A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  Moral condemnations and court injunctions didn’t stop the proliferation of nickelodeons that showed unseemly fare and violated Edison’s patent, so the inventor and his colleagues hired squads of thugs to shut them down. They seized film, beat up directors and actors, forced audiences out of theaters, smashed the nickelodeon arcades, and set fire to entire city blocks where they were concentrated. But fortunately, the Jewish renegades lived and operated in neighborhoods where hundreds of soldiers stood ready and able to protect them—men like “Big” Jack Zelig, “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg, Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Joe “the Greaser” Rosenzweig, and the leaders of the notorious Yiddish Black Hand, Jacob “Johnny” Levinsky and “Charley the Cripple” Vitoffsky. There were even women ready for the fight—fierce, well-armed gun molls like Bessie London, Tillie Finkelstein, Birdie Pomerantz, and Jennie “the Factory” Morris.

  Cameras, projectors, film, and sound equipment disappeared from the storerooms of Edison companies and showed up on makeshift movie lots on the Lower East Side. Bullets rained down on the Trust’s enforcers from the rooftops of nickelodeons. And fires destroyed the Edison distributors’ warehouses in the Bronx, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In 1915 a federal court ruled the Trust an illegal monopoly, but by then the outlaw filmmakers had moved west, where they could make bigger and better movies. Who were the men who, with the help of their nicknamed friends, fought Thomas Edison and the law and won? They were Marcus Loew of Loews Theatres and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, William Fox of Twentieth Century-Fox, and the brothers Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner.

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  “BEHOLD A DICTATOR”: FASCISM AND THE NEW DEAL

  It is absurd to claim, as a few have done, that the New Deal, the basis of what we now know as “liberalism,” was identical to either German Nazism or Italian Fascism. But it is equally 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. Though we think of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s regimes as pathological, even psychotic, and entirely alien to our political tradition, in fact, they were organically connected to the most influential American political movement of the twentieth century.

  The policies initiated during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency redefined the relationship between the federal government and American society. The ideas behind those policies overthrew the laissez-faire ideology that had dominated the nation’s political culture since its founding. Most fundamentally, the New Deal brought about an age of communal morality and made social regimentation a primary value in American popular culture. The margin of freedom between the individual and society was at its narrowest in the age of Roosevelt.

  Though many see the New Deal era as a rebellious moment, when American culture embraced the interests of the lowest classes, in fact—like the War of Independence, abolitionism, and Reconstruction—it was one of the great antirenegade moments in the history of the United States.

  THIS GREAT ARMY

  In the spring of 1934, one year into his first term as president, Roosevelt was assailed by the left, the right, and even members of his own party. Leading Republicans took turns denouncing the “new dictatorship” in Washington. Typical was the claim made by GOP Congressman James M. Beck of Pennsylvania that Roosevelt’s New Deal had transformed the government into a “socialistic state of virtually unrestricted power.” Voices on the left were no less caustic. The Communist Party officially labeled the president a “Fascist.” Also critical of Roosevelt’s “heavy-handed” approach and “radical” policies were several Democrats, including former presidential candidate Al Smith and former Democratic National Committee chairman John J. Raskob, who helped form the anti-Roosevelt American Liberty League.

  Of course, Roosevelt also had many loyal supporters. One of his admirers sent word to the White House encouraging the president to stand his ground and be proud of his “heroic efforts in the interests of the American people.” The president’s “successful battle against economic distress,” wrote the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, “is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration.”

  The New Deal had many critics, but it would not have captured American political life were it not enormously popular. Roosevelt won four elections, all by landslides, and the Democratic Party, whose platform was rebuilt on New Deal ideas, controlled the federal government for most of the mid-twentieth century. Industrial workers and African Americans moved en masse into the Democratic Party as a result of New Deal policies. A generation of intellectuals celebrated the “Roosevelt Revolution,” academic discourse is still dominated by its partisans, and Roosevelt continues to be widely considered one of the greatest presidents in American history. But when the New Deal was created, few of its supporters in the United States were as effusive in their praise as were German and Italian fascists.

  In July 1933, just four months after Roosevelt had taken office, the newly elected Hitler praised “Mr. Roosevelt,” who “marches straight to his objectives over Congress, lobbies, and the bureaucracy.” Hitler’s compliments were not merely attempts to curry favor with the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. Nazis continued to honor the New Deal as a project akin to their own. In January 1934, the Nazi Party’s newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, applauded Roosevelt’s “dictatorial” measures. “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.” Many of the most favorable reviews of Roosevelt’s books, Looking Forward (1933) and On Our Way (1934), were written by German critics who saw the New Deal and National Socialism as parallel enterprises. In 1934 a biography by the German author Helmut Magers, Roosevelt: A Revolutionary with Common Sense, lauded the New Deal as “an authoritarian revolution” with “surprising similarities” to the Nazi seizure of power.

  Through the first two years of the Roosevelt presidency, the Völkischer Beobachter continued to find many similarities between Hitler and the “absolute lord and master” of the United States. “If not always in the same words,” the Nazi newspaper wrote, “[Roosevelt], too, demands that collective good be put before individual self-interest. Many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.” Roosevelt put forward “the fictional appearance of democracy,” but in the United States “the development toward an authoritarian state is under way.” The newspaper praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies.”

  Hitler himself saw a kindred soul in the American president. He told the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, that he was “in accord with the president in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the president places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy; which finds its expression in the slogan ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.’” Dodd’s successor, Hugh R. Wilson, reported to Roosevelt in 1938 that he had told Hitler that “you were very much interested in certain phases of the sociological effort, notably for the youth and workmen, which is being made in Germany, and that one of my first tasks would be to report to you on how these were being carried out.” Even as late as 1940, when it was apparent that Roosevelt was eager to intervene militarily against Germany, Joseph Goebbels’s weekly newspaper Das Reich continued to insist on a kinship between Nazi and New Deal policies. An article entitled “Hitler and Roosevelt: A German Success—An American Attempt” lamented that the American “parliamentary-democratic system” kept the New Deal from becoming fully realized. Acco
rding to the historian John A. Garraty, “It is clear, however, that early New Deal depression policies seemed to Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer’s.”

  Fascists in Italy were similarly impressed with the New Deal. In Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini found a comrade. “The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle,” Mussolini wrote in his review of Looking Forward, “is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.” When he heard that the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 gave the president unchecked power over much of the national economy, Mussolini exclaimed, “Behold a dictator!”

  Self-proclaimed fascists were not the only ones drawing such comparisons. Many of America’s leading liberals and Democratic Party stalwarts were drawing them as well. George Soule, the editor of the New Republic, wrote, “We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social and political ravages.” Oswald Garrison Villard, the publisher of the Nation, came to regret his early endorsement of Roosevelt. “No one can deny that the entire Roosevelt legislation has enormously enhanced the authority of the president,” Villard wrote in 1934, “given him some dictatorial powers, and established precedents that would make it easy for any successor to Mr. Roosevelt, or for that gentleman himself, to carry us far along the road to Fascism or state socialism.” Two of the founders of Consumer Reports, J. B. Matthews and Ruth Shallcross, wrote in Harper’s magazine in 1934 that “if developed to its logical conclusion,” the principle behind early New Deal policies “arrives at the Fascist stage of economic control.”

  The New Deal’s resemblance to European fascism was most striking in the first two years of the Roosevelt administration. Both Roosevelt and Hitler came to power in the depths of the Depression, and both argued that their extraordinary accumulation of authority and the establishment of a martial society were necessary in a time that was as perilous, they claimed, as war. “Turbulent instincts must be replaced by a national discipline as the guiding principle of our national life,” Hitler declared to the German people in 1933. “If you preserve the same discipline, the same obedience, the same comradeship, and the same unbounded loyalty in the future—then nothing will ever extinguish this movement in Germany.” He called on all Germans to make themselves into a military force. “Today millions are pouring into our ranks,” he said. “But the greater part of them must learn now what this brown army has practiced for years; they must all learn to face what tens of thousands of our comrades have faced, and have paid for with their blood, their lives.” In that same year, in his inaugural address, Roosevelt said this:

  If 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 is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife. With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

  Roosevelt was probably not the only president to wish for such power, but he was the only one willing to demand it. Should the country fail to make itself into one great fighting force, “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me,” he said from the east portico of the Capitol. “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.” Roosevelt was the only president to achieve this power.

  Two days after taking office, Roosevelt, invoking a “national emergency,” took an unprecedented step toward autocratic power. For the first time in United States history, a president closed the nation’s banks. Then, on March 9, Congress transferred much of its power to the president and gave him sole authority over a large swath of the nation’s economy. The Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 was amended to declare that during time of war “or during any other period of national emergency declared by the President, the President may, through any agency that he may designate, or otherwise, investigate, regulate, or prohibit, under such rules and regulations as he may prescribe, by means of licenses or otherwise, any transactions in foreign exchange, transfers of credit between or payments by banking institutions as defined by the President, and exporting, hoarding, melting, or earmarking of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency.” Congress effectively gave the president unchecked control over banks and financial transactions in general, and everything concerning gold in particular. More ominously, the new law allowed the president to alone decide when to acquire and exercise that power.

  The Roosevelt administration’s next major step, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), passed in June 1933, became the defining legislation of the so-called “First New Deal.” It 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. In a stunning reversal of laissez-faire and a repudiation of the American devotion to free and competitive markets, the NIRA and the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which put the law into practice, suspended all federal antitrust laws and created cartels of businesses in every major industry that—instead of market forces—decided how much products would cost, how much workers would make, and how much companies would produce. These cartels were called “code authorities.” In Italy they were called “corporatives.” In Germany they were known as “industrial cartels.” But in all three nations they held the same powers, and in all three nations they could be overruled only by the head of state: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Roosevelt in the United States.

  How could such a radical policy come about in the United States? Many of the men who conceived of the NIRA were opposed to free markets, disdainful of democracy, and committed to a centrally controlled economy. The architects of the early New Deal had their roots in progressivism and shared that movement’s obsessions with social order, discipline, rationality, and the merging of the individual’s identity with the nation. These obsessions were a transatlantic phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century, but they were particularly powerful in the United States, Italy, and Germany.

  According to historian John P. Diggins, whose 1972 book Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, was the first academic acknowledgment of fascist sympathies among American elites, “Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship drew more admiration from democratic America than from any other Western nation.” Many leading American intellectuals and political figures from the progressive generation were drawn to fascism in the 1920s. The famous progressive muckrakers Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell visited Italy and wrote glowing accounts of the Blackshirt regime. One of the most enthusiastic supporters of both the early New Deal and Italian fascism was Charles Beard, a Columbia University professor and the leading member of the school of “progressive historians.” In an article in the New Republic magazine, Beard argued that Americans should look past Mussolini’s use of violence and suppression of civil liberties and recognize that fascism was the most effective modernizing force in the world:

  [It is] an amazing experiment … an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism, politics and technology. It would be a mistake to allow feelings aroused by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the Fascist process to obscure the potentialities and the lessons of the adventure—no, not adventure, but destiny riding without any saddle and bridle across the historic peninsula that bridges the world of antiquity and our modern world.

  Another group t
hat was overwhelmingly supportive of Italian fascism was American big business, which praised Mussolini for bringing order and stability to the Italian economy. The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Julius Barnes, repeatedly declared in speeches and magazine articles that “Mussolini is without question a great man.” James Emery of the National Association of Manufacturers praised Il Duce at a NAM convention for “leading through the streets of a reunited country a great body of citizens” who rescued Italy from “the blighting hand of radical socialism.” Referring to the American economy, the Wall Street Journal titled an editorial “Needed A Mussolini.” Thomas W. Lamont, head of the J. P. Morgan banking network, called himself a “missionary” for fascism and devoted himself to “quiet preaching” on its behalf. According to Diggins, “With few exceptions, the dominant voices of business responded to fascism with hearty enthusiasm.” Many later directed their firms to donate money to the Nazi Party.

  One of those businessmen was Gerard Swope, the chairman of General Electric, who also wrote the first draft of the NIRA. In 1931 Swope published what he called the “Swope Plan,” which argued that antitrust laws had to be suspended so that companies in a given industry could free themselves from market forces and collectively determine prices, wages, and production levels. Running through Swope’s argument, as in the arguments of many New Dealers, was a hostility toward democracy. “Shall we wait for society to act through its legislatures,” he asked, “or shall industry recognize its obligation to its employees and to the public and undertake the task?” His answer was to replace the U.S. Congress with corporate cartels: “Organized industry should take the lead, recognizing its responsibility to its employees, to the public, and to its stockholders—rather than that democratic society should act through its government.” Herbert Hoover, the president at the time, called the Swope Plan a “prescription for Fascism.” That prescription was filled in the first month of Roosevelt’s presidency, when, according to Leon Keyserling, one of the principal authors of the NIRA, “The original draft of the act grew out of the so-called Gerard Swope plan for recovery.”