CHAPTER 1

Dissonant Voices

As the crisp stillness of autumn settled into the Midwest, roughly 2,000 people packed into the Concordia Turner Hall auditorium, a few blocks south of downtown St. Louis. It was October 19, 1936, and the upcoming presidential election loomed just two weeks away. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were hosting rallies in the Gateway City to secure last-minute votes, but instead of saddling up with a major party, the assembled citizens at Concordia Turner represented an ultraconservative splinter faction. This particular meeting had been organized by two insurgent far-right organizations, the National Jeffersonian Democrats and the Independent Coalition of American Women. After the crowd settled in, event chairman Isaac H. Lionberger introduced the keynote speaker, former Missouri Senator James A. Reed, the leader of the Jeffersonian Democrats. The crowd whooped and hollered as Reed strode to the stage. When Reed reached the dais, Lionberger praised him as “the greatest Democrat we now have in this country.” Reed was seventy-five years old, but he still bore the presence of a man who had spent years thrilling crowds from the stump. He shucked his coat and rolled up his sleeves, ready to denounce the greatest threat to the nation and his beloved Democratic Party: current president, and fellow Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.¹

Reed stoked the crowd like a plain-folks preacher, his voice swelling with passion as he condemned Roosevelt for abandoning traditional Democratic tenets. “I’m here fighting the cause of the Democratic Party tonight. What there is left of it,” Reed declared. Roosevelt and his liberal cabal had subjugated the Democratic Party, Reed said, and dragged “it over into Red territory.” In fact, Reed quipped, “I make the assertion that there isn’t a chemist in the world who could analyze a Russian Bolshevist and analyze the New Deal and tell which was the Bolshevist and which was the New Deal.”² He impressed upon the audience the importance of saving their party from the clutches of New Deal communism. It was an audacious notion. Retrenching the tidal wave of modern liberalism required putting radical thoughts into action. To Reed’s mind, the only path forward entailed supporting the lesser of two evils, which meant convincing these dissident Democrats to spurn their own party and vote Republican in the coming election.

Four years earlier, Roosevelt’s election had altered the trajectory of American politics. Roosevelt delivered a liberal revolution that rippled throughout the U.S. polity, a “new deal” that transformed the very relationship between the people and the federal government. He pledged to build America “from the bottom up and not from the top down” and mobilize government resources on behalf of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”³ To make good on that promise, Roosevelt called a special session of Congress the day after his inauguration. For one hundred days, Congress was a conveyor belt of New Deal legislation. Bills flew out the door to stabilize the banking industry, establish public works programs, create a safety net for struggling farmers and the unemployed, and implement long-overdue regulations on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s New Deal erected a welfare state atop the country’s capitalist foundation, a middle path of regulatory liberalism that circumvented both laissez-faire economics and state-planned socialism.⁴

Rather than viewing Roosevelt’s New Deal as salubrious progressivism, however, the far right spied red-tinged state tyranny. Most ultraconservatives during the 1930s were grassroots activists and former politicians who did not have to satisfy a constituency or maintain a political alliance, which freed them to spread their unvarnished, and at times unpopular, convictions. The far right’s disavowal of modern liberalism was not a simple policy disagreement or a prosaic debate over constitutional boundaries. Roosevelt, in their valuation, was a Marxist in sheep’s clothing, his New Deal a Trojan horse for communist revolution. Bainbridge Colby, the former secretary of state turned far-right activist, lamented that the Democratic Party was becoming a “thoroughgoing Socialist Party,” while Reed took it a step further by calling the New Deal an “unholy combination of Communism, Socialism, and Bolshevism.”⁵ Reed concluded his St. Louis speech to rapturous applause: “How much further will [Roosevelt] trample upon our Bill of Rights? What wild scheme might be germinating in his brain, or in the brain of some communist advisor? Such a man is not fit to hold the office of president of the United States.” Indeed, fears of un-American subversion beset the ultraconservative mind.

The ultraconservative revolt was not simple backlash politics, but a movement with deep roots weaving through both parties and tracing back to the previous century. The nativism, laissez-faire economics, and white supremacy that permeated late nineteenth century America formed the far right’s ideological heritage. In the early twentieth century, rampant paranoia about cultural decay, communist infiltration, and racial upheaval further directed the ultraconservative political compass. This ideological seedbed bolstered the far right’s perception that the New Deal had sparked an existential crisis between a free society and state paternalism. Red-baiting rhetoric, as illustrated by Reed’s speech, doubled as both a strategy to encourage political involvement and a cipher for larger structural critiques about the purpose and purview of government. During the lean years of the Great Depression, ultraconservatives occasionally found allies in right-wing Republicans, who held fast to their pro-business conservatism and despised the New Deal’s cooperation with labor, corporate tax increases, and mushrooming government programs. The far right also collaborated with conservative Democrats who accused Roosevelt of forsaking Democratic traditions. Though some ultraconservatives maintained their party affiliations, the far right as a whole was less driven by partisan loyalties than by a sense of ideological purity and righteous aggrievement. Ultimately, the far right’s ideological blend of economic libertarianism, social traditionalism, anti-statism, white supremacy, and conspiratorial anti-communism catalyzed right-wing action during an era of liberal hegemony.⁶

An interconnected web of ultraconservative reactionaries and organizations coalesced to disrupt Roosevelt’s New Deal revolution. Far-right leaders such as Reed, cattleman J. Evetts Haley, and former congressman Jouett Shouse represented the tip of the spear. Their groups served as critical nodes within the far-right network, each a point of convergence for embittered right-wingers. Shouse’s American Liberty League, an organization created and funded by wealthy elites, cloaked its illiberalism in a veil of constitutionalism, patriotic fervor, and paeans to individual and economic liberty. Reed’s National Jeffersonian Democrats attempted to redeem the Democratic Party through states’ rights arguments and conspiracies about federal and communist terror. Southern Jeffersonian chapters, particularly Haley’s Jeffersonian Democrats of Texas, peppered their rhetoric with white supremacy and southern agrarianism. While the Jeffersonians teamed up with the Liberty League in 1936, reactionary and quasi-fascist third parties, such as the Union Party and Christian Party, also formed to contest Roosevelt’s reelection bid. The breadth of far-right movements illustrated the depth of conservative disillusion during the height of New Deal liberalism. Furthermore, the conspiratorial, anti-statist mindset of 1930s ultraconservatives festered over time, fueling future right-wing activism and shaping the contours of midcentury conservatism.⁷

Mid-twentieth century ultraconservatives did not emerge in a vacuum—they built their movement upon preexisting strains of conservatism. In the late nineteenth century, disparate, and at times paradoxical, right-wing movements and ideologies permeated American society. Conservatism, broadly conceived, crossed party lines. The Democratic Party, especially in the South, was often viewed as the bastion of limited government and states’ rights. The Republicans, on the other hand, were divided between the laissez-faire impulses of the old guard, the nativist fears of social traditionalists, and the pro-government tendencies of nascent progressives. Conservatism stretched beyond Washington, too. As populist agrarian movements challenged the influence of the business elite, economic titans and their allies developed libertarian arguments to preserve their status, protect their property, and defend against federal economic regulations. These libertarians, such as political economist William Graham Sumner and steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, disdained social traditions and instead promoted a hierarchical, ruthless capitalism in which inequality fired the engines of progress. But their libertarianism proved situational. Industry magnates often used police power, whether governmental or mercenary, to crack down on union organizing, illustrating that state power in the spirit of “law and order” could be used to bolster the might of capital. On the other hand, social traditionalists distrusted the power of capital and yearned for a return to an idealized past where an entrenched cultural hierarchy commanded deference and civility. Traditionalist conservatives pulled from the ranks of ministers, Republican Mugwumps, and northeastern writers, all of which were groups united by fears of cultural decay, often viewing immigration and direct democracy as a civilizational threat.⁸

In the South, a region dominated by the Democratic Party, traditionalism took the form of white supremacy and an adherence to states’ rights. Defeat during the Civil War and the upheaval of Reconstruction produced among southerners a sense of unity as “oppressed” people, struggling under the yoke of northern federal tyranny. A prickly sense of pride and tradition dominated the old Confederacy. Southerners yearned for a return to antebellum social norms. To “redeem” the South, conservatives reduced black Americans to second-class citizens through Jim Crow segregation, and terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan enforced a strict racial hierarchy through extrajudicial violence, all of which extended the nation’s legacy of brutal racism well into the twentieth century. While these disparate conservatives did not always align ideologically, all three factions—traditionalists, proto-libertarians, and southern conservatives—shared an antipathy for the federal government and a fear of radical change. Looking forward, the mid-century far right emerged from the same ideological waters that nourished the nineteenth century’s conservative mainstream. Whether it was anxieties about economic interventionism, militant unionists, or socialist meddlers, anti-statism and anti-radicalism (soon-to-be anti-communism) often served as the bonding elements for the broader conservative movement.⁹

Around the turn of the century, new right-wing ideals and movements intermixed with and built upon Gilded Age conservatism. The patriotic jingoism of President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt and xenophobic nativism of Congressman Martin Dies Sr., a conservative Texas Democrat and father of far-right congressman Martin Dies Jr., promulgated a sense of American superiority and implied that immigration allowed inferior, alien cultures to infiltrate the United States. Though Teddy camped in the progressive wing of the Republican Party and embraced popular democracy, his belief in rule by the elite, his contempt for immigrants, and his glorification of violence in the name of progress denoted a more conservative core. Early twentieth-century conservatism also housed a nationalist wing which opposed internationalism and sought to maintain American neutrality as World War I heated up in Europe. War came anyway, bringing both a more active federal government and an abrogation of civil rights. When President Woodrow Wilson proposed an international alliance, the League of Nations, to prevent future wars, Republicans such as Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued that the League would trample the Constitution and erode American sovereignty. Even some of Wilson’s fellow Democrats, including Missouri senator James A. Reed, a soon-to-be ultraconservative activist, opposed joining the League. Replacing nationalism with internationalism, they argued, was a key tenet of communism. The tension between foreign policy hawks and anti-interventionists remained unresolved and continued to percolate throughout the twentieth-century conservative movement. Nevertheless, Gilded Age and early twentieth-century right-wing philosophies—nationalism, laissez-faire economics, social traditionalism, white supremacy, anti-statism—formed the ideological bedrock for both mainstream conservatives and intransigent ultraconservatives.¹⁰

As the country sprinted into the postwar era, the sociopolitical environment of the Roaring Twenties provided multiple ideological touchstones for the midcentury far right. The United States emerged relatively unscathed from World War I, but Russia’s communist revolution combined with fears of immigration to create a burst of paranoia that rippled throughout postwar society. American journalist John Reed called Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 the “ten days that shook the world,” an event that paved the way for the First Red Scare, a high tide of xenophobic nationalism, ideological repression, and violence against minorities and labor unionists. The instability born out of the transition to a peacetime society fostered economic unrest. Conservatives viewed the battles between labor and capital as a microcosm of the larger war between socialist-collectivism and capitalism. Previous examples of radical violence, such as President William McKinley’s assassination at the hands of an anarchist in 1901, and high-profile events such as the 1919 Boston Police Strike and the 1920 Wall Street bombing heightened the perception that foreign “bolshevism” was invading American shores. The postwar decade, in short, created a petri dish for reactionary conservatism.¹¹

The First Red Scare conjured an enemy—communism—that conservatives blamed for socioeconomic problems and exploited for political gain, a red-baiting strategy absorbed and employed by future far-right activists. Mainstream conservatism ascended as right-wing Republicans won the presidency in 1920 on a ticket featuring anti-intellectual, pro-business Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio and Calvin Coolidge, the union-busting governor of Massachusetts. Xenophobia and anti-communism reverberated throughout Harding’s and Coolidge’s presidencies. During the 1924 presidential election Coolidge asked “whether America will allow itself to be degraded into a communistic and socialistic state, or whether it will remain American.”¹² Coolidge’s words hinted at undercurrents of nativist nationalism and highlighted conservative Republicans’ willingness to harness anti-communist anxieties for partisan purposes. The language of anti-communism not only defended American institutions that were supposedly under assault from alien ideologies, but also fused together with anti-statism to form the binding agent that melded disparate conservative ideologies into a coherent whole. When red-scare impulses flared again in the mid-twentieth century, ultraconservatives capitalized. Kent Courtney, a third-party agitator and far-right pamphleteer, sent a letter chastising Congress: “Every Congressman should be a militant anti-Communist. In this cold war there is no room for halfhearted Americans.”¹³ Anti-communism served as a political action strategy for defeating progressive reform while simultaneously congealing into a critical component of modern conservatism’s ideological foundation, one that guided the far right’s political instincts in particular.¹⁴

Concern over atrophy at the hands of communist saboteurs or state tyrants extended into the economic realm, leading far-right and mainstream conservatives to develop intellectual defenses of free-market capitalism. Influenced by their laissez-faire forebears, conservatives of all stripes viewed free-market economics as a crucial bulwark against the Red Menace. The nation’s economy roared after the initial postwar turbulence, bolstering conservatives’ faith in free enterprise. Harding and Coolidge initiated policies favored by business leaders, such as high tariffs, low taxes, and deregulation. Herbert Hoover, then serving as commerce secretary, implemented his “associative state,” which aligned the interests of government and capital, empowering businessmen while obviating large bureaucracies. Despite the fact that Republicans had their thumb on the scale for capital, many businessmen and wealthy elites viewed federal power as a menace to economic freedom. Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken, both godfathers of the midcentury libertarian movement, took a dim view of government. In his short-lived periodical, Freeman, Nock promoted his own radical Jeffersonian vision in which prosperity and progress came only through individual and economic liberty. Though Nock’s anti-statism seemed at odds with Hoover’s “associative state,” each philosophy held an overarching aversion to progressive economic interventionism and a faith in free enterprise. The state, according to Nock, was a destroyer rather than a defender of freedom. This anti-statist language became a staple of far-right thought. According to John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, “The greatest enemy of man is, and always has been, government.”¹⁵ Ultraconservative activist Willis E. Stone later helmed a Nockian crusade to abolish the income tax and fight the “bureaucratic domination” and “communistic empires” within the federal government.¹⁶ The midcentury far-right vanguard embodied the fact that libertarianism had crystallized into an ideological staple of the broader conservative movement.¹⁷

Religious right-wingers also used the Roaring Twenties as a springboard for conservative activism. The culture war between traditionalism and modernism, particularly the teaching of evolution and Darwinism, convinced fundamentalists that American society was in crisis. Driven by a conservative theological philosophy, fundamentalists championed individual conversion experiences, biblical inerrancy, and a broad evangelical mission. Culture wars widened the rifts between liberal modernists and right-wing fundamentalists, dividing major northern denominations, such as the Baptists and Presbyterians; however, modernism failed to penetrate the South’s thicket of conservative evangelicalism. Southern evangelicals would soon transport their religious conservatism westward, weaving a fundamentalist thread throughout the Sunbelt. Imbued with faith to purify society, fundamentalists fought against the “one-world, secular” League of Nations and railed against the secularization of public schools. The fundamentalist movement provided a rallying point for ultraconservatives. For example, minister Gerald B. Winrod cut his teeth as an anti-evolution, anti-modernism crusader; he embraced the fundamentalist label, founded the Defenders of the Christian Faith, and eventually became an anti-Semitic fascist during the Great Depression. Thirty years after the culture wars of the 1920s, fundamentalists continued to view the world through a binary lens, though one sharpened by the global communist-capitalist divide rather than the battles over modernism. “There are no two ways about this question,” wrote Billy James Hargis, founder of the Christian Crusade. “We are either pro-Christ or pro-Communist.”¹⁸ Fundamentalism, like anti-communism and free-market libertarianism, bridged 1920s conservatism to the midcentury radical right and eventually evolved into a critical component of the conservative movement.¹⁹

The cultural anxieties of the postwar era fueled white supremacy and set off ugly episodes of racial violence throughout the United States. The Red Summer of 1919, part of the broader Red Scare, witnessed dozens of race massacres in major cities such as Chicago and Washington. Roving bands of white vigilantes attacked black citizens, leading to hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, and untold amounts of property damage. In 1921, white mobs destroyed the affluent black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing at least twenty-five black residents and torching thirty-five city blocks. Lynchings plagued the nation, particularly the South. Between the years 1889 and 1924, over 3,000 people, the vast majority of them African American, were lynched. The number of vigilante murders diminished during the 1920s due, in part, to an extensive anti-lynching campaign led by women such as Ida B. Wells and Jessie Daniel Ames. Nevertheless, the turmoil allowed southerners to further entrench racial apartheid in the old Confederate states. Segregation and disenfranchisement thrived. Despite the violence and civil rights abuses, the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers and intellectuals, came together to defend southern culture. Modernity, they cried, threatened the South’s traditional social hierarchy. The Agrarians produced a book, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, which contained defenses of segregation and white supremacy, Confederate apologias, and paeans to southern nationalism. Mid-twentieth century conservatives, from far-right agitators such as J. Evetts Haley to pragmatists such as William F. Buckley Jr., embraced Agrarian writers as conservative forebears who valued social order and tradition while opposing communism and the state leviathan.²⁰

White supremacy reached a fevered crescendo in the 1920s, which fostered a renascence of the Ku Klux Klan, born again as Protestant defenders of Americanism. Unlike its Reconstruction era predecessor, the 1920s Klan was a mainstream social and political movement. The second Klan spread beyond the confines of the old Confederacy, cultivating a following in the Midwest, Southwest, and West Coast. It established headquarters in major cities such as Houston, Indianapolis, and Portland. Right-wing ministers, including future televangelist Robert Schuller and fundamentalist preacher Bob Jones Sr., lauded the Klan as a bulwark protecting white Protestant America. Through grassroots action and an aggressive membership drive, the Klan gained tangible, and bipartisan, political power. Indiana’s Republican governor, Houston’s Democratic mayor, Oregon’s Republican speaker of the house—all Klansmen. At the height of its influence, the group claimed as many as six million members, though the actual figure is likely closer to one or two million. The Klan’s middle-class membership and festive social gatherings resembled the Rotary more than a ragtag cadre of murderous Confederate veterans. Nevertheless, visceral racism and vigilantism lurked close to the surface.²¹

By fusing Protestant morality with preexisting strains of nativism and race hatred, the second Klan created a cocktail of far-right conservatism. Only native-born, Protestant whites were considered “100%” or “true” Americans, according to Klan thinking. Numerous immigrant groups and religious and racial minorities morphed into categorical “others” who represented a latent threat to white American society. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans demonized Catholics as an “alien” influence spreading discord and sowing a “crop of evils.”²² In 1922, 6,000 people gathered at the Portland Municipal Auditorium to hear Klansman R. H. Sawyer rage, “The negro in whose blood flows the mad desire for race amalgamation is more dangerous than a maddened wild beast.”²³ Though the Klan’s membership plummeted during the late 1920s, the result of numerous violent scandals, its legacy lived on. Segregationists continued to deploy red-baiting, racist rhetoric as the fight for civil rights challenged the country’s racial hierarchy and traditional social norms. The second Klan ultimately reflected a political tradition of white supremacy that stretched from the Reconstruction era through the mid-twentieth century. More broadly, if late nineteenth-century conservatism formed the far right’s ideological bedrock, then the conservatism of the 1920s built upon that edifice, laying the groundwork for future generations of far-right activists.²⁴

Indeed, the ultraconservative movement grew out of the same ideological soil that nourished mainstream conservatism, germinating a reactionary mass desperate to defend America from perceived subversion. The far right soon got the chance to man the barricades, because by 1934 a sea change had swept through American politics. Republican conservatism declined, humbled by the Great Depression, while Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism ascended. Though the southern conservative wing of the Democratic Party remained entrenched and powerful, Roosevelt’s liberal coalition charted a new policy course from Washington. Rather than viewing liberty through the lens of economic freedom, a conservative axiom, Roosevelt defined liberty as economic security for the entire spectrum of American society, from the most vulnerable citizens to banks and industry. The New Deal instituted regulations on the banking sector, committed the government to the welfare of Americans, promised millions of dollars in aid to farmers, and established massive public works relief programs. Additionally, Roosevelt’s progressive liberalism created an environment that empowered workers and encouraged average Americans to get more involved in politics.²⁵

Yet, where Roosevelt saw a restoration of American promise, conservatives spied looming government oppression. Conservatives, ranging from mainstream politicians to radical activists, distrusted Roosevelt’s flexing of state power. Right-wing Republicans bemoaned the erosion of individual and economic liberty and constitutional order, and some, including former President Hoover, spoke to the far right by crowning Roosevelt a socialist bent on wealth redistribution and the destruction of capitalism. Southern Democrats, on the other hand, feared that Roosevelt’s reforms would upend the South’s exploitative labor system and traditions of white supremacy, so they fought against the New Deal and successfully hampered the benefits extended to minorities and farm laborers. The nascent conservative business movement, led by groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers and Leonard Read’s Foundation for Economic Education, believed that New Deal reforms curtailed the autonomy, power, and prestige of business. Right-wing businesspeople criticized the federal expansion and deficit spending of New Deal liberalism and lifted up free-market economics as a necessary bulwark protecting capitalism from socialist meddling. Mainstream and far-right conservatives alike failed to smother Roosevelt’s New Deal, but their arguments overlapped substantially, establishing the necessary ideological infrastructure for a broad conservative alliance.²⁶

Even though the New Deal served as a buoy, rather than an anchor, for capitalism, ultraconservatives stoked anti-statist resentment, establishing themselves as the shock troops for the American Right. Roosevelt’s left turn in 1935, particularly the labor-friendly Wagner Act and proposed tax hikes on wealthy elites and corporations, spurred a right-wing revolt. Not content to fight the New Deal within the normal boundaries of polite debate, the far right proffered conspiracy theories depicting Roosevelt as a communist bent on destroying America. Such conspiratorial language ran the gamut from overheated accusations of planned state tyranny to bigoted anti-Semitic diatribes about the “Jew Deal.” In his magnum opus, Our Enemy, the State, Nock characterized the federal government as “blundering, wasteful, and vicious,” a leviathan intent on transforming social power into state despotism.²⁷ Anti-Semite James True asserted that his organization, James True Associates, existed to contest “the Jew Communism which the New Deal is trying to force on America.”²⁸ Most mainstream politicians avoided public anti-Semitic commentary, but anti-communist conspiracies and libertarian rhetoric flooded the political discourse.²⁹

Rather than solely representing an extremist fringe, conspiratorial anti-communism had deep roots within the conservative intellectual and political tradition. Many of Roosevelt’s critics, from ultraconservatives to mainstream right-wingers, utilized the occasional hysterical, red-baiting diatribe for partisan gain. Hoover warned that the New Deal would “enslave” taxpayers. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican, said Americans were “living under [a] political dictatorship,” and Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Henry P. Fletcher compared Roosevelt to Hitler and Mussolini and derided the New Deal as “lettered on the Russian model.”³⁰ This strategy helped conservatives claw back power, especially when the New Deal lost steam in the late 1930s. Republican Robert Taft of Ohio, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1938, warned that the New Deal would “practically abandon the whole theory of American government, and inaugurate what is in fact socialism.”³¹ Anti-communism provided a useful cudgel for portraying New Deal liberalism as a red tide threatening America. But for some conservatives, particularly the far right, conspiracies alleging communist subversion served as both strategy and axiom. Ultraconservatives viewed themselves as hardnosed truth-tellers, warning that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a veil for communist revolution, and the fact that mainstream conservatives utilized the same anti-communist rhetoric lent legitimacy to far-right crusaders.

James A. Reed, the former Democratic senator from Missouri, was a leader of this ultraconservative vanguard. Known to friends and colleagues as Jim, Reed hailed from a family of midwestern farmers. His father, John Reed, and older brother died during his youth, forcing a young Jim to mature quickly. He helped his mother, Nancy Reed, take care of the farm and attended public school before spending a few semesters at Parsons Seminary (now Coe College). Reed hailed from a family steeped in American politics—one of his ancestors, David Reed, was sued by George Washington over land in Pennsylvania—but Jim turned away from his Republican lineage upon hearing Senator John G. Carlisle, a Kentucky Democrat, bemoan how Republican tariffs hurt farmers. After becoming a lawyer and marrying his wife, Lura Olmstead, Reed moved his family to Kansas City, Missouri, and established a law practice. At the turn of the century Reed ran for and won his first elected office, serving as the Kansas City mayor from 1900 through 1904. Reed’s allies viewed him as a “law and order” do-gooder, but opponents caught a whiff of authoritarianism when Reed deployed local police forces and replaced judges to root out perceived municipal corruption.³²

After winning an open Senate seat in 1910, Reed forged a career as a loyal Democrat so long as the national party dedicated itself to Jeffersonian, small-government ideals. For most of his life, Reed chastised the GOP as “the champion of privilege, the tool of manufacturing and capitalistic interests.” He viewed his own party as the protector of “the natural liberties of man,” an antagonist toward “every form of special privilege and every kind of tyranny.”³³ A staunch reactionary, Reed believed in a particular narrative of American history. For example, he characterized the Reconstruction era as unconstitutional northern oppression. The “blackest pages in our political history,” Reconstruction, according to Reed, was a “good example of what happens under a centralized government without states’ rights.”³⁴ He saw the federal government as “a pauper” that can only “take from people who possess property” and “give that property to others.”³⁵ To Reed’s mind, empowering the government meant eroding individual liberties and traveling the path of communism.

The climax of Reed’s political career proved to be his key role in defeating the League of Nations. Despite his Democratic loyalties, Reed joined with Republicans to criticize the League, issuing standard conservative warnings of an erosion of constitutional principles and a loss of national sovereignty; however, Reed also stooped to the level of race-baiting. “The majority of the nations composing the league do not belong to the white race,” Reed declared. “On the contrary, they are a conglomerate of the black, yellow, brown, and red races, frequently so intermixed and commingled as to constitute an unclassified mongrel breed.” According to Reed, this “colored League of Nations” would be dominated by “degenerate races” who were “low in the scale of civilization.”³⁶ This type of rhetoric not only reflected the xenophobia of the postwar era, it was also a bigoted appeal to southern Democrats and other white Americans terrified by the prospect of racial equality. President Woodrow Wilson, the League’s driving force, scorned Reed for his defiance, calling him a “marplot” and urging Missourians to turn him out in 1922.³⁷ Instead, Reed won a third term.

Reed defined himself as a defender of individual liberty and states’ rights, an heir to the mantle of Thomas Jefferson. Yet, his words and actions occasionally raised questions about his views on race and state power. A few years after stumping against the “colored” League of Nations, Reed supported the Immigration Act of 1924, which implemented severe immigration restrictions, particularly from nonwhite, non-European countries. Three years later, when a Jewish farm organizer sued Henry Ford for libel for his anti-Semitic, conspiratorial columns in the Dearborn Independent, Reed helmed Ford’s legal defense. Reed disclaimed any sympathies for Ford’s anti-Semitism; in fact, back in 1916 Reed gave a speech in which he proclaimed, “To the Jew let me say, the land of America is also your land.”³⁸ But the fact that he joined Ford’s defense team, not to mention his racist diatribes during the debate over the League of Nations, cast doubt upon Reed’s professions of tolerance. Nevertheless, he remained a popular figure, especially in Missouri. One year after the Ford case, in 1928, Reed ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on, as one writer put it, “the plain, old-fashioned platform of Jackson Democracy.”³⁹ Lee Meriwether—former special ambassador to France and future Jeffersonian Democrat leader—coordinated Reed’s campaign and became one of his closest confidants. Reed won two states, Missouri and Wisconsin, but, after losing the nomination to New York’s Al Smith, he retired from the Senate and returned to his Kansas City law firm. “To be a fraud is safer and happier in Washington today than it has been since March 4, 1911,” wrote H. L. Mencken in American Mercury, “For James A. Reed … has hung up his sword and gone home to Missouri.”⁴⁰

Reed supported Roosevelt’s presidential bid in 1932 because he was a loyal Democrat; he even assailed Hoover for establishing “capitalistic socialism.”⁴¹ However, the New Deal’s federal experimentation convinced the Missourian that Roosevelt represented a grave threat to America. Much of Reed’s hatred of the New Deal stemmed from his strict constitutional interpretation and a narrow reading of the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave the federal government the power to levy a national income tax. Reed regarded Roosevelt’s tax policies as “robbery perpetrated by the government in defiance of the other provisions of the Constitution.”⁴² At times, Reed’s speeches revealed a paranoid mind. “They rush into homes,” Reed asserted of New Dealers, “spy upon people, shoot down citizens without warrant and without right, inspect the books of partnerships and corporations from the small to the great, and undertake in every imaginable way the supervision and regulation of humanity.”⁴³ Reed never provided any evidence for such state-sponsored violence, but he was less interested in forming a factual critique of the New Deal than fostering anti-government anxieties. “You cannot make socialism and communism democracy by calling them the ‘new deal,’” Reed thundered at a Detroit speaking engagement. “Being a Democrat,” he continued, “it follows that I am not a Communist, a Socialist, a Bolshevist, or a combination of all three, and that, therefore, I am not a New Dealer.” After his address in Detroit, eight Michigan area radio stations carried Reed’s message and multiple newspapers, including the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun, transcribed portions of his speech.⁴⁴ The Kansas City Times reprinted Reed’s address in its entirety. The widespread media coverage convinced Reed that millions of other Americans shared his anti–New Deal animus, a reactionary mass waiting to be awoken by fellow patriots.⁴⁵

Conservatives gravitated to Reed’s orbit. Meriwether, then working as an attorney in St. Louis, told Reed, “My own thought is that the thing to do now is to put a brake on the Socialist wheels of Roosevelt’s wagon; and the most effective way to apply the brake is to elect Congressmen who will not say Amen to all Roosevelt’s demands.”⁴⁶ James M. Beck, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, broached the idea of a new conservative party. Beck believed at least one-third of House Democrats did not sympathize with the New Deal and wondered if “the only way to save our form of government would be a coalition party which could be called the Constitution Party, which would merge conservative Republicans with conservative Democrats.”⁴⁷ Enthused, Meriwether wrote back, “I think with you, that in this emergency differences over minor matters should be put aside, and that conservative democrats would join with conservative republicans in trying to prevent any further march in the direction of Moscow.”⁴⁸ For these right-wingers, the New Deal represented a new type of threat, one that warranted forgetting partisan squabbles in favor of forging a unified conservative front against a despotic, communist-inspired foe. The desire to consolidate conservative factions by redrawing partisan lines increasingly became a central impulse of the modern conservative movement. Reed shared the sentiment. “I do not know what to say about attempting to organize a party to head off what is now going on,” Reed wrote, “but if anything is to be done, it ought to be started.”⁴⁹

As Reed and his cohort contemplated staging a conservative revolt in 1934, a group of right-wing industrialists formed the American Liberty League to contest New Deal liberalism. The League desired a return to the “employer’s paradise” of the Gilded Age, setting an important foundation for the conservative business movement. The organization started with a series of correspondence between John J. Raskob, DuPont vice president and former Democratic chairman, and retired executive R. R. M. Carpenter. Raskob argued that industrialists needed an organization “to protect society from the sufferings which it is bound to endure if we allow communistic elements to lead the people to believe that all businessmen are crooks.”⁵⁰ He knew that business executives feared the popularity of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and he figured, correctly, that their economic anxiety could spark the League’s creation. The founding members and financiers of the American Liberty League read like a Who’s Who of prominent industrialists, including Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors; the du Pont brothers, Irénée, Lammot, and Pierre; president of Sun Oil J. Howard Pew; Sewell L. Avery of Montgomery Ward; and Weirton Steel executives Ernest T. Weir and Earl F. Reed. On paper the League’s board of directors seemed bipartisan, but it was dominated by anti-labor, anti-statist conservatives, including Irénée du Pont, Democrats Al Smith and John W. Davis, Republican congressman James W. Wadsworth of New York, and former New York Republican governor Nathan L. Miller. The former chair of the Democratic Party’s executive committee, Jouett Shouse, served as the League’s president.⁵¹

Jouett Shouse was born in rural Woodford County, Kentucky, in 1879 to John Samuel Shouse, a Disciples of Christ minister, and Anna Armstrong. During his youth, the Shouse family moved to neighboring Missouri, where a young Jouett attended the University of Missouri before dropping out at the end of his junior year. Jouett found the newspaper industry more fruitful and soon returned to Kentucky to work as a staff writer and editor of the Lexington Herald and the Kentucky Farmer and Breeder. After he married his wife, Marion Edwards, the pair relocated to Kansas and Shouse embarked on a political career. In 1912, Jouett aligned himself with the Democratic Party, running for and winning a Kentucky state senate seat. Two years later, he earned a promotion to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing one of Kansas’s largest wheat-growing regions, the seventh congressional district. Shouse gained an appointment to the Banking and Currency Committee, where he befriended Chairman Carter Glass, a states’ rights Democrat from Virginia. After losing his seat in 1918, Shouse moved into the private sector, serving as a director for various corporations and establishing a tax-counseling partnership with former Kansas congressman Dudley Doolittle.⁵²

Despite no longer holding elected office, Shouse remained politically active and grew more conservative as he aged. He became an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (serving under Secretary Glass), headed Kansas’s Democratic National Committee (DNC) delegation in 1920 and 1924, and convinced Kansas delegates to support Al Smith’s candidacy in 1928. Shouse served on Smith’s Executive and Advisory Committee, working closely with committee chairman and future Liberty Leaguer John Raskob. After Smith’s devastating loss to Hoover, Shouse became the chairman of the DNC Executive Committee, where he hammered Hoover and the Republicans for the country’s economic turmoil. The year 1932 proved transitional for Shouse. He lost his bid to become the DNC’s permanent chairman and give the DNC keynote address, so he turned to political organizing. At the behest of Pierre du Pont, Shouse served as the president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, but he continued to stump for the Democrats and voted for Roosevelt in 1932. It was the last time he ever voted for the Democratic Party. Shouse opposed the New Deal in its entirety and accused Roosevelt’s “totalitarian government” of abandoning the Democratic Party’s traditional states’ rights moorings. His anti-statist inclinations and relationships with industrial giants made him the perfect figure to helm the Liberty League’s crusade.⁵³

The Liberty League became a vehicle for the capital class to oppose New Deal liberalism. Its founding statement indicated a conservative mission to “defend and uphold the constitution,” “teach the necessity and respect for the rights of persons and property,” and “foster the right to work, earn, save, and acquire property, and to preserve the ownership and lawful use of property when acquired.”⁵⁴ In short, the League thought the government existed to protect wealth and privilege. To the far right, the fight for political and economic power was a zero-sum game. Roosevelt’s New Deal threatened to diminish their privilege by uplifting exploited groups, including tenant farmers, factory workers, and racial minorities—an inversion of the existing hierarchy. Any attempt to regulate capital and restrict the hand of the free market fueled what historian Lawrence B. Glickman called an “elite victimization” complex.⁵⁵ Essentially, these industrialists thought they were the “forgotten men” of the Great Depression. Senator Elmer Thomas, an Oklahoma Democrat and staunch New Dealer, saw through the façade, calling the group an “anti-Roosevelt organization” formed by “die-hards and standpatters who from the start have disagreed with President Roosevelt’s New Deal program.”⁵⁶ The Christian Science Monitor observed that the League united “the extreme conservative wings of both major parties” and “plainly sets off its objectives as hostile to those of the New Deal.”⁵⁷ Nevertheless, immense funding and appeals to economic freedom earned the League an ephemeral spurt of fame, propelling the organization’s expansion into twenty-two states. “From the way the letters are coming in,” Shouse grinned as he picked up roughly 1,000 letters from the New York office, “this appears to be the idea of a lot of people all over the country.”⁵⁸

The League’s outspoken conservatism caught Reed’s attention, and the former senator united with Shouse against the common enemies of Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1935, Reed joined the Liberty League’s National Lawyers Committee—a group, also known as the Lawyers’ Vigilance Committee, organized to criticize the New Deal on strict constitutional grounds—and sent Shouse transcriptions of his speeches.⁵⁹ Shouse, for his part, delighted in Reed’s oratory and urged the Missourian to join the League’s national advisory board. When Reed sent Shouse one of his addresses he included a message: “It will show you that our minds are traveling along parallel lines.”⁶⁰ Certainly the two men occupied similar ideological ground. Both responded to Roosevelt’s attack against “economic royalists” by retorting that communistic New Dealers sought to arouse class warfare. The League declared that Roosevelt sided with “communists and other radicals, who are deeply ignorant of the facts of our industrial life.”⁶¹ Reed echoed this sentiment in front of a crowd of Maine conservatives: “That is the theory of all Communism and Bolshevism. It is their initial step. They come forward denouncing first those who have considerable value in property but in the end they destroy all property and deny all opportunity.”⁶² Conspiratorial rhetoric fostered anti-Roosevelt, anti-statist sentiments and lubricated connections within conservative circles. Indeed, this loose far-right coalition was waiting for the appropriate moment to awaken the reactionary vox populi and kick the usurper out of the White House.

The 1936 presidential election provided ultraconservatives with the first opportunity to defeat Roosevelt and restore the traditional order. As the election year dawned, the American Liberty League amplified its assault on Roosevelt and the New Deal. The League classified New Deal programs as a “definitive challenge to the American form of government,” and wrote, “The progressive tightening and expansion of regulation, inevitably characteristic of economic planning, is a vicious combination of Fascism, socialism and communism.”⁶³ This conflation of political extremes represented an ideological alchemy particular to the far right. In an effort to denigrate the New Deal, Liberty Leaguers derided Roosevelt as a “fascist,” “socialist,” “communist” “dictator.”⁶⁴ The most notable critique came from Al Smith, the former New York governor and erstwhile ally of Roosevelt. At a Liberty League function in late January 1936, Smith berated the Roosevelt administration for betraying Democratic principles, ballooning the deficit, enlarging the bureaucracy, and fomenting class warfare. He called Roosevelt an “autocrat” and “socialist” and characterized the New Deal as “communism in disguise.” Smith concluded his speech with a shocking, conspiratorial warning: “There can only be one Capitol, Washington or Moscow. There can only be one atmosphere of government, the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of Communistic Russia. There can only be one flag, the Stars and Stripes, or the red flag of the Godless Union of the Soviet. There can only be one national anthem, ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ or the ‘Internationale.’”⁶⁵ Smith’s diatribe, presenting an ideological binary pitting liberal communism against conservative Americanism, encapsulated the worldview of the far right. The American Liberty League fired the first shot across the bow, and New Deal Democrats soon found themselves under attack from within their own party.

Just days after Smith’s Liberty League address, a group of far-right Democrats challenged Roosevelt for control of the party’s future. Texas businessman John Henry Kirby and Georgia’s reactionary governor Eugene Talmadge issued a call to all “Jeffersonian Democrats of Southern and border States … to repudiate the New Deal.”⁶⁶ The ensuing “Grass Roots Convention” in Macon, Georgia, provided a platform for ultraconservative Democrats to air grievances against the Roosevelt administration. Liberty League patrons, including Raskob and the du Ponts, funded the gathering, illustrating that wealthy conservatives hedged their bets by backing multiple anti-Roosevelt movements. With racist flyers filtering through the crowd and a huge Confederate flag draped behind the podium, speakers railed against federal tyranny and defended southern tradition. Gerald L. K. Smith denounced Roosevelt as a “communist” and a “cripple” and characterized Eleanor Roosevelt as “the female Rasputin in the White House.”⁶⁷ Talmadge took the stage after Smith, bellowing, “If the New Dealers can pick their own Supreme Court the wheels of our democracy would catch fire and burn down our freedom.” The specter of the Civil War loomed in Talmadge’s mind: “States’ rights are in the balance today more than they were in the days of 1861.”⁶⁸ The Macon crowd, composed of thousands of anti-Roosevelt dissidents, whooped and hollered for Smith and Talmadge, but the convention did not spin off into a third party, nor did it unmoor the national Democratic Party from Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism. However, the convention precipitated and emboldened the ultraconservative grassroots movements that coalesced during the 1936 presidential election.⁶⁹

Reed emerged as a prominent leader of the right-wing resistance. As the 1936 primary season got under way, he delivered an inflammatory address in front of the Lawyers Association of Kansas City. Reed’s speech, titled “Shall We Have Constitutional Liberty or Dictatorship,” portrayed the New Deal as a paternalistic blight on American tradition. “It came like a thief in the night, and has spread with the silence and rapidity of a malignant cancer,” Reed thundered. “If it be not speedily cut out, it will soon reach and destroy the heart of American liberty!” Wielding the far right’s bipolar ideological alchemy, Reed demonized the New Deal: “They wear the cloak of the Democratic party—but beneath that honest robe are concealed the red garments of bolshevism, communism, socialism, and fascism. Nothing done by Stalin, by Mussolini, by Hitler was more drastic, more brutal, and more destructive of liberty.” Near the end of his speech Reed warned his audience against reelecting Roosevelt because they were “facing a crimson tide” that would “sweep over this country.”⁷⁰ The American Liberty League published Reed’s speech as a pamphlet, as did smaller presses such as Kansas City’s Martin Printing Company, gaining Reed a fair amount of notoriety within right-wing circles, but the way forward remained unclear as conservatives struggled to shape a national movement within the existing two-party system.

Reed expected Roosevelt to steamroll toward the Democratic Party’s nomination, but the GOP lacked a clear front-runner. Conservatives bent on opposing Roosevelt worried that the Republicans would nominate a “me-too” New Dealer, narrowing the ideological spectrum and essentially writing conservatism out of the election. Reed expressed concerns about one particular presidential hopeful, Alfred “Alf” Landon, the moderate Republican governor of Kansas. In a letter to St. Louis attorney Sterling Edmunds, Reed rejected Landon: “If, however, the Republicans nominate a man or adopt a platform leaning over toward the New Deal, there would be nothing left except to vote for the third ticket.”⁷¹ Edmunds concurred, “His nomination would give us a choice of evils.”⁷² Over the course of the Republican primaries, Senator William Borah of Idaho carried numerous states, but, much to Reed’s chagrin, Landon emerged from the national convention as the GOP’s standard bearer. Landon seemed a savvy choice to party insiders. He was the only GOP governor elected and reelected in 1932 and 1934, and Republican strategists believed he could turn out the vote in the agricultural West. In an attempt to pander to discontented conservatives, the Republican Party platform accused Roosevelt of betraying Democratic principles and proclaimed, “America is in peril.”⁷³ However, the GOP also supported numerous New Deal planks, such as Social Security, labor rights, and economic regulation. Dismayed by Landon’s nomination, Reed knew it was too late to organize an effective third party, but he hesitated to support the GOP. While Reed and his inner circle debated Landon’s merits, they bore no uncertainty of the political enemy: New Deal liberalism.

After Roosevelt gained the Democratic nomination in the early summer, Reed and Edmunds called for a meeting of conservatives to contest Roosevelt’s “collectivist policies” and “discuss what we can and should do in the present campaign.”⁷⁴ On August 7, 1936, forty delegates from twenty-two states met at Detroit’s Book-Cadillac Hotel to lay plans for grassroots action. The hotel’s Renaissance-inspired architecture provided an appropriate setting for a group that sought the rebirth of a traditionalist, conservative Democratic Party. The disgruntled attendees, all right-wing Democrats hailing mostly from midwestern and southern states, were united by their desire to defeat Roosevelt. The New Deal was a “betrayal,” they declared, an “apostasy to Democratic principles.” The conference concluded with a Declaration of Position, which condemned Roosevelt’s administration for replacing democracy with a “collectivist state” based on “the tenets and teachings of a blended communism and socialism.”⁷⁵ Multiple high-profile anti–New Dealers signed the declaration, including Reed; Democrat Joseph B. Ely, the former Massachusetts governor; Colonel Henry Breckinridge, an attorney and former Assistant Secretary of War who briefly challenged Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination; and Bainbridge Colby, a former Progressive Party leader turned Missouri Democrat. Most importantly, the Detroit conference concluded with the formation of the National Jeffersonian Democrats, a group that promoted an idealized version of American democracy that downplayed socioeconomic strife, accentuated individual freedom and states’ rights, and viewed U.S. politics through a conspiratorial anti-communist lens. The Jeffersonian Democrats, like the American Liberty League, soon became a critical node in the fledgling far-right network.⁷⁶

The National Jeffersonian Democrats, as the group’s name implied, looked to President Thomas Jefferson as their intellectual guiding light. The organization considered Jefferson the true founder of the Democratic Party and cherry-picked anti-statist philosophies from Jefferson’s political life to form their ideological core. This perspective had significant purchase among white southerners. In the announcement for the Grass Roots Convention, for example, Kirby and Talmadge wrote that Jefferson “viewed the maintenance of the Constitution and its guarantees of liberties not only as sacred, but as essential to the very existence of the republic.” Conversely, they noted, “the present Federal government in Washington has violated the venerated doctrine of States Rights … and sought to override and ignore the Constitution.” The Jeffersonian Democrats portrayed themselves as the defenders of Democratic principles being uprooted by New Deal liberalism, an ideology they considered “alien, foreign, and inimical to America and Americanism.”⁷⁷ Additionally, the fact that Thomas Jefferson believed political power should reside in the hands of a “natural aristocracy” appealed to the Jeffersonian Democrats because, like the American Liberty League, many members stemmed from the wealthy, and white, upper crust of southern and midwestern society.⁷⁸

Jefferson represented a convenient, though imperfect, vessel for conservative philosophies. Hopewell L. Rogers, the chairman of the National Jeffersonian Speakers Bureau, boiled the Jeffersonian platform down to four basic principles: “1) economic individualism, 2) political democracy, 3) social classlessness, and 4) local self-government.”⁷⁹ The call for “social classlessness” was not an egalitarian push for economic and racial equality, but instead represented the group’s attempt to define itself against the straw man of Rooseveltian class warfare. They omitted Jefferson’s slave-owning and racism—notable, considering his white supremacist views aligned with the those of many ultraconservatives—and skimmed over his expansion of federal power through the Louisiana Purchase. The Jeffersonians even ignored the fact that Roosevelt himself invoked Jefferson to justify the New Deal. Nevertheless, the Jeffersonian Democrats’ historical interpretation underscored, according to historian Patrick Allitt, the “elevation of Thomas Jefferson, once dreaded as a dangerous radical, into the hero of anti-government Southern conservatives in the twentieth century.”⁸⁰ To the minds of far-right conservatives, Roosevelt and the New Deal were an existential threat to America while Jefferson’s strict constitutionalism, advocacy for states’ rights, and defense of property represented a political panacea for halting liberal progress.⁸¹

Funding poured in to bolster the Jeffersonian crusade, particularly from right-wing businessmen. Prominent Liberty League patrons, including Sloan, the du Ponts, and Raskob, donated to the Jeffersonians. Raskob alone contributed $50,000 to the cause, and Bernard H. Kroger, founder of the Kroger grocery-store chain, donated $1,000. Louisville entrepreneur Lafon Allen contributed out of fear that Roosevelt intended to “destroy” both national parties and create his own radical coalition—though, Allen noted, “This might not be a bad thing, since we would then have a two-party alignment based upon fundamental differences of political faith, a thing which can hardly be said to have existed in this country for some years.”⁸² Perhaps this was the moment, Jeffersonians thought, to break the current party structure and erect an ideologically polarized system. The Jeffersonian Democrats’ modern media strategy helped get the word out. Gleason L. Archer Sr. used his extensive contacts with major radio networks to schedule broadcasts for the National Jeffersonians. Archer urged the Jeffersonians to purchase evening airtime because he believed a “silent vote” would be cast by the majority of “fathers and mothers who sit at their radios and listen to speakers for and against the New Deal.”⁸³ The archival record does not reveal the total amount of contributions to the National Jeffersonians, but in just one week, late in October, the organization spent nearly $100,000. The extensive funding provided a foundation for the group’s movement to depose Roosevelt and, more broadly, revealed an ideological and financial web connecting far-right groups.⁸⁴

The National Jeffersonians established their headquarters in St. Louis and dedicated themselves to grassroots action. “You, of course, know that it is extremely difficult to do any organization work from headquarters by letter,” Edmunds wrote to Reed. “We need organizers in the field.”⁸⁵ Now serving as the organization’s secretary, Edmunds urged his fellow founders to establish Jeffersonian state chapters “to which other Democrats may rally and which will offer a forum for Senator Reed, Governor Ely, Mr. Colby and other speakers who are willing to come into your state.”⁸⁶ Edmunds became the national organization’s point man; he was responsible for creating an interconnected network of Jeffersonian state chapters. Colby provided a list of 10,000 individuals in 30 states, to whom Edmunds sent a copy of the Jeffersonian Declaration, an enrollment card, and a form letter imploring fellow Democrats to spurn Roosevelt in 1936. Edmunds told potential recruits, “There is not a member of the Democratic Party who can read this Declaration without realizing that nothing less than his loyalty to his country is on trial.”⁸⁷

Early on the Jeffersonians sought to coordinate a national anti–New Deal resistance rather than support the Republican ticket, a mindset that filtered down to the organization’s state branches along with the group’s conspiratorial anti-communism. However, the group created no guidelines regarding how to oppose Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, giving individual chapters great tactical latitude. As activists responded to Edmunds’s mass mailer, Jeffersonian chapters popped up around the country. The New York Jeffersonians rented space in the Empire State Building, installed long-distance telephone lines, and established connections with local newspapers to promote their ideologies and entice new recruits. California had two Jeffersonian chapters, each called the Jeffersonian Democrats of California, although a dispute over naming rights lingered for years. Right-wingers in Virginia established a Jeffersonian state branch, too. It is difficult to find an accounting of every state that contained a Jeffersonian chapter, but, as evidenced by Talmadge’s “Grass Roots Convention,” their views found support in conservative pockets throughout country, even if the state lacked an official affiliate. Above all, the most active state chapter was the Jeffersonian Democrats of Texas (JDT).⁸⁸

One of the eight national committee members who signed the Jeffersonian Declaration was J. Evetts Haley, an ultraconservative cattleman who chaired the Texas Jeffersonian chapter. The JDT retained the national organization’s free-market idealism and communist conspiracy theories, but Haley’s outfit added white supremacism and southern traditionalism to the platform. Haley’s upbringing on the isolated plains of West Texas molded his ultraconservative political ideals. Born in Belton, Texas, on July 5, 1901, to John and Julia Haley, “Evetts grew up in an atmosphere of political and educational participation,” and he credited his parents for his conservative, traditionalist inclinations.⁸⁹ Haley’s family tree was drenched in Anglo-Texas tradition; many of his ancestors fought for Texas during the Texas Revolution and joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Haley family quickly traded the rolling hills of Belton for the parched climate of West Texas’s Llano Estacado, an area that produced a “self-sufficient, lonely, suspicious citizenry, slow to change.”⁹⁰ Haley cherished the traditionalism of the plains, claiming that he was “bogged deeper in its traditions, and more devoted to its ideals, than to all else besides.”⁹¹ This politically charged upbringing in arid West Texas imbued Haley with a belief in rugged individualism, an adherence to white supremacist traditions, and an overarching right-wing bent. A perfect storm of Jeffersonian principles.⁹²

During his formative years, Haley made a name for himself regionally as a cowman and historian of the Great Plains before becoming a notable far-right activist. He spent summers developing his cowboy skills by working on his family’s land near the Pecos River and on the legendary Long S Ranch. Under pressure from his mother, Haley quit the cow-punching lifestyle to pursue higher education, eventually graduating from the University of Texas in 1926 with a master’s degree in history. Haley spent the 1920s and 1930s polishing his promising writing career, which coincided with the First Red Scare and a surge in anti-communist anxieties. Business progressivism—an economic philosophy that valued “public service and efficiency” over state-funded social programs—and the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan dominated Texas politics during Haley’s formative years. This sociopolitical environment fueled Haley’s ultraconservatism, and when Roosevelt instituted the New Deal after his landslide victory in 1932, Haley envisaged the specter of government oppression. His frontier upbringing produced a deep distrust of the federal government; he viewed the state as an alien intruder invading local society. Haley’s anti-statism intertwined with the white supremacy that coursed throughout the Deep South. Haley was a Confederate apologist; he lauded the Confederacy’s “moral principle” during the “War Between the States.”⁹³ Furthermore, his relative economic privilege further separated him from the plight of racial minorities and immigrants in Texas. In the quagmire of the Great Depression, Haley transformed from a simple cowman-historian into a far-right tribune.⁹⁴

Before the National Jeffersonians’ founding meeting, Haley and other right-wing Texans, including John Henry Kirby, founded an organization, the Constitutional Democrats of Texas, to challenge Roosevelt on the Texas ticket. The group soon merged with the Jeffersonian Democrats, rechristened as the Jeffersonian Democrats of Texas. The JDT corporate charter referred to Roosevelt, though not directly, as “some wild political dreamer” who sought to disrupt states’ rights and compound “the American people into one common regimented mass.”⁹⁵ Haley served as the primary JDT organizer and propagandist, and Houston-based judge W. P. Hamblen wrote the Texas Jeffersonians’ declaration: “We re-assert our belief in the Constitution, in the rights of the States, and in the Jeffersonian principles. Believing thus, we must condemn the Roosevelt administration.”⁹⁶

The Texas Jeffersonians, like the national organization, sought to remove FDR from the Democratic ticket and painted liberalism as a cog in a grand communist conspiracy. Haley spun conspiratorial webs about New Deal welfare spending, communist subversion, and voter manipulation. Liberalism, he warned, would distort Texas’s white supremacist traditions. In one pamphlet Haley asserted, “[The] breakdown of color lines and mixture of the races, black, white, and tan, is one of the cardinal principles of the Red philosophy. Already the initial steps have been carefully taken by [the] leading lights of the New Deal.”⁹⁷ Haley worried that this supposed dissolution of racial barriers threatened the privilege of white southern patricians like himself. Federal relief, he declared, enabled “an army of shiftless negroes and aliens at the expense of all of us,” even though farmworkers, many of whom were black or Hispanic, were excluded from New Deal benefits.⁹⁸ The Texas Jeffersonians also pandered to the Lone Star State’s anti-Catholic anxieties; one pamphlet warned of a Catholic cabal in the postal service that pursued “domination over American politics and [to] wipe out Protestantism.”⁹⁹ Haley’s fearmongering appealed to populist ultraconservatives; however, like the Liberty League, the Texas Jeffersonians’ most energetic members stemmed from the upper echelon of Texas society—large landowners, conservative lawyers, and wealthy businessmen. In terms of official numbers, the Texas chapter claimed about 5,000 active members.¹⁰⁰

Haley used the Jeffersonian network to build a far-right movement through grassroots action. If liberalism threatened the established sociopolitical mores of southern society, as Haley argued, white southerners needed a call to arms. He created mailing and fundraising lists by urging fellow Jeffersonians to provide contact information for like-minded individuals. Thousands of Texans supported the Jeffersonian cause through modest donations, usually between one and ten dollars. Yet the organization’s appeal remained limited because Roosevelt’s subsidies were popular, especially among Texas farmers, which further bolstered Texans’ Democratic loyalties. Lubbock’s Morning Avalanche newspaper dismissed the Texas Jeffersonians by comparing financial contributions to “pouring sand in a rat hole.”¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, Haley used Jeffersonian funds to distribute anti–New Deal literature across Texas. The organization circulated its self-published newspaper, the Jeffersonian Democrat, in every county and made dubious claims that print runs exceeded one million. As historian Keith Volanto noted, “Readers who picked up the Jeffersonian Democrat and found no problem with the views expressed, or excitedly experienced a ‘Give ’Em Hell!’ moment, were safely in the ultraconservative camp.”¹⁰² The Jeffersonians also advertised in over three hundred weekly newspapers and at least sixty dailies. One such advertisement declared that the South-oriented Democratic Party had “passed completely away” because FDR’s administration was “flouting the Constitution” and “wooing the Negro vote.”¹⁰³ Despite tapping into Texas’s white supremacist, anti-statist traditions, the Jeffersonians failed to remove Roosevelt from the state ticket because of the Democratic Party’s traditional dominance and FDR’s popularity.¹⁰⁴

The Texas Jeffersonians’ inability to alter the Texas Democratic ticket or dent Roosevelt’s celebrity revealed a major weakness for the National Jeffersonian movement. The only other mainstream option entailed supporting Landon, and right-wingers doubted whether the Kansan could topple a popular incumbent president. “My own belief is that Landon is sunk 10,000 fathoms deep, and that no conceivable salvaging operations will ever bring him to the surface,” Mencken wrote to Reed.¹⁰⁵ “Roosevelt might have been beaten by a candidate capable of using an ax,” Mencken continued. “Poor Landon is too mild a fellow for the job.” Reed, who had already expressed doubts about the Republican candidate, confessed in a letter to Shouse, “I do not think that Landon stands a chance whatever to carry Missouri.”¹⁰⁶ These assessments of a milquetoast Landon candidacy notwithstanding, the Jeffersonian Democrats decided that the only way to defeat Roosevelt was by supporting their traditional political enemy. Such a strategic alliance between the far right and the Republican Party was always in the cards.

Rather than allowing Roosevelt to walk away with the election, the Jeffersonians pivoted toward characterizing the Republican Party as the lesser of two evils. Edmunds rushed out letters, warning that the choice between FDR and Landon “will determine whether we are to go on to a condition of greater happiness under a free system of government, or whether we are to … be subjected to a coercive system of government, under which our rulers will prescribe what we shall and shall not do in every activity of our daily lives.”¹⁰⁷ The Jeffersonian Democrats of California purchased radio broadcasts two to three times a day and published hundreds of thousands of pamphlets to promote Landon. Down in Texas, Haley disseminated encouraging form letters predicting a Landon victory: “We are making splendid progress in our movement. The Literary Digest poll indicates that Roosevelt will be defeated, and this has never failed to be correct.”¹⁰⁸ Even the office manager of the Houston headquarters, Fannie B. Campbell, got caught up in the frenzy when she wrote to Haley, “I can barely keep my enthusiasm down as the days go by and hundreds of phone calls come in in answer to our various literature we are sending out. I feel so confident at present that we are going to win out.”¹⁰⁹ The Texas Jeffersonians deluded themselves into believing that Landon had a chance for victory in the solidly Democratic Lone Star State. A forced pragmatism settled upon the far right as conservative, anti-Roosevelt Democrats talked themselves into supporting Landon.¹¹⁰

As the election neared, high-profile Jeffersonians fanned out to multiple states to deliver condemnations of Roosevelt and drum up support for the Republicans. The National Jeffersonians focused on winning over conservatives in the industrial Midwest. Meriwether appeared on St. Louis radio. “I loved my Democratic home,” he intoned. “I have moved out of it only because it has been captured by men imbued with Socialistic and Communistic doctrines, by men who would not recognize a Democratic principle were they to meet one in the middle of the road.”¹¹¹ Colonel Breckinridge spoke at an Indianapolis meeting sponsored by the Independent Coalition of American Women. Reed traveled to multiple cities, including Toledo, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and St. Louis, Missouri. At each stop he took the stage to wild applause and urged his followers to vote against Roosevelt in the coming election. Reed struck familiar conspiratorial chords, accusing Roosevelt of cozying up to Communist Party USA leader Earl Browder, moving the Democratic Party into “Red territory,” and, in general, “destroying American civilization.”¹¹² Like a plain-folks preacher, Reed appealed to his constituents’ anxieties: “Shall American civilization be preserved or shall it be surrendered into the red hands of the anarchists and socialists?”¹¹³ Reed occasionally stumped for Landon directly, particularly when he coordinated with the American Liberty League in Maine, but more often he praised the Republican Party as the antithesis of New Deal liberalism. Citing “radical changes” in the Republican Party, namely the conservative portions of the GOP’s platform, Reed pontificated about saving the nation. “The fact about the matter [is] that all our old party differences that we used to fight over … have become almost totally unimportant,” Reed declared. “The question is whether we’re going to preserve that liberty which our fathers fought for and our boys died for.”¹¹⁴

The far right’s pragmatism, its decision to back an imperfect Landon in order to vanquish Roosevelt, underscored the era’s fluid partisan and ideological boundaries. Despite the fact that the Jeffersonians and Liberty League canvassed for Landon across the country, the Kansas governor never passed the ultraconservative litmus test. To the far right, Landon was the lesser of two evils, but an evil nonetheless. However, right-wingers recognized that voting for the Democratic ticket ensured four more years of Roosevelt. The middle path meant stoking anti-liberal anxiety within the Democratic Party while, for the moment, supporting the GOP. At the national and state levels, Jeffersonian Democrats worked with the official GOP machinery during the election. The Republican National Committee printed red-baiting Jeffersonian pamphlets. “What will move [Democrats] to leave is Mr. Roosevelt’s repudiation of fundamental American principles,” read one such tract by Lee Meriwether, “what no real Democrat can approve or forgive is his adoption of policies imported from Communist Russia.”¹¹⁵ Haley and the Texas Jeffersonians abandoned the Democratic Party and collaborated directly with the GOP and affiliated Landon for President clubs, a move which represented a stark pivot away from the South’s Democratic moorings.

The political alliance between the Republican Party and the far right went only so far, however. The southern tradition of white supremacy opened a significant rift in the Jeffersonian-Republican coalition. The Jeffersonians fought for conservative values by stoking racial prejudices and employing conspiratorial, inflammatory language. “The South stands at the cross-roads of destiny,” Haley declared in one Jeffersonian pamphlet. “Is it to continue to be a ‘white man’s country,’ or is it to be sunk to the cultural level of the negro, and have the purity of its blood corrupted with mulatto strains?”¹¹⁶ But the Republicans—Landon, specifically—needed to court voters, and the aggressive tactics of the Jeffersonians alienated African Americans, a key part of the traditional Republican constituency. Landon’s campaign refused to embrace race-baiting rhetoric to win southern votes. For example, the Houston GOP branch declined to distribute issues of the Jeffersonian Democrat because of Haley’s racist demagoguery, illustrating the limitations of Jeffersonian activism. Moreover, Landon struggled to appease both the liberal-internationalist and conservative-nationalist wings that vied for hegemony in the Republican Party. Many right-wingers dismissed Landon as a soft New Dealer, but, at the same time, Landon risked losing moderate Republican support by criticizing popular liberal programs. This conundrum put Landon in an ideological straitjacket—he had little room to maneuver. Regardless, as Election Day approached, Landon pivoted to the right, sputtering about economic regimentation and “attacks on our freedom.”¹¹⁷ Landon nevertheless struggled to gain momentum.¹¹⁸

With the National Democratic Party in the hands of New Dealers and the Republican Party toeing a moderate line, multiple third parties emerged to entice disgruntled ultraconservatives. One curious group coalesced under the banner of the Union Party, offering a right-wing alternative to Roosevelt’s New Deal. The party included Gerald L. K. Smith, the former organizer of the late Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program; Francis Townsend, a physician and author of the Townsend Plan, an old-age pension proposal; and Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest with an incredibly popular, Detroit-based radio show. At the behest of Coughlin, the Union Party drafted North Dakota Congressman William Lemke, an erstwhile Republican, to oppose Roosevelt. The Union Party lobbed blistering attacks at both Roosevelt and his Republican opposition. At a rally attended by 25,000 people, Father Coughlin asserted, “The old corpses of the Democratic and Republican parties are stinking in our nostrils,” deriding the New Deal as infested by “atheists” and “red and pink communists.”¹¹⁹ Smith whipped audiences into a frenzy by presenting New Dealers as “as a slimy group of men culled from the pink campuses of America with [a] friendly gaze fixed on Russia.”¹²⁰ Lemke, a subdued speaker compared to the histrionics of Smith and Coughlin, joined the conspiratorial chorus. “I do not charge that the President of this nation is a Communist,” Lemke quipped, “but I do charge that … Communist leaders have laid their cuckoo eggs in his Democratic nest and that he is hatching them.”¹²¹ Despite paradoxically regarding Roosevelt as a tool of both banking interests and international communism, the Union Party, like the Jeffersonian Democrats, believed anti-communist fearmongering could dent Roosevelt’s popularity.¹²²

The Union Party faced an uphill battle against a popular president and the historical inefficacy of third-party movements, ultimately fraying apart before the election occurred. The party housed a multitude of zealots but struggled with the day-to-day minutiae of political campaigning. In a party unified solely by an anti-Roosevelt animus, personal and ideological differences proved insurmountable. Lemke was not an inspiring leader; he lacked the public-speaking panache of Smith and Townsend and had a limited political vocabulary. Smith later offered withering criticism, describing Lemke as the “complete composite of unattractiveness. He looked like a hayseed.”¹²³ As the group fractured, Coughlin descended into anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish communism and resented Smith’s ability to upstage his own oratory skills. Smith abandoned the shipwreck of Lemke’s campaign to build his own revolutionary nationalist movement in order to, as he put it, “seize the government of the United States.”¹²⁴ In response, Lemke and Townsend denounced Smith’s fascist sympathies, which freed Smith to pursue his own far-right ambitions through the Committee of One Million. The Union Party fizzled, making it onto only thirty-four state ballots, six of which did not reflect Lemke as the Union Party candidate.¹²⁵

Another third party emerged when William Dudley Pelley attempted to parlay his notoriety as the leading American fascist into a political career. Pelley took a strange road to the political arena. In 1929, he had a mystical conversion experience, after which he created his own theology combining elements of spiritualism, Christian Science, and anti-Semitism. He sought to create a Christian Commonwealth that would rid the country of banks, unions, currency, and New Deal programs; disenfranchise Jews and force them into ghettos; and classify African Americans as wards of the state. Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship of Germany in 1933 inspired Pelley to create an American fascist organization, the Silver Shirts. One year later, the organization boasted 15,000 members. Pelley blamed communists and Jews for destroying American freedoms and considered New Deal liberals complicit partners in this grand conspiracy. During the 1936 election, Pelley suspected Landon had a hidden Jewish ancestry and accused the Union Party of ignoring, and thus enabling, a covert Jewish plot in America. Pelley threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for the Christian Party and used his periodical, Pelley’s Weekly, as his campaign mouthpiece. However, the Christian Party got on the ballot in only one state, Washington, illustrating that Pelley struggled with political campaigning and appealed to an extreme fringe that lacked the popularity to build a winning coalition.¹²⁶

Despite wealthy patronage, fanatical supporters, and a message of patriotic paranoia, conservatives of all stripes struggled in vain against the tide of Roosevelt’s popularity. “As far as the majority of Americans are concerned,” a prescient letter-to-the-editor writer surmised, “the real villain today is not Franklin D. Roosevelt but the capitalist system.”¹²⁷ Roosevelt won the 1936 election in a landslide, receiving over twenty-seven million votes while Landon managed just under a meager seventeen million, a massive ten-million-vote deficit. The electoral disparity was even greater; Landon netted a paltry eight electoral college votes while Roosevelt commanded five hundred twenty-three. The third parties floundered as expected. Lemke and the Union Party received just under 900,000 votes and failed to win a single electoral vote. Pelley’s Christian Party registered less than 1,600 total votes. Even the Texas Jeffersonians failed to undermine Roosevelt—FDR won an astounding 87 percent of the popular vote in Texas—which underscored the difficulties of building a successful conservative coalition through the Depression-era southern GOP.¹²⁸ In fact, FDR did such a good job demonizing the far right, particularly the Liberty League, that Landon referred to his association with ultraconservatives as the “kiss of death.”¹²⁹ Roosevelt and the New Deal, it seemed, remained insurmountable.

After the electoral dust had settled, Edmunds sent out letters to the most active Jeffersonians, asking for suggestions about the future of the organization. Most wanted to continue the fight, although “many of them suggested that activities be suspended for the immediate present, in view of the overwhelming character of the vote for Pres. Roosevelt.”¹³⁰ The Texas Jeffersonians shuttered their Austin headquarters as quickly as the wind dissipated from Landon’s sails, but Haley’s closing letter to Hamblen summarized the Jeffersonians’ self-perception: “This has been a campaign by patriots.”¹³¹ Some stalwarts despaired at the turnout for Roosevelt. Meriwether offered the best distillation of Jeffersonian despondence: “What are the Jeffersonian Democrats going to do? What can they do?”¹³² In a letter to Reed, Edmunds argued that it was best for the Jeffersonians to “avoid publicity” until Roosevelt “again arouses the alarm of the conservative and uncorrupted elements of our citizenship.”¹³³ There was some talk of setting up a headquarters in Washington, D.C., and sending speakers into southern states to promote Republican-endorsed Jeffersonian candidates. Despite FDR’s emphatic victory, a feeling that the movement needed to be maintained permeated the far right. After all, Reed noted, “What is to be gained by Jeffersonian Democrats sitting silently on the side line, while men like Roosevelt and [Congress of Industrial Organizations President] John Lewis wreck American institutions?”¹³⁴

During his second inaugural address, Roosevelt soon raised conservative alarms by signaling his intent to pursue a more left-leaning path. Rather than stress the importance of new social programs, FDR used his political capital to target the New Deal’s bête noire: the Supreme Court. The Court struck down numerous New Deal programs during Roosevelt’s first term, notably the National Industrial Recovery Act and Agricultural Adjustment Administration, leading FDR to argue that old age and inefficiency plagued the court. On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt sent his plan to Congress. The proposal would have allowed Roosevelt to appoint up to six new justices for every current justice that had served for at least ten years and waited longer than six months after their seventieth birthday to retire. Six of the nine justices turned seventy in 1937, which meant Roosevelt could have “packed” the court with six New Deal–friendly justices. Additionally, the bill called for appointing more than forty new judges to lower federal courts, thus laying the groundwork to alter the judicial branch for decades. The reaction against Roosevelt’s plan was swift. Archconservative Senator Glass condemned the court reorganization plan. Senator Tom Connally, a Texas Democrat and southern conservative but frequent supporter of Roosevelt, added his voice to the opposition, as did Montana Democrat Burton K. Wheeler, a moderate liberal. Even Vice President John Nance Garner took a vacation to Texas to display his displeasure. Perhaps most importantly, more than 50 percent of Americans opposed the court reform plan from its inception.¹³⁵

This political environment seemed ripe for an ultraconservative resurgence, yet grassroots right-wingers stayed out of the limelight. After the debacle of 1936, the far right had become a poisoned chalice. In a letter to former congressman James E. Watson, an Indiana Republican, newspaper editor William Allen White referred to Shouse and the Liberty League as “black beasts” that were “liable to make [Roosevelt] friends instead of enemies.”¹³⁶ Instead, the Liberty League worked behind the scenes. Fearful that overt criticisms would roust support for Roosevelt’s court proposal, Shouse convinced Landon not to mention the plan in his Lincoln Day speech. The Jeffersonians, for their part, made plans to attack the reorganization plan head-on. However, Edmunds revealed to Raskob, “After this plan had been submitted, we were strongly advised by Governor Smith and others to call off our meeting and remain in the background, which we did.”¹³⁷ Raskob continued funding the Jeffersonians, but the organization remained silent as the court battle roiled and the 1938 midterm elections approached. Ultimately, the Senate rebuked Roosevelt by sending the court bill back to committee in a stunning 70-20 vote, proving to conservative politicians that the far right remained a liability rather than a useful political partner, a lesson adopted by future conservative pragmatists like William F. Buckley Jr. Ultraconservatives had a different interpretation of the court bill’s defeat. Raoul Desvernine, the leader of the Liberty League’s National Lawyers Committee, regarded the court bill’s defeat as a “complete vindication of the teachings of the American Liberty League.”¹³⁸ Despite getting shunned by the political mainstream during the most important political battle of Roosevelt’s first two terms, far-right agitators found solace in the belief that their activism laid the groundwork for future conservative victories.¹³⁹

The revolt against Roosevelt and the New Deal, led by the Jeffersonian Democrats and the American Liberty League, illustrated an undercurrent of disgruntled conservatives within both major parties and among wealthy elites. Though not all opponents of the New Deal were ultraconservatives, the far right’s red-baiting rhetoric honed the anti-communism of the First Red Scare for a new era of preponderant liberalism. Ultraconservatives appealed to the country’s latent anti-statism, providing the framework for future critiques of liberalism. The American Liberty League failed to dislodge Roosevelt, but the organization provided a point of convergence for right-wing businessmen and professed ideas that permeated the broader conservative movement. Similarly, the rebellious Jeffersonian Democrats highlighted the internecine ideological conflict within the Democratic Party, brought forth a ground-swell of ultraconservative activism, and foreshadowed the South’s political reorientation. The Jeffersonian rejection of Democratic liberalism portended and helped initiate the midcentury conservative exodus from the Democratic Party, and their grassroots tactics, especially the mass-mailing techniques, appeared in future conservative campaigns. Both groups constituted critical nodes within the fledgling far-right network, weaving together a patchwork of conservative philosophies, electoral strategies, and right-wing leadership in an era dominated by liberalism.¹⁴⁰

The Great Depression was a critical inflection point for American politics. Roosevelt and the national Democratic Party forged a sectional coalition that turned into an electoral juggernaut by creating a party wedded to Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism rather than a sense of political aggrievement and southern white supremacy. This transformation modulated the power of conservatives, particularly those in the South, who were the traditional reactionary force in American politics. After 1936, Roosevelt’s congressional opponents solidified within the conservative wings of both major political parties, but each party continued to house liberals and conservatives, stifling resistance to Roosevelt’s liberal order. The backlash against Roosevelt’s “court-packing” scheme in 1937 resuscitated right-wing opposition, which carried over into the next phase of far-right activism.¹⁴¹ Even with the threat of World War II on the horizon, New Deal liberalism remained the target for many conservatives, especially those on the far end of the spectrum. As the United States teetered on the brink of war in the early 1940s and Roosevelt’s New Deal revolution morphed into a warfare state, the far-right vanguard rejoined the fray.