Hitler, too, had more than his share of U.S. defenders. Among the more notorious was Republican Congressman Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania. He took to the floor of the House in May 1933 to decry the international Jewish conspiracy, reading passages from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic screed purporting to prove a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, into the Congressional Record and announcing that the president’s abandonment of the gold standard “had given the gold and lawful money of the country to the international money Jews of whom Franklin D. Roosevelt is the familiar.” “This country has fallen into the hands of the international money changers,” he charged. “Is it not true,” McFadden asked, “that in the United States today the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the gold and the lawful money? And is not this repudiation bill a bill specifically designed and written by the Jewish international money changers in order to perpetuate their power?”20
The infamous “radio priest” of Royal Oak, Michigan, Father Charles Coughlin, took to the airwaves to proclaim his corporatist and increasingly anti-Semitic vision. His weekly publication Social Justice serialized The Protocols and urged followers to join the Christian Front armed militia. Gallup reported in 1938 that 10 percent of American families owning radios listened to Coughlin’s sermons on a regular basis and 25 percent did so occasionally. Eighty-three percent of the steady listeners approved of the priest’s messages.21 Even in 1940, Social Justice had over 200,000 readers weekly.22
Even farther to the right were the so-called shirt movements, which took their inspiration from Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts. William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion may have enlisted as many as 25,000 members in 1933. In Kansas, Gerald Winrod, the “Jayhawk Nazi,” whose Defender newspaper reached a hundred thousand readers, garnered 21 percent of the Republican vote in the Kansas U.S. Senate primary in 1938.23 With West Virginia’s Knights of the White Camelia, Philadelphia’s Khaki Shirts, Tennessee’s Crusader White Shirts, and New York City’s Christian Mobilizers, the country was awash in extremists.24 One of the most violent of these organizations was the Midwest-based Black Legion, which had split off from the Ku Klux Klan in 1925. Wearing black robes instead of the Klan’s white sheets, the Legion had a membership estimated at between 60,000 and 100,000 in 1935. Its head, electrician Virgil Effinger, spoke openly about the need for mass extermination of American Jews25 before the federal government cracked down on the group in 1937. Although not a “shirter,” a failed haberdasher, Harry Truman, had earlier applied for membership in the Klan before thinking the better of it.
In reality, Hugh Johnson’s influence on the New Deal was fleeting and the far Right’s nonexistent. Not only did the New Deal reject fascist solutions, it resisted attempts to impose any unified, coherent philosophy. It was more of a hodgepodge of agencies. Raymond Moley wrote that viewing the New Deal as the product of a consistent plan “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” Roosevelt was more pragmatic than ideological. And he was willing to allow government to play a vastly bigger role than any of his predecessors could have imagined.26
Roosevelt focused from the outset on jump-starting the U.S. economy and getting Americans back to work. Solving international problems would take a backseat. He made that abundantly clear at the World Economic Conference in London in July 1933. He had already issued executive orders to release U.S. monetary policy from the constraints of gold in April but held out the prospect of returning the United States and, if possible, the rest of the world to the gold standard. By the summer, however, he had had a change of heart. So when confronted with the choice between an inflationary economic recovery program at home and going along with the Europeans’ demand for currency stabilization and a restored international gold standard, Roosevelt opted for the former. Fully expecting that Roosevelt would go along with the joint declaration by Great Britain and the gold-bloc nations to return to the gold standard and halt speculation in exchange rates, the fifty-four world leaders attending the London summit were taken aback by Roosevelt’s July 3 announcement that the United States would be party to neither exchange rate stabilization nor a gold standard. The conference broke up, leaving most European leaders bitterly disappointed. Many, including Hitler, concluded that the United States was withdrawing from world affairs.
Back home, Roosevelt received a mixed response. Certain business and banking titans, including Frank A. Vanderlip, J. P. Morgan, and Irénée du Pont, offered measured support, at least in public.27 Moley surmised that nine out of ten bankers—“even those in the lower part of Manhattan”—supported Roosevelt’s rejection of the gold standard.28 But former Democratic presidential candidate turned New Deal critic Al Smith dismissed Roosevelt’s monetary policy, calling it a commitment to “baloney dollars” instead of “gold dollars.” Smith expressed astonishment that “the Democratic party is fated to be always the party of greenbackers, free silverites, rubber dollar manufacturers, and crackpots.”29
Moley’s assurances notwithstanding, many bankers adamantly opposed Roosevelt’s currency measures. The Federal Reserve advisory council, made up of leading bankers throughout the nation, warned the Federal Reserve Board that economic recovery required a gold standard. “Demands for currency inflation and further credit inflation,” the council instructed, “…rest upon reasoning again and again proved… to be a tragic illusion.”30 The most scathing condemnation of both Roosevelt and his currency decisions, however, came from the Chamber of Commerce. After rejecting a resolution offering support for Roosevelt’s monetary policy, the New York State Chamber applauded when railroad magnate Leonor F. Loree declared that “the ending of the gold standard was as great a violation of trust and a denial of what is printed on that bill as was Germany’s wartime disregard for Belgium’s neutrality.”31 By the next May, having been bludgeoned with a constant barrage of criticism, Roosevelt felt compelled to send a letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s annual convention, asking members to “stop crying wolf” and to “cooperate in working for recovery.”32 But businessmen’s attacks on Roosevelt and his New Deal policies intensified. In October 1934, Time noted that businessmen’s enmity toward Roosevelt had become quite personaclass="underline" “It was no longer a matter of Business v. Government but of Business v. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”33
Roosevelt’s inward-looking approach was apparent across the board. He repudiated his earlier support for joining the League of Nations and willingly sacrificed foreign trade in order to stimulate domestic recovery. He even took steps to reduce the country’s 140,000-man army, which prompted a visit by Secretary of War George Dern. Dern brought along General Douglas MacArthur, who told the president that he was endangering the country’s safety. In his memoirs, MacArthur recalled:
The President turned the full vials of his sarcasm upon me. He was a scorcher when aroused. The tension began to boil over…. I spoke recklessly and said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt. The President grew livid. “You must not talk that way to the President!” he roared.