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

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Just as National Socialism superseded the decadent “bureaucratic age” of the Weimar Republic, the Völkischer Beobachter opined, so the New Deal had replaced “the uninhibited frenzy of market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.”