Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Little has changed since Hegel’s complaint about the flaw in “abstract thinking”: that it cannot conceive of a handsome murderer.

THE SPECIFIC LESSON to be learned from Fascism and National Socialism was that it was possible to create a kind of national, non-class-specific socialism.

Yet both liberal and Fascist commentators identified a number of similarities between the socially oriented policies of the New Deal and Fascist ideas of collective consolidation. The consensus among political scientists and economists of the time was that the United States, under Roosevelt in the spring and summer of 1933, had, in a process of voluntary consolidation, transformed itself into a postliberal state. This synchronicity ended with America’s entry into World War II and the Allies’ victory over Fascism and National Socialism. Memories of the New Deal’s common roots with its enemies were repressed, and postwar America was free to enjoy a myth of immaculate conception when it came to the birth of the liberal-democratic welfare state. Roosevelt, no longer named in the same breath with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, posthumously became the patron saint of liberal democracy in its triumphant struggle against the forces of evil.

The broad-ranging powers granted to Roosevelt by Congress, before that body went into recess, were unprecedented in times of peace. Through this “delegation of powers,” Congress had, in effect, temporarily done away with itself as the legislative branch of government. The only remaining check on the power of the executive was the Supreme Court. In Germany, a similar process allowed Hitler to assume legislative power after the Reichstag burned down in a suspected case of arson on February 28, 1933. As in the United States, the judiciary remained—for the short term, at least—independent.

The National Socialists hailed the emergency relief measures undertaken during Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office as fully consistent with their own revolutionary program. On May 11, 1933, the main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, offered its commentary in an article with the headline “Roosevelt’s Dictatorial Recovery Measures.” The author wrote, “What has transpired in the United States since President Roosevelt’s inauguration is a clear signal of the start of a new era in the United States as well.” The tone on January 17, 1934, was much the same: “We, too, as German National Socialists are looking toward America. . . . Roosevelt is carrying out experiments and they are bold. We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail.”

Just as National Socialism superseded the decadent “bureaucratic age” of the Weimar Republic, the Völkischer Beobachter opined, so the New Deal had replaced “the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation” of the American 1920s. The paper stressed “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” praising the president’s style of leadership as being comparable to Hitler’s own dictatorial Führerprinzip. “If not always in the same words,” the paper wrote, “[Roosevelt], too, demands that collective good be put before individual self-interest. 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.” The newspaper admitted that Roosevelt maintained what it called “the fictional appearance of democracy,” but it also proclaimed that in the United States “the development toward an authoritarian state is under way.” The author added, “The president’s fundamental political course still contains democratic tendencies but is thoroughly inflected by a strong national socialism.”

There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt’s managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price “codes” for American industry. The Italian press was quite taken with these similarities, and Mussolini laid the groundwork for such comparisons in a book review he wrote of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. On the one hand, he identified a spiritual kinship: 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. In other passages, Mussolini was more reserved: The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much “Fascism” the American President’s program contains. We need to be careful about overgeneralizing. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.

In his review of the Italian edition of New Frontiers, a book written by Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, Mussolini wrote: The book as a whole is just as “corporativistic” as the individual solutions put forth in it. It is both a declaration of faith and an indictment of economic liberalism. . . . Wallace’s answer to the question of what America wants is as follows: anything but a return to the free-market, i.e., anarchistic economy. Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.10

In the Political Quarterly, Oswald Garrison Villard spoke more hypothetically: No one can deny that the entire Roosevelt legislation has enormously enhanced the authority of the President, given him some dictatorial powers, and established precedents that would make it easy for any successor to Mr. Roosevelt, or for that gentleman himself, to carry us far along the road to fascism or state socialism.21

Roosevelt himself once spoke in the presence of journalists of Mussolini and Stalin as his “blood brothers.” And during the public unveiling of the National Industrial Recovery Act, when Roosevelt referred to the industrial associations that had been reconstituted by the codes as “modern guilds,” those fluent in the jargon may well have recognized the reference to the corporatist system associated with Fascism.

Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, for instance, proclaimed, “What we are doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we are doing them in an orderly way.”

THERE WAS BROAD consensus in the 1930s that a “shirt movement” (a reference to Fascists’ proclivity for uniforms) could not just be simply imported into the United States. In other words, to be successful, American “Fascism” had to take on American form. Or to cite a dictum usually attributed to Huey Long: “When America gets Fascism it will call it Anti-Fascism.”

The movement that had such a great effect on the young Franklin D. Roosevelt was heavily influenced by the Prussian-German model. In 1912, he cited German reformers as models for a new balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility: “They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it was necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people.”45 Moreover, all of the leading Progressive figures, including Woodrow Wilson, studied either in Germany or at American universities founded along German lines. In the process, they 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.

Roosevelt consciously distinguished between radio and everyday speech, realizing that each followed its own specific dramatic rules. For that reason, he sometimes refused to allow his live speeches to be broadcast over the airwaves.

Ernst Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler’s earliest friends and allies, once noted: Those who know Hitler only from his appearances in later years—a demagogue and dictator boundlessly ranting and raving at the microphone—have no idea what a subtle and mellifluous instrument his nonamplified voice was at the time of his political debut. His baritone was both gentle and resonant. His gutturals gave listeners goose bumps. His vocal chords were still fresh and allowed him to produce nuances that had a unique effect. . . . His rhetorical style was often reminiscent of the playing technique of a master violinist, who seldom runs the full length of the bow over the strings, so that the sound is less a fully fledged tone than the intimation of an idea.15 Our post-1945 impression of Hitler’s speeches is deceptive.

In the end, the difference between Roosevelt’s preference for radio dramatics and Hitler’s and Mussolini’s reliance on staged live events seems primarily the result of a technological and therefore cultural time lag. Whereas in Europe large physical congregations were still required to suggest and maintain the idea of political charisma, in the United States, with its more advanced mass media, the same psychological mechanisms were already obeying different rules.

The U.S. Communications Act of 1934, however, restricted the duration of broadcasting licenses to six months. Simultaneously, Roosevelt appointed one of his most faithful party stalwarts as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Shortly thereafter, radio stations were required to submit transcripts of all programs “on public affairs” for FCC approval, and an FCC member let it be known that airing programs critical of the government could lead to broadcasting licenses being revoked.12 Thus it was not without some justification that a 1935 German Ph.D. dissertation on American broadcasting laws concluded, “State control is a reality in America today.”

Adolf Hitler revealed the origins of his preferred method for influencing public opinion. “I’ve learned a lot from Marxism,” Hitler said, adding: Fundamentally, these new means of political struggle can be traced back to the Marxists. I only needed to adopt and further develop them, and I essentially had what we needed. I just had to continue, with greater resolve, where the Social Democrats had failed ten times over because they insisted on trying to achieve their revolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism could have been if it had freed itself from its absurd, artificial connection with the democratic system.

Johnson was anything but a model democrat. An authoritarian hothead who raged that Blue Eagle detractors deserved “a sock right on the nose,” he considered the corporatism of the Italian Fascists a model worthy of emulation and saw his task as so important that, as he said, “this law stuff doesn’t matter.”

To quote Bernard Baruch: The best method of enforcement lies in the power of public opinion. If it is completely understood that those who are cooperating are soldiers against the common enemy within, and those who omit to act are on the other side, there will be little hanging back.

While the courts reaffirmed Germans’ de jure right to nonparticipation in voluntary campaigns, judges de facto convicted recalcitrants of antisocial behavior toward the German Volk. One such conviction in 1937, for instance, found the plaintiff guilty of “gross misuse of the freedom accorded to him by the Führer in his confidence in [the essential goodness of] the German soul.”

A corresponding process occurred in the psychology of politics. People no longer looked to liberal democracy, which they held responsible for the Depression, for protection and guidance. Instead, they placed their trust in a new type of authoritarian state, personified institutionally by II Duce and the Führer in Italy and Germany, and symbolically by President Roosevelt in the United States. The cornerstone of the leader’s legitimacy was the idea that he embodied the nation as a whole, and under his leadership, the course the nation was to pursue led not outward but inward.

In a strange analogy, the same was true in the Soviet Union, where 1924 had marked the end of proletarian internationalism and the idea of world revolution, just as 1929 marked the end of liberal capitalism in the West. Stalin’s promulgation of “socialism in one country” effectively killed off Lenin and Trotsky’s dream of communist internationalism. The Soviet-Russian nationalism that superceded the idea of a world revolution under Stalin was as autarkic, defensive, and introspective as the prevailing sentiments in pre-1937 Italy, Germany, and the United States.

mainstream America, insofar as it took any notice of the post-Arthurdale settlements, and in particular the new communities’ residents, mistrusted and opposed the planners’ attempts to develop collective and cooperative forms of life. These were perceived as authoritarian and un-American, contrary to such values as individualism and competition. It may have been hyperbolic political rhetoric when a Roosevelt opponent described the settlement projects as “the first Soviet colchos on American soil.” But it was another matter entirely when the homesteaders themselves complained about state regulation and regimentation, which in the eyes of many of them amounted to government control of their private lives. As historian Diane Ghirardo concludes, “settlers rightly felt that they were surrendering entirely too much freedom simply to obtain a loan or to remain on a project, and some felt that they were being spied upon, and that their privacy was unreasonably invaded.” In this respect, the New Deal’s homesteads not only resembled but outdid their equivalents in Mussolini’s Italy.

All political systems have showcase projects through which they present themselves to the world and expect their aims, methods, and ideals to be judged. For Fascism, the New Deal, and National Socialism, those projects were, respectively, the reclamation of an area of swamplands, the building of dams and power plants along a forgotten river valley, and the construction of a national network of highways. To understand why these projects were so important to the three governments in question, we must first turn to the regime they all implicitly copied and competed against: the Soviet Union.

Following a protracted power struggle after Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin transformed the internationalist legacy of the Soviet Union into the idea of “socialism in one country.” His vision was, so to speak, a kind of Russian “national socialism.”

Italian Fascists treated Soviet Communism, much as they did the New Deal, as a step in the right direction—but one that Fascism had taken with greater consistency and determination. Communism was acknowledged as a post- and antiliberal system, lacking only the decisive Fascist insight that the triumph over free-market chaos depended not on the proletariat but on the nation.

As we have seen again and again, Fascism and National Socialism were “American” in their use of techniques of mass manipulation; we can now say that they were also American in their ideology of classlessness. The political, psychological, and charismatic leap needed to carry Fascism and National Socialism to power had been made in America under Andrew Jackson a century earlier, establishing classlessness as practically a civil religion. In their effort to create a classless folk-community, Fascism and National Socialism can be seen as attempts to modernize the Continent and raise it up to America’s level. But influence flowed in the other direction as well. In its adoption of a social welfare system, the New Deal, it could be said, was carrying out a transformation that had taken effect in Europe, and first of all in Germany, fifty years previously. It is tempting to conjecture that a great swap occurred: While Fascist Europe took over the American creed of classlessness, New Deal America imported major elements of European economic and social order.

It was World War II that decided which system of statism would triumph in the global arena: the totalitarian welfare state along Fascist/National Socialist lines, or Roosevelt’s liberal variant. As the outcome of the war demonstrated, Old Europe’s bid to modernize via Fascism and National Socialism failed. The victor was America, but an America that achieved the stability that became its hallmark only by assimilating a major part of its defeated enemies’ culture, much like the Alexandrian and Roman empires had in their time. The great postwar synthesis that created the trans-Atlantic “West,” spanning the United States and Europe, would have been impossible without the cross-fertilization of the 1930s, which included, as Karl Mannheim gloomily predicted prior to the war, the ongoing influence of the totalitarian model: As soon as the Western states have taken up [the] fundamental problem of universal security—the management of the trade cycle—they will gradually be forced to manipulate all social control, as the dictatorships have done from the start... . Competition with [the totalitarian] states compels the democracies to make use of some, at least, of their methods.

SINCE ITS DEFEAT in 1945 and subsequent departure from the center of the global stage, Europe has found itself in the comfortable situation of a prosperous rentier protected by its American guardian. The continent that had always been a military threat to the United States was transformed into an oasis of pacifism. On the other hand, America’s own role changed profoundly as it assumed responsibility for the security of this European “Switzerland.” In the words of Werner Sombart, the United States metamorphosed from merchant to warrior. When Sombart used these terms during World War I to distinguish between mercantile England and bellicose Germany, the idea of the United States as a nation of warriors was close to inconceivable. Among the pillars of American national identity was the belief that the United States, in contrast to militaristic Europe, was a peacable republic of merchants, pace such figures as Teddy Roosevelt. This self-image was reversed with little fanfare during the forty years of the Cold War; official acknowledgment came only with the new doctrine of preventive war and its implementation in Iraq in 2003. That Germany—the militarist monster of the past, America’ enemy in two World Wars, and since 1945, its most loyal ally—refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq made the exchange of roles powerfully clear.

Flynn’s prognosis for the regime of his enemy Roosevelt sounds more apt today than when he originally made it in 1944, even though his reason—the cost of creating and maintaining the welfare state—is no longer a concern. “We must have enemies,” he wrote in As We Go Marching, “They will become an economic necessity for us.”