https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt
After 1945, the term "fascist" conjured up images of Nazi death camps, but in the 1930s it had a very different connotation, meaning the centralization of political power as in Benito Mussolini's Italy and of a "third way" between communism and capitalism. While most American businessmen thought Roosevelt was hostile to them, critics on the left said he was too friendly. Comparisons of American domestic programs to fascist economics are not necessarily pejorative as one of the motives behind the Interstate Highway System was that President Eisenhower was impressed by Adolf Hitler's autobahn system.[23] Early in Roosevelt's first term, supporters and critics alike found similarities between the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and Italian corporatism. In 1935 and 1936, after Italy invaded Ethiopia and the Supreme Court struck down the NRA, contemporaries stopped comparing the NRA to Italian corporatism. Interest in the subject returned in 1973, when two prominent historians[who?] wrote articles on resemblances between the New Deal and fascist economics. According to James Q. Whitman, by the late 1980s it was "almost routine" for New Deal historians to identify similarities between the New Deal and fascist economic programs.[24] Similarities are in anti-depression policies as in totality the New Deal and fascism were very different.[25]
Critics on the left Edit
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) first charged Roosevelt with being fascist less than two months after he took office. On May Day, 1933, the CPUSA ran a series of newspaper advertisements denouncing "the whole Roosevelt program of preparation for fascism and war" and calling Roosevelt a "fascist dictator". The ads' examples of alleged fascist activities included "forced labor for the unemployed" and harsh tactics against striking farm workers in California. Scholar Paul Kengor wrote that the charges were ridiculous.[26] Richard Hofstadter noted that critics from the left believed "that the NRA was a clear imitation of Mussolini's corporate state".[27]
Left-liberal publications such as The Nation and The New Republic worried that the Civilian Conservation Corps' (CCC) integration with the military could start a transformation to a fascistic society. While the CCC was operated by the military and had some militaristic aspects, the Roosevelt administration allayed these fears by emphasizing the CCC's civilian character. Unlike its German counterpart, the CCC was never a compulsory service.[28]
Critics on the right Edit
Main article: Old Right (United States)
Conservatives have made the most significant[dubious – discuss] criticisms of Roosevelt and have been keeping up with these criticisms for decades. They warned of "regimentation". They made cautionary comparisons of Roosevelt's economic programs to communism and fascism, to which Roosevelt responded in a June 1934 Fireside Chat by saying that the critics were motivated by self-interest and that everything he did was within the United States' political tradition.[29] Without providing details, Roosevelt privately told his Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes on October 4, 1933 that the New Deal was doing some things that were being done in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Roosevelt was a pragmatist who had studied under William James at Harvard College. As a pragmatist, Roosevelt was willing to consider various sources of ideas for social experiments.[30]
The most prominent of Roosevelt's critics in regards to fascism was Herbert Hoover, who saw a connection between the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the "Swope Plan", named after Gerard Swope. Hoover was an ardent supporter of trade associations, but saw the Swope Plan as fascistic because of its compulsory nature.[25] Historian George H. Nash argues:
Unlike the "moderate," internationalist, largely eastern bloc of Republicans who accepted (or at least acquiesced in) some of the "Roosevelt Revolution" and the essential premises of President Truman's foreign policy, the Republican Right at heart was counterrevolutionary. Anti-collectivist, anti-Communist, anti-New Deal, passionately committed to limited government, free market economics, and congressional (as opposed to executive) prerogatives, the G.O.P. conservatives were obliged from the start to wage a constant two-front war: against liberal Democrats from without and "me-too" Republicans from within.[31]
The Old Right emerged in opposition to the New Deal of President Roosevelt and Hoff says that "moderate Republicans and leftover Republican Progressives like Hoover composed the bulk of the Old Right by 1940, with a sprinkling of former members of the Farmer-Labor party, Non-Partisan League, and even a few midwestern prairie Socialists".[32]
Historians compare New Deal with Europe Edit
The Swope Plan was the starting point for drafting the NIRA and it was in no way copied from Europe. Many prominent businessmen had participated in writing it. However, Hoover denounced the Swope plan as monopolistic and refused to support any proposal made by the Chamber of Commerce, though it was widely praised by American businessmen and academics.[33][34] The Swope Plan was corporatist, but far less extensive than fascist corporatism. Historian John A. Garraty said that the NIRA was "similar to experiments being carried out by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy and by the Nazis in Hitler's Germany. It did not, of course, turn America into a fascist state, but it did herald an increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of interest groups, both industrialists' organizations and labor unions". Garraty said that another influence was the concept of the corporate state, where capitalists and workers, supervised by the government, worked out problems to avoid wasteful competition and dangerous social clashes.[35] Historian Ellis Hawley reviewed the legislative history of the NIRA. A key member of the Brains Trust, Raymond Moley, led efforts to review industrial recovery plans. Another significant influence was Hugh S. Johnson, who drew on his experience with the war industries board.[36] Popular historian Amity Shlaes stated:
The NRA was the consummation of a thousand articles and a thousand trends. It was the ideas of Moley, the trade unions, Stuart Chase, Tugwell, Stalin, Insull, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Mussolini's Italian model all rolled into one.[37]
According to comparative law scholar James Whitman, it was not the NIRA statute that fueled suspicions of fascism—it was the leaders of the National Recovery Administration as the head of the NRA, Hugh Johnson, openly admired Mussolini. Both Johnson and his assistant, Donald Richberg, made disturbing statements indicating that they were hostile to parliamentary government. Richberg denied being a fascist, but described Roosevelt several times as a "Man of Action". Whitman said that there were "striking" differences between the ideology of Johnson and Richberg and fascist propaganda.[24]
Garraty suggested that there were some "striking" similarities between Roosevelt's programs and German anti-depression policies, but concluded that the New Deal did not have much in common with fascism in total because of the vast political differences between the two systems. Roosevelt expanded political participation for the less fortunate and Garraty stated that the main reason for the similarities was that both nations were dealing with problems that were unique in the industrial world.[38] Garraty stated that the New Deal lacked any consistent ideological base. While the Brains Trust got a lot of attention, theorists never had much impact on Roosevelt who drew on populism, with its hostility to bankers and its willingness to inflate the currency; Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism in its dislike of competition and deemphasis on antitrust laws; and the ideas of social workers from the Progressive Era. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis influenced Roosevelt on financial reforms. The War Labor Board from World War I influenced Roosevelt's labor policy.[39]
Other scholars had varying views on the relationship between the New Deal and fascist economics:
New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg said in 1968 that "Mussolini's corporate state did not find [an] American following". Leuchtenburg said that if the New Deal had any foreign counterparts, it was in Scandinavia (see the Nordic model).[40] According to Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt was overall a net exporter of ideas and Arthur Schlesinger had similar findings.
John P. Diggins found only superficial similarities between the New Deal and Italian fascism. However, Diggins produced some quotations indicating that Roosevelt was interested in fascist economic programs and admired Mussolini.[41]
Kiran Klaus Patel stated: "On the whole, there was a special closeness between the German Labor Service and the CCC, just as there was a whole series of similar measures in social, cultural, and economic policies in Nazi Germany and under the New Deal". Patel stated that the two nations' politics were obviously different, with the United States adopting reform while Germany adopted fascism. The main reasons for the economic similarities according to Patel was the growth in state interventionism along with the fact that Germany and the United States faced similar problems, particularly the need to reduce mass unemployment. "In attempt to achieve that goal, both nations subsequently employed what were often strikingly similar instruments of economic and social policy; on this level, the crisis led to a limited degree of convergence.[42]
Ludwig von Mises wrote that the New Deal was a "replica" of Otto von Bismarck's social policies.[43] Milton Friedman also said that Bismarck's Germany influenced the New Deal. Friedman said that both Wilhelmine Germany's aristocratic and autocratic government and left-wing governments had a paternalistic philosophy. According to Friedman, other sources included Fabian England, Sweden and American universities, particularly Columbia. Britain's Old Age Insurance Act (1908) and National Insurance Act (1911) were precursors for America's social security laws.[44]
James Q. Whitman said that in its day-to-day operations the NRA only had limited resemblance to fascist corporatism. American corporatism was of an indigenous nature that traced back to nineteenth century German theorists of corporatism. It was also built on the United States' World War I experience, which used corporatism to manage the economy. European corporatism was an ideology of political economy, built on conflicts between labor and capital. It appealed to "thuggish anti-parliamentarians who were the fascists". The United States' corporatism was only an economic ideology as Americans viewed Congress as a "place full of incompetents, not rogues". Whitman said that there were two main differences between the NRA's corporatism and European fascism. One was that in the United States class warfare never reached the level of intensity that it did in Europe. The other reason was that unlike Italy and Germany, the United States had a long tradition of representative government.[45]
Shlaes wrote that Roosevelt's policies were often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad. She acknowledges that Hoover and Roosevelt may not have had better alternative as their policies may have spared America some facsimile of Mussolini's fascism or Joseph Stalin's Communism. Shales states: "The argument that democracy would have failed in the United States without the New Deal stood for seven decades, and has been made anew, by scholars of considerable quality, quite recently".[46]
Friedrich Hayek Edit
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Hayek focused mostly on Britain, but he also mentioned the New Deal and argued that Britain and the United States had started to abandon their basic commitment to personal liberty through increasingly statist economic programs. Historian Alan Brinkley said that Hayek's work was influential because it expressed concerns that already existed. The biggest challenge to the New Deal was the fear that the expanding federal bureaucracy limited personal economic freedom and autonomy. According to Brinkley, liberals accused Hayek of attacking a straw man, but their criticism had a strongly defensive tone. Alvin Hansen wrote a scathing review, but said that The Road to Serfdom is "'good medicine but a bad diet'". Stuart Chase acknowledged that Hayek provided "a useful warning [...] which every planner should paste under the glass top of his desk". Reinhold Niebuhr noted that totalitarianism's rise prompted the democracies to be apprehensive about collectivist solutions, stating that "a wise community will walk warily and test the effect of each new adventure before further adventures".[47]
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