Published after The Terrible Twos, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) projects
1980s Reagan policies to a future New England in which a totalitarian theocracy has toppled the
U.S. government. Unlike other fascist dystopian novels, Atwood’s, now a cable TV series,
explores women’s subjugation in a dystopian near-future in which Christian fundamentalists
target women’s rights, replicating toward women the violent Nazi repression of Jews and other
ethnic groups. Among dystopian novels of the new century, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against
America (2004) envisions an alternate history in which an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi president
Charles Lindbergh makes peace with Nazi Germany and establishes a repressive state apparatus
modeled after Germany’s.
This overview of U.S. fascist dystopian fiction includes only the most well-known texts. But,
given its striking thematic parallels to The Terrible Twos, one early dystopian work merits
special attention, though it’s unlikely Reed knew of it in 1980. In a recent essay, Brooks E.
Hefner discusses the little-known fascist dystopian fiction, “The Black Stockings,” by the
African American writer William Thomas Smith. Published from June through August 1937 in
the African-American weekly newspaper The Baltimore Afro-American, “The Black Stockings”
differs from other dystopian fiction of the period in that it “imagines the rise of [U.S.] fascism as
rooted almost purely in racial animosity and American nativism, a fear and hatred of others that
generates an irrational cycle of blame and resentment.” 6 In Smith’s narrative, “the ‘Black
Stockings’ of the title are…an informal [white] militia…[who] wear black stockings over their
heads, ensuring anonymity as they terrorize non-white groups.” 7 Their leader, Hugo Heflock,
runs for president, and through his privately-owned radio network exploits racist and nativist
fears to build broad support among Depression-era whites and eventually threaten the power of
mainstream political parties. The anti-fascist resistance coalition in the narrative, the “Sons of
Light,” are “a multiracial and multiethnic group allied with the U.S. president and presented as
the only hope for preserving American democracy.” Like Smith’s dystopian work, The Terrible
Twos similarly identifies racism and bigotry as crucial components of Dean Clift’s neo-fascist
administration, as noted in earlier pages. The Nicholites, also a multiracial and multiethnic
resistance group, work to undermine the spread of neo-fascist ideology, in this case by appealing
6
Hefner discussion of “Black Stockings” highlights the absence of race in other early anti-fascist dystopian
fiction.
7
See Hefner’s summary of the “Black Stockings” plot.
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