Almost every program of the early New Deal was rooted in the politics of war, the economics of war, or the aesthetics of war emerging from World War I. The Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, the signature public works project of the New Deal, had its roots in a World War I power project. (As FDR explained when he formally asked Congress to create the thing, "This power development of war days leads logically to national planning.") The Supreme Court defended the constitutionality of the TVA in part by citing the president's war powers.
Many New Deal agencies, the famous "alphabet soup," were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. FDR's public housing initiative was run by the architect of World War I-era housing policies. During the war, public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR, everyone became in effect a war laborer.
Presumably it is not necessary to recount how similar all of this was to developments in Nazi Germany. But it is worth noting that for the first two years of the American and German New Deals, it was America that pursued militarism and rearmament at a breakneck pace while Germany spent relatively little on arms (though Hitler faced severe constraints on rearmament). The Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise as well as four cruisers, many smaller warships, and over one hundred army planes parked at fifty military airports. Perhaps one reason so many people believed the New Deal ended the Depression is that the New Deal's segue into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.
Old Wilson hands infested every level of the Roosevelt bureaucracy. This makes sense in that Roosevelt's was the first Democratic administration since Wilson. Even so, the New Dealers weren't looking for mere retreads; they wanted war veterans. When Holger Cahill at first declined the invitation to head the Federal Art Project, a colleague explained, "An invitation from the Government to a job like that is tantamount to an order. It's like being drafted."45
Not only did government agencies organize themselves along military lines, but the staffers spoke in military jargon. Field work was work "in the trenches." Junior staffers were called "noncoms." New federal programs went "over the top." And so on.
Perhaps no program better represented the new governmental martial outlook than the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Arguably the most popular program of the New Deal, the CCC mobilized some 2.5 million young men into what could only be called paramilitary training. CCCers mostly worked as a "forestry army," clearing dead wood and the like. Enlistees met at army recruiting stations; wore World War I uniforms; were transported around the country by troop trains; answered to army sergeants; were required to stand at attention, march in formation, employ military lingo — including the duty of calling superiors "sir" — read a CCC newspaper modeled on Stars and Stripes; went to bed in army tents listening to taps; and woke to reveille.
After the CCC was approved by Congress, FDR reported, "It is a pretty good record, one which I think can be compared with the mobilization carried on in 1917." The Speaker of the House boasted of the CCC's success: "They are also under military training and as they come out of it they come out improved in health and developed mentally and physically and are more useful citizens and if ever we should become involved in another war they would furnish a very valuable nucleus for our army."46 Meanwhile, the Nazis were establishing similar camps for virtually identical reasons.
The chief motive among social planners was to get young men out of the mainstream workforce. The public arguments tended to emphasize the need to beef up the physical and moral fiber of an embryonic new army. FDR said the camps were ideal for getting youth "off the city street corners." Hitler promised his camps would keep youth from "rotting helplessly in the streets." Mussolini's various "battles" — the "Battle of the Grains" and such — were defended on similar grounds.
A second rationale was to transcend class barriers, an aspect of the program that still appeals to liberals today. The argument, then as now, is that there are no common institutions that foster a sense of true collective obligation. There's merit to this point. But it's interesting that the Nazis were far more convinced of this rationale than the New Dealers, and it informed not only their Labor Service program but their entire domestic agenda.47
A far more shocking example of the militarization of American life came in the form of the National Recovery Administration, led by Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, Time's Man of the Year for 1933. General Johnson was a pugnacious brawler who threatened that Americans who didn't cooperate with the New Deal would get a "sock in the nose." The military liaison to the War Industries Board and director of America's first military draft during the Great War — which he later called the "great schooling" for the New Deal — Johnson was convinced that what America needed was another injection of wartime fervor and fear. Few public figures — Joseph McCarthy included — were more prone to question the patriotism of their opponents. At every opportunity, Johnson claimed the war on the Depression was indistinguishable from battle. "This is war — lethal and more menacing than any other crisis in our history," he wrote. No sphere of life was out of bounds for the new service. "It is women in homes — and not soldiers in uniform — who will this time save our country," he announced. "They will go over the top to as great a victory as the Argonne. It is zero hour for housewives. Their battle cry is 'Buy now under the Blue Eagle!'"48
The Blue Eagle was the patriotic symbol of compliance that all companies were expected to hang from their doors, along with the motto "We do our part," a phrase used by the administration the way the Germans used "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz."49 Now largely airbrushed from popular awareness, the stylized Indian eagle clutching a band of lightning bolts in one claw and an industrial cogwheel in the other was often compared to the swastika or the German Reich eagle in both American and German newspapers. Johnson demanded that compliance with the Blue Eagle program be monitored by an army of quasi-official informants, from union members to Boy Scouts. His totalitarian approach was unmistakable. "When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird."50
It's difficult to exaggerate the propagandistic importance FDR invested in the Blue Eagle. "In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure their comrades do not fire on comrades," the president explained. "On that principle those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance." In a fireside chat in 1933, Roosevelt called for a great Mussolini-style "summer offensive against unemployment." Hollywood did its part. In the 1933 Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade, starring James Cagney, a chorus line uses flash cards to flip up a portrait of Roosevelt, and then forms a giant Blue Eagle. Will Rogers led a Who's Who roster of stars in Blue Eagle and NRA radio broadcasts.