Franklin D. Roosevelt is the most sainted president of the 20th century. You have to look far and wide to discover the truth about his character and policies. But as John T. Flynn noted in this landmark 1948 volume, FDR actually prolonged the Great Depression and deliberately dragged the country into a war that seriously compromised American liberties.
What’s more, he did this despite campaign promises to slash bureaucracy and cut spending. He ran as a small-government liberal, a fact (among a million) that has been completely forgotten today.
This new edition has an introduction by historian Ralph Raico, who shows that this work still remains the best overall book on the FDR era. Flynn wrote a devastating indictment. If the contents of the book were widely known, the monuments erected in FDR’s honor would be torn down forthwith.
So crucial is a proper understanding of the 1930s to applying Austrian School theory today that this work is highly recommended as a part of every Austrian library.
The contents of this essential work of 437 pages.
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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.
"The commonly accepted theory that Fascism originated in the conspiracy of the great industrialists to capture the state will not hold. It originated on the Left."
It was his melancholy good fortune to come upon the scene when the world went in for arms on an unprecedented scale and it was he who, more than any other man, developed the international market for arms.
In much of America, the New Deal was run by a small number of very powerful political bosses.
Mises Institute, 2008
