3. On the ubiquity of fascist practices in the United States in those years, see Joseph Fronczak, “The Fascist Game: Transnational Political Transmission and the Genesis of the U.S. Modern Right,” Journal of American History 105, no. 3 (December 2018): 563–88.
4. Bernstein, The Turbulent Years , p. 769.
5. “Recall the Days When Populists Had a Foothold: Agrarian Revolt of ’92 Akin to Present Farmer Discontent,” Nebraska State Journal , December 19, 1932. The story was a reprint from the Associated Press.
6. Henry W. Lawrence, “Farmers in Revolt—1893 and 1933,” Santa Cruz News , April 29, 1933 (the article was reprinted from Every Week magazine). The text under the headline reads, “Forty years ago the disgruntled agriculturalists put their trust in a third party, the Populists; today they are trying direct action but though their methods differ their grievances are much the same.” See also Frank Parker Stockbridge, “Revival of the Populists,” Brooklyn Eagle , May 5, 1933.
7. White was not a supporter of FDR that year (he was a friend of the Republican nominee, Kansas governor Alf Landon), but he was not hostile to the president, either. He makes a fascinating comparison between a speech of Roosevelt’s that he watches and Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” oration in 1896. See William Allen White, “40 Years: New Men, Old Issues,” New York Times , August 9, 1936.
8. Historians: In his 1946 history of American radicalism, Chester McArthur Destler drew a clear line from Populism to the New Deal and its various regulatory agencies (American Radicalism, 1865–1901 , p. 31). In 1959, C. Vann Woodward looked back on the similarities between the 1890s and the 1930s and declared, “From many points of view the New Deal was neo-Populism” (Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 29, no. 1 [Winter 1959–60]: 55). Popular writers: See in particular Gilbert Seldes, Mainland (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), where the connection between the two is made more than once. In a February 1936 column, Walter Lippmann compared the Tennessee Valley Authority to the dreams of the Populists. In the New York Times in 1932, John Chamberlain described the career of the famous Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis as a form of “Populism become disciplined,” and in January 1938 syndicated columnist Drew Pearson tipped his readers to look for stiffer antitrust enforcement when President Roosevelt appointed a man to the Federal Trade Commission who had supposedly got his political start in the old People’s Party.
9. Perkins’s remarks are found in Frances Perkins and J. Paul St. Sure, Two Views of American Labor (UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations, 1965), p. 2.
10. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking Press, 1946), pp. 72–73.
11. The New Deal as the dawn of expertise-in-government is, for example, the favored interpretation of Richard Hofstadter. See chapter 7 of The Age of Reform (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), in which he argues that the New Deal represented the triumph of managerialism and the rise of “reform-minded Americans” from the various professions. Hofstadter’s larger point is that the New Deal owed little or nothing to Populism. Years later, in the heyday of the free-market faith, Daniel Yergin would use the same understanding as a way of dismissing the New Deal for its top-down, big-government hostility to market freedom. See Yergin, The Commanding Heights (Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 51–56.
12. This last phrase is often transcribed as “lured us from the old barricades,” but according to FDR’s actual text for the occasion, the word was “verities.” See https://www.fdrlibrary.org/documents/356632/390886/1932+DNC+Acceptance+Speech.pdf/066093f1-bab8-48a8-81b5-65ed8c000f89.
13. George H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (University of Minnesota Press, 1951), p. 17.
14. Undated 1934 speech by Olson, reprinted in James M. Youngdale, Third Party Footprints: An Anthology from Writings and Speeches of Midwest Radicals (Ross & Haines, 1966), p. 255.
15. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Pantheon, 1984), p. 212. In the pages to come I am following the lead of Susman’s famous essays, “The Culture of the Thirties,” “Culture and Commitment,” and “The People’s Fair,” all of which were collected in Culture as History .
16. Stu Cohen, The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration (David R. Godine, 2008), p. xv. The populist implications of the FSA style are explained particularly well by historian Stuart Ewen in PR!: A Social History of Spin (Basic, 1996).
17. See Gerstle’s fascinating account of a textile union in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
18. The pamphlet was issued by the CIO’s famous Political Action Committee, the first PAC of them all. It is reprinted in Gaer, The First Round , p. 19.
19. Roosevelt speech delivered in Cleveland, Ohio, November 2, 1940, from a transcript of the speech on the website of the FDR Library, Marist College.
20. For still others, as the historian Warren Susman points out, this was the language of public relations. The worship of the common man happened at roughly the same time as the invention of scientific polling and with it the discovery of “the concept of the typical or the average,” an idea that would eventually become as ubiquitous as “the people” itself.
21. The quotations in this paragraph and the two that follow come from Kenneth Burke, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” in American Writers’ Congress , ed. Henry Hart (International Publishers, 1935), pp. 87–94, emphasis in original. On the extreme hostility with which Burke’s speech was received, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (Verso, 1996), p. 443.
22. This is a point of special emphasis in vice president Henry Wallace’s intensely populist wartime speech, “The Century of the Common Man,” reprinted in the book of that same title (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943), p. 16. Additionally, Gilbert Seldes wrote in Mainland (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), a book much concerned with the Populist legacy: “How to use the middle class is the great problem for demagogues—and how to save it is the problem for democrats.” Similarly, Kenneth Burke, in the speech quoted above, urged his colleagues to adopt a populist stance because it would help them “combat the forces that hide their class prerogatives behind a communal ideology,” which is to say, to combat demagogues of the nationalist, fascist, and anti-Semitic variety.
23. According to Benjamin Hufbauer, “How Trump’s Favorite Movie Explains Him,” Politico , June 6, 2016.
24. I am following the analysis here of historian Michael Denning, whose 1996 book The Cultural Front is one of the most comprehensive efforts to grapple with thirties-style populism. On Welles, see chapter 10, “The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism.”
25. Wallace, The Century of the Common Man , p. 20.
26. Welles’s speech was delivered at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1942. It is reprinted in a pamphlet called Toward New Horizons: The World Beyond the War (Office of War Information, 1942), p. 9.
27. One place Morgenthau’s speech can be found is in the collection of archival material on the European Union compiled by the University of Luxembourg: https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2003/12/12/b88b1fe7-8fec-4da6-ae22-fa33edd08ab6/publishable_en.pdf .
28. I am reiterating here the standard critique of Popular Front culture. It is answered persuasively by the historian Michael Denning in his authoritative cultural history of the era, The Cultural Front , in which he argues that the thirties marked not the end of modernism but merely a departure in a different direction.
29. John Kenneth Galbraith, “On the Economics of F.D.R.,” Commentary , August 1, 1956, p. 173.
30. FDR on academic “jargon”: As quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval , vol. 3 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960),
p. 650. “Whole community” / “if the ballot”: from “The Uses of an Education,” a speech FDR gave at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, on October 21, 1933. It is reprinted in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt , vol. 2 (Random House, 1938), p. 418.
31. Richard V. Gilbert et al., An Economic Program for American Democracy (The Vanguard Press, 1938), p. ix.
32. Thomas T. Spencer, “The Good Neighbor League Colored Committee and the 1936 Democratic Presidential Campaign,” Journal of Negro History 63, no. 4 (1978): 307–8. The detail about the Cab Calloway concert is related in Donald R. McCoy, “The Good Neighbor League and the Presidential Campaign of 1936,” Western Political Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 1014.
33. Denning, The Cultural Front , p. 130. Denning describes this anti-racist culture admirably and at some length. At times he uses the word “populist” to describe it, but he also takes pains to distinguish Popular Front populism from received definitions of populism, a point that he carries a bit too far, in my opinion. See in particular his account of historical Populism on page 125.
34. Here as in many other places in this chapter I am indebted to the trailblazing work of Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Basic Books, 1995), chapter 6.
35. CIO Political Action Committee, The People’s Program for 1944 , reprinted in Joseph Gaer, The First Round: The Story of the CIO Political Action Committee (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), pp. 188, 211.
36. CIO National Political Action Committee, The Negro in 1944 , reprinted in Gaer, The First Round , p. 451.
37. Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism , p. 296.
38. Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), p. 245.
4. “THE UPHEAVAL OF THE UNFIT”
1. “Moral and intellectual bankruptcy”: attributed to the prominent journalist Nathaniel Peffer. “Political democracy is moribund”: attributed to ACLU president Roger Baldwin (!). “Modern Western civilization is a failure”: attributed to novelist Louise Maunsell Field. All of these as quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval , vol. 3 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 646.
2. On these points see Jared Goldstein, “The American Liberty League and the Rise of Constitutional Nationalism,” Temple Law Review 86, no. 2 (2014): 296. Also: “Liberty League Income Equals Major Parties,” Washington Post , January 3, 1936, p. 9.
3. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval , p. 633; Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960 , 3rd ed. (Macmillan, 1962), p. 719.
4. Richard S. Tedlow, “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal,” Business History Review 50, no. 1 (1976): 36. Tedlow regards this slogan as self-evidently ridiculous in the violent context of the Depression.
5. See “Industry Offers Plan of Recovery,” New York Times , December 4, 1934.
6. Edward F. Hutton, “Let Business ‘Gang Up,’ ” Public Utilities Fortnightly 16, no. 11 (November 21, 1935): 684, 686, 688. Incidentally, the particular bit of regulation that provoked Hutton’s outraged call to gang up was the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935.
7. “The N.A.M. Declares War,” Business Week , December 14, 1935; Arthur Krock, “In Washington,” New York Times , December 6, 1935; “Industry Adopts Political Planks for New Deal War,” New York Times , December 6, 1935.
8. Professor: “Industry Adopts Political Planks,” New York Times , December 6, 1935. Steelmaker: “Political Activity Urged on Industry,” New York Times , December 6, 1935. Bardo: “Business Leaders to Enter Politics to End New Deal,” New York Times , December 5, 1935.
9. The two correspondents were R. R. M. Carpenter and John J. Raskob. Their letters were published on page 2 of the New York Times on December 21, 1934, under the headline “The Carpenter and Raskob Letters.” Page 1 of that day’s issue carried a story in which Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota announced, “These letters … bear all the earmarks of having been the birth-place and the birth-time of the Liberty League.” See “Nye Sees in Letter by Raskob ‘Birth’ of Liberty League.”
10. G. W. Dyer, Regimenting the Farmers , a speech given “over the Network of the Columbia Broadcasting System, May 5, 1935,” American Liberty League pamphlet #33. Anonymous, Economic Planning—Mistaken but Not New , American Liberty League pamphlet #75, November 1935, p. 2. Anonymous, The AAA and Our Form of Government , American Liberty League pamphlet #80, December 1935.
11. Hoover, quoted in Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval , p. 544. Anonymous, The Dual Form of Government and the New Deal: A Study of the Roosevelt Administration’s Persistent Attempt to Destroy Local Self-Government in the United States and Substitute Therefor a Centralized, All-Powerful Federal Authority Similar to the Current Dictatorships in Several European Countries , American Liberty League pamphlet #134, September 1936, p. 22.
12. Smith’s speech was covered with a huge page 1 headline in the Chicago Tribune for January 26, 1936: “NEW DEAL FRAUD: AL SMITH.” The text I am using here is the version published by the American Liberty League itself as pamphlet #97, The Facts in the Case , pp. 13, 14.
13. The list of attendees was carried by the Tribune on page 6. The backfiring of the Al Smith broadcast is a staple of the historiography of the period. For example, see Goldstein, “The American Liberty League and the Rise of Constitutional Nationalism,” pp. 312–16.
14. Captain William H. Stayton, Is the Constitution for Sale? , speech delivered “over the Network of the Columbia Broadcasting System,” May 30, 1935, American Liberty League pamphlet #40, p. 3.
15. “Collectivism”: Los Angeles Times , October 3, 1936; “Russia and Spain”: Los Angeles Times , October 6, 1936.
16. All of these are from the Chicago Daily Tribune (“World’s Greatest Newspaper”), October 20, October 22, and November 2, 1936.
17. Ralph M. Shaw, The New Deal: Its Unsound Theories and Irreconcilable Policies , American Liberty League pamphlet #39, 1935, p. 13.
18. Ibid., p. 11.
19. William R. Perkins, A Rising or a Setting Sun?: A Study in Government Contrasting Fundamental Principles with Present Policies in the Light of Authentic History , American Liberty League pamphlet #135, September 1936, p. 27.
20. Ibid., pp. 28, 30.
21. Thomas Nixon Carver, “Where We Need Planning the Most,” Nation’s Business , March 1935. This article was apparently an excerpt from Carver’s pamphlet What Must We Do to Save Our Economic System?
22. Frederick H. Stinchfield, The American Constitution—Whose Heritage?: The Self-Reliant or Those Who Would Be Wards of Government? , American Liberty League pamphlet #90, January 1936, p. 6.
23. E. T. Weir, “ ‘I Am What Mr. Roosevelt Calls an Economic Royalist,’ ” Fortune , October 1936, p. 198.
24. Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (Free Press, 1956), p. 13. This is also Richard Hofstadter’s understanding of the New Deal, as he described it in The Age of Reform .
25. The book was called The Economics of the Recovery Program and featured an essay by Joseph Schumpeter.
26. Walter E. Spahr, “The People’s Money,” part of a Round Table Discussion of “The Constitution and the New Deal ,” July 10, 1935, American Liberty League pamphlet #51, pp. 9, 11, 12. See also the article about Spahr in the Chicago Tribune for January 22, 1936, in which he attributed the “tragic” deeds of the New Deal to its “appalling mixture of ignorance and demagoguery.”
27. Professors and the New Deal: A Compendium of Quotations Demonstrating That a Great Majority of the Nation’s Educators Believe in Sound Principles of Economics and Constitutional Theories of Government , American Liberty League pamphlet #91,
January 1936, p. 23.
28. “Real Experts on the Job,” Los Angeles Times , April 11, 1936; Professors and the New Deal , American Liberty League pamphlet #91, January 1936, p. 23.
29. On the GOP brain trust, see “G.O.P. to Tell What New Deal Is Doing to U.S.: Group of 50 Experts Will Report on Record,” Chicago Tribune , April 10, 1936, p. 13. On the popularity of this booklet among leading conservatives (including former president Herbert Hoover), see Luca Fiorito and Cosma Orsi, “ ‘Survival Value and a Robust, Practical, Joyless Individualism’: Thomas Nixon Carver, Social Justice, and Eugenics,” History of Political Economy 49, no. 3 (2017): 487–89.
30. Thomas Nixon Carver (“as told to Kenneth Crist”), “Alms, the Man, and Prosperity,” Los Angeles Times , May 19, 1935.
31. All quotations are from Carver’s 1935 article, “Where We Need Planning the Most.” The suggestion about marriage and cars is described in Fiorito and Orsi, “ ‘Survival Value and a Robust, Practical, Joyless Individualism.’ ”
The People, No Page 25
