Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (15 page)

Financiers, who lent but never labored, and who foreclosed on farmers and small businesses, were the perfect target for populists. To them might be added the railroad owners, the mining companies, other big corporate battalions, and politicians, especially those from the east of the country. These relatively few powerful people were, it was argued, holding a whole nation to ransom, a view expressed thus by the late-nineteenth-century Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly:

The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated, our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for the few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.
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Populism was particularly strong in the Midwest, where there were many small farmers and the frontier spirit was easier to invoke. Electoral revolts against the political Establishment were periodic, spiking at times of agricultural depression, when great stump orators roused the discontented to action—men like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, “Sockless Jerry” Simpson, “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, and William Jennings Bryan, who ran unsuccessfully for president on the Democratic ticket.

But progressive as it could be, American populism also lent itself to more reactionary impulses. Suspicious of big capital, it was equally hostile to the big state; and much as it claimed to champion the little man, it often took up cudgels against those seen as the conscript army of unwanted change—immigrants. Who these immigrants were depended on the most recent wave of arrivals. In the 1840s, it was the Irish and thus the Catholics; in the 1850s, the Germans; in the 1890s, the Italians—and therefore the Catholics again. It was also a fairly natural step from anti-big-business populism to protectionism, and almost as natural to progress from there to isolationism. The early-twentieth-century populists—unlike British jingoists—were largely unimpressed by anything smacking of imperialism or what Thomas Jefferson termed “entangling alliances.” Big business might require empires and foreign policies, but prairie farmers certainly did not. It was this attitude that was to have a deep influence on those who opposed America’s entry into the Second World War.

Flynn and the New Deal

Born in 1882 to a middle-class Irish Catholic family in New York, John T. Flynn started his career in the legal profession before deciding that he was more inclined to write. He got his first journalistic break in 1916, on the
New Haven Register
in Connecticut, and went on to become a regular, and increasingly celebrated, writer for the liberal
New Republic
magazine, with the column “Other People’s Money.” He also wrote a weekly syndicated newspaper column, “Plain Economics.” But he differed from the other writers in this generally progressive stable in one important way: he was skeptical about big government, with its bureaucracies, subsidies, and inefficiencies. Though in November 1932 he had no difficulty supporting the presidential candidacy of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had promised prudent administration in the face of the Depression, he had considerable problems with the way Roosevelt subsequently chose to interpret this mandate.

The new president wasted no time in revealing his hand. Following the crash of 1929, U.S. unemployment had, by the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, soared from a low of just over 3 to a catastrophic 24 percent. All around the industrialized world, straight laissez-faire economics were increasingly falling out of favor, and the fashionable spectrum extended only from Keynesian interventionist economics at one end to corporatism or state socialism at the other, a spectrum that Roosevelt now began to explore. His inaugural address in March 1933 was uncompromising: he told the country just how far he was willing to go to pass the measures “that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.” His hope was that Congress would willingly agree to endorse the necessary programs, and then he continued:

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

The consequence of this determination was what the historian Hugh Brogan called an “orgy of lawmaking.”
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An armored column of acts and agencies poured out of Washington: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Farm Credit Act, and many more. Even the FBI was hugely strengthened and given new powers. Where most on the center-left were glad to see such action, others like Flynn were dismayed. Their initial support became disillusionment, which hardened into an opposition that at times began to sound like fanaticism. Not only was the New Deal a mistake, Flynn came later to argue, it was very close to being evil:

This is the complete negation of liberalism. It is, in fact, the essence of fascism . . . When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government—then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.
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How frustrating then that what was all too apparent to Flynn was so hidden from his colleagues and, more important, from the voters, who in 1936 compounded their forgivable error of 1932 by choosing to reelect Roosevelt by a landslide. Flynn—on the wrong side of the consensus—began a dogged and, in its own way, courageous campaign against Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was his belief that it could not work unless the whole country—using Roosevelt’s own metaphor—was mobilized as though for war. And what more effective way could that be managed than by having an actual war? It was therefore natural that the dominant politician of the day should use his powers to persuade the nation, should the occasion arise, to take part in armed conflict. Such a conflict, according to Flynn, could only lead to a horrific loss of American life for no real gain, the possibly permanent curtailment of freedoms at home, and economic disaster.

The War Conspiracy

This last sentiment, at least, was one that Flynn shared with most Americans. Wilsonian enthusiasm for engagement in the world, which had taken America into the First World War and then bestowed upon it the proselytizing role at the Versailles peace conference, had evaporated fairly quickly once normal business was resumed. The American elite had been disillusioned by the vengefulness and shortsightedness of the European victors, while ordinary Americans were more aware of the country’s 263,000 dead, wounded, and missing in a war fought almost entirely a whole ocean away. And although the objective fact was that the United States emerged from the conflict richer and more powerful than when it went in, the perception was that these debatable fruits of victory had been unequally bestowed. In the 1920s, while heavy industry boomed and there were enormous increases in profitability, farm prices and wages fell. Then came the Depression.

So, although most populists had started out as supporters of the New Deal, they were absolutely united behind the idea that the Great War had been a disaster, and one that must not be repeated. By the mid-1930s, one of the most effective articulators of this view was the most decorated marine in U.S. military history, retired Major General Smedley Butler, twice winner of the Medal of Honor. As Hitler came to power, and the possibility of a new war in Europe became more tangible, Butler campaigned for neutrality. In 1935, he published a famous pamphlet—reprinted again and again in different versions up to 1941—
War Is a Racket
, in which he asserted that his own actions as a soldier had been, to his shame, dictated by the needs of war profiteers and big capital. In an earlier speech, Butler had confessed:

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
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The First World War, said Butler, had indebted the nation but enriched companies such as DuPont, U.S. Steel, and, of course, the banks. He knew, too, why President Woodrow Wilson had changed his mind about entering the war. It was because he had been persuaded that an Allied defeat would be bad for the U.S. finance houses, to which Britain owed so much money. This, Butler argued, was the very essence of a racket. Or, indeed, a conspiracy. “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. Out of the war a few people make huge fortunes.”
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He cited the “21,000 millionaires and billionaires” who “got that way” from the conflict.

There were plenty of politicians who saw things the same way that Butler did. One was the senator for the midwestern state of North Dakota, Gerald Prentice Nye. Ten years younger than John Flynn, Nye had enjoyed a similar career, working as a journalist in Wisconsin and Iowa (and campaigning for Prohibition) before, in 1925, being selected by the Republicans to take a vacant seat in the Senate. In 1934, he was asked by Congress to head a committee to investigate whether the banks and munitions industry had profiteered from the Great War and whether the prospect of financial gain had indeed been a primary cause of U.S. involvement. Several of his fellow populist midwesterners joined him on the committee; Flynn was his chief researcher.

Starting on September 4, 1934, and over sixteen months and ninety-three hearings, the Munitions Investigating Committee questioned more than two hundred witnesses, and became an important reference point for those who wished to resist any future drift into foreign entanglements. The conclusion of its report, published in February 1936, was, however, too nebulous to be of any direct benefit to what would become known as the isolationist cause: “While the evidence before this committee does not show that wars have been started solely because of the activities of munitions makers and their agents,” it stated, “it is also true that wars rarely have one single cause, and the committee finds it to be against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity.”
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More helpfully, the committee noted that in the two years before entering the Great War, the United States had lent $27 million to Germany, compared with $2.5 billion to the Allies. The inference was obvious: 58,000 Americans had lost their lives for the cause of American banking. Nye himself said as much in a speech later that year, claiming that “the record of facts makes it altogether fair to say that these bankers were in the heart and center of a system that made our going to war inevitable.”
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Neutrality and Isolationism

From quite early in his presidency, Roosevelt had become convinced that, in the event of a war between the European democracies and the European dictatorships, America could not permit a victory for the latter. The problem was, as he knew well, that the American polity from voter to Congress was opposed to any repeat of 1917. Rhetorically, at any rate, Roosevelt was forced to portray himself as another isolationist. So, from 1934 onward, in a paradoxical reflection of what was happening in the rest of the world, the United States opted to stand apart. In that year, the passage of the Johnson Act prohibited American loans to countries that had not yet repaid their debts from the Great War. And in 1935, Congress began to pass a series of neutrality acts and other measures that required the administration to place an arms embargo on any nation at war, forbade the carrying on American ships of any weapons destined for countries at war, and authorized the president to prevent U.S. citizens from sailing on ships belonging to belligerent nations. Roosevelt did attempt to get Congress to make a distinction between aggressors and their victims, for the purposes of support and supply, but Congress—arguing that supplying one side was highly likely to provoke the other side into some kind of armed attack on U.S. interests—disagreed. Further acts in 1936 and 1937 effectively precluded aid to Abyssinia when it was invaded by Mussolini; to the Spanish Republic, whose rebels were being supplied by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; and to China when it was attacked by Japan. In each case, arguably, American neutrality served the interests of fascist aggression and acted against those of democracy and national integrity. Ironically, since it had never taken up membership in the very League of Nations that it had helped create, the United States found that it had effectively forsworn any way of intervening in the various crises that were beginning to engulf the world.