Sue Coe
'Resisting' Linocut, 5.5 inches x 12 inches made for a 6 foot x 20 foot billboard in Brooklyn, New York, 2020.
Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump to his first term as President, a number of new books were published asking the question “What happened?” or in more concerned voices, “Can it happen here?” Books like Hannah Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four flew off the shelves. Now, with eight years to ponder, and a new Trump Administration ascendant—this time with the addition of the unelected tech oligarch Elon Musk helping to lead the charge—the need for understanding and information seems all the more dire.
One new volume that helps fill the bill is The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism, a graphic novel-style compendium and guide with art by Sue Coe and text by Stephen F. Eisenman. Eisenman, an art historian by trade (and an environmental justice activist), is well-equipped to deliver a combination of commentary and analysis of Coe’s superb illustrations along with an easy-to-read and understand history of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fascist movements.
OR Books, 198 pages
The book, designed for young adults—it is advertised online for ages fifteen and above—begins with an introduction to the concepts of American democracy and a call to start conversations on the topic with family and friends. What follows is a concise history of fascism as it arose in the 1920s in Italy and Germany. The book goes on to the places where these fascist movements continued late into the twentieth century, often with the assistance of the U.S. government, through dictators in Spain and Latin America. It also touches on the role of the Ku Klux Klan as a fascist organization in the 1910s and 1920s that had a resurgence in the early years of Trump’s first term with the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
Coe’s powerful artwork illustrates many aspects of this history, including the rule of Jim Crow laws in the segregated South, Henry Ford’s support for Adolf Hitler, and the political terrorism of the McCarthy-era crackdown on free speech. Most of the rest of the images in the book, in a variety of styles including painting, drawing, and prints, chronicle Trump’s actions against democracy and various government agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as rollbacks of environmental protections, and the rise of disinformation.
But the book’s images also contain expressions of hope—depicting demonstrations for change and against police brutality, young people working to protect the climate, and movements to end war.
Eisenman undertakes two tasks in this book: firstly, to instruct young (and older) readers about the history of fascism and the clear danger of its potential return; and secondly, to awaken new audiences to the role of political art, a field in which Coe has worked for five decades. As Coe tells The Progressive, “The book is a collection of activated art, which had an immediate mission in the moment to resist, warn, inform, which was projected onto walls, put into pamphlets and essays, and made into prints.” A portion of the work in the collection was made exclusively for this book.
As the activist Paul Robeson once said, “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” In this essential new volume, Eisenman and Coe take this message to a new young audience, noting that “only an interventionist, or politically engaged art can compete with our internal doom scrolling and fully engage our minds and our senses.”