The April Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and education about fascist and antifascist movements in the United States. We seek to learn from past efforts to resist fascist threats and to build more democratic and mutually supportive communities in order to continue this work in our own time.

In this April Institute Short, Julie Carr discusses her new book Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (Nebraska, 2023). Carr describes what happens when familial and national mythologies are turned upside down and we must find our footing in a new historical understanding of ourselves and our world. This was the case when a family archive revealed that Carr’s great-grandfather, Omer Madison Kem, cofounder of the Populist Party and a source of family pride, was an early and enthusiastic proponent of eugenics and scientific racism. And it happens to so many of us when we learn how feminist icon Margaret Sanger, whom Carr discusses here, shed her radical roots and grafted her fight for birth control onto an American eugenics movement that also influenced German fascism. These reorientations can be difficult, says Carr, but when we are able to accept the complexities of our histories, as individuals and as a nation, including the fascistic tendencies that run through these histories, we can find a greater commitment to resisting such tendencies whenever they arise.

Julie Carr is professor of English and Chair of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder as well as a founding member of the April Institute’s Board of Directors. The April Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to interdisciplinary research and education about fascism and antifascism in the United States.