The Blue Eagle and the Swastika

The Roosevelt Myth - the maddened remonstrance by the America Firster, John T Flynn - opens with an hour-by hour recount of the day of Roosevelt’s  inauguration in 1933. The chapter concludes,

Next morning the New York Times carried only a single front page story that had no connection with the inauguration. It had to do with another of the Messiah’s of tomorrow.

VICTORY FOR HITLER EXPECTED TODAY

In his The Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany Wolfgang Schivelbusch takes up the challenge of giving reason to Flynn’s shocking thesis of parallel and resemblance between the two 'messiahs'.

Schivelbusch sets out at some distance from events of fame and infamy. He begins with architecture. He repudiates the commonplace ‘conflation of the monumental – that is backward-looking neoclassical architecture ... and ... totalitarian regimes ... and ... the association of modernist architecture with liberal democracy’. In refutation he points out that during the inter-war Period the liberal democracies erected numerous neoclassical piles –  the US Supreme Court, built over the years 1932-1935, being a spectacular case in point  (not to mention  - we may add – the Stormont parliament, the New South Wales State Library, and the Auckland War Memorial Museum). And it is equally true that ‘modernism’ appeared in Fascist architecture- even Nazi architecture exhibited a functionalism that conformed to modernist precept. It would, then, be closer to the truth to say that civic architecture between the wars manifested no ideological divide – but rather exhibited a common style, which might be simply called “Government International”.

The point of his architectural prologue is clear. Civic architecture is the epitome of Schivelbusch’s key thesis: that a common style and technology is consistent with wholly different ends. Specifically, a common political style and political technology is consistent with different political ends.  Thus, Schivelbusch maintains, however distinct their ends, the New Deal and the Third Reich had much in common in their political style and technology.

What was this supposed shared ‘political technology’? It amounted to an attempt to  brew a one-ness between a charismatic ruler and the ruled - a one-ness that dispensed with intermediating bodies and constraining religions - a one-ness that, however contrived or faked, was not simply an act of the duper duping the duped, but involved an implicit reciprocity between ruler and ruled.

Schivelbusch's method is to articulate some inauspicious parallels between the 'new deals'.

As is well known, the Nazis instituted a boycott of Jewish business almost as soon as they won power.  In Schivelbusch’s telling the New Deal also began with a boycott; or, at least,  something like a boycott. The National Recovery Administration instituted a host of ‘codes’ for the conduct of business,  setting minimum prices and wages, maximum hours, etc. Those businesses that  agreed to conform were issued Blue Eagles posters to display from their premises to the public.  And what of those businesses that declined to conform with these (voluntary) codes? Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Hugh Johnson, announced that with respect to such recalcitrants, ‘The public simply cannot tolerate non-compliance with their plan ... May Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to trifle with that [plan]’.  Schivelbusch sees in this a ‘threat of a boycott’. There was, indeed, a wave of physical intimidation of ‘non-compliers’, reminiscent of confrontations of strikers and strike breakers. But it cannot be said there was any formal boycott.  For all that, there is something sinister in Johnson’s incitement of The People’s Ire at any defiance of ‘their’ plan. And the scene of 250,000 people marching down New York City’s 5^th avenue in September 1933 with Blue Eagle flags flying doesn’t quite look the same after Schivelbusch’s comfortless analogy.

A surely more palpable parallel between the New Deal and the Third Reich lies in their common ‘back to the land’ housing programs. The unbelievably named ‘Subsistence Homesteads Division’ of the Department of the Interior launched 34 housing projects that sought to settle urban workers in semi-rural communities, each composed of 1 to 5 acre lots. The first of these was Arthurdale in West Virginia, conveniently close to Washington DC, and patronised by Eleanor Roosevelt, who busied herself in the choosing house types and their interiors. At the same time the Nazi Reich Commission for Settlement Projects was bringing to realisation the older ideal of the ‘Landstaat’   - rural settlement – in parts of Ramersdorf on the outskirts of Munich.

Schivelbusch is surely placing too much burden is placed on this (delectable) coincidence. Schemes for restoring village life were a standard move of anti-industrial ideologists since the late 19^th century (See Davison 1978, 251-254 for some curious illustrations). And the number of people housed by these projects was, of course, minute. But to Schivelbusch their significance didn’t lie in the numbers; they were essentially elaborate advertisements for their respective governments.They underline the ‘propaganda state’ aspect of the various New Deals that Schivelbusch considers so of characteristic of these governments.

By ‘propaganda’ Schivelbusch does not refer to the deception that Nazis used arrantly, intensely and routinely as technique of rule. By propaganda he does not mean the lie inflicted by the knower on those who can know no better. Propaganda is not the ‘programming’ of innocents. Schivelbusch wants the reader to allow that the propagandised had some autonomy in their beliefs. The success of propaganda therefore turned on a certain reflexivity between the propagandizers and the propagandized. In keeping with that the Nazis  and the New Deal were genuinely concerned with what the public believed; the Nazis elaborately tracked public opinion, and Roosevelt urged his listeners to write to him convey their views. In Schivelbusch’s account this was not just a ‘success check’ on propaganda; but an input into formulation of propaganda. Propaganda worked insofar as it articulated ‘the as-yet nebulous popular will’.

In his reach for parallels Schivelbusch seeks a correspondence between the Fireside Chat and Nuremberg Rally. Certainly both conformed to that communion of the ruler and ruled that the political technology deployed. Both involved psychological incitement: the rallies very obviously, radio not so obviously, but Schivelbusch reminds us of the strange power of radio in the 1930s. (Witness the bizarre reaction to Orson Wells' War of the Worlds radio drama).

Schivelbusch feels required to answer why the supposed common political technology manifested itself in ‘chats’ in the US but in rallies in Germany. Roosevelt, recall, never permitted the broadcast of his speeches; while  Hitler’s radio broadcasts were overwhelming speeches, and only infrequently direct addresses ‘to the German peope’. Schivelbusch puts this contrast down to ‘technological lag’; Germans were relatively unused to this new medium, and unlike Americans were unable to invest ‘charisma’ in radio. We see here that  Schivelbusch's unity thesis is refracted through the material conditions. We see the same turn in his explanation as to why the most salient public works differed between the two countries:   autobahns in Germany, the Tennessee Valley  Authority in the US.  His answer is that in 1933 Germany had an extensive electricity grid, but few cars; the US, by contrast, had extensive car ownership but many households off the grid. Each country caught up where they had some catching up to do.

There is, then, a functionalism present in Schivelbusch. Indeed, in his analysis, both Nazism and the New Deal at bottom functioned as ‘completing egalitarianisms’ ; each of the two were catching up where the other was ahead. Germany was ahead in the economic dimension of egalitarianism, but behind in its social dimension; and the USA the reverse. Specifically, Germany had the advanced welfare statism of a developed egalitarianism; the US had not. But the US exhibited (or at least observed) the classlessness (‘fraternity’) of a developed egalitarianism, Germany did not. Fascism  offered classlessness to Germany: The New Deal offered social security to the US.

Schivelbusch, then, is implicitly advancing two resemblance theses; one for means, and another for ends. So it not merely that the two buildings shared the same style and technology; they performed the same task. 
 But the proposed unity of ends  cannot be endured. Yes, both had powerful egalitarian aspect: but which successful political movement in the past two  hundred years has not? It matters more that each also served other ends that the other shattered. It is, in other words, completely inadequate to describe the value system of both as solely ‘ egalitarian’. And I would contend (uncontroversially) is the divergences of these value systems that makes the Third Reich so notoriously divergent from the New Deal.

The US, of course, was and remains a society saturated through with liberalism. German history (at least until the post-War period) had a highly ambiguous relation to liberalism, to say the least.  Liberalism seem to wax strongest in  moments of crisis; while in the US liberalism was business as usual.  

To liberalism – the aversion to rulers – we can contrast another value system – the aversion to rules. We can call this ‘anti-nomianism’. In this system the negative and positive poles of egotism and self-annihilation  supply the energy;  and the irrational guides and channels that to its great end;:power without law. Such an inflammable system can hardly persist. But in Germany it was ignited by fin de siecle bedlam, and superheated by the political and economic dislocation following the First World War. 

By contrast, in the United States anti-nomianism makes only  a more fitful appearance; in religious manias; in extreme Abolitionism; in the mass  bohemianism of ‘the 60s’.

The conflict of the New Deals was evidently a conflict of liberalism and anti-nomianism.  Schivelbusch is uninterested in this pedestrian truth. But, then, it is inconsistent  with his functionalism. Consider:   was not the common technology that interests him - then attempt to synthesise a one-ness between a charismatic ruler and the ruled – part and parcel of anti-nomianism?  It was the liberalism, that is second sight  of the American consciousness, that prevented that ‘technology’ getting into full operation. .                                                                                                                                                                           

Davison, Graeme 1978, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.