Republican Hoover built the federal broadcasting shield in 1927. Roosevelt fashioned it into a weapon in 1934 and Democrats have never put it down since. One might consider the elaborate FCC speech barriers: A Poll Tax on Public Debate

One of the more enduring myths accepted as reality in our modern society is that America has a relatively free press. The ruling authorities and their entrenched accomplices promote that lie as diligently as they work to ensure that it never again becomes true.

America did have a mostly free and independent press until the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s. Within a few years, a small group of Republicans, progressives and corporate interests successfully nationalized the airwaves with restrictive licensing that blocked competition, rewarded insiders and squelched dissent.

Over the next few decades, the increasingly powerful medium of radio and then television drowned out the previously broad spectrum of information and ideas—with often three or more diverse choices of daily newspapers in many U.S. cities—and turned free speech into carefully rationed federal broadcasting privileges, their anointed urban newspaper monopolies and a few approved magazines.

One of the more ironic parts of this forgotten history is that a Republican, Herbert Hoover, led the initial charge to politicize the press. When the more authoritarian FDR took the reins in 1933—holding onto power until his death in 1945—he would ultimately purge the airwaves as well as the newspaper and magazine stands of the nation’s greatest commentators, publishers, editors and writers. In their absence, only pro-war / pro-welfare state neo-liberals and neo-conservatives would survive in mainstream media for generations to come.

During Roosevelt’s tenure in office, administration officials and prominent associates would wage a scorched-earth campaign against any independent voice of dissent while generously rewarding supporters. Popular radio talk-show hosts Father Charles Coughlin and Boake Carter were dramatically forced off the air. New Republic columnist and author John Flynn was successfully targeted for censorship by FDR himself. Independent newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, a lifelong Democrat who initially supported FDR but later soured to New Deal abuses, was vilified and marginalized. Robert “Colonel” McCormick of the Chicago Tribune got roughed up by Roosevelt’s cronies in a similar fashion.

(Anti-New Deal publishers Hearst and McCormick were so popular with the general public that their newspaper “holdings comprised over 50 percent of the country’s Sunday circulation” according to pro-FDR media historian Betty Houchin Winfield. Once those independent newsmen’s reputations were destroyed, establishment papers in New York and Washington D.C. would come into prominence.)

The Hollywood studios of Walt Disney were occupied by federal troops one day after Pearl Harbor. The editor and lead columnist for the Saturday Evening Post—middle-America’s most admired weekly read—were run off the magazine. Libertarian writer, Albert Jay Nock, was blacklisted. Editor for the liberal Nation magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard, met the same fate. Famous aviator and anti-war spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, found himself viscously condemned by pro-war media for quietly speaking the truth. Popular syndicated columnist at the Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken, may have “voluntarily” went into oblivion under hostile conditions that still don’t make sense.

These are just some of the big names that went down with a fight. (All of the bolded names above will receive some overdue exoneration a bit later.) No one will ever know how many other smaller fish were scared off from honest reporting as a result of political pressure.

Today, this would be like President Trump having his underlings run coordinated smear campaigns and putting the Washington Post, Time magazine, and both MSNBC and CNN out of business or replacing their editorial staff with reliable pro-Trump lackies. To complete the parallel, a Trump campaign spokesman in Hollywood would have to direct a movie portraying a major publisher (say, Arthur Sulzberger of the NYT) as a hideous demagogue… all in good sport, of course.

(Mainstream media goes berserk when Trump merely defends himself from personal attacks during hostile press conferences or from wild conspiracy theories. Back in the 1930s, reporters were far more dignified in their principled disagreement with New Deal policies. And President Roosevelt was much more underhanded in dealing with the press than Trump’s frequent social-media salvos—many of which are so obvious as to be written in ALL CAPS.)

Hoover’s Enduring Legacy: A Poll Tax on Public Debate

Republican Herbert Hoover—who served as President from March 1929 to March 1933—is most known for being the unlucky occupant of the Oval Office during the New York City stock market crash of October 1929. (The Governor of New York at this time—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—usually gets left out of that narrative.)

“Wonder Boy” Hoover—as nicknamed by Republican predecessor Calvin Coolidge over his penchant for meddling—took major strides to increase spending, bailout failed banks, micro-manage the economy and “take action” during his single term in office. Unfortunately, his political mischief was not limited to economics.

Hoover’s most enduring and damaging legacy to overall freedom in America—rarely acknowledged in mainstream press—was his nationalizing of all formerly private and well-established common law broadcasting property rights, as documented by economist Thomas Hazlett and others. Hoover himself would later reminisce in his 1952 memoirs:

“One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. Members of the Congressional committees kept saying, ‘it is working well, so why bother?’” (as quoted by B.K. Marcus)

As Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and then Coolidge, Hoover used his position to reward large corporations (that eventually became propaganda monoliths NBC and CBS and subsequent replicas) by severely restricting access to the airwaves, while empowering government to arbitrarily harass any independent voices, which gradually disappeared from mass-media over the next generation. The resulting Radio Act of 1927 created sweeping federal powers to award or deny initial membership privileges (with periodic renewals) to an exclusive broadcasting fraternity based on subjective standards of operating in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

One of the few books available on the topic of federal broadcast rationing is Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, by Jesse Walker of Reason magazine. Delving into the political atmosphere of the time, Walker notes:

Every year from 1922 to 1925, Hoover hosted a national conference for the radio industry. The legal scholar Jonathan Emord, drawing on the conference records, has sketched a convincing theory of competition-fearing broadcasters [such as RCA-NBC and its parent companies General Electric and Westinghouse] and power-seeking government officials reaching a quid pro quo: “in exchange for regulatory controls on industry structure and programming content, industry leaders would be granted the restrictions on market entry that they wanted.”

Another good read on New Deal media history is Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. This book, written in 1993 and updated in 2008, has entire chapters on Garet Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post, columnist and author John Flynn, and publisher Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. These chapters cover about 100 pages and provide excellent insights to the time period. Strangely, the author couldn’t afford a single kind word for popular independent publisher Bill Hearst (barely mentioned) or any acknowledgement at all for radio sensation Charles Coughlin—both targets of FDR suppression.

Robert Murphy’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal provides a refreshing history of 1920s to 1940s economic affairs, with lengthy excerpts from other good books on the subject. Unfortunately, the P.I. Guide falls for the myth of a “liberal” media and omits any reference to the landmark Radio Act of 1927 or the Communications Act of 1934.

A 2004 essay by B.K. Marcus published by the Mises Institute gives a concise account of federal broadcasting controls. This work excels on legal theory and general history, but is silent on Roosevelt. A 2017 article in Reason magazine titled “FDR’s War Against the Press” finally sheds some light on this dark chapter of American culture, but leaves most of the victims buried and forgotten. I hope to expand upon all of the above.

Outside of these few offerings (and some obscure books and articles footnoted therein) mainstream media shows virtually no interest in Roosevelt’s harsh treatment of the press, which was calculated and brutal. Wikipedia goes to great contortions to justify Roosevelt’s censoring, as we shall soon see. PBS’s 13-hour infomercial “The Roosevelts – An Intimate History” (available on Netflix) manages to be even worse. When it comes to New Deal narratives, Hollywood and major media offer only glib platitudes on FDR’s efforts for “saving” the nation and providing “relief” for the common man—both of which are highly debatable. (Mr. Murphy’s P.I. Guide and economist Robert Higgs give ample evidence to suggest that Hoover and especially FDR made the Depression worse.)

To date, nothing I can find in mainstream or alternative media does justice to the enormous harm to public welfare caused by FDR’s war on the press, or Hoover’s enduring legacy of federal broadcasting controls. These arbitrary restrictions on the most powerful medium of news publishing amount to a crushing poll tax on public debate—far more debilitating than the despised poll tax on voting had ever been.

The contrast in restricted speech rights and nearly unlimited voting privileges is dramatic. The traditional poll tax required prior to voting in some southern states—banned in federal elections by the 24th Amendment in 1964 and outlawed in all elections by the Supreme Court in 1966—had only cost a few dollars. Yet poll taxes supposedly created insurmountable obstacles to poor people expressing their inalienable right to vote, which often means voting themselves more welfare. Federal speech restrictions effectively disenfranchise over 99.9% of Americans, rich or poor, from the powerful platforms of radio and TV broadcasting. Nonetheless, modern politicians and approved pundits unanimously support FCC speech rationing to keep out independent voices.

With a second (ostensibly “green”) New Deal in the works and internet freedom under constant threat, a more thorough history of the original New Deal in relation to independent reporting is long overdue.

“I can lead a nation with a microphone” (from Flobots’ song “Handlebars”)

When it comes to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the media, most mainstream accounts show a charming FDR comforting American families gathered round their home radios, in some cases, next to a fireplace. And that’s about as deep as the story goes.

During his three-plus terms in office, Roosevelt staged 30 such “fireside chats.” Some of them, like during the 1933 banking collapse and his 1941-42 maneuvering the U.S. into war, engaged over half the nation listening in to his well-rehearsed speeches.

Conventional accounts—in Wikipedia, the PBS-Roosevelt docudrama, multiple books and dozens of articles I’ve reviewed—never mention that these “chats” were advertising for partisan Democrat purposes. As such, the unilateral Roosevelt speeches were multi-billion-dollar political gifts in today’s currency. There was apparently no opportunity for a GOP response. And the radio press was largely neutered in its ability to put any of Roosevelt’s wild proposals into context.

What precipitated the climate of fear in broadcasting is another topic of embarrassment rarely mentioned in mainstream circles. Thanks to the efforts of Herbert Hoover and some liberal sponsors of corporate media control, the Radio Act of 1927 created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and gave it enormous latitude for enforcement. Giant corporations got the broadcasting cartel they longed for. Liberals got a tool for censorship they desired.

FDR’s handywork in the Communications Act of 1934 replaced the FRC with the Federal Communications Commission and gave government regulators even more arbitrary power. And Franklin Roosevelt frequently used these broad powers to his advantage. In the New Dealers’ opinions, criticizing FDR’s frenetic policies was never in the “public interest.”

University of Alabama history professor David Beito’s 2017 article “FDR’s War Against the Press” recounts some of the early fears of U.S. radio broadcasters. While Roosevelt complained bitterly about the “poisonous propaganda” of newspaper columnists:

Roosevelt’s relationship with radio was warmer. The key distinction was that broadcasters operated in an entirely different political context: Thanks to federal rules and administrators, they had to tread much more lightly than newspapers did. At its inception in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reduced the license renewal period for stations from three years to only six months.

Mr. Beito explains how federal rules impacted radio broadcasters during the New Deal, at a time before television was commercially available:

It did not take long for broadcasters to get the message. NBC, for example, announced that it was limiting broadcasts “contrary to the policies of the United States government.” CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that “no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.” He elaborated “that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval.” Local station owners and network executives alike took it for granted, as Editor and Publisher observed, that each station had “to dance to Government tunes because it is under Government license.” Some dissident radio commentators, such as Father Charles Coughlin and Boake Carter, gained wide audiences. But radio as a whole was firmly pro-Roosevelt—and both Coughlin and Carter were eventually forced off the air for pushing the envelope too far.

For this essay, I’ll only touch briefly on radio personality Boake Carter before moving on to more household names. Though long forgotten, he was once high on Roosevelt’s hit list.

Boake (pronounced “boke”) Carter was born in England, moved to America in 1921 and began radio commentary in 1930. Wikipedia states:

In 1936, he had more listeners than any other radio commentator. … But by 1937, the Roosevelt White House already had three federal agencies investigating him. In 1938, under pressure from Roosevelt’s allies, he lost his WCAU [Philadelphia] job, was barred from CBS, and lost his General Foods sponsorship that had replaced Philco [Radios]. With his removal, there was no longer any popular radio commentator who opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy.

The last sentence in bold seems to forget another prominent radio opponent of FDR’s foreign policy—Father Charles Coughlin, who was banished in 1940—but we get the drift. Based on Wikipedia’s hostile description of Boake Carter, one academic article online (that engages in overt victim shaming) and a surviving radio broadcast I could find, Mr. Carter was confident and eloquent, a World War I vet who understood the foolishness of unnecessary conflict, a critic of the New Deal and opponent of union violence. Naturally, radical leftists hated him. Modern historians have no use for him either.

Of all the Roosevelt purge victims, Wikipedia’s treatment of Boake Carter is arguably the least biased. For those on Roosevelt’s enemies list, contemporary historiography gets considerably worse. Yet others in the news media during the New Deal managed to stay in FDR’s favor.

Rewards for Loyal Press Servants

A separate essay could be justified to cover the corresponding rewards that the Roosevelt administration made available to the increasingly dominant throngs of pliant pressmen. Media historian Betty Houchin Winfield’s 1990 book FDR and the News Media scratches the surface on this important topic, but leaves more questions than answers.

Exclusive broadcast licensing rewarded primarily NBC and CBS with a near stranglehold on the airwaves throughout the Great Depression. Roosevelt also managed White House print media correspondents with strict access privileges that meant life or death to a journalist’s career.

While Ms. Winfield—a Missouri state professor and federal grant recipient—allows glimpses of pro-Roosevelt press gullibility, she remains harsh about all critics of the New Deal. For instance, Charles Coughlin was guilty of “demagoguery.” H.L. Mencken was “hostile” and “furious.” The “antagonistic” publishers Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst were waging a “frontal attack on those New Deal social and economic changes” out of their own “vested interests.” Professor Winfield provides almost no journalistic evidence in these men’s own words to corroborate her orthodox conclusions. Disagreeing with the New Deal simply means you are a bad person, according to this government scholar and many others in mass media.

Ms. Winfield—would could pass for a “moderate” by MSNBC standards—cites a few powerful but isolated anecdotes on gushing press adoration of Roosevelt’s antics, usually couched in the author’s own admiration for her subject. Franklin Roosevelt was so brash in his manipulation of the press:

Roosevelt would tell the correspondents exactly how to write stories. … “I suppose if I were writing your stories for you, I would say it is the most brutally frank Budget Message ever sent in.” … “In other words, if I were writing the story today I think it would be perfectly all right to say this, without putting in on me…” [about the “obligation” of his federal housing programs] The reporters became so used to his demands that by 1934 they began asking him for his news interpretations. (Winfield page 40, with more quotes like that)

One of many reporters who struggled to maintain his objectivity was Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. In Mr. Krock’s own memoirs, he described being questioned by FDR for not attending the jovial White House press performances. In response to Roosevelt’s query, Krock expressed his own difficulty in keeping his “objectivity when I’m close to you and watching you in action. You charm me so much that when I go back to write comment on the proceedings, I can’t keep it in balance.” (Winfield page 65)

Roosevelt would later reward Krock with an exclusive interview where FDR rationalized his failed court-packing plan of 1937. Historian Winfield “outs” Krock for violating press guidelines and allowing Roosevelt’s press secretary to review and edit his sensational “scoop” article published in the New York Times. Mr. Krock would be rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for this adulterated reporting the following year.

The New Dealers’ arsenal also contained hundreds of federal employees in media relations who produced thousands of one-sided marketing handouts to frame a story to Roosevelt’s advantage, apparently a first in non-wartime American politics. Democrat publicity bureaus’ use of “press releases” to spin stories in Roosevelt’s favor was so great that:

In less than one year, the NRA [industrial cooperation agency] issued 5,200 handouts and the AAA [agricultural office] almost 5,000. … In the 1939 study Government Publicity, James L. McCamy found that during a seven-week period in 1937 the New York Times printed 1,281 items which appeared to have been released or influenced by administration publicity offices. (Winfield pages 90-91)

By 1940, newspaper publishers were so eager to gain favor with the powerful New Deal office of communications that 135 papers carried the musings of FDR’s wife, Eleanor, in her daily column. No president before or after Roosevelt has attempted such an overt spousal accommodation via the press.

The potentially larger problem of broadcast jingoism—simplicity and repetition of the New Deal’s favorite buzzwords—can only be assumed at this point based on a few surviving anecdotes and knowing the pattern of modern State media (fond of terms like “family farmers,” “climate change,” “social security” and other expensively misleading slogans). Until comprehensive transcripts of radio and television broadcast news become available, this segment of media history remains largely untold.

Roosevelt’s War on ‘The Colonel’

For our “feature length” members of FDR’s enemies list, a good place to start is in the American heartland. Pretty much from day one of the Roosevelt revolution, New Dealers set their targets on Robert “Colonel” McCormick and his Chicago Tribune. And they never took a break.

From the moment the Prince of Hyde Park, New York declared his candidacy for the highest office in 1932, Chicago’s leading paper had never bought into the Roosevelt charm. Actually, McCormick was familiar with Roosevelt from their time shared at the elite Groton prep school at the turn of the century, according to historian Ralph Raico. And he wasn’t impressed.

Now as an adult, McCormick—a trained lawyer and distinguished World War I veteran—diligently exposed the legal usurpations, agricultural ruin, union excesses and other economic chicanery throughout Roosevelt’s dreadful tenure. And he did it on a daily basis in America’s second biggest city, with the largest circulation among broadsheet newspapers. To get some idea of how seriously Roosevelt took criticism from his old schoolmate, Justin Raimondo’s chapter (page 151) on Colonel McCormick gives insight:

The Tribune featured a cartoon on the front page, and the New Dealers lived in terror of the deft pen strokes of [the paper’s two leading cartoonists]. Frank C. Waldrop, in The Colonel of Chicago, relates the fact that “[i]t was no idle rumor that men who knew their business took care to stay out of harm’s way, if possible, on days that Mr. Roosevelt… and other dignitaries of quick-firing temperament, had been depicted.”

When FDR tried to use his ill-conceived National Recovery Administration (NRA) to seize effective control of the newspaper business during his first term, McCormick spoke out for press freedom during the annual meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association held in Manhattan. Based on popular mythology of a “liberal” Roosevelt fighting for American freedoms, one might think that New Dealers would welcome such an event. But that was not the case.

As McCormick lashed out at FDR inside the hall, 250,000 true believers in the [NRA] Blue Eagle paraded down Fifth Avenue, banners flying and in an ugly mood. This was the first indication that Roosevelt and his NRA mobs were getting ready to move against their opponents in the press… That summer in Washington, the NRA staged a propaganda campaign of unprecedented proportions, with marches, rallies, threats of boycott—and worse—for those who failed to cooperate. (Raimondo page 153)

Roosevelt hated the Chicago Tribune to such an extent that he worked with a wealthy supporter, silver-spoon retail heir Marshall Field III, to open a competing newspaper—the Chicago Sun in 1941 to siphon off the Tribune’s readers. But the public paid little attention to this obvious stunt.

Once the insipid “Franklin Son” was up and running, Roosevelt used his Attorney General to interfere with the Tribune’s exclusive franchise with the Associated Press, launching a three-year court battle that ended in 1945 with a victory for the meddling president. (To get some feel for the disposition of Mr. Field, he would later finance and sit on the board of directors for Chicago’s professional community agitator Saul Alinsky.)

From the mid-1930s until the end of the war, the Chicago Tribune endured public burning of its newspapers, angry protests, boycotts, shrill pamphlets, vicious personal smears in the pro-FDR press, IRS harassment and even treats of prosecution for “treason.” The Tribune survived the affair, but was financially and politically damaged.

This was Franklin D. Roosevelt in action. And he had a few more scores to settle.

Citizen Roosevelt Goes after ‘The Chief’

Next up for the Roosevelt treatment was publisher William Randolph Hearst. Mr. Hearst—known as “the Chief” to his many staff writers—was a lifelong Democrat who initially supported FDR in 1932 but increasingly soured to the New Deal around the middle of Roosevelt’s first term.

With any mention of Big Bad Bill Hearst, some overdue words of correction are needed to address the festering myths circulated by his contemporary adversaries as well as their surviving heirs in corporate media. Both groups hold congenital disgust for independent publishing that cannot be squared with reality.

A good read for anyone interested in this great American icon is the 2000 biography The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw. The book’s author generally favors a state-run economy and supports U.S. involvement in Europe’s War of the 1940s. Other than those standard features to be expected in big league publishing, the 600-page book is exhaustively researched, well written, and provides a fairly balanced treatment of the tensions between Hearst, Roosevelt and the many factions within their orbits.

Throughout his life, Hearst and his impressive chain of newspapers in at least 18 major cities and other media outlets took on powerful businesses and politicians with what often seemed like reckless abandon. His estimated 20 million readers during his mid-1930s peak loved him for it. The corporate oligarchs and their political serfs despised him. So did rabid New Dealers, as did the many partisan publishers that were either attached to one political party (like Joseph Pulitzer had been) or devoted to power (like the New York Times and Washington Post). And war enthusiasts of both Global Bloodbaths wanted Hearst to be hog-tied and thrown into a barbecue pit.

One example of Hearst’s fearless nature involves his papers’ reporting before and during World War I. The Republican pro-war New York Tribune ran hit pieces in six successive Sunday editions from April to June 1918 denouncing Hearst for his alleged disloyalty, relying on a tally of unpatriotic articles promoted by state and federal officials. According to The Chief’s author, Mr. Nasaw, each of the six anti-Hearst articles in the New York Tribune was preceded by a boxed scorecard:

Since the United States entered the war [in April 1917] the Hearst papers have printed:

74 – attacks on our allies

17 – instances of defense or praise of Germany

63 – pieces of antiwar propaganda

1 – deletion of a Presidential proclamation

Total 155

Hearst was among the few publishers resisting English and French propaganda stories of German atrocities in Belgium before U.S. entry to the war. During America’s intervention, his conservative press opponents went to Washington to work with the U.S. Attorney General in 1918 to put Hearst out of business on charges of “treason.” The bogus claims were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. (The Chief pages 243, 268-270)

Probably the best summation of Hearst’s character comes early in the book based on a private letter from Winston Churchill to his wife after a 1929 meeting with the Chief in Los Angeles. Mr. Churchill viewed Hearst as “simple” but remarked on his “complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million daily circulation [at the time], oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy” and other mostly amenable qualities. What’s surprising is that Churchill—a career war hawk—had every reason to dislike Hearst for his vigorous opposition towards U.S. coming to England’s rescue in WW I.

So what were Hearst’s politics? He was very much for international economic cooperation (including with Soviet Russia and Socialist Germany), but opposed open warfare with either. He was pro-labor when business had all the power and pro-business when federalized unions turned violent in the mid-1930s. Hearst believed strongly in law and order, initially favoring alcohol prohibition (as did FDR) then switching to the “wet” side when organized crime flourished in the late 1920s. He strongly opposed Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act industrial cartels but supported job-killing government make-work “relief” programs until at least 1935 when patronage abuses became rampant. Overall, Hearst was intense in his opinions but usually more practical than ideological.

If you happened to be a Marxist college professor radicalizing your students, a corrupt business tycoon seeking political favor, or a lying government official reneging on campaign promises—and Hearst’s reporters found out, as they often did—your life was going to be unpleasant for quite a while. Which is to say, Hearst made some powerful enemies.

In the case of Hearst’s wisely abandoning the disastrous New Deal, Roosevelt’s ranks of minions and collaborators would never forgive him. A common claim holds that after his endorsed candidate, FDR, took office in 1933 the Hearst newspapers suddenly “moved far to the right.” In this case, that oft-repeated “far right” comment was dropped into Wikipedia’s History of New York City (1898–1945), haphazardly footnoted to the book above. The possibility that Hearst (like many other proponents of individual liberty) was the steady hand and it was actually Roosevelt who had shifted the country far to the left escapes consideration in mainstream circles.

Perhaps the biggest ongoing farce regarding the villainous portrait of William Randolph Hearst is how his aggressive criticism of America’s entry into both World Wars gets brushed aside—totally ignored—with trite exaggerations about the publisher’s youthful exuberance during America’s brief 1898 war against Spain in Cuba. What’s most absurd about that whole affair—usually embellished with the legend of Hearst supposedly saying “I’ll furnish the war”—is the raw chutzpah of those leveling the charges. In most cases, the Latter-Day Peaceniks now wringing their hands over some century-old reporting before a brief war in Cuba are also the zombie-like death merchants who lied us into much bigger and permanently debilitating wars. And the Hearst critics are still proud of their own war-mongering!

Which brings us back to That Man in the White House. Roosevelt had been watching Hearst closely from around 1934 when his National Recovery Administration was broiling the country. In the Fall of 1934, FDR instructed his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to have the IRS dig through the tax returns of Hearst and his vast publishing enterprise as a weapon to hold in his back pocket. The author of The Chief says Roosevelt never used this sledge hammer, so I take that to be correct. But Roosevelt didn’t stop with attempted tax extortion.

Throughout 1935, Hearst had been exercising his First Amendment right to criticize the New Deal’s bureaucratic excesses and persistently high unemployment, which infuriated the sensitive aristocrat in the White House. By March 1936:

the president had signaled that it was “open season” on Hearst by ridiculing him, by name, during a press conference. Asked if he had clamped a censorship on his administration, the president, Newsweek reported, “snapped back his answer: Preposterous! The correspondent must have read that in a Hearst paper!” (The Chief page 520)

This crude effort to stir his base to action did not go unnoticed. Democrat Senator Hugo Black, “a zealous and effective New Deal loyalist” was already chairing a commission to go on a hunting expedition through private telegrams of Hearst and anyone else who might impede Roosevelt’s progress. The 2017 Reason article provides a good accounting of the Black Committee tactics:

Over a nearly three-month period at the end of 1935, FCC and Black Committee staffers searched great stacks of telegrams in Western Union’s D.C. office. Operating with virtually no restriction, they read the communications of sundry lobbyists, newspaper publishers, and conservative political activists as well as every member of Congress. Writing to Black, one investigator stated that they had gone through “35,000 to 50,000 per day.” Various newspapers and members of Congress later estimated that staffers had examined some five million telegrams over the course of the investigation.

Of course, this was an unethical and probably illegal invasion of privacy, not to mention an assault on the Constitution. The results of the dragnet were used by New Dealers to openly attack Bill Hearst and other anti-New Deal newspapers. Facing the threat of lawsuit from Hearst and criticism from ACLU and finally some pro-Roosevelt press, the Black Committee disbanded in mid-1936. Team Roosevelt got away with a public relations hand slap. Senator Black would be rewarded by FDR the next year with a Supreme Court appointment. The lengthy Wikipedia page for Hugo Black does not contain a single word of this disgraceful affair or mention Bill Hearst once. Ms. Winfield’s FDR media book entirely omits the Black Committee episode.

For the remainder of Roosevelt’s reign, William Randolph Hearst would be tarred as evil incarnate. And few dared to challenge that assessment. New Deal supporters would organize protests, write pamphlets and books, and even produce the 1941 smear film Citizen Kane to drive home their point. The sole intent of that “classic” movie was to demonize the most prominent surviving publisher who dared to criticize their Leader for Life and his ridiculous economic, social and military schemes.

Scores of partisans in media and academics still pretend that libelous movie—produced by a socialist and prominent FDR campaigner, Orson Welles—was innocent entertainment. The enormous Wikipedia page on Citizen Kane praises the work as “Considered by many… to be the greatest film ever made.” The Wiki writers make no mention of any political affiliation of the producer Welles or any possible motive for him disliking Hearst. At the time of its release, Kane was a cinematic flop despite ample free buzz from media admirers. Everyone knew Welles was a left-wing activist in contempt of Hearst and in support of Roosevelt. One of many books to confirm Welles’s political activism is Orson Welles Interviews, edited by Mark Estrin, which states:

Welles had been active in American political life for some time, speaking at anti-Fascist [sic] rallies as early as 1938 and campaigning intensively for Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944.

The political viewpoints and motivations of Mr. Welles seem to be much more intriguing than any mainstream journalist (and even The Chief) has been willing to admit. But these views are largely beyond the scope of this essay.

After decades of a hard-charging press baron making many powerful and unhinged enemies, Citizen Kane would be their underhanded way to slap back. Long after Hearst died in 1951, movie “experts” and academic malcontents would suddenly discover how “great” this piece of partisan artwork actually was. People who knew the real background were now retired or dead. And the story of a rotten man of “yellow journalism” made for a nice affirmation for the pliable scribes of modern stenography.

During his prolific life Bill Hearst enraged socialists, big business and war hawks alike during his more than 60-year news career. As a result of doing his job and being surrounded by too many lesser peers in the news business, very little positive material can be found in his defense. This is too bad, since Hearst was a fiercely independent defender of the little guy, even if his economic understanding was a bit rough at times, and his respect for authority was what one might expect from a college punk-rock band.

Between Hearst and Roosevelt, the Chief was usually the bigger man. And he paid a much bigger price.

Mr. Hyde Park Cuts Again

Another press target of FDR was John Flynn, author and columnist for the New Republic and other periodicals. One of Flynn’s most popular books, The Roosevelt Myth, is now available online at Unz Review. Flynn was much more the academic thinker and considerably less of a street-brawler than Hearst or McCormick.

Yet Roosevelt’s antipathy for Flynn—daring to criticize the late-1930s war scare in another publication—prompted him to write to the editor of the Yale Review magazine and suggest that Flynn “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review. (Raimondo page 114)

There is some debate on whether or not Roosevelt directly influenced the New Republic in their decision to axe one of their top columnists, Flynn, after five years with the magazine. But Roosevelt wanted Flynn silenced. He got caught writing his directions as such to another editor. And Flynn was fired from the New Republic in 1938.

But Mr. Flynn was fortunate and quickly got hired by the Chicago Tribune. Many others facing the wrath of the New Dealers were not so lucky.

A Pox on the ‘Radio Priest’

With Hearst and McCormick damaged and Flynn and Carter fired, political hit men in the New Deal politburo kept plotting ahead on their mission. After years of organized smears from partisan belligerents, the popular liberal radio personality, Charles Coughlin, was finally run off the airwaves for daring to speak out against the rising militarism and other issues he saw as troubling America. The intolerance of FDR and other pro-war agitators of the time arguably provides the most relevance to this ugly chapter of American history. The back story of FDR’s orchestrated censorship campaign against Coughlin warrants a closer look too, as nearly all of it has been omitted from government civics lessons.

Starting on the air in 1926, within less than a decade the passionate and independent Catholic priest had built an estimated audience of 30 million listeners—easily the biggest in the nation—to his one-hour Sunday afternoon show. In comparison on audience size, with more than double the U.S. population today, the leading talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh peaked out at only 20 million weekly listeners.

To avoid the trap of selective outrage (ubiquitous in any analysis of Coughlin), comparisons with modern talk radio and one of his subsequent peers are again useful. The flag-waving hyper-nationalism in broadcasting today is so over-the-top that when conservative FoxNews commentator, Sean Hannity, urges President Trump to “bomb the hell out of” Iran, it barely raises eyebrows. Hannity, too, claims to be a religious man and added “We have the greatest military, thank God, on the face of this earth.” Another leading voice of AM talk radio, Mark Levin, an accomplished author and legal scholar who identifies as a Jew, uses his FCC microphone privileges to sling childish insults at his political opponents and spreads anti-Muslim paranoia on a daily basis. Let’s not forget the atheist radio hawk, Rush Limbaugh, who promotes breathless adoration of the federal military and all its travails. I won’t even bother to cite any of the vile scapegoating that spews continuously from the mouths of left-wing extremists throughout cable news. As far as race-baiting goes, Mr. Coughlin’s supporters never rioted or burned down one, much less 110 cities, in protest as did the followers of a sainted Street Preacher of the 1960s.

Charles Coughlin was at times sanctimonious, but never approached the level of depravity of the leading dissidents of the 1960s or today. During his career, Coughlin was very well informed on foreign policy and also a fairly serious cultural thinker (by New Deal standards) who earned the respect of his broad middle-class audience. According to this harsh review of historian Alan Brinkley’s 1982 book Voices of Protest on Coughlin and Huey Long, “only the faintest undercurrent of religious prejudice can be found in the rhetoric of [Coughlin’s] prime political years.” (Mr. Brinkley’s slanted treatment of Coughlin and Long—denouncing both men in callous terms throughout the book, while offering polite excuses for their censorious opponents—only makes his subjects appear more innocent.)

Another important executive characteristic consistently overlooked by scholars involves the vastly different approaches to media relations between FDR and his predecessor. Father Charles Coughlin and William Randolph Hearst were both highly critical of incumbent Herbert Hoover (and supportive of the challenger Roosevelt) during the 1932 election. But the Republican president apparently never used political power to harm his press critics. The coddled aristocrat, Franklin Roosevelt, took a less forgiving approach—especially with Coughlin and Hearst.

Throughout his public career, Coughlin embraced a standard liberal agenda of “social justice,” nationalized banking, politicized unions, and protecting local merchants from corporate domination. These views were blended with more conservative ideas of criticizing New Deal bureaucracies, resisting international wars and railing against Communism, although his coercive social policies shared significant congruence with socialist goals.

Commonly known as the “Radio Priest,” Coughlin had first come to fame in the 1920s by denouncing a group of white nationalists in his hometown of Detroit. In the late 1930s, he witnessed another assortment of mostly atheist political activists promoting union and political violence at home and wide-scale military bloodshed abroad, and once again sounded a (far more nuanced and cautious) warning. But the folks he attacked in the 1920s had nowhere near the media clout of the socialists and ethnocentric crusaders who had achieved significant political power in the U.S. by the 1930s. Making matters worse, Coughlin increasingly strayed off the path of safe political discourse—particularly after 1938 when his career was threatened by organized Jewish groups and grandstanding Gentile war-enthusiasts. He also dared to criticize the emperor in the White House, usually for not being progressive enough.

Franklin Roosevelt—a man with virtually zero accomplishments outside of politics, who grew increasingly obsessed over his skillfully manufactured public image—never took criticism well. By mid-1934 his administration was quietly working behind the scenes to undermine Coughlin’s ability to stay on the air, viewing the Radio Priest (still a New Deal supporter) as too unpredictable. (Brinkley page 127)

Then in January 1935, Coughlin energized his listeners to bombard Capitol Hill against Roosevelt’s nearly successful attempt to drag America into the quagmire of a World Court. New Dealers fumed at this last-minute, highly publicized defeat. Over the next few years, the liberal priest from Detroit completely broke with the Roosevelt regime on both domestic and foreign policy. With the help of pro-FDR federal broadcasters, Coughlin was bitterly attacked and eventually kicked off the air in 1940 and subsequently tarred as a “filthy goy” and the “wrong kind of socialist,” if you understand modern political slurs.

After an avalanche of abuse, Wikipedia is somewhat helpful in filling in a few gaps. Using the trick of passive reporting to exonerate the aggressors, they state:

After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939, Coughlin’s opposition to the repeal of a neutrality-oriented arms embargo law resulted in additional and more successful efforts to force him off the air.

Although it was FDR and pro-war extremists pulling the strings here, Wikipedia makes it seem like “Coughlin’s opposition” forced his own censoring. Wikipedia is more direct a few sentences later, stating:

After the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. declaration of war in December 1941… The Roosevelt Administration stepped in again. On April 14, 1942, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote a letter to the Postmaster General, Frank Walker, and suggested revoking the second-class mailing privilege of [Coughlin’s newspaper] Social Justice, which would make it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to his readers.

The final act of FDR’s retaliation succeeded in silencing Father Coughlin and his loyal fans for good. Rather than acknowledge this act of political despotism by Democratic royalty, most historians (and neo-con admirers as well) choose to “punch down” on the memory of a defrocked radio host rather than stand up to concentrated executive power. Between Coughlin and Roosevelt, Harvard professor Alan Brinkley’s assessment of one of the men got it right: “As the years passed and his popularity grew, a strain of megalomania wore away his self-restraint until finally his excesses destroyed him.”

As is common for books written in the early 1980s (when the Fairness Doctrine was still in effect and State adoration completely dominated mass media) the subsidized historian could only speak harshly of the weak. That Man who nearly “destroyed” the entire country managed to escape Brinkley’s analysis unscathed.

In reality, Charles Coughlin’s biggest failings were more fundamental. Coughlin’s lack of private-sector (i.e., “real world” or “service”) experience, absence of any significant ground support movement, and belief that positive social “uplift” could be achieved through a microphone (or a book or article, for that matter) all spelled doom for his highly energetic efforts. Of course, none of those critiques justified the actions of the New Deal gestapo.

The Darkening Mood of 1939-1941

American political culture during the Great Depression was bad enough in times of peace. But during the 1939-40 covert war buildup by FDR, professional life for an anti-New Deal journalist or filmmaker became miserable.

A mere one day after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt launched another military action—this time in California. In a June 2018 essay by Ron Unz on the Great Purge of the 1940s, he writes:

Walt Disney was also the only high-ranking Hollywood figure perched squarely within the anti-war camp. And the day after the surprise Japanese attack, hundreds of U.S. troops seized control of Disney Studios, allegedly in order to help defend California from Japanese forces located thousands of miles away, with the military occupation continuing for the next eight months.

Disney immediately complied, producing absurdities like “The Thrifty Pig,” which cast the role of Big Bad Wolf as a Nazi, and other pro-war films. During the war, Roosevelt would frighten the public with vast military hardware parades that one might expect from North Korea or the old Soviet Union. People were bombarded with non-stop propaganda posters and movies encouraging people to enjoy wartime rationing, glamorizing America’s military heroics and depicting the enemy as sub-human. All of Hollywood cooperated. All of America shipped their eligible boys to the battlefront, sent their wives to the factories, bought patriotic war bonds and looked to Washington for salvation.

If Roosevelt’s New Deal planners excelled at anything, it was planning. This would be an all-out war against two very formidable foes. U.S. Central Command needed absolute obedience on the battlefield and unwavering support at home. A servile media was always FDR’s preference; now he had the perfect excuse. In the years immediately prior to Pearl Harbor, it was just a matter of arranging the chess pieces for maximum chance of victory.

The Sage of Baltimore Goes Silent; Celebrity Aviator Gets Shot Down

One of the last sturdy knights (or so it would seem) remaining on the anti-New Deal chessboard was voluminous author and syndicated columnist for the Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken. As we’ve seen, by 1940, the mood in America was so grim that newspaper publishers fully understood the message: go along with New Deal economic ruination and military intervention… or expect a public thrashing.

Mencken had always been a fierce defender of individual liberties and against mass political movements. As an independent thinker in a time of political conformity, during the 1930s his critics were increasingly labeling him as “right-wing.” A summation of Mencken and another libertarian writer, Albert Jay Nock (blacklisted in 1941) and their alleged “drift” to the right, Murray Rothbard wrote in 1962:

The great individualist Albert Jay Nock has written that, while in the 1920’s he was generally considered a flaming “radical,” and in the 1930’s as a bitter “reactionary,” his political philosophy remained, in these decades, exactly the same. The same might be said of his friend Mencken, who also remained, throughout, an individualist and a libertarian. In the 1920’s, Mencken directed his fire against the tariff and other special privileges to favored business groups, against laws and edicts against free speech and other personal liberties, and especially against the monstrous tyranny of Prohibition. In the 1930’s, Mencken directed his major attacks against the major threat to liberty of that era: the New Deal.

A 2002 profile of Mencken in The Atlantic concluded that “Nothing seemed to matter more to him than uncensored self-expression.” This common view does not explain Mencken’s abrupt departure from the public scene around 1940; I can’t find anyone who attempts to explain it. By the start of U.S. entry into World War II, Mencken had continuously written for newspapers or magazines for over 40 years.

Yet around 1940, the opinionated Sage of Baltimore went into self-imposed hibernation to work on writing books. These would be autobiographical books—Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943)—that lacked any of his prior fury towards political shenanigans.

Mencken’s abrupt change of mood simply makes no sense. And the lack of scholarship on this crucial period in Mencken’s and America’s history also strains credibility. After all, this was one of the country’s most popular writers, a man about whom dozens of books and hundreds of articles have since been written.

The early 1940s was a time period of crushing U.S. media intolerance. In September 1941, a popular spokesman for the anti-interventionist movement, aviator Charles Lindbergh, found himself condemned and outcast after talking at an America First rally in Iowa. This now infamous anti-war speech (captured at length in Wikipedia) acknowledged Jewish “persecution” in Germany and correctly noted “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration” as three groups “pressing this country toward war.” (Subsequent tales about Lindbergh “singling out” Jews are simply false.) But open dialogue was the last thing on the pro-war agenda.

Lindbergh’s sober assessment that war in Europe would be devasting to Jews has been forgotten in the rush to condemn the last great voice of moderation in the 1940s. But dozens of photos from early-war European labor camps made available by religious scholar Nathanael Kapner (compared to the endless displays of gruesome late-war photos promoted by Hollywood and federal broadcasters) suggest the aviator was once again correct. The evident conclusion that Allied terror bombing of German civilians made food scarce for everyone has been assiduously censored by pro-war belligerents ever since.

During this same period, editor for the liberal Nation magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard was “blacklisted” and “lost his editorship as a direct consequence of his intransigent opposition to the war.” (Raimondo page 133)

Yet, Mencken—who turned 60 in September 1940—simply “retired” from the strenuous job of… opinion writing? (“retired” quote from Raimondo page 134, with no hint of curiosity)

These were ugly times for free speech. And the Roosevelt machine—as it had shown with McCormick, Hearst, Coughlin and others—was eager to squash all opposition. And print publications were American liberty’s last line of defense.

Pro-FDR media historian, Betty Houchin Winfield, recounts that as of 1940, NBC and CBS (who were pro-war and pro-welfare as she fails to mention) occupied a commanding “86 percent of the total night-time radio power in the country.” And the desperate man in the White House was still smarting from a 1938 mid-term election that saw Republicans gain 81 seats in the House, 8 seats in the Senate, and 13 new governorships. (Winfield pages 110 and 139)

In the face of this daunting opposition, I suppose it’s possible that the literary giant of “uncensored self-expression” voluntarily retreated into the shadows to go write books about himself. But I’m thinking there’s more to the story.

Whatever the motive for Mencken’s sudden departure from journalism, the reason seems more complex than the trite description offered in Wikipedia: during the 1940s, Mencken “ceased writing for The Baltimore Sun for several years.” The executed rebel “ceased breathing” makes as much sense.

Ten hours of searching history books and online accounts returned similar vagueness, which fits with the larger pattern. Nearly all mainstream media accounts of other documented New Deal censorship consistently downplay Roosevelt’s harsh treatment of press critics. So I’m thinking some sloppy reporting may be at work here, or possibly willful omissions of embarrassing FDR activity. I remain hopeful that Unz Review commenters may possess some better answers.

The Demise of the Saturday Evening Post

Once the sharpest minds and passionate voices of political discourse were severely tarnished or entirely removed from public access, it was easier for New Dealers to clamp down on any remaining pockets of resistance. One of the last such voices of reason in the mainstream press was the Saturday Evening Post.

During the 1920s and 30s, the Saturday Evening Post had been America’s most popular weekly magazine. The Post accomplished this by finding and developing the best fiction and non-fiction writers and illustrators in the country (including Jack London, Garet Garrett, Norman Rockwell and dozens of other household names of the era) and by appealing to classic American values. This was “a culture that valued achievement, hard work, self-improvement, independence, self-discipline, and the entrepreneurial spirit” as Old Right media historian and longtime AntiWar.com editor, the late Justin Raimondo once described it.

Two decent books that provide contemporary insight to American culture during the Roosevelt years are collections of Garet Garrett’s articles originally published in the weekly magazine. The first book is Salvos Against the New Deal: Selections from the Saturday Evening Post 1933-1940 and the second is Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post 1939-1942. Both books are edited by journalist Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times and were published in 2007 and 2003, respectively. Once again, the Radio Act of 1927, the Communications Act of 1934 and federal broadcasting controls are not mentioned at all in either book.

But the detailed history (particularly on union militancy, NRA collusion and agricultural follies) within both collections gives a glimpse of what mainstream reporting looked like at the time—and it most definitely was not liberal or some version of the right-wing Neanderthals found foraging at AM talk radio and FoxNews. If anything, the articles in both collections go to excessive lengths to present long-winded, intellectually sanitized murmurings against the total state; this style seems to reflect conservative meekness throughout the Great Depression. In hindsight, it’s amazing that Roosevelt would bother to censor a magazine of such mild critiques, particularly for their insipid 1939-1942 anti-war editorials.

Nevertheless, the Saturday Evening Post was a popular fixture of middle-America that Roosevelt viewed as an impediment to his glory. Over the prior two generations, the magazine had successfully labored to establish a refined pedigree of its own in conservative cultural commentary. From 1899 to 1936, the Post was led by the steady hand of its editor George Horace Lorimer, a man of sound economic and legal principles with a healthy distain for foreign military adventurism. (The prior Wikipedia link misses all of that and provides only a photo and basic shell outline.)

After Lorimer’s retirement in late 1936, editorial direction fell to Wesley Stout, who held similar anti-New Deal views as Lorimer. But the Post’s owner, Curtis Publishing Company, was growing increasingly uneasy with standing against the angry tides of collectivism and militarism rising in New York and Washington.

After much private and public acrimony, in 1942, a pro-government delinquent named Ben Hibbs was installed to pacify New Dealers and minimize attacks on the magazine, which were becoming unbearable. Under the new pliant Post leadership, a state-controlled economy and European warfare suddenly seemed quite reasonable. The only thing left was to purge the remaining opposition.

Economics columnist and author of 13 books, Garet Garrett was forced out within months, after twenty years of writing at the Post. So was editor Wesley Stout, another twenty-year veteran. In Stout’s 1971 obituary in the New York Times, the paper whitewashes this pivotal event as:

Mr. Stout resigned as editor of The Saturday Evening Post in 1942 because of what was termed “a firm but friendly disagreement with the Curtis Publishing Company on policy.”

Again, we see the tell-tale use of passive language (“was termed” by whom?) in the above blurb. The reality, which NYT was not only aware of but also contributed to, was much less pleasant. By 1942, with Roosevelt’s achievement of dragging the U.S. into battle, the climate of fear and intolerance was so intense in American publishing that Garrett was blacklisted for the next two years. Along with other recently purged voices of liberty, they faced “harassment, vilification, and deprivation of livelihoods.” (Raimondo page 88)

Former Post editor from 1937-1942, Wesley Stout, who had brought the magazine to it all-time peak circulation (as NYT admits) would find work at the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit—a logical and voluntary career change in the narrative of the Times. Garrett finally found employment writing for a magazine of the National Industrial Conference Board, reaching a much smaller audience but avoiding the wrath of FDR and his loyal shock troops.

The full story of what had transpired would only come out over a decade later, in 1953, when Garrett’s most popular book was published. In Reclaiming the American Right (pages 92-93) Justin Raimondo provides more details on the period but the following passage captures the essence:

On the dust jacket of The People’s Pottage, we are told that Garrett’s Saturday Evening Post editorials “created much bitter controversy and caused the New Deal to threaten the life of that magazine.”

With Lorimer dead and Garrett and Stout gone, the once-cherished magazine of Main Street U.S.A. could now safely appeal to the higher prerogatives of the publishing establishment. And the conversion didn’t take long.

The next year would see a face plant for the ages. But this too would be shrouded in journalistic folklore. The stupefying naivete of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” oil paintings would be published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943. In this popular series, the artist and magazine expressly catered to FDR’s launch of those platitudes in January 1941 during a State of the Union address. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms debut was clairvoyantly 11 months before the “surprise” Japanese attack and would subsequently be used ad nauseum to boost public support for his long-anticipated military intervention on behalf of England and France.

In the war-time fog of state-sponsored patriotism during World War II, none were left in mass media or government to question the absurdity of a Commander in Chief—a man who distained free speech, preferred subsidized religion over the freely administered variety, despised free-market prosperity, and reveled in public fear-mongering—lecturing anyone on “essential human freedoms” that we must pursue “everywhere in the world.” And the weary public, across all political persuasions, devoured Rockwell’s and the Post’s soothing comforts with hopeless abandon.

Decades later, curators of the Saturday Evening Post would rationalize their prior disloyalty against the New Deal and make amends. Its managing editors issued a revealing article in 2017 titled “On the Side of Social Security: The Post argued for government assistance in 1952 after several years of opposition.”

Another retrospective published in July 2019 celebrates the joys of arbitrary Thought Crime legislation and selective racial revenge, something the Post would have unequivocally opposed in its heyday. The puff piece is titled “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Still Works for You: Proposed by President John F. Kennedy and delivered after his assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reckoned with the malignancy of discrimination.” The 2019 article forgot to mention the enormous economic progress of black Americans during the 1940s and 50s, which seriously undercuts the demand for federal skin-color legislation in the first place.

It’s barely worth mentioning what the Post’s view on World War II and subsequent military endeavors now entails. Suffice to say, FDR would have been proud.

Epilogue

Does New Deal history have any significance today? Let us count the ways.

For starters, the open celebration of an abusive tyrant—with a 12-year record of immense failure, media manipulation and lawless usurpations—should remove any doubt over the corruption of American institutions who have thoroughly whitewashed this vital period. Anyone not already convinced of the totalitarian inclinations of the original New Deal and its recent “green” reincarnation should think again.

On media controls, the pervasive hypocrisy of the education-media-entertainment industries couldn’t be more glittering. The same ones who cry foul over the slightest impediment to poor people voting for more welfare and their own freedom to slander at will, fully accept the total obstruction of FCC barriers that block over 99.9% of Americans from the powerful platforms of radio and television.

Populists and liberals who repeat the mantra about “six giant corporations controlling 90% of the media” entirely miss the point. Their longstanding support of political press interference created that disparity which they now abhor.

Even more bizarre is the conservative-libertarian wing of neo-con journals, talk radio, and FoxNews. Their silent approval of speech rationing indicates that once a person reaches the inner sanctum of broadcast privilege, any notion of “free market” spectrum access becomes obsolete.

Yet the question remains, what next?

Getting a clearer picture of the importance of independent journalism certainly helps, as does recognizing the inherent drawbacks of federal broadcast interference. It’s no coincidence that accurate reporting and robust analysis can, most often, only be found on internet sites free of government privilege—just as it was in newspapers and magazines up until the 1930s.

After that realization comes the reality check. America didn’t become great from people sitting around, writing and reading books and articles—whining about ancient grievances or launching bombastic comments—always assigning external blame for our vast cultural ills. You can only tell other people “you’re wrong” so many times before the message gets stale and the original goal becomes forgotten. Progress came from people who first got informed, then decided to invest their personal labors in hope of building a better tomorrow.

Is there a critical mass of Americans willing to perform the task of rebuilding functioning local institutions and eventually establishing a sane framework for the larger community? The answer to that question may determine if we ascend towards another Renaissance or drift into another long winter of discontent.

Steve Penfield Email: [email protected]