Even a Democrat Accused FDR of Trying “to Transplant Hitlerism to Every Corner of this Country”

Perhaps not surprisingly, comparisons of the New Deal with totalitarian ideologies were part and parcel of the everyday rhetoric of Roosevelt's domestic enemies. A Republican senator at the time described the National Recovery Administration (NRA) as having gone “too far in the Russian direction,” while even a Democrat accused FDR of trying “to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of this country.” Herbert Hoover called for open resistance to FDR's policies: “We must fight again for a government founded on individual liberty and opportunity that was the American vision. If we lose we will continue down this New Deal road to some sort of personal government based upon collectivist theories. Under these ideas ours can become some sort of Fascist government.” 

Such sentiments could, of course, be put down to the usual partisan politics and intraparty rivalries, were it not for the fact that they were echoed by intellectual observers of economics and social policies who were otherwise Roosevelt allies. They, too, saw a Fascist element at the core of the New Deal. Writing in the Spectator, liberal journalist Mauritz Hallgren noted:

We in America are bound to depend more upon the State as the sole means of saving the capitalist system. Unattended by black-shirt armies or smug economic dictators--at least for the moment--we are being forced rapidly and definitely into Fascism. . . . 

Elsewhere, he observed:

I am certain that in this country it will come gradually, dressed up in democratic trappings so as not to offend people. But when it comes it will differ in no essential respect from the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany. This is Roosevelt's role--to keep people convinced that the state capitalism now being set up is entirely democratic and constitutional.

In the North American Review, Roger Shaw concurred:

The New Dealers, strangely enough, have been employing Fascist means to gain liberal ends. The NRA with its code system, its regulatory economic clauses and some of its features of social amelioration, was plainly an American adaptation of the Italian corporate state in its mechanics. The New Deal philosophy resembles closely that of the British Labour Party, while its mechanism is borrowed from the BLP's Italian antithesis.

--Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Picador Henry Holt and Company, 2007), Kobo e-book.