FDR1

[Linda Reed--PCC West Campus CSC <lreed@west.cscwc.pima.edu>]

As to the President, it is an account of an image projected upon the
popular mind which came to be known as Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is
the author's conviction that this image did
not at all correspond to the man himself and that it is now time to
correct the lineaments of this synthetic figure
created by highly intelligent propaganda, aided by mass illusion and
finally enlarged and elaborated out of all
reason by the fierce moral and mental disturbances of the war.

The moment has come when the costumes, the grease paint, the falsely
colored scenery, the technicolored
spotlights and all the other artifices of makeYDup should be put aside
and, in the interest of truth, the solid facts
about the play and the players revealed to the people. 

July, 1948 

Preface to the Popsvox PublishingR edition 

Someone once said that Washington DC is a place where history is taken
for granted and granite mistaken for
history. The new FDR "memorial" is notable for what it forgets. John
T. Flynn, active columnist and author
throughout the Roosevelt years and beyond, made an enormous contribution
to accurate reporting and
genuine understanding of the New Deal. Unfortunately, Flynn's work
has been out of print for decades while
the politically correct elite have not only preserved the myth, they
have now literally cast it in stone. 

Do not despair. The technology of the information age provides a remedy.
Flynn is back, facts, footnotes and
all, and in an electronically enhanced form unimagined in the age when
journalists scribbled on notepads with
pencil stubs. As a MicrosoftR WindowsR help file, it can be searched,
annotated, printed out . . . or even read,
page by pungent page. Even better for students, editorialists or online
newsgroup debaters, the electronic
version is only a mouse-click away when a citation is needed. No more
flipping through paper texts in search of
a passage about the Democratic National Committee or the $3,000.000
income Eleanor took down as First Lady.
Find what you want when you want it. Add your own annotations and memory
joggers. Tools are the human
heritage, as are words and ideas. 

This revived book is produced for the Historical Research Foundation
in New ork whose mission is the
conservation of truth in history. 

- Ed.

Saturday morning, March 4, 1933...the conquering Democrats poured into
the city, hastening to take over after so many hungry
years in the wilderness. 
{Hitler/1933?-sog}

Only a week before an assassin's bullet had barely missed Roosevelt.
It
struck Anton Cermak, the Bohemian mayor and boss of Chicago, who with
Al Smith, had opposed Roosevelt's
nomination. 
he got the bullet intended for Roosevelt {BIG Assumption - sog}and
died a few days later. 

Later, as Roosevelt's train sped from New ork to Washington carrying
himself and
his family, word came to him that aboard another train carrying the
65YDyearYDold Senator Thomas J. Walsh and
his bride of two days, the aged groom dropped dead in his Pullman drawing
room. He was speeding to the
capital to be sworn in as Attorney General. 

Two weeks before the lameYDduck Congress had turned a
somersault and voted the amendment to the Constitution ending Prohibition.

FortyYDone legislatures were in
session waiting eagerly for the chance to approve the wet amendment
and to slap taxes on beer and liquor to
save their empty treasuries. 

The country, the states, the towns needed money YD something
to tax. And liquor was the richest target. "Revenue," said one commentator,
"unlocked the gates for Gambrinus
and his foaming steed." 

first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have
to fear is fear
itself." 

"The means of exchange are frozen in the streams of trade."

"et our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken
by no
plague of locusts3,300,000,000 YD in
addition to all the other specific appropriations for government, into
his hands to be spent at his sweet will in
any way he desired. The great purse YD which is the greatest of all
the weapons in the hands of a free parliament
to oppose the extravagances of a headstrong executive YD had been handed
over to him. The "spendthrift"
Hoover was in California at his Palo Alto home putting his own affairs
in order, while the great Economizer who
had denounced Hoover's deficits had now produced in 100 days a deficit
larger than Hoover had produced in
two years. 

Roosevelt had no wish to stem the
panic. The onrushing tide of disaster was sweeping the slate clean
for him YD at the cost of billions to investors
and depositors. The greater the catastrophe in which Hoover went out
of power the greater would be the
acclaim when Roosevelt assumed power. 

For this drastic decision there could be, of course, but one excuse,
namely that Mr. Roosevelt had a definite
plan and that such a plan could be better carried out with a full disaster.
What, then, was his plan? We shall see
presently.4 

the crisis had assumed a terrifying
aspect. To this was added the fear of inflation and of irresponsible
and even radical measures by the new
President. One of these, of course, was the agitation which went on
behind the scenes for the nationalization of
the whole banking system. Men close to the President-elect were known
to be for this.

Then Glass asked Roosevelt what he was going to do.
To Glass' amazement, he answered: "I am planning to close them, of
course." Glass asked him what his
authority was and he replied: "The Enemy Trading Act" YD the very act
Hoover had referred to and on which
Roosevelt had said he had no advice from Cummings as to its validity.
Glass protested such an act would be
unconstitutional and told him so in heated terms. "Nevertheless," replied
Roosevelt, "I'm going to issue a
proclamation to close the banks." 

After delivering his inaugural address, Roosevelt issued a proclamation
closing all banks.

They decided that the action
must be swift and staccato for its dramatic effect; that the plan,
whatever it might be, must be a conservative
one, stressing conventional banking methods and that all leftYDwing
presidential advisers must be blacked
out during the crisis; and finally that the President must make almost
at the same time a tremendous gesture in
the direction of economy.

w it is difficult to believe that it could
ever have been uttered by a man who before he ended his regime would
spend not merely more money than
President Hoover, but more than all the other 31 Presidents put together
YD three times more, in fact, than all the
Presidents from George Washington to Herbert Hoover. This speech was
part of the plan Moley and Woodin
had devised to sell the banking plan in a single package with the great
economy program. 

To the great audience that listened to the fireside chat, the hero
of the drama YD the man whose genius had led
the country safely through the crisis of the banks YD was not any of
the men who had wrestled with the problem,
but the man who went on the radio and told of the plan he did not construct,
in a speech he did not write. Thus
Fate plays at her ageYDold game of creating heroes. 

a Great Man attended by a Brain Trust to bring understanding first
and then order out of
chaos. 

Actually there are no big men in the sense in which Big Men are sold
to the people. There are men who are
bigger than others and a few who are wiser and more courageous and
farseeing than these. But it is possible
with the necessary pageantry and stage tricks to sell a fairly bright
fellow to a nation as an authentic BIG Man.
Actually this is developing into an art, if not a science. It takes
a lot of radio, movie, newspaper and magazine
work to do it, but it can be done. 
{FDR/Hitler - sog}

For the farmer the New Deal would encourage cooperatives and enlarge
government lending agencies. But the
greatest enemy of the farmer was his habit of producing too much. His
surplus ruined his prices. The New Deal
would contrive means of controlling the surplus and ensuring a profitable
price. 

As for business the New Deal proposed strict enforcement of the antiYDtrust
laws, full publicity about security
offerings, regulation of holding companies which sell securities in
interstate commerce, regulation of rates of
utility companies operating across state lines and the regulation of
the stock and commodity exchanges. 

Roosevelt in his preelection speeches had stressed all these points
YD observing the rights of the states so
far as to urge that relief, oldYDage pensions and unemployment insurance
should be administered by them, that
the federal government would merely aid the states with relief funds
and serve as collection agent for social
insurance.

First of all, his central principle YD his party's traditional principle
of war upon BIG government YD was reversed.
And he set out to build a government that in size dwarfed the government
of Hoover which he denounced. The
idea of a government that was geared to assist the economic system
to function freely by policing and
preventive interference in its freedom was abandoned for a government
which upon an amazing scale
undertook to organize every profession, every trade, every craft under
its supervision and to deal directly with
such details as the volume of production, the prices, the means and
methods of distribution of every
conceivable product. This was the NRA. It may be that this was a wise
experiment but it was certainly the very
reverse of the kind of government which Mr. Roosevelt proposed in his
New Deal. 

Enforcement of the antiYDtrust act was a longtime pet of his party and
it was considered as an essential
instrument to prevent cartels and trusts and combinations in restraint
of trade which were supposed to be
deadly to the system of free enterprise. The New Deal had called loudly
for its strict enforcement. et almost at
once it was suspended YD actually put aside during the experiment YD
in order to cartelize every industry in
America on the Italian corporative model. 
{Fascism! - sog}

First, and most important, was the NRA and its dynamic ringmaster,
General Hugh Johnson. As I write, of
course, Mussolini is an evil memory. But in 1933 he was a towering
figure who was supposed to have
discovered something worth study and imitation by all world artificers
everywhere. 

The NRA provided that in
America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised
trade association. It was not called a
corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially
the same thing. These code authorities could
regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods,
etc., under the supervision of the NRA.
This was fascism. The antiYDtrust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt
had denounced Hoover for not
enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled
men to combine. 

In spite of all the fine words about industrial democracy, people began
to see it was a scheme to permit business men to combine to put up
prices and keep them up by direct decree or
through other devious devices. The consumer began to perceive that
he was getting it in the neck.

. A tailor named Jack Magid in New Jersey was arrested, convicted,
fined and sent to jail. The crime was that he had pressed a suit of
clothes for 35 cents when the Tailors' Code
fixed the price at 40 cents. The price was fixed not by a legislature
or Congress but by the tailors.

The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets
grew up. Only the most violent police
methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman's garment industry
the code authority employed
enforcement police.8 They roamed through the garment district like
storm troopers. They could enter a man's
factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute
interrogation, take over his books on the
instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private
coatYDandYDsuit police went through the
district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who
were committing the crime of sewing
together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods
many code authorities said there could be
no compliance because the public was not back of it. 

"Mob rule and racketeering had a considerable
degree displaced orderly government."9 

On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court, to everybody's relief, declared
the
NRA unconstitutional. It held that Congress at Roosevelt's demand had
delegated powers to the President and
the NRA which it had no right to delegate YD namely the power to make
laws. It called the NRA a Congressional
abdication. And the decision was unanimous, Brandeis, Cardozo and Holmes
joining in it. 

But of course he had imposed it not as a temporary expedient but as
a new order and he boasted of it. He had
done his best to impose the dissolution of the antiYDtrust laws on the
country. 

Curiously enough, while Wallace was paying out hundreds of millions
to kill millions of hogs, burn oats, plow
under cotton, the Department of Agriculture issued a bulletin telling
the nation that the great problem of our
time was our failure to produce enough food to provide the people with
a mere subsistence diet.

Oliphant was a lawyer whose reformist addictions overflowed into every
branch of public affairs. A
devout believer in rubber laws, it was easy for him to find one which
could be stretched to include rubber
dollars. 

We are thus continuing to move toward a managed
currency." 

Roosevelt's billions, adroitly used, had broken down every
political machine in America. The patronage they once lived on and
the local money they once had to disburse
to help the poor was trivial compared to the vast floods of money Roosevelt
controlled. And no political boss
could compete with him in any county in America in the distribution
of money and jobs. 

The poll indicated that Long could corral 100,000 voted in New ork
State, which could, in a close
election, cost Roosevelt the electoral vote there. Long became a frequent
subject of conversation at the White
House. 

Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, a young physician,
eluded the vigilance of Long's guards and shot him. 

" A monument stands to the memory of this arch demagogue in the Hall
of Fame of the
Capitol building in Washington and his body rests in a crypt on the
state capitol grounds YD a shrine to which
crowds flock every day to venerate the memory of the man who trampled
on their laws, spat upon their
traditions, loaded them with debt and degraded their society to a level
resembling the plight of a European
fascist dictatorship. 

The Treasury and the Department of Justice went into action and before
long there were income tax
indictments against at least 25 of the Long leaders and henchmen. 

When little men think about large problems the boundary between the
sound and the unsound is very thin and vague. And when some idea is
thrown out which corresponds with
the deeply rooted yearnings of great numbers of spiritually and economically
troubled people it spreads like a
physical infection and rises in virulence with the extent of the contagion.
The spiritual and mental soil of the
masses near the bottom of the economic heap was perfect ground for
all these promisers of security and
abundance. 

They had cooked up for themselves that easy, comfortable potpourri
of socialism
and capitalism called the Planned Economy which provided its devotees
with a wide area in which they might
rattle around without being called Red. 

But the time would come when they would approach much closer
to their dream of a planned people. We shall see that later. 

He was a man literally without any fundamental philosophy. The positions
he took on political and economic
questions were not taken in accordance with deeply rooted political
beliefs but under the influence of political
necessity. 

NRA and the AAA. This was a plan to take the whole industrial and agricultural
life of the country under
the wing of the government, organize it into vast farm and industrial
cartels, as they were called in Germany,as they were called in Italy,
and operate business and the farms under plans made and carried out
under the supervision of government. 

As for the Reds, they did not move in heavily until the second term
and not en masse until the third
term, although the entering wedge was made in the first. And then the
point of entry was the labor movement. 

This thing called revolutionary propaganda and activity is something
of an art in itself.
It has been developed to a high degree in Europe where revolutionary
groups have been active for half a
century and where Communist revolutionary groups have achieved such
success during the past 25 years. It
was, at this time of which I write, practically unknown to political
and labor leaders in this country and is still
unknown to the vast majority of political leaders.

He vetoed that but had
an arrangement with the Democratic leadership that they would pass
it over his head. Thus the President could
get credit for trying to kill it while the Democrats would get credit
for actually passing it. 

Their chief reliance was
upon the charge that the President had usurped the powers of Congress,
attacked the integrity of the courts,
invaded the constitutional prerogatives of the states, attempted to
substitute regulated monopoly for free
enterprise, forced through Congress unconstitutional laws, filled a
vast array of bureaus with swarms of
bureaucrats to harass the people and breed fear in commerce and industry,
discourage new enterprises and
thus prolonged the depression, had used relief to corrupt and intimidate
the voters and made appeals to class
prejudice to inflame the masses and create dangerous divisions. 

Their chief reliance was
upon the charge that the President had usurped the powers of Congress,
attacked the integrity of the courts,
invaded the constitutional prerogatives of the states, attempted to
substitute regulated monopoly for free
enterprise, forced through Congress unconstitutional laws, filled a
vast array of bureaus with swarms of
bureaucrats to harass the people and breed fear in commerce and industry,
discourage new enterprises and
thus prolonged the depression, had used relief to corrupt and intimidate
the voters and made appeals to class
prejudice to inflame the masses and create dangerous divisions. 
. From the moment the
gavel fell to open that wild conclave to the knock of the adjourning
gavel everything that was said and done or
that seemed to just happen was in accordance with a carefully arranged
and managed scenario. The delegates
were mere puppets and answered to their cues precisely like the extras
in a movie mob scene. 

the South had both arms up to its shoulder blades in Roosevelt's relief
and
public works barrel. National politics was now paying off in the South
in terms of billions. When Alf Landon
talked about Roosevelt's invasions of the Constitution, the man on
relief and the farmer fingering his subsidy
check replied "ou can't eat the Constitution."

As to the public debt he said we
borrowed eight billions but we have increases the national income by
22 billions. Would you borrow $800 a
year if thereby you could increase your income by $2200, he asked.
That is what we have done, he answered,
with the air of a man who has easily resolved a tough conundrum. And
though the figures were false and the
reasoning even more so it was practically impossible for a Republican
orator to reason with voters against
these seemingly obvious and plausible figures. 

The President's victory was due to one thing and one thing only, to
that one great rabbit YD the spending rabbit YD
he had so reluctantly pulled out of his hat in 1933. This put into
his hands a fund amounting to nearly 20 billion
dollars with which he was able to gratify the appetites of vast groups
of people in every county in America

. Without the revival of investment there could
be no revival of the economic system. The system was being supported
by government spending of borrowed
funds. 

Roosevelt's unwillingness to compromise now angered his own supporters
who were being forced to carry this
unpopular cause. In the end he had to assure Robinson that he would
have the appointment, and then to
crown Roosevelt's difficulties, Robinson was stricken with a heart
attack in the Senate and died shortly after,
alone in his apartment. 

The Treasury made a practice of keeping tricky books and producing
phony results. It had merely shifted relief payments to other accounts.
They were, in fact, larger than the year
before. 

Then he revealed the extent of his plans YD they
would have to step up spending, forget about balancing the budget and
get along with a two or three billion
dollar a year deficit for two years. Then a conservative would come
into office. That administration would do
what Roosevelt had been promising he would do YD quit government spending.
And then the whole thing would
go down in a big crash.

Then he revealed the extent of his plans YD they
would have to step up spending, forget about balancing the budget and
get along with a two or three billion
dollar a year deficit for two years. Then a conservative would come
into office. That administration would do
what Roosevelt had been promising he would do YD quit government spending.
And then the whole thing would
go down in a big crash.

What could he spend on? That was the problem.
There is only a limited number of things on which the federal government
can spend.

The one big thing the federal government can spend money on is the
army and navy.

The depression which assaulted our unprepared society in 1929 was by
no means a mysterious phenomenon to
those who had given any attention to the more or less new studies in
the subject of the business cycle. It was,
first of all and essentially, one of those cyclical disturbances common
to the system of private enterprise. That
economic system has in it certain defects that expose it at intervals
to certain maladjustments. And this was
one of those intervals. Had it been no more than this it could have
been checked and reversed in two or three
years. But this cyclical depression was aggravated by additional irritants:

1. The banking system had been gravely weakened by a group of abuses,
some of which arose out of the
cupidity of some bankers and others out of ignorance. 

2. A wild orgy of speculation had intruded into the system stimulated
by a group of bad practices in the
investment banking field. 

3. A depression in Europe arising out of special causes there had produced
the most serious repercussions
here. 

The great, central consequence of these several disturbances was to
check and then almost halt completely,
the flow of savings into investment. All economists now know what few,
apparently, knew then YD that in the
capitalist system, power begins in the payments made by employers to
workers and others in the process of
producing goods. And this must be constantly freshened by an uninterrupted
flow of savings into investment
YD the creation of new enterprises and the expansion of old ones. If
this flow of savings into investment slows
down the whole economic system slows down. If it is checked severely
the whole economic system goes into a
collapse. 

throughout Hoover's term one of these YD the ruthless operation of gamblers
in the stock market with the
dangerous weapon of short selling YD continued to add at intervals spectacular
crashes in the market which
intensified the declining confidence of the people. 

But Hoover had against him, in addition to those natural, international
and social disturbances, an additional
force, namely a Democratic House of Representatives which set itself
with relentless purpose against
everything he attempted to do from 1930 on. It had a vested interest
in the depression.

and generally to do all those things he had denounced in Hoover without
the slightest foundation for
the charges.

It was always easy to sell him a plan that involved giving away government
money.
It was always easy to interest him in a plan which would confer some
special benefit upon some special class in
the population in exchange for their votes. He was sure to be interested
in any scheme that had the appearance
of novelty and he would seize quickly upon a plan that would startle
and excite people by its theatrical
qualities.

He did not dream of the
incredible miracle of government BANK borrowing. He did not know that
the bank lends money which it
actually creates in the act of making the loan. When Roosevelt realized
this, he saw he had something very
handy in his tool kit. He could spend without taxing people or borrowing
from them, while at the same time
creating billions in bank deposits. Wonderful! 

Roosevelt
discovered what the Italian Premier Giolitti had discovered over 50
years before, that it was not necessary to
buy the politicians. He bought their constituents with borrowed money
and the politicians had to go along.

Those who, in their poverty and helplessness, refused to surrender
their independence, paid for it. A man in
Plymouth, Pa., was given a whiteYDcollar relief job before election
at $60.50 a month. He was told to change his
registration from Republican to Democratic. He refused and very soon
found himself transferred YD transferred
from his whiteYDcollar job to a pickYDaxe job on a rock pile in a quarry.
There he discovered others on the rock pile
who had refused to change their registration. This was in America,
the America of the men who were chanting
and crooning about liberty and freedom 365 days a year, who were talking
about democracy and freedom for all
men everywhere. 

These primaries of 1938, of course, were the scenes of the great Roosevelt
purge, when distinguished
Democratic senators and congressmen were marked for annihilation.

It had already become a crime for a Democrat to disagree with the administration