Of all the symptoms in America which have been referred to as Fascist the one which indicates most conclusively that the cancerous disease now eating at the vitals of Europe has come here, is that of the men and women who stand on street corners in New York and other cities selling a paper pledged to race hatred and shouting shibboleths at passers. It is a phenomenon so ominous and strange in America, so distinctly a throwback to barbarism and darkness that any novelist able to shed light on it may well write one of those fictions which is timely yet has implications not to be dated, which is local yet speaks to all men everywhere.

James Farrell is a novelist with the necessary equipment. He has for almost ten years been occupied with arresting, detailed and sociologically scrupulous studies of lower middle-class Irish-American Catholics—a group that has contributed conspicuously to the tendency described above. Consequently, when he writes of Tommy Gallagher, American Fascist, he writes with peculiar authority. Many of us have come to know the manifestations of this type and even the basic economic and social data which help account for him, but his private personality, his train of thought, his spiritual, moral and psychological constitution—that is the province of a Farrell. And in Tommy Gallagher's Crusade he has taken at least one dramatic step into that province.

Although too brief to be a study of American Fascism in all its budding forms or even a complete portrait of a single Fascist, Tommy Gallagher's Crusade is an effective sketch, a telling and revelatory introduction. Farrell's technique is familiar: a realism that knows no turning from the object, a brick-by-brick method that sometimes plods, but ends by building up to the solidity of a tower, an honesty that is fanatic, and hatred of hypocrisy that is barely controllable. The story he tells this time is of Tommy Gallagher who decides that his career lies in helping Father Moylan, radio priest and publisher of "Christian Justice," drive the Jews out of America and make the country safe for Hitlerism. The interesting thing is that Tom's family out in Brooklyn is not only thoroughly respectable, but moderately well off, and that it opposes bitterly what Tommy is doing. Tommy himself has had various jobs, but hasn't managed to keep any of them; instead he has taken to hawking "Christian Justice" on street corners. He meets his father's mild remonstrances with arrogance and his brothers' enmity with contempt. He progresses to the notorious picket line in front of a radio station which has refused to broadcast Father Moylan; he draws strength from his sense of communion with others no matter how queer they seem; he shrieks their frenzied slogans; he is puffed up with importance, at first shamed, but at last flattered by all the publicity. He learns from day to day to mouth all the ancient nauseating tribal lies, to mock Jews on the street, to join other hoodlums in assaulting them. He learns to go about spoiling for a fight, looking particularly for gatherings which he considers "Red." He attends meetings of the Christian American party and is carried away by hysterical speeches, orgiastic demonstrations, murderous, flaring hatreds. And always he is terrifying because he is only a tool. Finally, he is badly beaten while trying to break up a meeting; when his brothers greet his return with ridicule he decides to leave home. But he is even too weak to stay away and so he takes to brooding in his room, nursing his hate and caressing his sense of frustration, venomous with self-pity, waiting for a day of vengeance, remembering that Hitler, too, had suffered rebuffs like this. . . .

The anatomy of Tommy Gallagher's brand of Fascism is dramatically clear. Throughout, his lack of moral and intellectual resources is appalling: capable of only the feeblest, muddiest substitute for thinking, he is suscéptible to catchwords and simplified solutions; with soft jobs whisked away by depression he is prey to every unscrupulous demagogic promise; with an education that has failed to cut him off from bigotry, the flame of intolerance waits in him to be fanned or smothered, and finally, with an ego insecure by nature and frayed by circumstances, his personality craves nourishment, strong, hypodermic nourishment. Calculated for just such personalities are the promises, the implicit racial flattery, the righteousness, the mumbo-jumbo and shifty distortions of Father Moylan and his "Christian Justice." Once the infection has set in, disease of spirit proceeds apace.

With that acute insight into the reverie world of the normal mind in general and the thwarted, underdeveloped youth in particular that distinguished Studs Lonigan, Farrell presents Tommy as almost constantly engaged in self-magnification. Everything that Tommy does has in it somewhere the desire to see Tommy the center of things; everywhere he insists on fancying himself as attracting comment, admiration—at worst, any kind of attention. Again and again he is above all pathetic. Far from being a monster, he is all too frailly human. In fact, because his circumstances are not altogether his fault and because he is to some extent tricked and duped, our hate is ever and again mixed with pity. We cannot help seeing that he is brutal because his ego is famished, violent because he needs excitement and attention, blind because he lacks equipment. . . . But understand his psychology though we may, even pity him though we may, he looms up in, the end a cruel and sinister figure, treacherous, blindly vicious, corrupted by ancient hates and lies, overflowing with rancor—a creature of the new barbarism.

Tommy Gallagher is in his own way linked to history for his "crusade" is part of the oldest and greatest crusade of hate in the records of man. That is perhaps why Farrell's book, although hardly more than a long short story, has implications that may well make any civilized reader flame with rage or grow heartsick with despair.