New York Times, Sept. 26, 1919, p. 3.
69. 'President Greets Fliers,' Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1924; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 217; Barry, Great Influenza, p. 125.
70. For Butler, see Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 80; and Kennedy, Over Here, p. 74. To his eternal credit, the historian Charles Beard resigned his teaching position in protest. Few of his colleagues followed his example. For Ely, see Rothbard, 'Richard T. Ely,' p. 588, citing Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. 207.
71. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 299; 'Stamping Out Treason,' editorial, Washington Post, April 12, 1918.
72. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, p. 69; John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 102.
73. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 290.
74. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933- 1939 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 63; Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.
75. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 59.
4. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT'S FASCIST NEW DEAL
1. Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 273; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 50.
2. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, pp. 10-11.
3. Lewis S. Feuer, 'American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-32: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology,' American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1962), p. 148, citing Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: The First Thousand Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 104; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 22; Ickes, Secret Diary, vol. 2, pp. 325- 26.
4. The best single treatment of FDR's policies as dictatorial and fascistic can be found in William E. Leuchtenburg's essay 'The New Deal as the Moral Analogue of War,' in FDR Years, pp. 35-75. On Lippmann, see Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 5; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 300.
5. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 17.
6. Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 27, citing Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability — and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), p. 160.
7. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 223.
8. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984), p. 50.
9. Ibid., pp. 52, 61.
10. However, this attitude didn't extend to his own interests. He told his mother she should not go overboard by following the government mantra that one should buy Liberty Bonds 'until it hurts.' The man who would later decry 'economic royalists' told the woman controlling his purse strings not to sell off any of the family's more valuable assets in order to buy more patriotic — but less lucrative — securities. Davis, FDR, pp. 512-13.
11. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 412; Leuchtenburg, FDR Years, p. 2.
12. Burns, Roosevelt, p. 144.
13. Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, pp. 18, 37; Alvin H. Hansen, 'Toward Full Employment,' speech at the University of Cincinnati, March 15, 1949, quoted in Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 5.
14. 'Liberalism vs. Fascism,' editorial, New Republic, March 2, 1927, p. 35. It is impossible not to detect the fascist obsession with unity and action in Croly's defense of Mussolini. In another editorial he declared, 'Whatever the dangers of Fascism, it has at any rate substituted movement for stagnation, purposive behavior for drifting, and visions of great future for collective pettiness and discouragement.' Brinkley, End of Reform, p. 155; John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 204.
15. John Patrick Diggins, 'Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini's Italy,' American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (Jan. 1966), p. 495.
16. Stuart Chase, A New Deal (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 252.
17. The Marquis de Sade considered himself a great revolutionary and philosophe. But in reality he was a bored pervert who came up with elaborate rationales to poke and scratch people for the fun of it. Lenin was bored to nausea by anything but constant agitation for revolution. Martin Heidegger taught an entire course on boredom, calling it the 'insidious creature [that] maintains its monstrous essence in our [Being].' It's been speculated that Heidegger signed up with the Nazis at least in part to cure himself of boredom.
18. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 416.
19. 'We who are over sixty,' Sinclair Lewis observed on the occasion of Wells's death in 1946, 'have remembered all that he meant to us...For here was a man who, more than any other of this century, suggested to our young minds the gaudy fancy (which conceivably might also be fact) that mankind can, by taking thought,' refuse 'to make our lives miserable and guilty just to please some institution that for a century has been a walking and talking corpse.' Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 178. I did not get the title of this book from Wells's speech, but I was delighted to discover the phrase has such a rich intellectual history. See Philip Coupland, 'H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'' Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (Oct. 2000), pp. 541- 58.
20. Coupland, 'H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'' p. 543.
21. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 128. When the film version opened in theaters, a letter appeared in the British Union of Fascists party newspaper, Action, asking, 'Is Mr. Wells a Secret Fascist?' The correspondent noted, 'The supermen all wore the black shirt and broad shiny belt of Fascism! The uniforms were identical, and their wearers moved and bore themselves in the semi-military manner of fascists.' Coupland, 'H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'' p. 541. H. G. Wells, 'What Is Fascism — and Why?' New York Times Magazine, Feb. 6, 1927, p. 2; George Orwell, 'Wells, Hitler, and the World State,' Horizon, Aug. 1941, in Essays (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 371.
22. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866 (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 682; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 93.
23. In the 1920s and 1930s various fascist-like intellectual cults popped up based on the idea that engineers should rule, the most famous of which was Thorstein Veblen's 'technocracy' fad.
24. As a writer for the Village Voice puts it, Coughlin was the leader of a 'group of right-wing Christian political losers.' James Ridgeway, 'Mondo Washington,' Village Voice, March 14, 2000, p. 41. A writer for the New York Times simply declared Pat Buchanan the
