LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING

by Jonah Goldberg

  Coughlin himself was a darling among Capitol Hill Democrats, particularly the progressive bloc—the liberals to the left of FDR who pushed him for ever more aggressive reforms. In 1933 the administration was under considerable pressure to include Coughlin in the U.S. delegation to a major economic conference in London. Ten senators and seventy-five congressmen sent a petition declaring that Coughlin had “the confidence of millions of Americans.” The vast majority of the signatories were Democrats. There was even a groundswell among progressives for FDR to appoint Coughlin treasury secretary.

  This was no joke. Indeed, Coughlin was perhaps the foremost American advocate of what had become an international push toward economic nationalism. An heir to the Free Silver movement, he was a classic left-wing populist. The more “dignified” forces of liberalism embraced him in much the same way today’s Democratic Party embraces Michael Moore. Raymond Moley ran an article on inflation by Coughlin in the journal he edited. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace collaborated with Coughlin in an effort to sway the administration’s monetary policy further to the left. Recall that Wallace (who was Alger Hiss’s boss at Agriculture) went on to become Roosevelt’s penultimate vice president, the leading Soviet “useful idiot” in the United States, the editor of the New Republic, and the Progressive Party’s 1948 presidential nominee. In 1933 the League for Independent Political Action, a far-left group of intellectuals chaired by John Dewey, invited Coughlin to participate in its summer institute. When William Aberhart, the “radical premier” of Alberta, Canada, visited Coughlin in Detroit in 1935 to discuss his own left-wing economic program, Aberhart explained he wanted to get “the most expert advice on the continent.”

  Coughlin was more than willing to roll up his sleeves for the role of attack dog for the Democratic Party. The centrist Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to win a major party’s presidential nomination, had become an increasingly bitter foe of the New Deal and FDR. This was all the provocation Coughlin needed. After tipping off FDR in a telegram, Couehlin took to the air to flay his fellow Catholic as a bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street.

  Liberals often debated among themselves whether Couehlin’s contribution was worth the price of his unflinching demagoguery. Until late in 1934 the answer was invariably yes. Chief among his defenders was Monsignor John Ryan, the most respected liberal Catholic intellectual and theologian in America at the time. When Coughlin unfairly and cruelly ripped Al Smith to shreds, many wondered whether it was time to distance themselves from the Radio Priest. Ryan intervened and declared the rabble-rouser was “on the side of the angels.” This was the standard liberal defense of the supposedly right-wing Coughlin. He was fighting the good fight, so who cared about his excesses?

  At a congressional hearing on FDR’s monetary policy, Coughlin offered a two-hour peroration that held the committee transfixed. “If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program,” he blustered, “I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!” “I know the pulse of the Nation,” he further declared. “And I know Congress will do nothing but say: ‘Mr. Roosevelt, we follow.’ ” “God is directing President Roosevelt,” he added. “He is the answer to our prayers.” In his sermons the leader of America’s religious left sounded like he’d borrowed Mussolini’s talking points: “Our Government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely, that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not for the laborer.”

  So how did Coughlin suddenly become a right-winger? When did he become persona non grata in the eyes of liberal intellectuals? On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left.

  This isn’t nearly as contradictory as it sounds. Coughlin became a villain in late 1934 almost solely because he had decided that FDR wasn’t radical enough. FDR’s less than fully national-socialist policies sapped Coughlin’s patience—as did his reluctance to make the priest his personal Rasputin. Still, Coughlin managed for most of the year to qualify his support, saying things like “More than ever, I am in favor of a New Deal.” Finally, on November 11, 1934, he announced he was forming a new “lobby of the people,” the National Union for Social Justice, or NUSJ. He issued sixteen principles of social justice as the platform for the new super-lobby. Among its articles of faith:

  * that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family...

  * I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.

  * I believe in upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good.

  * I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.

  * I believe in the event of a war and for the defense of our nation and its liberties, if there shall be a conscription of men let there be a conscription of wealth.

  * I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor, because, as is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.

  The following month Coughlin issued another seven principles, to elaborate exactly how the NUSJ would combat the horrors of capitalism and modern commerce. These were even more explicitly anti-capitalist. Thus it was the government’s “duty” to limit the “profits acquired by any industry.” All workers must be guaranteed what we would today call a living wage. The government must guarantee the production of “food, wearing apparel, homes, drugs, books and all modern conveniences.” “This principle.” Coughlin rightly explained, “is contrary to the theory of capitalism.”

  The program was largely derived from the prevailing views of the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor and Wisconsin Progressive labor parties, and Coughlin’s own well-worn themes. That his economic doctrine should be influenced from the disparate branches of American populism shouldn’t be a surprise. From the outset, Coughlin’s ideological roots intermingled with those of many New Dealers and progressives and populists. At no time was he ever associated with classical liberalism or with the economic forces we normally connect with the right.

  This returns us to one of the most infuriating distortions of American political debate. In the 1930s, what defined a “right-winger” was almost exclusively opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The muckraking journalist J. T. Flynn, for example, is often labeled a leading light of the Old Right for no other reason than that he was a relentless FDR critic and a member of America First (indeed, he was one of the most articulate voices decrying the incipient fascism of the New Deal). But Flynn was no classical liberal. He had been a left-leaning columnist for the New Republic for much of the 1930s, and he denounced Roosevelt for moving in what he considered a rightward direction. As for his isolationism, he considered himself a fellow traveler with Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party. Charles Beard, and John Dewey.

  Senator Huey Long, the archetypal American fascist, is likewise often called a right-winger by his detractors—though his place in the liberal imagination is more complicated. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, still admire Long and invoke him very selectively. Long inspired Sinclair’s It Can V Happen Here as well as the far superior AH the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, and his larger-than-life persona elicits an ambivalent reaction from liberals who admire his economic populism but dislike his unrefined demagoguery. But leaving all that aside, what cannot be denied is that Long attacked the New Deal from the left. His Share the Wealth plan was pure booboisie socialism. His well-documented opposition to the actual Socialist Party was ent
irely cultural and pragmatic, not ideological, “Will you please tell me what sense there is in running on a socialist ticket in America today?” Long quizzed a reporter from the Nation. “What’s the use of being right only to be defeated?” Meanwhile, Norman Thomas was regularly beseeched by his rank and file to show more sympathy to Coughlin and Long. “Now I am a socialist,” an Alabama man wrote Thomas in 1935. “have been for thirty five years...[Long] is telling the people the things we have been telling them for a generation. They listen to him...while they thought we were fools.”

  What makes Long so recognizable as a fascist was his folksy contempt for the rules of democracy—”the time has come for all good men to rise above principle”—and his absolute faith that he was the authentic voice of the people. His rule over Louisiana certainly transcended that of a mere political boss. He had an authentic organic connection with his constituents that seemed to exceed anything Americans had seen before. “There is no dictatorship in Louisiana. There is a perfect democracy there, and when you have a perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.” Oddly enough, what may have allowed so many liberals and socialists to recognize the fascism in Long’s politics was their own elitism and cosmopolitanism. Long had no use for pointy-headed experts and elites. His was an undiluted populism of the sort that throws aside dogma and celebrates the wisdom of the mob above all else. He appealed to the narcissism of the masses, proclaiming that through his own will to power he could make “every man a king.” He had a relationship with his folk more akin to Hitler’s relationship to the Volk than FDR could ever manage. As such, many liberals saw it as threatening, and rightly so.

  Within the White House. Long and Coughlin were seen, along with other populist and radical movements and leaders—including Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for the governorship of California and Dr. Francis Townsend Js bizarre pension movement, which swept the country in the 1930s—as dangerous threats to the control and rule of New Deal planners, But only the most sloppy and circular thinking—the sort that says right-wing equals bad, and bad equals right-wing—would label such radicals and collectivists as anything but creatures of the left.

  In 1935 Roosevelt was sufficiently worried about these various threats from the left that he ordered a secret poll to be conducted. The results scared the dickens out of many of his strategists, who concluded that Long could cost FDR the election if he ran on a third-party ticket. Indeed. Roosevelt confessed to aides that he hoped to “steal Long’s thunder” by adopting at least some of his issues.

  How did FDR hope to steal the thunder of incipient fascist and collectivist movements in the United States? Social Security, for starters. Although the extent of its influence is hotly debated, few dispute that the national-socialist push from below—represented by Long. Coughlin. and Townsend—contributed to the leftward tilt of Roosevelt’s “Second Hundred Days.” FDR the Third Wayer aped the Bismarckian tactic of splitting the difference with the radicals in order to maintain power. Indeed, just when Long’s popularity was spiking, Roosevelt unexpectedly inserted a “soak the rich” bill into his list of “must pass” legislative proposals. How things would have played out over time is unknowable because Long was assassinated in September 1935. As for Coughlin, his problems accelerated as he became ever more of an economic radical and ever more sympathetic to the actual, name-brand, foreign fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. His anti-Semitism—evident even when Roosevelt and New Deal liberals welcomed his support—likewise became ever more pronounced. During the war FDR ordered his Justice Department to spy on Coughlin with the aim of silencing him.

  How much electoral support Long, the Coughlinites, and the rest would have garnered had Long survived to challenge Roosevelt at the polls remains a matter of academic speculation, but it is somewhat irrelevant to the larger point. These populist leftists framed the public debate. That Coughlin garnered 40 million listeners in a nation of only 127 million and that his audience was largest when he was calling the New Deal “Christ’s Deal” should tell us something about the nature of FDR’s appeal, and Coughlin’s. Even those New Dealers who despised Long and Coughlin believed that if they didn’t steal their thunder. “Huey Long and Father Coughlin might take over.” What’s more, there was precious little daylight between the substantive ideas and motivations of “street” or “country” fascists like Long and Coughlin and those of the more rarefied intellectuals who staffed the Roosevelt administration.

  REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN MAN

  One can easily make too much of the parallel chronology of Hitler’s and Roosevelt’s tenures. But it is not a complete coincidence that they both came to power in 1933. Though obviously very different men, they understood many of the same things about politics in the mass age. Both owed their elections to the perceived exhaustion of traditional liberal politics, and they were the two world leaders who most successfully exploited new political technologies. Roosevelt most famously utilized the radio—and the Nazis quickly aped the practice. FDR broke with all tradition to fly to the Democratic National Convention to accept his party’s nomination. The imagery of him flying—a man of action!—rather than sitting on the porch and waiting for the news was electrifying, as was Hitler’s brilliant use of planes, most famously in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Take away the text of New Deal, Soviet, and Nazi propaganda posters and other artwork, and it’s almost impossible to tell whether the bulging-biceps laborers are the New Soviet Man, the New Nazi Man. or the New Deal Man. Max Lerner observed in 1934, “The most damning blow that the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the compliment they have paid us in taking over (and perfecting) our most prized devices of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses.”

  Where FDR and Hitler overlapped most was in their fawning over “the forgotten man.” Fascism’s success almost always depends on the cooperation of the “losers” during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes—the people who have just enough to fear losing it—are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this “status anxiety” as the source of Progressivism’s quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against “fat cats,” “international bankers,” “economic royalists,” and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues. Hitler and Mussolini were surely more demagogic than FDR, but Roosevelt fully understood the “magic” of such appeals. He saw nothing wrong with ascribing evil motives to those who didn’t support him, and he certainly relished his role as the wellborn tribune of the little guy.

  Obviously, this wasn’t all a cynical act. FDR did care about the little guy. the worker, and the like. But so did Hitler. Indeed, there is a mounting body of scholarship showing that “Hitler’s New Deal” (David Schoenbaum’s phrase) was not only similar to FDR’s but in fact more generous and more successful. Germany prospered under Hitler according to the most basic indicators. The birthrate increased 50 percent from 1932 to 1936; marriages increased until Germany led Europe in 1938-39. Suicide plummeted by 80 percent from 1932 to 1939. A recent book by the German historian Gotz Aly calls Hitler the “feel good dictator” because he was so successful in restoring German confidence.

  When Hitler became chancellor he focused like a laser on the economy, ending unemployment far faster than FDR. When asked by the New York Times if his first priority was jobs. Hitler boisterously responded, “Wholly! I am thinking first of those in Germany who are in despair and who have been in despair for three years . .. What does anything else matter?” Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn’t mention Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he “produces for the masses. That little car of his had done more than anything else to destroy class differences.”

  Mussolini and Hitler also felt that they were doing things along similar lines to FDR. Indeed, they celebrated the New Deal as a kindred effort. The German press was particularly lavish in its praise for FDR. In 1
934 the Volkischer Beobachter—the Nazi Party’s official newspaper—described Roosevelt as a man of “irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will” and a “warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs .” The paper emphasized that Roosevelt, through his New Deal, had eliminated “the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation” of the previous decade by adopting “National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies.” After his first year in office. Hitler sent FDR a private letter congratulating “his heroic efforts in the interests of the American people. The President’s successful battle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration.” And he told the American ambassador, 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.’ ”

  Mussolini was even more assiduous in claiming the New Deal as an incipient fascist phenomenon. He reviewed FDR’s book Looking Forward, saying, in effect, “This guy’s one of us”: “The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.” Mussolini wrote that FDR understood that the economy could not “be left to its own devices” and saw the fascistic nature of how the American president put this understanding into practice. “Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism,” he wrote. (He later reviewed a book by Henry Wallace, proclaiming, “Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.”) The Volkiseher Beohachter also noted that “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.”