Branded as a Tory and a Reactionary
Foremost among the members of this new “right” was the muckraking journalist John T. Flynn. Unlike Mencken, whose radical views had always centered on a rugged brand of individualism, Flynn qualified as a progressive liberal until the New Deal drove him away. A graduate of Georgetown Law School, Flynn made his name in the 1920s and early 1930s as a left-leaning financial columnist and author whose books bore such les as
Graft in Business and
Trusts Gone Wrong! He enjoyed identifying and exposing the dirty deeds of big business and, as biographer John Moser writes, “in particular he saw abuses in the banking system and the New York Stock Exchange, and as early as February 1929 he was predicting that the value of corporate securities was about to plummet.” Flynn’s work earned him a prominent perch at the
New Republic, then as now one of the country’s leading left-liberal publications, where he wrote a weekly economics column from 1933 until he was dropped in 1940 for his increasingly harsh attacks on FDR’s policies.
But like Mencken, Flynn started out as a Roosevelt supporter, referring to the New Deal as a “promising experiment.” It took the National Recovery Administration to cure him of that. The centerpiece of FDR’s first 100 days, the NRA represented the nightmare of central planning made real. Enacted as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which FDR hailed as “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress,” the NRA sought to micromanage the economy through more than 500 wage-, hour-, and price-fixing “codes of fair compe ion,” mandating everything from the price of food to the cost of having a shirt hemmed. The NRA’s stated purpose was to increase efficiency via military-style organization, yet as historian Arthur Ekirch has pointed out: “Little attention was paid to the fact that it was industry itself that had largely prepared the regulations governing prices and production. Also ignored was the fact that the NRA meant the suspension of an rust laws along with the whole theory of free compe ion and free enterprise.”
Flynn was among the few who noticed. As a member of the progressive movement, he had long worried about the growing power and influence of the big corporations. Now FDR and his so-called brain trust were climbing into bed with them! As Flynn put it, “Curiously, every American liberal who had fought monopoly, who had demanded the enforcement of the anti-trust laws, who had denied the right of organized business groups, combinations and trade associations to rule our economic life, was branded as a Tory and a reactionary if he continued to believe these things.” Thus Flynn found himself on the right.
Using the same muckraking approach that had made him a darling of the left, Flynn denounced the NRA as “probably the gravest attack upon the whole principle of the democratic society in our political history.” As for Roosevelt, Flynn argued that although the president proclaimed “his devotion to democracy, he adopted a plan borrowed from the corporative state of Italy and sold it to all the liberals as a great liberal revolutionary triumph.”
Nor did these scathing attacks go unnoticed. After reading an article of Flynn’s published by the
Yale Review, FDR wrote privately to the editor, denouncing Flynn as “a destructive rather than a constructive force” who “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.”
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@ the concept of a Social Security "account"
