John T. Flynn was an early New Dealer who quickly saw what happens when power is concentrated in the executive state. He became a passionate opponent of FDR and his policies.
This 1940 book is his analysis of the American presidency and the place of FDR in it. It sheds light on how he came to power and kept it through all those years of declining liberty and rising statism. This volume had a big impact on the growing anti-FDR movement at the time, and continues to be sought after as an important study in the history of the presidency.
Hilariously, it sits on the bookshelf at FDR’s “Little White House” in Georgia, in the living room where FDR vacationed. Maybe some tour guide has a good sense of humor!
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John T. Flynn was a journalist, author, and master polemicist of the Old Right. He started out as a liberal columnist for that flagship of American liberalism, the New Republic, and wound up on the Right, denouncing “creeping socialism.” What is unusual about Flynn is that instead of being seduced by the New Deal and the Popular Front into supporting the war, Flynn was led by his thoroughgoing antiwar stance to challenge the developing state worship of modern liberalism. Flynn’s essential insight — that the threat to America is not to be found in any foreign capitol, but in Washington, D.C.
NY: Doubleday, 1940
