The KI Welcomes Dana Frank for Upcoming Talk: “A Nest of Fascists”

Posted in Events

The Kalmanovitz Initiative, in partnership with the Georgetown History Department is excited to welcome Dana Frank, Professor of History Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz to discuss her new book  What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times (Beacon Press, 2024)

Dana Frank will discuss: “A Nest of Fascists:  The Black Legion in Lima, Ohio, and its Appeal to White Working-Class Men (and A Few Women) during the Great Depression.”

You don’t want to miss the insight and lessons learned in this talk that echoes the political climate today.

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In 1936, alarms suddenly erupted in the US media nationwide about a clandestine, white supremacist, fascist organization in the upper Midwest that had killed at least fifty people in Detroit. A KKK spinoff known as the Black Legion, it was based on Lima, Ohio, and led by a grumpy electrician with a fishy past named Virgil Effinger.  By 1936 one in five white men in Lima belonged to the Legion–a total of 5,000 people. Nationwide, at least 200,000 joined it, perhaps many, many, more. This talk takes us deep into Lima and draws on FBI records, oral histories, news reports, and government investigations in order to trace the terrorist activities of the Black Legion, its appeal to white working-class men, and its alarming takeover of law enforcement, city government, and the federal relief office, all the way up to a prosecutor soon elected to Congress–and  countenanced by the FBI, WPA, and most of the Ohio legislature.  The story of the Black Legion is a missing link in our understanding of the history of US fascism, and speaks directly to fascism’s grassroots appeal today.

This talk is drawn from a new book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times (Beacon Press), which focuses on four stories:  one looks at mutual aid, cooperatives and unemployed protests before the New Deal; another explores collective survival by the million Mexicans and Mexican Americans expelled during during the early 30s–contrasting their disappearance, largely, from official historical memory, with  the enshrinement of largely mythical “Dust Bowl” white migrants who stepped into their jobs. A third chapter examines an astonishingly militant sit-down strike in 1937 by seven African American women who worked as wet nurses, selling their breast milk to the city of Chicago. 

Dana Frank is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California. Santa Cruz, and the author of six previous books on labor, women, and social justice in the US and Honduras, including The Long Honduran Night, Buy American, and, with Robin D.G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Hammer & Hope Magazine, Miami Herald,  The Nation, The Jacobin, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, and many other publications.  She has also testified in the US House of Representatives and the Canadian Parliament.  She is regularly interviewed by the Associated Press, Washington Post, NPR, and elsewhere, and is a regular guest on Democracy Now!