A Tribute to John T. Flynn

In his two classic critiques of the New Deal and Rooseveltian global imperialism, 1944’s As We Go Marching and The Roosevelt Myth, which first appeared in 1948, John T. Flynn detailed in his own pugnacious style the deception, deceit and disaster that were the four presidential terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Ralph Raico described Flynn in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Roosevelt Myth, “There is little doubt that the best informed and most tenacious of the Old Right foes of Franklin Roosevelt was John T. Flynn.”

This commitment to liberty cost Flynn much, both financially and professionally. In his life, Flynn would find himself blacklisted, first by the Progressive-Left, then later by the Buckleyized/Trotskyized New Right. But this persecution only seemed to clarify his insights and commitment to liberty, much as similar blacklisting did to Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Gregory Pavlik, the editor of Forgotten Lessons, a book of essays by John T. Flynn, summed up his career: “When Flynn died in 1964 he was an outcast from both the then-fashionable varieties of liberalism and conservatism. His life was a testament to his character – he refused to compromise his deepest convictions for the affection of trendy demagogues of any political stripe.”

John Thomas Flynn was born in 1882 in Washington, D.C., into a middle class old Irish Catholic family, and went to school in New York City. During his formative years, the ramifications of the Spanish-American War created in him a life-long opposition to imperialism, whether European or American. He entered Georgetown to study law, but was irresistibly drawn towards a career in journalism. After serving as the editor of papers in New Haven and New York, he began a career as a freelance writer, focusing on political influence and corruption on Wall Street. In particular, he later worked as the chief researcher for the Nye Committee of the U.S. Senate investigating the role of New York banks and the munitions industry (the putative military-industrial complex “merchants of death”) in involving the United States in World War I. Although a staunch supporter of a free economy, Flynn was also a populist, and viewed the rich and powerful as conspirators for war and preparations for war against the interests of the middle and lower classes.

Flynn was a critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and of Roosevelt’s motives and personality traits virtually from the start, viewing the entire program as a copy of Mussolini’s Fascist State corporatism. Key to Flynn’s critique of New Dealism was the similarity between the Code Authorities of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, and Mussolini’s state-supervised industrial cartels. Flynn observed and documented in his critique that many American intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen greatly admired Mussolini and his policies.

It was Benito Mussolini, after all, who wrote “If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual ([classical] liberalism implies individualism),” then “this [the twentieth century] is the ‘collective’ century, and therefore the century of the State. …Fascism spells government.”

In response to Flynn’s unremitting criticisms of him, Roosevelt personally wrote a letter to a magazine editor suggesting that Flynn “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” Shortly thereafter, Flynn was fired from The New Republic and found it increasingly difficult to find outlets for his work. The New Dealers’ inside and outside the government had begun a smear campaign against all critics of the New Deal, and of Roosevelt in particular, as Nazi sympathizers.

In the postwar period Flynn began a career as a staunch Old Right radio commentator and authored several books. Unlike the so-called New Right, Flynn remained an anti-interventionist during the Cold War, opposing the Korean war and the creeping Vietnam quagmire, and predicted that the Soviet leviathan would collapse on its own, as every Misesian knows it did. At the age of 79, he ended his public career in 1960. John T. Flynn died in 1964.

On Roosevelt the Man:

He had little interest in books. Friendly biographers say, as if it were some sort of special genius, that what he knew he “absorbed from others” rather than from books. However, one does not “absorb” history or economics from others in chats. They must be patiently studied over long periods out of the only sources that are available – the appropriate books. Miss Perkins, who knew him from his early manhood up to his death, says he was not a student, that he knew nothing of economics and that he admitted he had never read a book on the subject. Edward J. Flynn, his campaign manager in the 1940 election and closely associated with him as a friend and as Secretary of State of New York while he was governor, says he never saw him reading a book. Three men who worked closely with him in the White House and one of them previously in Albany, also say they never saw him interested in a book, save an occasional detective story.

His career as a lawyer was extremely sketchy. He began as a law clerk with Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Later a junior in that firm found an old memo addressed to the office manager and signed by Mr. Ledyard directing him “under no circumstances to put any serious piece of litigation” in the hands of “young Mr. Roosevelt.”

At this point Roosevelt could not be tagged as a man with any indispensable qualifications in any field of life. He was 40 years old. He had the reputation of being a snob. In the legislature, says his devoted follower Frances Perkins “he didn’t like people very much … he had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of selfrighteousness and deafness to the hopes, fears and aspirations which are the common lot.” Democrats like Bob Wagner and Al Smith and others “thought him impossible and said so.”

… some of his intimates [said] he was a complex character. There was really nothing complex about Roosevelt. He was of a well-known type found in every city and state in political life. He is the wellborn, rich gentleman with a taste for public life, its importance and honors, who finds for himself a post in the most corrupt political machines, utters in campaigns and interviews the most pious platitudes about public virtue while getting his own dividends out of public corruption one way or another. In any case, they are a type in which the loftiest sentiments and pretensions are combined with a rather lowgrade political conscience.

Roosevelt was a stamp collector all his life and like all stamp collectors he got to know the location on the map of all the countries whose stamps he owned. He loved to display this special knowledge. But this simple and rudimentary subject of geography is not to be confused with the far more formidable subject of European and Asiatic economic, social and political movements. In setting all this down, I am not accusing Roosevelt of being a wicked man because he was not a good student, did not read books on economic or social science or law or politics and knew less about foreign affairs than William Borah or Herbert Hoover or Key Pittman or Carter Glass. I merely seek to set the picture straight and to frame Mr. Roosevelt within the more or less narrow limits which bound his intellectual energies and interests.

However, he did believe that he knew a great deal about these subjects, although occasionally he admitted he did not understand financial and economic questions too well. But he had a way of doing a little bragging about his intellectual equipment, about which he was secretly a little sensitive. For instance, he wore the purely honorary Phi Beta Kappa key given him while he was governor by William Smith-Hobart College, a girls’ school in New York State, leaving visitors to suppose he had got it at Harvard. He used to tell a story about how he humiliated a legal antagonist before a jury. The weakness in the story was that it was an old courtroom joke told about lawyers time out of mind, that he took credit for it personally and that he had never tried a jury case in his life. Another time he explained to Emil Ludwig some course he had just taken by saying he had learned that technique “when he was a teacher” and his superior had taught him how to handle pupils. Of course he had never been a teacher. When he was President he told a room full of senators, all of whom had gone through World War I while he was in civilian clothes, that he had “seen more of war than any man in the room.” And in one of his speeches when he was assuring the audience of his horror of war, he explained it by the terrible things he had seen on the battlefield, describing the regiment he had seen wiped out, the thousands of young soldiers he had seen choked with blood in the mud of France, although he had never been in a battle in his life. And though he had never served in the Army or Navy, he got some local post to make him a member of the American Legion, after which he went around on occasion wearing a Legion cap.

In the case of Roosevelt, with his somewhat easy approach to official virtue, his weakness for snap judgments, his impulsive starts in unconsidered directions, his vanity, his lack of a settled political philosophy, his appetite for political power and his great capacity as a mere politician, the Presidency became in his hands an instrument of appalling consequences.

There was a wide streak of egotism in Roosevelt which made it impossible for him in some circumstances to perceive the fine line that divides correct from improper conduct in public office particularly in so exalted an office as the presidency. For instance, Roosevelt had been all his life an ardent stamp collector…. When he became President he found himself the actual head of the Post Office and of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. Very early in the game he got Jim Farley, his Postmaster General, who knew nothing of this seemingly harmless pastime, to get for him the imperforate first sheets (that is, sheets minus the usual perforations) of a number of new stamp issues. Farley got the sheets, paid face value for them, gave one sheet of each issue to the President, one to Mrs. Roosevelt, one to Louis Howe and a few others. Shortly after, an authority in the field called on Farley and explained to him that these imperforate sheets were great rarities, because so difficult to get, that they would have immense commercial value and this was an act of dubious ethical value. Farley assured him that the sheets would not get into commerce, that they were merely given to the President for his personal collection, etc. Shortly after a sheet turned up in Virginia. The man who had warned Farley wrote to the owner and asked a price on it. He wanted $20,000.

On Roosevelt’s Monument:

There remains an incident unique in national political history. It is the singular story of the Roosevelt estate and the schemes he personally managed to create a shrine for himself with government money and funds extorted from federal officeholders. So far as I know our political annals reveal no comparable example of personal vanity completely unrestrained by any sense of shame.

Statues are built by the hundreds to all grades of celebrities. But shrines are reserved for those few whose records, strained through the sieve of history, provide the evidences of greatness which merit this extraordinary tribute. In good time the candidate for such honors will have his claim recognized. The greatest of our shrines – Washington’s home at Mount Vernon – was restored and is maintained by a private group, the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association. After Jefferson’s death, his estate was saved for his heirs by some friends and his home – Monticello – is operated by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, a private organization…. Franklin D. Roosevelt took no chances on being neglected. He personally conceived the idea of a shrine for himself, organized and promoted the movement himself and personally pushed it through. And he did this long before the war – before he had been enlarged by events and propaganda for good or evil into a world figure.

The idea took form in Roosevelt’s mind in 1938. By this time the depression had returned to his doorstep. Over 11,000,000 people were unemployed. He had just told Henry Morgenthau that the best course for them was to rock along for the next two years on a two or three billion dollar a year deficit and then go out of office, turn the mess over to the Republicans and wait for the people to call them back to power in 1944. It is incredible but true that it was at this moment of frustration he should have cooked up this plan for a national shrine for himself. He now conceived the plan of having built on his Hyde Park estate a library and workshop which he would use as his place of business when he left the White House. The next stage in this scheme was to make it a “memorial library,” the funds for which would be put up by the thousands of party workers who held office in his administration. And so it turned out in this first stage – a Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Library. He would give the land out of his mother’s estate. The Democratic officeholders would pay the bills to build and furnish it. As a “memorial library” it would be exempt from taxation. And there he and his staff would work, as later proposed, for Collier’s at $75,000 for himself, plus three of four of his staff on the Collier’s payroll. All this was managed by a committee to raise the money and complete the project consisting of his law partner, Basil O’Connor, Joseph Schenck, later sent to jail by the government, Ben Smith, a Wall Street operator and several others. They raised $400,000 from those elements of the “common man” who held Democratic jobs.

By the time it was finished the idea had expanded…. The United States, through the National Archives, became the owner and maintainer of the “library,” thus taking that burden off his hands. The “library” was to house his papers and collection of ship models, etc., as well as provide him with a completely free workshop for the rest of his life and become a monument after his death.

If Roosevelt in retreat, harried by the return of the depression in 1938, repudiated by the country on the Court fight and by his party in the purge fight and faced with a grave revolt and split in his party, could envisage himself as the only American president to have a government-built and supported shrine, to what dimensions would the emanations of his ego swell after America got into the war, when, like a Roman emperor, he was throwing around unimaginable billions all over the world, when ministers, kings, dictators and emperors from everywhere were covering him with flattery as they begged millions at his hands?

By the end of 1943, flattery, applause, sycophancy had literally rotted the nature of Franklin Roosevelt. In December of that year he decided, like an Egyptian Pharaoh, to transform his home into a great historic shrine – a Yankee pyramid – where his family might live in a kind of imperial dignity, where he might retire if he survived the war as a kind of World Elder Statesman and Dictator Emeritus, and where he would be entombed. In December, 1943, he deeded to the government “as a national historic site” his Hyde Park estate, with the proviso that he and the members of his family would have the right to live in it as long as they lived…. Secretary Ickes asked Congress for $50,000 a year for maintenance of the estate. An admission fee is now charged and it is estimated that the maintenance cost will be around $100,000 a year.

Thus Roosevelt is not merely the only president whose home and grave are maintained by the government as a national shrine, but the government was doing this even before he passed away and all in accordance with a project he thought up all by himself and put over before he died.

On the New Deal:

… as those around him at the time have testified, he showed not the least concern about doing anything to arrest the onset of the panic. What he wanted was a complete crash. He wished for the panic to sweep on to a total banking disaster. He wished for the public to see his predecessor [Herbert Hoover] go out in a scene of utter ruin, thus setting the stage for him to step upon it as the savior who would rebuild from the very bottom.

[H]e accepted his high office as one taking over the command of an army – an army organized for attack. He would recommend measures “that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.” But – ah, but! – if Congress should fail to go along with him – “I-shall-not-evade-the-clear-course-of-duty-that-will-confront-me.” There was an ominous accent of the resolute captain on every word. He would ask for the one remaining instrument – a grant from Congress of “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

It can be truly said that the nation responded to the ringing utterance of the inaugural address. Congress was prepared to go along in an extraordinary effort. Partisanship sank to its smallest dimensions. Everywhere the new President was hailed with unprecedented applause. In spots the acclaim rose to almost hysterical strains. Rabbi Rosenblum said we see in him a Godlike messenger, the darling of destiny, the Messiah of America’s tomorrow. Next morning the New York Times carried only a single frontpage story that had no connection with the inauguration. It had to do with another of those Messiahs of tomorrow. The headline read: VICTORY FOR HITLER EXPECTED TODAY – Repression of Opponents Makes Election Triumph inevitable.

Roosevelt, once he got into power, began, in complete violation of his Number One pledge [to decrease government spending], to spend money like a drunken sailor and then to promise the earth and the fullness thereof. He asked nothing of the people but that they vote for him.

In the Agricultural Department a vast bureau was set up with a wilderness of checkwriting machines and amidst thundering mechanical noises, was pouring out a flood of checks to farmers in return for killing their stock, plowing back crops and burning grain in their fields.

[E]ach day Morgenthau and Roosevelt met, with Jesse Jones, head of the RFC, present, to fix the price of gold. They gathered around Roosevelt’s bed in the morning as he ate his eggs. Then “HennyPenny” and Roosevelt decided the price of gold for that day. One day they wished to raise the price. Roosevelt settled the point. Make it 21 cents, he ruled. That is a lucky number – three times seven. And so it was done. That night Morgenthau wrote in his diary: “If people knew how we fixed the price of gold they would be frightened.”

[The] curious epidemic of grotesque notions sponsored by shallow and in some cases dangerous men is, of course, not an unknown phenomenon. When little men think about large problems the boundary between the sound and the unsound is very thin and vague. And when some idea is thrown out which corresponds with the deeply rooted yearnings of great numbers of spiritually and economically troubled people it spreads like a physical infection and rises in virulence with the extent of the contagion. The spiritual and mental soil of the masses near the bottom of the economic heap was perfect ground for all these promisers of security and abundance. Roosevelt prospered on that.

Actually the one thing he did that was based on a very definite philosophy was the program that consisted of the NRA and the AAA. This was a plan to take the whole industrial and agricultural life of the country under the wing of the government, organize it into vast farm and industrial cartels, as they were called in Germany, corporatives as they were called in Italy, and operate business and the farms under plans made and carried out under the supervision of government. This is the complete negation of [classical] liberalism. It is, in fact, the essence of fascism. Fascism goes only one step further and insists, logically, that this cannot be done by a democratic government; that it can be done successfully only under a totalitarian regime. Of course, Roosevelt did not know that he was indulging in a fascist experiment because he did not know what fascism was. In those days fascism was not defined as anti-Semitism. It was a word used to describe the political system of Mussolini. Roosevelt merely did something which at the moment seemed politically expedient because it satisfied a vast mass of farmers and business men. He never examined the fundamentals of it because that was not the way his mind worked. The NRA did not fully satisfy the technocratic groups represented by the Tugwells and their disciples in spite of the many points of resemblance. The NRA left too much control in the hands of business whereas they would have preferred to see that control in the hands of the technicians – preferably the professors. As for the Reds, they did not move in heavily until the second term and not en masse until the third term, although the entering wedge was made in the first. And then the point of entry was the labor movement.

The test of fascism is not one's rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is – how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life?

When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.

But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem of fascism. Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy.

It should be equally clear that all this is in no sense communism…. [A] reason for the confusion is the character of the men who are authentic and honest New Dealers but who were not communists…. They began to flirt with the alluring pastime of reconstructing the capitalist system. They became the architects of a new capitalist system. And in the process of this new career they began to fashion doctrines that turned out to be the principles of fascism. Of course they do not call them fascism, although some of them frankly see the resemblance. But they are not disturbed, because they know that they will never burn books, they will never hound the Jews or the Negroes, they will never resort to assassination and suppression. What will turn up in their hands will be a very genteel and dainty and pleasant form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all because it will be so virtuous and polite.

As the year 1941 dawned, the experiments of Roosevelt had been under observation for eight years. There can be no dispute as to the commission he held from the people. He was not elected to substitute a new system of government and economy, to set up a socialist or fascist or communist system or any form of state-planned capitalism. His promise was to restore conditions under which the American system of free representative government and the free system of private enterprise could function at its highest efficiency.

The word “business” is well understood by our people. It refers to that collection of great and small enterprises which produce goods and services for the population. It does two things. It produces our food, our clothes, our luxuries and necessities; it provides, also, the jobs by which the people earn the income with which they can purchase these things. As Roosevelt came into power one might have supposed that business was some gigantic criminal conspiracy against the welfare of the nation. He began with a sweeping attack upon business and he kept it up until the war. Even during the war, in such moments as he could give to the subject, he was making plans for further assaults upon business.

On Roosevelt and the War:

In January, 1938, I talked with one of the President's most intimate advisers. I asked him if the President knew we were in a depression. He said that of course he did. I asked what the President proposed to do. He answered:

“Resume spending.” I then suggested he would find difficulty in getting objects on which the federal government could spend. He said he knew that. What, then, I asked, will the President spend on? He laughed and replied in a single word:

“Battleships.” I asked why. He said: “You know we are going to have a war.” And when I asked whom we were going to fight he said “Japan” and when I asked where and what about, he said “in South America.” “Well,” I said, “you are moving logically there. If your only hope is spending and the only thing you have to spend on is national defense, then you have got to have an enemy to defend against and a war in prospect.”

Apparently the best hope of a war at that moment for popular consumption was with the Japanese, who had just sunk the Panay, and as there was little chance of arousing the American people to fight around Japan, South America seemed a more likely battleground to stimulate our fears and emotions. There is nothing new about this. Kings and ministers have toyed with this device for ages and convinced themselves they were acting wisely and nobly.

Here he was with a depression on his hands – eleven million men out of work, the whole fabric of his policy in tatters, his promise only a few months old to balance the budget still fresh in the minds of the people and yet pressing the necessity, as he put it himself, of spending two or three billion a year of deficit money and, most serious of all, as he told Jim Farley, no way to spend it.

Here now was a gift from the gods – and from the gods of war at that. Here was the chance to spend. Here now was something the federal government could really spend money on – military and naval preparations.

On The Roosevelt Myth:

[D]uring the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt I was an active journalist and as such very close to the events…. For most of the time I wrote a daily column which appeared in a large number of American newspapers, a weekly column in an American magazine of opinion and I contributed to numerous national magazines literally hundreds of articles dealing with these events.

As to the … image projected upon the popular mind which came to be known as Franklin D. Roosevelt [i]t is the author’s conviction that this image did not at all correspond to the man himself and that it is now time to correct the lineaments of this synthetic figure created by highly intelligent propaganda, aided by mass illusion and finally enlarged and elaborated out of all reason by the fierce moral and mental disturbances of the war.

Part of the Roosevelt legend is the concept of a fine old aristocratic family that became the friend of the common man. It is unimportant, perhaps, but it serves to illustrate the glittering crust of fable which overlays this whole Roosevelt story.

In the beginning, of course, was Roosevelt. And then came the Brain Trust. After that we had the Great Man and the Brain Trust. The casual reader may suppose this is just a catch collection of syllables. But it is impossible to estimate the power these few words exercised upon the minds of the American people. After all, a crowd of big business boobies, a lot of butterfingered politicians, two big halls full of shallow and stupid congressmen and senators had made a mess of America. That was the bill of goods sold to the American people. Now amidst the ruins appeared not a mere politician, not a crowd of tradesmen and bankers and congressmen, but a Great Man attended by a Brain Trust to bring understanding first and then order out of chaos.

After the war in Europe got under way and Roosevelt began to assume the role of friend not merely of the common man but of the whole human race, after he began to finger tens of billions, after he finally put on the shining armor of the plumed knight and lifted his great sword against the forces of evil on the whole planet – then the propaganda took on formidable proportions. The most powerful propaganda agencies yet conceived by mankind are the radio and the moving pictures. Practically all of the radio networks and all of the moving picture companies moved into the great task of pouring upon the minds of the American people daily – indeed hourly, ceaselessly – the story of the greatest American who ever lived, breathing fire and destruction against his critics who were effectually silenced, while filling the pockets of the people with billions of dollars of war money. The radio was busy not only with commentators and news reporters, but with crooners, actors, screen stars, soap opera, comedians, fan dancers, monologists, putting over on the American mind not only the greatness of our Leader but the infamy of his critics, the nobility of his glamorous objectives and the sinister nature of the scurvy plots of his political enemies. The people were sold first the proposition that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only man who could keep us out of war; second that he was the only man who could fight successfully the war which he alone could keep us out of; and finally that he was the only man who was capable of facing such leaders as Churchill and Stalin on equal terms and above all the only man who could cope successfully with the ruthless Stalin in the arrangements for the postwar world.

The ordinary man did not realize that Hitler and Mussolini were made to seem as brave, as strong, as wise and noble to the people of Germany and Italy as Roosevelt was seen here. Hitler was not pictured to the people of Germany as he was presented here. He was exhibited in noble proportions and with most of those heroic virtues which were attributed to Roosevelt here and to Mussolini in Italy and, of course, to Stalin in Russia. I do not compare Roosevelt to Hitler. I merely insist that the picture of Roosevelt sold to our people and which still lingers upon the screen of their imaginations was an utterly false picture, was the work of false propaganda and that, among the evils against which America must protect herself one of the most destructive is the evil of modern propaganda techniques applied to the problem of government.

People who supposed he wrote his own speeches acclaimed him as a great orator. People who knew nothing of finance and economics extolled him as a great economic statesman. But over and above this some cunning techniques were industriously used to enhance the picture. For instance, Mrs. Roosevelt took over the job of buttering the press and radio reporters and commentators. They were hailed up to Hyde Park for hamburger and hot dog picnics. They went swimming in the pool with the Great Man. They were invited to the White House. And, not to be overlooked, it was the simplest thing in the world for them to find jobs in the New Deal for the members of their families.

Roosevelt was built by propaganda, before the war on a small scale and after the war upon an incredible scale, into a wholly fictitious character.

Conclusion:

The quotes presented here are only a sampling of the wit and keen observations made by John T. Flynn about that period in American history when liberty almost died. Throughout his works, Flynn exposes Roosevelt’s lack of principles, his lies and corruption and nepotism, the shocking flippancy in his approach to social and economic issues, the turn towards militarism to obscure the absolute failure of the New Deal to "solve" the Depression, and punctures the myths surrounding the whole sordid disaster for Americans and the world that was the Roosevelt administration.

Today, as America and the rest of the world faces a President and his advisors as prone to deceit and statist “solutions” as FDR, libertarians should follow the great example of John T. Flynn. In our pursuit to defend and protect individual liberty, we should never cease telling the truth about the nature and motivations of those who seek to manipulate tragedies, at the expense of Americans and the peoples of the rest of the world, for their own personal power, success and privilege.

January 31, 2003