It is "absurd to ignore, as all our textbooks do, the fact that the New Deal and European fascism grew from the same ideological roots, produced strikingly similar policies, and fostered national cultures that, if not identical, bore the resemblance of siblings," writes Thaddeus Russell, professor of American Studies at Occidental College,[1] where President Barack Obama matriculated.[2] Naziism and Fascism were in fact "organically connected," argues Russell, author of A Renegade History of the United States, to "the New Deal, the basis of what we now know as 'liberalism'," which he calls the "most influential American political movement of the twentieth century." The New Deal, concludes Russell, "created an economic system that was virtually identical to the national economies established in Italy and Germany, and further consolidated power in the hands of the president."[3]
"Both Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy influenced the New Deal enormously,"[4] writes Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man. "[T]he New Deal was often compared with Fascism," according to cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch.[5] “The slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (i.e., the commonweal ranks above private profit) is likewise the idea underlying the American New Deal,” wrote Ludwig von Mises.[6]
Roosevelt presented the New Deal in militaristic terms of "discipline," sacrificing individual rights for "leadership" promising a greater good. His first inaugural address contained an exhortation that could have been made by Mussolini or Hitler:
“ | [I]f we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress can be made, no leadership becomes effective.... We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at the larger good.... I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people.... [I]n the event that the Congress shall fail... I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.[7] | ” |
Meanwhile, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “lamented that the nation lacked a benevolent dictator to force through reforms."[8] Soviet intelligence source[9] Walter Lippmann told Roosevelt, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers";[10] in his influential[11] column, Lippmann added that the use of "'dictatorial powers,' if that is the name for it—is essential."[12] The New York Herald Tribune approved the inauguration with the headline "FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY."[13] "We called for a Man of Action, and we got one," wrote New Dealer Donald Richberg. For only the Man of Action could overcome the "inefficiencies and corruptions of popular government":
“ | The American people might well go down upon their knees and thank God that in that dreadful day there came into power the man who alone could save them — the Man of Action.[14] | ” |
A Hollywood movie was released about a President of the United States who "revokes the Constitution, becomes a reigning dictator," and employs "brown-shirted storm troopers,"[15]—by means of whom he not only "declares martial law,"[16] but “dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad.”[17] This movie was made not by a conservative such as Frank Capra, but by Walter Wanger, a "liberal Hollywood mogul"; in the film, the dictator ("an FDR lookalike")[18] is not the villain, but the hero, who by such dictatorial means "solves all of the nation's problems."[19] Roosevelt enjoyed the movie and saw it several times.[20] Most chilling, FDR wrote that he thought this film “should do much to help.”[21]
The mood in Washington at FDR's inauguration was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan” reported The New York Times. “America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, reported the Times, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”[22] Progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.”[23] George Soule, editor of the pro-Roosevelt New Republic magazine, wrote, "We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages."[24] "We in America,” wrote liberal journalist Mauritz Hallgren, “are being forced rapidly and definitely into Fascism..."[25]
Mussolini was convinced that the New Deal was copying Fascist economic policies.[26] "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices," wrote Mussolini in a review of FDR's book Looking Forward. "Without question, the mood accompanying this sea-change is reminiscent of Fascism." Mussolini wrote that the book New Frontiers, by FDR's Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, was "just as 'corporativistic' as the individual solutions put forth in it... The book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism..."[27] On a visit to New York, Mussolini said to Grover Whalen, Chairman of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's Committee on Receptions to Distinguished Guests, "You want to know what Fascism is? It is like your New Deal."[28]
Nazi Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht declared that Roosevelt had the same economic idea as Hitler and Mussolini;[29] the official Nazi Party organ, Völkischer Beobachter, praised what it called "Roosevelt's Dictatorial Recovery Measures", writing, "We, too, as German National Socialists are looking toward America.... Roosevelt is carrying out experiments and they are bold. We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail." The paper applauded “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” commenting, "Many passages in [Roosevelt's] book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist."[30]
Hitler himself admired FDR’s approach, saying, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”[31] Hitler likewise congratulated Roosevelt for "his heroic effort in the interest of the American People." He added:
“ | The President's successful struggle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German People with interest and admiration. The Reich Chancellor is in accord with the President that the virtues of sense of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline must be the supreme rule of the whole Nation. This moral demand, which the President is addressing to every single citizen, is also the quintessence of German philosophy of the State, expressed in its motto "The public weal before private gain."[32] | ” |
But Hitler's admiration for Roosevelt gave way to contempt upon the opening of hostilities. With the German declaration of war against the United States, Hitler would deprecate Roosevelt, not as a tool of the Bolsheviks, but as "the candidate of a Capitalist Party."[33]
As early as 1933, the manifesto of the first United States Congress Against War and Fascism (a Communist front) "pointed to the NRA, the CCC, and the other policies of the Roosevelt administration as indications of America's preparedness for war and Fascism," according to FDR's Attorney General Francis Biddle.[34] The well-known socialist Theodore Dreiser (who would become an open Communist in 1945),[35] classed FDR with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, saying that all used the ideas of Karl Marx.[36]
"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," observed President Ronald Reagan, himself a former New Dealer. "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."[37] Even "intellectual observers of economics and social policies who were otherwise Roosevelt allies," observes Schivelbusch, "saw a Fascist element at the core of the New Deal."[38]
Roosevelt’s economic adviser, Rexford Tugwell, the “most prominent of the Brain Trusters and the man often considered the chief ideologist of the 'first New Deal' (roughly, 1933–34),”[39] was "open in his respect for Mussolini's economic policies." Of the Fascist system he wrote, "It's the cleanest, neatnest [sic], most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious." Tugwell, "the most left-wing member of Roosevelt's brain trust,"[40] said, “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary... Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has. But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily.”[41]
Roosevelt was also a secret admirer of Mussolini, writing to his friend John Lawrence, "I don't mind telling you in confidence, that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman."[42] FDR also wrote to U.S. Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long about Mussolini, "I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble."[43] According to ex-Marxist[44] Lewis Feuer, FDR privately acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.”[45]
Tugwell was deeply interested in the ideas of the Fabian Society (which "set up the banner of Socialism militant"),[46] particularly those of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Referring to Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Tugwell commented, “Miss Perkins was literate in the Fabian tradition, and so were some of the rest of us.” Roosevelt himself, observed Tugwell, “had a good Harvard education when Fabianism was developing, and he probably knew quite well the work of Wells and Shaw."[47] But as John T. Flynn, who had supported Roosevelt in the 1932 election, observed, "the line between fascism and Fabian socialism is very thin. Fabian socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator."[48] One Fabian socialist from the 1920s and '30s, Oswald Mosley,[49] went on to found and lead the British Union of Fascists, in which role he was lauded by Shaw,[50] who also admired both Mussolini and Hitler.[51]
Shaw had contempt for freedom. Mussolini, Hitler and other dictators, he wrote, "can depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods," rather than by what Shaw dismissed as "comfortable notions of freedom."[52] Asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain, Shaw replied, "Welcome them as tourists."[53]
Shaw thoroughly endorsed[54] the Nazi doctrine of "life unworthy of life" (Lebensunwertes Leben).[55] In the BBC's weekly magazine, he made a 1933 "appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. Deadly by all means, but humane not cruel..."[56] His appeal would shortly come to fruition in Nazi Germany.[57]
H.G. Wells had similar contempt for human life, writing, "No doubt Utopia will kill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births."[58] In a 1932 speech at Oxford University, Wells exhorted his audience, “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”[59] Two years later Roosevelt and key members of his “Brains Trust” met with Wells, who judged FDR “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order... He is continually revolutionary in the new way without ever provoking a stark revolutionary crisis.”[60] Wells had no difficulty identifying FDR's program as socialism:
“ | The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?[61] | ” |
Wells observed that "the President ... has made himself the spear-head of the collectivising drive"; that he was engaged in "progressive socialisation of the nation"; and that his opposition threatened to "slow down the drift to socialism."[62] Wells suggested that the President and First Lady were particularly incurious about the source of the ideas they took for granted:
“ | I doubt if these two fine, active minds have ever inquired how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians the world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made.[63] | ” |
"Combined with the relief program and with public works," wrote Perkins, the the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the centerpiece of the "first New Deal," constituted "an effective demonstration of the theories which John Maynard Keynes had been preaching and urging upon the English government," adding:
“ | [Keynes] pointed out that the combination of relief, public works, raising wages by NRA codes, distributing moneys to farmers under agricultural adjustment, was doing exactly what his theory would indicate as correct procedure. He was full of faith that we in the United States would prove to the world that this was the answer.[64] | ” |
Keynes had long been sympathetic to corporatist ideas. According to James R. Crotty, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Sheridan Scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst:
“ | When Keynes heralded the death of laissez-faire in the 1920s, it was not just macroeconomic policy he had in mind. He called with equal enthusiasm for the state to adopt powerful industrial policies to regulate enterprise and industry behavior. At least in this period, Keynes was unabashedly corporatist.[65] | ” |
In his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes advocated "a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment." Agreeing with Lenin's NEP, Mussolini's corporatism, and Hitler's national socialism, he added, "This need not exclude all manner of compromises and devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative." Nevertheless, he insisted, "The central controls necessary to ensure full employment will, of course, involve a large extension of the traditional functions of government."[66]
In a 1939 interview by the Fabian Kingsley Martin, published in the New Statesman (a British journal founded by leading Fabians), Keynes conceded that his economic proposals envisioned—again like the NEP, Fascism and National Socialism—an "amalgam of private capitalism and state socialism."[67] In this interview, Keynes dubbed his system "liberal socialism"; in 1944 he would explicitly refer to this approach as yet another a "middle way."[68] That year, he would work together with Soviet agent[69] Harry Dexter White to create the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, quintessential "Third Way" globalist institutions.
Keynes had been involved with Fabian socialism since at least his student days at Cambridge.[70] Mosley had been a Fabian socialist in 1930, when Keynesian economics was the "officially accepted Fabian line," notes Former Trotskyite[71] Zygmund Dobbs. Mosley went on to found the British Union of Fascists, which "at first was modeled after Mussolini’s example but later became patterned after Hitler. Through all these tergiversations, Mosley never had to abandon his Keynesist principles."[72] As a leading Fascist propagandist[73] noted (in a book with a preface by Mussolini):[74]
Communist Party General Secretary William Z. Foster commented, "The Nazi fascists were especially enthusiastic supporters of Keynes."[76] As Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, in Nazi Germany, "A work like Keynes’ General Theory could have appeared unmolested—and did."[77] In the introduction to the 1936 German edition of his treatise, Keynes himself suggested that the total state that the National Socialists were then building was perfectly suited for the implementation of his investment schemes:
“ | The theory of aggregate production that is the goal of the following book can be much more easily applied to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given output turned out under the conditions of free competition and a considerable degree of laissez-faire.[78] | ” |
Moreover, Keynes was at least an ambivalent anti-Semite. He called Albert Einstein "a naughty Jew boy... that kind of Jew... who have not sublimated immortality into compound interest." This he contrasted with
“ | the other kind of Jews, the ones who are... serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.[79] | ” |
According to Keynes:
“ | [Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs.[80] | ” |
Just as Roosevelt expressed to Ambassador Long his admiration of Mussolini, Long in turn reported to Tugwell regarding Fascist economics, “Your mind runs along these lines.... It may have some bearing on the code work under N.R.A.”[81] The NRA—“the New Deal’s attempt to bring to America the substance of Mussolini’s corporativism”[82]—was established by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933--centerpiece of the New Deal legislation—which was “similar to experiments being carried out by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy and by the Nazis in Adolf Hitler's Germany,” according to John A. Garraty,[83] president of the Society of American Historians.[84] "There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt's managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price 'codes' for American industry," wrote Schivelbusch.[85] According to Leon Keyserling, chairman of President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers, NIRA had grown out of the 1931 "Swope Plan,"[86] which, aping Mussolini, had proposed "a national organization of modified cartels in which competition would be limited, overproduction governed, workers and investors vigorously protected," all controlled by "some Federal supervisory body."[87] As one NRA study concluded, “The Fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”[88]
The Italian Fascist Party journal of political theory Gerarchia (Leadership) characterized the NRA as "bearing a Fascist signature" and as "corporatism without the corporations." Progressive journalist Roger Shaw agreed, "The NRA... was plainly an American adaptation of the Italian corporate state."[89] When Roosevelt referred to the industrial cartels established by the NRA as "modern guilds," writes Schivelbusch, he was making "reference to the corporatist system associated with Fascism."[90] FDR's own economics instructor at Harvard[91] concurred, identifying the NRA as "essentially fascistic."[92]
Just as Mussolini “organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state supervised trade association” that “operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc.,”[93] the NRA “forced virtually all American industry, manufacturing, and retail business into cartels possessing the power to set prices and wages, and to dictate the levels of production.”[94]
As head of the NRA and thus “FDR’s leading bureaucrat,”[95] the President appointed[96] General Hugh Johnson, who was granted “almost unlimited powers over industry.”[97] According to economist Thayer Watkins (who teaches economic history at California’s San José State University),[98] Johnson was “an admirer of Mussolini’s National Corporatist system in Italy and he drew upon the Italian experience in formulating the New Deal.”[99] Walker F. Todd, research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, agrees that Johnson “did admire greatly what Mussolini appeared to have done,” identifying the NRA as a “thoroughly corporativist” idea.[100]
According to Jonah Goldberg, Johnson displayed a portrait of Il Duce in his NRA office and actually distributed a memo at the 1932 Democratic Convention proposing that the entire Congress and Supreme Court be sent into temporary exile and that "FDR become a Mussolini-like dictator.”[101] In his retirement speech, Johnson invoked what he called the “shining name” of Mussolini.[102] Johnson was said to carry around with him a copy of Raffaello Viglione’s pro-Mussolini book,[103] The Corporate State, and presented a copy to Perkins.[104]
Roosevelt appointed Johnson’s former business partner George Peek to head the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Both men had “worked with the War Industries Board, the agency that regulated American production during World War I, and they believed their experience of managing an economy almost totally sealed off from the world market would suit the country now.”[105] They had long advocated a policy of expanding tariffs to keep foreign agricultural products out of the United States,[106] a policy that would have again rendered the U.S. economy “almost totally sealed off from the world market”[107]—a fair approximation of “autarky,” an economic policy particularly but not exclusively “associated with Nazi economic organization.”[108] Indeed, the AAA was analogous to the Reich Food Estate, which had been established in Germany by the Nazis to similarly dictate agricultural production quotas and prices.[109] Like the AAA (and Mussolini's "Battle for Grain")[110] the Reich Food Estate promoted agricultural protectionism[111] in pursuit of autarky.[112]
"The German Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst—RAD) arose from a party organization set up in 1931 and known as the NS-Arbeitsdienst for the purpose of easing unemployment,"[113] "like its New Deal equivalent, the Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC],"[114] which would be established two years later.[115] According to Garraty, both
“ | were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.' In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.[116] | ” |
The CCC "smacks of Fascism, of Hitlerism, of a form of Sovietism," observed William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor.[117] "The American side, and especially President Roosevelt himself, was strikingly open and receptive to ideas emanating from Nazi Germany," writes historian Kiran Klaus Patel. According to Patel, there was at least one actual "intercultural transfer," in which the CCC studied and adopted ("on personal orders from Roosevelt") a program for training aviation mechanics modeled after the Flyer Hitler Youth.[118]
The National Youth Administration (NYA) was conceived as a New Deal “alternative to the Hitler Youth,” designed to hold young people “to their patriotic loyalties.”[119] Harry Hopkins—whom Ishkak Akhmerov, the NKVD's leading illegal officer in the United States,[120] identified as "the most important of all Soviet war-time agents in the United States"[121] (according to Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect) -- told the the NYA's Advisory Committee, “we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”[122] Hopkins had hired the Communist[123] lawyer Lee Pressman back into the government immediately after he was "purged" from AAA.[124] According to Pressman, Hopkins told him, “The first time you tell me I can’t do what I want to do, you’re fired. I’m going to decide what I think has to be done and it’s up to you to see to it that it’s legal.”[125] Among his other hires was Eleanor Roosevelt's close friend Lorena Hickok, whom Hopkins brought into the government on Mrs. Roosevelt's recommendation. Hickok wrote, "If I were 20 years younger and weighed 75 pounds less, I think I'd start out to be the Joan of Arc of the Fascist Movement of the United States."[126]
Even some New Dealers have come to see the essential similarities between their ideology and fascism. For example, according to Friendly Fascism, by left-wing political science professor Bertram Gross, a leading architect of liberal social policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Carter:[127]
“ | I sought solutions for America's ills... through more power in the hands of central government.... In this I was not alone. Almost all my fellow planners, reformers, social scientists, and urbanists presumed the benevolence of more concentrated government power.
Big Business-Big Government partnerships ..., were the central facts behind the power structures of old fascism in the days of Mussolini, Hitler and the Japanese empire builders.... I see Big Business and Big Government as a joint danger.... Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of this creeping fascism.... In America, it would be supermodern and multiethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. |
” |
While writing his book, Gross dreamed that he was searching through a huge, empty house for "friendly fascists."
“ | I flung open one of the doors," Gross writes. "And there sitting at a typewriter and smiling back at me, I saw myself."[128] | ” |
Several myths have formed around the Great Depression. Among these are the myth that the Depression was brought to an end by the New Deal, or by the "wartime prosperity" of World War II. Neither of these is true. One study found that New Deal policies actually prolonged the depression by about seven years.[129] In fact, Americans' personal consumption did not rebound to 1929 levels until 1941.[130] "[T]he consensus among historians today," writes Schivelbusch, is "that the United States completely emerged from the Depression only with its entry into World War II."[131] Although the conscription of some 10 million young men into the armed forces reduced the civilian unemployment rate during World War II, the standard of living in the U.S. actually declined during the war. Using the Friedman-Schwartz price index, economist Robert Higgs found that real personal consumption per capita actually declined by more than 6 percent during 1941-1943, and did not recover to the 1941 level until 1946.[132]
Categories: [Liberalism] [Fascism] [New Deal]