The Road Ahead: America's Creeping Revolution

by John T. Flynn

My purpose in writing this book is to attempt to describe the road along which this country is traveling to its destruction. Human societies come under the influence of great tides of thought and appetite that run unseen deeply below the surface of society. After a while these powerful streams mass along with them without the individuals in the mass being aware of the direction in which they are going. Up to a certain point it is possible to resist these controlling tides and to reverse them, but a time comes when they are so strong that society loses its power of decision over the direction in which it is going. I believe we are now moving along under the dominion of such tides and that all things we do to deal with our accumulating perils are futile because we do not understand the tides nor the direction in which they are carrying us. I believe that we still have in our hands the means of checking this onrush to disaster...

Genres: Politics, American History, Nonfiction, History

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

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.

Reviews

[Didier "Dirac Ghost" Gaulin · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting introduction on the Fabian society in England opens the book, which drops in quality afterwards. It is short, and there's much better to read when it comes to the author.

[Bruce Cline · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Road Ahead (to Socialism), America’s Creeping Revolution by John T Flynn (pp 200), published 1949. This booklet is a diatribe against the most pernicious threat to American (if not the world) freedom and prosperity. It begins with a detailed examination of Britain’s post World War II Labor-dominated economy, and uses it as a harbinger of America’s slide into socialism. Of course, Britain’s economy was gutted, its gold reserves emptied, its workforce horribly mangled, and its imperial territories (and their finances) moving to independence. None of that was true of the U.S. Regardless, Britain’s experiments with nationalizing parts of its economy were positioned by the author as clear precedent for the U.S. After describing the demise of G.B., he writes about socialism in America (it was and is a minor movement), notes that Communism & Socialism are essentially the same, describes the capture of unions and the Democratic Party by socialists, notes the “War on the South” including “outrageously exaggerated” travails of the “Negro,” claims a Socialist infiltration of the Christian Church, describes the socialist capture of educators, and gives an assessment of America today (1949). He then provided a 10 point plan for halting the insidious slide of America into the cesspool of Socialism.

What a blast from the hysterical past!