Lost Steinbeck essay predicted regular assaults on American democracy

An article by John Steinbeck predicting that American democracy would be repeatedly threatened by fascist or populist attempts to overturn the rule of law has been unearthed.

Writer John Steinbeck.

An article by John Steinbeck predicting that American democracy would be repeatedly threatened by fascist or populist attempts to overturn the rule of law has been unearthed and published for the first time in the US.

It was written in 1954 but only appeared, translated into French, in one of a series of columns the author wrote while living in Paris.

Andrew Gulli, editor of The Strand Magazine, said he had obtained the original English version of the essay from among the author’s papers at a library in Texas.

He said it offered a prescient vision of future challenges to American democracy, an analysis that is pertinent almost 70 years later.

Steinbeck, the author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, began writing for Le Figaro – the esteemed daily newspaper that is France’s oldest – while living in a flat near the Champs-Elysees, intending his weekly columns to be a light, cultural commentary on the pleasures of being an American in Paris. But in his third instalment he felt moved to write about political upheavals in his homeland.

“The question most asked of an American in Paris is, ‘How about McCarthyism?’ ” he wrote. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into alleged communist infiltration of branches of the US government whipped up a climate of fear. (During the what we now know as the McCarthy era, hundreds of people in public service, the defence forces, and even entertainment, were accused of being sympathetic to the communist cause and were blacklisted, many losing their careers, even if few of them had ever been members of the Communist Party.)

A Trump supporter speaks with riot police during a protest. Picture: Getty Images

Steinbeck defined McCarthyism as “the attempt to substitute government by men for government by law”. It was “simply a new name for something that has existed from the moment when popular government emerged”.

He added: “We are thought to be a wild, precipitate people, full of experiment, volatile and unpredictable. Actually, the opposite is true. Our changes come very slowly (but) when they are fixed, they are never reversed.”

McCarthyism was merely the latest in a series of movements involving “the taking of power by a self-interested group at the expense of the whole”, he wrote.

“Call it fascism or whatever you will. It changes its name every few years. It always uses the bait of improvement or safety. And it has never succeeded. The hard core of the people and the constitution has always resisted it and won.”

Steinbeck contended that the struggle against these movements made US democracy stronger.

William Souder, author of the recent Steinbeck biography Mad At The World, said Steinbeck did not anticipate the extent to which some of the institutions of American democracy could be eroded, and that he would have been surprised at Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party. “He would have thought – this is my own view – that Trump is a criminal, charlatan egomaniac,” he said.

The Times