Andrew S. Terrell -- Alpers, Benjamin L.. Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture.

Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003.

Intellectual and cultural historian, Benjamin L. Alpers traces the changing connotations

of the words, “Dictator,” and “Totalitarianism,” from the 1920s into the 1950s in his monograph

Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture. Alpers believes that historians

misunderstood the origins of “totalitarianism;” it was not a product of the Cold War, but the

culmination of a changing public culture throughout the three decades surveyed. Alpers asserts

there were three larger stages in the period studied where opinions of the terms changed from

admiration, to distrust, to apprehension with a temporary suspension of feelings while allied to

the Soviet Union in WWII. Up to the pivotal 1937 shift in interpretation, Alpers shows how

Mussolini fascinated masses, and the American public saw FDR as a benevolent dictator; the

public did not consider “dictator” to be a derogative term. However, Hitler’s rise to power, and

the subsequent depiction of Stalin questioned the preconceived interpretations and opinions of

dictatorships. “Totalitarianism” was a term coined by Calvin Hoover that had a more negative

connotation that--for the changing public--better defined dictatorships including the anti-Stalinist

Left, especially after WWII. Animosity and utter feelings of consternation carried over into the

Cold War era; to Alpers, these feelings were the antecedents to the Cold War Consensus. In the

end, Alpers maintains much of the thoughts and interpretations surrounding “totalitarianism” as

an ideology survived into the twenty-first century.

Alpers grapples with popular culture sources for much of his research, but balances them

well enough with intellectual documents. His approach to the inter-war years is refreshing and

worthy of note in the historiography of the era and Cold War origins bibliographies. His larger

thesis of the origins of totalitarianism concept is reasonable, but does he adequately convince his

readers that anxieties against dictators truly went dormant during WWII?