Fascist Cowboys!!! (I am not making this up!)
Due to the ascendancy of tRump, I have been introduced to Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism and am reading through it now. Paxton provides this note concerning the origin of the term "national socialism"
The term
national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barres, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Mores in 1896 as the "- first national socialist." Mores,
after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices.
As a cattleman, Mores found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism.
His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform.
Praxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Page 55.
I'm sure his failure as a cattle rancher had something to do with that damn liberal fedral gubment.