Franklin Roosevelt
In January 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt was beginning his fifth year as U.S. president. His first term had been grueling, as the administration improvised a response to the country’s unprecedented “national emergency.” He had been assailed by critics for trampling on rights and creating an unmanageable sprawl of new federal agencies. But now, three months after an election that he took as vindication, the president’s mood lightened. He told friends that he had earned some political capital, and he was going to spend it.
On January 12, 1937, Roosevelt stunned Washington by announcing a sweeping plan to reorganize the executive branch. He wanted to create two new departments for social welfare and public works; merge all the existing independent regulatory agencies into the executive departments; weaken the General Accounting Office; abolish the Civil Service Commission; give himself the power to move bureaus among departments; and expand the White House staff.
For many Democrats on Capitol Hill, though, it was the foulest medicine that Roosevelt had ever asked them to swallow. And three weeks later, on Feb. 6, it got worse. Roosevelt asked Congress to approve a bill prepared in “deepest secrecy” by Justice Department lawyers. It would allow Roosevelt to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices, if the sitting ones refused to resign at age 70. This was a direct assault on an aging court that had repeatedly stymied New Deal polices during Roosevelt’s first term.
In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as "Fascist means to gain liberal ends." He wasn't hallucinating. FDR's adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done "many of the things which seem to me necessary." Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, "If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere." She added that if she were younger, she'd like to lead "the Fascist Movement in the United States." At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, "The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America."
Roosevelt himself called Mussolini "admirable" and professed that he was "deeply impressed by what he has accomplished." The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt's 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism." The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised "Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies" and "the development toward an authoritarian state" based on the "demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest."
On January 12, 1937, Roosevelt stunned Washington by announcing a sweeping plan to reorganize the executive branch. He wanted to create two new departments for social welfare and public works; merge all the existing independent regulatory agencies into the executive departments; weaken the General Accounting Office; abolish the Civil Service Commission; give himself the power to move bureaus among departments; and expand the White House staff.
For many Democrats on Capitol Hill, though, it was the foulest medicine that Roosevelt had ever asked them to swallow. And three weeks later, on Feb. 6, it got worse. Roosevelt asked Congress to approve a bill prepared in “deepest secrecy” by Justice Department lawyers. It would allow Roosevelt to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices, if the sitting ones refused to resign at age 70. This was a direct assault on an aging court that had repeatedly stymied New Deal polices during Roosevelt’s first term.
In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as "Fascist means to gain liberal ends." He wasn't hallucinating. FDR's adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done "many of the things which seem to me necessary." Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, "If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere." She added that if she were younger, she'd like to lead "the Fascist Movement in the United States." At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, "The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America."
Roosevelt himself called Mussolini "admirable" and professed that he was "deeply impressed by what he has accomplished." The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt's 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism." The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised "Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies" and "the development toward an authoritarian state" based on the "demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest."