John Thomas Flynn

"Why is the Communist so deeply stirred about the Negro? Is he trying to correct injustices suffered by the Negro in order to improve his lot here and make him love America more? We know that the Communist has one supreme interest and that is to excite and stimulate the hatreds of every class in the country."

"Sooner or later this country must face the problem of the Negro. It is simple enough in New York. It is not so simple in Mississippi, where the Negroes almost equal the whites in number, or in Georgia, where Negroes outnumber whites in probably half the counties of the state. White supremacy is a phrase encrusted with unpleasant connotations in the North."

"The old Socialists, with their luminous dreams, got power in Germany after World War I, and operated a society not greatly different from that now in effect in England—partially nationalized and partially planned. It ended in fascism and Hitler, for the line between fascism and Fabian socialism is very thin. Fabian socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator."

"Indeed to my mind the great, decisive factor in the choice between socialism and capitalism is that the system of production by private enterprise in a severely restrained republican-government is the only one in which men can enjoy the inestimable blessing of freedom. Socialism is impossible under any condition, but if it can be made to work at all it must be under an all-powerful State with the vast powers necessary to enforce its decrees governing every sector of our lives."

"One of the first facts we must face when we discuss the United Nations is that its members are in no sense united. The United Nations is not an instrument for preserving the peace of the world. It is an instrument for protecting a few powerful nations, chiefly Russia and Great Britain, in a dangerous racket that has led to almost all the wars in the last 150 years."

"We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies in Europe and Asia."

"Another oily illusion fostered by the politicians is that the ‘government needs the money.’ You will do well to keep in mind that the ‘government’ is merely a collection of rules and regulations and authorizations. It is not a human, living thing you can see or touch with your fingers. In itself it is something you can describe as a tremendous authority—a group of powers. But this authority and these powers are all in the hands of men—politicians. The government is a vast army of politicians equipped by the Constitution with great and dangerous powers.• Among these powers the most dangerous is the power of these politicians to put their hands in your pocket or your bank account or your pay check and take away a very sizeable chunk of your dollars."

"This dangerous grant of powers to the politicians may be said—as I shall show—to be at the bottom of all our troubles-our entanglement in the brawls of other nations all over the globe, our own oppressive national debt, the swarms of political hirelings consuming our substance in every part of the country and—most serious of all—the slow but quickening creep of this great free nation into the toils of something called the Collectivist State, which is a pretty name for socialism. It may be well to remind the reader that Karl Marx, the father of modem socialism, put the income tax high up on his blueprint for destroying private enterprise and building the socialist State."

"John Flynn and other America Firsters believed that government should regulate business by preventing monopolies and cartels from controlling large sectors of the economy. However, Flynn and his colleagues did not think that government itself should become a large economic power. This condition would restrict individual freedom, which was the essence of their definition of liberalism.... Flynn and his colleagues rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brand of liberalism, in which government entered the economic community as a large employer and customer."

"I have watched John T. Flynn during these many years and the net answer in my mind is that he has always, with practically no exception, been a destructive rather than a constructive force. Therefore, Q.E.D., John T. Flynn should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review."