Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion From World War 1 to the McCarthy Era by Alex Goodall

Author:Alex Goodall [Goodall, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Radicalism, United States, Political Ideologies, 20th Century, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9780252095313
Google: M3APBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013-12-15T10:56:39+00:00

PART III

The New Anticommunism

8

American Fascism

The New Deal and the Radical Right

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts—and every state south or west of Pennsylvania. The new president received seven million more votes than the incumbent, Herbert Hoover. Not even Al Smith’s home state of New York had voted Democrat in 1928, yet in 1932 Democrats swept to victory from the Hudson to the San Francisco Bay. As usual, returns for the Democrats in the Solid South would have not looked out of place in a dictatorship—91 percent in Georgia, nearly 96 percent in Mississippi, 98 percent in South Carolina—and they were dominant in the cities and industrial zones. The triumph of 1932 was more than just a reconstruction of the Wilson coalition, though. In the staunchly Republican Midwest, Michigan fell for the first time since the Civil War. Wisconsin gave more than 63 percent to the Roosevelt ticket, and in the West Idaho passed into Democratic hands with nearly 59 percent of voters. Even in patrician New England, Hoover’s margin of victory in Connecticut and New Hampshire measured in the low thousands. Across the nation, people emphatically signaled their anger over the economic crisis and desire for a new direction in American politics.

Among other things, the election results suggested a widespread rejection of traditional antiradicalism, discredited by more than a decade’s political smearing, partisan divisions, and industrial and Prohibition-related violence, and capped off by the most severe depression in living memory. Within a year of taking office, the new president and his supporters in Congress had dismantled large parts of the countersubversive settlement of the 1920s: repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, recognizing the Soviet Union, and renewing the push for union rights. Following the passage of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the president turned the language of patriotism in a new direction, targeting the industrialists who had so successfully branded the open shop as the “American Plan” in the 1920s. A new logo featuring an American eagle was designed; only employers who signed up to codes of conduct that typically included the rights of workers to ballot on unionization were allowed to display the seal. The public was encouraged only to buy with the Blue Eagle.1 The NIRA was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, but the subsequent Wagner Act went even further in guaranteeing workers’ rights. By the mid-1930s, only the strict limits on immigration remained from the antiradical policies passed after World War I.

Even Emma Goldman, the most celebrated and hated deportee of the Great Red Scare, was briefly allowed to return to America for a speaking tour following the publication of her autobiography. Goldman’s enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution had faded within weeks of her deportation to Russia in 1919, and since departing the country in 1921 she had traveled widely and written about her disillusionment with the Soviet experiment. But throughout the 1920s, she remained barred from the nation that had been her home for thirty-four years.

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