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COMMENTARY

Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt

By David Boaz

This article appeared in the October 2007 issue of Reason.

What FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the
30s

hree New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelts America, Mussolinis Italy,

T and Hitlers Germany, 1933 1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, New

York: Metropolitan Books, 242 pages, $26

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne OHare McCormick wrote that the
atmosphere in Washington was strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first
weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the
Five-Year Plan. America today literally asks for orders. The Roosevelt
administration, she added, envisages a federation of industry, labor and
government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.

That article isnt quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German
cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But it underscores his central
argument: that there are surprising similarities between the programs of
Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler.

With our knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, we find
it almost impossible to consider such claims dispassionately. But in the 1930s,
when everyone agreed that capitalism had failed, it wasnt hard to find common
themes and mutual admiration in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, not to
mention Moscow. (Three New Deals does not focus as much on the latter.) Nor is
that a mere historical curiosity, of no great importance in the era following
democracys triumph over fascism, National Socialism, and communism.
Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynns

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warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. Since then we
have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to
accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the 30s.

Schivelbusch finds parallels in the ideas, style, and programs of the disparate
regimes even their architecture. Neoclassical monumentalism, he writes, is
the architectural style in which the state visually manifests power and
authority. In Berlin, Moscow, and Rome, the enemy that was to be eradicated
was the laissez-faire architectural legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, an
unplanned jumble of styles and structures. Washington erected plenty of
neoclassical monuments in the 30s, though with less destruction than in the
European capitals. Think of the Man Controlling Trade sculptures in front of
the Federal Trade Commission, with a muscular man restraining an enormous
horse. They would have been right at home in Il Duces Italy.

To compare, Schivelbusch stresses, is not the same as to equate. America

during Roosevelts New Deal did not become a one-party state; it had no secret
police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration
camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system
that National Socialism abolished. But throughout the 30s, intellectuals and
journalists noted areas of convergence among the New Deal, Fascism, and
National Socialism. All three were seen as transcending classic Anglo-French
liberalism individualism, free markets, decentralized power.

Since 1776, liberalism had transformed the Western world. As The Nation
editorialized in 1900, before it too abandoned the old liberalism, Freed from
the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their
natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which
surround us industry, transportation, telephones and telegraphs, sanitation,
abundant food, electricity. But the editor worried that its material comfort has
blinded the eyes of the present generation to the cause which made it possible.
Old liberals died, and younger liberals began to wonder if government couldnt
be a positive force, something to be used rather than constrained.

Others, meanwhile, began to reject liberalism itself. In his 1930s novel The Man
Without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote, Misfortune had decreed that the mood
of the times would shift away from the old guidelines of liberalism that had

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favored Leo Fischel the great guiding ideals of tolerance, the dignity of man,
and free trade and reason and progress in the Western world would be
displaced by racial theories and street slogans.

The dream of a planned society infected both right and left. Ernst Jnger, an
influential right-wing militarist in Germany, reported his reaction to the Soviet
Union: I told myself: granted, they have no constitution, but they do have a
plan. This may be an excellent thing. As early as 1912, FDR himself praised the
Prussian-German model: They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do
as he pleased with his own property and found it necessary to check this liberty
for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people, he said in an address to the
Peoples Forum of Troy, New York.

American Progressives studied at German universities, Schivelbusch writes, and

came to appreciate the Hegelian theory of a strong state and Prussian
militarism as the most efficient way of organizing modern societies that could
no longer be ruled by anarchic liberal principles. The pragmatist philosopher
William James influential 1910 essay The Moral Equivalent of War stressed
the importance of order, discipline, and planning.

Intellectuals worried about inequality, the poverty of the working class, and the
commercial culture created by mass production. (They didnt seem to notice the
tension between the last complaint and the first two.) Liberalism seemed
inadequate to deal with such problems. When economic crisis hit in Italy and
Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression
the anti-liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and
that the time for bold experimentation had arrived.

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw
described the New Deal as Fascist means to gain liberal ends. He wasnt
hallucinating. FDRs adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini
had done many of the things which seem to me necessary. Lorena Hickok, a
close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell,
wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, If [President] Roosevelt
were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere. She added that if she were
younger, shed like to lead the Fascist Movement in the United States. At the

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National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart

of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, The Fascist Principles
are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.

Roosevelt himself called Mussolini admirable and professed that he was

deeply impressed by what he has accomplished. The admiration was mutual.
In a laudatory review of Roosevelts 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini
wrote, Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves
the economy to its own devices. Without question, the mood accompanying
this sea change resembles that of Fascism. The chief Nazi newspaper,
Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised Roosevelts adoption of National
Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies and the
development toward an authoritarian state based on the demand that
collective good be put before individual self-interest.

In Rome, Berlin, and D.C., there was an affinity for military metaphors and
military structures. Fascists, National Socialists, and New Dealers had all been
young during World War I, and they looked back with longing at the
experiments in wartime planning. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt
summoned the nation: 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. 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. I assume
unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army. 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.

That was a new tone for a president of the American republic. Schivelbusch
argues that Hitler and Roosevelt were both charismatic leaders who held the
masses in their sway and without this sort of leadership, neither National
Socialism nor the New Deal would have been possible. This plebiscitary style
established a direct connection between the leader and the masses.
Schivelbusch argues that the dictators of the 1930s differed from old-style
despots, whose rule was based largely on the coercive force of their praetorian
guards. Mass rallies, fireside radio chats and in our own time television
can bring the ruler directly to the people in a way that was never possible
before.

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To that end, all the new regimes of the 30s undertook unprecedented
propaganda efforts. Propaganda, Schivelbusch writes is the means by which
charismatic leadership, circumventing intermediary social and political
institutions like parliaments, parties, and interest groups, gains direct hold
upon the masses. The NRAs Blue Eagle campaign, in which businesses that
complied with the agencys code were allowed to display a Blue Eagle symbol,
was a way to rally the masses and call on everyone to display a visible symbol
of support. NRA head Hugh Johnson made its purpose clear: Those who are not
with us are against us.

Scholars still study that propaganda. Earlier this year a Berlin museum
mounted an exhibit titled Art and Propaganda: The Clash of Nations 1930
45. According to the critic David DArcy, it shows how the German, Italian,
Soviet, and American governments mandated and funded art when image-
building served nation-building at its most extreme. The four countries rallied
their citizens with images of rebirth and regeneration. One American poster of
a sledgehammer bore the slogan Work to Keep Free, which DArcy found
chillingly close to Arbeit Macht Frei, the sign that greeted prisoners at
Auschwitz. Similarly, a reissue of a classic New Deal documentary, The River
(1938), prompted Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott to write that
watching it 70 years later on a new Naxos DVD feels a little creepy. There are
moments, especially involving tractors (the great fetish object of 20th-century
propagandists), when you are certain that this film could have been produced
in one of the political film mills of the totalitarian states of Europe.

Program and propaganda merged in the public works of all three systems. The
Tennessee Valley Authority, the autobahn, and the reclamation of the Pontine
marshes outside Rome were all showcase projects, another aspect of the
architecture of power that displayed the vigor and vitality of the regime.

You might ask, Where is Stalin in this analysis? Why isnt this book called Four
New Deals? Schivelbusch does mention Moscow repeatedly, as did McCormick
in her New York Times piece. But Stalin seized power within an already
totalitarian system; he was the victor in a coup. Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt,
each in a different way, came to power as strong leaders in a political process.
They thus share the charismatic leadership that Schivelbusch finds so
important.

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Schivelbusch is not the first to have noticed such similarities. B.C. Forbes, the
founder of the eponymous magazine, denounced rampant Fascism in 1933. In
1935 former President Herbert Hoover was using phrases like Fascist
regimentation in discussing the New Deal. A decade later, he wrote in his
memoirs that the New Deal introduced to Americans the spectacle of Fascist
dictation to business, labor and agriculture, and that measures such as the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, in their consequences of control of products and
markets, set up an uncanny Americanized parallel with the agricultural regime
of Mussolini and Hitler. In 1944, in The Road to Serfdom, the economist F.A.
Hayek warned that economic planning could lead to totalitarianism. He
cautioned Americans and Britons not to think that there was something
uniquely evil about the German soul. National Socialism, he said, drew on
collectivist ideas that had permeated the Western world for a generation or
more.

In 1973 one of the most distinguished American historians, John A. Garraty of

Columbia University, created a stir with his article The New Deal, National
Socialism, and the Great Depression. Garraty was an admirer of Roosevelt but
couldnt help noticing, for instance, the parallels between the Civilian
Conservation Corps and similar programs in Germany. Both, he wrote, were
essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt
described work camps as a means for getting youth off the city street corners,
Hitler as a way of keeping them from rotting helplessly in the streets. In both
countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of
young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were
organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the
physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to
national service in an emergency.

And in 1976, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan incurred the ire of Sen.
Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), pro-Roosevelt historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,
and The New York Times when he told reporters that fascism was really the
basis of the New Deal.

But Schivelbusch has explored these connections in greater detail and with
more historical distance. As the living memory of National Socialism and the
Holocaust recedes, scholars perhaps especially in Germany are gradually
beginning to apply normal political science to the movements and events of the

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1930s. Schivelbusch occasionally overreaches, as when he writes that Roosevelt

once referred to Stalin and Mussolini as his blood brothers.? (In fact, it seems
clear in Schivelbuschs source Arthur Schlesingers The Age of Roosevelt
that FDR was saying communism and fascism were blood brothers to each
other, not to him.) But overall, this is a formidable piece of scholarship.

To compare is not to equate, as Schivelbusch says. Its sobering to note the real
parallels among these systems. But its even more important to remember that
the U.S. did not succumb to dictatorship. Roosevelt may have stretched the
Constitution beyond recognition, and he had a taste for planning and power
previously unknown in the White House. But he was not a murderous thug. And
despite a population that literally waited for orders, as McCormick put it,
American institutions did not collapse. The Supreme Court declared some New
Deal measures unconstitutional. Some business leaders resisted it. Intellectuals
on both the right and the left, some of whom ended up in the early libertarian
movement, railed against Roosevelt. Republican politicians (those were the
days!) tended to oppose both the flow of power to Washington and the shift to
executive authority.

Germany had a parliament and political parties and business leaders, and they
collapsed in the face of Hitlers movement. Something was different in the
United States. Perhaps it was the fact that the country was formed by people
who had left the despots of the Old World to find freedom in the new, and who
then made a libertarian revolution. Americans tend to think of themselves as
individuals, with equal rights and equal freedom. A nation whose fundamental
ideology is, in the words of the recently deceased sociologist Seymour Martin
Lipset, antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism
will be far more resistant to illiberal ideologies.

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and

editor of Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World.

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