Forgotten Lessons : Selected Essays of John T. Flynn

by John T. Flynn, Gregory P. Pavlik (Editor)

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com."This collection of essays and articles provides a small sampling of Flynn's work, as well as a look at some of the great themes that animated the Old Right. The articles and essays in this volume were chosen to highlight Flynn's advocacy of limitations on the intrusive, interventionist state, and the disastrous consequences of allowing those limitations to relax. Many of his warnings revolve around the dangers of economic planning and political manipulation of the market, debt financing of government spending, militarism, and war. Flynn regarded each of these evils as interrelated. In his view, interventionism on the domestic front leads inexorably to intervention in foreign affairs. Thus, Flynn regarded U.S. intervention in World War II as the inevitable consequence of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. In many ways, Flynn was the first to outline the true nature of the twentieth-century welfare-warfare state."This is troubling stuff for a generation of conservatives raised on the military Keynesianism known as Reaganism. But the Cold War is over, and the conservatism of the welfare-warfare state has little to offer to a new era. The wisdom of an older generation beckons. If we have the good sense to pay heed to the lessons offered by Flynn and his Old Right cohorts, we may summon the courage and moral authority to harness the Leviathan let loose by the Roosevelt revolution. We can then bequeath the next generation a nation dedicated to the forgotten principles of peace and freedom."

Genres: American

199 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

American journalist best known for his opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to American entry into World War II.
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.
During the Cold War period, Flynn continued his opposition to interventionist foreign policies and militarism. An early 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.