When Democrats Were Called Fascists: Corporate Socialism and Roosevelt’s New Deal

February 7, 2025 By Neil M. Tokar

The presidential election of 1932 was about Wall Street selecting a candidate willing to implement actual fascist plans in America. Unlike the Democratic party candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, Republican party candidate Herbert Hoover refused to submit to Wall Street’s demands. Hoover recorded the details of the courageous decision that cost him the White House in his memoirs:

Among the early Roosevelt fascist measures was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 16, 1933. The origins of this scheme are worth repeating. These ideas were first suggested by Gerard Swope (of the General Electric Company) at a meeting of the electrical industry in the winter of 1932. Following this, they were adopted by the United States Chamber of Commerce. During the campaign of 1932, Henry I. Harriman, president of that body, urged that I agree to support these proposals, informing me that Mr. Roosevelt had agreed to do so. I tried to show him that this stuff was sheer fascism; that it was merely a remaking of Mussolini’s ‘corporate state’ and refused to agree to any of it. He informed me that in view of my attitude, the business world would support Roosevelt with money and influence. That, for the most part, proved true.

So how did the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave, turn into a fascist country? Let’s begin by defining my terms.

Defining Some Key Terms.........

During Roosevelt’s first eight years the guiding phrases of the New Deal were not ‘Communism,’ ‘Socialism,’ and ‘Fascism,’ but ‘Planned Economy.’ This expression was an emanation from the caldrons of all three European collectivist forms. The phrase first popularized by Mussolini, and often mouthed by the Communists and the Socialists, was itself a typical collectivist torture of meaning. It was not a blueprint, but a disguise. It meant governmental execution and dictation......................

The Thesis of Corporate Socialism

Frederic Bastiat’s dictum is that “socialism is a system where everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.” Corporate socialism is, according to Antony C. Sutton’s book Wall Street and FDR, a system consisting of a few big businesses who live at the expense of everyone else in society because these privileged businesses possess legal monopolies in key sectors of the economy....................

How Sutton Developed and Defended His Thesis

“One can trace a literary path,” Sutton wrote in Wall Street and FDR, “by which prominent financiers have pushed for national planning and control for their own benefit and that ultimately evolved into the Roosevelt New Deal.”..............” Howe’s monopoly strategy advised corporate socialists to cover all of this up by saying that they were acting in “the name of the public good” and in “the public interest.”.............Secretary of Labor under FDR recorded how Baruch brought fascism to America:

At the first meeting of the Cabinet after the President took office in 1933, the financier and adviser to Roosevelt, Bernard Baruch, and Baruch’s friend General Hugh Johnson, who was to become the head of the National Recovery Administration, came in with a copy of a book by Gentile, the Italian Fascist theoretician, for each member of the Cabinet, and we all read it with great care............

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