Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
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Flynn and the New Deal
Born in 1882 to a middle-class Irish Catholic family in New York, John T. Flynn started his career in the legal profession before deciding that he was more inclined to write. He got his first journalistic break in 1916, on the New Haven Register in Connecticut, and went on to become a regular, and increasingly celebrated, writer for the liberal New Republic magazine, with the column “Other People’s Money.” He also wrote a weekly syndicated newspaper column, “Plain Economics.” But he differed from the other writers in this generally progressive stable in one important way: he was skeptical about big government, with its bureaucracies, subsidies, and inefficiencies. Though in November 1932 he had no difficulty supporting the presidential candidacy of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had promised prudent administration in the face of the Depression, he had considerable problems with the way Roosevelt subsequently chose to interpret this mandate.
The new president wasted no time in revealing his hand. Following the crash of 1929, U.S. unemployment had, by the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, soared from a low of just over 3 to a catastrophic 24 percent. All around the industrialized world, straight laissez-faire economics were increasingly falling out of favor, and the fashionable spectrum extended only from Keynesian interventionist economics at one end to corporatism or state socialism at the other, a spectrum that Roosevelt now began to explore. His inaugural address in March 1933 was uncompromising: he told the country just how far he was willing to go to pass the measures “that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.” His hope was that Congress would willingly agree to endorse the necessary programs, and then he continued:
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. 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.
The consequence of this determination was what the historian Hugh Brogan called an “orgy of lawmaking.”4 An armored column of acts and agencies poured out of Washington: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Farm Credit Act, and many more. Even the FBI was hugely strengthened and given new powers. Where most on the center-left were glad to see such action, others like Flynn were dismayed. Their initial support became disillusionment, which hardened into an opposition that at times began to sound like fanaticism. Not only was the New Deal a mistake, Flynn came later to argue, it was very close to being evil:
This is the complete negation of liberalism. It is, in fact, the essence of fascism . . . When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government—then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.5
How frustrating then that what was all too apparent to Flynn was so hidden from his colleagues and, more important, from the voters, who in 1936 compounded their forgivable error of 1932 by choosing to reelect Roosevelt by a landslide. Flynn—on the wrong side of the consensus—began a dogged and, in its own way, courageous campaign against Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was his belief that it could not work unless the whole country—using Roosevelt’s own metaphor—was mobilized as though for war. And what more effective way could that be managed than by having an actual war? It was therefore natural that the dominant politician of the day should use his powers to persuade the nation, should the occasion arise, to take part in armed conflict. Such a conflict, according to Flynn, could only lead to a horrific loss of American life for no real gain, the possibly permanent curtailment of freedoms at home, and economic disaster.
The War Conspiracy
This last sentiment, at least, was one that Flynn shared with most Americans. Wilsonian enthusiasm for engagement in the world, which had taken America into the First World War and then bestowed upon it the proselytizing role at the Versailles peace conference, had evaporated fairly quickly once normal business was resumed. The American elite had been disillusioned by the vengefulness and shortsightedness of the European victors, while ordinary Americans were more aware of the country’s 263,000 dead, wounded, and missing in a war fought almost entirely a whole ocean away. And although the objective fact was that the United States emerged from the conflict richer and more powerful than when it went in, the perception was that these debatable fruits of victory had been unequally bestowed. In the 1920s, while heavy industry boomed and there were enormous increases in profitability, farm prices and wages fell. Then came the Depression.
So, although most populists had started out as supporters of the New Deal, they were absolutely united behind the idea that the Great War had been a disaster, and one that must not be repeated. By the mid-1930s, one of the most effective articulators of this view was the most decorated marine in U.S. military history, retired Major General Smedley Butler, twice winner of the Medal of Honor. As Hitler came to power, and the possibility of a new war in Europe became more tangible, Butler campaigned for neutrality. In 1935, he published a famous pamphlet—reprinted again and again in different versions up to 1941—War Is a Racket, in which he asserted that his own actions as a soldier had been, to his shame, dictated by the needs of war profiteers and big capital. In an earlier speech, Butler had confessed:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.6
The First World War, said Butler, had indebted the nation but enriched companies such as DuPont, U.S. Steel, and, of course, the banks. He knew, too, why President Woodrow Wilson had changed his mind about entering the war. It was because he had been persuaded that an Allied defeat would be bad for the U.S. finance houses, to which Britain owed so much money. This, Butler argued, was the very essence of a racket. Or, indeed, a conspiracy. “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. Out of the war a few people make huge fortunes.”7 He cited the “21,000 millionaires and billionaires” who “got that way” from the conflict.
There were plenty of politicians who saw things the same way that Butler did. One was the senator for the midwestern state of North Dakota, Gerald Prentice Nye. Ten years younger than John Flynn, Nye had enjoyed a similar career, working as a journalist in Wisconsin and Iowa (and campaigning for Prohibition) before, in 1925, being selected by the Republicans to take a vacant seat in the Senate. In 1934, he was asked by Congress to head a committee to investigate whether the banks and munitions industry had profiteered from the Great War and whether the prospect of financial gain had indeed been a primary cause of U.S. involvement. Several of his fellow populist midwesterners joined him on the committee; Flynn was his chief researcher.
Starting on September 4, 1934, and over sixteen months and ninety-three hearings, the Munitions Investigating Committee questioned more than two hundred witnesses, and became an important reference point for those who wished to resist any future drift into foreign entanglements. The conclusion of its report, publi
shed in February 1936, was, however, too nebulous to be of any direct benefit to what would become known as the isolationist cause: “While the evidence before this committee does not show that wars have been started solely because of the activities of munitions makers and their agents,” it stated, “it is also true that wars rarely have one single cause, and the committee finds it to be against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity.”8 More helpfully, the committee noted that in the two years before entering the Great War, the United States had lent $27 million to Germany, compared with $2.5 billion to the Allies. The inference was obvious: 58,000 Americans had lost their lives for the cause of American banking. Nye himself said as much in a speech later that year, claiming that “the record of facts makes it altogether fair to say that these bankers were in the heart and center of a system that made our going to war inevitable.”9
Neutrality and Isolationism
From quite early in his presidency, Roosevelt had become convinced that, in the event of a war between the European democracies and the European dictatorships, America could not permit a victory for the latter. The problem was, as he knew well, that the American polity from voter to Congress was opposed to any repeat of 1917. Rhetorically, at any rate, Roosevelt was forced to portray himself as another isolationist. So, from 1934 onward, in a paradoxical reflection of what was happening in the rest of the world, the United States opted to stand apart. In that year, the passage of the Johnson Act prohibited American loans to countries that had not yet repaid their debts from the Great War. And in 1935, Congress began to pass a series of neutrality acts and other measures that required the administration to place an arms embargo on any nation at war, forbade the carrying on American ships of any weapons destined for countries at war, and authorized the president to prevent U.S. citizens from sailing on ships belonging to belligerent nations. Roosevelt did attempt to get Congress to make a distinction between aggressors and their victims, for the purposes of support and supply, but Congress—arguing that supplying one side was highly likely to provoke the other side into some kind of armed attack on U.S. interests—disagreed. Further acts in 1936 and 1937 effectively precluded aid to Abyssinia when it was invaded by Mussolini; to the Spanish Republic, whose rebels were being supplied by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; and to China when it was attacked by Japan. In each case, arguably, American neutrality served the interests of fascist aggression and acted against those of democracy and national integrity. Ironically, since it had never taken up membership in the very League of Nations that it had helped create, the United States found that it had effectively forsworn any way of intervening in the various crises that were beginning to engulf the world.
Unilateralists were happy, isolationists were content, the consciences of American pacifists were relatively clear. None of this, however, could obscure what Churchill was to call “the gathering storm.” Roosevelt and his colleagues saw war coming and didn’t think the United States would be able to keep out of it. While the neutrality acts were being discussed and enacted, the Rhineland was remilitarized, Austria forcibly integrated into the Reich, and Czechoslovakia occupied. On the other side of the world, an aggressive Japan was busy constructing the Asian empire it had begun with the annexation of Manchuria in 1931. The problem for the president was how to prepare his reluctant constituents for what might be asked of them.
America First
Roosevelt’s task became even more urgent when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and the principal democracies—France and Britain—declared war. His first act was to affirm U.S. neutrality. His second, just weeks later, was to ask Congress to remove the arms embargo, his obvious intention being to regain the ability to supply Britain and France. Congress agreed. The game now was for Roosevelt to edge America further toward standing alongside the democracies while simultaneously presenting this as the best strategy for preventing direct U.S. involvement in a European war. By mid- 1940, with the crushing German victories in Scandinavia and France, public sentiment—sympathetic to Britain but unwilling to fight—was supportive of this dubious compromise. Such feelings helped Roosevelt to win his third term in the presidential election that autumn. Soon after reelection, in one of his broadcast “fireside chats,” while describing America’s role as the arsenal of democracy, Roosevelt further elaborated his idea of the trade-off: “This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security, because the nub of the whole purpose of your president is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.”10
Meanwhile, John T. Flynn was becoming one of the most strident advocates of American neutrality. His experience on the Munitions Investigating Committee with Nye had helped turn him from a financial journalist to an antiwar crusader. In 1938, he had participated in the formation of the Keep America Out of War Congress (KAOWC), alongside the socialist leader Norman Thomas, former editor of The Nation Oswald Garrison Villard, and a historian of rising reputation named Harry Elmer Barnes. Many well-known left-of-center intellectuals, social activists, and union leaders also signed up. Flynn warned his countrymen that fighting a war would wreck America. “Our economic system will be broken,” he wrote, “our financial burdens will be insupportable. . . . The streets will be filled with idle men and women. The once independent farmer will become a government charge . . . and amidst these disorders we will have the perfect climate for some Hitler on the American model to rise to power.”11
A year later he might have regretted the comparison, given the extreme bellicosity of the original Hitler. Even so, in the face of Germany’s obvious and seemingly implacable expansionism, isolationists continued to warn their compatriots that any involvement at all could lead only to a hecatomb. “Did we have anything to do with the promises Britain and France made to Poland? No we didn’t!” said Smedley Butler, before taking a fabulous swipe into empty air, and demanding, “Are we culpable in any way because Hitler started before the other side was ready?”12 But the questionable relevance of this argument to the issue of whether America would be able to tolerate the total defeat of the democracies was balanced by Butler’s much more effective appeal to the parents of the nation. “After you’ve heard one of those speeches and your blood is all hot and you want to go and hit someone like Hitler,” he advised, “go upstairs to where your boy is asleep. Go into his bedroom. You’ll find him lying there, pillows all messed up, covers all tangled, sleeping away so hard.”13
Some of those boys themselves decided to move against their possible conscription into another conflagration. In early 1940, a petition was circulated in Yale University Law School, demanding that “Congress refrain from war, even if England [sic] is on the verge of defeat.” The idea of the petition’s sponsors was to set up a national organization of students to oppose involvement in the European conflict; instead they created something that became much bigger and endlessly controversial. By the end of July 1940, the movement had been backed by several Chicago businessmen, and was being presided over by the respected chairman of Sears Roebuck, General Robert E. Wood. In August the organization became the America First Committee (AFC).
It is interesting that these days membership in America First is consistently left out of obituaries, curricula vitae, and accounts of regional religious and peace organizations. In 1940, however, commitment must have been enormous, because the organization grew with tremendous rapidity. Its early supporters included novelists and poets like Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, and e. e. cummings. There was the First World War air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, actress Lillian Gish, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and American flying hero Charles Lindbergh, possibly the most celebrated American then alive. Among its student partisans were two future presidents, Gerald R. Ford and John F. Kennedy (who d
onated a hundred dollars to the cause), and future novelist Gore Vidal. In Congress it could number among its supporters a large number of midwestern and western progressives, men like senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, Robert Taft of Ohio, William Borah of Idaho, and Gerald Nye. The New York branch, which at its zenith was to claim a membership of 135,000, was chaired by John T. Flynn.
The AFC’s public position was that America should build up its defenses at home so that it would be impregnable, while desisting from offering any kind of aid to the belligerents—the implication being that the United States would then be able to contemplate in safety whatever kind of world emerged from the ashes of Europe. What was needed in the short term was that Americans “keep their heads amid the rising hysteria in times of crisis.”14
Through the second half of 1940 and most of 1941, a public struggle of predictable bitterness ensued between isolationists and interventionists. Seen from London, the AFC and its supporters were in many ways as much of an existential threat as Hitler. Essentially a coalition that included friends of Germany as well as enemies of war, America First was open to accusations of appeasement and pro-Nazism. In retaliation, the rhetoric of AFC campaigners was just as impassioned in their claims that the administration and its financier friends were attempting to manipulate the American people into war.