Fear Itself (86 page)

84
Max Weber,
Economy and Society
(New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), pp. 1381–97.

85
Reinhold Niebuhr,
Reflections on the End of an Era
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), pp. 23, 3, ix, 19, 56.

86
William Ernest Hocking, “The Future of Liberalism,”
Journal of Philosophy
32 (1935): 230–31.

87
This strand of thought dates back at least to Italy’s 1922 March on Rome, when the question arose as to whether the “unknown quantity” of Fascism might be exported to overcome the limitations of liberal states with legislatures at their core. See Alan Cassels, “Fascism for Export: Italy and the United States in the Twenties,”
American Historical Review
69 (1964): 707.

88
Hans. J. Morgenthau,
The Purpose of American Politics
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), p. 52.

89
Cited by Ronald Steel,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 299.

90
Lindsay Rogers,
Crisis Government
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), pp. 61, 165, 112.

91
Arnold Toynbee,
Survey of International Affairs, 1931
(London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 1. For just this reason, Clive James’s observation is compelling to the effect that a book about the twentieth century that “does not deal constantly with just how close culture came to being eradicated altogether would not be worth reading.” See James,
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 3.

92
F. J. C. Hearnshaw, “Democracy or Dictatorship?,”
Contemporary Review
146 (1934): 434–36.

93
Paul H. Douglas,
The Coming of a New Party
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), p. 224.

94
The most important study of this question, placing the United States in a historical and comparative universe, is Clinton L. Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948). Rossiter believed such government to be inevitable under modern conditions, and thus he sought to stipulate normative and practical conditions for the use of its instruments. See also The Editors, “Introduction” to “Symposium: Emergency Powers and Constitutionalism,”
International Journal of Constitutional Law
2 (2004): 207–10.

95
Stuart Chase, “A New Deal for America, IV: Survey for a Third Road,”
The New Republic,
July 27, 1932, p. 282. This article was reprinted as chapter 9 of Stuart Chase,
A New Deal
(New York: Macmillan, 1932).

96
Cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Walter Lippmann: The Intellectual v. Politics,” in
Walter Lippmann and His Times,
ed. Marquis Childs and James Reston (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), p. 211. Adams, who had a successful career in business before turning to history, was best known for
Our Business Civilization: Some Aspects of American Culture
(New York: A&C Boni, 1929) and
The Epic of America
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1931).

97
Following his 1910 graduation from Harvard, where he had focused on philosophy, studying with William James, who proved a lasting influence, and serving as an assistant to George Santayana, a philosopher of aesthetics, and a poet and novelist, Lippmann had helped found
The New Republic
in 1913, and he later served as a columnist and editor of the
World,
arguably the country’s most stimulating newspaper before it folded in the late 1920s. His books included
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
(New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914);
Liberty and the News
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920);
Public Opinion
(New York: Macmillan, 1922);
The Phantom Public
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925); and
A Preface to Morals
(New York: Macmillan, 1929).

98
These columns of January 17, January 24, February 10, February 14, and February 24 are gathered in Walter Lippmann,
Interpretations, 1933–1935,
ed. Alan Nevins (New York: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 1–13.

99
Cited by Steel,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century,
p. 300; Jonathan Alter,
The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 5, 187.

100
Clinton L. Rossiter, ed.,
The Federalist Papers
(New York: Mentor Books, 1999), p. 225.

101
Bryce is cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “War and the Constitution: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in
Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures
, ed. Gabir S. Borrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 159.

102
“Do We Need a Dictator?,”
Nation
March 1, 1933, p. 220.

103
Herbert Hoover,
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941
(New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 336, 351, 357. An example of the critique from the Right for how the New Deal was overriding classical liberalism during FDR’s first term is Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.,
The Decline of American Liberalism
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1955). See also Marquis Childs, “They Hate Roosevelt,” in
The New Deal: The Critical Issues,
ed. Otis L. Graham Jr. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

104
A revised version of James’s talk first appeared in a 1910 pamphlet of the Association for International Conciliation, and was published as William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,”
McClure’s Magazine,
August 1910, pp. 463–68. This phrase, which has been often deployed, was utilized by President Jimmy Carter to advocate a new federal energy policy. See “Carter Asks Strict Fuel Saving; Urges ‘Moral Equivalent of War’ to Bar a ‘National Catastrophe,’”
New York Times,
April 19, 1977. President Carter did not credit William James; a column by James Reston, “Moral Equivalent War,”
New York Times,
April 20, 1977, probed the continuing relevance of James’s views.

105
William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1902); reprinted in William James,
Writings, 1902–1910,
ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), pp. 332–33.

106
In this phrase, I follow the spoken record rather than the written one.

107
The Editors, “Introduction” to the “Symposium: Emergency Powers and Constitutionalism,” p. 207.

108
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, in
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 11–16.

109
Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I,” p. 432.

110
For a discussion of democratic emergency powers as conservative, see John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino, “The Law of the Exception: A Typology of Emergency Powers,”
International Journal of Constitutional Law
2 (2004): 210–39.

111
This parallelism has been noted by Giorgio Agamben,
State of Exception
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 21–22.

112
He reviewed President Wilson’s constitutional writings as well as Edward S. Corwin’s
The President’s Control of Foreign Relations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1917); and he surveyed the
Congressional Record
of the 65th Congress, meeting from April 2, 1917, to November 21, 1918. See Lindsay Rogers, “Presidential Dictatorship in the United States,”
Quarterly Review
231 (1919): 127–48.

113
His son, James C. Hagerty, later served as press secretary during Dwight Eisenhower’s two White House terms.

114
New York Times,
March 5, 1933.

115
Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 205.

116
“One of the central characteristics of the state of exception [is] the provisional abolition of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers.” Agamben,
State of Exception,
p. 7.

117
Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Vast Tides That Stir the Capital: Behind the Revolutionary Experiments in Washington There Is an Impetus That Derives Directly from a People Demanding Immediate Steps to Meet the Crisis,”
New York Times Magazine,
May 7, 1933, pp. 1–3. McCormick was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting in 1937.

Commenting on the government’s economic plans, she wrote that “one is dazed by the dimensions of this program” that “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative state as it exists in Italy.” For a contemporaneous assessment, see Carmen Haider, “The Italian Corporate State,”
Political Science Quarterly
46 (1931): 228–47. A useful overview is Edward R. Tannenbaum, “The Goals of Italian Fascism,”
American Historical Review
74 (1969): 1183–1204.

118
Clinton L. Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in Modern Democracies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp. 257–58.

119
Ibid., p. 259.

120
Ibid., p. 260.

121
Ibid., p. 262.

122
During the interwar years, the sense of delegation as despotism was influentially argued by Lord Hewart of Bury,
The New Despotism
(London: E. Benn, 1929).

123
Anthony J. Badger,
FDR: The Hundred Days
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), pp. 169–71; see also Alter,
The Defining Moment,
p. 8.

124
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Second Fireside Chat,” Washington, DC, May 7, 1933, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Great Speeches
(New York: Dover Publications, 1999), p. 41.

125
Joseph M. Bessette,
Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

126
Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship,
p. 263.

127
These are criteria identified by Frederick Watkins, Robert Dahl’s most important teacher, in “The Problem of Constitutional Dictatorship,” in
Public Policy,
ed. Carl Friedrich and Edward Mason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), p. 329, and by Arend Lijphart, “Emergency Powers and Emergency Regimes: A Commentary,”
Asian Survey
18 (1978): 404.

128
Ferejohn and Pasquino, “The Law of Exception,” p. 217.

129
C. Vann Woodward,
Origins of the New South,
1877–1913
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), pp. 373–74.

130
William A. Link, “The Social Context of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930,” in
The Wilson Era: Essays in Honor of Arthur S. Link,
ed. John Milton Cooper Jr. and Charles E. Neu (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1991), p. 77; Arthur S. Link, “The Progressive Movement in the South, 1870–1914,”
North Carolina Historical Review
23 (1946): 172, 179–92, 194–95.

131
V. O. Key Jr.,
Southern Politics in State and Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 315, 5.

CHAPTER 4
AMERICAN WITH A DIFFERENCE

1
The number of registered blacks did not fall to zero, even in the Deep South. In 1940, for example, estimates place black registration at two thousand each in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, three thousand in South Carolina, and twenty thousand in Georgia, primarily in Atlanta. These, of course, were tiny proportions of the adult black population. See Steven F. Lawson,
Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 134.

2
For a detailed description of the operation of rules and practices aimed at depressing the franchise, see Ralph J. Bunche,
The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 47–68, 181–378, and the discussions in Lawson,
Black Ballots
; Alexander Keyssar,
The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
(New York: Basic Books, 2000); Michael Perman,
Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Richard M. Valelly,
The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).