The New Deal Can Be Seen As a Veteran's Reunion Reconvening the Bureaucrats Who Had Managed the Wartime Economy in 1917-18

The war metaphor influenced nearly all of the New Deal’s reform programs and the institutions put in place to implement them. The NRA was modeled on the War Industries Board of 1917, established by Woodrow Wilson to subordinate industry to the needs of wartime production, and it was directed by a former general who had served on that body. The Civilian Conservation Corps was paramilitary in structure. Even programs that seemed far removed from military purposes—the construction of settlements, the regulation of rivers, and the production of electricity—were thoroughly infused with the aura of wartime mobilization. Indeed, the Tennessee Valley Authority was presented to the public as a continuation of a defense project from World War I.

Extending the military metaphor, the New Deal could be seen as a veteran’s reunion, reconvening the bureaucrats who had managed the wartime economy in 1917 and 1918. For them, the New Deal was an occasion to bring a chapter of history that had ended in disappointment, to a happier conclusion. Tugwell spoke for many when he said that the wartime economy had been a kind of socialism and regretfully added that with the war’s end a great experiment had been broken off in midstream. Such sentiments were echoed in the nostalgic euphoria with which early Fascism and National Socialism pursued their experiments. Journalists who witnessed events on both sides of the Atlantic found the popular mood in the first days of the New Deal reminiscent of the Fascist March on Rome in 1922 and the German elections in March 1933.

—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.

The Technocrats Had No Problem Seeing the Similarities between the National Recovery Administration (NRA) Codes and Fascist Corporatism

Roosevelt himself once spoke in the presence of journalists of Mussolini and Stalin as his “blood brothers.” And during the public unveiling of the National Industrial Recovery Act, when Roosevelt referred to the industrial associations that had been reconstituted by the codes as “modern guilds,” those fluent in the jargon may well have recognized the reference to the corporatist system associated with Fascism. . . .

Rexford Tugwell, the man who was known as the most left-wing member of Roosevelt’s brain trust and who was frank about his admiration for the Soviet planned economy, was also open in his respect for Mussolini’s economic policies, though he otherwise rejected Fascism on ideological grounds. . . .

The technocrats who worked below the level of political decision making had no problem seeing the similarities between the NRA codes and Fascist corporatism. As one put it: “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those which we have been evolving here in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”

—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.

Mussolini Asks, “Where Is America Headed?” Il Duce Answers, “It Is on the Road to Corporatism”

In his review of the Italian edition of New Frontiers, a book written by Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, Mussolini wrote:

The book as a whole is just as “corporativistic” as the individual solutions put forth in it. It is both a declaration of faith and an indictment of economic liberalism. . . . Wallace’s answer to the question of what America wants is as follows: anything but a return to the free-market, i.e., anarchistic economy. Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.

—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.

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.

Mussolini Asks about Roosevelt's New Deal: Just How Much “Fascism” Does the American President’s Program Contain?

There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt’s managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price “codes” for American industry. The Italian press was quite taken with these similarities, and Mussolini laid the groundwork for such comparisons in a book review he wrote of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. On the one hand, he identified a spiritual kinship:

The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.

In other passages, Mussolini was more reserved:

The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much “Fascism” the American President’s program contains. We need to be careful about overgeneralizing. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism. More than that cannot be said at the moment.

Mussolini’s reserve reflected the customary etiquette among world leaders, who try to avoid appearing partisan: in July 1933, the month Mussolini’s review appeared, his press department was ordered not to describe the New Deal as Fascist because it might provide welcome ammunition to Roosevelt’s political enemies at home. A year later, Mussolini was sufficiently convinced of the strength of the president’s position to be rather less diplomatic in his choice of words. In his review of the Italian edition of New Frontiers, a book written by Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, Mussolini wrote:

The book as a whole is just as “corporativistic” as the individual solutions put forth in it. It is both a declaration of faith and an indictment of economic liberalism. . . . Wallace’s answer to the question of what America wants is as follows: anything but a return to the free-market, i.e., anarchistic economy. Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.

--Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), e-book.