis published one last book, Operational Thinking for Survival, in 1968 and continued to publish the Appeal until 1972.

Though Dennis died in obscurity in Spring Valley, New York, he made his mark in the interwar years as a critic of liberalism and an outspoken isolationist. His criticism of liberal capitalism was often incisive. His advocacy of authoritarianism, however, made him an object of political derision and repression. He ended his life a political outcast.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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