FDR’s New Deal: The Failed American Corporate State

by Zoltanous

For nearly a hundred years, both the American left and the American right have shared a deep, ongoing fear that fascism could someday take root in the United States and destroy constitutional government. On the progressive side, a common warning has been that fascism would arrive here disguised in national symbols and religious language. Conservatives have replied that if fascism ever showed up, it would do so while claiming to speak for liberal ideals. Both predictions have usually been dismissed as pure speculation. They were not. In the years right after World War I, and especially in the early New Deal period, the United States experimented with fascist-style institutions, language, and ways of organizing the economy — sometimes deliberately, sometimes without fully realizing it. The clearest institutional expression of that experiment was the National Recovery Administration (NRA) under General Hugh S. Johnson.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The account that follows traces how those sympathies first took root, how they acquired concrete institutional shape, and how they finally disintegrated. The immediate aftermath of World War I left the United States restless. Demobilized soldiers, economic dislocation, labor strife, and a determined backlash against radical leftism produced a climate of unease. Among many business leaders, conservatives, and veterans the foremost threat seemed the possible importation of Bolshevism. Against that background, demands for order and decisive leadership acquired fresh attraction as a barrier against chaos. By the middle of the 1920s explicit praise for Mussolini’s Italy had begun to appear inside American diplomatic and political circles. Richard Washburn Child, United States Ambassador to Italy from 1921 to 1924, ranked among the regime’s earliest American defenders. Milford W. Howard, a onetime Southern congressman and Populist, journeyed to Italy in 1927, met Mussolini, and thereafter lectured and wrote in favor of Fascism throughout the country. During the 1926 congressional debates on Italian war debts, Congressman Sol Bloom sided with Republican colleagues in pressing for lenient terms, pointing to the courteous reception his daughter had received from Gabriele D’Annunzio and Mussolini. The American Legion, a major veterans’ organization, likewise drew direct analogies between its own purpose and that of the Italian Fascists. In November 1923 National Commander Alvin M. Owsley stated:

“If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy! … Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”

— Alvin M. Owsley, exclusive interview with NEA Service’s Edward M. Thierry, December 1922​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A photo of Alvin

The Legion advanced “100% Americanism,” mounted military-style parades, and employed force against radical labor organizations such as the Industrial Workers of The World. The Great Depression, lasting from 1929 to 1939, constituted a fundamental collapse of modern industrial economies rather than a mere cyclical downturn. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 drove the nation into crisis. Between 1929 and 1932 global output declined by roughly 15%; American stock values fell nearly 90 percent from April 1930 to July 1932; unemployment approached 25% by 1933 (reaching a peak of 23.6% that year). Banks failed, farm prices collapsed, manufacturing contracted sharply, and mass evictions generated widespread homelessness and improvised camps. The period exposed stark imbalances: excess production confronted insufficient purchasing power, international trade contracted dramatically, and deep wealth disparities left ordinary citizens unable to sustain the economy. Inevitably, mass hardship ignited social unrest. Food protests became frequent, occasional uprisings erupted, and the 1932 Bonus Army episode crystallized public discontent.

Within that setting the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or Bonus Army, formed. Tens of thousands of unemployed World War I veterans and their families (approximately 20,000 in the capital), led by former sergeant Walter Waters and supported by retired Marine General Smedley Butler, marched on Washington to demand early payment of service bonuses scheduled for 1945. Waters conceived a “Khaki Shirt” movement patterned on Fascist paramilitary organization that might seize power and “clean out the high places in government.” On July 28 President Herbert Hoover directed General Douglas MacArthur and Major George Patton to clear the camps. The eviction, carried out with tear gas and the burning of shelters, dispersed the veterans and their families. The Bonus Army dissolved, and Waters’s project collapsed within months. Hoover’s inadequate response to the downturn contributed substantially to his defeat in the ensuing election.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) carried the 1932 election with 57.4% of the popular vote, winning every state outside the Northeast and assembling the New Deal Coalition that would dominate American politics for decades. He took office on March 4, 1933, amid economic collapse and social unrest, presenting the New Deal as a comprehensive redesign meant to shift the United States away from unregulated free-market practices toward coordinated recovery. Drawing explicitly on economic corporatism and Fascist-style planning, the program called for vigorous state action through unemployment relief, public-works projects, and early proposals for universal health coverage.

FDR’s advisory circle; the Brain Trust — advanced the intellectual ideal. Among them were the Columbia political scientist and Georgist economist Raymond Moley, whose progressive reform background and speechwriting skill framed the campaign’s message of bold intervention; the agricultural economist and technocrat Rexford G. Tugwell, whose planning ideology and conviction that modern industry required systematic state coordination of production made him the group’s leading advocate of deliberate economic management; the corporate lawyer and social democrat Adolf A. Berle, whose analysis of concentrated private power supplied the institutional critique that large corporations must be regulated in the public interest; the progressive speechwriter Samuel I. Rosenman and the progressive lawyer Basil O’Connor, practical counselors who translated academic ideas into campaign language; the progressive Harry L. Hopkins, whose philosophy that created jobs were better than handouts shaped relief strategy; and the social democrat labor reformer Frances Perkins, whose settlement-house background and deep ties to the socialist movement brought organized-worker priorities into the circle. Additional legal and administrative voices — Harold L. Ickes, James P. Warburg, Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin V. Cohen, Thomas G. Corcoran and Felix Frankfurter, reinforced the same outlook. Together they promoted concepts such as “industrial partnership,” modeled on distributism, that encouraged cooperation across social and occupational lines and amounted, in essence, to a program of American social democracy.

Most consequentially for the industrial recovery program that followed, however, stood Hugh S. Johnson: the hard-driving military veteran, West Point graduate, and War Industries Board alumnus whose open affinities for Italian Fascism supplied the decisive administrative energy and organizational discipline.

Those ideas were rooted in earlier American thinkers, from Alexander Hamilton to Henry Charles Carey, who had emphasized solidarity among workers, employers, farmers, and producers. In the depths of despair such strategies offered a measure of hope, though committed free-market advocates condemned them as excessive governmental interference. In his inaugural address Roosevelt cast the crisis in military language:

“If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army … 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.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933

Congress answered by transferring extensive authority to the executive, leaving the Supreme Court as the chief remaining constraint. One of Roosevelt’s early appointments was Breckinridge Long, a long-standing ally who made no secret of his enthusiasm for Fascist Italy, as ambassador to Rome. Roosevelt received Long’s reports directly rather than through the State Department. In reply to Long’s first enthusiastic dispatch he wrote:

“There seems to be no question that [Mussolini] is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Breckinridge Long, 16 June 1933

Later that month, Roosevelt praised contemporary accounts of Fascist Italy for accurately portraying the country’s sweeping transformation under Mussolini. During Italo Balbo’s celebrated visit to the United States in the summer of 1933, Roosevelt reportedly expressed admiration for Italy’s system of labor organization and conveyed a generally favorable and understanding attitude toward the Fascist regime, according to Balbo’s subsequent report to Mussolini. Shortly afterward, Roosevelt privately reiterated similar sentiments in a conversation with a White House correspondent.

“I don’t mind telling you in confidence, that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

The Chicago Italo Balbo monument

In the first 100 days alone, FDR’s team enacted major measures to stabilize banking and agriculture. The Emergency Banking Act, passed on March 9, 1933, imposed a week-long nationwide bank holiday, allowing the Treasury to audit and strengthen institutions. More than 90% of closed banks reopened, restoring public confidence, ending panic withdrawals, and returning liquidity to circulation. It also enlarged Federal Reserve authority over currency and supervision, encouraging redeposits and stimulating loans. Concurrently, the Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial banking from speculative investment, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to safeguard deposits, restricted risky lending, and strengthened regulatory powers, thereby steadying the financial system and encouraging expansion. The Cullen-Harrison Act authorized the sale of low-alcohol beer, relaxing Prohibition restrictions, and the full repeal of Prohibition in 1933 generated new tax revenue, jobs, and consumer spending. On March 20 the Economy Act reduced federal outlays by cutting salaries and benefits for government employees and veterans, reducing aid to states, and authorizing departmental consolidations, moves that improved fiscal balance and redirected resources toward private investment. Agricultural relief proved central: the Farm Credit Administration, established on March 27, refinanced mortgages for one-fifth of farmers, easing their debt burdens. Then the June 16 Farm Credit Act created a system of farmer-owned cooperatives to supply credit, providing vital support to rural economies.

“The Governor of the Farm Credit Administration … is authorized and directed to organize and charter twelve corporations to be known as “Production Credit Corporations” and twelve banks to be known as “Banks for Cooperatives.” One such corporation and one such bank shall be established in each city in which there is located a Federal land bank. The directors of the several Federal land banks shall be ex officio the directors of the respective Production Credit Corporations and Banks for Cooperatives.”

— US Congress, Farm Credit Act of 1933

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), created on March 31, employed thousands of veterans and three million young men aged 18 to 28. Their work ranged from constructing roads and bridges to conserving the nation’s natural resources: forestry, soil-erosion control, flood prevention, tree planting, trail building, and broader environmental stewardship. The program both reduced rural unemployment and left a durable imprint on the landscape, pairing immediate relief with long-term national conservation.

“I propose to create [the CCC] to be used in complex work, not interfering with normal employment and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control, and similar projects. I call your attention to the fact that this type of work is of definite, practical value, not only through the prevention of great present financial loss but also as a means of creating future national wealth.”

— FDR, message to Congress on Making the Civilian Conservation Corps a Permanent Agency, April 05, 1937

Photos of the CCC

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), established on May 12, channeled federal funds to states for immediate relief — food, clothing, shelter — while generating work for 20 million unskilled laborers in local and state governments. The next day the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) sought to stabilize farm incomes by raising agricultural prices through controlled scarcity and direct payments. From 1933 to 1940 output increased by 30%, and prices rose substantially by year’s end, strengthening the agrarian sector. Meanwhile the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), founded on May 18, undertook large-scale regional planning, creating jobs, electrifying communities, and improving living conditions across the Tennessee Valley. Financial markets also came under regulation. The Securities Act of 1933, enacted May 27, imposed rigorous disclosure requirements to curb fraud: companies had to register securities, reveal financial information, issue prospectuses, and file periodic reports. These rules increased transparency, restored investor confidence, and stabilized markets while facilitating capital formation for expansion and employment. The act also created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to enforce compliance. On June 6 the Emergency Railroad Act established the Federal Coordinator of Transportation, overseeing national railroad operations, rationalizing services, and protecting workers’ rights under the Railway Labor Act. The Homeowners Refinancing Act of June 13 allowed homeowners to refinance mortgages to avert foreclosure, with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation providing parallel relief.

At the center of the New Deal stood the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 16, which established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the National Labor Board (NLB, formalized in August 1933). These agencies aimed to revive industry, secure labor rights, and enlarge public services. In June 1932 Bernard Baruch, the prominent Wall Street financier, attended the Democratic National Convention intent on inserting a trusted business-oriented figure into Roosevelt’s inner circle. He conditioned a $50,000 campaign contribution on the inclusion of his long-time associate Hugh Johnson in the Brain Trust. Roosevelt agreed. Johnson and Baruch had first collaborated on the War Industries Board during the First World War. After the war Johnson prepared a summary of the Board’s records for Baruch; the two remained close. In June 1932 Johnson circulated among a small circle of colleagues a draft plan for emergency national government signed with the alias Muscleinny. The document argued for the temporary dissolution of Congress and the concentration of authority in a single executive; it even contemplated the deportation of President Hoover, the vice-president, and members of Congress to a foreign archipelago. The draft survives among the Moley Papers and is analyzed in John K. Ohl’s biography of Johnson. Once inside Roosevelt’s circle, Johnson contributed administrative vigor and a commanding style that both drew and unsettled the academic members of the Brain Trust. Because of his wartime experience and his commitment to industrial self-government, he was assigned to help draft the industrial recovery legislation that became the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 16, 1933. Roosevelt appointed him Administrator of the new National Recovery Administration.

Johnson giving a Roman salute

Johnson in Time Magazine

Before the bill passed, Johnson presented Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins with a copy of the Fascist text The Structure of the Corporate State by Raffaello Viglione and Giovanni Miraldi, observing that its code committees supplied a useful model. Perkins later recalled glancing at the book with astonishment and remarking on the similarity of the institutional design. She remained persuaded, however, that Johnson entertained no scheme to overturn the constitutional order; he was simply deeply impressed by the notion of state authority and repeatedly likened the Depression to a war that demanded wartime discipline and regulation. The NRA, directed by Johnson — operated as a federal vertical trade association, seeking to balance the claims of workers and capitalists, stimulate economic growth, and substitute cooperative industrialism for cutthroat competition. While some economists later judged the NRA a failure, closer examination suggests it may have been the most ambitious effort in American history to redistribute industrial power across economic sectors. Johnson summarized his method for handling the competing interests inside the NRA:

“There are three conflicting interests in NRA—management, labor, and consumers. You can’t fully please any. You can only try to be fair to all while denying to each the full of its demands. When you try to do this in an atmosphere of sniping, reaching for power and intra-mural intrigue, you have assumed an almost impossible job. Of course, the alternative is to support one cause and suppress the other. You can thus concentrate your dead cats on one flank and get the support of those to whom you have knuckled—but that is a cowardly and faithless course for a public servant.”

— Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle: From Egg to Earth

The NRA functioned through negotiated codes rather than unilateral command. Industry proposals were submitted at public hearings attended by representatives of labor and consumers. Deputy Administrators sought consensus; when agreement proved unattainable the state issued a final ruling. Section 7(a) of the NIRA guaranteed the right to collective bargaining. The National Labor Board, organized into twenty regional panels composed of state, labor, and management representatives, settled 1,019 strikes, averted 498 others, and resolved 1,800 additional disputes during its existence. Business representatives were appointed by the NRA’s Industrial Advisory Board (IAB), headed by Commerce Secretary Daniel C. Roper, while labor delegates came from the Labor Advisory Board (LAB) under Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. Hugh Johnson personally selected the Consumer Advisory Board (CAB). Together these boards constituted an Advisory Council that appointed Deputy Administrators to convert negotiations into binding agreements. This arrangement enabled local trade unions to bargain effectively, either enforcing or moderating collective bargaining — a marked contrast to Germany’s Labor Front (DAF) under Robert Ley, which abolished unions altogether, though both systems relied on indirect representation, with Ley’s labor trustees fixing wages and benefits. The American fascist Lawrence Dennis argued that such a system offered superior practical justice:

“The fascist State, through government-assisted unions of workers, government-regulated associations of employers, and special executive tribunals for hearing appeals and complaints, can afford far more redress and correction than the liberal State with its judicial process available only to the rich individual and the large corporation.”

— Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism

The Blue Eagle emblem functioned as a public mark of compliance. On September 13, 1933, New York City staged what was described as the largest parade in its history: 250,000 marchers, 200 brass bands, floats, military units, and labor and capital delegations advancing side by side up Fifth Avenue, observed by an estimated 1.5 million spectators and accompanied by 49 airplanes. Contemporary critic John T. Flynn described the apparatus without euphemism:

“He (Hugh Johnson) began with a blanket code which every business man was summoned to sign—to pay minimum wages and observe the maximum hours of work, to abolish child labor, abjure price increases and put people to work. Every instrument of human exhortation opened fire on business to comply—the press, pulpit, radio, movies. Bands played, men paraded, trucks toured the streets blaring the message through megaphones. Johnson hatched out an amazing bird called the Blue Eagle. Every business concern that signed up got a Blue Eagle, which was the badge of compliance…. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism.”

— John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth

Mussolini, reviewing Roosevelt’s Looking Forward on July 7, 1933, observed:

“The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much ‘Fascism’ the American President’s program contains. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism. More than that cannot be said at the moment. The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.”

— Benito Mussolini, quoted in Il New Deal nella pubblicistica politica italiana dal 1933 al 1938 by Marco Sedda

An official NRA pamphlet of the period stated that:

“The Fascist Principles are very similar to those which we have been evolving here in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”

— National Recovery Administration, Capitalism and Labor Under Fascism

Johnson even distributed copies of The Italian Corporative State by Fausto Pitigliani, one of Mussolini’s economic theorists — to members of the administration, including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, presenting the Fascist model as a practical guide for American industrial recovery. Writing in the Fascist journal Gerarchia, Giovanni Selvi argued that the NRA bore unmistakable Fascist characteristics, describing it as an embryonic form of corporatism adapted to American conditions. Mussolini likewise praised Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers, interpreting it as further evidence that the United States was moving toward a corporatist economic order similar to that which Fascism claimed represented the future of modern industrial society. Fortune magazine likewise observed these similarities in real time:

“The Corporate State is to Mussolini what the New Deal is to Roosevelt.”

— Fortune, vol. X, no. 1: The State

Mussolini put the comparison even more bluntly on another occasion:

“You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”

— Benito Mussolini, quoted in Mussolini In Mr. New York: The Autobiography of Grover A. Whalen by Grover Aloysius Whalen

The administrative model of the NRA illustrated its true scope. At the apex stood the President, beneath whom the Industrial Emergency Committee and the National Industrial Recovery Board coordinated operations. Advisory boards represented consumers, industry, and labor, while specialized divisions — Research and Planning, Legal, Compliance, and technical sectors such as Basic Materials, Textiles, Food, Chemicals, Equipment, and Manufacturing, managed sector-specific oversight. Compliance enforcement and code administration operated at the base, ensuring that agreements negotiated across industries were carried out effectively. This hierarchy reflected the NRA’s dual purpose: regulating commerce while encouraging collaboration among economic actors.

Present Administrative Organization of the NRA

At the apex stood the President, with the Industrial Emergency Committee and National Industrial Recovery Board coordinating operations. Advisory boards for consumers, industry, and labor fed into an Advisory Council. Specialized divisions (Research and Planning, Legal, Compliance) and the Code Administration Director oversaw sector-specific codes, cascading down to regional and state compliance offices and Code Authorities.

A representative divisional organization chart further clarifies the internal structure of a typical NRA division. At the apex sat the Division Administrator, supported by advisors representing consumers, industry, and labor, alongside assistant administrators responsible for legal counsel, executive oversight, code enforcement, and technical operations. Beneath them, deputy administrators supervised a wide array of specific industries, organized in columns, ranging from Fabricated Metal Products and Electric and Neon Signs to Railway Brake Beams and extending to detailed sub-sectors such as Aluminum Cooking Utensil Manufacturing, Bank Instrument Production, and numerous other manufacturing and related fields. This layout underscores the meticulous, granular oversight through which the NRA administered industrial codes and coordinated operations across the economy.

Sample Divisional Organization of the NRA

Under a Division Administrator and Assistant Division Administrator, deputy administrators and assistant deputies managed highly granular industry codes — ranging from Fabricated Metal Products, Electric and Neon Signs, and Railway Brake Beams to dozens of specialized manufacturing categories such as Aluminum Cooking Utensils, Bank Instruments, and Photographic Equipment. This structure enabled the NRA’s detailed code-making and enforcement across the economy.

Johnson concentrated first on the six largest and most organized industries: cotton textiles, steel, petroleum, automobiles, lumber, and coal. In cotton textiles he secured a 40-hour week, minimum wages of $10 in the South and $11 in the North, production limits, collective bargaining, and a ban on child labor under sixteen. In steel he threatened forced shorter hours and higher wages until the open-shop clause was abandoned. In oil he imposed production controls and, when majors and independents deadlocked, drafted a code himself. In automobiles he permitted a “merit” clause while preserving individual bargaining. Coal proved the most intractable; after regional codes failed and strikes spread, Johnson brought John L. Lewis and resistant operators together and obtained a unified code that included union representation, checkweighmen, prohibition of child labor and scrip and maximum hours — though nineteen regional divisions remained. The Bituminous Coal Code restored more than 4,500 small operators; the Lumber Code revived over 2,000 mills; the Container Code, employing the Stevenson Plan of production stabilization and product diversification, achieved near-total voluntary compliance, raised shipment values roughly 76% between 1932 and 1935 (shipments rose 76.34%), reduced the workweek from 55 to 40 hours, increased employment more than 30 percent (30.7%), and raised the sector’s national income share from 0.1% to 0.29 percent, a 190% rise, while minimum wages reached 40 cents. Retail, wholesale, and rubber-tire codes preserved tens of thousands of small merchants (potentially over 100,000). In Texas, Oklahoma, and California, petroleum companies faced fierce competition, overproduction, and price volatility due to local resource isolation; anti-trust laws had previously blocked government intervention. The NRA enabled industry representatives to agree on production ceilings, stabilizing prices and harmonizing industry and consumer interests. The Corrugated & Solid Fiber Shipping Container Code replaced rigid pricing with the Stevenson Plan, promoting volume stability and profitability through diversification rather than expansion. Post-NRA, the National Container Association continued these innovations in diversification and cost accounting.

In its two years of operation the NRA generated approximately 2.875 million jobs, more than all other contemporary New Deal agencies combined, without substantial Treasury outlays, and added roughly three billion dollars annually to purchasing power. Within four months of the Presidential Reemployment Agreement, voluntary compliance reached 96% of commerce and industry, covering over 400 codes. The agency established regulated hours and wages, improved working conditions, abolished child labor in covered sectors, and dismantled many sweatshops. William Green of the American Federation of Labor called the NRA “the Magna Charta of organized labor”; John L. Lewis compared it to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The AFL’s collaboration went well beyond public endorsement. Green himself sat on the NRA’s Labor Advisory Board, federation officials helped draft and administer industry codes, and local unions actively enforced Blue Eagle compliance among their members. In a fully developed corporate state the AFL would almost certainly have been the existing institution absorbed or nationalized into the official labor structure, much as independent unions were incorporated into Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Green himself described the underlying principle in the American Federationist:

“The act rests upon the principle that Labor is a partner in industry and has a right to participate in the decisions and duties of industry and that the spirit and practice of cooperation are essential to the best interests of all.”

— William Green, American Federationist

The same cooperative relationship extended into electoral politics: the federation helped build the broader New Deal coalition, including the crucial alliance with the American Labor party that delivered key votes for Roosevelt in New York.

Johnson regarded strong unions as indispensable partners in industrial recovery, once telling Frances Perkins that if trade unions did not exist they would have to be created. At the same time his military background led him to view strikes as mutiny against the national effort. He mediated disputes in automobiles, coal, textiles, and steel, often securing temporary settlements that kept production moving. The NRA mitigated the Depression’s wage shocks by shortening hours, raising pay, and accelerating production, directly challenging economists who predicted that higher labor costs, which dominated economic outlays, would suppress consumption, reduce purchasing power, and worsen unemployment. In practice, synergies with the PWA and AAA expanded the pool of purchasers, cushioning pricing effects. Critics such as Huey Long and Dudley Cates argued that the suspension of anti-trust enforcement and the introduction of price agreements injured small business. Defenders replied that the pre-NRA antitrust regime had often prevented small firms from stabilizing prices or pooling resources against larger competitors, and that many of the enterprises forced to close under the codes had depended on unlivable wages and child labor. The suspension of the Sherman and Clayton Acts was a notable triumph.

Pre-NRA, these statutes, intended to curb monopolies, often destroyed small enterprises struggling to stabilize prices, coordinate output, or pool resources against larger competitors, risking legal reprisal. Laissez-faire inaction would have handed the economy to outright oligopolies. The NRA introduced carefully limited, sector-specific price agreements to prevent collapse, outlawing predatory or monopolistic undercutting. While some argue this burdened small businesses, many of those affected were sweatshops dependent on child labor and unlivable wages, forced to close when fair pay became mandatory. Ethical small firms occasionally failed if unable to meet wage standards, but unsustainable enterprises forfeited their right to exist. Price-fixing remained limited and was contested even inside the administration; production controls were frequently preferred. When internal studies revealed that hundreds of codes permitted open-price systems and waiting periods that facilitated collusion, Johnson issued Office Memorandum 228 in June 1934, directing a sharper emphasis on competition and stricter review of cost formulas. The Bituminous Coal Code consolidated the industry vertically with labor, ending destructive interregional rivalries between Northern and Southern Appalachian firms, stabilizing wages, and implementing equitable labor practices and dispute resolution. Even former President Herbert Hoover later summarized the experiment in the same terms:

“Along with currency manifest, the New Deal introduced to Americans the spectacle of Fascist dictation to business, labor, and agriculture.”

— Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression 1929-1941

For a brief period the United States possessed an economic arrangement based on industrial democracy — one that sought to balance the interests of labor, management, and the public under the pressure of national emergency. By mid-1934, however, enforcement weakened. Efforts to decentralize authority to state directors became entangled in bureaucratic conflict with the National Emergency Council under Donald Richberg. Johnson’s health deteriorated under the strain of long hours, constant controversy, heavy drinking, and personal difficulties. Rumors of an affair circulated in Washington. Cabinet members urged Roosevelt that Johnson’s troubles threatened the larger recovery program. Bernard Baruch, once Johnson’s patron, grew alarmed that the NRA was moving toward excessive regulation and bureaucracy. When Frances Perkins asked Baruch to persuade Johnson to resign, Baruch replied that Johnson had “got too big for his boots” and had tasted “the tempting, but poisonous cup of publicity.” On August 18, 1934, Roosevelt gently suggested a temporary assignment abroad. Johnson reacted angrily. Two days later, with Perkins and Richberg present, FDR repeated the suggestion. Johnson resigned on the spot. On September 9 he submitted a formal plan to reorganize the NRA as a purely administrative body supervised by a National Industrial Commission and Tribunal. Roosevelt asked Baruch to deliver the final message that it was time to step down. Johnson’s resignation took effect on October 15. Lawrence Dennis, writing at the time, described precisely the principle the Johnson had attempted to put into practice:

“Thus we shall see what fascism has to do to make a system of private ownership and management workable, so far as arrangements involving capital income or reward are concerned. The ruling principle must be that capital and management reward must be kept in continuous and flexible adjustment with economic possibilities, and that legal and institutional arrangements — like loan contracts, bonds, legal concepts of just compensation, due process of law, and confiscation — must not obstruct executive action of government to maintain this adjustment otherwise than by the present devices of bankruptcy, foreclosures, reorganization, and cycles of booms and depressions.”

— Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism

In September 1934, Johnson proposed transforming the NRA into a fully administrative body of 60 government representatives, each supported by legal, labor, and economic aides, empowered to enforce codes. A National Industrial Commission, appointed by the President and comprising economic, labor, and industrial experts, would coordinate recovery programs across the NRA, AAA, FTC, FERA, and DOJ. A National Industrial Tribunal would adjudicate disputes, regulate fair trade, and enforce labor codes through specialized boards representing labor, industry, and consumers; the Industrial Appeals Board, defending small businesses, would be incorporated. The NIRA would gain DOJ enforcement powers, including revocation of Blue Eagle certification for non-compliance. These ambitious September 9, 1934, proposals never materialized. Without Johnson’s driving force the agency rapidly fragmented. A special review body known as the Darrow Board (led by Clarence Darrow, twice indicted for juror bribery) added to the criticism. In May 1935 the Supreme Court, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act. The case concerned a small local poultry business in Brooklyn whose activities the Court judged insufficiently interstate. The Blue Eagle disappeared. Public reaction was muted; federal bureaucracy had already throttled its effectiveness over the preceding seven months, leaving little to mourn. Thus, the NRA, the United States’ lone experiment in self-governing industrial democracy via voluntary mass mobilization, ended in May 1935. In his farewell remarks to the NRA staff on October 1, 1934, Johnson said:

“There remains only to say good-by to you and this, in my present state of emotion and affection, I cannot do. I shall be here for a few days. I shall devote most of my time to seeing those of you who care to see me and sit down for a few minutes’ chat. […] And now that it is time to go: ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.’ God bless you.”

— Hugh S. Johnson, My Friends At The NRA, October 1, 1934

Johnson continued to defend the principle of industrial self-government, offered constitutional revisions of the recovery program, and later became an outspoken critic of what he termed the “Third New Deal” — the further concentration of power, bureaucratic expansion, and fiscal policies of the later 1930s. He supported Wendell Willkie in 1940, offered in a final telegram to serve Roosevelt again as a soldier under his commander-in-chief, and died in April 1942 after the administration declined to renew his reserve commission. At Arlington, Bernard Baruch lamented the loss of “that brain, his courage and facility of expression.”

Alongside the NRA the early New Deal produced the Emergency Banking Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities Act, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the Public Works Administration. Later legislation included Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Works Progress Administration, rural electrification, and resettlement experiments. Rexford Tugwell, after visiting Fascist Italy in 1934, recorded his envy of Italian Fascism:

“I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary. And at any rate she is being rebuilt physically in a systematic way. … Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as F.D.R. has. But he has the press controlled so they cannot scream lies at him daily. And he has a compact and disciplined nation although it lacks resources. On the surface, at least, he seems to have made enormous progress. … It’s the cleanest, neatest, most effectively operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.”

— Rexford G. Tugwell, diary entry, October 1934

Greenbelt towns and subsistence homesteads reflected similar ambitions for planned communities. Johnson himself briefly directed the New York City Works Progress Administration in 1935, expanding employment rolls from roughly 88,000 to more than 220,000 before resigning. Communist party leaders were among the sharpest contemporary critics of the NRA’s corporatism. Party general secretary Earl Browder denounced the NRA as:

“The American brother to Mussolini’s ‘corporate state,’ with state-controlled labor unions closely tied up with and under the direction of the employers.”

— Earl Browder, The Communist, vol. 12, no. 8

William Z. Foster, another leading figure in the Communist party, made the same connection explicit the following year:

“And it is significant to note that the Roosevelt industrial code policies (the N.R.A.) originated in the United States Chamber of Commerce (organ of finance capital) and were hailed by many of their supporters as first steps towards a fascist corporate state in the United States.”

— William Z. Foster, Fascist Tendencies In The United States

Subsequent New Deal measures expanded federal reach. The National Housing Act of June 27, 1934, established the Federal Housing Administration and Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation to support homebuyers. The Resettlement Administration, founded May 1, 1935, relocated struggling families to regions with employment prospects. On May 11, the Rural Utilities Service (originally the Rural Electrification Administration) financed water, electrical, and telecommunications projects, supplying low-interest loans to cooperatives, electrifying rural areas, modernizing agriculture, and elevating living standards. The National Youth Administration, inaugurated June 26, 1935, operated four years, offering education and employment to 4.5 million youths, expanding workforce capacity. Monetary and trade policies complemented these initiatives. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 devalued the dollar, centralized gold reserves, expanded governmental monetary control, stimulated spending, created jobs, and stabilized international finance. The Reciprocal Tariff Act empowered FDR to negotiate bilateral trade agreements, spurring exports, moderating imports, increasing tariff revenue, and supporting employment; exports rose 50% in the 1930s. The Jones-Costigan Act (Sugar Act) regulated production and pricing, safeguarding markets and producer incomes. The Davis-Bacon Act amendment of 1931 mandated prevailing wages for federally funded construction, ensuring labor fairness. The Revenue Act of 1935 imposed higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations to redistribute income, fund Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and alleviate poverty and unemployment. The Public Works Administration, under NIRA Title II, financed monumental infrastructure: roads, bridges, dams, and public buildings — creating jobs and fostering technological advancement through projects like Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam.

British fascist Oswald Mosley hanging out with Roosevelt

FDR’s policies yielded tangible results: banking stabilized via the Emergency and Glass-Steagall Acts; unemployment fell from 24.9% in 1933 to 14.3% by 1937 through CCC, FERA, and related programs; agricultural prices rose; the TVA improved regional economies; HOLC prevented foreclosures; the PWA created infrastructure and jobs; industrial production surged 50% from 1933 to 1937; and consumer spending climbed, laying the groundwork for long-term growth and restoring confidence in government. Yet, by 1935, the Supreme Court invalidated many New Deal institutions. FDR’s 1937 Judicial Procedures Reform Bill (court-packing to revive the NIRA, AAA, and related programs) failed, drawing accusations of dictatorial overreach, even from Johnson, who opposed FDR, endorsed Wendell Willkie in 1940, and turned toward isolationism before his death in 1942. FDR ultimately abandoned radical reforms for moderate measures like the Wagner Act. The 1937 recession underscored the fragility of recovery, highlighting the necessity of constant policy management. While setbacks occurred, the New Deal left enduring advancements. FDR’s attempt to rescue America temporarily reshaped the nation, yet liberal constitutional confines precluded the birth of a social state.

The NRA remains the closest approach the United States has made to a system of industrial self-government under state auspices, an experiment in which capital, labor, and public authority negotiated production rules under the banner of national recovery. Its brief existence demonstrated both the practical possibilities of coordinated industrial democracy and the constitutional, political, and administrative obstacles that ultimately confined the New Deal within liberal limits. As Michael Lind has observed, the lineage of such thinking stretched from Lincoln through Coolidge and Hoover. The NRA’s goals were to balance class interests, promote recovery through coordinated growth, and replace cutthroat competition with collaboration. Structurally the Labor, Industrial, and Consumer Advisory Boards formed an Advisory Council that appointed Deputy Administrators for each sector. Unlike the DAF, which banned independent unions, the NRA preserved collective bargaining while still relying on state arbitration — an arrangement that paralleled aspects of corporatism in Salazar’s Portugal and Imperial Japan. Through more than five hundred codes the NRA centralized industrial planning. Businesses recorded substantial after-tax earnings between 1932 and 1935 ($2.4 billion) even while complaining of compliance costs; consumers faced higher prices; labor obtained higher wages and legal protections. The experiment illustrated a larger constraint: liberal democracy limits actual corporatism. The Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in 1935; Roosevelt’s subsequent court-packing plan revealed the boundaries of executive power. Effective corporatism requires strong central authority, vertical structures of representation, and legislative support — conditions the American constitutional order did not fully supply. Coercive mobilization and large-scale deficit financing, as practiced in Nazi Germany, achieved faster recovery than America’s more decentralized effort. John Garraty summarized the comparative record:

“The two movements [F.D.R.’s America and Hitler’s Germany] nevertheless reacted to the Great Depression in similar ways, distinct from those of other industrial nations. Of the two the Nazis were the more successful in curing the economic ills of the 1930s. They reduced unemployment and stimulated industrial production faster than the Americans did and, considering their resources, handled their monetary and trade problems more successfully, certainly more imaginatively. This was partly because the Nazis employed deficit financing on a larger scale and partly because their totalitarian system better lent itself to the mobilization of society, both by force and by persuasion. By 1936 the depression was substantially over in Germany, far from finished in the United States.”

— John Garraty, quoted in How Hitler Tackled Unemployment and Revived Germany’s Economy by Mark Weber

FDR’s cult of personality on display

The New Deal therefore offers both a case study in corporatist practice and a demonstration of the limits imposed by constitutional liberalism. The NRA’s voluntary industrial collaboration failed not from absence of vision but from the structural constraints of the Constitution, congressional resistance and judicial review.

“The real end of the New Deal period took place in the Congressional election of November, 1938, when some eighty odd liberal and middle-of-the-road members of the House were replaced by members much more conservative than they were. But, actually, the New Deal was defeated by the coalition of northern Republicans and southern Democrats that took place in Congress in 1937.”

— Thomas R. Amlie, Let’s Look at The Record

In a society marked by intense individualism and powerful private interests, cooperative economics prove difficult to sustain without stronger coercive authority. The NRA marked the moment when the United States came closest to realizing such a vision — an authentic American Fascism. Under Johnson the agency distributed literature that explicitly noted the similarity of its principles to those of Fascist Italy and the sympathies that filled its ranks left little doubt about the direction of the effort. Lawrence Dennis argued that the constitutional boundaries of liberal democracy left Roosevelt with few purely domestic instruments capable of full recovery; large-scale wartime mobilization would ultimately prove necessary both to stimulate the economy and to consolidate authority. Despite the disasters that war would bring — disasters whose human and moral costs remain indefensible; the administration chose that war path.

“This New Deal dilemma is not the way to avoid fascism, as the New Dealers have hoped, but rather to make it inevitable.”

— Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism

Viewed in this light, the New Deal stands as a testament to ambitious governance under constitutional limits and as a prelude to the more coercive measures of military and industrial power required to overcome the Depression completely. Its legacy resides not only in the statutes it produced but in the enduring lesson that transformative programs demand alignment among authority, public compliance and the institutional capacity of the state.

FDR was never a true dictator… yet among all the presidents the republic has known, he came closest to exercising the concentrated personal authority of one. Even Lincoln’s wartime measures — suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, and expanded executive reach — were surpassed in both scale and institutional permanence by the apparatus Roosevelt constructed. The chart of cumulative executive orders issued in the first year of each modern presidency makes the comparison concrete: Roosevelt’s line rises higher and steeper than any other, far outpacing the wartime expansions of Truman and Hoover and dwarfing the far more modest first-year totals of every subsequent president. The modern American order — the institutional architecture that made the United States a global superpower and sustained its hegemony — exists only because of the New Deal. The wartime mobilization completed the transformation that the NRA had begun, forging the permanent state capacity, the expectations of governmental power and the fusion of crisis management with enduring institutions that still define the American system.

John T. Flynn, one of the New Deal’s most persistent critics, concluded that the program’s dependence on crisis made it structurally reliant on a permanent state of emergency:

“But willingly or unwillingly, Flynn argued, the New Deal had put itself into the position of needing a state of permanent crisis or, indeed, permanent war to justify its social interventions. ‘It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis…. Hitler’s story is the same.’ … Flynn’s prognosis for the regime of his enemy Roosevelt sounds more apt today than when he made it in 1944 … ‘We must have enemies,’ he wrote in As We Go Marching. ‘They will become an economic necessity for us.’”

— Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals

America is left with the historical fact that for a brief period it turned toward a form of liberal fascism; the fascism of the factory floor, the boardroom, and the union hall. That compact sought to rescue the American worker from wage slavery and the American capitalist from the self-destruction of unrestrained competition. For its short, intense existence the NRA, under Johnson, served as a bridge between the isolated individual and the abstract state, resting on the principle of common discipline that FDR invoked in his first inaugural address. Even the National Socialists in Germany initially praised FDR’s New Deal for decisively crushing the excesses of capitalism. The Völkischer Beobachter and other Nazi press hailed America’s break with the “uninhibited frenzy of market speculation,” stressed Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in economic and social policy, and noted the compatibility of his leadership style with the Führerprinzip. Hitler himself expressed sympathy:

“The Reich chancellor requests Mr. Dodd to present his greetings to President Roosevelt. He congratulates the president upon his heroic effort in the interest of the American people. The president’s successful struggle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration. The Reich chancellor is in accord with the president that the virtues of sense of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline must be the supreme rule of the whole nation. This moral demand, which the president is addressing to every single citizen, is only the quintessence of German philosophy of the state, expressed in the motto ‘The public weal before the private gain.’”

— Adolf Hitler letter to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Dodd on March 14, 1934

To them the NRA’s sectoral codes, state-supervised industrial self-government, and subordination of pure market competition looked like a recognizable form of collectivist organization.

What Johnson sought and would have delivered had constitutional limits and internal resistance not constrained him — was a far more rigorously hierarchical and coercive system than the incomplete corporatism of Fascist Italy. At the absolute apex would stand the President exercising emergency powers that temporarily overrode ordinary legislative and judicial checks. Immediately beneath him a single dominant Administrator (or a tightly controlled National Industrial Commission of presidential appointees) would hold real command authority, appointing and removing key officers, issuing binding directives, and retaining final say over code approval and enforcement. Advisory boards for consumers, industry, and labor would still exist, but only in a consultative role; they would no longer dilute central power. Beneath this apex the organization would split into two tightly interlocked pillars forced to function as one. On the industrial side, a Code Administration Director would oversee mandatory sectoral Code Authorities covering Basic Materials, Textiles, Food, Chemicals, Equipment, Manufacturing, and dozens of finer industrial sub-divisions.

Each Code Authority would possess genuine regulatory power to fix production quotas, prices, wages, hours, and distribution methods under direct federal supervision. Non-compliance would mean loss of the Blue Eagle and referral to the Department of Justice for real sanctions. On the labor side, a Compliance and Enforcement apparatus staffed by appointed Labour Trustees would operate at every level: national, regional, and local. These trustees would hold explicit authority to intervene directly in any firm, compel settlements, override local arrangements, and bring cases before strengthened Industrial Appeals or Honour-style review panels. Occupational communities, cells, and blocks at the plant and trade level would be organized under the same vertical chain so that capital and labor remained inside a single disciplined structure. The result would be a fully realized American corporate state organized by industry, enforced by trustees with coercive reach and totalitarian command from above.

This arrangement would have been substantially closer to National Socialism than to Fascist Italy. Italian corporatism remained more theoretical and incomplete; the corporations retained a degree of residual private initiative and a more negotiated relationship between capital, labor, and the state. Mussolini never fully subordinated everything to a single all-powerful leader principle or liquidated independent economic activity to the same degree. The German model, by contrast, was tighter and more hierarchical from the top down. The Führerprinzip was absolute, the German Labour Front absorbed the unions completely. Labour Trustees and Honor Courts possessed real coercive power to intervene in businesses and settle disputes by force if necessary. Economic groups and chambers operated under far stricter central direction. Johnson’s preferred NRA, with its one-man commands, mandatory sectoral codes, and trustees empowered to reach into the workplace, would have moved the American experiment decisively toward the more Bolshevik-adjacent totalizing Third Reich.

NRA diagram if FDR was dictator

A diagram of the Nazi corporate state

When domestic recovery under constitutional limits proved insufficient, the administration’s policies, above all the oil embargo, asset freezes, and economic isolation of Imperial Japan; deliberately forced Japan into a strategic corner from which war became the only remaining path. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary on 25 November 1941 that the question before Roosevelt and his advisers was:

“The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

— Henry L. Stimson, Diary Entry, November 25, 1941

In the National Socialist analysis Das amerikanische Rätsel (The American Enigma), published in April 1941 by the Zentralverlag der NSDAP before the German declaration of war, the journalist Theodor Seibert contrasted FDR’s wealthy origins and corrupt oligarchic methods with the populist rise of Mussolini and Hitler from simple beginnings, exposed the hypocrisy of Roosevelt’s repeated assurances that America would stay out of the conflict, and argued that the President required war both to satisfy his wealthy backers and to stabilize an American economy that he had failed to restore. As I observed, much of this pressure was also compounded by the extensive infiltration of pro-Soviet communist agents into the highest levels of his government, most notably Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, State Department official Alger Hiss, White House economic adviser Lauchlin Currie, Treasury economist Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (head of a major espionage network) and Victor Perlo of the War Production Board and Treasury, among others confirmed by the Venona decrypts and later archival evidence.

The choice of that war, despite the disasters it unleashed, sealed the outcome of modern history. The modern American order of superpower and hegemony that emerged from it remains the New Deal’s most lasting, and most consequential, inheritance.

“The New Deal matters because we all live in it; it gives structure to our lives in ways we do not ordinarily bother to count or catalog. When we imagine the end of the world as we know it, the world we are thinking might end is the one the New Deal built.”

— Eric Rauchway, Why The New Deal Matters

That order is the demographic collapse of Western civilization under American leadership, the eradication of many distinct cultures, and the forced compliance of remaining peoples to a cosmopolitan, non-racial form of abstract idealism.

“The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization.”

— Patrick Buchanan, The Death of The West

Above all, it stands as a living manifestation of the Leviathan of managerial democracy.

“The New Deal is a phase of the transition process from capitalism to managerial society. The New Deal is not Stalinism and not Nazism. But no candid observer, friend or enemy of the New Deal, can deny that in terms of economic, social, political, ideological changes from traditional capitalism, the New Deal moves in the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism.”

— James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution

For that reason, FDR is arguably the most consequential figure in American history. He was, after all, the American dictator.

“America had a fling at National Socialism. Roosevelt was for all administration purposes a dictator, but a benevolent one, and the country loved it.”

— Alistair Cooke, Alistair Cooke’s America

What was pitched as an emergency “experiment” in industrial coordination ultimately produced something far more enduring. The provisional instruments of the early 1930s — codes, advisory boards, and state-supervised associations — hardened under the pressure of total war into the permanent machinery of the managerial state. That machinery continues to structure the relationship between capital, labor, and public authority. Formal private ownership persists, yet the decisive questions of production, pricing, investment, and labor are subject to continuous political adjustment in the name of collective interests. The result is economic fascism in its mature American expression: not the theatrical dictatorship of the interwar European regimes, but a quieter, more resilient corporatism that operates through regulation, subsidy, procurement, and perpetual crisis management.

It is worth recalling that Ezra Pound, the American fascist writer and poet, did not regard the American constitutional system itself as necessarily incompatible with fascism. Rather, he believed its existing machinery could be redirected by men willing to exercise it with sufficient determination:

“This is not to say I “advocate” fascism in and for America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini, any more than I or any enlightened bolshevik thinks communism is possible in America without Lenin. I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 500 men with guts and sense to USE it.”

— Ezra Pound, Jefferson And/Or Mussolini

Modern “progressives” who present themselves as the antithesis of authoritarianism — Kyle Kulinski, the Squad, the Democratic Socialists of America faction now embedded within the Democratic party, and figures such as Zohran Mamdani — are in practice the most consistent heirs of this order. Their advocacy of sectoral bargaining, industrial policy, price regulation, and the subordination of private enterprise to socially defined ends reproduces the essential basis of the New Deal’s corporatism more faithfully than any program advanced by Donald Trump or the contemporary Republican party. The sole point of partial convergence on the right remains immigration. Yet even here, the historical genealogy is more complicated than the conventional left-right narrative suggests. FDR himself held immigration and racial views deeply entangled with the assumptions of early 19th-century American progressivism. His private remarks were frequently paternalistic toward racial minorities, while his political decisions demonstrated a willingness to accommodate racial segregation when doing so was necessary to preserve the broader New Deal coalition. In discussing the possibility of integrating Black personnel into the Navy, for example, Roosevelt remarked:

“We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship. The ship’s band. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a colored band on some of these ships, because they’re darn good at it.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 27, 1940

The significance of the remark is not that it constitutes some uniquely racial slur, but that it illustrates the paternalistic nature within which Roosevelt could conceive of Black advancement: inclusion was possible, but often within racialized assumptions about the roles and capabilities appropriate to Black Americans. More consequential still were the policies and political calculations of his administration. FDR repeatedly declined to make federal anti-lynching legislation a priority because he feared that doing so would cause Southern Democrats to block his economic program. As he explained to NAACP leader Walter White:

“If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt quoted in A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White by Walter White

The New Deal’s racial consequences likewise extended far beyond private attitudes. Many of its relief and employment programs were administered through state and local governments, particularly in the South, allowing segregation and racial discrimination to shape access to federal benefits. The unprecedented expansion of federal administrative capacity therefore did not automatically dismantle inherited Jim Crow; in important instances, it incorporated those racist views into the machinery through which federal policy was implemented. Roosevelt’s wartime administration produced an even more severe example. Executive Order 9066 authorized the military exclusion of Japanese Americans from designated areas, resulting in the forced removal and incarceration of more than 120,000 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were American citizens or legally resident immigrants. The policy was driven by wartime hysteria, military pressure and longstanding anti-Asian prejudice, and its implementation demonstrated the extraordinary coercive power that an expanded administrative state could exercise over an entire population.

Roosevelt’s public rhetoric sometimes presented a markedly different image, including the wartime assertion that “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.” But such statements do not erase the private attitudes, political compromises or discriminatory policies of his administration. They instead illustrate the contradiction inherent in FDR’s racial record: universalistic democratic rhetoric could coexist with paternalistic governance, political accommodation of segregation and some of the most sweeping exercises of racialized federal power in American history.

The immigration question reveals an even broader intellectual context of his racism. In a 1923 article for Asia magazine, FDR defended restrictions upon Japanese immigration through an appeal to reciprocal treatment and the “Golden Rule,” arguing that Americans could legitimately demand restrictions upon immigration from Asia because they themselves would not tolerate comparable restrictions upon American immigration abroad. Beneath that language of reciprocity, however, lay an explicit anxiety over Asian assimilation, intermarriage and the racial composition of the American population:

“I think I may sincerely claim for American public opinion in this respect an honest adherence to the Golden Rule. Surely the people of the East will come to realize that we ask of them on their side of the great water no more favorable rule, we expect no lighter restrictions, than we demand in regard to our native land.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, Asia magazine, July 1923

Roosevelt’s position was not merely abstract. In 1925, after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, he went further in describing the supposed biological consequences of racial intermixture:

“Californians have properly objected on the sound basic ground that Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population… Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, Macon Telegraph, April 30, 1925

Whatever distinctions may be drawn between Roosevelt’s personal racial views and the policies of his presidency, these statements demonstrate that his attitudes toward Asian immigration cannot be reduced to a neutral doctrine of reciprocal immigration policy. They placed him within an intellectual environment in which assimilation, racial mixture and national identity were understood through biological and scientific categories.

His position existed within a broader progressive-era in which immigration restriction, eugenics, racial classification and state-directed social engineering frequently intersected. That environment culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924. The Johnson-Reed Act, signed by President Calvin Coolidge rather than Roosevelt, established the national-origins quota system, deliberately using the 1890 census as its demographic baseline in order to favor immigrants from northern and western Europe while sharply reducing immigration from southern and eastern Europe. It also imposed an absolute exclusion upon Japanese immigration. The legislation was therefore not simply an expression of civic nationalism; it was informed by the period’s increasingly elaborate theories based in white supremacy.

Among the prominent intellectual figures associated with this movement was Madison Grant, whose The Passing of The Great Race presented the Nordic race as the superior branch of European humanity and warned that unrestricted immigration threatened the biological character of the United States. Grant was deeply involved in the American progressive movement, eugenics, plus advocated immigration restriction and forced sterilization, and actively supported the legislation that produced the national-origins quota system. His racial theories subsequently attracted considerable attention in Germany and influenced European racial theorists, including figures associated with Nazism. Grant’s importance therefore extends beyond his role as an American immigration restrictionist; his work illustrates how American racial science and eugenics could become part of the intellectual reservoir upon which Nazism subsequently drew. Lothrop Stoddard represented an even more explicit bridge between American progressivism and European fascism. His writings portrayed immigration, racial mixture and demographic change as threats to Western civilization and advocated biological and political measures to preserve it. Stoddard subsequently traveled through Nazi Germany in 1940, met Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazi officials, then wrote favorably of aspects of the regime’s eugenic sterilization program. His earlier writings had also circulated in Germany and helped demonstrate that racial theories of American leftist origin could enter the intellectual environment of European nationalism. Stoddard therefore provides a particularly striking example of the transatlantic circulation of ideas that connected American progressives with European fascist thought.

None of this makes Roosevelt a National Socialist, but it sure makes the New Deal more synonymous with true fascism. The 1924 Immigration Act is therefore another point of overlap in the larger story, especially what he called the “Golden Rule,” was adherence to Nordicism. This demonstrates that the American political tradition from which the New Deal emerged was already comfortable with an expanded administrative state exercising unprecedented authority over the composition and organization of society. The fact that many of these policies and intellectual currents were later repudiated by modern liberals does not erase their presence within the earlier progressive tradition; it demonstrates instead how dramatically the political meaning of those institutions changed over the course of the 20th century.

The irony is therefore complete: those who most insistently denounce fascism are those most actively reconstructing its economic ideas while clothing it in anti-fascist symbolism and democratic rhetoric. The same trajectory is visible among the intellectuals of progressive economics. Robert Reich, a prominent self-described anti-fascist and critic of Trump, has long championed precisely the instruments pioneered in the early New Deal: aggressive industrial policy, government-directed investment, centralized labor coordination and the deliberate reallocation of power from capital toward politically determined social goals. What such advocates fail to recognize is the decisive implication of their own demand to “close the loopholes.” The residual spaces of market autonomy, judicial resistance and incomplete enforcement are precisely what prevent the system from achieving full coordination. To eliminate those spaces is to complete the project. The resulting order would constitute the coming American fascism — not under the banners of the interwar right, but under the abstract language of popular democracy, equity and the common good. All that remains is a sufficiently determined executive and a progressive reinterpretation of the Constitution flexible enough to ratify the transformation.

“Originalism is an absurd position, of course. American society is so different today from what it was in the eighteenth century that any attempt to apply precepts from that time to this time is doomed to failure.”

— Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism

This institutional evolution has been sustained by the continuous state of emergency that has characterized American political life since 1945. The United States has been engaged in formal or informal warfare almost without interruption for eight decades. Permanent crisis supplies the indispensable justification for permanent coordination. In the present phase the designated “enemy” is the far-right fascists, enemies of our democracy, white supremacy, radical Islam, non-liberal states, etc. — an elastic umbrella capable of encompassing ordinary political opposition. The irony is total: the forces most aggressively advancing the economic system of fascism simultaneously manufacture the eternal enemy required to legitimize further centralization. The consequence is a self-reinforcing cycle of emergency powers, censorship and selective political coercion directed against whoever is designated the threat of the moment. The managerial state does not merely respond to crisis; it requires crisis in order to perpetuate itself.

Thus the deepest legacy of the New Deal is not any particular statute or agency, but the creation of an order in which economic fascism can advance indefinitely beneath a democratic illusion. The constitutional restraints that once limited FDR have been progressively reinterpreted; the wartime habits of mobilization have never been fully dismantled; and the progressive successors of the original experiment continue to press for the final institutionalization that would close the remaining gaps. What stands between the present incomplete version and its fully realized form is only the will of a determined executive and a judiciary prepared to treat the Constitution as a living charter of managed change rather than an unchanging restraint upon power. The New Deal did not merely rescue a depressed American economy. It remade the state, the culture and the destiny of Western civilization as we know it. Pound himself had anticipated precisely this possibility, arguing that the only fascism capable of taking root in the Anglo-French world would have to come from the left:

“The only Fascism that can work in England or France or America is fascism of the left.”

— Ezra Pound, letter to Oswald Mosley, July 1934