In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that “America has a dictator” in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of “spiritual renewal” were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were “immortal principles.” “America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an ‘etat majeur.’ There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices. This has nothing to do with any demo-liberal conception of things” In 1933 members of Mussolini’s press office recognized that these statements were starting to hurt their putative comrade-in-arms. They issued an order: “It is not to be emphasized that Roosevelt’s policy is fascist because these comments are immediately cabled to the United States and are used by his foes to attack him.” Still, the admiration remained mutual for several years. FDR sent his ambassador to Italy, Breekinridge Long, a letter regarding “that admirable Italian gentleman,” saying that Mussolini “is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.”
Perhaps Norman Thomas, America’s leading socialist, put the question best: “To what extent may we expect to have the economics of fascism without its politics?”
But the most glaring similarity between Nazi Germany, New Deal America, and Fascist Italy wasn’t their economic policies. It was their common glorification of war.
THE FASCIST NEW DEALS
The core value of original fascism, in the eyes of most observers, was its imposition of war values on society. (This perception—or misperception, depending on how it is articulated—is so fundamental to the popular understanding of fascism that I must return to it several times in this book.) The chief appeal of war to social planners isn’t conquest or death but mobilization. Free societies are disorganized. People do their own thing, more or less, and that can be downright inconvenient if you’re trying to plan the entire economy from a boardroom somewhere. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. The ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done: build roads, hospitals, houses. Domestic populations and institutions were required to “do their part.”
Many progressives probably would have preferred a different organizing principle, which is why William James spoke of the moral equivalent of war. He wanted all the benefits—Dewey’s “social possibilities” of war—without the costs. Hence, in more recent times, the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and “diversity” as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert-driven unity. But at the time the progressives just couldn’t think of anything else that did the trick. “Martial virtues,” James famously wrote, “must be the enduring cement” of American society: “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built.”
In Italy many of the first Fascists were veterans who donned paramilitary garb. The fascist artistic movement Futurism glorified war in prose, poetry, and paint. Mussolini was a true voluptuary of battle, rhetorically and literally. “War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it,” he declared in a Jamesian spirit in the Enciclopedia Italian’s entry on Fascism. Meanwhile, from the movement’s origin as the German Fighting League Against Interest Slavery, the Nazis were always a paramilitary organization, determined to recapture the esprit de corps of the Great War, the socialism of the trenches.
Still not every Fascist pounding the table about war actually wanted one. Mussolini didn’t launch a war until a full sixteen years into his reign. Even his Ethiopian adventure was motivated by a desire to revitalize Fascism’s flagging domestic fortunes. Hitler did not commence his military buildup at once, either. Indeed, while solidifying power, he cultivated an image as a peacemaker (an image many Western pacifists were willing to indulge in good faith). But few dispute that he saw war as a means as much as an end.
With the election of Franklin Roosevelt, the progressives who’d sought to remake America through war socialism were back in power. While they professed to eschew dogma, they couldn’t be more dogmatically convinced that World War I had been a successful “experiment.” Had not the experiences of the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy in the 1920s proved that America had dropped the ball by relinquishing war socialism?
During the campaign FDR promised to use his experience as an architect of the Great War to tackle the Depression. Even before he was nominated, he ordered aides to prepare a brief on presidential war powers. He asked Rexford Tugwell to find out if he could use the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act to unilaterally embargo gold exports and extracted an assurance from his intended attorney general that no matter what the arguments to the contrary, the Department of Justice would find that Roosevelt had the authority to do whatever he felt necessary in this regard. Roosevelt’s inaugural address was famously drenched with martial metaphors: “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to the disciplined attack upon our common problems.”
According to a document unearthed by the Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, FDR’s staff prepared a radio address to the American Legion, the first to be delivered after his inaugural, in which FDR was to instruct the veterans that they should become his own “extra-constitutional” “private army” (Alter’s words). “A new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound.”’ Roosevelt’s prepared text read, “I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.”
While Alter concedes this was “dictator talk—an explicit power grab” and showed that FDR or his minions contemplated forming “a makeshift force of veterans to enforce some kind of martial law.” he minimizes the importance of his own discovery. He leaves out the legacy of the American Protective League, which FDR no doubt endorsed. He fails to mention that the American Legion saw itself as an “American Fascisti” for a time. And he leaves out that FDR—who showed no reluctance when it came to using the FBI and other agencies to spy on domestic critics—oversaw the use of the American Legion as a quasi-official branch of the FBI to monitor American citizens.
Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War I. The Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, the signature public works project of the New Deal, had its roots in a World War I power project. (As FDR explained when he formally asked Congress to create the thing, “This power development of war days leads logically to national planning.”) The Supreme Court defended the constitutionality of the TVA in part by citing the president’s war powers.
Many New Deal agencies, the famous “alphabet soup,” were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the wan The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. FDR’s public housing initiative was run by the architect of World War I-era housing policies. During the war, public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR, everyone became in effect a war laborer.
Presumably it is not necessary to recount how similar all of this was to developments in Nazi Germany. But it is worth noting that for the first two years of the American and German New Deals, it was America that pursued militarism and rearmament at a breakneck pace while Germany spent relatively little on arms (though Hitler faced severe constraints on rearmament). The Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise as well as four cruisers, many smal
ler warships, and over one hundred army planes parked at fifty military airports. Perhaps one reason so many people believed the New Deal ended the Depression is that the New Deal’s segue into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.
Old Wilson hands infested every level of the Roosevelt bureaucracy. This makes sense in that Roosevelt’s was the first Democratic administration since Wilson. Even so. the New Dealers weren’t looking for mere retreads; they wanted war veterans. When Holger Cahill at first declined the invitation to head the Federal Art Project, a colleague explained. “An invitation from the Government to a job like that is tantamount to an order It’s like being drafted.”
Not only did government agencies organize themselves along military lines, but the staffers spoke in military jargon. Field work was work “in the trenches.” Junior staffers were called “noncoms.” New federal programs went “over the top.” And so on.
Perhaps no program better represented the new governmental martial outlook than the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Arguably the most popular program of the New Deal, the CCC mobilized some 2.5 million young men into what could only be called paramilitary training. CCCers mostly worked as a “forestry army,” clearing dead wood and the like. Enlistees met at army recruiting stations; wore World War I uniforms; were transported around the country by troop trains; answered to army sergeants; were required to stand at attention, march in formation, employ military lingo—including the duty of calling superiors “sir”—read a CCC newspaper modeled on Stars and Stripes; went to bed in army tents listening to taps; and woke to reveille.
After the CCC was approved by Congress, FDR reported, “It is a pretty good record, one which I think can be compared with the mobilization carried on in 1917.” The Speaker of the House boasted of the CCC/s success: “They are also under military training and as they come out of it they come out improved in health and developed mentally and physically and are more useful citizens and if ever we should become involved in another war they would furnish a very valuable nucleus for our army.”
Meanwhile, the Nazis were establishing similar camps for virtually identical reasons.
The chief motive among social planners was to get young men out of the mainstream workforce. The public arguments tended to emphasize the need to beef up the physical and moral fiber of an embryonic new army. FDR said the camps were ideal for getting youth “off the city street corners.” Hitler promised his camps would keep youth from “rotting helplessly in the streets.” Mussolini’s various “battles”—the “Battle of the Grains” and such—were defended on similar grounds.
A second rationale was to transcend class barriers, an aspect of the program that still appeals to liberals today. The argument, then as now, is that there are no common institutions that foster a sense of true collective obligation. There’s merit to this point. But it’s interesting that the Nazis were far more convinced of this rationale than the New Dealers, and it informed not only their Labor Service program but their entire domestic agenda.
A far more shocking example of the militarization of American life came in the form of the National Recovery Administration, led by Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, Time’s Man of the Year for 1933. General Johnson was a pugnacious brawler who threatened that Americans who didn’t cooperate with the New Deal would get a “sock in the nose.” The military liaison to the War Industries Board and director of America’s first military draft during the Great War—which he later called the “great schooling” for the New Deal—Johnson was convinced that what America needed was another injection of wartime fervor and fear. Few public figures—Joseph McCarthy included—were more prone to question the patriotism of their opponents. At every opportunity, Johnson claimed the war on the Depression was indistinguishable from battle. “This is war—lethal and more menacing than any other crisis in our history,” he wrote. No sphere of life was out of bounds for the new service. “It is women in homes—and not soldiers in uniform—who will this time save our country,” he announced. “They will go over the top to as great a victory as the Argonne. It is zero hour for housewives. Their battle cry is ‘Buy now under the Blue Eagle!’ ”
The Blue Eagle was the patriotic symbol of compliance that all companies were expected to hang from their doors, along with the motto “We do our part,” a phrase used by the administration the way the Germans used “Gemehmutz geht vor Eigemwtz” Now largely airbrushed from popular awareness, the stylized Indian eagle clutching a band of lightning bolts in one claw and an industrial cogwheel in the other was often compared to the swastika or the German Reich eagle in both American and German newspapers. Johnson demanded that compliance with the Blue Eagle program be monitored by an army of quasi-official informants, from union members to Boy Scouts. His totalitarian approach was unmistakable. “When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.”
It’s difficult to exaggerate the propagandistic importance FDR invested in the Blue Eagle. “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure their comrades do not fire on comrades,” the president explained. “On that principle those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance.” In a fireside chat in 1933, Roosevelt called for a great Mussolini-style “summer offensive against unemployment” Hollywood did its part. In the 1933 Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade, starring James Cagney, a chorus line uses flash cards to flip up a portrait of Roosevelt, and then forms a giant Blue Eagle. Will Rogers led a Who’s Who roster of stars in Blue Eagle and NRA radio broadcasts.
Johnson’s favorite means of promoting compliance with the Blue Eagle were military parades and Nuremberg-style rallies. On September 12, 1933. Johnson harangued an audience of ten thousand at Madison Square Garden, vowing that 85 percent of America’s workers were already under the authority of the Blue Eagle. The following day New York was nearly shut down by a Blue Eagle parade in honor of “The President’s NRA Day.” All Blue Eagle-compliant stores were ordered shut at 1:00 p.m., and the governor declared a half-day holiday for everyone else as well. Under the direction of a U.S. Army major general the Blue Eagle parade marched from Washington Square up Fifth Avenue to the New York Public Library, where it passed a reviewing stand upon which stood Johnson, the governors from the tristate area, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
This was the biggest parade in New York’s history, eclipsing even the ticker-tape parade to celebrate Charles Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic. In true corporatist fashion, labor and management alike were expected to participate. The President’s NRA Day Parade boasted fifty thousand garment workers, thirty thousand city laborers, seventeen thousand retail workers, six thousand brewery hands, and a Radio City Music Hall troupe. Nearly a quarter-million men and women marched for ten hours past an audience of well over a million people, with forty-nine military planes flying overhead. Because of events like this, writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Johnson and Roosevelt achieved their goal of “transforming a government agency into a religious experience.” A member of the British Independent Labour Party was horrified by such pageantry, saying it made him feel like he was in Nazi Germany.
The New York parade was no isolated incident. Similar spectacles were held in cities across the country, where marchers typically wore the uniforms of their respective occupations. The Philadelphia Eagles football team was named in honor of the Blue Eagle. A hundred thousand schoolkids were marched onto the Boston Common and forced to swear an oath, administered by the mayor: “I promise as a good American citizen to do my part for the NRA. I will buy only where the Blue Eagle flies.” In Atlantic City, beauty pageant contestants had the Blue Eagle stamped on their thighs. In San Francisco, eight thousand schoolchildren were orchestrated to form an enormous Blue Eagle. In Memphis, fifty thousand citizens marched in the city’s Christmas parade, which ended with Sa
nta Claus riding a giant Blue Eagle.
Not surprisingly, victims of the Blue Eagle received little sympathy in the press and even less quarter from the government. Perhaps the most famous case was Jacob Maged, the forty-nine-year-old immigrant dry cleaner who spent three months in jail in 1934 for charging thirty-five cents to press a suit, when the NRA had insisted that all loyal Americans must charge at least forty cents. Because one of the central goals of the early New Deal was to create artificial scarcity in order to drive prices up, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration ordered that six million pigs be slaughtered. Bountiful crops were left to rot. Many white farmers were paid not to work their land (which meant that many black tenant farmers went hungry). All of these policies were enforced by a militarized government.
In urban centers the plight of blacks was little better. By granting new collective bargaining powers to unions, FDR also gave them the power to lock blacks out of the labor force. And the unions—often viscerally racist—did precisely that. Hence some in the black press said the NRA really stood for the “Negro Run Around,” the “Negro Removal Act,” and “Negroes Robbed Again.” At a rally in Harlem a protester drew a picture of the Blue Eagle and wrote underneath: “That Bird Stole My Pop’s Job.” Meanwhile, under Johnson’s watchful eye, policemen would break down doors with axes to make sure tailors weren’t working at night and—literally—yank newsboys from the street because they didn’t work for big corporations.