CHAPTER 2

Radical Patriots

“To hell with the government!” Those were the last words Sewell Avery shouted as two steel-helmeted GIs carried him out of his Chicago office.¹ The confrontation marked the culmination of months of tension between Avery, chairman of the board for mail-order titan Montgomery Ward, and the American government. With the nation focused on World War II and President Franklin Roosevelt keen on keeping the economy humming, Avery’s refusal to comply with federal directives to negotiate with a local union put him in Roosevelt’s crosshairs. Government officials had arrived around noon that day, April 27, 1944, to serve notice that the federal government was seizing control of Montgomery Ward. Undersecretary of commerce Wayne C. Taylor and Assistant Attorney General Ugo Carusi presented Avery with a certified copy of Roosevelt’s order, but Avery refused to budge. Taylor told reporters, “Mr. Avery stated that he does not recognize the legality of my authority and … has declined to accede to my demand.”² A crowd of 1,500 employees, shoppers, and curious bystanders gathered outside as the standoff stretched into its seventh hour. Faced with Avery’s intransigence, federal officials called in a fleet of military police. The troops arrived by the truckload, bayonets fixed, and a small squad marched up to Avery’s office to carry out Roosevelt’s order. When Avery once again refused to leave, Attorney General Francis Biddle, who had flown in from Washington to prevent exactly this type of showdown, ordered his removal. Avery sneered at Biddle, “You New Dealer!” before troops unceremoniously dumped him out on the sidewalk.³ The episode became a lightning rod for controversy. Avery’s refusal to acquiesce marked the first time a major company stood firm against the federal government’s expansive wartime power. Roosevelt later justified the seizure through wartime rationale: “Strikes in wartime cannot be condoned, whether they are strikes by workers against their employers or strikes by employers against their government.”⁴ Conservatives, however, did not buy Roosevelt’s reasoning. A Los Angeles Times columnist complained that Montgomery Ward was “NOT a war industry” and raised an alarmist scenario: “Presidential seizure … by armed troops are actions bearing an extraordinary resemblance to the Hitlerism we are fighting a war supposedly to destroy.”⁵ Westbrook Pegler, a labor-antagonizing journalist, also saw the specter of government tyranny in Roosevelt’s actions, writing that the seizure boosted “the unioneer, the racketeer, and the Communist” at the expense of “law-abiding citizens.”⁶ Avery’s stand became a symbol of right-wing defiance. The picture of Avery, arms crossed, being thrown out by federal troops made him a martyr of the far right. As a financier of the American Liberty League, Avery had already established himself in the broader right-wing network, and now his battle cry against government oppression recalled the aggrievement felt by Depression-era industrialists. The fact that Roosevelt had used similarly heavy-handed tactics against recalcitrant strikers did not matter; when FDR backed the union over Montgomery Ward, ultraconservatives such as Avery declared that the government had its thumb on the wrong people.

The World War II era marked a pivotal moment for the far right. Fascism stalked Europe, breathing life into similar movements within the United States. The growth of domestic fascist groups such as the German American Bund and the Silver Shirts highlighted conservatism’s extremist edge and the overlapping ideologies along the American right wing. Europe’s descent into war also sparked foreign policy battles. As the war loomed over American politics, a coalition of old guard conservatives and patriotic nationalists came together to defend neutrality against internationalist hawks. The America First Committee (AFC), a nationalist organization dedicated to nonintervention, sparred against a slow-growing chorus of internationalism, underscoring a dispute over foreign policy neutrality that plagued the conservative movement for years after the war ended.

Furthermore, debates over electoral and organizing strategies continued to divide ultraconservative ranks. Anti-communist conspiracies and grassroots strategies remained far-right staples, but ultraconservatives also discovered how to weaponize state power against liberal opposition. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by Texas Democrat and far-right translator Martin Dies Jr., attacked liberalism as a communist plot and brought ultraconservative conspiracies into the political mainstream, providing a blueprint for using state power to undermine liberalism. The publication of the “Conservative Manifesto” and Roosevelt’s failed purge of right-wing Democrats during the 1938 midterms signaled the gradual reorientation of ideological and partisan lines. Two years later, traditionalists sounded the alarm when Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term. Disaffected Democrats, notably James A. Reed and the Jeffersonian Democrats, jumped ship to support Republican Wendell Willkie, continuing the pattern of forced pragmatism wherein ultraconservatives viewed Republican candidates, rather than third-party crusades, as the best vehicle for vanquishing Roosevelt and his liberal coalition. Despite Willkie’s defeat, the 1940 election further established the far-right’s relationship with the GOP, laying the groundwork for the formation of an ultraconservative wing within the Republican Party.⁷

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the global conflagration, Roosevelt shifted New Deal liberalism toward a more expansive warfare state. Often mythologized as a time of national unity and consensus, the World War II era marked a continuation of substantial social and political divisions. The New Deal’s long reach already rankled conservatives, and the fact that the warfare state enlarged the federal government’s administrative capacities further stoked right-wing rancor. The regulations of the wartime economy, particularly the federal government’s takeover of Montgomery Ward, sharpened the far-right’s libertarian, free-market impulses and spawned a new generation of ultraconservative activists. When Roosevelt ran for a fourth term in 1944, a group of conservative Texas Democrats rebelled. The revolt of the Texas Regulars revealed the limits of far-right pragmatism and blazed a trail for future ultraconservative third parties. Ultimately, the maelstrom of World War II forced a maturation of the organizational and ideological contours of midcentury ultraconservatism.⁸

By the late 1930s, the rise of dictators and bellicose nationalism had fractured global relations. After taking an ultranationalist turn in the late 1920s, Japan set out to create its own empire, culminating with the 1937 “China Incident” where Japanese soldiers committed countless atrocities and sacked critical Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Nanking. In Europe, multiple powers fell under authoritarian regimes. Benito Mussolini claimed the premiership of Italy in 1922 by invoking patriotic nationalism and a return to Italian glory. Joseph Stalin maneuvered his way into power after the death of Vladimir Lenin, relying on fear and oppression to dominate the Soviet Union. During a period known as the Great Purge, Stalin imprisoned much of the nation’s military, diplomatic, and intellectual leadership, inoculating himself from political challengers at the expense of national security and civil liberties. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, pitting the Second Spanish Republic against the nationalist (and quasi-fascist) leader General Francisco Franco. The Weimar Republic of Germany struggled under the yoke of the Treaty of Versailles and capitulated when Adolf Hitler assumed the chancellorship in 1933. After the Nazi Party consolidated power, Hitler embarked on his mission to provide lebensraum (a homeland) for the people of Germany by invading nearby nations, beginning with the annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938.⁹

Though much of the American public recoiled as Europe descended into turmoil, the rise of fascism and hyper-nationalism abroad stoked similar movements at home. The Great Depression era witnessed an explosion of domestic fascist organizations, notably William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of America and the German American Bund. Pelley, a spiritualist writer and admirer of Hitler, formed the Silver Legion, also known as the Silver Shirts, in 1933 in the wake of Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship. A congressional report described the Silver Shirts as a “subversive” organization, “the largest, best financed, and certainly the best publicized.”¹⁰ The group capitalized on discontent—whether racial, economic, or cultural—and started with only a few hundred members before peaking just one year later with 15,000. The German American Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized citizen born in Munich, Germany, disseminated Nazi propaganda through its membership and rallies. The American government investigated the Bund and uncovered that the organization sent members to Germany for training and received “its inspiration, program, and direction from the Nazi Government of Germany.”¹¹ Bund leaders estimated that the organization had roughly 20,000 to 25,000 dues-paying members, though a separate Justice Department investigation placed the number much lower—around 6,500. Nevertheless, Kuhn claimed a larger “sympathizer” movement of nearly 100,000. A patchwork of fascist groups coordinated with Kuhn’s Bund, including the Christian Mobilizers, Christian Crusaders (not to be confused with Billy James Hargis’s ministry), and the Silver Shirt Legion. A number of fascist-adjacent movements also appeared during the World War II era, such as Elizabeth Dilling’s Mothers’ Movement, Gerald L. K. Smith and the Committee of One Million, and the America First Committee, illustrating that, while most Americans pinned their hopes on Roosevelt’s recovery efforts, others turned to the siren song of fascism.¹²

Domestic fascist groups flourished alongside established ultraconservative organizations such as the Jeffersonian Democrats and the American Liberty League, and the two movements shared some ideological touchstones despite holding significant differences. American fascists and ultraconservatives both employed conspiratorial language and considered any opposing ideology illegitimate. For example, the Christian Mobilizers denounced the “growing despotism of the Pinko-Liberal-Internationalist-Communistic-Popular Front in our city state and national governments,” a phrase which reflected the far right’s ideological alchemy, flattening nonconservative ideologies into shades of communism.¹³ A sense of patriotic nationalism also connected fascists and far-right activists. The two movements gained energy from the First Red Scare and notions of “Americanism,” both of which marginalized immigrants and left-wing political groups as un-American and magnified the threat of an internal conspiracy. This Manichean mindset fed into the far right and fascist right’s belief that America was a white Protestant nation, first and foremost.

Important differences separated ultraconservatives from domestic fascists, however. The fascist right sought to aggressively employ state power and disrupt democratic traditions to defeat their opponents. In their mind, only the creation of an authoritarian white Christian ethnostate could stop the presumed global Jewish conspiracy infecting American government.¹⁴ For example, a reporter for Baltimore’s Sun wrote that the Silver Shirts “dreamed of and planned an American dictatorship, with William Dudley Pelley as the white king.”¹⁵ On the other hand, far-right activists advocated for small government, laissez-faire economics, and a minimizing of social strife at the expense of racial minorities. Ultraconservatives claimed to abhor revolutionary upheaval and notions of a dictatorship. Instead, power should be earned through traditional channels. They even used the term “fascist” as a pejorative against liberals, accusing the New Deal of paving the road to authoritarianism.

Nevertheless, the divide between domestic fascists and ultraconservatives was as porous as the separation between the far right and mainstream conservatives. Each faction’s view of state power revealed the overlapping circles of the right-wing Venn Diagram. Fascist groups worked to foment a revolution that would end in an authoritarian dictatorship; an all-powerful state that would delineate a hierarchical social structure was the fascists’ end goal. The far right, on the other hand, gained power through the republican system and then pulled the levers of power to their advantage. In other words, authoritarian power came through the ballot box instead of revolutionary upheaval. Yet both the far right and domestic fascists approved of state power so long as it matched their political goals or targeted the right kind of people. When the House Un-American Activities Committee leveraged federal authority against liberals, for example, both fascist organizations and far-right groups praised the efforts as necessary for rooting out communism. Many southern conservatives used state power to brutally enforce white supremacy and racial segregation, and right-wing politicians would soon harness the power of congressional investigations to attack liberalism. Ultimately, the professed anti-statism of the far right was a paradox—it was simultaneously a deeply held ideological conviction about the proper role of government and a cynical strategy to undermine liberalism while veiling right-wing authoritarianism. Ultraconservatives and domestic fascists occupied adjacent, and at times overlapping, spaces on the political spectrum, but the latter’s virulent, revolutionary rhetoric bore the mark of extremism and cast a pall over American politics.

The darkening international scene and growth of domestic fascism alarmed Americans of all stripes, prompting the House of Representatives to create a committee, led by New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein, to investigate subversive activities within the United States. Though the rise of domestic fascism provided the impetus for Dickstein’s committee, the anti-communist anxieties of the previous decade had paved the way and would guide the hand of future subversive-hunting committees. In the wake of the Crash of 1929, Congressman Hamilton Fish III, a New York Republican, proposed the creation of a House committee to investigate perceived treacherous organizations, particularly the Communist Party and its affiliated groups. Despite finding that communists held little influence, the Fish Committee recommended, among other things, criminalizing the Communist Party and deporting alien communists. Other right-wing congressmen joined Fish’s xenophobic crusade, including a young Texas Democrat, Congressman Martin Dies Jr., who put forth a bill to deport communist immigrants. The Fish Committee set an important precedent of using congressional committees to investigate allegations of communist sabotage; however, by the mid-1930s, the threat of internal fascism replaced communism as the anti-subversive obsession. Alarmed by the rising enthusiasm for Nazi Germany and threats against New York’s Jewish community, Dickstein petitioned to convene a new special committee to investigate the prevalence of domestic fascism. The McCormack-Dickstein committee traced a network of financial support stretching from Germany to domestic fascist outlets, which led Dickstein to request another, more expansive, special committee. He hoped to secure $200,000 to combat a subversive “hate campaign” led by 150 far-right groups. Congress tabled Dickstein’s request, but the Fish and Dickstein Committees laid the groundwork for future congressmen to use federal investigations as a weapon against partisan enemies.¹⁶

A couple years later, in the summer of 1938, Congress considered a new proposal to investigate subversive radicalism within the United States. This time Martin Dies Jr. wanted to run the show. Dies hailed from a political family. His father, Martin Dies Sr., had served as the U.S. representative for Texas’s second congressional district, a rural and predominantly African American district ensconced within the piney woods of East Texas. The elder Dies campaigned for protective tariffs, old-timey traditionalism, and white supremacy. He told the Republican Party that, to gain votes in the South and West, it needed to “declare for the white man’s domination of this Government and integrity of the Caucasian race.”¹⁷ Dies Sr. also considered immigrants a threat to America’s “free institutions” and supported restrictive immigration policies.¹⁸ Throughout his congressional career, the elder Dies staked out a position as an ultraconservative segregationist and nativist, ideas which presaged his son’s future ideological and political palette.

During his formative years, Dies Jr. worked in his father’s law office and gleaned many of his father’s hard-line conservative platforms. “My father … was one of the first men in the United States to denounce against immigration. So you see I was brought up on this doctrine,” Dies once wrote.¹⁹ Dies disdained the Texas Ku Klux Klan—exemplifying conservative factionalism, he believed the Klan’s violent racism was un-American and “bad for Texas”—but his ultraconservatism nevertheless fused southern racist traditions with anti-statist populism and xenophobic Americanism.²⁰ Dies excelled on the stump, and he used his family name, oratory skills, and a dash of old-fashioned race-baiting to win a U.S. congressional seat, the same one once held by his father, at the tender age of twenty-nine. He received significant support from John Nance Garner, then the Speaker of the House and a fellow Texas Democrat; Garner ensured that Dies received appointments to numerous congressional committees, where the young Democrat made a name for himself as a nativist firebrand. While serving on the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, for example, Dies put forth a bill that would permit “the exclusion and expulsion of alien communists” from the United States; he hoped “to stop all new immigration from every country.”²¹ To Dies, immigration and political radicalism were inextricably intertwined. “I saw 100,000 Communists march through the streets of New York. I did not see an American in the crowd,” he wrote in 1935. “Many of them are aliens that should be deported and others are foreign born who should have their naturalization papers canceled.”²² Though Dies espoused anti-statist philosophies, he frequently urged the use of federal power to enforce anti-immigrant policies, foreshadowing his use of state authority to fight the specter of communist subversion.²³

Dies originally backed Roosevelt’s New Deal, but the gradual support for civil rights among non-southern Democrats and the increasing boldness of labor unions changed his calculus. In 1935 Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, commonly known as the Wagner Act, which bolstered unions’ right to organize and take collective action. But labor unrest during the Great Depression, particularly the General Motors (GM) sit-down strike, alarmed Dies and his fellow conservatives. During a sit-down strike, workers halted production by seizing control of critical plant infrastructure, a radical mutation of the traditional walkout strike. The 1936 GM strike pitted one of the country’s largest employers, run by far-right patrons Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and the du Pont family, against its labor force. Strikers took control of at least fifty plants—including GM’s crown jewel, the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan—and demanded that GM recognize the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the exclusive national union for GM laborers. The strike prompted a hard line from GM brass; executive vice president William S. Knudsen scorned the strikers as “trespassers and violators of the law of the land.”²⁴ Violent episodes punctuated the strike, and union leadership—John L. Lewis, founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and Walter Reuther, leader of UAW Local 174—instructed the strikers to hold out for their demands. After forty-four days and some behind-the-scenes support from President Roosevelt, the strike ended with a massive victory for labor. The UAW now had exclusive representation over all GM employees, and the strike’s success inspired others: over 2,000 strikes occurred in 1937 alone.²⁵

Labor militancy evolved into an ultraconservative fever dream. Some right-wingers accused the strikers of dooming American democracy by violating the sanctity of property rights. Frank E. Gannett, right-wing publisher and chairman of the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, criticized Michigan governor Frank Murphy and Roosevelt for enabling a slippery slope of “mob rule.” “If a group of men can seize Chrysler’s plant, they can likewise seize his home,” Gannett warned. “If they can seize his home and lock him out of it, they can do the same to you or to anyone else. And if the law … cannot protect property, our human rights cannot be protected.”²⁶ Matt L. Love, a railroad magnate and constituent of Dies, mirrored Gannett and the aggrievement of the American Liberty League, characterizing unionists as “un-American” and “unlawful.” Love implored Dies to do something: “When we have to sit idly by and see property of private individuals just unceremoniously taken away from them without due process of law, I think it is nothing short of a crime and should be dealt with accordingly.”²⁷ Dies agreed, noting that he considered the sit-down strikes a far greater threat than Roosevelt’s concurrent attempt to reorganize the court. “If employees can seize other peoples’ property with immunity and prevent employers from having access to it or use it, then this Republic is at an end and it is a matter of no importance who is on the court,” Dies replied.²⁸ The workers’ seizure of plant property was indeed illegal, but the right wing’s retort sought to demonize unions and minimize labor struggles as much as urge a return to law and order.²⁹

The conservative response to the strike also bore a familiar conspiratorial anti-communism. Westbrook Pegler called the sit-down tactic a “communist device” that “brings fascism that much closer,” even though he acknowledged that most strikers were not actual communists.³⁰ John Caffrey, a civilian from Aurora, Colorado, urged Dies to deport the “aliens and foreign trouble makers that are giving us all this trouble with sit down strikes, preaching communism and Nazism.”³¹ Conservatives correctly surmised that communists were involved in the unions and present at the strikes but misplaced the impetus: the union went on strike because of labor grievances, not revolutionary communism. Nevertheless, any communist involvement, not to mention the fact that the sit-down action took over the literal means of production, led ultraconservatives to view the strikes as a communist usurpation. Mistrust of labor stretched across the entire nation during the mid-1930s. One poll indicated that an overwhelming percentage of Americans, 66 to 34, supported GM’s non-negotiation stance. Many of Dies’s constituents reflected this national majority and encouraged Dies to investigate labor radicalism. Businessmen and white-collar professionals in Dies’s district sent letters of support, and even some fraternal labor organizations, such as the local United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, worried about the events unfolding in Flint. However, one constituent warned Dies not to criticize Roosevelt or the sit-down strikers, believing both shared immense popularity in Dies’s Second District. Texans certainly approved of FDR, but a poll revealed that 73 percent of the South, including Texas, favored criminalizing sit-down strikes, making it the most anti-union region of the nation—no surprise considering the South’s long history of labor exploitation.³²

Mistrust of labor became a tool for leveraging conservative gains. Dies demanded that the federal government take action to support GM’s management and, more broadly, the rights of property owners. He wanted to fight the strikers using existing antitrust laws and, as a member of the House Committee on Rules, pushed for a new “impartial inquiry,” an updated Dickstein committee to investigate the origin of the sit-down strikes.³³ His measure passed the committee but was greeted by laughter in the House after Dies dissembled that this new investigation would “not be directed against labor unions.” After a raucous debate and the threat of a fistfight, Congress tabled Dies’s measure on April 8, 1937, even though the Senate had voted to condemn the sit-down strikes just one day prior. Dies failed, for now, to create a new investigatory committee, but the Texan’s anti-labor stance struck a chord along the conservative spectrum. Through his rhetoric and political stature, Dies became one of the earliest far-right translators, a respectable figure who legitimized ultraconservative beliefs for the political mainstream.³⁴

In a twist of irony, it was the proliferation of fascist propaganda, rather than the roiling debate about communist labor saboteurs, that prompted the House to create another special committee to investigate un-American activities. Two months after calling for a renewed investigative committee, Dies viewed an affidavit which alleged that a Bund member advocated assassinating Roosevelt. Dies used it to revive his demand for an anti-subversive investigation, but other congressmen still contended that such an inquiry could lead down dangerous paths. Maury Maverick, a fellow Texas Democrat, worried that the committee would become an “entering wedge to religious persecution,” while Nebraska Republican Karl Stefan fretted about provoking anti-German sentiments.³⁵ Even the previous HUAC chairman, John W. McCormack, acknowledged the committee’s potential to devolve into a partisan tool.³⁶ Nevertheless, on May 26, 1938, a new committee, christened the House Un-American Activities Committee, convened to investigate domestic subversion. McCormack’s cautionary words would go unheeded.

Through HUAC, Dies sharpened conspiratorial anti-communism into a state-sanctioned, far-right weapon. The Dies Committee had six members aside from Dies himself: Massachusetts Democrat Arthur D. Healey, Ohio Democrat Harold G. Mosier, New Jersey Republican J. Parnell Thomas, New Mexico Democrat John J. Dempsey, Illinois Republican Noah M. Mason, and Alabama Democrat Joe Starnes. The group’s conservative bent illustrated that, at the time, right-wing ideologies crossed partisan lines. Dempsey and Healey, both dedicated New Dealers who were uncomfortable with Dies’s mission, were the odd men out and missed numerous committee meetings. At the inaugural committee gathering Dies laid out his vision: “This special committee was created … for the purpose of conducting an investigation of the extent, character, and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States; the diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American propaganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of domestic origin and attacks the principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution.” Dies clarified that the committee was not “after anyone,” would be “fair and impartial,” and was “more concerned with facts than opinions.” However, the Texan failed to enunciate what constituted subversive activities, noting only a need to “distinguish clearly between what is obviously un-American and what is no more or less than an honest difference of opinion with respect to some economic, political, or social question.”³⁷ This ambiguous modus operandi allowed Dies to expand HUAC’s purview and turn the committee into a right-wing shillelagh—political, cultural, and racial issues were often framed through an ultraconservative prism.³⁸

The Dies Committee initiated its investigations by interviewing members of the German American Bund and affiliated Nazi organizations. Dies’s investigations were part of a national campaign against domestic fascism led by President Roosevelt and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Anti-Semitic fascists attacked Dies and the committee for collaborating with subversive Jews, being Jewish themselves, or ignoring the “real” problems within the United States. For example, Joe McWilliams of the Christian Mobilizers said the Dies Committee was misleading the country because it was “Jew controlled” and blind to the threat of “Jew Communism.”³⁹ Pelley used similar language, calling Roosevelt a “stooge” for East European “kikes” and deriding Dies as “the Jew-lover from Texas.”⁴⁰ The FBI and Dies Committee produced numerous reports on fascist groups, and the multitiered investigations bore fruit: the government surveilled Gerald L. K. Smith, indicted Winrod, and prosecuted Pelley, resulting in Silver Shirt membership falling to 5,000 members.⁴¹

After scrutinizing fascist groups—the committee’s original focus—Dies soon pivoted to expansive investigations into communism in labor unions and government agencies. FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover similarly widened Roosevelt’s mandate into a dragnet that included communist groups, labor unions, and fringe isolationists. This illustrated a pattern in which right-wingers redirected federal power against their ideological opponents. If liberalism was a liminal stage of communism, as many far-right activists believed, then it was wholly appropriate to target liberals as subversives. Dies invited anti-labor advocates to testify and subpoenaed workers involved in the Detroit sit-down strikes. John P. Frey, a leader of the American Federation of Labor, appeared before the committee and proclaimed that communists dominated the CIO. Other CIO opponents levied similar salacious charges, confirming Dies’s belief that a cabal of foreign radicals sought to dismantle American capitalism. Communists did control significant portions of the CIO and held positions in the National Labor Relations Board, but witnesses and Dies himself exaggerated their influence. Labor communists did not hold state power and played no policymaking role, as Dies did, and committee witnesses provided scant evidence to support their tales of communist plots. With Dies and his fellow investigators, accusations came first, often without evidence, and dominated the headlines, while denials and corrections were obscured on the back pages.⁴²

The Dies Committee amassed files on people accused of subversion and listened to all manner of wild-eyed conspiracies. Witnesses often contorted progressive or liberal beliefs into un-American treason, and investigators accepted hearsay and gossip so long as it fit the correct ideological parameters. In one particularly embarrassing episode, a witness alleged that child movie star Shirley Temple “unwittingly served the interests of the Communist Party.”⁴³ Nevertheless, mainstream media coverage boosted the accusations emanating from committee hearings. “Says Reds Started Sit-Down Strikes,” blared one New York Times headline; the article relayed that a HUAC investigator believed wives of prominent labor leaders were teaching a nebulous “un-Americanism” in Detroit public schools.⁴⁴ In fact, the New York Times dedicated five hundred inches of space to the committee within the first two months of its existence, and other outlets provided even more extensive coverage. A cycle of misinformation developed as the Dies Committee gave witnesses a platform and the media promoted the allegations at face value, which fed conspiracies about the size, power, and permeation of internal communist subversion.⁴⁵

Through the committee, Dies and his fellow ultraconservatives used state power to discredit liberalism by portraying it as un-American sabotage. Dies investigated New Deal agencies and many of Roosevelt’s closest advisors for communist inclinations. Frequent targets included Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and Works Progress Administration (WPA) supervisor Harry Hopkins. In a speech before the Boston Chamber of Commerce, Dies characterized the New Deal bureaucracy as “the intermediate step to dictatorship” and called bureaucrats “wild-eyed monkeys, who know only how to propose some scheme to take away other people’s property and other people’s rights.”⁴⁶ At one point, the committee targeted the Federal Theatre and Writers Project—a branch of the WPA that provided jobs to unemployed writers and actors, some of whom were communist activists. Dies Committee member and vehement New Deal critic J. Parnell Thomas roared, “Practically every play presented under the auspices of the Project is sheer propaganda for Communism or the New Deal.”⁴⁷ The browbeating worked: Congress shuttered the theater project in 1939 in the wake of HUAC’s investigation, despite the fact that none of the committee members had viewed any WPA plays. The inquiry illustrated the effectiveness of using state power against liberal programs and laid bare the far right’s hypocritical stance regarding federal authority. Despite the occasional Dies Committee highlight, such as the successful dismantling of the German American Bund, HUAC’s sloppy procedures, ideological partisanship, and conspiratorial rhetoric cast doubt on the committee’s probity.⁴⁸

The tactics and tone of the Dies Committee opened a festering wound within the American polity. Conservatives praised Dies as a hardnosed truth-teller. Hamilton Fish proclaimed, “I love the Dies Committee for the enemies it has made.”⁴⁹ John B. Trevor Sr., a nativist lawyer with significant congressional influence, encouraged Dies’s relentless intransigence: “Beware of compromises, Martin, remember they satisfy nobody.”⁵⁰ Trevor’s letter illustrated the far right’s worldview in which a stark division separated the American polity into conservative allies and liberal-communist enemies. This mindset diminished pragmatism because compromise meant dealing with the devil. Dies received support from conservative civic organizations, such as the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and many of Dies’s local constituents lauded his anti-subversive investigations. One Beaumont man, Paul B. Matlock, wrote to Dies, “The dangerous political groups among us must be not merely checked but eradicated and if in doing so the Government intrude upon some of the beneficent rights we have accorded aliens, at least such barking of shins will be no skin from the citizens of this country.”⁵¹ A certain tension permeated far-right conservatism—professed anti-statism often chafed against statist solutions such as investigatory committees or, as Matlock advocated, truncating political rights. Nevertheless, Newton W. Powers, a Texas Civilian Conservation Corps worker, agreed with the use of statist measures to undermine liberalism. Powers wrote to Dies after hearing him on the radio: “Why don’t you see that they [the communists] are disposed of … are the men in congress a bunch of jelly-fish or are they red blooded Americans who do not want to see this country run by communistic elements.”⁵²

On the other hand, labor leaders and New Dealers took a dim view of Dies’s investigations. Dickstein and other congressmen, including HUAC members Dempsey and Healey, condemned Dies’s penchant for partisan bias and enabling of conspiracy theories. Congressman Adolph J. Sabath, an Illinois Democrat, criticized Dies for needlessly investigating the government and withholding evidence that foreign governments sponsored subversive propaganda.⁵³ Harold Ickes mocked Dies as a cynical opportunist, “hissing through his teeth, rending the air with blood-curdling yelps, freezing the very marrow of our bones with his tales of fearsome, ferocious government clerks who read the New Republic.”⁵⁴ The chairman of Beaumont Typographical Union, A. D. Covin, attempted to change Dies’s mind through multiple letters. After failing to make a dent, Covin concluded that the Dies Committee was “a tool in the hands of the corporate interests” bent on unwinding liberal reforms. “Why don’t you join the Republican Party and cease being a hypocrite,” Covin admonished.⁵⁵ Even Dies admitted that at times his committee did an “inadequate and slipshod job,” but rather than acknowledging any ideological bias, he cited personnel issues and limited funding, despite receiving roughly $650,000 over the course of the committee’s five-year existence.⁵⁶

Conservatives used the Dies Committee to sharpen federal power and anti-communism into an anti-liberal harpoon. During the 1938 midterm elections, the committee went hunting for New Dealers. For example, Michigan governor Frank Murphy had endured intense criticism for his moderation during the 1937 sit-down strikes. In the days leading up to Murphy’s tough reelection bid, two witnesses—Paul V. Gadola, a Republican Circuit Court judge, and former Flint city manager John M. Barringer—told the Dies Committee that the governor held a “treasonable attitude” for enabling the sit-down strikes.⁵⁷ When Dies inquired whether or not the sit-down strikes would have occurred without communist instigators, Barringer replied, “No, they would not and I’ll say further that they would not have progressed so rapidly except for the attitude of the La Follette committee and Governor Murphy.”⁵⁸ Roosevelt tried to aid Murphy’s flagging reelection bid by reminding the nation that the governor’s actions prevented bloodshed on the factory floor. Nevertheless, Michigan voters spurned the incumbent and put Republican Frank Fitzgerald into office. Murphy was one of eleven Democratic governors to lose a seat in 1938, underscoring how the conspiratorial anti-communism of the Dies Committee damaged liberal opponents and mainstreamed ultraconservative beliefs.⁵⁹

While Dies laid the foundation for turning state power against liberalism, congressional conservatives moved to consolidate forces during the midterm season. An economic recession hit in 1937, and conservatives hoped to influence Roosevelt’s plans for resuscitating the economy. Turner Catledge of the New York Times reported that a cabal of conservative senators circulated a ten-point program in order to “establish a basis upon which the moderate and conservative forces of the Senate, Democratic and Republican, could coalesce.”⁶⁰ The document read like a right-wing wish list: it contained provisions about supply-side economics, capital gains tax reductions, states’ rights, an unfettered free market, and an end to federally owned corporations. Though it conceded the legitimacy of “collective bargaining and [labor’s] right to organize,” rugged individualist and pro-business language permeated the document.⁶¹ Josiah Bailey, a North Carolina Democrat, spearheaded the movement, and he was joined by a bipartisan coterie of other senators, including Virginia Democrats Harry F. Byrd and Carter Glass, New York Democrat Royal S. Copeland, Nebraska Democrat Edward R. Burke, Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings, South Carolina Democrat Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith, Michigan Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg, and Delaware Republican John G. Townsend.⁶² This right-wing coalition hoped to gather signatures in support of a drive to, as Bailey later stated, “stop this trend toward collectivism.”⁶³ Dewey L. Fleming of the Baltimore Sun recognized Bailey’s strategy as an “open bid for a consolidation of conservative forces in Congress.”⁶⁴

Yet, the movement struggled to gain momentum, and the soon-to-be-called “Conservative Manifesto” quickly became a flashpoint on the acceptable parameters of right-wing thought during an era of liberal hegemony. Significant portions of the manifesto leaked to the press before Bailey could secure widespread congressional support. The leak put Bailey on the defensive. Interviewers prodded him with uncomfortable questions about whether he hoped to bolster the already formidable anti-Roosevelt, anti–New Deal bloc in Congress. Bailey rejected the term “manifesto” and, despite the fact that the document outlined policy goals in opposition to multiple New Deal platforms, characterized the draft as “entirely non-political and nonpartisan in character.”⁶⁵ He even suggested that Roosevelt might sign it. Other senators remained wary, however. They remembered Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 and how New Dealers caricatured mainstream conservatives by conflating them with far-right groups such as the American Liberty League. After all, some of the senators associated with the manifesto, notably Byrd and Smith, had ties to the far right. Despite the fact that the manifesto exhibited the significant overlap of right-wing ideologies, mainstream conservatives drew a stark separation between themselves and the ultraconservative right. Charles L. McNary, an Oregon Republican and Senate minority leader, voiced the fears of many who balked at the manifesto by saying, “Anyone who signs that thing is going to have a Liberty League tag put on him.”⁶⁶

As the Conservative Manifesto reverberated throughout the political arena, the 1938 midterms proved to be a watershed moment for Roosevelt. One Baltimore Sun writer speculated that the manifesto might embolden Congress to contest Roosevelt: “Members [of Congress] now do not bear such striking resemblance to tiny birds in a nest, opening their mouths to receive and swallow whenever they hear a fluttering of wings.”⁶⁷ Perhaps, as the writer implied, the manifesto marked a turning point, a steeling of the conservative movement against Roosevelt’s dominance. With conservative Democrats circling his administration, Roosevelt went on the offensive, attacking numerous anti–New Deal Democrats, including manifesto-approving senators such as “Cotton Ed” Smith and Millard Tydings. Roosevelt eschewed party machinery and appealed straight to voters in support of New Deal candidates, leading high-profile conservative Democrats to sound the alarm about a Roosevelt “purge.” Tydings spoke out against Roosevelt on the radio, asserting that the president should be removed from office for election tampering.⁶⁸ Dies accused Roosevelt of being guilty of “violating the fundamental principle of Americanism—maintenance of the independence of each branch of Government,” high irony considering Dies’s congressional crusade against Roosevelt’s executive branch.⁶⁹ The “purge” made for great copy, and newspapers provided breathless coverage of the theatrics. “Final ‘Purge’ Showdown at Hand for Roosevelt” blared Turner Catledge’s New York Times column.⁷⁰ Roosevelt occupied a precarious position in 1938, and the electoral drama further fueled the far right’s paranoia about state tyranny.

In the end, Roosevelt’s “purge” backfired, succeeding only in turning voters away from the Democratic Party. Republicans gained eighty seats in the House of Representatives and eight in the Senate. The Institute of Public Opinion reported that three main issues convinced voters to spurn the Democrats: Roosevelt’s court reorganization plan, the attempted purge of conservative Democrats, and the sit-down strikes of 1937. Though Democrats still controlled Congress, the margins were smaller than before. Worse still for Roosevelt, conservative Democrats from southern segregationist states dominated his party’s caucus, accounting for more than half of Democratic seats in the House and nearly as many in the Senate. Moreover, the election of Senator Robert A. Taft, an Ohio Republican who chastised the New Deal’s predilection for “planned economy and government regulation,” signaled a shift in American politics.⁷¹ Taft’s election put another far-right translator in the halls of Congress, bolstering the ranks of congressional conservatives and exemplifying the national anti-administration tide. Journalist Mark Sullivan called the results “a visitation of adversity upon Mr. Roosevelt,” noting that the “election was a move of the country toward conservatism.”⁷² For the first time since 1932, Roosevelt’s New Deal faction showed signs of cracking.⁷³

It seemed that an ascendant bipartisan conservatism might fracture Roosevelt’s liberal coalition, but the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 complicated the political calculus. World War II tested citizens’ views of American neutrality. Though a sense of nationalistic neutrality (an essential ingredient in the ultraconservative brew) remained popular with the American public, Hitler’s invasion of Poland weakened the noninterventionist wing of the Republican Party and empowered Roosevelt’s internationalist inclinations. As the 1940 election loomed, the debate over interventionism and internationalism consumed the nation and dominated the presidential campaign season. Multiple high-profile politicians, including Taft, urged Roosevelt to avoid the European conflict. Right-wing newspapermen, such as Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Daily Tribune, churned out noninterventionist columns. McCormick’s brand of conservatism proved particularly reactionary—he thought Roosevelt’s internationalism revealed a would-be dictator bent on destroying American democracy. Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg across Europe cast doubt upon America’s ability to stay out of the war, but right-wingers refashioned legitimate global concerns into anti-liberal conspiracies. Just days after Germany invaded the Low Countries, Taft declared, “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund.” Taft further asserted that American entry would be “more likely to destroy American democracy than to destroy German dictatorship.”⁷⁴ In this moment, Taft was translating far-right ideas for a mainstream audience: New Deal liberalism and war mobilization constituted the nation’s greatest threats.⁷⁵

The 1940 presidential election foregrounded the battle over American intervention, but it also represented a pivotal moment for ultraconservatives such as James A. Reed and the Jeffersonian Democrats. As the election year dawned, the Jeffersonians lacked direction, still smarting from their failure in 1936. Multiple Jeffersonian headquarters had shuttered after the 1936 election, which left Reed wondering whether his collaborators had any fight left. He worried about a potential Roosevelt third term and believed that continued New Deal policies would sap grassroots enthusiasm for the Democratic Party. Yet, Reed fretted that the Jeffersonian Democrats lacked the constitution for another political battle, especially with a potential war looming on the horizon. In a letter to Lee Meriwether, Reed complained, “The difficulty appears to be that those who ought to be very earnestly interested and in a fighting mood are on the contrary in a comatose condition.”⁷⁶

As the election season heated up, Jeffersonian leaders sent out feelers to gauge the temperament of the most prominent members. The responses revealed a scattershot of opinions and strategies, ranging from rekindling the Jeffersonian grassroots apparatus to joining forces with the Republicans. Meriwether urged aggression; he called for a meeting of the Jeffersonian brass and implored the organization to put out a statement, get “scouts” into vulnerable districts, and promote suitable anti–New Deal candidates.⁷⁷ Some members, J. Evetts Haley included, supported Meriwether’s thinking, but others favored waiting until both parties had chosen their nominees, hoping that one of the parties would choose a suitably conservative candidate. A few argued that the Jeffersonians should create an alternative, conservative coalition and draft their own candidate—popular choices included Conservative Manifesto supporter Senator Byrd, Vice President John Nance Garner, and publisher Frank Gannett—if the Democrats nominated Roosevelt. W. P. Hamblen, one of the architects of the Texas Jeffersonians, motioned that, if the Democrats selected a New Dealer, the Jeffersonians should “openly espouse the cause of the Republicans.” On the other hand, William Ritchie of Omaha, Nebraska, opposed endorsing a Republican “under any circumstances.”⁷⁸ Uncertainty reigned with the election less than a year away.⁷⁹

After experiencing defeat in 1936 and sitting out the 1938 midterms, the Jeffersonian Democrats struggled to chart a course in 1940. The hegemony of liberalism left little space for far-right ideals. Liberalism still dominated the national Democratic Party, which meant that conservative Democrats, especially in the South, felt alienated in their own party. Even though southern Democrats had already stymied portions of the New Deal and spoke out against Roosevelt, polls indicated that, if Roosevelt ran for a third term, the South would return him to the White House by overwhelming margins. Thus, building a conservative movement within the Democratic Party seemed impossible so long as Roosevelt remained the party’s leader. On the other side of the partisan divide, the Republican Party had a growing conservative wing, as evidenced by the emergence of Taft, but it was not yet strong enough to usurp power. That would be a battle left to future far-right activists. The last option, forming a third party, seemed like a feeble vehicle for protest votes. Ultraconservatives knew that a third-party crusade would not dislodge Roosevelt, and thus the utility of third-party action was another argument left to future ultraconservative generations. Ultimately, the far right’s political quagmire captured the early moments of shifting party ideologies; in the coming decades, ultraconservatives would form the vanguard of the gradual party realignment and the creation of a conservative, southern-facing Republican Party.⁸⁰

As war ravaged Europe and far-right activists plotted a potential return to politics, the 1940 presidential election illuminated the Democratic Party’s perpetual internecine battles. The rift between liberal Democrats and the party’s conservative wing, epitomized by Martin Dies’s anti-communist investigations and the Jeffersonians’ lurking presence, continued to expand. Additionally, the fact that Roosevelt had already served two terms further complicated matters. No president had ever successfully run for a third term after George Washington’s decision to step away in 1796, and many Democrats did not support a third term for Roosevelt, including James Farley, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Though Roosevelt never explained his reasoning, numerous events—Nazi success in Western Europe, a desire to solidify the New Deal’s legacy, and his popularity with the public—seemed to compel the president to break tradition. Roosevelt outmaneuvered Democratic challengers, including Vice President Garner, to win an unprecedented third-term nomination. Reed watched the convention from afar. “In a few brief hours, the cruel ravishment will have occurred and the rejuvenated victim will again be able to smilingly greet his friends,” he wrote to Al Smith. “It will probably be the most enjoyable and enthusiastic example of cooperative rape yet recorded in history or in the records of the courts.”⁸¹ Reed’s hideous metaphor underscored his anger—a cabal of subversive liberals had once again desecrated his beloved party.⁸²

With Roosevelt’s nomination in place, the far right saw a communist consensus taking over American politics. “Here is the great danger. Both parties have been bidding for the votes of the Reds and the Pinks,” Reed wrote to Sterling Edmunds. “If, in the next campaign, the Republicans follow their previous course, [we will] simply have a race between two parties traveling on parallel lines and there will be no obstacle to prevent them, either or both, from landing us in the mire of socialism.”⁸³ However, Reed saw a way out. “I am developing a very keen interest in Wendell Willkie,” Reed told Edmunds. “If the Republicans could nominate him there would be a clear issue between [the] Roosevelt and anti-Roosevelt philosophy of government.”⁸⁴ Even though Willkie was not an ultraconservative ideologue, the far right had decided that a centrist was better than a liberal. Reed acknowledged substantial differences between his own ultraconservatism and Willkie’s moderation, but he nevertheless believed Willkie stood the best chance of unseating Roosevelt. Reed’s interest in Willkie prophesied the direction of the political winds in 1940. As noninterventionism diminished amid the increasing threat of war, the Republican Party needed a candidate who could match Roosevelt’s avowed internationalism.

Willkie, a dark horse internationalist who had switched to the Republican Party but two years earlier, seemed like the man for the moment. Born in Indiana and raised by dedicated social reformers, Willkie immersed himself in progressive causes in his younger years. He supported the League of Nations, contested Ku Klux Klan power in Indiana, and even voted for Roosevelt in 1932. However, Willkie’s experience in the business world altered his politics. A lawyer by education, Willkie served as legal counsel for Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, a utilities company, where he eventually became president and chief executive officer in 1934. It was from this vantage point as a business executive that Willkie sharpened his critique of Roosevelt’s regulatory liberalism. Small wonder why ultraconservatives lined up to support him. Perhaps far-right leaders saw Willkie, the former progressive turned business conservative, as a prodigal son, if not a kindred spirit. During the early New Deal, Willkie supported the idea of a social safety net, but he criticized the Tennessee Valley Authority and coined the term “Big Government” to “demonize the ills of excessive Washington activism.” Willkie wove a hawkish foreign policy together with conservative economic platforms, portraying Roosevelt’s empowerment of labor and regulatory liberalism as a threat to national security.⁸⁵

Willkie’s campaign succeeded in bringing together a cross-party conservative coalition. Eschewing a traditional primary campaign, he instead employed a media strategy to position himself as a political outsider. His opening salvo, a piece in Fortune titled “We the People,” charged that Roosevelt’s New Deal “impeded economic recovery with an antibusiness philosophy.”⁸⁶ The Indianan’s rhetoric of internationalism, property rights, and free markets appealed to a broad swath of conservatives, including moderate-to-liberal Republicans and right-wing newspapermen such as Henry Luce and Ogden Reid. Willkie secured support from corporate executives, such as Pepsi-Cola president Walter Mack Jr. and J. P. Morgan director Thomas Lamont, and inspired legions of grassroots supporters. Oren Root, the grandnephew of Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state Elihu Root, sent out tens of thousands of copies of Willkie’s “We the People” column and helped form the Willkie Clubs, an extra-party organization that collaborated with Republican machinery.⁸⁷

The remnants of the Jeffersonian Democrats weighed aligning with the Willkie forces. Perhaps tired of inaction, many had decided it was better to man the front than sit on the sidelines. Joe Bailey, a leader of the Texas Jeffersonians, suggested that the Jeffersonians should present their platform to the Republican National Committee in the hopes that the GOP would adopt some of their planks.⁸⁸ At first, Reed resisted. “I think that is rather a doubtful move,” he told Bailey. “It serves to identify us at once with the Republican Party and it might weaken our protest as DEMOCRATS against a third term.”⁸⁹ However, at the persistence of Meriwether and Bainbridge Colby, Reed consented because, as he saw it, “The concentration of power in our central government has, not gradually but rapidly, deprived the people of the states of their inherent rights.”⁹⁰ Once again, a forced pragmatism characterized by cross-party cooperation among conservatives trumped four more years of Roosevelt.

Meriwether took the Jeffersonian platform to the GOP. To underscore ideological common ground, he highlighted a section of the 1924 Democratic plank that privileged states’ rights over an enlarged federal government and bureaucratic expansion. Meriwether told the RNC, “We are confident” that individual Jeffersonian Democrats “will not support a party with Socialist, and even Communist, leanings, merely because it wears the label ‘Democrat.’” Instead, he argued, “These Democrats will support the Republican nominees in the 1940 campaign, once they understand that … their major policies in 1940 are based on fundamental American principles.” RNC chairman John Hamilton and the Resolutions Committee referred to the Jeffersonian overture as “fine”—not quite a ringing endorsement.⁹¹ Meriwether privately complained that the stunt produced “little publicity,” but the tryst hinted that collaborating with the GOP was fast becoming more amenable to disaffected Democrats.⁹²

The Jeffersonians’ move toward open collaboration with the Republican Party recalled the bolt to Landon in 1936 and illustrated the far-right movement’s ideological complexity. Ultraconservatives remained ostracized within Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, which forced them into the political wilderness. The Jeffersonians had crossed partisan lines to support a Republican in 1936 with the sole objective of defeating Roosevelt. In 1940, the group was poised to repeat the effort. Early polls showed Willkie within striking distance of Roosevelt.⁹³ A few weeks after the Jeffersonian meeting Reed admitted, “I am very favorably impressed by Willkie,” revealing an approval he never displayed toward Landon.⁹⁴ Indeed, many ultraconservatives viewed Willkie as a far superior candidate to Landon. Despite his penchant for internationalism, Willkie had a business background, raged against “Big Government,” and, ultimately, stood a better chance of defeating Roosevelt. The partisan affiliation of the ultraconservative movement was shifting, and the trend line pointed toward the Republican Party, or at least away from the Democrats.

Indeed, the 1940 election was a prelude to the struggle over the contours and direction of the conservative movement. Far-right organizations such as the American Liberty League and Jeffersonian Democrats, because of their hard-line views and visibility in Landon’s 1936 defeat, were seen as a threat to conservative hopes in 1940. At Smith’s behest, Reed considered shutting down the Jeffersonian apparatus. Rather than staging a third-party insurrection or forging their own grassroots movement, the remaining Jeffersonians decided the group should take a back seat to disgruntled New Dealers such as Lewis Douglas, FDR’s former budget director who resigned over concerns of deficit spending and now headed the Democrats for Willkie organization. The Texas Jeffersonians, one of the most active groups in 1936, officially terminated their operations; Bailey confided that some of the Texas Jeffersonians were “ready to turn Republican.”⁹⁵ Reed, however, remained a defiant Democrat. “Mr. Roosevelt cannot make a Communist or a Socialist out of me by betraying the Democratic flag,” Reed declared. “Neither can Mr. Roosevelt make a Republican out of me.”⁹⁶ Reed never renounced his Democratic loyalties. Instead, by joining the Willkie crusade, Reed sought to redeem his party from Roosevelt’s clutches.⁹⁷

The far right used Willkie’s status as a former Democrat to illustrate the party’s misguided trajectory under Roosevelt and entice disaffected Democrats. Al Smith described Willkie as “a lifelong democrat,” while Meriwether observed, “He did not leave the Democratic Party, it left him.”⁹⁸ The idea that Willkie was the real Democrat, not Roosevelt, appealed to estranged conservatives and influenced the creation of the grassroots Democrats for Willkie organization. Even before the official demise of the Jeffersonian Democrats, Meriwether held a mass rally of 2,000 people under the Willkie Democratic Club banner, but he and the other organizers found the $600 cost onerous, illustrating the Jeffersonians’ weakened state in 1940. As the Jeffersonian apparatus decayed, other groups moved in to feast on the scraps, trying to gain access to the Jeffersonians’ mailing lists. Edmunds sent a list of the most foundational Jeffersonians—750 people in thirty-seven states—to Alan Valentine, executive director of the National Committee of Democrats for Willkie. When Valentine’s group approached the Jeffersonians about an official organizational merger, Reed saw the potential for a larger movement. Reed issued a statement that Roosevelt’s administration had created “a crisis which lays upon all right-thinking persons regardless of party the duty to set aside minor differences and to unite in the protection of democratic and American principles.” As a result, he noted, “We have therefore concluded to accept the invitation extended. I believe this will … result in the repudiation of the Roosevelt dictatorship and the triumphant election of Wendell Willkie.”⁹⁹

The merger marked the official dissolution of the National Jeffersonian Democrats, but multiple issues precipitated the Jeffersonians’ decline. The threat of World War II prompted a surge of national security concerns and wartime patriotism, which weakened anti-administration views, boosted Roosevelt’s political fortune, and forced a tactical shift from dissident Democrats. Many of the Jeffersonian leaders were elderly and lacked the constitution to continue the toil of grassroots organizing. It is also possible that the 1936 defeat diminished their faith in far-right ideals, but this seems unlikely given the group’s ideological intensity. The Democrats for Willkie organization offered a salve to Reed and other conservative Democrats: they could plant far-right ideology within Willkie’s campaign, thereby influencing the GOP without abandoning their own party. The new group urged Jeffersonians to “begin the organization of a Democrats for Willkie committee in your community,” and Reed encouraged former Jeffersonians to “give their services freely in the furtherance of the state and local organizations of Democrats for Willkie clubs.”¹⁰⁰

As the Jeffersonians disbanded, the American Liberty League met a similar fate. After the disaster of 1936, funding for the organization dried up. Financial backers reneged on their promised donations, and by 1937 the du Ponts were the sole financial string holding the organization together. The Liberty League trimmed its organization down to the bone over the next few years. The League’s Executive Committee went into hibernation, holding no meetings between late 1936 and 1940. In 1937, Jouett Shouse’s annual salary was slashed from $54,000 to $12,500, and then he served as president without compensation for the next three years. The League’s final act, after years of running on a skeleton crew, was to fire its statistician and close its National Press Club office in September 1940. Shouse retreated to his private law practice while the du Ponts, hoping to avoid entanglements with the second Hatch Act, which limited contributions to political campaigns, threw their financial heft behind Willkie. A Senate investigation into campaign finances credited the du Pont family with spending $121,225 on pro-Willkie groups, including Democrats for Willkie. Even though the American Liberty League and Jeffersonian Democrats dissolved during the election, the far right’s financial and grassroots network survived and continued to boost conservative causes.¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, despite the grassroots outpouring, support from disillusioned Democrats and wealthy financiers, and a handsome, internationalist candidate, the Republicans lost to Franklin Roosevelt for the third election in a row. Willkie received more popular votes than the two previous GOP candidates, Hoover and Landon, but Roosevelt crushed him in the electoral college: 449 to 82. Despite losing a few seats in the Senate, the Democrats retained a stranglehold on both houses of Congress. Roosevelt’s allegedly sagging coalition persevered. Conservatives, particularly far-right activists, once again felt the sting of failure. Reed blamed milquetoast conservatives for Willkie’s defeat. In a letter to Al Smith, he wrote, “This campaign [for Willkie] began to develop into a real frontal attack. But, even up to the end there were too many mealy-mouthed protestants.”¹⁰² The far right’s support of Willkie, like their support of Landon, indicated a pattern of forced pragmatism during the early years of the ultraconservative movement. The lack of a true right-wing candidate on a major ticket, combined with a disinterest in third-party activism, compelled ultraconservatives to back imperfect, impure candidates in an effort to defeat liberalism. However, despite the appearance of continued liberal dominance, the 1940 presidential election revealed cracks in the New Deal coalition.¹⁰³

Internationalism won at the ballot box, but the argument over America’s global role continued to rage after the election. The controversy intensified on March 11, 1941, when Congress passed Lend-Lease, which gave Roosevelt the power to provide military aid to nations whose defense he considered critical to American security, and extended the tours of duty for men drafted under the Selective Training and Service Act. To noninterventionists, Roosevelt’s decision to give military assistance to Great Britain was the opening salvo for American entry into World War II. Hiram Johnson, a Republican senator from California, characterized Lend-Lease as “the wickedest piece of legislation that has ever been presented to the American Congress,” while Montana Democrat Burton Wheeler predicted that the bill would “plow under every fourth American boy.”¹⁰⁴ Taft, clinging to the raft of old guard neutrality, lamented, “War is worse even than a German victory.”¹⁰⁵ These senators voiced the concerns of many citizens and lent credibility to a surging movement against American involvement.¹⁰⁶

The America First Committee emerged in the final months of 1940 as a critical node for noninterventionism and patriotic Americanism. A week after the signing of Lend-Lease, the organization rushed out a statement of principles: “Our first duty is to keep America out of foreign wars. Our entry would only destroy democracy, not save it.”¹⁰⁷ General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board for Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck and Company, served as America First’s national chairman. A man with ultraconservative leanings, Wood went so far as to say that U.S. entry would facilitate “the end of capitalism all over the world.”¹⁰⁸ The organization as a whole was not a far-right group—its statement of principles bore no resemblance to the Jeffersonians’ overheated ideological screed—but its membership overlapped substantially with the far right. The AFC represented a moment when some ultraconservative ideas, noninterventionist foreign policies in this case, aligned with the political mainstream. Roughly 800,000 people joined the AFC, forming a national network of hundreds of chapters concentrated in and around the Midwest. The organization held rallies, created a research bureau to disseminate policy studies, and engaged in mass-mailer campaigns to convince more Americans to reject the accelerating drift toward war.¹⁰⁹

Despite promoting mainstream noninterventionist views, the America First Committee became a breeding ground for right-wing extremists. Domestic fascists infiltrated the committee, illustrating the porous borders separating the various shades of conservatism and making the organization an easy target for detractors. Roosevelt denounced committee spokesmen as “unwitting aids of the agents of Nazism” who “preached the gospel of fear.”¹¹⁰ The committee tried to fight this perception by spurning the support of high-profile extremists such as Father Coughlin and the Christian Front, but many Americans still considered Wood’s group a front for Nazi Germany. Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator and one of the committee’s primary spokespeople, dealt the AFC an irreparable blow. Appearing before a Des Moines crowd, Lindbergh declared that “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” conspired to assure American entry.¹¹¹ Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism was beyond the pale, and the outburst of anger toward him was swift and scathing. Willkie spoke for many Americans when he described Lindbergh’s speech as “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.” “If the American people permit race prejudice to arrive at this critical moment,” Willkie averred, “they little deserve to preserve democracy.”¹¹²

The repudiation of Lindbergh’s bigotry, while setting an important moral compass for American foreign policy, implicitly provided cover for and revealed the self-perception of the far right. Despite holding white supremacist ideologies, ultraconservatives such as Reed and Haley viewed themselves not as racist bigots, but as defenders of Americanism. Yet, the ultraconservative definition of “Americanism” often excluded various racial categories, religious groups, and political ideologies in order to placate the far right’s myopic national vision. This right-wing radicalism threatened to alienate voters, which is why Smith attempted to sideline the Jeffersonians during numerous elections. Regardless, Lindbergh’s speech and the surrounding controversy tainted the noninterventionist cause with the stench of bigotry and prejudice. Making matters worse, rather than distancing themselves from Lindbergh’s conspiratorial rhetoric, America First leaders signed off on his ideas, further discrediting their own cause.¹¹³

The linkage to anti-Semitism dealt America First a crippling blow, but the ideological quibbling over neutrality ended when war came to America on December 7, 1941. Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war rendered all noninterventionist arguments irrelevant. One day after the “date which will live in infamy,” the United States officially entered World War II. Roosevelt asserted that, in order to win the war, the United States needed to become the “arsenal of democracy,” and he created multiple government agencies to facilitate the rise of the warfare state. The War Production Board coordinated the conversion from peacetime commerce to wartime industry. The sprawling Office of War Information produced propaganda by working with Hollywood studios, national and local radio networks, and various publication outlets. Citizens engaged with the warfare state by rationing goods, buying war bonds, supporting labor and consumer rights, and even by paying increased taxes. The transition to a warfare state forced an ideological and societal shift; instead of fretting about social and economic justice, the entire nation bent toward war production and national security concerns.¹¹⁴

Though the warfare state facilitated the construction of Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy,” the far right viewed it as proof that liberalism was indeed a red-tinged leviathan. The Great Sedition Trial of 1944, for example, pitted Roosevelt’s administration against a coterie of extreme-right activists. The government charged radicals like Pelley and Dilling with conspiring to cause military insubordination. The far right, however, saw the trial as a prelude to political oppression. Perhaps more alarming to ultraconservatives was the government’s unprecedented wartime economic interventionism. The government passed a bill allowing for the requisition of war material, created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) to manage labor-capital relations, and permitted Roosevelt to seize industrial plants involved in the war effort. The power to take over specific plants, part of the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act, was created to protect industries from labor unrest. There were hundreds of thousands of labor disputes throughout the war but only sixty-four plant seizures. However, Roosevelt’s use of this power carried the explosive class antagonisms of the Great Depression and forced Americans to reflect upon the government’s expansive economic management.¹¹⁵

Within this war-addled regulatory vortex, the Montgomery Ward labor crisis captured the nation’s attention and breathed new life into the ultraconservative movement. The local union for Montgomery Ward’s Chicago headquarters, the United Retail and Wholesale Employees of America (URWEA), had spent months negotiating against intractable management. An antiunion sentiment coursed throughout Montgomery Ward’s leadership. Sewell Avery condemned unions as subversive conspiracies that stripped property owners of their constitutional rights. The situation came to a head when Avery refused to sign a new labor contract. In response, the URWEA local called for a strike on April 12, 1944. Worried about maintaining a well-oiled economy, and perhaps trying to earn labor votes in an election year, Roosevelt instructed Avery to comply with NWLB directives and ordered workers to return to their posts. The union called off its strike, but Avery still refused to negotiate. Instead, the chairman accused Roosevelt of trespassing into the realm of private enterprise and settled in for a prolonged labor dispute by hiring high school–aged scabs. Roosevelt responded by ordering the military to seize Montgomery Ward properties, which culminated in a defiant Avery being hauled out of his office by U.S. troops.¹¹⁶

The seizure monopolized newspaper headlines and inflamed conservative anger. “Troops Seize Montgomery Ward Plant,” declared the front page of the Washington Post.¹¹⁷ The picture of armed soldiers carting Avery out of Montgomery Ward was emblazoned across the front pages of newspapers across the country.¹¹⁸ The next day Avery joked, “I’ve been fired before in my life, but this is the first time they carried me out feet first.” Congressional conservatives, however, were not inclined toward humor. Charles S. Dewey, an Illinois Republican and former banking executive, demanded an investigation and described the seizure as “un-American” and reminiscent of “Gestapo methods.”¹¹⁹ Conservatives of all stripes voiced outrage over Roosevelt’s actions. If it could happen to Avery, they surmised, it could happen to anyone. Senator Byrd anointed the event as “an outrageous abuse of power,” while General Wood warned, “If the wartime powers of a President can be invoked to virtually confiscate the property and business of Montgomery Ward, then the President can seize the business of any merchant or any other enterprise anywhere and anytime.”¹²⁰ Avery wrapped himself in the cloak of victimization, proclaiming that “the kind of slavery that is being gradually put into effect now with government help is far worse than anything that ever happened before.”¹²¹ Overheated rhetoric, anti-labor conspiracies, and anti-statist rage framed the conservative mindset.¹²²

One name was notably absent from the Montgomery Ward controversy: Martin Dies Jr. Considering his anti-labor bona fides, Dies should have been front and center. Yet, while Avery remained locked out of his Montgomery Ward office, Dies fretted about reelection. The patriotic nationalism of World War II dampened the American public’s willingness to entertain Dies’s conspiratorial investigations. Marquis Childs of the Washington Post chided, “Instead of working quietly and efficiently as does the FBI, the Dies Committee wrangles and rants and thereby, in my opinion, damages the lawmaking process.”¹²³ After all, Missouri Democrat John J. Cochran pointed out, “Congress was not intended to be a Muckraking body.”¹²⁴ Dies claimed that a throat ailment prevented him from running for reelection and threw in the towel. However, columnist Drew Pearson pointed out that Dies faced a tough primary opponent, judge J. M. Combs, and faced damaging allegations of nepotism. A grassroots movement to boost voter rolls in his district further endangered Dies’s reelection bid. His decision to step away sealed the fate of the Dies Committee.¹²⁵

Dies’s retreat back to private life did not steal attention away from the Montgomery Ward saga, which lingered through 1944 and into 1945. The government returned control of Montgomery Ward to Avery before he signed the union’s contract, leading to another Avery holdout and prompting another URWEA strike in December. This time Roosevelt ordered the seizure of the main Chicago plant plus six other Ward locations across the nation, once again forcing Avery from office. The traditional drama of labor versus capital evolved into a referendum on presidential powers during wartime. However, conservatives ignored incidents where Roosevelt used state power against labor—such as the 1944 takeover of the Philadelphia Transportation Company during a racially charged union strike—in favor of portraying the president as an anti-capitalist tyrant. After the second Montgomery Ward seizure, Avery released a statement condemning Roosevelt’s action as “a violation of the Constitution.” The government did not return control of the Chicago Montgomery Ward to private ownership until after World War II. For workers, Roosevelt’s actions throughout the Montgomery Ward crisis indicated a respect for labor rights. However, the seizure fed a growing negative perception of liberal economic regulation and boosted the nascent free-market movement.¹²⁶

The Montgomery Ward saga galvanized an alliance between right-wing businessmen and far-right activists, many of whom viewed the government’s actions as tantamount to communist tyranny. Arthur Sears Henning of the Chicago Daily Tribune captured this conspiratorial zeitgeist: “The incident has served to focus the spreading feeling in congress and the country at large that President Roosevelt is steadily building a totalitarian dictatorship partaking of a combination of fascism and communism that, if he is successful in his undertaking, will doom democracy in this nation.”¹²⁷ Avery received over 3,000 letters, many from fellow executives and pro-business organizations, supporting his fight against Roosevelt. Only 172 citizens wrote in to laud Roosevelt’s actions.¹²⁸ Former Jeffersonian Democrats supported Avery’s position, too. Lee Meriwether pondered, “It is possible the Montgomery-Ward affair will awaken people to what’s going on in Washington; all with whom I have discussed the matter think the reaction will deal the ‘New’ Deal a deadly blow.”¹²⁹ James Reed took a harsher tone. He compared the plant seizure to the upheaval of the Civil War era and evoked the anger of southern whites toward Reconstruction era martial law: “It appears that the rule of law is to be abolished and bayonet rule substituted.”¹³⁰ For the far right, the Montgomery Ward controversy became a synecdoche explaining communist infiltration, diminishing property rights, and the loss of economic freedom.

Roosevelt’s use of executive power catalyzed new activists to join the far-right crusade. Willis E. Stone, a California-based engineer and businessman, viewed Avery as a libertarian martyr, and the Montgomery Ward seizure intensified Stone’s conviction that modern liberalism was simply jackbooted communism in disguise. Incensed by wartime economic mandates, Stone drafted a constitutional amendment to limit federal economic incursions. His one-line amendment, published in the pages of the Sherman Oaks Citizen-Tribune, read, “The government of the United States of America shall not engage in any business, commercial, or industrial enterprise in competition with its citizens.”¹³¹ Stone modified his proposition over time, with the final version aiming to retrench all government economic activity and repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. The proposal was a panacea that would, according to Stone, halt the “growth of this cancer” and “retrieve the ground lost to socialism.”¹³² His anti-statism aligned with the business-minded conservatism of men such as Avery, Shouse, and Frank Chodorov, a libertarian thinker who contributed to the periodical Freeman. Stone’s activism continued after World War II; he funded and led multiple organizations to spread his radical libertarianism and his amendment, which he branded the “Proposed 23rd Amendment.” The economic interventionism of Roosevelt’s warfare state set the foundation for future ultraconservative activism, which would flourish with the beginning of the Cold War.¹³³

The presidential election of 1944 occurred amid the battle over Montgomery Ward, providing one final crescendo of far-right action during the Roosevelt era. With the United States embroiled in a two-front war, Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented fourth presidential term. Traditionalists balked at the decision. Many right-wingers, especially in Texas, still resented Roosevelt’s replacement of John Nance Garner with labor ally Henry A. Wallace on the 1940 Democratic ticket. The final straw came when Republicans chose a moderate candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, who described himself as a “New Deal Republican.” Conservatives had been shut out for the third election in a row. In response, a group of far-right Texas Democrats, who came to be known as the Texas Regulars, separated from the national Democratic Party and formed a third-party outfit. With wealthy Texas businessmen, especially oil tycoons, bankrolling the movement, the revolt resembled a Lone Star version of the American Liberty League. Democratic Senator W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a folksy ultraconservative who relied on race baiting and conspiratorial anti-communism to drum up white votes, emerged as the movement’s leader. The Regulars created a platform that, when examined holistically, called for the redemption of the southern Democratic Party. The platform demanded the “return of states rights” and the “restoration of the supremacy of the white race,” both of which the Regulars argued had been “destroyed by the Communist-controlled New Deal.”¹³⁴ The Regulars created an avenue for aggrieved white conservatives who were still smarting after the Smith v. Allwright decision abolished the white primary. Built upon a foundation of libertarianism, conspiratorial anti-communism, and white supremacy, the Texas Regulars’ third-party crusade sought to oust Roosevelt and restore the Democratic Party to its Dixieland traditions.¹³⁵

The campaign only materialized in the final months of the election season, so the Regulars and their political allies, such as the Committee for Constitutional Government, hustled to get their message out to voters. Radio stations carried the Texas Regulars’ broadcasts during the final two weeks of the campaign, and crowds in the hundreds attended rallies featuring prominent far-right Texans. At the Texas Regulars’ first statewide rally, Dies took the stump, deriding liberals as communist dupes and the New Deal as “antidemocratic and un-American.” “It is a form of Fascism disguised as a liberal movement to deceive gullible and unthinking people,” Dies told the crowd.¹³⁶ O’Daniel caterwauled about “smear brigades” and “parasitic government snoopers” and called wartime rationing a “Communistic, totalitarian measure” intended to create “an autocratic, bureaucratic dictatorship.”¹³⁷ The Regulars followed in the footsteps of the American Liberty League and the Jeffersonian Democrats, raking in donations from wealthy industrialists and portraying the election as an existential, communism-versus-Americanism struggle.

However, the Texas Regulars declined to follow the Jeffersonians down one critical trail: they would not support the Republican Party. The Regulars won over far-right Democrats, but their refusal to cross the partisan divide limited their appeal. Even Dewey’s nomination of Ohio governor John W. Bricker, a hard-line conservative who complained that the New Deal was “in the hands of the radicals and communists,” for vice president was not enough to sway the Texas Regulars.¹³⁸ Furthermore, not all ultraconservatives agreed with the Regulars’ third-party strategy. Haley wrote off the Regulars and the national Democratic Party, choosing instead to support Dewey by donating to the local Republican apparatus. In a moment of pragmatism, Haley’s rancor toward Roosevelt’s corruption of the old Democratic Party outweighed Dewey’s New Deal leanings. The Regulars captured the Texas Democratic convention and put forth their own slate of electors, but no candidates, which made it all the more difficult for voters to identify with their movement. Their inability to collaborate with the Republican Party and failure to form a broad far-right coalition further narrowed the Regulars’ already limited base.¹³⁹

The mutiny of the Texas Regulars failed to temper Roosevelt’s popularity. On Election Day, only 135,000 Texans voted for the Texas Regulars’ ticket, a smidge under 9 percent of the total vote in Texas. Despite the humbling numbers, the Texas Regulars constituted an important moment for the far right. Not only did the Regulars serve as a predecessor for the 1948 Dixiecrat Revolt, but the debate over third-party organizing versus reforming a mainstream party became an object of ultraconservative obsession in the coming decades.

The GOP experienced similar struggles in shifting voters away from Roosevelt. Dewey got closer to defeating Roosevelt than any other Republican—he lost the popular vote by only 3.5 million votes—but Roosevelt cruised to another landslide electoral victory: 432 to 99. However, less than three months into his fourth term, Roosevelt passed away after years of health problems. It was up to his brand-new vice president, former Kansas senator Harry S. Truman, to bring the war to a close. For Americans, World War II ended twice. The European Theater concluded with the fall of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, and the atomic bombing of Japan terminated the Pacific Theater in early August. Six long years of fighting (four for the Americans) left global leaders picking up the pieces of a shattered international order.¹⁴⁰

The World War II era marked an epochal turning point for American society. Roosevelt continued to dominate national politics, but fissures appeared within the New Deal coalition. During the war, the welfare-state liberalism that marked the Great Depression morphed into an expansive warfare state. This new brand of liberalism protected the existing welfare state—permanent fixtures included Social Security, the Wagner Act, and a vast array of public works projects and regulatory systems—but privileged winning the war above all else. Roosevelt expanded federal power to unforeseen levels, providing far-right activists with more ammunition and new avenues to contest modern liberalism. Ultraconservatives derided Roosevelt’s support of labor unions, attacked liberals’ perceived hostility toward business, and proffered conspiracy theories that communist cabals propelled federal empowerment. Labor strife and industrial seizures, rather than being viewed as a consequence of the wartime economy, became a referendum on communist subversion and the dangers of state authority. To ultraconservatives, liberalism remained a tyrannical leviathan.¹⁴¹

After almost a decade of trying to convince voters of Roosevelt’s socialist leanings, the Jeffersonian Democrats met an interminable foe: Father Time. Much of the Jeffersonian leadership was quite old; Reed, Edmunds, and Meriwether were septuagenarians and octogenarians. Sterling E. Edmunds died in the summer of 1944. “He was as sterling as his name,” a grieving Meriwether wrote to Reed.¹⁴² A few months later, just weeks before Roosevelt won a fourth term, Reed passed away at the age of eighty-two. Nevertheless, the Jeffersonian Democrats left important legacies for future ultraconservatives. Cold War far-right groups reflected the Jeffersonian organizational structure, with a national headquarters serving as the tip of the spear while state chapters gathered followers and tailored their messaging for local audiences. They also demonstrated how grassroots activists could collaborate with extra-party organizations, right-wing businessmen, and official party organs. Most important, the Jeffersonians created an avenue for disaffected southern and midwestern Democrats to redeem the party, even if it meant supporting the party of Lincoln. Indeed, the Jeffersonian coalition blurred party lines, foreshadowing the protracted political reorganization of the twentieth century. Haley, a relatively young forty-four years old at the dawn of 1945, would live to see this reorientation come to fruition. The Jeffersonians did not effect an electoral shift and many members died before the Republican Party became synonymous with conservatism, but the organization brought together wealthy businessmen, right-wing politicians, and local radicals, an admixture that fueled the ultraconservative movement and pushed far-right ideas into the political mainstream.

Martin Dies Jr. also straddled the porous separation between mainstream conservatives and the radical right. His anti-labor, anti-subversive investigations left a different, but no less critical, legacy for Cold War ultraconservatives. Dies was an effective right-wing translator—he took the far right’s anti-statist, conspiratorial mindset and channeled it into state-sanctioned investigative action against the state itself. He accused liberals of abusing state power while wielding state power against liberal or, as he saw them, communist enemies. Because Dies’s investigations also revealed a number of actual domestic communists, he legitimized far-right paranoia and convinced conservatives that New Deal liberalism was in fact a gateway for un-American subversion. Through his committee, Dies bequeathed a strategy for attacking liberalism through a fusion of federal power and conspiratorial accusations. Cold War conservatives inherited Dies’s anti-statist blueprint. When anti-communist hysteria gripped America during the early Cold War, HUAC reemerged as a weapon for attacking postwar liberalism and a critical hub for ultraconservative activism.¹⁴³

Ultimately, the World War II era reconfigured the foundations of ultraconservatism. The growing warfare state aggravated far-right anxieties and became the rationale for investigating left-wing subversion, but divergent electoral strategies, especially whether or not to form a third party, would continue to puzzle the ultraconservative movement. World War II restricted the success of some far-right activism—ultraconservatives had been kept at arm’s length during elections, and noninterventionism crumbled amid accusations of bigotry—but it laid the groundwork for Cold War conservatism. After World War II, the warfare state prioritized the growing rift between the United States and the Soviet Union rather than returning to welfare-state liberalism, helping shift the American polity rightward. The ensuing Cold War provided the perfect environment for ultraconservatism. Though non-interventionists had failed to prevent American entry into World War II, activists such as Robert McCormick and General Wood carried nativist anti-internationalism into the Cold War. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy inherited the investigatory mantle from Dies and continued stoking anti-communist hysteria through the mirage of internal subversion. Businessmen such as Avery and Stone demonized state economic intervention and generated publicity for the blossoming free-market libertarian movement. It would be up to this new ultraconservative vanguard—one hardened by political defeat, the Great Depression, and World War II—to bear the far-right banner forward into the Cold War.