WEBVTT NOTE John T. Flynn: Liberal 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:11.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:24.000 John T. Flynn was born fewer than ten miles from central Washington, D.C., in a small town in Prince George's County, Maryland, late in October of 1882. 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:29.780 Before a decade had passed, Flynn's father, an attorney, had moved his growing family 4 00:00:29.780 --> 00:00:35.200 to New York, and it was there that the younger Flynn grew up, in a moderately prosperous 5 00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:38.220 middle-class Irish Catholic household. 6 00:00:38.220 --> 00:00:43.520 He attended parochial schools and a small, undistinguished college in New York, then 7 00:00:43.520 --> 00:00:48.520 moved back to the nation's capital at the turn of the 20th century to attend law school 8 00:00:48.520 --> 00:00:51.080 at Georgetown University. 9 00:00:51.080 --> 00:00:56.560 Flynn was a scholarship student at Georgetown and his family, as has been noted, was modestly 10 00:00:56.560 --> 00:01:02.940 well-to-do, but any student can always use a few extra bucks, and Flynn earned his own 11 00:01:02.940 --> 00:01:07.540 extra bucks as a part-time reporter for the Washington Times. 12 00:01:07.540 --> 00:01:12.080 After graduating from Georgetown, he spent a few months in his father's law office back 13 00:01:12.080 --> 00:01:18.200 in New York, but it wasn't long before he abandoned law forever in favor of journalism. 14 00:01:18.200 --> 00:01:23.640 It seems likely that he attended law school at all only as a way of displaying his filial 15 00:01:23.640 --> 00:01:29.960 piety and his wholehearted willingness to follow in his father's professional footsteps. 16 00:01:29.960 --> 00:01:34.360 Certainly his decision to become a journalist did not make him rich or produce anything 17 00:01:34.360 --> 00:01:36.200 like quick success. 18 00:01:36.200 --> 00:01:41.660 He wound up leaving the practice of law for a series of jobs, none of which lasted very 19 00:01:41.660 --> 00:01:47.240 long or paid very well on a series of New York and Los Angeles newspapers. 20 00:01:47.240 --> 00:01:53.420 Then he landed in 1916 at the age of 34 in New Haven, Connecticut, where he had secured 21 00:01:53.420 --> 00:01:56.120 a position on the New Haven Register. 22 00:01:56.120 --> 00:02:01.560 And now, at last, he began to enjoy some noticeable success in journalism. 23 00:02:01.560 --> 00:02:05.020 Within a year, Flynn was city editor of the Register. 24 00:02:05.020 --> 00:02:09.400 Within three years, he had moved on to the New York Evening Globe, and within another 25 00:02:09.400 --> 00:02:16.720 three years, by late 1922, not long after his 40th birthday, John T. Flynn had become 26 00:02:16.720 --> 00:02:33.720 A year later, when he left the Evening Globe, he found that he had little trouble moving smoothly into a new career as a freelance writer for magazines, mostly Collier's, Harper's, The Forum, and The New Republic. 27 00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:39.440 By 1931, at the age of nearly 50, he saw his first book appear in print. 28 00:02:39.440 --> 00:02:44.040 It was the first of nearly 20 books Flynn would write, despite the fact that he had 29 00:02:44.040 --> 00:02:47.740 got off to rather a late start as an author of books. 30 00:02:47.740 --> 00:02:54.040 In his magazine pieces and his books, he wrote mostly about economics and economic policy, 31 00:02:54.040 --> 00:02:59.000 the subjects he had begun to specialize in during his years on the Evening Globe. 32 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:02.920 It wasn't as though Flynn knew anything much about economics. 33 00:03:02.920 --> 00:03:08.560 Ralph Reiko, in his Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Flynn's best-known 34 00:03:08.560 --> 00:03:13.800 book, writes that Flynn's thinking on economics was not notably sophisticated. 35 00:03:13.800 --> 00:03:19.320 He fully appreciated the productive dynamism of the private property market economy, but 36 00:03:19.320 --> 00:03:25.480 in his progressive phase he held that government had a crucial role to play in reining in the 37 00:03:25.480 --> 00:03:32.440 excesses of capitalism by thwarting monopolies, protecting small investors, and undertaking 38 00:03:32.440 --> 00:03:44.440 and Moderate Social Reform. Yet he was never a socialist. To his mind, the hopes for a free and prosperous society lay in a truly competitive private enterprise system. 39 00:03:44.440 --> 00:04:00.440 Reiko assures us that Flynn opposed the New Deal practically from the start. But one wonders. Flynn's biographer John E. Moser reports that in 1932, at the time Franklin Roosevelt was running for his first term in the White House, 40 00:04:00.440 --> 00:04:06.960 House, Flynn publicly dismissed what he called the Doctrine of Laissez-Faire as the Gospel 41 00:04:06.960 --> 00:04:08.860 of the Reactionary. 42 00:04:08.860 --> 00:04:15.640 In 1934, Flynn called for a national minimum wage law, a vast program of public spending 43 00:04:15.640 --> 00:04:21.560 mainly on construction projects to relieve unemployment, and a government-run system 44 00:04:21.560 --> 00:04:24.780 of unemployment and old age insurance. 45 00:04:24.780 --> 00:04:31.340 In 1936, Flynn called for three constitutional amendments, one that would give to the government 46 00:04:31.340 --> 00:04:37.340 the police power over all economic matters of national importance, and two others that 47 00:04:37.340 --> 00:04:44.180 would free Congress and state legislatures from the inhibitions of the due process clause. 48 00:04:44.180 --> 00:04:47.540 Sounds a lot like the New Deal to me. 49 00:04:47.540 --> 00:04:53.820 Flynn thought, according to Moser, that instead of opening up the economy to competitive forces, 50 00:04:53.820 --> 00:05:01.260 Roosevelt seemed bent on cartelizing it, principally through the National Recovery Act, NRA, which 51 00:05:01.260 --> 00:05:05.620 Flynn regarded as a copy of Mussolini's corporate state. 52 00:05:05.620 --> 00:05:11.540 And what exactly was it that Flynn had expected as the outcome of constitutional amendments 53 00:05:11.540 --> 00:05:16.740 to give the federal government the police power over all economic matters of national 54 00:05:16.740 --> 00:05:18.020 importance? 55 00:05:18.020 --> 00:05:21.180 One shakes one's head in wonderment. 56 00:05:21.180 --> 00:05:26.700 What John T. Flynn was, of course, was a liberal, specifically what for most of a hundred 57 00:05:26.700 --> 00:05:32.940 years now has been known as a classical liberal, that is, an advocate of a political position 58 00:05:32.940 --> 00:05:40.020 that is basically anti-war, pro-market, in favor of free international trade and in favor 59 00:05:40.020 --> 00:05:46.380 of freedom for every individual, virtually what you'd call a libertarian position, except 60 00:05:46.380 --> 00:06:14.820 To get a sense of how utterly ridiculous this idea seems to a hardcore libertarian, imagine 61 00:06:14.820 --> 00:06:18.820 and attempting to reform the Mafia in this way. 62 00:06:18.820 --> 00:06:23.620 It is important to bear in mind here that these classical liberals of whom I speak are 63 00:06:23.620 --> 00:06:29.760 not all a bunch of bewigged denizens of the 18th century who stopped short of anarchism 64 00:06:29.760 --> 00:06:34.040 in their political thinking only because it hadn't yet been invented. 65 00:06:34.040 --> 00:06:39.840 On the contrary, there were still liberals long after anarchism was invented. 66 00:06:39.840 --> 00:06:44.500 If you figure, for the sake of intellectual convenience, that anarchism was invented by 67 00:06:44.500 --> 00:06:51.260 by William Godwin in the 1790s, then you can say that a full hundred years after anarchism 68 00:06:51.260 --> 00:06:56.500 had been invented, during the second Grover Cleveland administration, that's between 69 00:06:56.500 --> 00:07:03.020 1893 and 1897, there were still plenty of liberals in the United States. 70 00:07:03.020 --> 00:07:08.940 They were even sufficiently numerous to exercise arguably a considerable influence in our domestic 71 00:07:08.940 --> 00:07:11.020 politics at that time. 72 00:07:11.020 --> 00:07:14.480 And these liberals hadn't the excuse of ignorance, either. 73 00:07:14.480 --> 00:07:17.080 They knew about the anarchist alternative. 74 00:07:17.080 --> 00:07:22.240 The largest circulation anarchist periodical in the world was edited and published right 75 00:07:22.240 --> 00:07:27.740 here in the United States, in New York, by Benjamin R. Tucker, who rightly referred to 76 00:07:27.740 --> 00:07:33.240 anarchists of his stripe as un-terrified Jeffersonian Democrats. 77 00:07:33.240 --> 00:07:38.580 For more than 200 years in this country, those who qualify for the description classical 78 00:07:38.580 --> 00:07:44.180 Classical Liberal have rejected anarchism not out of ignorance of its existence, but 79 00:07:44.180 --> 00:07:48.760 out of terror at what they imagine to be its practical results. 80 00:07:48.760 --> 00:07:53.580 And who is it who qualifies exactly for the description Classical Liberal? 81 00:07:53.580 --> 00:07:57.740 This is a more complicated question than it may at first seem. 82 00:07:57.740 --> 00:08:02.980 All classical liberals have always believed it was all right to coerce the other residents 83 00:08:02.980 --> 00:08:08.220 of their communities or countries for certain purposes, but they have differed widely on 84 00:08:08.220 --> 00:08:13.020 What Purposes They Considered Important Enough to Justify Such Coercion? 85 00:08:13.020 --> 00:08:18.740 To Adam Smith, it was just to coerce his neighbors to provide schooling for those whose parents 86 00:08:18.740 --> 00:08:22.460 were too poor or too improvident to buy it for them. 87 00:08:22.460 --> 00:08:27.420 To Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues among the American Founding Fathers, it was just 88 00:08:27.420 --> 00:08:32.200 to coerce one's neighbors if they were of the wrong sex or the wrong color. 89 00:08:32.200 --> 00:08:37.340 To Friedrich Hayek, it was just to coerce his neighbors to provide subsidies to museums 90 00:08:37.340 --> 00:08:40.460 and Symphony Orchestras and Ballet Companies. 91 00:08:40.460 --> 00:08:45.900 To Ludwig von Mises, it was just to coerce his neighbors to raise armies to fight against 92 00:08:45.900 --> 00:08:48.780 the Axis powers in World War II. 93 00:08:48.780 --> 00:08:54.700 It was just, he believed, even if it meant forcing young men at gunpoint to don the uniforms 94 00:08:54.700 --> 00:09:01.180 of soldiers and sailors and drop bombs on non-violent civilian populations. 95 00:09:01.180 --> 00:09:06.560 Yet liberals and liberalism have done a powerful lot of good for the goal of liberty over the 96 00:09:06.560 --> 00:09:08.480 in the last few centuries. 97 00:09:08.480 --> 00:09:14.520 As the anarchist Rudolf Rocker wrote in his magnum opus Nationalism and Culture, liberalism 98 00:09:14.520 --> 00:09:19.480 judges the social environment according as it furthers the natural development of the 99 00:09:19.480 --> 00:09:24.820 individual or is a hindrance to his personal freedom and independence. 100 00:09:24.820 --> 00:09:30.760 Its conceptions of society are those of an organic process resulting from man's natural 101 00:09:30.760 --> 00:09:36.600 Social Necessities and Leading to Free Associations, which exist as long as they fulfill their 102 00:09:36.600 --> 00:09:41.200 purpose and dissolve again when this purpose has become meaningless. 103 00:09:41.200 --> 00:09:47.060 The less this natural course of things is affected by forceful interference and mechanical 104 00:09:47.060 --> 00:09:54.220 regulation from outside, the freer and more frictionless will be all social procedure, 105 00:09:54.220 --> 00:10:00.380 and the more fully can man enjoy the happiness of his personal freedom and independence. 106 00:10:00.380 --> 00:10:06.120 From this point of view, liberalism judged also the state and all forms of government. 107 00:10:06.120 --> 00:10:12.520 Its advocates believed, however, that government in certain matters cannot be entirely dispensed 108 00:10:12.520 --> 00:10:13.520 with. 109 00:10:13.520 --> 00:10:17.980 Yet they saw clearly that every form of government menaces man's freedom. 110 00:10:17.980 --> 00:10:23.320 Hence, they always endeavored to guard the individual from the encroachments of governmental 111 00:10:23.320 --> 00:10:29.280 power, and strove to confine this to the smallest possible field of activity. 112 00:10:29.280 --> 00:10:34.600 The administration of things always meant more to them than the government of men. 113 00:10:34.600 --> 00:10:40.920 Hence, the state, for them, had a right to exist only as long as its functionaries strove 114 00:10:40.920 --> 00:10:47.080 merely to protect the personal safety of its citizens against forcible attacks. 115 00:10:47.080 --> 00:10:53.160 The state constitution of liberalism was, therefore, predominantly of a negative nature. 116 00:10:53.160 --> 00:10:59.080 The focal point of all the social-political thought of its advocates was the largest possible 117 00:10:59.080 --> 00:11:06.240 Thus, Rudolf Rocker, in 1937. 118 00:11:06.240 --> 00:11:12.720 In a later work, Pioneers of American Freedom, Rocker wrote that American individualist anarchism 119 00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:18.320 of the sort exemplified by the writings of Benjamin R. Tucker was closely interwoven 120 00:11:18.320 --> 00:11:24.640 at its very root with American liberalism, and was in many respects a quite natural outgrowth 121 00:11:24.640 --> 00:11:39.900 Rocker concluded that Tucker was right in calling the anarchists simply un-terrified 122 00:11:39.900 --> 00:11:42.840 Jeffersonian Democrats. 123 00:11:42.840 --> 00:11:48.240 Since the liberals were terrified, of course, they fell far short of advocating a completely 124 00:11:48.240 --> 00:11:54.080 libertarian program, the abolition of the state, nor, as we have seen, did they really 125 00:11:54.080 --> 00:11:59.560 only limit themselves to advocacy of a state that strove merely to protect the personal 126 00:11:59.560 --> 00:12:03.280 safety of its citizens against forcible attacks. 127 00:12:03.280 --> 00:12:08.320 Prominent liberals have wanted a state that also schooled its citizens and subsidized 128 00:12:08.320 --> 00:12:14.400 their artistic creativity, conscripted them into wartime military service, and guaranteed 129 00:12:14.400 --> 00:12:18.080 the property rights of the owners of human slaves. 130 00:12:18.080 --> 00:12:25.700 Yet, as Ludwig von Mises points out in the opening paragraphs of his 1927 book, Liberalism, 131 00:12:25.700 --> 00:12:31.460 nowhere was even this half-hearted program ever completely carried out. 132 00:12:31.460 --> 00:12:36.100 Even in England, which has been called the homeland of liberalism and the model liberal 133 00:12:36.100 --> 00:12:42.360 country, the proponents of liberal policies never succeeded in winning all their demands. 134 00:12:42.360 --> 00:12:47.760 In the rest of the world, only parts of the liberal program were adopted, while others, 135 00:12:47.760 --> 00:12:53.760 were either rejected from the very first or discarded after a short time. 136 00:12:53.760 --> 00:12:59.760 Only with some exaggeration can one say that the world once lived through a liberal era. 137 00:12:59.760 --> 00:13:04.760 Liberalism was never permitted to come to full fruition. 138 00:13:04.760 --> 00:13:10.760 Nevertheless, brief and all too limited as the supremacy of liberal ideas was, 139 00:13:10.760 --> 00:13:13.760 it sufficed to change the face of the earth. 140 00:13:13.760 --> 00:13:16.760 A magnificent economic development took place. 141 00:13:16.760 --> 00:13:23.520 The release of man's productive powers multiplied the means of subsistence many times over. 142 00:13:23.520 --> 00:13:28.720 On the eve of the First World War, the world was incomparably more densely populated than 143 00:13:28.720 --> 00:13:34.780 it had ever been, and each inhabitant could live incomparably better than had been possible 144 00:13:34.780 --> 00:13:36.680 in earlier centuries. 145 00:13:36.680 --> 00:13:42.520 The prosperity that liberalism had created reduced considerably infant mortality, which 146 00:13:42.520 --> 00:13:47.780 which had been the pitiless scourge of earlier ages, and, as a result of the improvement 147 00:13:47.780 --> 00:13:52.200 in living conditions, lengthened the average span of life. 148 00:13:52.200 --> 00:13:58.000 Nor did this prosperity flow only to a select class of privileged persons. 149 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:03.160 On the eve of the World War, the worker in the industrial nations of Europe, in the United 150 00:14:03.160 --> 00:14:09.040 States and in the overseas dominions of England, lived better and more graciously than the 151 00:14:09.040 --> 00:14:11.940 nobleman of not too long before. 152 00:14:11.940 --> 00:14:16.700 Not only could he eat and drink according to his desire, he could give his children 153 00:14:16.700 --> 00:14:18.220 a better education. 154 00:14:18.220 --> 00:14:23.580 He could, if he wished, take part in the intellectual and cultural life of his nation, and if he 155 00:14:23.580 --> 00:14:29.820 possessed enough talent and energy, he could, without difficulty, raise his social position. 156 00:14:29.820 --> 00:14:34.460 It was precisely in the countries that had gone the farthest in adopting the liberal 157 00:14:34.460 --> 00:14:40.860 program that the top of the social pyramid was composed in the main, not of those who 158 00:14:40.860 --> 00:14:46.300 who had, from their very birth, enjoyed a privileged position by virtue of the wealth 159 00:14:46.300 --> 00:14:52.100 or high rank of their parents, but of those who, under favorable conditions, had worked 160 00:14:52.100 --> 00:14:57.660 their way up from straightened circumstances by their own power. 161 00:14:57.660 --> 00:15:01.180 Thus Ludwig von Mises, in 1927. 162 00:15:01.180 --> 00:15:06.300 And Mises's point here is not only well taken, it's undeniably true. 163 00:15:06.300 --> 00:15:09.500 Liberals have done a world of good for liberty. 164 00:15:09.500 --> 00:15:14.940 So what are hardcore libertarians to do with such liberals, including Mises? 165 00:15:14.940 --> 00:15:20.500 In the 1890s, men like Benjamin R. Tucker, who was arguably the founder and leader of 166 00:15:20.500 --> 00:15:26.140 the first American libertarian movement, ignored liberals and formed their strategic alliances 167 00:15:26.140 --> 00:15:31.700 instead with other anarchists, whatever their economic doctrines might be. 168 00:15:31.700 --> 00:15:38.740 Since the early 1940s, however, when the contemporary American libertarian movement first got underway, 169 00:15:38.740 --> 00:15:41.220 have adopted a different strategy. 170 00:15:41.220 --> 00:15:46.300 We have made common cause with modern-day classical liberals, whom we have taken to 171 00:15:46.300 --> 00:15:49.340 calling limited government libertarians. 172 00:15:49.340 --> 00:15:54.420 And I'd say too many of us have written off anarchists who don't feel comfortable calling 173 00:15:54.420 --> 00:16:00.200 themselves anarcho-capitalists as our adversaries, not our allies. 174 00:16:00.200 --> 00:16:05.980 But setting aside that last point, at least for the nots, how are we to know a true classical 175 00:16:05.980 --> 00:16:08.140 liberal when we see one? 176 00:16:08.140 --> 00:16:14.360 A person who believes, as Rocker put it, that government in certain matters cannot be entirely 177 00:16:14.360 --> 00:16:21.240 dispensed with, yet who sees clearly that every form of government menaces man's freedom, 178 00:16:21.240 --> 00:16:27.500 and thus always endeavours to guard the individual from the encroachments of governmental power, 179 00:16:27.500 --> 00:16:32.440 and strives to confine this to the smallest possible field of activity. 180 00:16:32.440 --> 00:16:38.040 How are we to distinguish this classical liberal when we encounter him or her, from the 181 00:16:38.040 --> 00:16:43.720 The sort of garden-variety status that hangs around National Review and the American Spectator 182 00:16:43.720 --> 00:16:50.000 and the Republican Party and wants the state to leave his guns alone, but is enthusiastic 183 00:16:50.000 --> 00:16:56.440 about seeing it look in your windows and through your keyholes so it can lock you up for reading 184 00:16:56.440 --> 00:17:01.400 the wrong things or putting the wrong substances in your own body. 185 00:17:01.400 --> 00:17:05.720 The answer is implicit, I think, in Rocker's phraseology. 186 00:17:05.720 --> 00:17:12.680 The classical liberals, Rocker says, see clearly that every form of government menaces man's 187 00:17:12.680 --> 00:17:18.520 freedom, and thus always endeavor to guard the individual from the encroachments of governmental 188 00:17:18.520 --> 00:17:24.760 power and strive to confine this to the smallest possible field of activity. 189 00:17:24.760 --> 00:17:30.640 To use terminology adapted from the world of computers, liberty is the classical liberal's 190 00:17:30.640 --> 00:17:32.540 default setting. 191 00:17:32.540 --> 00:17:39.660 Their tendency is to see the solution to any social problem as liberty, any proposed government 192 00:17:39.660 --> 00:17:47.060 solution to that problem they view with dubiety, any deviation from a policy of strict liberty 193 00:17:47.060 --> 00:17:52.460 they see as requiring an explanation, a justification, an argument. 194 00:17:52.460 --> 00:17:57.780 They may make mistakes about which arguments they succumb to, which government intrusions 195 00:17:57.780 --> 00:18:04.180 It is on individual liberty they come to accept, but their hearts are in the right place. 196 00:18:04.180 --> 00:18:08.420 It is in this sense that John T. Flynn was a classical liberal. 197 00:18:08.420 --> 00:18:14.100 He was always at his purest and best, his most liberal, on subjects like international 198 00:18:14.100 --> 00:18:15.880 trade and war. 199 00:18:15.880 --> 00:18:21.340 But even on issues like economic matters of national importance, issues on which he had 200 00:18:21.340 --> 00:18:27.740 once recommended government interference in the market, Flynn gradually became more libertarian. 201 00:18:27.740 --> 00:18:33.540 John Moser points out that the young Flynn considered philosophy empty and futile. 202 00:18:33.540 --> 00:18:44.840 More important in his judgment was social science, for experts trained in the social sciences could identify the basic facts of any troublesome social situation. 203 00:18:44.840 --> 00:18:52.340 After all, evils were as easy to identify as any scientific phenomenon, and once having identified them, 204 00:18:52.340 --> 00:19:02.340 Experts trained in the social sciences would know precisely what reforms to recommend to solve social problems in a scientific way. 205 00:19:02.340 --> 00:19:14.340 The problem with this vision of reality was pinpointed by the writer and anti-war activist Lawrence Dennis in a pair of letters written in 1952 to Harry Elmer Barnes. 206 00:19:14.340 --> 00:19:22.100 Mozer quotes Dennis as saying that the same facts can prove diametrically opposite conclusions, 207 00:19:22.100 --> 00:19:28.220 because facts by themselves, without a well-developed theory of interpretation, prove little or 208 00:19:28.220 --> 00:19:29.680 nothing. 209 00:19:29.680 --> 00:19:35.000 As Flynn grew older, he came more and more to realize that Dennis was right. 210 00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:38.940 The path to utopia was by no means so simple. 211 00:19:38.940 --> 00:19:43.780 Collecting the facts scientifically was not sufficient to guarantee the good judgment 212 00:19:43.780 --> 00:19:46.020 of the Experts Who Collected Them. 213 00:19:46.020 --> 00:19:53.060 Moreover, there was the problem that intellectuals, whom by this time, 1954, he had taken to calling 214 00:19:53.060 --> 00:19:57.380 eggheads, were irresistibly drawn to power. 215 00:19:57.380 --> 00:20:02.660 Over time, therefore, his thinking evolved in a steadily more liberal, steadily more 216 00:20:02.660 --> 00:20:05.860 individualist, direction. 217 00:20:05.860 --> 00:20:11.140 Over time, also, Flynn steadily became better and better known. 218 00:20:11.140 --> 00:20:17.080 Moser acknowledges that the name of John T. Flynn might be unfamiliar today, but he notes 219 00:20:17.080 --> 00:20:22.380 that Flynn's name would have been readily recognizable to any American who followed public 220 00:20:22.380 --> 00:20:27.040 affairs from the late 1920s through the 1950s. 221 00:20:27.040 --> 00:20:33.160 As a newspaper columnist, freelance magazine writer, best-selling author, and widely recognized 222 00:20:33.160 --> 00:20:40.580 expert on economics, finance, politics, and foreign affairs, his words were read by millions. 223 00:20:40.580 --> 00:20:45.760 Through the 30s and into the 40s, Flynn wrote a weekly column called Other People's Money 224 00:20:45.760 --> 00:20:47.460 in the New Republic. 225 00:20:47.460 --> 00:20:53.140 He also wrote, for much of his career, a daily newspaper column, one that eventually appeared 226 00:20:53.140 --> 00:20:56.540 in all the papers of the Scripps-Howard chain. 227 00:20:56.540 --> 00:21:03.180 On top of that, on and off during the 1930s and early 1940s, and consistently in the late 228 00:21:03.180 --> 00:21:08.540 In the 1940s and 1950s, he had a weekly radio program. 229 00:21:08.540 --> 00:21:14.260 And that weekly 15-minute program, behind the headlines, was a big success. 230 00:21:14.260 --> 00:21:19.380 In the end, it brought Flynn's words to a much larger audience than ever before. 231 00:21:19.380 --> 00:21:26.140 By the end of 1949, Moser tells us, the program was being carried on 56 stations, including 232 00:21:26.140 --> 00:21:29.640 all 45 affiliates of the mutual network. 233 00:21:29.640 --> 00:21:37.680 By the autumn of 1952, Flynn was being heard on 362 stations, and he gleefully reported 234 00:21:37.680 --> 00:21:44.640 that it took a corps of clerks just to go through his fan mail, 100 to 500 pieces of 235 00:21:44.640 --> 00:21:47.800 which arrived each day. 236 00:21:47.800 --> 00:21:52.840 Flynn retired from public life in 1960 at the age of 77. 237 00:21:52.840 --> 00:21:58.320 He died four years later, in 1964, at the age of 81. 238 00:21:58.320 --> 00:22:03.240 At the time of his death, he was thought of by most who knew of him as a member of the 239 00:22:03.240 --> 00:22:07.280 Right, what later came to be called the Old Right. 240 00:22:07.280 --> 00:22:12.660 Ralph Raco characterizes him that way in his introduction to Flynn's best-known book, 241 00:22:12.660 --> 00:22:18.240 The Roosevelt Myth, calling him the intellectual mainstay of the Old Right. 242 00:22:18.240 --> 00:22:22.440 But in fact, Flynn was never, in any sense, on the Right. 243 00:22:22.440 --> 00:22:28.080 To the end of his life, Moser writes, Flynn never referred to himself as anything but a 244 00:22:28.080 --> 00:22:34.160 The fact is that Flynn came to be thought of as a member of the right for one reason 245 00:22:34.160 --> 00:22:36.320 and one reason only. 246 00:22:36.320 --> 00:22:41.760 His opposition to the domestic and foreign policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 247 00:22:41.760 --> 00:22:44.920 The thinking seemed to run pretty much as follows. 248 00:22:44.920 --> 00:22:50.360 The opposition to the New Deal came from conservatives, conservative republicans, right? 249 00:22:50.360 --> 00:22:53.200 So Flynn must have been a conservative, right? 250 00:22:53.200 --> 00:22:56.160 Well, in a word, no. 251 00:22:56.160 --> 00:22:58.960 That's another podcast. 252 00:22:58.960 --> 00:22:59.960 This is Jeff Rigenbach.