Lawrence Dennis

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Lawrence Dennis (December 25, 1893 - August 20, 1977) was a leading pamphleteer for the old right frequently accused of advocating fascism.

A mulatto, Dennis was born in Atlanta, Georgia. After a rather spectacular career as a child evangelist, he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy and then to Harvard. After commanding a company of military police in France during World War I, Dennis graduated from Harvard in 1920 and entered the foreign service. His salad days in the foreign service were marked by his adept ability on account of his mixed race to "play both sides of the street" in the social and night life of posts ranging from Haiti to Romania.

The turning point of Dennis' life came when he served in Nicaragua when he resigned from the foreign service in disgust at the U.S. intervention there against the Sandino rebellion. He then became an adviser to the Latin American fund of the Seligman banking trust, but again made enemies when he wrote a series of exposes of their foreign bond racket in The New Republic in 1930. These exposes propelled Dennis into a national public intellectual career, publishing his first book at the height of the depression in 1932, Is Capitalism Doomed?, which submitted that capitalism was, and by all right should be, on its death knell, but warned of the grave dangers of a world devoid of its positive legacy. Dennis' later two books detailed his sense of the system that was emerging to replace it, with The Coming American Fascism in 1936, detailing the system's substructure, and The Dynamics Of War And Revolution in 1940, on the superstructure.

The proper interpretation and legacy of these works remains controversial today, especially within the old right. Thomas DiLorenzo has maintained that Dennis was in fact the "leading intellectual fascist" he was smeared as by the partisans of the New Deal, while Justin Raimondo has argued that Dennis was a disinterested student of phenomena to which he was opposed, anticipating with far superior execution the later work of such authors as James Burnham. Others, including Raimondo, have suggested that Dennis' writings are far closer to the ideas professed by the modern anti-globalist left than are those of the New Left.

However, in his own time, Lawrence Dennis was the target of a relentless smear campaign for serving as probably the leading intellectual representative, along with Charles Beard, of the progressive opposition to the New Deal. It was thus in 1944 that Dennis was indicted, in a group which ranged from genuine progressives to bonafide pro-Nazi agitators, in a sedition prosecution under the Smith Act which ended in a mistrial because the Judge suddenly, and mysteriously, died. Dennis co-authored with Maximillian St. George an account of the trial, A Trial On Trial, in 1946.

In his later years Dennis continued to propagate his views through a modest newsletter, The Appeal To Reason, which did nonetheless maintain a prominent circle of readers , including Herbert Hoover, Joseph P. Kennedy, William Appleman Williams, Harry Elmer Barnes, and James J. Martin. Dennis' last book, Operational Thinking For Survival, was published in 1967.