SOURCE: "Our Own Storm Trooper: A Long, Short Story That Traces the Background of a Crusade of Hate," in The New York Herald Tribune Books, October 15, 1939, p. 6.

Below, Rugoff finds Farrell's novella Tommy Gallagher's Crusade a frighteningly accurate portrayal of the mindless hatred that characterized the growing Fascist movement in America during the 1930s.

Of all the symptoms in America which have been referred to as Fascist the one which indicates most conclusively that the cancerous disease now eating at the vitals of Europe has come here, is that of the men and women who stand on street corners in New York and other cities selling a paper pledged to race hatred and shouting shibboleths at passers. It is a phenomenon so ominous and strange in America, so distinctly a throwback to barbarism and darkness that any novelist able to shed light on it may well write one...