A picture of Lawrence Dennis as a boy

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 February 2009:

Here’s a picture of Lawrence Dennis and his aunt as they were when they toured England in 1910. In those days he was billed as “the boy evangelist.” Before long Dennis would be sent from his boyhood home in Atlanta to elite schools in the North, schools where he began passing for white. After graduating from Harvard, Dennis would serve as a US Army officer in World War I, a diplomatic agent in Central America in the 1920s, and a banker on Wall Street in the days before the Great Crash. In a series of books published in the 1930s, he would argue that the USA was destined to become a fascist state in which dissent would be greeted with criminal prosecution. For predicting the end of free speech in America, he would be arrested and tried for sedition in 1944. I guess that showed him.