Once upon a time, democracy excited the American imagination. When Thomas Mann toured the United States in the spring of 1938 with a lecture on “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” his audiences averaged somewhere between two thousand and seven thousand people at a time. In New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, Chicago, Tulsa, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, thousands of Americans eagerly showed up to hear the most famous antifascist émigré writer speak about the dangerous situation in Europe and his hope for a democratic renewal in America. When Mann’s lecture was published as a short book that same year by Alfred A. Knopf, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt recommended it in her national syndicated newspaper column. In 1938 and 1939 alone, The Coming Victory of Democracy sold twenty-five thousand copies. Albert Murray, a devoted reader of Mann, called it “one of the most compelling statements of the case for commitment in democratic literature.”
Mann picked an inauspicious time to champion democracy. His lecture tour had scarcely begun when Nazi troops marched unopposed into Vienna, the first step in Hitler’s expansionist plans for a Greater German Reich. “It is not easy to speak on the coming victory of democracy at a moment when the aggressive brutality of fascism seems to be so distressingly triumphant,” Mann admitted. Ever since the British and French governments’ policy of non-intervention in the Spain Civil War, he’d been convinced that no one in Europe was willing or capable of standing up to Hitler. “It is relatively clear that they are letting the man manage things exactly as he pleases,” Mann observed in his diary during the tour.
On the other hand, what could be more urgent than to defend democracy at its weakest? An outspoken supporter of the former Weimar Republic, Mann was all too aware of the fragility of the democratic project. “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without,” he said in his lecture. Mann feared that democracy, because it is always a work in progress which at its best only asymptotically approaches its own realization, was too susceptible to the fickleness of human nature. “It is the fate of man in no condition and under no circumstances ever to be entirely at ease upon this earth,” he said. To alleviate this “eternally semi-painful condition,” humankind desires variety and change, and is too easily attracted by what is new, by the promise of ever greater possibilities for the future. With its “shrill propaganda of youthfulness, its publicity tricks,” fascism was exploiting this weakness for novelty, Mann warned. “Upon this the fascists place their emphasis, of this they boast; their attitude of revolution and opportunism, are meant to attract the youth of the world.”
Mann’s lecture was characteristically thorough in its condemnation of the Nazi regime. In lecture halls across America, he warned repeatedly of the internment of Jews in concentration camps within Germany, the compulsion to wear a yellow star, and he told the attendant throngs about the Nazi’s “degenerate art” exhibit in Munich the year before. He described and condemned the Nazi’s systematic censorship, their ruthless violence, their insatiable “lust for human degradation.” He even called out his fellow Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun for his fascist sympathies and for mocking the pacifist writer Carl von Ossietzky, winner of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize. A prisoner of the Nazi regime since 1933, Ossietzky would die in hospital later that year, on May 4, 1938, after years of daily torture.
More than just a protest, Mann’s lecture was an exhortation to the nation he would shortly call home. Stung by what he viewed as a betrayal of Europe by the British and the French, he implored American listeners to consider a militant humanism and hoped to persuade them of their moral duty to intercede in the event of a new world war. Mann knew that there were critics from the right who saw fascism as the antidote to communism, and he intended to disabuse them of that myth. He insisted that fascism was not remotely a “protective bulwark” against bolshevism. At the same time, for anyone who considered Nazism a socialist project with sincere concern for the working class, Mann insisted that there was nothing “socialist” about National Socialism at all. (Someone should read the lecture aloud to Alice Weidel, the chairwoman of Germany’s fascist AfD party, with whom our own Elon Musk is so chummy. She recently claimed in conversation with Musk that Hitler was in fact “a communist.”) Mann explained: “It cannot [. . .] be sufficiently emphasized that fascist socialism is a moral travesty of real socialism.” To prove his point, Mann reminded his listeners of the Nazi Party’s decision to build their rally grounds in Nürnberg when there was a massive housing shortage in Germany. How much more “socially minded” of President Roosevelt to put before Congress “a plan for the construction of three or four million new homes,” Mann said, likely referring to the Wagner–Steagall Housing Act of 1937.
Mann went so far as to suggest that “Europe and the world are ripe for the consideration of an inclusive reform of the regulation of natural resources and the redistribution of wealth.” The bourgeois liberalism of previous generations would no longer suffice; social reform which would secure “spiritual as well as economic freedom” was necessary. “Only in this way can democracy take the wind out of the sails of fascism and also of bolshevism and overcome the merely temporary and deceptive advantages which the charm of novelty gives the dictatorships.”
The Coming Victory of Democracy was largely consistent with Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism. Indeed, Mann, like many émigré writers, was an admirer of the American president whom he met on three occasions, two of them as a private guest at the White House. “The president is a decidedly fascinating man,” Mann wrote to his brother Heinrich after one such visit, “sunny in the face of his handicap, spoiled, cheerful, also something of an actor. Nevertheless, he is a man of profound and unshakeable convictions, the born counterpart to the European miscreant, whom he hates as much as we do.” Mann was so impressed with Roosevelt that he paid him a kind of fictional homage in Joseph the Provider, the fourth and final volume of his massive work Joseph and his Brothers: In his foreword to the 1948 single volume edition of this quartet, Mann wrote that the “New Deal is unmistakably reflected in Joseph’s magical administration of Egypt’s economy.”
But his admiration for Roosevelt’s policies did not necessarily reflect sympathy for the average American’s political profile. “I am not a capitalist,” Mann confessed in his lecture — and this admission was not without its risks. Despite Mann’s protestations to the contrary, there were those in the United States who were itching to cast Mann and his sympathizers are communist contaminants. In his recent book, Taking Back America, the historian David Austin Walsh demonstrates that in the 1930s the far right viewed New Deal liberalism, socialism, and communism as fundamentally the same thing. “Many believed the New Deal was an ‘alien’ agenda imposed upon the United States by communists, immigrants, and above all Jews,” Walsh writes. Mann’s audiences did not necessarily take for granted the fact that America had any responsibility opposing Nazism. Many of the same individuals and organizations that opposed Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal,” as it was crudely called, later adamantly opposed American intervention in the Second World War — a war that the far-right activist Elizabeth Dilling called “the war for the kikes.” In the leadup to America’s intervention in the Second World War, Mann made a point of appearing in cities throughout the Midwest, where most German-American immigrants had settled and where pro-Nazi sentiment was therefore likely to be strongest. (The antisemitic Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, whose broadcasts had some ten million listeners, lived in Detroit).
Publicly, Mann was fast becoming the face of the German exile community and its fight against Hitler. In his diary, though, he agonized over whether he really believed all he said on the stage: “Democratic idealism. Do I believe in it? Am I only adopting it as an intellectual role?” While working on the lecture in the fall of 1937, he wrote to René Schickele, “Between ourselves, it is a role with which I am identifying in the same way as an actor does with his. And why am I playing it? Out of hatred for Fascism and Hitler.” Some of this survives in the text of the lecture itself; at one point Mann asks if he is not guilty of lapsing into “after-dinner oratory.”
More than just a performance, however, and still more than an attempt to canvass support for Roosevelt’s foreign policy, The Coming Victory of Democracy is a moving and courageous expression of faith — faith in the future, in democracy, in America. “Here it will be possible — here it must be possible — to carry out those reforms of which I have spoken; to carry them out by peaceful labour, without crime or bloodshed,” Mann said. In his closing, he declared his intention to emigrate to America, and his conviction that, given the situation in Europe, “many good Europeans will meet again on American soil. I believe, in fact, that for the duration of the present European dark age, the centre of Western culture will shift to America.”
If it’s true, as Bill McKibben recently suggested, that the beginning of Trumps’ second term as president means we’ve “finally come to the end of the FDR era,” the era of America as “a group project,” then The Coming Victory of Democracy is a forceful reminder of why it was that America embarked on that project in the first place. With a constitutional crisis looming and the postwar order unraveling, Mann’s lecture is a summons to rediscover and renew our faith in democracy. To do so will require more than after-dinner oratory, however. With an opposition party unwilling to oppose, a media landscape in the sweaty hands of tech billionaires, and an administration prepared to betray America’s allies, the future looks grim indeed. Perhaps, like Mann, we will have to screw ourselves to the conviction that a revival of democracy is still possible, that it must be possible. To steel ourselves for the struggle ahead, The Coming Victory of Democracy is not a bad place to start.
This essay is the second installment of Morten Høi Jensen’s series Mannhood, on all things related to Thomas Mann, which will continue throughout 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth.