Professor James Whitman reports:
Early in the Autumn of 1934, after several weeks of bureaucratic intrigue within the Roosevelt White House, General Hugh Johnson was forced to resign as chief of the National Recovery Administration. For some months, the President had resisted pressure to dismiss Johnson, who had presided over the NRA in erratic and impolitic fashion. But in late September, after several instances of egregious misbehavior on Johnson's part, the President pushed him out. A few weeks later, General Johnson gave his farewell speech, invoking the "shining name" of Benito Mussolini It was not the first time that the Director of the NRA, who was widely rumored to have fascist inclinations, had spoken glowingly of Italian practices. Nor was General Johnson alone in the early New Deal years. A startling number of New Dealers had kind words for Mussolini. Rexford Tugwell spoke of the virtues of the Italian Fascist order. So did internal NRA studies. And the President himself expressed interest in bringing the programs of "that admirable Italian gentleman" to America. Moreover, the early New Dealers seemed, to many contemporaries, willing to pass beyond praise into active imitation. To supporters and critics alike, General Johnson's NRA, a vast scheme for delegating governmental authority to private cartels, seemed akin to the "corporativism" of Italian Fascism. Only with the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 did the New Dealers abruptly drop their public praise for Italian Fascism (at the same moment that Cole Porter abruptly dropped, from his popular hit, the line "You're the top! You're Mussolini!")
By an amazing coincidence , the three musketeers of the National Recovery Act (FDR, Hugh Johnson, and Bernard Baruch) all had offices at 120 Broadway in New York City in the 1920's. As Professor
Antony Sutton has explained:
The National Recovery Administration, most important segment of the New Deal, was then designed, constructed, and promoted by Wall Street. In essence, the NRA originated with Bernard Baruch and his long-time assistant General Johnson. In detail, NRA was the Swope Plan, and its general principles were promoted over the years by numerous prominent Wall Streeters.
There were, of course, planning variants from the socialists and Marxist-influenced planners, but these variants were not the versions that finally became NRA. NRA was essentially fascist in that industry, not central state planners, had the authority to plan, and these industrial planners came from the New York financial establishment. Bernard Baruch's office was at 120 Broadway; the offices of Franklin D. Roosevelt (the New York offices of Fidelity & Deposit and the law offices of Roosevelt & O'Connor) were also at 120 Broadway. Gerard Swope's office and the executive offices of General Electric Company were at the same address. We can therefore say in a limited sense that the Roosevelt NRA was born at 120 Broadway, New York City.
A look at fascism, American style.
