Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt: what FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the '30s.

• Author: Boaz, David
• Position: Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 - Book review

Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, by wolfgang Schivelbusch, New York: Metropolitan Books, 242 pages, $26

ON MAY 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was "strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.... America today literally asks for orders." The Roosevelt administration, she added, "envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy."

That article isn't quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But it underscores his central argument: that there are surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hider.

With our knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, we find it almost impossible to consider such claims dispassionately. But in the 1930s, when everyone agreed that capitalism had failed, it wasn't hard to find common themes and mutual admiration in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, not to mention Moscow. (Three New Deals does not focus as much on the latter.) Nor is that a mere historical curiosity, of no great importance in the era following democracy's triumph over fascism, National Socialism, and communism. Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynn's warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. Since then we have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the '30s.

Schivelbusch finds parallels in the ideas, style, and programs of the disparate regimes--even their architecture. "Neoclassical monumentalism," he writes, is "the architectural style in which the state visually manifests power and authority." In Berlin, Moscow, and Rome, "the enemy that was to be eradicated was the laissez-faire architectural legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, an unplanned jumble of styles and structures." Washington erected plenty of neoclassical monuments in the '30s, though with less destruction than in the European capitals. Think of the "Man Controlling Trade" sculptures in front of the Federal Trade Commission, with a muscular man restraining an enormous horse. They would have been right at home in Il Duce's Italy.

"To compare," Schivelbusch stresses, "is not the same as to equate. America during Roosevelt's New Deal did not become a one-party state; it had no secret police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system that National Socialism abolished." But throughout the '30s, intellectuals and journalists noted "areas of convergence among the New Deal, Fascism, and National Socialism." All three were seen as transcending "classic Anglo-French liberalism"--individualism, free markets, decentralized power.

Since 1776, liberalism had transformed the Western world. As The Nation editorialized in 1900, before it too abandoned the old liberalism, "Freed from the vexatious...