FDR1

As to the President, it is an account of an image projected upon the popular mind which came to be known as Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is the author's conviction that this image did not at all correspond to the man himself and that it is now time to correct the lineaments of this synthetic figure created by highly intelligent propaganda, aided by mass illusion and finally enlarged and elaborated out of all reason by the fierce moral and mental disturbances of the war. The moment has come when the costumes, the grease paint, the falsely colored scenery, the technicolored spotlights and all the other artifices of makeYDup should be put aside and, in the interest of truth, the solid facts about the play and the players revealed to the people. July, 1948 Preface to the Popsvox PublishingR edition Someone once said that Washington DC is a place where history is taken for granted and granite mistaken for history. The new FDR "memorial" is notable for what it forgets. John T. Flynn, active columnist and author throughout the Roosevelt years and beyond, made an enormous contribution to accurate reporting and genuine understanding of the New Deal. Unfortunately, Flynn's work has been out of print for decades while the politically correct elite have not only preserved the myth, they have now literally cast it in stone. Do not despair. The technology of the information age provides a remedy. Flynn is back, facts, footnotes and all, and in an electronically enhanced form unimagined in the age when journalists scribbled on notepads with pencil stubs. As a MicrosoftR WindowsR help file, it can be searched, annotated, printed out . . . or even read, page by pungent page. Even better for students, editorialists or online newsgroup debaters, the electronic version is only a mouse-click away when a citation is needed. No more flipping through paper texts in search of a passage about the Democratic National Committee or the $3,000.000 income Eleanor took down as First Lady. Find what you want when you want it. Add your own annotations and memory joggers. Tools are the human heritage, as are words and ideas. This revived book is produced for the Historical Research Foundation in New ork whose mission is the conservation of truth in history. - Ed. Saturday morning, March 4, 1933...the conquering Democrats poured into the city, hastening to take over after so many hungry years in the wilderness. {Hitler/1933?-sog} Only a week before an assassin's bullet had barely missed Roosevelt. It struck Anton Cermak, the Bohemian mayor and boss of Chicago, who with Al Smith, had opposed Roosevelt's nomination. he got the bullet intended for Roosevelt {BIG Assumption - sog}and died a few days later. Later, as Roosevelt's train sped from New ork to Washington carrying himself and his family, word came to him that aboard another train carrying the 65YDyearYDold Senator Thomas J. Walsh and his bride of two days, the aged groom dropped dead in his Pullman drawing room. He was speeding to the capital to be sworn in as Attorney General. Two weeks before the lameYDduck Congress had turned a somersault and voted the amendment to the Constitution ending Prohibition. FortyYDone legislatures were in session waiting eagerly for the chance to approve the wet amendment and to slap taxes on beer and liquor to save their empty treasuries. The country, the states, the towns needed money YD something to tax. And liquor was the richest target. "Revenue," said one commentator, "unlocked the gates for Gambrinus and his foaming steed." first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." "The means of exchange are frozen in the streams of trade." "et our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts3,300,000,000 YD in addition to all the other specific appropriations for government, into his hands to be spent at his sweet will in any way he desired. The great purse YD which is the greatest of all the weapons in the hands of a free parliament to oppose the extravagances of a headstrong executive YD had been handed over to him. The "spendthrift" Hoover was in California at his Palo Alto home putting his own affairs in order, while the great Economizer who had denounced Hoover's deficits had now produced in 100 days a deficit larger than Hoover had produced in two years. Roosevelt had no wish to stem the panic. The onrushing tide of disaster was sweeping the slate clean for him YD at the cost of billions to investors and depositors. The greater the catastrophe in which Hoover went out of power the greater would be the acclaim when Roosevelt assumed power. For this drastic decision there could be, of course, but one excuse, namely that Mr. Roosevelt had a definite plan and that such a plan could be better carried out with a full disaster. What, then, was his plan? We shall see presently.4 the crisis had assumed a terrifying aspect. To this was added the fear of inflation and of irresponsible and even radical measures by the new President. One of these, of course, was the agitation which went on behind the scenes for the nationalization of the whole banking system. Men close to the President-elect were known to be for this. Then Glass asked Roosevelt what he was going to do. To Glass' amazement, he answered: "I am planning to close them, of course." Glass asked him what his authority was and he replied: "The Enemy Trading Act" YD the very act Hoover had referred to and on which Roosevelt had said he had no advice from Cummings as to its validity. Glass protested such an act would be unconstitutional and told him so in heated terms. "Nevertheless," replied Roosevelt, "I'm going to issue a proclamation to close the banks." After delivering his inaugural address, Roosevelt issued a proclamation closing all banks. They decided that the action must be swift and staccato for its dramatic effect; that the plan, whatever it might be, must be a conservative one, stressing conventional banking methods and that all leftYDwing presidential advisers must be blacked out during the crisis; and finally that the President must make almost at the same time a tremendous gesture in the direction of economy. w it is difficult to believe that it could ever have been uttered by a man who before he ended his regime would spend not merely more money than President Hoover, but more than all the other 31 Presidents put together YD three times more, in fact, than all the Presidents from George Washington to Herbert Hoover. This speech was part of the plan Moley and Woodin had devised to sell the banking plan in a single package with the great economy program. To the great audience that listened to the fireside chat, the hero of the drama YD the man whose genius had led the country safely through the crisis of the banks YD was not any of the men who had wrestled with the problem, but the man who went on the radio and told of the plan he did not construct, in a speech he did not write. Thus Fate plays at her ageYDold game of creating heroes. a Great Man attended by a Brain Trust to bring understanding first and then order out of chaos. Actually there are no big men in the sense in which Big Men are sold to the people. There are men who are bigger than others and a few who are wiser and more courageous and farseeing than these. But it is possible with the necessary pageantry and stage tricks to sell a fairly bright fellow to a nation as an authentic BIG Man. Actually this is developing into an art, if not a science. It takes a lot of radio, movie, newspaper and magazine work to do it, but it can be done. {FDR/Hitler - sog} For the farmer the New Deal would encourage cooperatives and enlarge government lending agencies. But the greatest enemy of the farmer was his habit of producing too much. His surplus ruined his prices. The New Deal would contrive means of controlling the surplus and ensuring a profitable price. As for business the New Deal proposed strict enforcement of the antiYDtrust laws, full publicity about security offerings, regulation of holding companies which sell securities in interstate commerce, regulation of rates of utility companies operating across state lines and the regulation of the stock and commodity exchanges. Roosevelt in his preelection speeches had stressed all these points YD observing the rights of the states so far as to urge that relief, oldYDage pensions and unemployment insurance should be administered by them, that the federal government would merely aid the states with relief funds and serve as collection agent for social insurance. First of all, his central principle YD his party's traditional principle of war upon BIG government YD was reversed. And he set out to build a government that in size dwarfed the government of Hoover which he denounced. The idea of a government that was geared to assist the economic system to function freely by policing and preventive interference in its freedom was abandoned for a government which upon an amazing scale undertook to organize every profession, every trade, every craft under its supervision and to deal directly with such details as the volume of production, the prices, the means and methods of distribution of every conceivable product. This was the NRA. It may be that this was a wise experiment but it was certainly the very reverse of the kind of government which Mr. Roosevelt proposed in his New Deal. Enforcement of the antiYDtrust act was a longtime pet of his party and it was considered as an essential instrument to prevent cartels and trusts and combinations in restraint of trade which were supposed to be deadly to the system of free enterprise. The New Deal had called loudly for its strict enforcement. et almost at once it was suspended YD actually put aside during the experiment YD in order to cartelize every industry in America on the Italian corporative model. {Fascism! - sog} First, and most important, was the NRA and its dynamic ringmaster, General Hugh Johnson. As I write, of course, Mussolini is an evil memory. But in 1933 he was a towering figure who was supposed to have discovered something worth study and imitation by all world artificers everywhere. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The antiYDtrust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to combine. In spite of all the fine words about industrial democracy, people began to see it was a scheme to permit business men to combine to put up prices and keep them up by direct decree or through other devious devices. The consumer began to perceive that he was getting it in the neck. . A tailor named Jack Magid in New Jersey was arrested, convicted, fined and sent to jail. The crime was that he had pressed a suit of clothes for 35 cents when the Tailors' Code fixed the price at 40 cents. The price was fixed not by a legislature or Congress but by the tailors. The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman's garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police.8 They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man's factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coatYDandYDsuit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it. "Mob rule and racketeering had a considerable degree displaced orderly government."9 On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court, to everybody's relief, declared the NRA unconstitutional. It held that Congress at Roosevelt's demand had delegated powers to the President and the NRA which it had no right to delegate YD namely the power to make laws. It called the NRA a Congressional abdication. And the decision was unanimous, Brandeis, Cardozo and Holmes joining in it. But of course he had imposed it not as a temporary expedient but as a new order and he boasted of it. He had done his best to impose the dissolution of the antiYDtrust laws on the country. Curiously enough, while Wallace was paying out hundreds of millions to kill millions of hogs, burn oats, plow under cotton, the Department of Agriculture issued a bulletin telling the nation that the great problem of our time was our failure to produce enough food to provide the people with a mere subsistence diet. Oliphant was a lawyer whose reformist addictions overflowed into every branch of public affairs. A devout believer in rubber laws, it was easy for him to find one which could be stretched to include rubber dollars. We are thus continuing to move toward a managed currency." Roosevelt's billions, adroitly used, had broken down every political machine in America. The patronage they once lived on and the local money they once had to disburse to help the poor was trivial compared to the vast floods of money Roosevelt controlled. And no political boss could compete with him in any county in America in the distribution of money and jobs. The poll indicated that Long could corral 100,000 voted in New ork State, which could, in a close election, cost Roosevelt the electoral vote there. Long became a frequent subject of conversation at the White House. Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, a young physician, eluded the vigilance of Long's guards and shot him. " A monument stands to the memory of this arch demagogue in the Hall of Fame of the Capitol building in Washington and his body rests in a crypt on the state capitol grounds YD a shrine to which crowds flock every day to venerate the memory of the man who trampled on their laws, spat upon their traditions, loaded them with debt and degraded their society to a level resembling the plight of a European fascist dictatorship. The Treasury and the Department of Justice went into action and before long there were income tax indictments against at least 25 of the Long leaders and henchmen. When little men think about large problems the boundary between the sound and the unsound is very thin and vague. And when some idea is thrown out which corresponds with the deeply rooted yearnings of great numbers of spiritually and economically troubled people it spreads like a physical infection and rises in virulence with the extent of the contagion. The spiritual and mental soil of the masses near the bottom of the economic heap was perfect ground for all these promisers of security and abundance. They had cooked up for themselves that easy, comfortable potpourri of socialism and capitalism called the Planned Economy which provided its devotees with a wide area in which they might rattle around without being called Red. But the time would come when they would approach much closer to their dream of a planned people. We shall see that later. He was a man literally without any fundamental philosophy. The positions he took on political and economic questions were not taken in accordance with deeply rooted political beliefs but under the influence of political necessity. NRA and the AAA. This was a plan to take the whole industrial and agricultural life of the country under the wing of the government, organize it into vast farm and industrial cartels, as they were called in Germany,as they were called in Italy, and operate business and the farms under plans made and carried out under the supervision of government. As for the Reds, they did not move in heavily until the second term and not en masse until the third term, although the entering wedge was made in the first. And then the point of entry was the labor movement. This thing called revolutionary propaganda and activity is something of an art in itself. It has been developed to a high degree in Europe where revolutionary groups have been active for half a century and where Communist revolutionary groups have achieved such success during the past 25 years. It was, at this time of which I write, practically unknown to political and labor leaders in this country and is still unknown to the vast majority of political leaders. He vetoed that but had an arrangement with the Democratic leadership that they would pass it over his head. Thus the President could get credit for trying to kill it while the Democrats would get credit for actually passing it. Their chief reliance was upon the charge that the President had usurped the powers of Congress, attacked the integrity of the courts, invaded the constitutional prerogatives of the states, attempted to substitute regulated monopoly for free enterprise, forced through Congress unconstitutional laws, filled a vast array of bureaus with swarms of bureaucrats to harass the people and breed fear in commerce and industry, discourage new enterprises and thus prolonged the depression, had used relief to corrupt and intimidate the voters and made appeals to class prejudice to inflame the masses and create dangerous divisions. Their chief reliance was upon the charge that the President had usurped the powers of Congress, attacked the integrity of the courts, invaded the constitutional prerogatives of the states, attempted to substitute regulated monopoly for free enterprise, forced through Congress unconstitutional laws, filled a vast array of bureaus with swarms of bureaucrats to harass the people and breed fear in commerce and industry, discourage new enterprises and thus prolonged the depression, had used relief to corrupt and intimidate the voters and made appeals to class prejudice to inflame the masses and create dangerous divisions. . From the moment the gavel fell to open that wild conclave to the knock of the adjourning gavel everything that was said and done or that seemed to just happen was in accordance with a carefully arranged and managed scenario. The delegates were mere puppets and answered to their cues precisely like the extras in a movie mob scene. the South had both arms up to its shoulder blades in Roosevelt's relief and public works barrel. National politics was now paying off in the South in terms of billions. When Alf Landon talked about Roosevelt's invasions of the Constitution, the man on relief and the farmer fingering his subsidy check replied "ou can't eat the Constitution." As to the public debt he said we borrowed eight billions but we have increases the national income by 22 billions. Would you borrow $800 a year if thereby you could increase your income by $2200, he asked. That is what we have done, he answered, with the air of a man who has easily resolved a tough conundrum. And though the figures were false and the reasoning even more so it was practically impossible for a Republican orator to reason with voters against these seemingly obvious and plausible figures. The President's victory was due to one thing and one thing only, to that one great rabbit YD the spending rabbit YD he had so reluctantly pulled out of his hat in 1933. This put into his hands a fund amounting to nearly 20 billion dollars with which he was able to gratify the appetites of vast groups of people in every county in America . Without the revival of investment there could be no revival of the economic system. The system was being supported by government spending of borrowed funds. Roosevelt's unwillingness to compromise now angered his own supporters who were being forced to carry this unpopular cause. In the end he had to assure Robinson that he would have the appointment, and then to crown Roosevelt's difficulties, Robinson was stricken with a heart attack in the Senate and died shortly after, alone in his apartment. The Treasury made a practice of keeping tricky books and producing phony results. It had merely shifted relief payments to other accounts. They were, in fact, larger than the year before. Then he revealed the extent of his plans YD they would have to step up spending, forget about balancing the budget and get along with a two or three billion dollar a year deficit for two years. Then a conservative would come into office. That administration would do what Roosevelt had been promising he would do YD quit government spending. And then the whole thing would go down in a big crash. Then he revealed the extent of his plans YD they would have to step up spending, forget about balancing the budget and get along with a two or three billion dollar a year deficit for two years. Then a conservative would come into office. That administration would do what Roosevelt had been promising he would do YD quit government spending. And then the whole thing would go down in a big crash. What could he spend on? That was the problem. There is only a limited number of things on which the federal government can spend. The one big thing the federal government can spend money on is the army and navy. The depression which assaulted our unprepared society in 1929 was by no means a mysterious phenomenon to those who had given any attention to the more or less new studies in the subject of the business cycle. It was, first of all and essentially, one of those cyclical disturbances common to the system of private enterprise. That economic system has in it certain defects that expose it at intervals to certain maladjustments. And this was one of those intervals. Had it been no more than this it could have been checked and reversed in two or three years. But this cyclical depression was aggravated by additional irritants: 1. The banking system had been gravely weakened by a group of abuses, some of which arose out of the cupidity of some bankers and others out of ignorance. 2. A wild orgy of speculation had intruded into the system stimulated by a group of bad practices in the investment banking field. 3. A depression in Europe arising out of special causes there had produced the most serious repercussions here. The great, central consequence of these several disturbances was to check and then almost halt completely, the flow of savings into investment. All economists now know what few, apparently, knew then YD that in the capitalist system, power begins in the payments made by employers to workers and others in the process of producing goods. And this must be constantly freshened by an uninterrupted flow of savings into investment YD the creation of new enterprises and the expansion of old ones. If this flow of savings into investment slows down the whole economic system slows down. If it is checked severely the whole economic system goes into a collapse. throughout Hoover's term one of these YD the ruthless operation of gamblers in the stock market with the dangerous weapon of short selling YD continued to add at intervals spectacular crashes in the market which intensified the declining confidence of the people. But Hoover had against him, in addition to those natural, international and social disturbances, an additional force, namely a Democratic House of Representatives which set itself with relentless purpose against everything he attempted to do from 1930 on. It had a vested interest in the depression. and generally to do all those things he had denounced in Hoover without the slightest foundation for the charges. It was always easy to sell him a plan that involved giving away government money. It was always easy to interest him in a plan which would confer some special benefit upon some special class in the population in exchange for their votes. He was sure to be interested in any scheme that had the appearance of novelty and he would seize quickly upon a plan that would startle and excite people by its theatrical qualities. He did not dream of the incredible miracle of government BANK borrowing. He did not know that the bank lends money which it actually creates in the act of making the loan. When Roosevelt realized this, he saw he had something very handy in his tool kit. He could spend without taxing people or borrowing from them, while at the same time creating billions in bank deposits. Wonderful! Roosevelt discovered what the Italian Premier Giolitti had discovered over 50 years before, that it was not necessary to buy the politicians. He bought their constituents with borrowed money and the politicians had to go along. Those who, in their poverty and helplessness, refused to surrender their independence, paid for it. A man in Plymouth, Pa., was given a whiteYDcollar relief job before election at $60.50 a month. He was told to change his registration from Republican to Democratic. He refused and very soon found himself transferred YD transferred from his whiteYDcollar job to a pickYDaxe job on a rock pile in a quarry. There he discovered others on the rock pile who had refused to change their registration. This was in America, the America of the men who were chanting and crooning about liberty and freedom 365 days a year, who were talking about democracy and freedom for all men everywhere. These primaries of 1938, of course, were the scenes of the great Roosevelt purge, when distinguished Democratic senators and congressmen were marked for annihilation. It had already become a crime for a Democrat to disagree with the administration