54. Grosvenor Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917-1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 292.
55. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 289; Woodrow Wilson, A Proclamation by the President of the United States, as printed in New York Times, May 19, 1917, p. 1.
56. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).
57. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 288; Barry, Great Influenza, p. 127.
58. For the Bernays quotation, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 70. For the CPI posters, see Barry, Great Influenza, p. 127.
59. Barry, Great Influenza, p. 126.
60. "Charges Traitors in America Are Disrupting Russia," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1917, p. 3; Stephen Vaughn, "First Amendment Liberties and the Committee on Public Information," American Journal of Legal History 23, no. 2 (April 1979), p. 116.
61. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 293.
62. Ibid., pp. 293, 294.
63. H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 40. In all of the cases of Burleson's clamping down on the press, there are only two instances when Wilson disagreed with his postmaster enough to redress the situation. In all the others Wilson steadfastly supported the government's largely unlimited right to censor the press--including one instance when Burleson used his powers to harass a local Texas journal that criticized his decision to evict sharecroppers from his property. In a letter to one congressman, Wilson declared that censorship is "absolutely necessary to the public safety." John Sayer, "Art and Politics, Dissent and Repression: The Masses Magazine Versus the Government, 1917-1918," American Journal of Legal History 32, no. 1 (Jan. 1988), p. 46.
64. Sayer, "Art and Politics, Dissent and Repression," p. 64 n. 99; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, pp. 216-17.
65. Carl Brent Swisher, "Civil Liberties in War Time," Political Science Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Sept. 1940), p. 335.
66. See Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People's History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 89-92.
67. Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots (New York: Boni, 1927), p. 62. See also John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 206. About a decade later, a legion representative from Texas pinned a legion button on Mussolini's lapel, making him an honorary member. In return, Mussolini posed for a photograph wearing a Texas cowboy hat with the legion colonel.
68. "Congress Cheers as Wilson Urges Curb on Plotters," New York Times, Dec. 8, 1915, p. 1; Charles Seymour, Woodrow Wilson and the World War: A Chronicle of Our Own Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1921), p. 79; "Suggests Canada Might Vote with US," New York Times, Sept. 26, 1919, p. 3.
69. "President Greets Fliers," Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1924; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 217; Barry, Great Influenza, p. 125.
70. For Butler, see Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 80; and Kennedy, Over Here, p. 74. To his eternal credit, the historian Charles Beard resigned his teaching position in protest. Few of his colleagues followed his example. For Ely, see Rothbard, "Richard T. Ely," p. 588, citing Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. 207.
71. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 299; "Stamping Out Treason," editorial, Washington Post, April 12, 1918.
72. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p. 69; John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 102.
73. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 290.
74. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 63; Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.
75. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 59.
4. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT'S FASCIST NEW DEAL
1. Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 273; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 50.
2. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, pp. 10-11.
3. Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology," American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1962), p. 148, citing Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: The First Thousand Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 104; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 22; Ickes, Secret Diary, vol. 2, pp. 325-26.
4. The best single treatment of FDR's policies as dictatorial and fascistic can be found in William E. Leuchtenburg's essay "The New Deal as the Moral Analogue of War," in FDR Years, pp. 35-75. On Lippmann, see Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 5; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 300.
5. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 17.
6. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 27, citing Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability--and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), p. 160.
7. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 223.
8. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984), p. 50.
9. Ibid., pp. 52, 61.
10. However, this attitude didn't extend to his own interests. He told his mother she should not go overboard by following the government mantra that one should buy Liberty Bonds "until it hurts." The man who would later decry "economic royalists" told the woman controlling his purse strings not to sell off any of the family's more valuable assets in order to buy more patriotic--but less lucrative--securities. Davis, FDR, pp. 512-13.
11. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 412; Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 2.
12. Burns, Roosevelt, p. 144.
13. Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, pp. 18, 37; Alvin H. Hansen, "Toward Full Employment," speech at the University of Cincinnati, March 15, 1949, quoted in Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 5.
14. "Liberalism vs. Fascism," editorial, New Republic, March 2, 1927, p. 35. It is impossible not to detect the fascist obsession with unity and action in Croly's defense of Mussolini. In another editorial he declared, "Whatever the dangers of Fascism, it has at any rate substituted movement for stagnation, purposive behavior for drifting, and visions of great future for collective pettiness and discouragement." Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 155; John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 204.
15. John Patrick Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini's Italy," American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (Jan. 1966), p. 495.
16. Stuart Chase, A New Deal (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 252.
17. The Marquis de Sade considered himself a great revolutionary and philosophe. But in reality he was a bored pervert who came up with elaborate rationales to poke and scratch people for the fun of it. Lenin was bored to nausea by anything but constant agitation for revolution. Martin Heidegger taught an entire course on boredom, calling it the "insidious creature [that] maintains its monstrous essence in our [Being]." It's been speculated that Heidegger signed up with the Nazis at least in part to cure himself of boredom.
18. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 416.
19. "We who are over sixty,
" Sinclair Lewis observed on the occasion of Wells's death in 1946, "have remembered all that he meant to us...For here was a man who, more than any other of this century, suggested to our young minds the gaudy fancy (which conceivably might also be fact) that mankind can, by taking thought," refuse "to make our lives miserable and guilty just to please some institution that for a century has been a walking and talking corpse." Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 178. I did not get the title of this book from Wells's speech, but I was delighted to discover the phrase has such a rich intellectual history. See Philip Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (Oct. 2000), pp. 541-58.
20. Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" p. 543.
21. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 128. When the film version opened in theaters, a letter appeared in the British Union of Fascists party newspaper, Action, asking, "Is Mr. Wells a Secret Fascist?" The correspondent noted, "The supermen all wore the black shirt and broad shiny belt of Fascism! The uniforms were identical, and their wearers moved and bore themselves in the semi-military manner of fascists." Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" p. 541. H. G. Wells, "What Is Fascism--and Why?" New York Times Magazine, Feb. 6, 1927, p. 2; George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler, and the World State," Horizon, Aug. 1941, in Essays (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 371.
22. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866 (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 682; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 93.
23. In the 1920s and 1930s various fascist-like intellectual cults popped up based on the idea that engineers should rule, the most famous of which was Thorstein Veblen's "technocracy" fad.
24. As a writer for the Village Voice puts it, Coughlin was the leader of a "group of right-wing Christian political losers." James Ridgeway, "Mondo Washington," Village Voice, March 14, 2000, p. 41. A writer for the New York Times simply declared Pat Buchanan the "Father Coughlin of 1996." Samuel G. Freedman, "The Father Coughlin of 1996," New York Times, Feb. 25, 1996. The historian Michael Kazin told BusinessWeek, "Buchanan hearkens back to Father Coughlin's 1930s isolationist-conservatism." Lee Walczak, "The New Populism," BusinessWeek, March 13, 1995, p. 72. A professor writing for Foreign Policy expresses shock that "the contemporary Christian Right have been staunch supporters of Israel," which he says should be a "surprise to observers familiar with the anti-Semitic virulence of such pre-World War II Christian conservatives as radio commentator Father Charles." William Martin, "The Christian Right and American Foreign Policy," Foreign Policy, no. 114 (Spring 1999), p. 72. Newsweek counts Father Coughlin and Ronald Reagan as two "conservatives" who really got radio. Howard Fineman, "The Power of Talk," Newsweek, Feb. 8, 1993, p. 24. And on and on.
25. Marshall William Fishwick, Great Awakenings: Popular Religion and Popular Culture (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth, 1995), p. 128.
26. "Lays Banks' Crash to Hoover Policies," New York Times, Aug. 24, 1933, p. 7; "State Capitalism Urged by Coughlin," New York Times, Feb. 19, 1934, p. 17.
27. A wide range of observers understood that communism was a new religion. John Maynard Keynes began his brilliant 1925 essay "A Short View of Russia" by declaring, "Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul--religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient."
28. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 122.
29. "'Roosevelt or Ruin,' Asserts Radio Priest at Hearing," Washington Post, Jan. 17, 1934, pp. 1-2; Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 126. See also Father Coughlin, Address, National Union for Social Justice, Nov. 11, 1934, www.ssa.gov/history/fcspeech.html (accessed Feb. 20, 2007).
30. Principles of the National Union for Social Justice, quoted in Brinkley, Voices of Protest, pp. 287-88.
31. Coughlin went on: "We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in any industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited." Charles A. Beard and George H. E. Smith, eds., Current Problems of Public Policy: A Collection of Materials (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), p. 54.
32. Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 239.
33. Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1998, p. 240); Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 66.
34. Sinclair was the muckraking journalist who most famously wrote The Jungle, the story of an exploited immigrant in the Chicago meatpacking industry who ultimately finds salvation through socialism. Sinclair himself was formally a member of the Socialist Party until World War I, when he broke with it in favor of intervention (which would have made him a Fascist in Italy). Sinclair remained an ideological socialist (and food faddist) for the rest of his days. Dr. Townsend is an even odder duck. In September 1933 he wrote a letter to his local California newspaper claiming that America's economic problems could be solved if only the federal government gave two hundred dollars to all people over the age of sixty, so long as they promised to spend the money within thirty days. This alone would jump-start the economy and pull the elderly out of poverty. Within three months of that letter to the editor, there were three thousand Townsend clubs across the country, as well as a weekly national newspaper. By the summer of 2005, there were an estimated 2.25 million members across the country. The Townsend movement, which Today dubbed "easily the outstanding political sensation of 1935," ended up winning numerous seats in state legislatures and even two governorships. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 180.
35. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 73.
36. Gotz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Holt, 2007). A discerning reader might ask, "Why was Hitler's Germany so much more successful than America if the Third Reich was more socialist?" It's an excellent question and one that I've asked several economists. The short answer is "real wages." See Jody K. Biehl, "How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer," Spiegel Online, March 22, 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html (accessed June 26, 2007).
37. Anne O'Hare McCormick, "Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans," New York Times, July 10, 1933, p. 6.
38. John A. Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (Oct. 1973), pp. 933-34; Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, pp. 19-20.
39. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, pp. 23, 24, 19.
40. Benito Mussolini, "The Birth of a New Civilization," in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 73; Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, p. 31.
41. Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 146.
42. Interestingly, James engages the German philosopher S. R. Steinmetz in his essay. And while he disagrees with Steinmetz on several substantial points, it's worth noting that he says Steinmetz is "a conscientious thinker" and "moral" militarist. Steinmetz, now widely forgotten, was a very prominent German social Darwinist and eugenicist. William James, Memories and Studies (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1934), p. 281.
43. Alter, Defining Moment, p. 4.
44. Ibid., p. 5.
45. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 63.
46. Ibid., pp. 55, 56.
47. Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution, p. 63. Konstantin Hierl, the head of the Labor Service, explained that there was no better way to overcome class differences than to dress "the son of the director and the young worker, the university student and the farmhand, in the same uniform, to set them the same table in common service to Volk and Vaterland." Comparing Germany to Spain, Hitler proclaimed in 1936, "What a difference compared with a certain other country. There it is class against class, brother against brother. We have chosen the other route: rather than to wrench you apart, we have brought you together."
48. Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle, from Egg to Earth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), p. 264.
49. Colloquially, this is "All for one, one for all," but its closer translation would be "The community over self-interest."
50. Otto Friedrich, "F.D.R.'s Disputed Legacy," Time, Feb. 1, 1982.
51. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy, p. 164.
52. "Not Since the Armistice," Time, Sept. 25, 1933, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,882190,00.html (accessed February 7, 2007); T. H. Watkins, "The Bird Did Its Part," Smithsonian, vol. 30, no. 2, May 1999.
53. "Red Rally Dimmed by Harlem Fervor," New York Times, Aug. 5, 1934, p. N3.
54. Lee Lescaze, "Reagan Still Sure Some in New Deal Espoused Fascism," Washington Post, Dec. 24, 1981, p. A7. Reagan was even more straightforward the previous August: "Anyone who wants to look at the writings of the Brain Trust of the New Deal will find that President Roosevelt's advisers admired the fascist system...They thought that private ownership with government management and control a la the Italian system was the way to go, and that has been evident in all their writings." See Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (Roseville, Calif.: Prima, 2001), p. 681; Robert G. Kaiser, "Those Old Reaganisms," Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1980, p. A2.
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