The New Deal Made Them "Right"

Remembering FDR's principled liberal opponents

Damon W. Root | October 16, 2009

Toward the end of a mostly sympathetic profile of the great journalist and critic H. L. Mencken, Christopher Hitchens once claimed that Mencken’s only “brilliance and verve” occurred during “the period between 1910 and the end of Prohibition.” Which is to say, before Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came along. It’s an all too common refrain. Biographer Terry Teachout characterized Mencken as “blinded partly by his hatred of Roosevelt.” Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher—whom you’d expect to know better—declared Mencken’s opinion of Roosevelt to be “maniacal—there is no other word to use.”

Although it’s true that Mencken ended the 1930s as an enemy of what he called FDR’s “More Abundant Life,” he hardly started out the decade that way. A self-described “lifelong Democrat,” Mencken voted for Roosevelt in 1932 and voiced cautious support for the New Deal’s first stirrings, writing in March 1933, “I have the utmost confidence in his good intentions, and I believe further that he has carried on his dictatorship so far with courage, sense and due restraint.”

It wasn’t until Mencken realized the vast size and intrusive scope of that “dictatorship” that he went on the attack, lambasting the New Deal as a “puerile amalgam of exploded imbecilities, many of them in flat contradiction of the rest.” Indeed, in a passage that could be recycled and reused in our own troubled times, Mencken denounced Roosevelt for proposing “to lift the burden of debt by encouraging fools to incur more debt, and to husband the depleted capital of the nation by outlawing what is left of it.”

“That the rebel of the twenties should now become a spokesman of the conservatives of the thirties,” observed Mencken scholar Malcom Moos, “came as a shock to many of Mencken’s admirers.” But was it really so shocking? As America’s most famous political journalist for several decades, Mencken routinely championed the individual against the collective, siding with the imprisoned antiwar socialist Eugene V. Debs, with the embattled high school science teacher John Scopes, and with the thankless American taxpayer, the sort “who feels that he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him.” To put it differently, Mencken didn’t turn right, the country lurched wildly to the left.

And he wasn’t the only one to feel the shift. By the late 1930s, a handful of prominent liberals suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the New Deal consensus. Much like Mencken, they joined the “right” almost by default. For the sin of holding fast to certain fundamental beliefs, including the quaint notion that big business and big government should be kept as far apart as possible, they were dubbed heartless reactionaries and “economic royalists.” Yet thanks to their principled opposition, some of the New Deal’s worst excesses were brought to light or kept at least partially in check.

Branded as a Tory and a Reactionary

Foremost among the members of this new “right” was the muckraking journalist John T. Flynn. Unlike Mencken, whose radical views had always centered on a rugged brand of individualism, Flynn qualified as a progressive liberal until the New Deal drove him away. A graduate of Georgetown Law School, Flynn made his name in the 1920s and early 1930s as a left-leaning financial columnist and author whose books bore such titles as Graft in Business and Trusts Gone Wrong! He enjoyed identifying and exposing the dirty deeds of big business and, as biographer John Moser writes, “in particular he saw abuses in the banking system and the New York Stock Exchange, and as early as February 1929 he was predicting that the value of corporate securities was about to plummet.” Flynn’s work earned him a prominent perch at the New Republic, then as now one of the country’s leading left-liberal publications, where he wrote a weekly economics column from 1933 until he was dropped in 1940 for his increasingly harsh attacks on FDR’s policies.

But like Mencken, Flynn started out as a Roosevelt supporter, referring to the New Deal as a “promising experiment.” It took the National Recovery Administration to cure him of that. The centerpiece of FDR’s first 100 days, the NRA represented the nightmare of central planning made real. Enacted as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which FDR hailed as “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress,” the NRA sought to micromanage the economy through more than 500 wage-, hour-, and price-fixing “codes of fair competition,” mandating everything from the price of food to the cost of having a shirt hemmed. The NRA’s stated purpose was to increase efficiency via military-style organization, yet as historian Arthur Ekirch has pointed out: “Little attention was paid to the fact that it was industry itself that had largely prepared the regulations governing prices and production. Also ignored was the fact that the NRA meant the suspension of antitrust laws along with the whole theory of free competition and free enterprise.”

Flynn was among the few who noticed. As a member of the progressive movement, he had long worried about the growing power and influence of the big corporations. Now FDR and his so-called brain trust were climbing into bed with them! As Flynn put it, “Curiously, every American liberal who had fought monopoly, who had demanded the enforcement of the anti-trust laws, who had denied the right of organized business groups, combinations and trade associations to rule our economic life, was branded as a Tory and a reactionary if he continued to believe these things.” Thus Flynn found himself on the right.

Using the same muckraking approach that had made him a darling of the left, Flynn denounced the NRA as “probably the gravest attack upon the whole principle of the democratic society in our political history.” As for Roosevelt, Flynn argued that although the president proclaimed “his devotion to democracy, he adopted a plan borrowed from the corporative state of Italy and sold it to all the liberals as a great liberal revolutionary triumph.”

Nor did these scathing attacks go unnoticed. After reading an article of Flynn’s published by the Yale Review, FDR wrote privately to the editor, denouncing Flynn as “a destructive rather than a constructive force” who “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.”

The Banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland

While Flynn’s words certainly stung, the attacks from Democratic hero Al Smith shook the New Deal coalition to its core. A legend among the reform-minded, Smith had long championed leftist causes ranging from minimum wage laws for women to government-built housing for the poor. A child of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Smith rose from Tammany Hall to the state capitol at Albany, where he served four terms as New York governor. In 1928, he received the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, though he suffered a disastrous electoral defeat at the hands of Republican Herbert Hoover. At the 1932 party convention, Smith lost the nomination to FDR.

So it came as a surprise when Smith began criticizing the New Deal. After all, hadn’t he supported the same sort of policies in New York? But like Flynn, Smith saw himself as a constructive critic, not as a partisan foe. As one of the country’s most famous opponents of alcohol prohibition, a group popularly known as the “wets,” Smith had been deeply troubled by the lessons of the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition, he wrote in 1933, “gave functions to the Federal government which that government could not possibly discharge, and the evils which came from the attempts at enforcement were infinitely worse than those which honest reformers attempted to abolish.” As biographer Christopher Finan put it, Smith “began to believe that the danger of giving new power to the federal government outweighed any good it might do. . . . He was putting himself on a collision course with the New Deal.”

That collision came on January 25, 1936, when Smith delivered a fiery anti–New Deal speech before the Liberty League, a mostly conservative group organized in opposition to Roosevelt’s policies. As Smith told the capacity crowd gathered at Washington’s Mayflower hotel, “this country was organized on the principles of representative democracy, and you can’t mix Socialism or Communism with that.” Deriding FDR and his brain trust for their “betrayal” of the Democratic party’s principles, Smith declared: “It is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas or Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch, but what I won’t stand for is to let them march under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland.”

Comments

John Tagliaferro|10.16.09 @ 12:22PM|#

So can we sell off TVA now?

Attorney|10.16.09 @ 12:38PM|#

Great article, Damon!

Colin|10.16.09 @ 12:51PM|#

Yes -- very well done, indeed.

|10.16.09 @ 12:51PM|#

Walter Lippmann would be another one to add to the list, considering that he was a founder of the New Republic and an adviser to President Wilson, but his The Good Society was pretty scathing about the New Deal.

Mad Max|10.16.09 @ 12:54PM|#

From the article:

‘As America’s most famous political journalist for several decades, [H.L.] Mencken routinely championed the individual against the collective, siding with . . . the embattled high school science teacher John Scopes . . .’

That depends on how you define ‘champion[ing]’ Scopes. If you mean that Mencken viciously denounced the rural Tennessee Protestants who opposed evolution, then yes, Mencken championed the teacher. But if you mean that Mencken sided with Scopes’ legal argument that the Tennessee evolution statute was unconstitutional, the opposite is the case. In the July 1, 1925 issue of The Nation magazine, Mencken wrote that the Tennessee legislature had every right to regulate what teachers taught in the government schools, even if that meant banning the teaching of evolution. The magazine later paraphrased Mencken’s article as follows, ‘One of the country's great journalists says that freedom of speech is just an illusion when it comes to teaching.’ I’ve read the article in print (it doesn’t seem to be available on the Internet, at least not for free), and Mencken basically makes the king’s-shilling argument: The government gets to regulate the behavior of its own employees. To be sure, Mencken didn’t think the Tennessee evolution law was wise, but he *did* believe it was constitutional.

What Mencken ‘championed’ was not the legal defense of Scopes, but a broader cultural narrative about retarded hicks and their superstitions.

John Tagliaferro|10.16.09 @ 1:02PM|#

Too bad he was not championing the abolition of public schools. Then we would have someone to admire.

mark|10.16.09 @ 1:29PM|#

I agree with Mencken here, as I imagine Clarence Thomas does (though strip searches for aspirin go to far, of course). Freedom of speech is an illusion in school.

CH|10.16.09 @ 3:22PM|#

Freedom on ANYTHING is an illusion in school.

|10.18.09 @ 1:17PM|#

Not true. You have the freedom to comply or get expelled.

Paul|10.16.09 @ 1:09PM|#

And he wasn’t the only one to feel the shift. By the late 1930s, a handful of prominent liberals suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the New Deal consensus.

It's funny. I always am quick to credit liberal in my transformation to libertarianism. All of the ideas that made me "not a republican" came from liberal doctrine. I'm reluctant to give the era so as not to date myself...

However, when I finally got to the 'liberal party', all the liberals had left. Suddenly my Democrat friends were preaching duty to country, limits to free speech, collective 'rights' over individual rights, deference to authority, national service, rooting for military intervention and foreign entanglements.

zoltan|10.16.09 @ 2:16PM|#

The words liberal and conservative have certainly been dirtied in the last century.

|10.18.09 @ 9:56PM|#

Intentionally, by both sides, I think.

Paul|10.16.09 @ 1:23PM|#

“a destructive rather than a constructive force” who “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.”

Every time I think I'm too hard on Roosevelt, I find something out about him that just fucks everything up, and I realize the guy was nothing more than a tyrant with a smile on his mug.

mark|10.16.09 @ 1:33PM|#

And were it not for the war, I believe history would not have been so kind to him.

Russ 2000|10.16.09 @ 1:23PM|#

Mencken voted for Roosevelt in 1932 and voiced cautious support for the New Deal’s first stirrings, writing in March 1933, “I have the utmost confidence in his good intentions, and I believe further that he has carried on his dictatorship so far with courage, sense and due restraint.”

I stopped reading Root's article right there.

I've read Mencken's political columns of the 20's and 30's in chronological order. The sentence Root quotes was mostly sarcastic, Mencken's support for Roosevelt was always tempered by an admission that Roosevelt's plank were mostly nonsens; Mencken voted for Roosevelt because he expected him to end prohibition.

To describe one's self as a Mencken Scholar is to proudly admit that you don't understand your subject. I'm glad that these so-called scholars have worked to keep Mencken's work in print, but their opinions are buncombe.

|10.16.09 @ 1:45PM|#

Yeah, but Mencken was sarcastic and biting about all politicians and their bunkum. He only became really horrified by FDR later when he realized that FDR really meant all the worst things in his platform.

Paul|10.16.09 @ 1:51PM|#

Russ, I have not read many of Mencken's columns, but whe I read the quote in Root's article, I scratched my chin when I read the word "dictator". That, to me seemed a sarcasm about his feeling regarding Roosevelt's presidency at large.

But I'm not sure if the way Root presented it in his article nullifies the thesis.

Gabriel E|10.17.09 @ 9:02AM|#

I may be mistaken, but I believe the word dictator did not have as much of a negative association attached to it back then. It was only after people knew about the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, that the word got it's bad vibe.

Pedantula|10.16.09 @ 5:52PM|#

"I stopped reading Root's article right there..."

Thank god, because who knows what harm might have come to you by going further.

Is everyone else okay?

JoshInHB|10.16.09 @ 9:17PM|#

No I'm not.
The guv really can give me a free ride, cant they?

|10.16.09 @ 11:21PM|#

Excellent article, though I remain pessimistic.

Bruce|10.18.09 @ 12:51PM|#

I sympathize with Mencken. I have not changed from Republican to Democrat, the Republican party has turned into a bunch of fascist, racist jesus-fuckers who abhor logic and common sense as "elistism." If he were alive today, Barry Goldwater would be tossed out of the GOP on his ass, called "communist" and "terrorist sympathizer" and "america hating socialist." Goldwater wouldn't be able to win so much as a local school board election as a Republican.

Politically speaking (ignoring issues of race and sex), both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are several degrees to the right of Barry Goldwater. That's how much our country has changed. A change for the worse, I might add.

|10.18.09 @ 1:21PM|#

Your adjectives are a little harsh, but I agree with you on what the GOP has become. At the same time, the Democrat Party has changed from the states' rights, classical liberal party to the collectivist, statist party that couldn't give a shit about individuals.

And on a side note, both parties are now in bed with businesses, even if they are different ones, though the GOP likes to say that they support all businesses, while the Dems like to say they don't care about business.

Ratko|10.19.09 @ 5:12AM|#

Great article, it adds support to my theory that all politicians are bags of feces who manipulate the public to empower themselves. Little good knowing such can do, however, people are weak and Americans are no exception, enough will always eagerly exchange liberty for institutionalization on promises of immediate gratification to prevent any kind of organised attempts to prevent politicians from making themselves into rulers. The temptations to trade the fears invented by the politicians for a little of their warm comforting breast milk is too great for the bulk of the masses.

There will be no roll back, a return of our freedoms. My belief, that the best we can hope for is enough of a balance between the two parties to bring them to stalemate, if they can't get anything "done" they can't take any more liberty, is a belief that remains unchanged.

Nice work, though, hat's off to Mr. Root.