Oh, I'm all for histiry, Chip. I've been watching, and on occasions trying to take part in, scholarly debates on the formal definition of fascism ever since I first got my mits on a computer, and have yet to feel particularly enlightened. I just no longer see the value in the exercise you seem to.
Furthermore, I don't think what Roosevelt did need have anything to do with what he said (he was a politician, after all) - I like lots of things he said, but certainly not everything he did.
Lastly, I'll admit to being no expert on the Brown Scare, but I've yet to be convinced Kuhn's mob were not in fact a (poorly) orchestrated wing of the German Nazi Party, at least at its executive level, as Kuhn - an avowed 'Friend of the New Germany' [ie Hitler's Germany], an underling of Henry Ford's and a vociferous Jew-baiter - had claimed at the time. I'm sure lots of unfairly oppressed German Americans had joined just to find voice and friends in an openly hostile host culture, but it's not as if their bundesleiter's views weren't known to them, and it's not as if we should blame Roosevelt for being wary of 'em - a lot more wary than large lumps of American capital at the time, by the way - so I don't think the HUAC can tenably be represented as a wing of capital at that time.
It was a good time to be Scared of the Browns, anyway. As to infringing rights of association, well, yeah, the government did that. And, yeah, this is how HUAC went on to oppress the left in the fifties. The Brown Scare, not of capital's making (rather, it was the creature of a liberal-democratic president, an anti-German culture and a Jewish pressure group who'd heard quite enough of messrs Hitler and Kuhn), put in place the foundations of McCarthyism, which was much more a creature of capital, for mine. So, if I'm going to be consistent, I'd have to say that infringements of individual freedoms are not, in themselves, fascist (although fascism definitively features them). It depends on who controls the coercive instruments of the state.
We've had threads about the freedom of speech and association before, and I generally stand on the freedom of speech, not least because repressive mechanisms have a way of backfiring on anyone with non-mainstream politics. But bits of Mein Kampf (available since 1927) are clearly militantly racist hate-speech, and (no matter how hypocritically, in a lynching America) publicly professed adherence to such stuff does constitute the sort of transgression a liberal democrat conviction must confront. After all, complete freedom is a pretty problematic notion, no?
Cheers, Rob.