Mussolini was even more assiduous in claiming the New Deal as an incipient fascist phenomenon. He reviewed FDR's book Looking Forward, saying, in effect, "This guy's one of us": "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." Mussolini wrote that FDR understood that the economy could not "be left to its own devices" and saw the fascistic nature of how the American president put this understanding into practice. "Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism," he wrote. (He later reviewed a book by Henry Wallace, proclaiming, "Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.") The Volkischer Beobachter also noted that "many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy."39
In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that "America has a dictator" in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of "spiritual renewal" were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were "immortal principles." "America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an 'etat majeur.' There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices. This has nothing to do with any demo-liberal conception of things." In 1933 members of Mussolini's press office recognized that these statements were starting to hurt their putative comrade-in-arms. They issued an order: "It is not to be emphasized that Roosevelt's policy is fascist because these comments are immediately cabled to the United States and are used by his foes to attack him." Still, the admiration remained mutual for several years. FDR sent his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, a letter regarding "that admirable Italian gentleman," saying that Mussolini "is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished."40
Perhaps Norman Thomas, America's leading socialist, put the question best: "To what extent may we expect to have the economics of fascism without its politics?"41
But the most glaring similarity between Nazi Germany, New Deal America, and Fascist Italy wasn't their economic policies. It was their common glorification of war.
THE FASCIST NEW DEALS
The core value of original fascism, in the eyes of most observers, was its imposition of war values on society. (This perception — or misperception, depending on how it is articulated — is so fundamental to the popular understanding of fascism that I must return to it several times in this book.) The chief appeal of war to social planners isn't conquest or death but mobilization. Free societies are disorganized. People do their own thing, more or less, and that can be downright inconvenient if you're trying to plan the entire economy from a boardroom somewhere. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. The ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done: build roads, hospitals, houses. Domestic populations and institutions were required to "do their part."
Many progressives probably would have preferred a different organizing principle, which is why William James spoke of the moral equivalent of war. He wanted all the benefits — Dewey's "social possibilities" of war — without the costs. Hence, in more recent times, the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and "diversity" as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert-driven unity. But at the time the progressives just couldn't think of anything else that did the trick. "Martial virtues," James famously wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built."42
In Italy many of the first Fascists were veterans who donned paramilitary garb. The fascist artistic movement Futurism glorified war in prose, poetry, and paint. Mussolini was a true voluptuary of battle, rhetorically and literally. "War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it," he declared in a Jamesian spirit in the Enciclopedia italiana's entry on Fascism. Meanwhile, from the movement's origin as the German Fighting League Against Interest Slavery, the Nazis were always a paramilitary organization, determined to recapture the esprit de corps of the Great War, the socialism of the trenches.
Still, not every Fascist pounding the table about war actually wanted one. Mussolini didn't launch a war until a full sixteen years into his reign. Even his Ethiopian adventure was motivated by a desire to revitalize Fascism's flagging domestic fortunes. Hitler did not commence his military buildup at once, either. Indeed, while solidifying power, he cultivated an image as a peacemaker (an image many Western pacifists were willing to indulge in good faith). But few dispute that he saw war as a means as much as an end.
With the election of Franklin Roosevelt, the progressives who'd sought to remake America through war socialism were back in power. While they professed to eschew dogma, they couldn't be more dogmatically convinced that World War I had been a successful "experiment." Had not the experiences of the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy in the 1920s proved that America had dropped the ball by relinquishing war socialism?
During the campaign FDR promised to use his experience as an architect of the Great War to tackle the Depression. Even before he was nominated, he ordered aides to prepare a brief on presidential war powers. He asked Rexford Tugwell to find out if he could use the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act to unilaterally embargo gold exports and extracted an assurance from his intended attorney general that no matter what the arguments to the contrary, the Department of Justice would find that Roosevelt had the authority to do whatever he felt necessary in this regard. Roosevelt's inaugural address was famously drenched with martial metaphors: "I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to the disciplined attack upon our common problems."
According to a document unearthed by the Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, FDR's staff prepared a radio address to the American Legion, the first to be delivered after his inaugural, in which FDR was to instruct the veterans that they should become his own "extra-constitutional" "private army" (Alter's words). "A new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound," Roosevelt's prepared text read, "I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us."43
While Alter concedes this was "dictator talk — an explicit power grab" and showed that FDR or his minions contemplated forming "a makeshift force of veterans to enforce some kind of martial law," he minimizes the importance of his own discovery.44 He leaves out the legacy of the American Protective League, which FDR no doubt endorsed. He fails to mention that the American Legion saw itself as an "American Fascisti" for a time. And he leaves out that FDR — who showed no reluctance when it came to using the FBI and other agencies to spy on domestic critics — oversaw the use of the American Legion as a quasi-official branch of the FBI to monitor American citizens.