Bronson1969 - The Monday Morning Memo

“A drought afflicted most of the 48 states. In the dustbowl, the topsoil of the southern plains was being blown away, and hundreds of thousands of Americans were on the move toward California in search of work. People everywhere were growing impatient. On the right, the American Liberty League, organized by some of America’s most powerful industrialists, charged that The New Deal was only making things worse, that Roosevelt had become a dictator, defying the Constitution, encouraging class warfare. Their best spokesman was FDR’s old ally, Al Smith, the former Democratic governor of New York. ‘The New Dealers,’ he said, ‘were hell-bent on socialism.’ ‘There can only be one capitol,’ Smith said, ‘Washington or Moscow, There can be only one flag, The Stars and Stripes, or the flag of the godless Soviets.’ Some of Roosevelt’s enemies called him ‘that man in the White House’ because they could not bear even to say his name. When someone unwisely mentioned ‘FDR’ in the presence of J.P. Morgan, whose own father had earlier done battle with T.R., Morgan is said to have exploded, ‘God damn all Roosevelts.’ The people among whom he was brought up, an awful lot of them learned to hate him. He seemed to be betraying everything that they had believed, and it just enraged people. On the left, Socialists and a handful of Communists took to the streets, denouncing Roosevelt as a captive of Capitalism, incapable of bringing about real change.”

- Ken Burns: The Roosevelts – An Intimate History, Episode 5, The Rising Road

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