AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE

On August 22, 1934, spokesman Jouett Shouse announced the creation of the American Liberty League. According to Shouse, the group was formed to defend the Constitution, to protect private property rights, and to encourage the public to support traditional American political values. The league's founders were disgruntled business conservatives, Wall Street financiers, right-wing opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and defeated rivals within Roosevelt's Democratic Party. The league's benefactors included the du Pont brothers (Pierre, Irenee, and Lammot); their business partner and former Democratic Party chairman, John J. Raskob; financier E. F. Hutton; and executive Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward. Many of the politicians active in the league were Republicans, but more visible were anti-Roosevelt Democrats such as 1924 and 1928 presidential nominees John W. Davis and Alfred E. Smith. Many league activists had worked together earlier for the relegalization of the U. S. liquor industry through the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.

Motivating league founders was a growing distaste of the expansion of federal power and of government intrusions upon the prerogatives of private businessmen. They condemned early New Deal relief and public jobs programs, agricultural production controls and subsidies, sponsorship of collective-bargaining rights, federal regulation of the banking and securities industries, and creation of public power facilities. Expansion in 1935 of federal regulation and taxation of business, promotion of labor rights, and income support for the poor and elderly through the Works Progress Administration, the Wagner Act, Social Security, and the Wealth Tax Act infuriated leaguers even more. But critics effectively lampooned league members as champions of privilege, ungrateful critics of an administration that had saved capitalism, and vindictive and selfish individuals seeking revenge on a president for betraying his social class.

The Liberty League raised money and financed legal critiques of New Deal measures, published anti-New Deal pamphlets and political propaganda, and aided the effort to defeat Roosevelt in 1936. Despite the organization's help for Republican nominee Alfred M. Landon, the incumbent won in a landslide. With the 1936 election seen as a repudiation of the league, it rapidly faded into obscurity, playing but a minimal role in such battles as the 1937 court-packing fight. By 1940, the Liberty League had ceased active operation. However, its legacy of fund-raising tactics, ideology-driven issues research and public education, and coordination with partisan legislative and electoral campaigns foreshadowed today's political action committees and independent-expenditure organizations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burk, Robert F. The Corporate State and the Broker State: The du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925–1940. 1990.

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 1956.

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. 1963.

Wolfskill, George. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–1940. 1962.