John T Flynn was a business journalist who originally covered graft and Wall Street scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. Originally a supporter of Roosevelt, he came to believe the New Deal's compulsory cartels under the NRA was a betrayal of traditional 'trust busting' liberalism. He saw FDR's massive reliance on public borrowing and deficit spending, rather than fiscal reform, was dangerous. A former Nye Committee investigator, Flynn was involved in Nye's exposure of the role major banks and munitions makers played in President Wilson's march to war in 1918. Flynn believed the failure of the New Deal to bring jobs would see FDR turn to military spending as an economic cure. When this prediction eventuated, Flynn became a leading spokesman for the America First Committee. After the war, wrote one of the first exposes arguing FDR had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. Flynn stayed a committed "isolationist" after the war, believing the same pattern of was re-emerging in the then new Cold War.
This book was written in 1944. I read the 1973 reprint "Free Life" edition of the book. It includes an excellent preface essay by Ronald Radosh summarising Flynn's life and work and placing his ideas in a broader context. Radosh compares Flynn's analysis to that of Indian / British communist writer R. Palme Dutt whose "Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay" provides something of an interesting "odd couple" pairing.
"As We Go Marching" provides an analysis of fascism that looks beyond the biographies of Mussolini and Hitler, and even the histories of the fascist and nazi parties. Flynn is interested in the political economy roots of fascism. This he locates in the economic crisis, but he goes beyond the depression, into the on-going political and economic crises of his subject states.
This is really two books in one. Flynn provides a background to the development of fascism in Italy and Germany and then looks as fascistic trends in the US during the war and pre-war periods. If Flynn had excluded the US chapters his well written book would have been more broadly acknowledged as a dissection of the roots of nazism. His American chapters however are what make the book controversial, especially as most (but not all) of the faults he identifies are rooted in the New Deal. Has he left the American material out he would probably have had a wider audience. Thankfully he didn't. But even the most one eyed liberal reader will find something to appreciate in his non-American sections.
Flynn shows how non-fascist politicians paved the way for fascist and nazi rule in Italy and Germany. The Weimar Constitution, with it's dictatorial Article 48 provision, exploited opportunistically by non-authoritarian politicians, was a time bomb waiting to explode. In both countries, it was non-fascist leaders, opportunists dealing with crises, paved the way for later dictators. They did so by building centralised emergency administrations and autarchic economic policies, all in the name of rational economic planning. They fostered syndicalism and corporatism, these tended in time to blur and the top down government element grew. They generated massive cycles of public spending and public debt. Debt and the growing cost of servicing it generated opposition from the saving, investing and taxpaying classes. Both Mussolin and Hitler were opportunists who felt unconstrained by tradition, ethics and even their own parties' platform. In order to win and maintain support from debt burdened taxpayers, they found militarism the path of least resistance, and the form of public spending least likely to alienate the savers. And to keep militarism alive they needed infusions of imperialism.
Flynn walks through this process in both Italy and Germany and highlights similar steps then being taken in the USA. Flynn's journalistic experience shines through and his writing is clear and argument logical. Some of his writing in the section dealing with America's turn-of-the-century experience with imperialism in the Philippines and Cuba is superb. Indeed Flynn's discussion of the linkages between depression, debt, militarism and war, what would later be called "military Keynesianism", is some of the best written.
A major weakness in Flynn's argument is his lack of any discussion of what causes economic crises that play such a prominent role in his book. He is more interested in how politicians and political systems react to depression than what causes it.
Another weakness, by focusing on the foundations of fascism he dismisses too lightly some of the 'superstructure', namely the fuehrer prinzip, antisemitism and alike. Flynn sees these almost as 'optional extras' for a fascist state not the real meat. This may be true, but these are of course, some of the most unpleasant and inhumane aspects of the whole system. Without them, as Flynn himself notes, many firm anti-fascists would be quite happy under fascism. My suggestion is that a quick peek at Peter Viereck's discussion of some of the 'spiritual' and romantic aspects of the Nazism to fill in the gaps.
How then do Flynn's arguments stand up looking back sixty years later? Although America isn't quite the great republic it was, the US certainly didn't end up like Mussolini's Italy, let alone Hitler's Germany.
If anything, subsequent research, particularly by historian Henry Ashby Turner, has shown that, in Germany at least, big business was probably not as supportive of Hitler as Flynn, and conventional wisdom ever since, imagined. And both the corporatism and economic planning of both Italy and Germany was probably more shambolic than their friends, foes and Flynn ever imagined. So, again, maybe superstructure is more important than Flynn's foundations.
Flynn believed the US would pursue national economic planning after the war. The postwar planning fashion attracted the critique of Hayek whose "Road To Serfdom" provides something of a distant cousin to Flynn's book. Flynn believed economic planning would necessitate, if not outright economic autarchy, at least international coordination between the major corporatist nations. The New Deal planners around Dr Alven Hansen, who headed FDR's personal planning think tank, were definitely thinking along these lines. The post-war planning push was however defeated and Truman's postwar demobilisation was probably more extreme than the New Deal planners wanted. The resulting postwar boom took much of the wind out of the sails of the economic planners. Was this enough to stop the beat of the marching drums?
To a certain extent, no. By the time Eisenhower left office the 'military industrial complex' had grown to be a sufficient concern to warrant his Farewell Address warning. Flynn's fellow WW2 isolationist Lawrence Dennis noted that US military spending in the 1950s in terms of GNP percentages exceeded Nazi Germany's prior to WW2. The US ultimately didn't adopt planning, but it did embrace it "lite" as keynesianism via the Full Employment Act. So without full national planning there was no need for autarchy, or Fynn's internationally co-ordinated corporatist autarchies.
But there was Breton Woods and the push for a new dollar based world monetary system and the birth of the so-called "free trade" regime. This has evolved into today's "Washington consensus". Instead of the unilateral removal of import restrictions as advocated by Adam Smith, "free trade" has now been reinvented a series of internationally negotiated agreements. It is now forgotten, but the Truman originally wanted a UN International Trade Organisation (the forerunner to today's WTO) but due to conservative opposition could only obtain a GATT. GATT, ITO, WTO or NAFTA are probably more accurately described as "mutually assured protectionism", or "mercantilism lite". So maybe Flynn was partly right here.
Militarism and 'imperialism' have certainly progressed since Flynn's day and executive power has risen to the point where "the Imperial Presidency" is now a reality not a nightmare. I doubt whether Flynn would have imagined Truman waging a major war without Congress vote, or Nixon's and LBJ's "secret wars" (presumably the enemy knew). Or Bush's organizing of illegal mass surveillance at home and rendition and Cuban Gitmos, thus placing his policies and agents, beyond the clutches of US law.
Still, thankfully, there do seem to be barriers, however thin, between our current predicament and Flynn's fascist future. The press, law and parliamentary practice, despite real failings, have not exactly rolled over and played dead. One party rule is still a long way off. And despite the slow ratcheting upwards of government spending, the market economy has managed to outrun the worst of the assaults of depression, corporatism and the wannabe economic planners. Whether what remains of these institutions can do so forever remains to be seen.
