Following the leaders

TODAY, every school kid learns that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were history’s great opposites -- Hitler the evil madman, President Roosevelt the hero of democracy. In his provocative new book, “Three New Deals,” historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch asks us to consider the similarities between them -- to go back before Auschwitz, before World War II, to early 1933, when Hitler and FDR took the helm of their respective governments. At that moment, many observers commented on their similarities: Both were “charismatic leaders who held the masses in their sway”; each promised to solve the economic crisis of the Great Depression that had left millions of people in their countries out of work, hungry and fearful.

Of course, Schivelbusch knows that Hitler and FDR were different, but he can’t help noticing that both responded to the Depression with the same two-sided program. Each abandoned what we now call “free market capitalism,” the belief that the capitalist marketplace automatically corrects itself. In its place, each introduced state regulation of the economy. And each introduced job and social welfare programs, giving the federal government responsibility for alleviating the suffering caused by economic crisis. Previously, private and local charities had ministered to society’s downtrodden. Hitler’s initial appeal to Germans was not that he would solve the problems of the Depression by killing all the Jews; what he promised was that the Nazis would protect ordinary people from economic suffering by creating a new kind of community (to be sure, one restricted to Aryans) with a strong leader who looked out for their welfare. That’s not so different from what the New Deal promised.

There’s more: Both FDR and Hitler built monumental public works that symbolized the energy and power of the state; both won unprecedented popular support for a new kind of charismatic leadership with new techniques of media and propaganda. But the author is careful not to call FDR a “fascist” or a national socialist, saying that “to compare is not to equate.”

Schivelbusch is a brilliant comparative historian, a prizewinner in Germany for his 2003 book “The Culture of Defeat,” which traced fascinating parallels between the American South after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871 and Germany after World War I. In each case, a government went to war confident of victory; each was stunned by defeat; each ended up rewriting their story as one of a heroic resistance to a brutal and unprincipled opponent; and each dreamed of revenge for the betrayals that led to defeat.

Schivelbusch brings the same comparative cultural focus to the 1930s with less success, although with equally fascinating and provocative ideas. For example, he explores the use of media by FDR and Hitler to create a new kind of bond between ruler and ruled. He cheerfully acknowledges that the differences were more significant than the similarities. FDR’s medium was radio -- the famous fireside chats, where the president established what seemed to be an intimate one-to-one relationship with individual listeners -- which led the skeptical leftist writer John Dos Passos to call him “the you-and-me President.” At the time, FDR was considered the master of the medium, with a “golden voice” that sounded “fresh,” “rich” and “melodious.”

Nothing could be more different from Hitler’s howling and ranting to thousands of chanting followers at vast public spectacles, with the massed audiences in a state of “quasi-mythic and religious ecstasy.” Hitler refused to speak from a radio studio -- for some reason, he considered that decision a matter of principle. This contrast led U.S. theorists in the 1930s to describe radio as a medium that preserved democracy and protected individuals from demagogues who hypnotized the masses.

And yet even here Schivelbusch sees similarities. “The end result” of their different media strategies was the creation of “a new kind of ‘electric’ connection between the speaker and the mass audience,” completely different from what had come before. Nobody in America had felt a strong personal connection to President Hoover, and nobody in Germany felt that kind of connection to President Paul von Hindenburg.

Public works are another similarity: Hitler built the autobahn, the world’s first freeway, even though Germany had few cars at the time; FDR built massive hydroelectric dams. Each project became emblazoned on the public consciousness through the widespread dissemination of heroic photographs. (Hitler didn’t need to build dams because Germany was already completely electrified; in 1930, only 20% of American households had electricity, Schivelbusch writes.) The New Deal dams, like the autobahn, were built to be seen by tourists; the structures included visitor centers, reception halls and observation platforms. Spectators ended up in vast, humming turbine rooms, “awed by the power of the state that had created such a wonder.” It still works today, as any visitor to Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas can attest.

Here, Benito Mussolini enters the story. He’s in the book’s subtitle, but he plays a minor role in Schivelbusch’s argument. The Italian leader pioneered state control of the capitalist economy, coining the term “fascism” as a “post-democratic” alternative to communism, and his intensely personal style anticipated Hitler’s. Mussolini also ran big public-works projects -- he drained the Pontine Marshes south of Rome and inaugurated the wheat harvest there, posing for photographers on a flatbed truck, surrounded by farm workers, bare-chested. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that neither FDR nor Hitler ever posed bare-chested.)

What explains the similarities of their programs? The answer is fairly simple: The Depression convinced just about everyone that free-market capitalism had failed. You could replace capitalism with some kind of socialist or communist system, which is what made the Soviet Union so interesting to people in the 1930s. The only alternative to the communist model was some kind of greater state control of the capitalist economy.

In the end, Schivelbusch acknowledges the big problem with the New Deal-fascism comparison: FDR addressed economic problems of the day in a way that preserved and deepened democracy -- he faced his opponents in elections, debated them in the media and when necessary compromised with them in Congress and the courts. Hitler and Mussolini abolished elections and an independent judiciary, and imprisoned or killed their opponents.

America avoided the totalitarian response to the Depression, Schivelbusch argues, because it lacked Europe’s sharp conflicts of class and politics. The specter of communism motivated the economically hard-hit middle classes first in Italy and then Germany to preserve their property by abandoning democracy, but neither communism nor socialism ever posed that kind of challenge in the United States, not even in the 1930s.

World War II tested the two systems on the battlefield, and everyone knows this story’s end: The fascist welfare state with a charismatic leader was destroyed by the democratic welfare state with a charismatic leader. The similarities Schivelbusch identifies are fascinating, but it is the differences that really matter. *