Authors: Ira Katznelson
Mussolini’s view that “liberalism is preparing to close the doors of its temples,” having piled “up innumerable Gordian Knots,” and having failed “to cut them with the sword of the world war,” also was confidently asserted in Moscow and Berlin.
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Josef Stalin similarly identified the problem of liberal democracy as one of representing parts of a divided society in fractious and fragmented parliamentary politics. Bolshevism differed, he argued, because it united the whole country to build a radiant future. The Soviet Union, he claimed, had overcome divisions between “capitalists and workers, landlords and peasants” by instituting one-party government unconstrained by liberal rules, democratic procedures, and legislative institutions that brought social divisions to the center of the state.
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As early as April 1920, Adolf Hitler had recorded a comparable opinion. Parliamentarianism would destroy Germany unless “one day a [man with an] iron skull shall come, with muddy boots, perhaps, but with a clear conscience and a steel fist, who will end the blathering of these [Reichstag] drawing room heroes. . . . We need a dictator who is a genius, if we wish to rise again.”
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Speaking thirteen years later as chancellor to representatives of German agriculture in early April 1933, some nine weeks after assuming power and just two weeks after the Reichstag had been stripped of its power to legislate, Hitler boasted that “the German people has been freed and released for the first time from the party views and considerations of our former representative assembly.”
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Such beliefs and opinions were not limited to dictators and dictatorships. As Roosevelt prepared to speak, skepticism was prevalent about whether representative parliamentary democracies could cope within their liberal constitutional bounds with capitalism’s utter collapse, the manifest military ambitions by the dictatorships, or international politics characterized by ultranationalist territorial demands. Hesitation, alarm, and democratic exhaustion were widespread. By the 1920s, political analysts as divergent as Germany’s Carl Schmitt, then an advocate for a democracy more militant than that on offer in the Weimar Republic but also a deep skeptic about parliamentary capabilities,
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and England’s James Bryce, the strong Liberal who was dubious about the effects of mass democracy, were calling into question the qualities and the desirability of democratic legislatures to grapple with challenges of governance and legitimacy.
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Their doubts echoed the postwar ruminations of Max Weber, who, in 1918, had projected what he thought to be the inevitable decay of national legislatures.
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Despite its long and relatively secure constitutional heritage, the United States could not stand apart. The panoply of anxiety was too extensive, the sense of disappointment too profound, the criticisms of liberal democracy too relentless, the defenders of democracy too plagued by doubt, and the problems of depth, difficulty, and urgency too insistent. Americans had reason to worry that their frail and undersized federal government lacked effective means to exercise global power, revive capitalism, or calm the widespread disquiet of the American people. The rise of the dictatorships along with the means they had adopted to address economic problems and rebalance international might and power revealed that familiar policies would no longer suffice.
At the start of the Roosevelt administration, Reinhold Niebuhr, America’s most prominent Protestant thinker, worried that “our western society is obviously in the process of disintegration.” He designated an end to the “philosophy of unqualified optimism [that] has attended the entire brief reign of modern capitalism,” and he offered “the basic conviction . . . that the liberal culture of modernity is quite unable to give guidance and direction to a confused generation which faces the disintegration of a social system and the task of building a new one.” Looking across the sea at Fascist ascendance and Communist assertiveness, Niebuhr agonized about the very fate of democracy, warning that “a dying social order hastens its death in the frantic effort to avoid or postpone it.” He further expressed concern about how “a dying capitalism is under the necessity of abolishing or circumscribing democracy, not only to rob its foes of a weapon, but to save itself from its own anarchy.”
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The next year, William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, declared that the time for political liberalism “has already passed,” for it is “incapable of achieving social unity.” Liberal democracy, he predicted, “has no future. . . . Its once negligible weaknesses have developed into menacing evils.” Commenting on how, for growing numbers of people across the globe, liberal political alternatives had come to seem unfeasible or beside the point, he wrote that “present reactions against Liberalism, crude, bedeviled, and alloyed as they are, move under the necessity of an historical dialectic, so far as they tend to reassert the reality of the total interest of society.” Despite rejecting how “contemporary dictatorships have taken the easy path” in seeking to gain “social unity at the cost of the individual,” he nonetheless argued that such a “total interest” would have to be more fully recognized in the United States by moving toward “a more unified society, capable of using its voice and its muscles, with a sterner internal discipline and a new emotional basis.”
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Niebuhr and his colleagues were hardly alone in voicing these concerns. It is an understatement to say that positive outcomes were not assured. The crisis of capitalism, they discerned, was a good deal more than an economic predicament, for it had produced a crisis of democratic confidence.
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As Hans Morgenthau recalled, “the impact of economic crisis upon American consciousness was not limited to denying the ability of America to achieve its purpose; it put into question the purpose itself.” Democracy, for many, seemed hollow and incapable. “Freedom there still was, but it was now experienced as a freedom to sell apples on the street. Power there still was, but it was now experienced as the meaningless gesture of casting a ballot.” With democracy caught “in a drama of disillusionment and frustration,” capitalism’s failures remade “America in the image of Europe,” and “seemed to have made a mockery of the American purpose and put an end to the American experiment itself.”
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In the period leading up to Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural, Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University’s president, who was no stranger to ethnic quotas, which he rigidly enforced, instructed the freshman class that the dictatorships were putting forward “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections.”
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Even the relatively optimistic Lindsay Rogers, the Columbia University political scientist, believed, in 1934, that representative institutions “must reconcile themselves to laying down general principles within the limits of which they will give executives free hands.” Such “considerable revamping of the machinery of representative government [that] will come quickly is greatly to be desired.” It might not, he worried, because such “crisis government in the United States is considerably more difficult than it is in European countries.”
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During the early 1930s, these anxieties found even more widespread expression in democratic Europe, especially in the mainstay democracies of Great Britain and France. Arnold Toynbee, who wrote about the rise and fall of civilizations, cautioned that “men and women all over the world [are] seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of society might break down and cease to work.”
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A prominent historian of ideas, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, noted that “it would seem as though autocracy were sweeping the Western world,” and he “freely admitted,” despite his own strong democratic orientation, “that Italy under Mussolini’s rule has enjoyed a distinctly more efficient régime than that of the corrupt and incompetent democracy which it superseded.”
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Out of phase with the historical moment, the capacities of the era’s democratic governments thus seemed vastly inferior to the instruments of mass mobilization and problem solving that the dictatorships had fashioned. Claiming the ability to liberate humankind from profound crises and deep traps by comprehending the tides of history, those antiliberal governments fashioned support and created complicity, drew an absolute distinction between friends and foes, and did not shrink from redemptive violence and targeted hatred. They, not the West’s democracies, it seemed, had seized a future, one that was starkly symbolized by Balbo’s squadron of planes that crossed the world.
The pressures on all the democracies, including that of the United States, were intense. Writing in 1932 about “the breakdown of the old order,” “the immediate economic and social needs of labor,” and “the exploitation of the farmers,” the economist and future U.S. senator Paul Douglas exhorted fellow advocates of peaceful and democratic change that all had not yet been lost. “If enough men and women become filled with this spirit, then the future will not belong to the Mussolinis, the Lenins, or to the plutocracy.” But he thought he was pushing against the odds. “And if ultimate failure is, nevertheless, the result, there will still be the joy of going down under a worthy flag. Happily,” he concluded, “I do not believe that such need be the fate of our democracy. If men will but organize and act intelligently, we can still obtain social change without catastrophe. But we do not have much time to lose.”
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The crisis of liberal democracy in Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, in short, generated widespread apprehension about democratic incapacity as Franklin Roosevelt was about to assume the presidency. As he and the country faced a night sky illuminated by barbarism in early 1933, they confronted confounding and pressing uncertainties. Could the political system meet its most urgent tests without suspending its rules? Might it be necessary to fashion a crisis government and transcend the limitations of ordinary procedures in order to confront the economic crisis, respond to the dictators, and rescue the system? Unless these questions could find persuasive answers, there might indeed be a great deal more to fear than fear itself.
III.
A
S THE
presidential limousine transported Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt from the White House to the Capitol on March 4, 1933, they must have wondered whether the economic desolation, social malaise, and political disappointment caused by the Great Depression might undermine America’s democracy unless the country’s traditional constitutional balance could be adjusted.
During the interregnum between the presidential election in November and this March Inauguration Day, a jarring, even incendiary, debate had been waged about the need for emergency government to overcome democracy’s greatest source of weakness, legislative power. From abroad, German, Italian, and Soviet leaders were claiming to have found effective means to direct economic growth, eliminate class conflict, build global might, and preserve national security. Worried that Congress would be unable to cope with these challenges, some of the country’s leading intellectuals and journalists advocated a new presidency, with a decidedly more elastic Constitution. Unlike the dictatorships that had abolished meaningful legislative institutions, the government of the United States, they thought, was hampered by the requirement that policies could pass into law only through open, and often divisive, legislative politics. At issue was not whether the United States would permanently lose its democracy but whether, faced with grave dangers, it would have to undergo a period of emergency rule, a constitutional dictatorship in which uncommon powers would be delegated from Congress to the president and the executive branch.
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Writing a series of widely noted articles for
The
New Republic
under the rubric of “A New Deal for America,” the economist Stuart Chase offered “a survey for a third road” between violent Fascist or Communist revolution, whose “road . . . is blocked,” and a “business dictatorship” whose “road . . . has mud holes and soft shoulders.” He called for a “third and last road,” a path that “may entail a temporary dictatorship,” though one that “will not tear up customs, traditions and behavior patterns to any such extent as promised by either the Red or the Black dictatorship.”
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Walter Lippmann was no less vocal. At the start of 1933, the popular historian James Truslow Adams identified Lippmann, then in his mid-forties, as “one of the most potent political forces in the nation,” the one truly national voice that had emerged since the war.
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Lippmann’s widely respected syndicated column in the
New York Herald Tribune
offered a combination of learning, incisiveness, and detachment.
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With President Hoover’s term ending, the Great Depression exacting an expanding toll, and fears of endless economic catastrophe becoming widespread, Lippmann worried that Congress could not govern effectively or quickly in the emergency.
The “situation,” he wrote, “requires strong medicine.” In advocating a grant of “extraordinary powers” to the incoming president, he insisted that “the danger we have to fear is not that Congress will give Franklin D. Roosevelt too much power, but that it will deny him the power he needs. The danger is not that we shall lose our liberties, but that we shall not be able to act with the necessary speed and comprehensiveness.” Extraordinary authority, he proposed, should give the president, “for a period say of a year, the widest and fullest powers under the most liberal interpretation of the Constitution.” Concurrently, Congress should “suspend temporarily the rule of both houses, to limit drastically the right of amendment and debate, to put the majority in both houses under the decisions of a caucus.” This supersession of normal politics, he concluded, “is the necessary thing to do. If the American nation desires action and results, this is the way to get them.”
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Lippmann directed the same advice to his good friend, the president-elect. During a February 1 visit to Warm Springs, Georgia, he counseled how “the situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”
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