The New Deal Made Them "Right"
Remembering FDR's principled liberal opponents
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Unfortunately for Smith, most Democrats saw things differently. Joseph Robinson, who had been Smith’s running mate on the 1928 presidential ticket, derided Smith for addressing the Liberty League’s “billion-dollar audience.” He “has turned away from the East Side with those little shops and fish markets,” Robinson sneered, “and now his gaze rests fondly upon the gilded towers and palaces of Park Avenue.”
Though Smith continued to enjoy hometown popularity in New York, he was basically excommunicated from the party. In 1936 he crossed the aisle to support Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon, declaring, “I am an American before I am a Democrat.” Four years later he campaigned on behalf of Republican Wendell Wilkie. FDR trounced them both.
As Smith remarked of his harsh treatment at the hands of one-time friends and allies, “Unless you’re ready to subscribe to the New Deal 100 per cent and sign your life name on the dotted line, you’re a Tory, you’re a prince of privilege, you’re a reactionary, you’re an economic royalist.” It took his support for FDR during World War II to repair the damage.
The Switch in Time
A similar impatience with the New Deal’s critics would famously reappear in FDR’s war on the Supreme Court, culminating in his failed court-packing bill of 1937, which would have allowed Roosevelt to appoint as many as six new Supreme Court justices. Among other things, that conflict transformed the fiery progressive Sen. Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) from a longtime friend into a deadly foe.
On February 5, 1937, FDR submitted his plan to reorganize the federal judiciary by allowing the president to appoint one new federal judge to match every sitting judge who had served at least 10 years and hadn’t retired or resigned within six months of turning 70. “A lower mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions,” FDR argued. “Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation.” In other words, the Court’s commitment to such “horse and buggy” notions as property rights and limited constitutional government kept getting in the New Deal’s way. Most ominously, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), the Court unanimously struck down FDR’s beloved NRA.
So Roosevelt bided his time, waiting until after his sweeping reelection in 1936 to strike against the “nine old men.” As historian William E. Leuchtenburg put it, the court-packing scheme “bore the mark of a sovereign who after suffering many provocations had just received a new confirmation of power.” Senator Wheeler would have agreed with that description, particularly the sovereign part. Wheeler thought the whole thing reeked of unbridled executive power.
And Wheeler, much more than Flynn or Smith, was a true-believing New Dealer with impeccable credentials. In 1924, he served as the running mate of Progressive Party presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette. As chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, Wheeler played an indispensable role in the 1935 passage of FDR’s bill to regulate utility holding companies. And on a personal note, when the Supreme Court nullified the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 in United States v. Butler (1936). Wheeler’s son-in-law, an economist at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, was tossed out of work.
But none of that changed Wheeler’s low opinion of FDR’s court-packing plan. As Wheeler wrote in a letter to the socialist leader Norman Thomas, “It is an easy step from the control of a subservient Congress and the control of the Supreme Court to a modern democracy of a Hitler or a Mussolini.” Addressing a national radio audience less than two weeks after FDR introduced the plan in Congress, Wheeler moved in for the kill: “Every despot has usurped the power of the legislative and judicial branches in the name of the necessity for haste to promote the general welfare of the masses—and then proceeded to reduce them to servitude. I do not believe that President Roosevelt has any such thing in mind, but such has been the course of events throughout the world.”
Against Wheeler’s incendiary rhetoric and crafty legislative maneuverings, the court-packing bill failed to garner the necessary votes and died in the Senate by a final tally of 70-20. Wheeler’s “conservative” stand thus helped preserve some degree of judicial independence. (Though FDR did eventually get what he wanted. By the time of his death in 1945, he had “packed” the Court with eight New Deal–friendly justices. And the plan itself is widely credited with influencing swing vote Justice Owen Roberts, whose newfound support was called “the switch in time that saved nine.”) Today’s pro-Roosevelt liberals might take a moment to contemplate what George W. Bush would have done with those courtpacking powers.
Superfluous Men
But outside of the court-packing battle, did the fight against the New Deal really matter? As Smith discovered, the voters didn’t seem to have any problem with Roosevelt, and most historians still praise him today for ending the Depression and “saving capitalism.” Is there anything to learn from the principled liberals who stood athwart the New Deal yelling stop?
Albert Jay Nock thought there was. An acclaimed journalist, editor, and biographer, Nock remains one of FDR’s most intriguing opponents. Though he’s normally remembered as a founding father of the modern libertarian and conservative movements, Nock actually championed a unique brand of Jeffersonian anti-statism that has never fit comfortably on the political right. An advocate of free trade and minimal government, he also opposed the private ownership of land, taking his cue from Henry George’s 1879 bestseller Progress and Poverty, which argued that the government should be funded exclusively via a “single tax” on collectively owned land.
Indeed, Nock’s political and economic views owed as much to the progressive historian Charles A. Beard as they did to the libertarian theorist Herbert Spencer. In his best remembered book, Our Enemy, The State, Nock combined Spencer’s emphasis on free trade and social cooperation with Beard’s thesis that the U.S. Constitution represented an “unscrupulous and dishonourable” coup d’etat waged explicitly by “the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor interests.” As historian Charles Hamilton observed about the Freeman, the political magazine Nock edited for its entire 1920–1924 run, readers “couldn’t decide if it was liberal, conservative, Bolshevik, revolutionary, anarchist, or Georgist.” Hamilton might as well have been writing about Nock himself.
And although Nock was never a New Deal supporter, he was nonetheless shoved to the right by the Rooseveltian juggernaut. As Brian Doherty observed in his definitive libertarian history, Radicals for Capitalism, “Nock had never stopped thinking of himself as a radical. He found it bitterly ironic that in the post-New Deal era, conservative businessmen became his primary audience.”
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So can we sell off TVA now?
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Great article, Damon!
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Yes -- very well done, indeed.
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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.
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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.
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Too bad he was not championing the abolition of public schools. Then we would have someone to admire.
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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.
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Freedom on ANYTHING is an illusion in school.
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Not true. You have the freedom to comply or get expelled.
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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.
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The words liberal and conservative have certainly been dirtied in the last century.
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Intentionally, by both sides, I think.
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“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.
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And were it not for the war, I believe history would not have been so kind to him.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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?
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No I'm not.
The guv really can give me a free ride, cant they? -
Excellent article, though I remain pessimistic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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While doing retroactive economic analysis, it strikes me as quite remarkable that the US economy did not recover on its own within at least 3-4 years from the 1929 event. All micro-economic thoery says that prices of productive goods should fall to levels that would allow them to become profitable, and a recovery from the pain should commence. Looking back, it is clear that only a man with a plan could delay the recovery for over 10 years, and require a major war to overcome the economic disruption.
Looking with the same jaundiced idea to today, I wonder how long the dear leader can prolong the admittedly painful recession with more "brilliant economic plans."
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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.
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Great article, thank you!
Indeed, and sadly, history is repeating itself! This time, we, the people, need to make it our mission to eradicate Socialism from our shores, once and for all!
Also, I refuse to call these people Liberals, as it continues to give them political cover. No, we need to call them precisely what they are: Socialists and Leftists.
Even the word Progressive is not fitting for a group whose policies only cause regressive results!
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I had a misdemeanor d be for the 96 gun law now i will be forced to sell my bussines after 35 years auto salvage yard to abide the law .Because of shells and guns in alot of them in my possesion Clean Record Since.
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is good