wkmac
Well-Known Member
John T. Flynn: Revisionist Journalist
From the article at the link above:
To simply say, as I did recently, that John T. Flynn, the American journalist who lived from 1882 to 1964, was a liberal does not really explain why he is important to modern libertarians. Flynn was a liberal, all right. But so were lots of other people in that period. In fact, during the 1920s and '30s, when Flynn first began to build a national reputation as a journalist, classical liberals arguably dominated the mainstream print media in this country........
John T. Flynn was, if not the very first, then one of the very first few, of the revisionist journalists to write about the New Deal, focusing on both its domestic and its foreign policies. He represents, therefore, the beginning of historical revisionism where the New Deal is concerned. And if any historical event fairly cries out for revisionist treatment, it is the New Deal.....
The truth is far otherwise. The truth is that the New Deal was what the revisionist historian Gabriel Kolko called a "triumph of conservatism." Kolko used that phrase as the title of a seminal 1963 book in which he showed that the wave of federal regulation of business that came in with the Progressive Era in the early years of the 20th century was in fact spearheaded by large corporations, which wanted the regulations in order to put smaller competitors out of business and enable the large corporations to enjoy a large, virtually guaranteed market share without having to take the trouble to compete in order to get it. In many cases, Kolko showed, the big corporations that lobbied for these new regulations actually wrote the regulations that were eventually adopted.
This was a "triumph of conservatism," because it was the political conservatives of the time — Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt — who made sure the corporations got their way. Just as the original European conservatives championed policies designed to benefit the aristocracy, so these early 20th-century American conservatives championed policies designed to benefit America's substitute for an aristocracy: a collection of big businessmen who, like the aristocrats of old, depended upon the state for most of their wealth and power.
The New Deal, of course, was nothing more than another collection of these same conservative policies of intervention — economic intervention at home and political and military intervention abroad. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson had adopted these conservative Republican policies during World War I. Now another Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, had adopted them in the face of the Great Depression. FDR, however, did introduce something new into the by now somewhat old and tiresome routine. These policies, FDR proclaimed, were actually liberal policies. And that proclamation made John T. Flynn mad as a hornet.
