Books: Palace Revolutionary

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THE COMING AMERICAN FASCISM— Lawrence Dennis—Harper ($2.50).

Although Fascism has been in power for more than ten years in Italy, for nearly three in Germany, the exact meaning of the word and the character of the social and economic organization it describes are still confused for most U. S. readers. Last week Lawrence Dennis offered a cold and logical definition of Fascism in a work which presented the aims of such a movement in U. S. terms, visualizing a dictatorship over economic life and suggesting the character, aims and personnel of the political party that might exercise this control. Scarcely mentioning German and Italian Fascism as examples, he attempts to show that a U. S. dictatorship would be more humane than either, advances as one of his strongest arguments for its establishment its greater flexibility and unity in preventing U. S. participation in a World War.

Unlike German Fascists, Lawrence Dennis makes no appeal to anti-Semitic prejudices, nor does he denounce "international bankers and Marxists" as the cause of all the mischief in the world. His chief opponent is liberalism, which he variously describes as muddled, sentimental, irrational. Believing that a major war will break out within five years, he holds that "liberal capitalism'' will involve the U. S. in the conflict in much the way that the U. S. joined the Allies in 1917. About equally divided between attacks on prevailing economic fallacies and less precise descriptions of the future dictatorship, The Coming American Fascism is a contradictory book, makes Fascism and the world in general seem so forbidding that only the grimmest spirits are likely to be attracted to it.

The Author. Tall, dark, broad-shouldered Lawrence Dennis is now associate editor of a Fascist magazine, The Awakener, author of a work on economics, Is Capitalism Doomed?, has been a member of the U. S. foreign service and a member of the staff of the banking house of J. & W. Seligman & Co. Born in Georgia 41 years ago, he is a graduate of Harvard, lives on a 200-acre farm in the Berkshires, near Becket, Mass., identifies himself as a Republican who hopes that the Republican Party will take over the U. S. and operate it as a Fascist corporate state. Denying that he is a "rabble rouser," Lawrence Dennis has said of himself: "I am too intellectual to be a good demagogue ... I believe in palace revolutions."