Important personalitiesBack

John Thomas Flynn (October 25, 1882, Bladensburg, Maryland – April 13, 1964) was a traditional conservative American journalist best known for his opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to American entry into World War II.


Career

Although Flynn graduated from Georgetown Law School, he chose a career in journalism. He started at the New Haven Register, but eventually moved to New York; there he was financial editor of the New York Globe. During the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote articles for such leading publications as The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and Collier's Weekly. He became one of the best-known political commentators in the United States. Like Oswald Garrison Villard, another key figure in the Old Right, Flynn was a leftist with populist inclinations during this period. He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president but criticized the New Deal. In 1939, he predicted that Social Security would be under water by 1970, and insolvent by 1980.


The 1930s

Consistently at all stages of his literary career, Flynn opposed militarism. He was a key advisor to the 1934 Nye Committee, which investigated the role of the so-called "merchants of death" (munitions manufacturers and bankers) in leading to U.S. entry into World War I.

By 1936, Flynn had publicly broken with Roosevelt. He was already drawing comparisons between the centralist features of the New Deal on the one hand, and Benito Mussolini's policies on the other: "We seem [he wrote] to be not a long way off from the kind of Fascism which Mussolini preached in Italy before he assumed power; and we are steadily approaching the conditions which made Fascism possible."

Flynn was one of the founders of the America First Committee which opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Eventually he became head of the New York City chapter, which claimed a membership of 135,000. The Committee charged that Roosevelt was using lies and deception to ensnare the United States into another war. It mounted campaigns against Lend-Lease, the Selective Service, and other initiatives by Roosevelt.

Although Flynn distanced the Committee from the claims of extremist and anti-Semitic groups, such as the National Union for Social Justice, his old pro-war leftist allies cut him off, and The New Republic pulled his regular column, "Other People’s Money." His 1940 book, Country Squire in the White House "placed [Flynn] on the White House enemies list."


World War II

The America First Committee disbanded in 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Flynn turned increasingly against New Deal liberalism, which he regarded as a "degenerate form of socialism and debased form of capitalism." In 1944 he wrote a sharp critique of the American drift toward statism: As We Go Marching. 

Four years later, Flynn followed As We Go Marching with another and rather similar book, The Roosevelt Myth. By 1950 he was describing himself as a liberal in the classical liberal tradition of small government and free markets.


Cold War

During the Cold War period, Flynn continued his opposition to interventionist foreign policies and militarism. An early (prophetic) critic of American involvement in the affairs of Indochina, he maintained that sending US troops would "only be proving the case of the Communists against America that we are defending French imperialism."

Flynn became an early and avid supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy. This was in part because Flynn (even in his early left-wing views) had always been firmly anticommunist and in part because McCarthy shared Flynn's dislike for the Washington/New York establishment.

In 1955, Flynn had a formal falling-out with the new generation of Cold War, conservatives when William F. Buckley, Jr., rejected one of his articles for the new National Review. This submission had attacked militarism as a "job-making boondoggle." Flynn retired from public life in 1960. During his last years (he died in 1964) some of his books were promoted and reprinted by the John Birch Society.

For many years Flynn made his home in Bayside, New York in a large compound overlooking Little Neck Bay, with a house and a separate building he used as a broadcasting studio. He was a neighbor and friend of Mrs. James J. Corbett, the widow of boxing champion "Gentleman Jim" Corbett.

His son, Thomas Flynn, was an influential figure credited with helping to save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s.




(photo source http://mises.org/daily/4803)