WEBVTT NOTE John T. Flynn: Revisionist Journalist 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 --> 00:00:22.000 To say, as I did last week, that John T. Flynn was a liberal does not really explain why he is important to modern libertarians. 3 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:29.000 Flynn, the American journalist who lived from 1882 to 1964, was a liberal all right, 4 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:32.480 Right, but so were lots of other people in that period. 5 00:00:32.480 --> 00:00:38.600 In fact, during the 1920s and 30s, when Flynn first began to build a national reputation 6 00:00:38.600 --> 00:00:44.600 as a journalist, classical liberals arguably dominated the mainstream print media in this 7 00:00:44.600 --> 00:00:45.600 country. 8 00:00:45.600 --> 00:00:50.520 Nearly all the major intellectual journalists and opinion leaders in the American public 9 00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:54.960 prints of the time were broadly libertarian in their thinking. 10 00:00:54.960 --> 00:01:00.040 There was H. L. Mencken, syndicated newspaper columnist and editor of the Smart Set and 11 00:01:00.040 --> 00:01:01.820 the American Mercury. 12 00:01:01.820 --> 00:01:07.460 There was Albert J. Nock, editor of the Freeman and regular contributor to the American Mercury, 13 00:01:07.460 --> 00:01:09.760 the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. 14 00:01:09.760 --> 00:01:13.280 There was Garrett Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post. 15 00:01:13.280 --> 00:01:16.640 There was Isabel Patterson of the New York Herald Tribune. 16 00:01:16.640 --> 00:01:22.660 There was Henry Hazlitt of the American Mercury, the New York Times and, a little later, Newsweek. 17 00:01:22.660 --> 00:01:27.040 There was Felix Morley of the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post. 18 00:01:27.040 --> 00:01:32.620 There was Rose Wilder Lane, one of the most prolific American freelancers, with articles 19 00:01:32.620 --> 00:01:38.020 in Harper's, the Lady's Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post, and Woman's Day, and 20 00:01:38.020 --> 00:01:44.060 a steady stream of books, including, a little later, the individualist classic The Discovery 21 00:01:44.060 --> 00:01:47.520 of Freedom, in the nation's bookstores. 22 00:01:47.520 --> 00:01:53.560 No espousal of classical liberalism in the years between the World Wars was no novelty. 23 00:01:53.560 --> 00:01:58.520 It was familiar enough to anybody who read the major periodicals of the time. 24 00:01:58.520 --> 00:02:03.440 For a journalist who flourished in that part of the 20th century to still be considered 25 00:02:03.440 --> 00:02:09.280 an important figure by libertarians 80 years later, that journalist has to have accomplished 26 00:02:09.280 --> 00:02:14.280 something considerably more noteworthy than merely being a liberal. 27 00:02:14.280 --> 00:02:19.440 The same might be said of other sorts of intellectuals, and of scholars too. 28 00:02:19.440 --> 00:02:25.520 And for that matter it can and should be said of intellectuals and scholars who were anarchists. 29 00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:30.720 Simply having been an anarchist is no reason to be remembered with interest many decades 30 00:02:30.720 --> 00:02:33.880 later by contemporary libertarians either. 31 00:02:33.880 --> 00:02:39.660 But for the sake of simplicity, let's confine our case at the moment to classical liberals. 32 00:02:39.660 --> 00:02:45.740 The reason Ludwig von Mises is remembered so well today, the reason his intellectual reputation 33 00:02:45.740 --> 00:02:51.860 is even larger today than it ever was during his lifetime, the reason it grows larger and 34 00:02:51.860 --> 00:02:57.140 more influential with every passing year, is not that Mises was a liberal. 35 00:02:57.140 --> 00:03:03.280 It's that, once one has read him, one finds it difficult to imagine how coherent thought 36 00:03:03.280 --> 00:03:09.760 about the Social Sciences, Economics, History or Philosophy could even take place in the 37 00:03:09.760 --> 00:03:15.880 absence of having read him, without his work as the foundation for one's further thought 38 00:03:15.880 --> 00:03:17.680 on these matters. 39 00:03:17.680 --> 00:03:22.800 Mises has literally taught us how to think about these subjects. 40 00:03:22.800 --> 00:03:28.920 He has provided us with the most logical and rigorous explanation of why liberalism was 41 00:03:28.920 --> 00:03:44.360 Similarly, the reason Friedrich August von Hayek is remembered so well today, the reason 42 00:03:44.360 --> 00:03:50.820 his intellectual reputation is even larger today than it ever was during his lifetime, 43 00:03:50.820 --> 00:03:56.500 the reason it grows larger and more influential with each passing year, is not that Hayek 44 00:03:56.500 --> 00:04:02.900 Ludwig was a liberal, but rather that he provided a phenomenally clear and luminous and usable 45 00:04:02.900 --> 00:04:08.600 understanding of how human society works, of how freedom works. 46 00:04:08.600 --> 00:04:14.660 His ideas about spontaneous order and the use of knowledge in society are far more important 47 00:04:14.660 --> 00:04:19.300 than his stands on particular policy questions of his era. 48 00:04:19.300 --> 00:04:24.620 Mises' ideas about praxeology and the ways in which market prices convey information 49 00:04:24.620 --> 00:04:30.660 to Buyers and Sellers are far more important than his stance on particular policy questions 50 00:04:30.660 --> 00:04:33.100 of the same era. 51 00:04:33.100 --> 00:04:35.940 So it is, too, with John T. Flynn. 52 00:04:35.940 --> 00:04:41.640 But to understand why Flynn should be important to modern libertarians, one must also understand 53 00:04:41.640 --> 00:04:45.340 a couple of fundamental truths about journalism. 54 00:04:45.340 --> 00:04:51.280 The first of these fundamental truths is that the term journalism has traditionally referred 55 00:04:51.280 --> 00:04:58.260 not just to so-called hard news reporting, but to all periodical writing about new or 56 00:04:58.260 --> 00:05:03.160 recent events in any department of human activity. 57 00:05:03.160 --> 00:05:09.540 Editorial writers, op-ed writers, book reviewers, columnists, all these people are just as much 58 00:05:09.540 --> 00:05:15.440 journalists as the reporters who write the government-glorifying drivel that fills the 59 00:05:15.440 --> 00:05:19.260 national and local news sections of most papers. 60 00:05:19.260 --> 00:05:25.140 If you think of journalists as a kind of historian, you might say that the editorial writers, 61 00:05:25.140 --> 00:05:31.340 op-ed writers, book reviewers and columnists are like the historians who stand back from 62 00:05:31.340 --> 00:05:38.040 the detailed particular picture of a specific event or era and reflect instead on the bigger 63 00:05:38.040 --> 00:05:44.740 picture, the wider context into which the specific event or era under study must be 64 00:05:44.740 --> 00:05:49.080 fitted in order to be fully comprehended. 65 00:05:49.080 --> 00:05:54.520 Such a historian was the great revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes, who was also, it is worth 66 00:05:54.520 --> 00:05:56.840 remembering, a newspaper man. 67 00:05:56.840 --> 00:06:03.160 And the kind of newspaper man he was, was an editorial writer, columnist and book reviewer. 68 00:06:03.160 --> 00:06:08.680 Nor is this comparison between journalists and historians at all far-fetched. 69 00:06:08.680 --> 00:06:13.200 Ask the shade of Philip L. Graham, who was president and publisher of the Washington 70 00:06:13.200 --> 00:06:22.440 and Post when he stated in 1953 that journalists write 365 days a year the first rough draft 71 00:06:22.440 --> 00:06:23.980 of history. 72 00:06:23.980 --> 00:06:29.680 In fact, that's the second fundamental truth about journalism we have to grasp if we want 73 00:06:29.680 --> 00:06:35.240 to understand the importance for contemporary libertarians of the liberal journalist John 74 00:06:35.240 --> 00:06:37.400 T. Flynn. 75 00:06:37.400 --> 00:06:40.480 Journalists are just historians in a hurry. 76 00:06:40.480 --> 00:06:46.560 And just as there are revisionist historians, historians who attempt to revise our understanding 77 00:06:46.560 --> 00:06:53.240 of the historical record, so there are revisionist journalists, journalists who, while events 78 00:06:53.240 --> 00:06:59.780 are taking place, insist on an alternative understanding of those events, an understanding 79 00:06:59.780 --> 00:07:04.600 that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of the time. 80 00:07:04.600 --> 00:07:11.000 John T. Flynn was, if not the very first, then one of the very first few of the revisionist 81 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:17.880 journalists to write about the New Deal, focusing on both its domestic and its foreign policies. 82 00:07:17.880 --> 00:07:22.600 He represents, therefore, the beginning of historical revisionism where the New Deal 83 00:07:22.600 --> 00:07:28.880 is concerned, and if any historical event fairly cries out for revisionist treatment, 84 00:07:28.880 --> 00:07:30.740 it is the New Deal. 85 00:07:30.740 --> 00:07:36.540 The myth of the New Deal, assiduously promoted by the state and its court historians, is 86 00:07:36.540 --> 00:07:42.420 that it was a triumph of liberalism, that by further curbing and cushioning the supposed 87 00:07:42.420 --> 00:07:48.260 excesses of capitalism, brought the American dream within reach of more Americans than 88 00:07:48.260 --> 00:07:54.420 ever before, and brought what Franklin Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms, freedom of speech 89 00:07:54.420 --> 00:08:04.180 The truth is far otherwise. 90 00:08:04.180 --> 00:08:09.620 The truth is that the New Deal was what the revisionist historian Gabriel Kolko called 91 00:08:09.620 --> 00:08:12.260 a triumph of conservatism. 92 00:08:12.260 --> 00:08:18.940 Kolko used that phrase as the title of a seminal 1963 book in which he showed that the wave 93 00:08:18.940 --> 00:08:24.320 of federal regulation of business that came in with the progressive era in the early years 94 00:08:24.320 --> 00:08:31.420 of the 20th Century was in fact spearheaded by large corporations, which wanted the regulations 95 00:08:31.420 --> 00:08:37.380 to put smaller competitors out of business and enable the large corporations to enjoy 96 00:08:37.380 --> 00:08:43.420 a large, virtually guaranteed market share without having to take the trouble to compete 97 00:08:43.420 --> 00:08:45.180 in order to get it. 98 00:08:45.180 --> 00:08:51.620 In many cases, Kolko showed, the big corporations that lobbied for these new regulations actually 99 00:08:51.620 --> 00:08:55.780 wrote the regulations that were eventually adopted. 100 00:08:55.780 --> 00:09:01.180 This was a triumph of conservatism because it was the political conservatives of the 101 00:09:01.180 --> 00:09:08.080 time, Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, who made sure the corporations got their way. 102 00:09:08.080 --> 00:09:13.620 Just as the original European conservatives championed policies designed to benefit the 103 00:09:13.620 --> 00:09:20.660 aristocracy, so these early 20th century American conservatives championed policies designed 104 00:09:20.660 --> 00:09:46.660 The New Deal, of course, was nothing more than another collection of these same conservative policies of intervention, economic intervention at home and political and military intervention abroad. 105 00:09:46.660 --> 00:09:53.260 The Democrat Woodrow Wilson had adopted these conservative Republican policies during World War I. 106 00:09:53.260 --> 00:09:59.060 Now another Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, had adopted them in the face of the Great Depression. 107 00:09:59.060 --> 00:10:06.460 FDR, however, did introduce something new into the by-now somewhat old and tiresome routine. 108 00:10:06.460 --> 00:10:12.060 These policies, FDR proclaimed, were actually liberal policies. 109 00:10:12.060 --> 00:10:16.460 And that proclamation made John T. Flynn mad as a hornet. 110 00:10:16.460 --> 00:10:24.300 It would seem to be something small like a hornet that would be the right sort of thing to refer to in describing John T. Flynn. 111 00:10:24.300 --> 00:10:34.060 For according to his biographer, John E. Moser, Flynn was a small man who stood under 5 feet 10 inches and weighed under 150 pounds. 112 00:10:34.060 --> 00:10:39.900 But, like a hornet, he had a hot temper and was quick to take umbrage at personal slights. 113 00:10:39.900 --> 00:10:47.300 It was not infrequent for those observing him an argument to become alarmed by the sight of his red face and bulging veins, 114 00:10:47.300 --> 00:10:57.600 but any observer who expressed concern for Flynn's health at such times would quickly discover that remarks about high blood pressure served only to make him angrier. 115 00:10:57.600 --> 00:11:01.900 Moreover, he could hold a grudge for years. 116 00:11:01.900 --> 00:11:07.100 He certainly held a grudge against Franklin Roosevelt for years for pushing the policies he 117 00:11:07.100 --> 00:11:13.500 pushed and then having the gall to call himself a liberal. Moser reports that Flynn wrote to New 118 00:11:13.500 --> 00:11:20.300 Deal lawyer Jerome Frank in 1940, I see the standard of liberalism that I have followed all 119 00:11:20.300 --> 00:11:27.340 my life, flying over a group of causes which, as a liberal, along with all liberals, I have abhorred 120 00:11:27.340 --> 00:11:29.220 and all my life. 121 00:11:29.220 --> 00:11:35.220 In that same year he wrote to his editor at the New Republic that he, Flynn, was a liberal 122 00:11:35.220 --> 00:11:41.020 writer who is saying now the same thing he said five years ago and ten years ago, who 123 00:11:41.020 --> 00:11:47.660 is opposed to third terms for presidents, to warmongering and militarism and conscription, 124 00:11:47.660 --> 00:11:51.500 and corrupt political machines and vast public debt. 125 00:11:51.500 --> 00:11:57.820 I held these views before Roosevelt was president, and I have now lost my liberal credentials 126 00:11:57.820 --> 00:12:03.800 because I do not agree with the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, Mr. Harry Stimson, Mr. 127 00:12:03.800 --> 00:12:08.040 Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie about the war. 128 00:12:08.040 --> 00:12:14.500 Two years earlier, in 1938, Flynn had expressed his wonderment in a column in the New Republic 129 00:12:14.500 --> 00:12:19.900 that the policies of the New Deal, including what he saw as its transparent efforts to 130 00:12:19.900 --> 00:12:37.120 It's easy from the vantage point of 75 years later to understand Flynn's dismay. 131 00:12:37.120 --> 00:12:43.420 He was earlier than most to realize that, as he put it, the New Deal was a form of conservatism 132 00:12:43.420 --> 00:12:45.760 dressed up as liberalism. 133 00:12:45.760 --> 00:12:51.180 He was earlier than most liberals to realize that while, as Moser puts it, the president 134 00:12:51.180 --> 00:12:57.720 had posed as one of them, all they could really expect from him were what Flynn himself called 135 00:12:57.720 --> 00:13:01.200 sweet words with no meaning behind them. 136 00:13:01.200 --> 00:13:06.420 Flynn poured out his outrage and scorn in a series of newspaper columns and magazine 137 00:13:06.420 --> 00:13:13.160 articles that later formed the foundation for his two great books of the 1940s. 138 00:13:13.160 --> 00:13:20.520 As We Go Marching, which came out in 1944, was, according to the historian Ronald Radosh, 139 00:13:20.520 --> 00:13:26.540 Flynn's most important representative and analytical work, the most informed and perceptive 140 00:13:26.540 --> 00:13:28.380 of all his books. 141 00:13:28.380 --> 00:13:33.680 Under the New Deal, Flynn believed, the United States was little by little adopting first 142 00:13:33.680 --> 00:13:39.500 one and then another policy that is beginning to make us look more like a national socialist 143 00:13:39.500 --> 00:13:42.080 government than a democracy. 144 00:13:42.080 --> 00:13:49.040 Among these policies, he argued, was the organization of the economic society as a planned economy 145 00:13:49.040 --> 00:13:54.600 under the supervision of the state, though the American version of this policy did owe 146 00:13:54.600 --> 00:14:00.000 more to the fascist government of Italy under Mussolini than to the National Socialists 147 00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:02.560 of Germany under Adolf Hitler. 148 00:14:02.560 --> 00:14:08.000 Fascism, as implemented by Mussolini, Flynn wrote, was a scheme in which the government 149 00:14:08.000 --> 00:14:14.440 accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, using the device 150 00:14:14.440 --> 00:14:21.480 of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending. 151 00:14:21.480 --> 00:14:27.240 And unsurprisingly, at least to Flynn, having incorporated the principle of state-created 152 00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:33.160 purchasing power into his system, it wasn't long before Mussolini turned naturally to 153 00:14:33.160 --> 00:14:39.460 to the old reliable project of militarism as the easiest means of spending money. 154 00:14:39.460 --> 00:14:45.100 It is scarcely necessary to dwell on this since our newspaper files are well supplied with 155 00:14:45.100 --> 00:14:51.460 statements of returning American travelers since 1935 telling, some with an accent of 156 00:14:51.460 --> 00:14:58.220 approval, how Mussolini has solved the problem of unemployment in Italy by means of expenditures 157 00:14:58.220 --> 00:15:00.100 on national defense. 158 00:15:00.100 --> 00:15:05.360 Some of our own high officials have found occasion to comment on this fact, contrasting 159 00:15:05.360 --> 00:15:10.800 his accomplishment with our own failure to put our people to work. 160 00:15:10.800 --> 00:15:17.160 Money was spent on highways, schools, public projects of various kinds, and on the draining 161 00:15:17.160 --> 00:15:23.440 of the pontine marshes, which became in Italy the great exhibition project, not unlike our 162 00:15:23.440 --> 00:15:25.760 TVA in America. 163 00:15:25.760 --> 00:15:32.800 But this was not enough, and so he turned more and more to military expenditures. 164 00:15:32.800 --> 00:15:38.240 According to Ronald Radosh, Flynn believed that despite many differences in the character, 165 00:15:38.240 --> 00:15:44.440 customs, laws, traditions, resources of the people of Italy, Germany and America, we have 166 00:15:44.440 --> 00:15:50.240 been drifting along identical courses and under the influence of the same essential 167 00:15:50.240 --> 00:15:51.600 forces. 168 00:15:51.600 --> 00:15:57.340 Flynn warned the readers of As We Go Marching that there were homegrown fascists, American 169 00:15:57.340 --> 00:16:00.320 fascists already living among them. 170 00:16:00.320 --> 00:16:05.840 If you want to figure out who they are, Flynn wrote, look for the people who urge for America 171 00:16:05.840 --> 00:16:11.920 the debt-supported state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic 172 00:16:11.920 --> 00:16:18.400 government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great 173 00:16:18.400 --> 00:16:24.800 Glamorous Public Works Project of the Nation and the Institution of Imperialism under which 174 00:16:24.800 --> 00:16:28.960 it proposes to regulate and rule the world. 175 00:16:28.960 --> 00:16:34.120 If they wanted to identify the American fascists, Flynn told his readers, they should look for 176 00:16:34.120 --> 00:16:40.160 the people who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state, interfering 177 00:16:40.160 --> 00:16:46.220 in the affairs of the states and cities, taking part in the management of industry and finance 178 00:16:46.220 --> 00:16:52.880 and Agriculture, assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions 179 00:16:52.880 --> 00:16:58.120 every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government 180 00:16:58.120 --> 00:17:04.520 can paralyze opposition and command public support, marshaling great armies and navies 181 00:17:04.520 --> 00:17:10.940 at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war, which will 182 00:17:10.940 --> 00:17:13.780 become our greatest industry. 183 00:17:13.780 --> 00:17:19.620 And adding to all this, the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration 184 00:17:19.620 --> 00:17:26.180 and domination, all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in 185 00:17:26.180 --> 00:17:32.580 which the executive will hold in effect all the powers, with Congress reduced to the role 186 00:17:32.580 --> 00:17:35.300 of a debating society. 187 00:17:35.300 --> 00:17:38.700 There is your fascist. 188 00:17:38.700 --> 00:17:43.280 Flynn's other great book of the 40s was called The Roosevelt Myth. 189 00:17:43.280 --> 00:17:49.080 It took a detailed and critical look at the career of FDR, the man who gave us the New 190 00:17:49.080 --> 00:17:54.480 Deal, and convinced most of us that it was a collection of liberal programs. 191 00:17:54.480 --> 00:18:01.000 In 1998, in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the Roosevelt myth, Ralph Rakow 192 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:07.500 said it remains the major debunking of Franklin Roosevelt, and called it merciless in exposing 193 00:18:07.500 --> 00:18:11.480 Roosevelt as a failure, a liar, and a fraud. 194 00:18:11.480 --> 00:18:16.760 As Flynn himself put it in the pages of the Roosevelt myth, Hitler and Mussolini were 195 00:18:16.760 --> 00:18:23.520 made to seem as brave, as strong, as wise and noble to the people of Germany and Italy 196 00:18:23.520 --> 00:18:26.060 as Roosevelt was seen here. 197 00:18:26.060 --> 00:18:30.240 Hitler was not pictured to the people of Germany as he was presented here. 198 00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:35.280 He was exhibited in noble proportions, and with most of those heroic virtues which were 199 00:18:35.280 --> 00:18:41.800 were attributed to Roosevelt here and to Mussolini in Italy and, of course, to Stalin in Russia. 200 00:18:41.800 --> 00:18:44.920 I do not compare Roosevelt to Hitler. 201 00:18:44.920 --> 00:18:51.120 I merely insist that the picture of Roosevelt sold to our people and which still lingers 202 00:18:51.120 --> 00:18:57.040 upon the screen of their imaginations was an utterly false picture, was the work of 203 00:18:57.040 --> 00:19:03.840 false propaganda, and that among the evils against which America must protect herself, 204 00:19:03.840 --> 00:19:09.120 One of the most destructive is the evil of modern propaganda techniques applied to the 205 00:19:09.120 --> 00:19:11.840 problem of government. 206 00:19:11.840 --> 00:19:18.380 If today we enjoy the services of numerous revisionist writers, all of them bent on correcting 207 00:19:18.380 --> 00:19:23.760 the public record as to the activities of the U.S. government during and after the New 208 00:19:23.760 --> 00:19:27.800 Deal, we owe no small thanks for this fact. 209 00:19:27.800 --> 00:19:30.240 To John T. Flynn. 210 00:19:30.240 --> 00:19:45.360 This is Jeff Rigenbach.