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

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

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.