Liars: How Progressives Exploit Our Fears for Power and Control Read online

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  i. Madeleine Astor would receive only five million dollars of her husband’s huge estate. Sixty-nine million dollars would go to his son from his first marriage, Vincent, who would become one of Franklin Roosevelt’s closest personal friends.

  ii. There’s no demand, though, from modern progressives to rename a building just a few blocks away: the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, named for an ardent Stalinist.

  iii. In May 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that an 1894 income tax act violated Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 of the Constitution, a clause that prohibited direct federal taxes on individuals.

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  PROFILE IN FEAR:

  THE DEVIL’S WATER

  Trumbull County, Ohio

  Circa 1885

  Wayne Wheeler swung a newly sharpened scythe through the alfalfa grass that came up to his hips.

  At five foot six and with a tidy mustache, he didn’t very much look the part of an Ohio farmer. His father, Joseph, had insisted that his son become an educated man—go to college and become a lawyer or a doctor. Young Wayne had every intention on following through with his dad’s wish—he loved his books—but he also loved the rough-and-tumble of farm life.

  Every July, his father would summon him, his siblings, and a handful of farmhands from neighboring towns to the fields, where they would work days on end from sunup to sunset, cutting the season’s supply of hay. Wayne liked the feel of calluses on his hand at the end of harvest season. He liked being around the farmhands who joked and cursed. Even now, as beads of sweat gathered on his upper lip in the sweltering Ohio sun, he found the musty, comforting smell of freshly cut grass wafting toward his nostrils intoxicating.

  But with each passing summer, Wayne noticed something troubling about a number of the farmhands, a few tormented souls who staggered in each morning, eyes bloodshot and smelling of alcohol. They’d sneak sips of their favorite liquid from mason jars kept out of sight of his devout Congregationalist father.

  One time, Wayne had been upstairs in his house when a drunken farmhand ran in from the fields in a maniacal rage, muttering in long, slurred sentences, “I’m a kill you two ladies! But I ain’t gonna do a hideous thang like that ’til I have my way with you two beauties!”

  His mother and sister were screaming for help. “Joseph!” they cried out. “Joseph!”

  Wayne cowered under his bed, covering his ears with the palms of his hands. He was paralyzed by fear.

  He heard the front door slam open, then the sounds of fists pummeling flesh and bone, thumps and cracks audible through the floorboards. He never saw or heard from the farmhand again, nor was the subject ever spoken about in the Wheeler household.

  And then there was “Old Soak,” the affable neighbor with a fondness for Kentucky bourbon and a knack for impressions of local town characters. As his nickname implied, Old Soak was harmless, even endearing, until he got hold of the bottle. Liquor made him belligerent and aggressive.

  One drunken evening, Old Soak ambled up to the Wheelers’ front porch to show off his impressions, but his kind face had transformed into a sneering picture of horror. Joseph Wheeler took the man’s arm and walked him home. As Wayne watched the silhouette of his father and this pitiable, broken man amble off down the road, the young man promised himself he would never touch alcohol.

  But none of those run-ins with drunkards compared to what happened one fateful July day.

  Wayne had piled up bales of hay and was loading them into a wagon. The choreography of lifting a hundred-pound hay bale into the air and then onto a cart was something to behold. Wayne had worked out a fluid rhythm: his pitchfork plunged into the hay bale, up it went, and then it leaped forward in a graceful arc onto the back of the wagon. Once he got into a groove, Wayne could fork bales forever.

  That was when he heard the voice. “Hey, boy!”

  The call came from the other side of the wagon. He’d been so busy he hadn’t noticed anyone approaching. Around the side staggered Hank, a new farmhand Wayne’s father had hired for the season. Just a few years older than Wayne himself, Hank already had a deep, gravelly voice, a mustache, scraggly hair, and a deep tan earned from many seasons in the sun. Wayne knew he was one of the hands who drank, but he’d never caused any problems.

  Wayne had never seen Hank drunk like this, though. He was staggering, leaning on his own pitchfork like a staff. Wayne could see the top of a glass flagon poking up from the pocket of Hank’s coveralls. It swished and sloshed with every step the man took.

  “Hey, boy!” Hank said again, advancing on Wayne. “Ol’ man says we ga-go farster.”

  Wayne couldn’t understand. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Ga-go farster!” Hank repeated. “Farster!”

  Was he saying “faster”? Wayne could barely understand his drunken gibberish.

  “Farster!” thundered Hank, almost shouting.

  With that, he took his pitchfork and tore into Wayne’s bales of hay, flinging them about in a desperate, frenzied attempt to throw more of them onto the wagon. He was making a bad job of it; strands of hay and larger chunks were flying every which way. Wayne’s hard work was on the verge of being ruined.

  “Hank, stop!” Wayne implored.

  Hank’s arms were moving like pistons, pumping up and down as he shoved the pitchfork into the hay and brought up again, pointing in the general direction of the wagon but instead scattering the hay into the low Ohio wind.

  “Stop, Hank, stop!”

  Hank stood straight for a moment, a wild look in his eye.

  Wayne froze. He could hear Hank’s grunting breaths and smell the stink of liquor from his lips.

  Then Hank lunged forward once again, unsteady on his feet, seemingly aiming to grab another chunk of hay with the pitchfork. Instead, the sharp metal prongs plunged deep into Wayne’s leg.

  The pain blinded Wayne for a moment. When he opened his eyes again, he was on the ground, surrounded by hay, the pitchfork still in his leg. Hank had backed away and was swaying where he stood, looking not at Wayne but around aimlessly at nothing in particular. Clearly, he had no conception of what he’d just done. And more important, he would be of no help.

  Wayne looked toward the house and saw some figures running across the field, no doubt attracted by his scream. One of them looked to be a woman, her shawl trailing behind her in the breeze. His mother? His sister? He couldn’t focus his reddened vision long enough to see. Closing his eyes to try to block some, any, measure of the pain, he began to crawl toward the house, his bleeding leg burning as the pitchfork tines shifted with every small movement.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw Hank shuffling around the wagon, hands in his pockets, whistling an infuriating tune. The smell of liquor clung to the air.

  It was a smell that would haunt Wayne Wheeler for the rest of his life.

  • • •

  By 1893, Reverend Howard Hyde Russell was one of the nation’s leading crusaders against alcohol. He had founded the Anti-Saloon League, preaching against the perils of the demon drink, while a student at Oberlin College. Now, on a return visit to campus, he delivered a lecture on temperance that enthralled many of his listeners but none more so than the student in his early twenties who found the abolition of alcohol to be a mission from God.

  Wayne Wheeler, who had followed his father’s wishes and entered college at Oberlin, sought out Russell after his speech. The reverend was so impressed by Wheeler’s passion and zeal that he offered the young man a job on the spot. He believed he’d found a worthy apprentice. He was right. In fact, he’d found someone who would take the Anti-Saloon League to heights few had imagined.

  Wheeler got right to work. As one of only a handful of permanent employees of the Anti-Saloon League, he rode his bike around Cleveland, evangelizing the masses during visits to churches and temperance meetings. He later enrolled in law school, knowing full well that his legal training could only help the cause.

  Haunted
by the memories of a childhood torment, Wheeler believed that only the full-scale abolition of alcohol across America could bring safety and comfort. Men could not be counted on to restrain themselves from their vices; the perfect world required absolute control. Besides, he wasn’t going to let any other children cower in fear under their beds, loathing their own helplessness, while the devil’s water turned men into demonic savages.

  Turning the tide of public opinion against the powerful liquor industry was not going to be easy. And it wasn’t going to be pretty. But it had to be done, regardless of the cost.

  Wheeler put together a temperance army that didn’t care about party or ideological labels. The “drys” would support any candidate from either party who adopted temperance as his campaign platform. They would use leaflets, advertisements, letter-writing campaigns, and visits from temperance advocates to increase public pressure on wavering legislators. Wheeler even coined the term pressure group to explain the League’s tactics. This pressure was justified, of course, because Wheeler knew what was best for the communities. The freedom to decide whether to drink alcohol responsibly didn’t belong to individuals, because those decisions affected the collective. Only sobriety could cure men who tormented their communities, people like Old Soak and Hank.

  The first target was Ohio’s governor, Myron Herrick, who was hostile to the cause. If Wheeler could unseat the powerful sitting governor, he knew the Anti-Saloon League would demonstrate its political power and terrify other politicians into getting in line.

  Wheeler, now head of the Ohio Anti-Saloon League chapter, began to encircle Herrick by slowly helping League allies get elected to the Ohio legislature. From this base of power, he built alliances to form a massive campaign against Herrick, finally defeating him in the 1905 election. Having enforced his will on Ohio, Wheeler then turned his gaze toward the rest of the country.

  In 1915, he left behind his dry comrades in Ohio and went to Washington, D.C., to become the general counsel for the entire Anti-Saloon League of America. He scaled his pressure-group tactics up to a nationwide level and became one of the most effective lobbyists of his time.

  In 1920, thanks in large part to Wheeler’s efforts, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States, went into effect. Prohibition was now in force across the nation. But instead of creating a new, perfect world, the law opened the door for bootleggers and organized crime to make millions from the distribution of liquor.

  That was of little concern to Wheeler. The drunks and brutes who’d scared him when he was young would not be able to scare anyone else.

  ♠

  3

  Second Wave:

  FDR, Wartime Progressive

  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

  —FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

  Washington, D.C.

  East Capitol Steps

  March 4, 1933

  It was a time for action. A time for vigor.

  A time for mobilizing the power of the executive office in support of full-scale war.

  The man in the morning coat and top hat sat rigid, his veins coursing with adrenaline, but his head never more clear. He—and, more important, his nation—had been waiting for this moment for decades. The reins of federal government had become dust-covered, untouched for far too long. They had to be grabbed and the slack wrung out on behalf of the people. And if a whip had to be taken to the concentrated powers and the princes of property to give the forgotten man his fair shake, so be it.

  A wry smile crossed his lips.

  No longer would the weak use federal power for piddling projects in the face of crisis while labor lay dormant. No longer would the strong businessmen of the great trusts and their lapdog money changers be left to shape society to their selfish whims.

  The ship of state was his for the steering toward a more social, equitable, and fair system. Planning was to be the operative word of the day, rather than wasteful, oligarchic, haphazard individualism. Could the politicians who surrounded him continue to just stand there, dazed and daunted, in the face of the rot of laissez-faire lunacy? No. The invisible hand was to be brought into the light of day.

  There was nothing to fear but fear itself. And, he knew, there was no one better equipped to fill the vacuum of incompetency and inaction than himself, the newly elected president of the United States of America.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt put his enamel cigarette holder to his lips, struck a match, and took a long drag, thick smoke twirling in the cool air like so many of the dreams he was about to fulfill.

  In that moment, he thought back to his days as a student at Groton and the much richer boys who never respected him. He thought of the last laugh he was sure to get over the bankers, lawyers, and industrialists who had doubted his cunning and intellect at Harvard and then at Columbia Law. They thought they were powerful—just watch.

  He thought of his late cousin Teddy and how it was time to finally make good on the bold progressive vision and vigorous executive power he had championed. He thought about how Teddy had commanded the bully pulpit and breathed life into the American people. He thought about how through sheer personality and grit, he, too, could marshal the resources of the nation for more social ends, not to mention his own.

  He thought of Woodrow Wilson, who had appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy, just as President William McKinley had done decades earlier for Teddy. He knew he could take Wilson’s revolutionary but academic critique of America and mold it into something practical and concrete, something truly useful for the little man. He knew that he’d not merely been pandering months earlier at the 1932 Democratic Convention when he said, “Let us feel that in everything we do there still lives with us, if not the body, the great indomitable, unquenchable, progressive soul of our Commander-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson.”

  He thought back to his days at Hyde Park and his responsibility now to command a much larger estate.

  He thought about how he had been preparing for this day his whole life.

  Taking in the sea of people one last time from his chair, Roosevelt collected himself, clutched the arm of his son James, and gathered all the strength he could muster to ascend the steps to the podium. The steel braces dug into his sides, the pain nearly unbearable as he swung one leg in front of the other, the product of nearly a decade of determined rehabilitation to become somewhat mobile again. He had always been athletic, an embodiment of vivaciousness, much like Teddy, until one day, he woke up and couldn’t feel his legs. But neither polio nor the attempt on his life mere weeks earlier could keep him from his rightful office.

  Franklin raised his right hand and repeated after Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes: “I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  Yes, he thought to himself, I can take this oath, with a caveat: it’s the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy. He suspected the reactionaries on the Supreme Court might not go along with his plans, but such recriminations would have to wait for another day. Right now, it was time for hard facts.

  Roosevelt began his address with confidence and conviction. “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he said. “[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

  Fear had gripped the nation ever since the stock market crashed three years earlier. Proud Americans who had once owned the polished cars and opulent mansions on the Upper West Side of his youth were reduced to beggars living in shantytowns in Central Park.
Survival was now foremost in their minds. Freedom was a fine principle, but when your day consisted of living hand-to-mouth in search of scraps of food to keep your family and yourself alive, it didn’t much matter. What mattered was giving people hope, even if it meant surrendering to the loving arms of a federal government. That was what FDR promised to deliver.

  His legs throbbing, Roosevelt ignored the pain and enumerated the economic strains under which the country languished, laying the Depression right at the feet of the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods,” who had “failed through their own stubbornness and . . . incompetence.” The “unscrupulous money changers” had been discredited. Punctuating his point, FDR said that such men were merely “self-seekers [with] no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

  There it was, the thing mankind feared the most: death. It was no accident that he’d carefully worked it into his speech. Scare them with their own demise, and then show them how, by following you, they can avoid it or at least stave it off for as long as possible.

  Roosevelt’s vision wasn’t merely talk, however; it required action. Men were to be put to work. “Redistribution” was to be achieved nationally. Supply and pricing imbalances were to be rectified. Foreclosures were to be halted. Government planning and supervision would rule the day. The greater good would reign.

  The balance of power between the executive and legislative branches would have to be tilted in his favor. “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis,” he said. “Broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

  The crowd roared.

  His wife, Eleanor, shuddered. She found the crowd’s raucous reaction a bit terrifying.