Country Squire in the White House

John T. Flynn

John T. Flynn was an early New Dealer who quickly saw what happens when power is concentrated in the executive state. He became a passionate opponent of FDR and his policies.

This 1940 book is his analysis of the American presidency and the place of FDR in it. It sheds light on how he came to power and kept it through all those years of declining liberty and rising statism. This volume had a big impact on the growing anti-FDR movement at the time, and continues to be sought after as an important study in the history of the presidency.

Hilariously, it sits on the bookshelf at FDR's "Little White House" in Georgia, in the living room where FDR vacationed. Maybe some tour guide has a good sense of humor!

Country Squire in the White House by John T. Flynn
Meet the Author
John T. Flynn
John T. Flynn

John T. Flynn was a journalist, author, and master polemicist of the Old Right. He started out as a liberal columnist for that flagship of American liberalism, the New Republic, and wound up on the Right, denouncing "creeping socialism." What is unusual about Flynn is that instead of being seduced by the New Deal and the Popular Front into supporting the war, Flynn was led by his thoroughgoing antiwar stance to challenge the developing state worship of modern liberalism. Flynn's essential insight — that the threat to America is not to be found in any foreign capitol, but in Washington, D.C.

Mises Daily John T. Flynn
John T. Flynn writes that it is government system that accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, using the device of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending, and which organizes the economic life of the people into industrial and professional groups to subject the system to control under the supervision of the state.
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References

NY: Doubleday, 1940