Within the White House, Long and Coughlin were seen, along with other populist and radical movements and leaders — including Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for the governorship of California and Dr. Francis Townsend's bizarre pension movement, which swept the country in the 1930s — as dangerous threats to the control and rule of New Deal planners.34 But only the most sloppy and circular thinking — the sort that says right-wing equals bad, and bad equals right-wing — would label such radicals and collectivists as anything but creatures of the left.
In 1935 Roosevelt was sufficiently worried about these various threats from the left that he ordered a secret poll to be conducted. The results scared the dickens out of many of his strategists, who concluded that Long could cost FDR the election if he ran on a third-party ticket. Indeed, Roosevelt confessed to aides that he hoped to "steal Long's thunder" by adopting at least some of his issues.
How did FDR hope to steal the thunder of incipient fascist and collectivist movements in the United States? Social Security, for starters. Although the extent of its influence is hotly debated, few dispute that the national-socialist push from below — represented by Long, Coughlin, and Townsend — contributed to the leftward tilt of Roosevelt's "Second Hundred Days." FDR the Third Wayer aped the Bismarckian tactic of splitting the difference with the radicals in order to maintain power. Indeed, just when Long's popularity was spiking, Roosevelt unexpectedly inserted a "soak the rich" bill into his list of "must pass" legislative proposals. How things would have played out over time is unknowable because Long was assassinated in September 1935. As for Coughlin, his problems accelerated as he became ever more of an economic radical and ever more sympathetic to the actual, name-brand, foreign fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. His anti-Semitism — evident even when Roosevelt and New Deal liberals welcomed his support — likewise became ever more pronounced. During the war FDR ordered his Justice Department to spy on Coughlin with the aim of silencing him.
How much electoral support Long, the Coughlinites, and the rest would have garnered had Long survived to challenge Roosevelt at the polls remains a matter of academic speculation, but it is somewhat irrelevant to the larger point. These populist leftists framed the public debate. That Coughlin garnered 40 million listeners in a nation of only 127 million and that his audience was largest when he was calling the New Deal "Christ's Deal" should tell us something about the nature of FDR's appeal, and Coughlin's. Even those New Dealers who despised Long and Coughlin believed that if they didn't steal their thunder, "Huey Long and Father Coughlin might take over." What's more, there was precious little daylight between the substantive ideas and motivations of "street" or "country" fascists like Long and Coughlin and those of the more rarefied intellectuals who staffed the Roosevelt administration.
REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN MAN
One can easily make too much of the parallel chronology of Hitler's and Roosevelt's tenures. But it is not a complete coincidence that they both came to power in 1933. Though obviously very different men, they understood many of the same things about politics in the mass age. Both owed their elections to the perceived exhaustion of traditional liberal politics, and they were the two world leaders who most successfully exploited new political technologies. Roosevelt most famously utilized the radio — and the Nazis quickly aped the practice. FDR broke with all tradition to fly to the Democratic National Convention to accept his party's nomination. The imagery of him flying — a man of action! — rather than sitting on the porch and waiting for the news was electrifying, as was Hitler's brilliant use of planes, most famously in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Take away the text of New Deal, Soviet, and Nazi propaganda posters and other artwork, and it's almost impossible to tell whether the bulging-biceps laborers are the New Soviet Man, the New Nazi Man, or the New Deal Man. Max Lerner observed in 1934, "The most damning blow that the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the compliment they have paid us in taking over (and perfecting) our most prized devices of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses."35
Where FDR and Hitler overlapped most was in their fawning over "the forgotten man." Fascism's success almost always depends on the cooperation of the "losers" during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes — the people who have just enough to fear losing it — are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this "status anxiety" as the source of Progressivism's quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against "fat cats," "international bankers," "economic royalists," and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues. Hitler and Mussolini were surely more demagogic than FDR, but Roosevelt fully understood the "magic" of such appeals. He saw nothing wrong with ascribing evil motives to those who didn't support him, and he certainly relished his role as the wellborn tribune of the little guy.
Obviously, this wasn't all a cynical act. FDR did care about the little guy, the worker, and the like. But so did Hitler. Indeed, there is a mounting body of scholarship showing that "Hitler's New Deal" (David Schoenbaum's phrase) was not only similar to FDR's but in fact more generous and more successful. Germany prospered under Hitler according to the most basic indicators. The birthrate increased 50 percent from 1932 to 1936; marriages increased until Germany led Europe in 1938-39. Suicide plummeted by 80 percent from 1932 to 1939. A recent book by the German historian Gotz Aly calls Hitler the "feel good dictator" because he was so successful in restoring German confidence.36
When Hitler became chancellor he focused like a laser on the economy, ending unemployment far faster than FDR. When asked by the New York Times if his first priority was jobs, Hitler boisterously responded, "Wholly! I am thinking first of those in Germany who are in despair and who have been in despair for three years...What does anything else matter?" Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn't mention Ford's virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he "produces for the masses. That little car of his had done more than anything else to destroy class differences."37
Mussolini and Hitler also felt that they were doing things along similar lines to FDR. Indeed, they celebrated the New Deal as a kindred effort. The German press was particularly lavish in its praise for FDR. In 1934 the Volkischer Beobachter — the Nazi Party's official newspaper — described Roosevelt as a man of "irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will" and a "warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs." The paper emphasized that Roosevelt, through his New Deal, had eliminated "the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation" of the previous decade by adopting "National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies." After his first year in office, Hitler sent FDR a private letter congratulating "his heroic efforts in the interests of the American people. The President's successful battle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration." And he told the American ambassador, William Dodd, that he was "in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan 'The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.'"38