No, I meant as an explanation of the Nazi’s adoption of “Keynsian” policy. I suspect their economic programs were more influenced by the success of their ideological allies than by the contrarian views of Englishmen.

We can both be right on this point. My impression has always been that the economy didn’t really approach full recovery until the war industries start kicking in post-’39 (and especially post-’41) but that New Deal programs kept unemployment down somewhat and kept the human costs of unemployment down as well, which kept the political crisis under control. Simple macroeconomic growth doesn’t impress me—then or now—because it’s distribution which people notice. (A quick google search turns up this discussion which seems to confirm my impression that the mid-30s were a period of GDP growth but slow employment recovery.)

I do still disagree with the last part: “…FDR undertook aggressive government intrusions into unprecedented areas of economic and social life. Those programs may have been of limited use, macroeconomically (maybe; I’m not convinced by the Friedmanistas), but they were psychologically powerful and blunted the drive to replace democracy with a “more vigorous” alternative.”

Growth under FDR was freakin’ huge; the one year where a GOP Congress forced him to pull back (1937? 8?) adds strong evidence that his policies were what was needed at the time. The efforts of the right amount to 60-odd years of pretending that a little more Hoover would have fixed things up.

Not sure whether that question is addressed to me or hypothetically to Keynes.

Keynes visited Hamburg in January 1932 to lecture and on returning to Britain wrote an article for the New Statesman: “Germany today is in the grips of the most powerful deflation any nation has experienced . . ”
[source: DE Moggridge: Maynard Keynes (1992) p.539]

I don’t recall what may be termed the British establishment taking Mussolini very seriously and there were few contacts with distant Japan. If anything, Italy and Japan had little impact on thinking in Britain at the time whereas parts of the establishment increasingly took the manifestation of the Nazis in Germany very seriously.

Some, like Churchill and his coterie of close advisers, regarded the Nazis as a looming threat to stability in Europe while others were admiring or mildly sympathetic, like Lloyd George and Lord Halifax: “Although there was much in the Nazi system that profoundly offended British opinion, I was not blind to what he (Hitler) had done for Germany, and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping Communism out of his country.”
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWhalifaxL.htm

There is also the case of Sir Oswald Mosley, a cabinet minister in MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929-31 until he resigned in 1930, saying the government was doing too little to address the problem of rising unemployment.

He went on to found the British Union of Fascists in 1932, which sought to emulate the paramilitary style of the Nazi Brownshirts in its public demonstrations and marches, hence the Public Order Act 1936 banning the wearing of uniforms by political parties. After the death of his wife in 1933, Mosley married his mistress, Diana Guiness, in Berlin in October 1936 at the the home of Josef Goebbels.

We have this entry in George Orwell’s research diary for: The Road to Wigan Pier, about Mosley speaking at a public meeting on 16 March 1936 in Yorkshire:

“Last night to hear Mosley speak at the Public Hall, which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . . ”
[source: George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940; Penguin Books, p. 230]

Note this part: “the working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle.”

Note too: “An MP is trying to secure the release of official papers which might shed light on the alleged Nazi sympathies of King Edward VIII. . . ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2074100.stm

Wouldn’t it make more sense to look at the examples of Italy and Japan, both of whom had weathered the Depression quite well by engaging in massive public spending, including militarization? It seems unlikely that Keynes was that convincing, in the absence of an already existing political ideology which privileges the role of the state (as a stand-in for the nation) as an organizing tool for collective welfare.

Despite recent history to the contrary, most political leaders seem to work by copying concrete examples of successful programs, rather than following untried theoretical paths.

Thanks, abb1. It really does help if people read the whole comment, or at least a sentence or two past the beginning.

There’s actually a long history, in politics, of mainstream parties taking up reforms and programs initially suggested by more radical ones when it seems that the ideas are catching on and the more radical parties might become popular as a result. The German establishment of social welfare programs in the late 1800s is a good example—stealing the thunder of the socialist and communist labor movements—as is the establishment of labor laws in most places. Environmental legislation in Japan in the early 1970s is another: the Socialist parties were gaining ground on the LDP on that issue before the (overdue, by any measure) application of a broad and rigorous government regulatory program.

” . . from 6 million in October 1933 to 4.1 million a year later, 2.8 million in February 1935, 2.5 million in February 1936, and 1.2 million in February 1937.” [CP Kindleberger: The World in Depression 1929-1939 (Allen Lane, 1973) p.240]

In that context, perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising the Nazis could win large majorites in popular plebiscites in Novermber 1933 and August 1934 – the first to endorse a one-party state and the second to endorse combining the constitutional functions of Reich President and Reich Chancellor in the person of the Führer – see the account in William Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Schacht – the main source of economic advice for the Nazis – had been providing impeccably orthodox advice on dealing with the depression, according to the account in Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics (Berg, 1990) but somehow, the Nazis latched onto to Keynes’s idea of job creation through spending on public works.

This proposal had surfaced in a pamphlet for the Liberal Party in Britain: Can LLoyd George Do It?, which Keynes had co-authored for the 1929 general election, Lloyd George being the Party leader. In the event, the Liberals only won 59 seats out of 615 in the election and – as mentioned above – HM Treasury persistently pushed the line thereafter that this couldn’t work because the additional public spending would crowd out equivalent private spending.

It is a supreme irony that Lloyd George visited Germany in 1936 and met Hitler:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7_UiikaPiI

LG came away very favourably impressed, so impressed that he wrote an article for the Daily Express on 17 November saying how wonderful Hitler was: “He is the George Washington of Germany . . The establishment of a German hegemony in Europe which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism. …”
http://www.icons-multimedia.com/ClientsArea/HoH/LIBARC/ARCHIVE/Chapters/Stabiliz/Foreign/LloydGeo.html

You’d best ask Eric himself as I didn’t write that and am unsure what it means.

a) A good analysis.

b) Total BS.

Of which name-calling is surely one.

IMO we should rather look at the substantive details of what FDR’s New Deal consisted and consider the counterfactual of what could have happened had nothing been done. After all, the Republican presidents at the time of the 1929 asset-price crash and through into the early 1930s were pretty adept at doing nothing. As Dorthy Parker memorably asked when Calvin Coolidge died in 1933, “How could they tell?”

FDR didn’t lack successive electoral mandates – in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. Congress even amended the constitution in 1951 (Amendment 22) to make sure no one after President Truman (FDR’s last VP) retired could ever again serve more than two terms as President.

Merely a closet totalitarian – or does your first sentence mean nothing?

Eric, it’s likely that this thread will bring in the FDR haters; expect bad things.

For any readers who might wish to know, IMO this is perhaps the best, concise overview of the interwar European economy – including a revealing comparison of the Nazi German versus British ways of addressing depressed economies:
Feinstein, Temin and Toniolo: The European Economy Between the Wars (OUP, 1997).

It goes against prevailing popular impressions now, I know, but Britain’s economy generally performed well after the trough of 1931 – apart from regions dependent on the traditional heavy industries where unemployment remained intractably high through to WW2.

The many rows of 1930s speculative semidetached houses, built in prosperous regions, is eloquent testimony as to the potent stimulus of low interest rates after Britain left the gold standard in September 1931. With that and a floating exchange rate for the Pound, the British economy grew strongly through to 1938 without much by way of government intervention or controls.

It tends to be overlooked nowadays but the Conservatives won the November 1935 general election with a landslide – arguably, partly, because of the commitment to rearmament announced in the government’s white paper of March that year when George Lansbury, Labour leader and an avowed pacificst, oppose rearmament on principle. Lansbury lost his seat in the election and Clement Attlee became party leader.