Lawrence Dennis (December 25, 1893 – August 20, 1977) was a mixed raced American[1] diplomat, consultant and author. He advocated Socialist fascism in America after the Great Depression, arguing that capitalism was doomed.[2]
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Dennis was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was of mixed race, though this was a fact he concealed later on in life.[3][4] Following a notable career as a child evangelist, he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy and then to Harvard.
During World War I, Dennis commanded a company of military police in France. He graduated from Harvard in 1920 and entered the foreign service.
The turning point of Dennis' life came when he served in Nicaragua. 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 enterprises in The New Republic and The Nation 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?. The book 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' two later books detailed his sense of the system that was emerging to replace it, which he believed to be a sort of Socialist fascism. The Coming American Fascism in 1936, detailing the system's substructure, and The Dynamics of War and Revolution in 1940, on the superstructure. In 1941 Life called Dennis "America's No. 1 intellectual Fascist".[5]
Dennis was an editor at The Awakener for some time. Later he founded his own publication, the Weekly Foreign Letter, and he wrote for Today's Challenge, published by the pro-German American Fellowship Forum of George Sylvester Viereck and Friedrich Auhagen. He tried to enlist in the American Army during World War II,[6] but the Army rejected him after the media ran stories about him.
In 1944 he was indicted, in a group which ranged from genuine progressives to pro-Nazi agitators, in a sedition prosecution under the Smith Act which ended in a mistrial after the judge died of a heart attack.[7] Dennis co-authored with Maximilian St. George an account of the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 which appeared in 1946 as A Trial on Trial, but put forth his own defense in court.
In his later years Dennis repudiated his views of the 1930s and early 1940s, became a critic of militarism and the Cold War, and propagated his views through a modest newsletter, The Appeal to Reason, which maintained 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 1969.