20. Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" p. 543.
21. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 128. When the film version opened in theaters, a letter appeared in the British Union of Fascists party newspaper, Action, asking, "Is Mr. Wells a Secret Fascist?" The correspondent noted, "The supermen all wore the black shirt and broad shiny belt of Fascism! The uniforms were identical, and their wearers moved and bore themselves in the semi-military manner of fascists." Coupland, "H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'" p. 541. H. G. Wells, "What Is Fascism — and Why?" New York Times Magazine, Feb. 6, 1927, p. 2; George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler, and the World State," Horizon, Aug. 1941, in Essays (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 371.
22. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866 (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 682; William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 93.
23. In the 1920s and 1930s various fascist-like intellectual cults popped up based on the idea that engineers should rule, the most famous of which was Thorstein Veblen's "technocracy" fad.
24. As a writer for the Village Voice puts it, Coughlin was the leader of a "group of right-wing Christian political losers." James Ridgeway, "Mondo Washington," Village Voice, March 14, 2000, p. 41. A writer for the New York Times simply declared Pat Buchanan the "Father Coughlin of 1996." Samuel G. Freedman, "The Father Coughlin of 1996," New York Times, Feb. 25, 1996. The historian Michael Kazin told BusinessWeek, "Buchanan hearkens back to Father Coughlin's 1930s isolationist-conservatism." Lee Walczak, "The New Populism," BusinessWeek, March 13, 1995, p. 72. A professor writing for Foreign Policy expresses shock that "the contemporary Christian Right have been staunch supporters of Israel," which he says should be a "surprise to observers familiar with the anti-Semitic virulence of such pre-World War II Christian conservatives as radio commentator Father Charles." William Martin, "The Christian Right and American Foreign Policy," Foreign Policy, no. 114 (Spring 1999), p. 72. Newsweek counts Father Coughlin and Ronald Reagan as two "conservatives" who really got radio. Howard Fineman, "The Power of Talk," Newsweek, Feb. 8, 1993, p. 24. And on and on.
25. Marshall William Fishwick, Great Awakenings: Popular Religion and Popular Culture (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth, 1995), p. 128.
26. "Lays Banks' Crash to Hoover Policies," New York Times, Aug. 24, 1933, p. 7; "State Capitalism Urged by Coughlin," New York Times, Feb. 19, 1934, p. 17.
27. A wide range of observers understood that communism was a new religion. John Maynard Keynes began his brilliant 1925 essay "A Short View of Russia" by declaring, "Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul — religion and business. We are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly inefficient."
28. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 122.
29. "'Roosevelt or Ruin,' Asserts Radio Priest at Hearing," Washington Post, Jan. 17, 1934, pp. 1-2; Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 126. See also Father Coughlin, Address, National Union for Social Justice, Nov. 11, 1934, www.ssa.gov/history/fcspeech.html (accessed Feb. 20, 2007).
30. Principles of the National Union for Social Justice, quoted in Brinkley, Voices of Protest, pp. 287-88.
31. Coughlin went on: "We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in any industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited." Charles A. Beard and George H. E. Smith, eds., Current Problems of Public Policy: A Collection of Materials (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), p. 54.
32. Brinkley, Voices of Protest, p. 239.
33. Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1998, p. 240); Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheavaclass="underline" 1935-1936, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 66.
34. Sinclair was the muckraking journalist who most famously wrote The Jungle, the story of an exploited immigrant in the Chicago meatpacking industry who ultimately finds salvation through socialism. Sinclair himself was formally a member of the Socialist Party until World War I, when he broke with it in favor of intervention (which would have made him a Fascist in Italy). Sinclair remained an ideological socialist (and food faddist) for the rest of his days. Dr. Townsend is an even odder duck. In September 1933 he wrote a letter to his local California newspaper claiming that America's economic problems could be solved if only the federal government gave two hundred dollars to all people over the age of sixty, so long as they promised to spend the money within thirty days. This alone would jump-start the economy and pull the elderly out of poverty. Within three months of that letter to the editor, there were three thousand Townsend clubs across the country, as well as a weekly national newspaper. By the summer of 2005, there were an estimated 2.25 million members across the country. The Townsend movement, which Today dubbed "easily the outstanding political sensation of 1935," ended up winning numerous seats in state legislatures and even two governorships. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 180.
35. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 73.
36. Gotz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Holt, 2007). A discerning reader might ask, "Why was Hitler's Germany so much more successful than America if the Third Reich was more socialist?" It's an excellent question and one that I've asked several economists. The short answer is "real wages." See Jody K. Biehl, "How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer," Spiegel Online, March 22, 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html (accessed June 26, 2007).
37. Anne O'Hare McCormick, "Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans," New York Times, July 10, 1933, p. 6.
38. John A. Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (Oct. 1973), pp. 933-34; Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, pp. 19-20.
39. Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, pp. 23, 24, 19.
40. Benito Mussolini, "The Birth of a New Civilization," in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 73; Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, p. 31.