Father Coughlin was a far right anti-semite xenophobe German useful idiot who was shouting don't fight the Jews' war, along with Lindbergh.
Pre-USSR Teddy Roosevelt said the same thing as his cousin FDR. Correlation isn't causation.
The big sitdown strikes came in 1936-37, after FDR's New Deal had brought about a partial recovery (from 26% to 14% unemployment) and the institutional reforms (the NLRB, right to unionize) that increased labor's bargaining power in the highly concentrated steel. auto and coal industries.
It was an economic abyss that engulfed ALL classes that brought about the New Deal, not a labor movement. But FDR's ascent prevented fascist as well as communist mobs from coalescing, as is clear from numerous stories in William Manchester's book, "America, The Glory and the Dream: 1932-72":
"Feelings of desperation were still internalized in most men (the
suicide rate tripled that winter) but more and more mobs were beginning
to coalesce.
In Lincoln, Nebraska, four thousand men occupied the statehouse,
another five thousand took over Seattle's ten-story County-City
Building, and five thousand Chicago teachers, tormented beyond
endurance, stormed the city's banks.
The strains of "L'Internationale" were becoming increasingly familiar
to the jobless; a forty-two-year-old radical named Louis Budenz led the
Ohio Unemployed League mass march on the Columbus statehouse.
His slogan was: "We must take control of the government and establish a
workers' and farmers' republic."
The sense of institutions, authority, and private property- the
intuitive discipline which Daniel Patrick Moynihan would later call
"the glue that holds societies together" --was showing signs of
disintegration.
The tax strikes and the bootleg mining of company coal seams were
ominous; so was the frequency with which empty lots were being gardened
without their owners' consent, and the scattered, aimless rioting in
Detroit, where relief had simply stopped.
Some communities quit.
Key West, Florida, was going into bankruptcy; there was no money to pay
the sanitation department, and whole streets were filling up with
rubbish and garbage.
Here and there the starving were muttering violence.
The mayor of a Massachusetts town, watching two thousand idle men
milling around his city hall, wrote that "a spark might change them
into a mob."
Governor O. Max Gardner of North Carolina warned of the danger of
"violent social and political revolution."
Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, faced with the state's reluctance to
appropriate funds for the city's six hundred thousand out-of-work men,
told the legislature, "Call out the troops before you close the relief
stations."
The well-fed were edgy.
Company men in employment offices became curt, bank tellers nervous,
elected officials quicker to call the police, policemen faster with the
nightstick.
Henry Ford had always been a pacifist.
Now he carried a gun.
In Richmond, Virginia, a delegation from the local Unemployed Council
called on Mayor J. Fulmer Bright a few days after Thanksgiving; the
mayor told his police chief, "Take these men by the scruff of the neck
and the seat of the pants and throw them out."
Jittery company guards killed four miners in Pennsylvania's Fayette
County.
New York ordered the apple sellers off its sidewalks, and John P.
O'Brien, the new occupant of Gracie Mansion, promised his city, "You're
going to have a mayor with a chin and fight in him. I'll preserve the
metropolis from the Red Army."
Plainclothesmen swinging truncheons waded into a Union Square rally;
the New York Times reported "screams of women and cries of men with
bloody heads and faces."
Oklahoma City police used tear gas to break up meetings.
Seattle police evicted the squatters from its County-City Building with
fire hoses.
Chicago law enforcement officers clubbed the unpaid teachers with
billies, two of them holding one middle-aged woman while a third
smashed her face.
Testifying before a Senate committee about the "sporadic uprisings in a
number of our industrial cities," an A.F.L spokesman said that "the
great bulk of those people know nothing about Communism. They wanted
bread."
To the propertied classes, the distinction was irrelevant.
As Robert Sherwood wrote, the way ahead seemed to be clouded by "black
doubt, punctured by brief flashes of ominous light, whose revelations
are not comforting."
If the government could not keep order, each man must look to his
own.
Some had mounted machine guns on their roofs.
They weren't paranoid. The evidence strongly suggests that had Roosevelt in fact been another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American
countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims.
Charles M. Schwab was one of many tycoons who believed revolution was
just around the corner.
The dean of the Harvard Business School said, "Capitalism is on trial
and on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western
civilization."
William Allen White called the Soviet Union "the most interesting place
on the planet."
New Russia's Primer was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice; it compared
American chaos with Russian order.
"Those rascals in Russia," said Will Rogers, "... have got mighty good
ideas.... Just think of everybody in a country going to work."
Elmer Davis said the profit system was dead.
Even Scott Fitzgerald was reading Marx and writing, "To bring on the
revolution, it may be necessary to work inside the Communist Party."
Stuart Chase asked in A New Deal, "Why should Russians have all the
fun of remaking a world?"
More than one man in office flirted with the left.
A secret clique of reserve army officers was reported ready to act if
the new President proved ineffective.
General Smedley D. Butler testified that a New York bond salesman had
attempted to recruit him for the right with an offer of $18,000 in cash.
Nicholas Murray Butler told his students that totalitarian regimes
brought forth "men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character,
and far more courage than the system of elections," and if anyone
represented the American establishment then it was Dr. Butler, with
his Nobel Prize, his thirty-four honorary degrees, and his thirty-year
tenure as president of Columbia University.
Governor Landon of Kansas declared, "Even the iron hand of a national
dictator is in preference to a paralytic stroke."
Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. of New York said in 1932, "If we don't
give it [dictatorship] under the existing system, the people will change the system."
In February 1933 he wrote the President-elect that he and his fellow
Republicans were ready to "give you any power you may need."
Al Smith thought the Constitution ought to be wrapped up and laid "on
the shelf" until the crisis was over.
Vanity Fair, whose associate editors included Clare Boothe Brokaw
(later Luce), demanded, "Appoint a dictator!"
Walter Lippmann wanted to give the President full power at the expense
of Congress; "the danger," he said, "is not that we shall lose our liberties, but that we shall not be able to act with the necessary speed and comprehensive ness and Republican Senator David A. Reed said outright, " If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now."
There was no Republican-controlled Congress from 1933-47. FDR had large Democratic majorities, though Southern Democrats prevented passage of any civil rights legislation.
Knowing, as we do now, how Italian Communist leader Togliatti fed Italian communists into Stalin's purge machine, Italians are almost universally happy that he was kept out of power in 1948.
One of the unknown contributors to Italy's rapid postwar recovery were the millions of tons of scrap metal left behind by both the Germans and the Anglo-Americans. My Italian father-in-law (from 1993-2005) had a small foundry and he had a friend in Lecco who made a fortune from transporting and selling as scrap hundreds of thousands of tons of bombed out or abandoned trucks, artillery pieces, tanks, etc and feeding it into Italy's northern industrial heartland.
"Military adventurism held in check": It was Eisenhower and JFK who held the crazies like Curtis LeMay in check. The 1950s and 1960s were the exact reverse of the Trump years. The White House was an island of sanity and the Pentagon full of preemptive war crazies.
"American hypocrisy": Truman was explicit about how this drove his decision to integrate the military in 1948. This was old news by the '60s.
"predatory capitalism": The Baltic States and Poland were happy to have free market capitalism, especially Estonia, whose PPP GDP per capita is $47.5k, almost as high as Spain's and 10% higher than Portugal's.
My Russian-Latvian wife was happy to see Latvian independence. She and her first husband were in the flower importing business even during Soviet times when Gorbachev allowed family-owned "cooperatives". She was later the CEO of Latvia's largest flower importer, in a joint venture with a Dutch partner to keep the local mafia away. No sane Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Czech, Pole, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, German Ossi or Bulgarian wants the USSR to return.
"the Ukraine": it's Ukraine, without the "the". Every Ukrainian finds this insulting and bigoted.
"NATO would not expand": Read the NATO charter. Membership is an open door that all of formerly Soviet-occupied Warsaw Pact states were happy to walk through. There was no written agreement to change the NATO charter. Russia has no inherent "sphere of influence" right to veto its neighbors' alliances. Full stop.
No Russian I've met in four visits to St Petersburg and Moscow regrets the demise of the gulag-governed USSR.
Did neoliberal triumphalism give us the bubble of debt-driven growth that preceded the crashes of 1989-91 and 2008-09? Absolutely. But such bubblicious manias are an inherent part of capitalism's credit cycles and preceded the existence of the USSR. Just look at 17th century tulips, the 18th century John Law-driven South Sea bubble, the 1830s railroad bubble, the Roaring '20s stock market bubble. Mob-like herding behavior is in human nature that requires no neoliberal ideology to gets its victims to drink the credit koolaid.
