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Enemies of the State
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Enemies of the State: The Radical Right from FDR to Trump, by D. J. Mulloy
 ENEMIES OF
THE STATE

The Radical Right in

America from FDR to Trump

D. J. Mulloy

RO W M A N & LI TTL EFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
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Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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“It’s rough out there / High water everywhere . . . ”

—Bob Dylan, “High Water (For Charley Patton)”

For my students and for my teachers.
Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  xi
1 Big Government on the March: FDR and the Roots of the
Radical Right  1
2 Wrestling the Octopus: Anti-Communism and the
Radical Right  27
3 Resisting the Tide: Civil Rights and the Radical Right   59
4 Out of the Wilderness: Ronald Reagan and the New Right   89
5 Radicalism Rising: Conspiracies and Anti-Statism at
Century’s End  119
6 Tea Parties and Trumpism: The Radical Right in the
Twenty-First Century  149
Conclusion  183
A Note on Sources  189
Index  209
About the Author  221
Acknowledgments

t h i s b o o k o ri g i n a t e d i n a c o n v e r satio n at the annual meet-

ing of the Organization of American Historians in a rain-swept Rhode
Island in April 2016. My sincere thanks to the American history edi-
tor at Rowman & Littlefield, Jon Sisk, and to the general editor of the
American Way series, John David Smith, for that conversation and for
their unstinting support and enthusiasm for this project. I would also like
to thank assistant editor Kate Powers for her considerable assistance in
seeing the book through to publication and everyone else at Rowman &
Littlefield, especially associate editor Hannah Fisher, who made it pos-
sible. Adam Crerar, David Monod, and Peter Woolstencroft took time
out of their busy schedules to cast their expert eyes over the manuscript,
for which I am very appreciative. A list of the authors whose work I
consulted in writing the book can be found in “A Note on Sources” at
the book’s end. I thank them all. History is an always ongoing discus-
sion about the past, and I am deeply grateful to be able to contribute to
it. My parents have remained steadfast in their support for more than
forty years now. I do not take that for granted. Finally, I would like to
thank my wonderful wife, the novelist Pamela Mulloy, and my amazing
daughter, Esme, a budding social historian, for allowing me to escape so
regularly to my office in the attic over the past few months and for not
complaining too much about the strange music so often emanating from
there.
Introduction

how did we get here, many people are currently asking themselves—
with a billionaire political outsider in the White House and a broader
climate in which a fervent hostility to government, especially the federal
government, seems to provide the very raison d’être for much of the poli-
tics taking place across the country? This book argues that to make sense
of these contemporary developments we need to understand the longer
history of the radical right in the United States—in all its many and var-
ied forms—going back at least to the days of the Great Depression, the
New Deal, and the extraordinary political achievements of Franklin D.
Roosevelt. The book therefore provides a concise history of the American
radical right from the 1930s through to the surprise election of Donald
Trump in 2016 and his first year in office.
It examines a wide range of fascinating—and frequently controver-
sial—groups and figures, including the American Liberty League, Huey
Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, the John
Birch Society, Citizens’ Councils, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Rich-
ard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, militia groups,
and the Tea Party. But it also considers the key role that big business and
the extremely rich have played in supporting the radical right throughout
this period, as well as the close, if sometimes fractious, relationship that has
existed between members of the radical right and the Republican Party. In
doing so, I make the case that the history of the radical right cannot and
should not be seen in isolation from broader historical trends and develop-
ments. Hence, among the significant events and issues covered in the pages
that follow are the “great debate” over America’s entry into the Second
World War, the Cold War, southern resistance to the civil rights move-
ment, the rise of the religious right, the Great Recession of 2008, and the
election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president.
What exactly do I mean by the term “radical right”? Its origins can
be traced back to the 1950s, to the attempt to account for the apparent
“lapse” in the American political system represented by McCarthyism.
xii introduction
In 1955 a group of prominent academics published a series of essays on
the phenomenon called The New American Right. Included among them
were Seymour Martin Lipset’s “The Sources of the ‘Radical Right’” and
Richard Hofstadter’s “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was these
two essays—supplemented by another Hofstadter essay called “The
Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in 1964—that did much to both
define the radical right and establish its chief characteristics. The fun-
damental difference between “moderate conservatives” and “pseudo-
conservatives,” these Columbia University professors argued, was that
the former were usually willing to negotiate and compromise in order to
achieve their political goals. They believed in “constitutional processes,
civil liberties, and due process,” and generally accepted “the past within
limits.” Whereas the latter—those on the radical right—wanted to “turn
the clock back” and had a tendency toward political extremism, conspir-
acy theories, paranoia, and a “dense and massive irrationality.”
The key distinction in Lipset and Hofstadter’s analysis was between
“genuine” conservatism and its more “radical” variant, but the term
“radical right” is also widely used to separate the racist right—usually
labeled the “extreme right”—from other right-wing groups that fall out-
side of the political mainstream. (To add to the complexity, another term,
the “far right,” is also sometimes used to denote both the radical right and
the extreme right. And that is before we add in other commonly used
descriptors, such as the religious right, the nationalist right, and most
recently—as discussed in chapter 6—the alt-right.) In its everyday use,
“radical” can have both negative and positive connotations, depending on
the context in which it is used. One can be praised for being radical in the
sense of wanting to bring about much-needed fundamental change and
criticized for being too radical, if it is felt that the change being sought
goes too far, is dangerous, or runs counter to previously established soci-
etal norms. Indeed, a group can be celebrated and condemned for its
radicalism at the very same time, depending on the perspective of those
observing it. American history is replete with examples of this, including
the Radical Republicans, who tried to secure the rights of freed slaves
in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the radical left of
the 1960s, in groups such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
or Students for a Democratic Society. (The word “radical” comes from
the Latin radix and means “pertaining to roots.” Politically, it has tended
introduction xiii
to be used to refer to those who have wanted to bring about significant
change—to pull something up by the roots and drastically alter it—and
until the middle of the twentieth century, it was more usually associated
with the left than with the right.)
In this book, I use “radical right” to describe various right-wing
groups and movements that, since the 1930s, have been driven by a deep
suspicion of the federal government and its role in American society.
This hostility to what is often referred to as “big government” contains a
number of political assumptions about the place of the state in American
life, the promise of the “free market,” individual liberties, freedom, taxa-
tion, “traditional” values, federalism, patriotism, and even the nature of
the constitutional system itself. It is an expression of political philosophy
but also of political identity, and it is firmly rooted in American history.
Indeed, anti-statism is as old as the nation itself, evident in the Decla-
ration of Independence, for instance, and manifested in various forms,
from Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, through the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the agita-
tions of the Copperheads during the Civil War. But in its modern incar-
nation, it is most closely associated with the American right’s reaction to
the enormous impact that FDR’s New Deal reforms had on the United
States—on its economy, on its politics, and on all levels of society—as the
nation sought a way out of the Great Depression.
The New Deal was a very much a watershed moment in American
history, with the federal government inserted into the lives of Americans
in ways that were previously unimaginable. It was also profoundly con-
sequential in purely political terms, not least because of the establishment
of Roosevelt’s New Deal electoral coalition—composed of labor unions,
blue-collar workers, white southerners, farmers, intellectuals, and mem-
bers of various ethnic and racial groups—which made the Democrats
the dominant political party, at least at the presidential level, for almost
the next fifty years. Not surprisingly, turning back this tide of liberalism
became the overriding aim of both the radical right and mainstream con-
servatives, and it began as early as 1934.
Similarly, it is also important to point out that while an explicit
and unabashed racism may clearly mark out one’s membership in the
extreme right, this does not mean that racial stereotypes and notions of
white supremacy have played no part in the ideology of the radical right
xiv introduction
or of American conservatism as a whole. On the contrary, although often
expressed in more coded form, in euphemism and through what has
come to be called “dog-whistle politics”—an approach that can be traced
back to the “southern strategy” of the Republican Party, beginning in the
early 1960s—racism is frequently evident on the radical right and within
conservatism more broadly, up to and including the presidency of Donald
Trump. In addition, we should not ignore the fact that avowedly racist
groups such as the Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, or
the National States’ Rights Party—all discussed in this book—have also
expressed more conventional and accepted right-wing beliefs, including
a fervent opposition to the activities of the interventionist state and lib-
eral welfarism. All of which is to say that the dividing lines between the
extreme right, the radical right, and conservatism are much less robust
than many people would like to believe. It is for all these reasons that
the Republican Party—the official repository of mainstream American
conservatism—features so prominently in the pages that follow. (It is also
the case that the radical right has often seen the GOP as the most likely
vehicle for the expansion of its political influence, another point that is
important to recognize.)
Three other terms closely associated with the radical right also need
some consideration. The first is demagoguery. From Huey Long and
Father Coughlin, through Joe McCarthy and George Wallace, and onto
President Trump, leaders of the radical right—if Trump is determined
to belong to the radical right, which is not entirely clear, as we shall see—
have often been accused of being demagogues. In the simplest sense, a
demagogue is someone who appeals to popular desires and prejudices,
rather than relying on rational argument. They are, as the novelist James
Fenimore Cooper put it in 1838, a “leader of the rabble.” A more sophis-
ticated definition is provided by Michael Singer in his 2009 book, Dema-
gogues: The Fight to Save Democracy from its Worst Enemies. In Singer’s
view, “true demagogues” meet four rules:
(1) They fashion themselves as a man or woman of the common peo-
ple, as opposed to the elites; (2) their politics depends on a powerful,
visceral connection with the people that dramatically transcends ordi-
nary political popularity; (3) they manipulate this connection, and the
raging popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition; and
introduction xv
(4) they threaten or outright break established rules of conduct, institu-
tions, and even the law.
Just because someone is accused of demagoguery doesn’t mean they actu-
ally are a demagogue, of course. This is because the term is also one of
political abuse, a useful means of undermining an opponent. We cer-
tainly need to bear this in mind, but it is nonetheless striking just how
often the term appears in discussions of the radical right.
Closely related to the concept of demagoguery is that of populism.
Like demagogues, populists attempt to mobilize “the people” against
“the elites,” but determining who exactly are “the people” and who gets
to speak for them is not necessarily a straightforward task. (The princi-
pal distinction between demagogues and populists, according to Singer,
is that populists “play by the rules, but demagogues most often bully the
rule of law.”) It is also important to point out that there are many dif-
ferent varieties of populism: left-wing, right-wing, and even centrist.
According to John Judis, for example, left-wing populists tend to “cham-
pion the people against an elite or an establishment,” whereas right-wing
populists “champion the people against an elite they accuse of favoring
a third group,” such as immigrants, ethnic minorities, or, as we will see
in chapter 2, communists. Indeed, for the historian Michael Kazin, pop-
ulism is “more an impulse than an ideology,” a “persistent yet mutable
style of political rhetoric.”
In American terms, populism’s roots are to be found in the short-lived
but enormously influential left-wing People’s Party, or Populist Party,
formed in 1891 by leading members of the Kansas Farmers Alliance
and the labor organization the Knights of Labor. The Populists railed
against the “money powers,” the railroads, and the “plutocracy” as they
sought to reform capitalism and extend the powers of government to end
“oppression, injustice, and poverty.” (There was also an element of rac-
ism and nativist hostility to immigrants in some of their demands and
rhetoric, it should be noted.) On the American right, the first major
populist movements emerged during the 1930s, in the form of Father
Coughlin’s National Union of Social Justice and Huey Long’s “share the
wealth” clubs—both of which were accused by their opponents of being
fascist. These were followed by George Wallace’s American Indepen-
dent Party in the 1960s and the presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and
xvi introduction
Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s, but elements of populism—its “expres-
sions, tropes, themes and images,” to use Kazin’s words—are evident in
numerous other members of the radical right, including Joe McCarthy,
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.
The third term that we need to address is what has been called the
“counter-subversive tradition” in American life. This too can be traced
back to the very founding of the United States and is closely bound up with
notions of American identity (and what Hofstadter called the “paranoid
style” in American politics). Ever since the American Revolution, fears
have been expressed that hidden enemies were a threat to the nation and
that it was incumbent upon groups of motivated citizens to come together
to both expose and thwart these subversive and sinister threats. These fears
have not just been confined to the margins of American society. As Rich-
ard Curry and Thomas Brown pointed out in their 1972 book on the sub-
ject, “From George Washington to Richard Nixon, American presidents
have uttered grim warnings against conspiracies. Fears of subversion are
very much part of the mainstream of politics.” As we shall see, this counter-
subversive tradition has been an especially prominent feature of the radical
right, and it has continued to find expression well into the twenty-first cen-
tury, with the federal government itself often being accused of all man-
ner of conspiratorial malfeasance. Interestingly, the historian David Brion
Davis has attributed the persistence of these beliefs to the idea of American
exceptionalism, to the notion that United States has a “special mission” in
the world. There is, he says, “a striking correlation between fears of con-
spiracy and American aspirations to national greatness.”
Finally, before setting out how the remainder of the book is organized,
let me say a few words about its title. As is now hopefully clear, Enemies
of the State is intended to capture the radical right’s deep hostility to “big
government” and the liberal state, but it also reflects the fact that many
of the groups and individuals discussed in the six chapters that follow
have themselves been frequently regarded as enemies of the state—as a
threat to democracy and even as a potentially dangerous “enemy within,”
to continue with the idea of the counter-subversive tradition—and they
have been routinely monitored, surveilled, and denounced precisely
because of these concerns. I will leave it to my readers to decide whether
such concerns are justified.
introduction xvii
As for the rest of the book, chapter 1 provides an account of the New
Deal and the extensive opposition it generated from a range of radical
rightists, including the American Liberty League, Huey Long, Father
Coughlin, and assorted domestic fascists such as Gerald Winrod’s
Defenders of the Christian Faith, William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirt
Legion, the Black Legion, and the German-American Bund. It also con-
siders the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, in which thirty far-right activists
were accused of being involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy to over-
throw the U.S. government, as well as the broader “Brown Scare” over
America’s supposed fascist problem and the highly contentious debate
between isolationists and interventionists concerning the nation’s entry
into the Second World War.
The anti-communist right of the early Cold War is the subject of
chapter 2. While it details the dramatic rise and fall of Senator McCar-
thy, it does so by placing McCarthyism in the context of the domestic
and international politics of the period, examining the key role played by
the FBI, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Ameri-
can Legion, and other members of the broader anti-communist network
during this time. Importantly, the chapter shows how the hunt for com-
munist subversion was motivated, in large part, by a desire to undermine
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, and to undo the legacy of the New
Deal. The John Birch Society, the most significant and formidable radi-
cal right-wing group of the 1960s, is also examined here, as are Dr. Fred
Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and Reverend Billy
James Hargis’s Christian Crusade.
Chapter 3 assesses the radical right’s opposition to the civil rights
movement. From “massive resistance” and terroristic violence to subtler
forms of protest centered on the advocacy of states’ rights and appar-
ent concerns about “law and order,” some of the key groups and figures
examined in this chapter include Strom Thurmond and the States’ Rights
Democratic Party, the Citizens’ Council movement, the Birch Society,
the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace’s American Independent Party, J. B.
Stoner, and General Edwin Walker, as well as numerous local, state, and
national politicians. It considers the various arguments that were used
to justify the continuation of racial segregation in the South, including
ongoing fears of communist subversion and objections to the overbearing
xviii introduction
and even “tyrannical” powers of the federal government, while stressing
the lasting impact that massive resistance had on American politics and
American society.
Ronald Reagan and the various elements of the New Right are the
principal subjects of chapter 4. Reagan’s remarkable transformation from
Hollywood actor and New Deal–supporting Democrat to the appar-
ent savior of American conservatism and scourge of “big government”
is critically examined, as is the disappointment that many members of
the New Right ultimately had in the Reagan presidency. The New Right
was a broad-based coalition of grassroots activists, politicians, religious
broadcasters, lobbyists, think tanks, and pressure groups, led by key fig-
ures such as Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, and Phyllis Schlafly and
supported by a wide-range of wealthy business leaders and their private
foundations. Beginning in the early 1970s, it played a crucial role both
in the “mainstreaming” of radical right-wing ideas and in the politiciza-
tion of evangelical Christians, helping to draw the religious right into the
orbit of the GOP through organizations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral
Majority.
Chapter 5 explores the increasingly rightward shift of the Republi-
can Party during the 1990s. It examines Newt Gingrich’s Contract with
America and the Republicans’ long-running attempt to impeach Bill Clin-
ton—which his wife, Hillary Clinton, famously claimed was the result of
a “vast right-wing conspiracy”—as well as the presidential campaigns of
the populist outsiders Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. It also discusses how
antigovernment sentiment, extreme rhetoric, and conspiratorial beliefs
became increasingly prominent features of mainstream political life and
considers the emergence of a startling new movement on the American
radical right, the heavily armed citizens’ militia movement.
Chapter 6 brings the story of the radical right into the early years of the
twenty-first century by examining the sudden and dramatic appearance
of the Tea Party and its attempt to both “take over” the Republican Party
and “take back” the American nation. It considers whether the Tea Party
is a genuinely grassroots political movement or an “astroturf” one—the
creation of right-wing media outlets like Fox News in combination with
members of the radical rich, such as the highly secretive Koch brothers—
and also how much of its vehemently expressed opposition to the presi-
dency of Barack Obama was motivated by racism. Donald Trump’s star-
introduction xix
tling election to the presidency, his enormously controversial first year in
office, and his relationship with the Tea Party are also addressed in detail.
The book’s conclusion assesses the overall significance of the radical
right in modern American history and considers where Donald Trump
can be situated within this history, returning us once again to questions
of demagoguery, populism, racism, conspiratorial thinking, and the long-
standing assault on “big government” in the United States since the 1930s.
 1
Big Government on the March
FDR and the Roots of the Radical Right

during the very depths of the Great Depression, on March 4,

1933, as part of his first inaugural address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(FDR) famously declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear
itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed
efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Whether or not the new president
actually believed that this was the only thing the nation had to fear, Roo-
sevelt’s persistent declarations of confidence in the American people and
in the American system—“this great nation will endure as it has endured,
will revive and will prosper,” he further stated that March day—were
powerful restoratives after the repeated failures and seeming indifference
of the Hoover years. Crucially, and in stark contrast to his predecessor in
the White House, Roosevelt also promised to mobilize the power of the
federal government to help bring an end to the crisis and to implement his
admittedly vaguely defined plans for a “New Deal” for Americans. The
situation was akin to wartime, FDR said, and he would be asking Con-
gress for “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as
great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by
a foreign foe.”
In many respects the accomplishments of the New Deal mark the
beginning of modern American history. It is a period comparable to the
wrenching changes brought on by the Civil War, with the federal gov-
ernment inserted into the economy and into society in ways that would
have been unthinkable a generation before. In an address in Williams-
burg, Virginia, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge remarked that should
2 enemies of the state
the federal government “go out of existence, the common run of peo-
ple would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a
considerable length of time.” It was not a comment that could be made
by the late 1930s. The years from 1932 to 1945, during which time FDR
served an unprecedented three terms in office, witnessed the redefinition
and triumph of American liberalism, the establishment of a new Demo-
cratic Party electoral coalition, and the creation of the welfare state—fol-
lowed in short order by that of the warfare state. Yet for all its successes,
opposition to the New Deal and to Roosevelt was also significant, and it
began early, within a year of his first inaugural address.
And for many of those on the American right during this time, it was
the president and his new policies and programs that really needed to be
“feared.”
This chapter examines these opponents of FDR, people who believed
that the New Deal would create a bureaucratic Leviathan, cripple the
free enterprise system, destroy states’ rights, undermine individual free-
dom, and put the nation on the road to communism, dictatorship, and
tyranny. It is a grouping, as we shall see, that includes conservatives in
Congress, big business, and various populists, nativists, and quasi-fascists.
The chapter also examines how Roosevelt and others responded to the
challenges posed by these groups. This is important because it is in the
fierce contest between the administration and its right-wing opponents
that we can find the roots of the “radical right” that would run—in vari-
ous forms—throughout the rest of the twentieth century and on into the
twenty-first century. We begin, though, with an overview of the Depres-
sion and of the New Deal
The scale of the crisis brought on by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was
both unprecedented and extraordinary. A quarter of the American work-
force was unemployed by 1932 (some 11.5 million people), and those for-
tunate enough to remain in work often found themselves struggling by
on reduced hours or reduced wages, as banks and businesses failed, sav-
ings were wiped out, and homes and farms were foreclosed upon. People
starved, suicides increased, and the birth rate dropped. Many took to the
road and to the rails in search of a fresh start, not least the “Okies” of Kan-
sas, Oklahoma, and Texas, hastened on by drought and dust to the sup-
posed “promised land” of California. Shantytowns, known as “Hoover-
villes” in stinging rebuke to President Herbert Hoover, sprang up in
big government on the march 3
dumps on the outskirts of towns and cities across the country. In the sum-
mer of 1932, thousands of World War I veterans marched on Washington
to demand the immediate payment of a special “bonus” that Congress has
promised them back in 1924, even though it wasn’t due until 1945. The
Senate refused to vote the veterans their relief, and the remnants of the
Bonus Army were violently dispersed from the nation’s capital by troops
under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, their encampments
torched in what, to many, seemed a horrible harbinger of the wider unrest
that might yet be unleashed on the nation as a whole.
It wasn’t true that Hoover, “the Great Engineer,” had done nothing
to end the Depression, as some of his critics charged, but it was certainly
the case that he remained firmly wedded to the political and economic
orthodoxies of an earlier age, mostly notably to laissez-faire economics
and strictly limited government, as he attempted to deal with it. Hoover
believed, for example, that the United States would be “plunged into
socialism and collectivism” if the federal government provided direct
unemployment relief and that it was really the role of state and local gov-
ernments working in conjunction with private enterprise to find a way
out of the crisis. In contrast, when he accepted the Democratic Party’s
nomination for president in 1932, Roosevelt had promised action, what
he called “bold, persistent experimentation.” “It is common sense to take
a method and try it,” he explained. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try
another. But above all, try something.” He was true to his word once in
the White House.
The first hundred days of Roosevelt’s first term passed by in a veri-
table blur of new federal initiatives, agencies, and programs. The Emer-
gency Banking Act stabilized the nation’s banking system and got money
moving again. The Civilian Conservation Corps put people to work in
the American countryside preventing floods, fighting pests, building
bridges, and repairing fences, all in camps run by the War Department.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act sought to drive up the prices of agri-
cultural products by placing restrictions on output. The Glass-Steagall
Banking Act separated commercial from investment banking and also
created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, by which the federal
government guaranteed the savings of ordinary Americans. The Ten-
nessee Valley Authority would build dams, control floods, and generate
cheap hydroelectric power. A Public Works Administration and Civil
4 enemies of the state
Works Administration were created—the latter of which, at its peak,
employed 4,230,000 people, as 40,000 schools, 1,000 airports, and more
than 500,000 miles of roads were either built or improved upon—and
the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was passed. The NIRA
allowed the administration to create work-relief agencies, but it also
established national codes that were intended to regulate the prices,
wages, hours, and conditions of work of hundreds of industries across
the nation (all of which was watched over by the ubiquitous martial sym-
bol of the Blue Eagle and its accompanying legend, “We Do Our Part”).
Despite all of this activity, the problems of the Depression were far from
solved, however, and as a result, a so-called second New Deal began in
mid-1935. The National Labor Relations Act replaced the NIRA, which
had recently been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The Wagner Act, as it was more commonly known (after Senator Robert
Wagner [D-NY], who drafted it), threw the power of the state behind the
right of labor to collective bargaining, empowering the National Labor
Relations Board to supervise union elections and prohibiting “unfair labor
practices” by employers, such as dismissing workers who joined a union.
Its impact was dramatic: in 1930 only 10 percent of workers in the manu-
facturing sector belonged to a union; by 1940 that number was 30 percent.
The Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million people to work at the
cost of some $11 billion, including thousands of artists, musicians, actors,
and writers, under projects such as the Federal Art Project, the Federal
Music Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the Federal Writers Proj-
ect. The Social Security Act established universal retirement, unemploy-
ment insurance, and welfare benefits for the poor and disabled. A Wealth
Tax was initiated. And in 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act, the last of
the major New Deal reforms, was passed, banning child labor and estab-
lishing a federal minimum wage.
Opposition to the New Deal from the American right began in ear-
nest during the summer of 1934, once the sense of immediate crisis had
passed. In early July, for example, a radio address by Idaho Republican
Senator William E. Borah denounced Roosevelt for attempting to “fasten
a stranglehold system of bureaucracy upon the people.” The Republican
national chairman, Henry P. Fletcher, criticized the New Deal similarly
as “government from above.” It was predicated, he said, “on the proposi-
tion that the people can’t manage their own affairs and that a government
big government on the march 5

Franklin D. Roosevelt prepares to give a radio address in 1938. His New Deal
reforms of the 1930s provided a major spur to the development of the radical right
in the United States. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Harris &
Ewing Collection, LC-DIG-hec-47601.

bureaucracy must manage for them,” and he feared that the economy
itself was at risk of being destroyed by “an all directing State.” Former
president Hoover, in his 1934 book, The Challenge to Liberty, made the
case that Roosevelt’s program was a “new philosophy which must mark
the end of liberty.” Disaffected conservative Democrats like Alfred E.
Smith, the party’s presidential candidate in 1928; John W. Davis, who
had run for the presidency in 1924; as well as numerous business owners,
large and small, voiced similar complaints.
On August 15, 1934, a new conservative organization called the Amer-
ican Liberty League came into being. It had grown out of a remarkable
exchange of correspondence the previous March between R. R. M. Carpen-
ter, a retired vice president of the Du Pont corporation, and one of its cur-
rent vice presidents, John J. Raskob, in which Carpenter had complained
6 enemies of the state
that “five negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this spring
saying they had easy jobs with the government. And a cook on my house-
boat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar
an hour as a painter.” Raskob in reply had encouraged Carpenter to “take
the lead in trying to induce the Du Pont and General Motors groups, fol-
lowed by other big industries, to definitely organize to protect society from
the sufferings which it is bound to endure if we allow communistic ele-
ments to lead the people to believe that all businessmen are crooks.”
Wrapping itself in patriotism, rugged individualism, and the defense
of the Constitution, the League was loftily committed, at least in princi-
ple, to the nonpartisan teaching of the “necessity of respect for the rights
of persons and property” and of the “duty of government to encourage
and protect individual and group initiative and enterprise.” In practice,
however, it was a huge propaganda machine set in almost perpetual
motion against the “ravenous madness” of Roosevelt and the New Deal.
In innumerable pamphlets, bulletins, leaflets, news conferences, radio
programs, reports, and speeches, the League and its spokespersons railed
against “that man in the White House” and his dangerous, immoral,
and dictatorial schemes. Indeed, for many Liberty League pamphlets, it
was usually enough to simply read the title in order to understand the
message intended to be conveyed; to wit: “The President Wants More
Power,” “Will It Be Ave Caesar?” “New Labels for Old Poisons,” “The
Way Dictatorships Start.”
The Liberty League could operate its extensive campaign against
the New Deal because, simply stated, it was awash with money. In this
respect the “big industries” that Raskob had seen as crucial in taking the
lead in the organization had certainly come through. With the du Pont
brothers, Irénée, Pierre, and Lammot, at the forefront of the operation,
other key financial backers included the president of General Motors,
Alfred P. Sloan; the chairman of General Foods, Edward F. Hutton; the
steel magnate Ernest T. Wier; and the Texas cotton broker Will L. Clay-
ton. Both Al Smith and John Davis became spokesmen for the League,
and many other politicians, academics, bankers, financiers, corporate
lawyers, and businessmen joined it. Jouett Shouse, who had led the
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, on which the Liberty
League was modeled, was the organization’s president.
big government on the march 7
The support of wealthy patrons was certainly a source of strength for
the League, but it was also a major weakness. Even though it cost noth-
ing to become a member, the organization was never able to create the
mass movement it had set out to establish; at its peak in 1936, member-
ship totaled only 124,856. Nor was it able to establish its planned Labor
and Farm divisions. Indeed, its only two subsidiaries were composed of
college students and lawyers. The League’s nonpartisanship was also
quickly exposed as a fiction. As the New York Times columnist Arthur
Krock noted in January 1936, “Members of the League might be classed
as the most conservative group in the country,” and it “is dominated by
Republicans.” Nor did it seem to have any actual practical alternatives
to the policies of the New Deal. (The best it could come up with was to
suggest that the Red Cross be used to handle all direct relief.) What was
worse, the League’s constant stress on the value of rugged individualism
and self-help betrayed a profound misreading of the humanitarian cri-
sis unfolding all around it, making the organization and its millionaire
backers an easy target for ridicule. The League was like a group com-
mitted to upholding only “two of the Ten Commandments,” joked FDR
shortly after its formation, and he virtually ignored the Republican Party
and its official candidate, Alfred M. Landon, during the 1936 presidential
election, preferring, it seemed, to campaign against the Liberty League
instead. “The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the
institutions of America,” he told a roaring crowd of more than one hun-
dred thousand at the Democratic National Convention at Franklin Field
in Philadelphia on June 27, 1936. “What they really complain of is that
we seek to take away their power.” “In vain they seek to hide behind the
flag and the Constitution,” he went on, turning the League’s attempt to
use the nation’s patriotic imagery back against it.
The American Liberty League was not the only group of businessmen
to inveigh against the New Deal. So too did the National Association of
Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other organiza-
tions, as well as individual business owners, including the powerful agri-
business leaders of California, men like Harry Chandler, who was also
the proprietor of the Los Angeles Times, and Joseph Knowland, publisher
of the Oakland Tribune. William Randolph Hearst, the most successful
newspaperman in the state, was an equally committed opponent of what
8 enemies of the state
he required his journalistic employees to refer to as the “Raw Deal.” Nor
did the financial backers of the League rely on it alone: they also sup-
ported a host of “masthead organizations” such as the Crusaders, Sen-
tinels of the Republic, Minute Men and Women of Today, the National
Conference of Investors, Women Investors of America, and the Farmer’s
Independence Council—supposedly independent or genuinely grassroots
groups that were actually run, for the most part, by professional lobbyists
and publicists. In addition, the du Pont brothers, Alfred Sloan, and John
Raskob were also behind the ill-fated attempt to have the segregationist
Georgia Democrat Eugene Talmadge run for the presidency in 1936 as
part of his Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution.
Such groups and their members were also responsible for much of the
highly personal and strikingly vicious abuse that was directed the presi-
dent’s way. “In their thesaurus of hate,” the historian George Wolfskill
writes,
Roosevelt was a “renegade Democrat,” an “extravagant,” “destruc-
tive,” “vacillating,” “unprincipled charlatan.” A “cripple,” an “invalid”
lacking physical stamina, a captive, psychologically, who was morally
“weak,” intellectually “shallow,” unbelievably “gullible,” a “dupe”
(surrounded by “radicals,” “crackpots,” “quarterbacks,” and “foreign-
thinking brain-trusters, some of whom were better known in Russia
than in the United States”). . . . From Newport to Miami, from Wall
Street to Park Avenue, in country club locker rooms, the cathedral-
like hush of bank offices, in board rooms and carpeted law offices, in
hotel suites and cabin cruisers the broad stories passed: Roosevelt was
an inveterate liar . . . a syphilitic, a tool of Negroes and Jews, a mad-
man given to unprovoked gales of immoderate laughter, an alcoholic, a
megalomaniac dreaming his dreams of dictatorship.
While directing most of their ire toward the administration in Wash-
ington, groups like the Liberty League were also concerned about the
rise of new “populist” movements like those associated with Dr. Francis
E. Townsend, Governor Huey “Kingfish” Long, and Father Charles E.
Coughlin (not to mention the activities of various socialist and communist
groups, of course). These movements were also of considerable concern to
Roosevelt, although for different reasons. The largely statist solutions to
the Depression proposed by Townsend, Long, and Coughlin may seem
to place them clearly on the left of the political spectrum, but this was not
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