Counter-Currents
Merwin K. Hart: Forgotten American Hero & Man of the Right
Morris van de Camp
Merwin K. Hart
1,582 words
I’d like to introduce the reader to an important Rightist of the past — Merwin K. Hart (1881-1962). Hart was a critic of Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He created a metapolitical society that eventually came to be called the National Economic Council, Inc. The National Economic Council aimed to fight the New Deal reforms of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration and turn back Communism more generally.
We would do well to emulate the work of Merwin Hart. His career was remarkably successful. He made powerful enemies along the way but still came out on top. His ideas became triumphant with the Reagan administration, and Reagan used those ideas to win the Cold War.
Most of the research material I used for this article comes from declassified FBI files on Hart. The quotes that aren’t cited come from this file.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Massive Coalition, and the New Dealers
To explain Hart’s ideas, one must understand the Leftism of his time and Leftism more generally. Destructive Leftism needs an economic crisis to start growing. The recrudescence of the destructive Leftism that exists today started in the 2008 economic crisis. The Leftism of FDR was made more powerful following the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. The election of 1932, held in the middle of the depression, swept the Republicans from power. This included many Congressmen that were immigration restrictionists.
Franklin Roosevelt is a curious man. He kept his deepest beliefs to himself and was probably a high functioning sociopath. He was something of a genuine Leftist while being something of a white advocate at the same time. To explain, he supported the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s, but supported segregationists and Southern efforts to manage Sub-Saharans. His administration also resisted immigration while hiring Jews that were secret Communists.
FDR’s wife Eleanor was a dedicated Leftist who took up the causes of the various radical movements in the Democratic Party at the time — like “civil rights.” Throughout her long life, she was often bedazzled with charming Leftists who turned out to be Communists genuinely trying to overthrow the US Government. Historians characterize Eleanor as cunning and naive.
FDR’s Democratic Party was a massive coalition. It functioned because of the political genius of Franklin and Eleanor, unity in the face of external threats/ongoing crises, and by the fact that the various factions within the Party didn’t attack the critical beliefs of the other. [1]
FDR’s coalition was also held together by its choice of a domestic enemy. This enemy was mostly Yankees who had been successful before the Depression. More carefully phrased, they were Northeastern WASPs who were often involved in finance and complex commercial activity. Merwin K. Hart was squarely from this group. He was a Yankee whose family was prominent in Utica, New York. They were wealthy, but did lose some of their fortune during the 1929 Crash.
Merwin K. Hart’s family were in Connecticut as early as the 1690s. They went on to be prominent in business and finance in Utica, New York. Upstate New York is an extension of New England. His family was Republican. Greater New England was the only part of the United States that held out in any way against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Keynesian Economics
Part of what concerned Hart was Roosevelt enacting Keynesian economic policies to turn around the economy. These economic ideas were popularized by John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Keynes was building on monetary policy ideas first explored in the 1890s. The first time the idea that using government funds to hire unemployed workers for public works projects was pushed by a Populist from Ohio named Jacob Coxey in 1894.
Today, Keynesian economics is just one tool among many economic policies that any government can enact. It works well in some cases and poorly in others. Rightists can use Keynesian policies as well as Leftists.
But in the 1930s it was new enough that there was a genuine concern that the economy would crash further with those policies enacted. Furthermore, some of the Roosevelt administration’s Keynesian economic ideas were obviously bad, like buying cattle from farmers in the drought-stricken prairies then shooting and burying the livestock. Most importantly though, the proponents of Keynesian economics were pretty radical, and some were out-and-out Communists.
Hart’s Career
Hart graduated from Harvard in 1904, a situation that gave him enormous social connections. He was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1906. He ran for the state senate in 1908 but he was defeated. According to an FBI report, Hart was
[A] very influential and respected man in the community, but had very few intimate personal friends, being the type who knew “everybody that counted” and who was very formal and aloof in his manner. While he was not disliked by the businessmen in Utica, he is not at all personally popular with them.
In addition to state politics, Hart practiced law, was involved in manufacturing, and organized various civic societies. During World War I, Hart served in the army, attaining the rank of captain.
A record of Captain Merwin K. Hart’s military service. Hart matches the pattern of pro-white activity in the twentieth century – it was led by the brave captains of the First World War.
Hart comes to the attention of the FBI in early 1942. They seem to be concerned about his activities because he was a supporter of Franco in Spain, he supported the German-American Bund, and the America First activist Charles A. Lindberg. Hart was also a prominent critic of the Roosevelt administration. It is probably the criticism of Roosevelt that was the main motivation for opening an investigation.
The FBI seemed to have no trouble finding informants to fill in the details of Hart’s activities. However, Hart said the same things in private as he said in public. He was a foe of Communism, American decline, and pro-Franco.
The Leftist Response to Hart’s Metapolitical Activities
The Roosevelt administration used invective against Hart in addition to FBI spying. Much of the invective involved Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes (1874-1952). At one point Ickes called Hart, “anti-Semite, anti-Negro, and anti-sharecropper.”
Anti-sharecropper? On the surface, “anti-sharecropper” is an odd choice of words for Ickes to use against Hart, but it makes sense given FDR’s coalition. Many people in the South had to take up sharecropping during the depression, so Ickes could kill two birds with one stone by shoring up his base and insulting his enemy in a single quip.
Eventually, the FBI was able to indict one of Hart’s allies, John Eoghan Kelly, as an unregistered agent of a foreign country (Francoist Spain) in 1943. Kelly was found guilty.
In many ways, the political Left of Roosevelt’s time used the same tricks the mainstream media and Obama administration used against Trump. They selectively prosecuted Kelly for supporting a foreign nation while ignoring those who supported the Soviet Union. They used a great deal of slander and got the FBI involved in investigating an otherwise legitimate group. All the time, they claimed they were supporting “democracy” while Hart was a fascist.
Hart Gets the Last Word
Hart’s fortunes changed in 1945. Roosevelt died and the considerable personal Roosevelt charm that papered over the real-world problems of his New Deal economic policies vanished. Truman thus inherited a floundering economy that created many headaches for him and caused the Republicans to win the House in 1946.
With the Nazis gone, the general public noticed the Soviet threat rather quickly too. [2] In 1944, Joe McCarthy, who would become an anti-Communist senator in the 1950s, changed party allegiance. The New Deal Leftists, Jews, and anti-Communists in Roosevelt’s coalition were starting to push out the more astute anti-Communist political operators.
These Democratic refugees were welcomed into the anti-Communist community that had been organized in part by Merwin K. Hart. The United States would go on to ally with Franco’s Spain by the end of the 1940s and remove Communists — many of whom were Jews in the 1950s. Merwin K. Hart was part of the effort.
The ideas of Hart’s economic policy are now mainstream talking points. They are:
- Curb government spending
- Reduce oppressive taxation
- Oppose subversive groups
- Oppose stifling restriction of private enterprise
- Promote true recovery
In a 1948 publication by the National Economic Council, Hart is also prophetic. He argues that the Labour Party’s nationalization of large industries in Great Britain and rationing would harm the British economy. He was right, while there were occasional upswings, the British economy floundered from crisis to crisis until Margaret Thatcher started to dial down state industries.
Hart further argued that political Zionism was bad for America. Indeed, the biggest ethnic conflict in the United States is between Yankees and Jews. Zionism and Israel have caused the United States no end of problems, including the Global War on Terror.
Hart died in 1962, he worked hard his entire life, kept within the law, and helped America keep free of domestic Communist subversion. Many of his ideas are now mainstream. It is up to us to continue his efforts.
Notes
[1] An artistic example of the Democratic Party’s coalition is the Leftist Joan Baez singing “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down” in the early 1960s.
[2] The “Punch a Nazi” meme starts as early as 1946, with the movie The Best Years of Our Lives. In the film, an America First person is punched out by an enraged veteran. There are no rebuttals to the America First anti-communist actor in the film. It is pure emotionalism. The scene is here.
10 comments
So he was a classical liberal who helped promote the red-herring of a Soviet threat, and was an ideological precursor of Reagan and Thatcher? Hurrah! Heil Hart!
Classical Liberalism is a Pro-White ideology. No one is signing up anymore for your vision of anti-capitalist, “pro-white” Leftism. Everyone who did so has already made alliances with 3rd world movements under the “One Struggle” banner and doesn’t give two shits about the White Race (except for maybe its genetic and spiritual failures, whom they enthusiastically recruit in their war against White Women and against everything that made White societies strong and prosperous).
You do not seem to have even the most elementary notion of what the Right is, its origins and development. A rightest critique of capitalism you call ‘pro-white leftism’. The Right in seeking to restore the traditional organic community of necessity looks to the pre-capitalist epoch of Western civilization. Marx applauded free trade as an essential part of the historical dialectic, as Spengler pointed out, and Evola was of the same opinion. Marxism arose under the capitalist Zeitgeist centered in England. Thomas Carlyle condemned the ‘money nexus’ and free trade as disruptive of the social organism. Was Father Coughlin a crypto-Bolshevik? Anthony Ludovici a ‘genetic and spiritual failure’? Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton … ? Perhaps you’ve stumbled into the wrong arena? There’s certainly nothing of the Right in what you state.
Yes, although I am not a particularly well-read person in terms of the history of political ideas, I often observe how many right-wing people get tricked by easy allegories about ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘hard work’ into supporting policies and economic models that work against everything that they hold dear, such as family, folk, nation.
I would like to recommend this provocative vid by Vox Day on this question
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgB8qjYI40g&list=WL&index=3&t=6s
People who think the (((soviets))) lost the cold war need to look around YouTube still has segments of a G Edward Griffin interview with Yuri Bezmenov , also check out about Anatoly Golitsyn and his Perestroika Deception etc. Just (((who))) won the cold war should come clear Maybe (((the West))) but certainly not the West. ..
The Bezmenov interview with Griffin is utter rubbish. A small time nobody translator claiming special insights into the KGB. His little books lack documentation, and he expects to be accepted at face value. His ‘love’ of the USA becomes quite vomit inducing . He would otherwise be of no account but for the fact that the Griffin interview has been revived as part of the renewed Cold War against Russia because Putin won’t play along with the globalists, just as the post-Lenin/Trotsky USSR would not do so.
What gives the Bezmenov interview and books a significant nuisance factor is that he directs attention against Russia as the source of US/Western cultural, moral and sociological decay, as part of a Russian conspiracy, whereas the rot has always emanated from within the USA, funded by Wall Street, not the Kremlin. The USSR was avid d in its public condemnation of the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Danny Cohn Bendit, and the New Left, which Bezmenov claims is a Russian plot to undermine the West. Crap. He also stated that the media was subverted by fellow travelers and dupes of Russia. More crap. The CIA had Project Mockingbird, and media proprietors played prominent roles in the cold war against the USSR, not as Russian agents, but as proponents of US liberal-internationalism. Gloria Steinem was an asset of the CIA, not the KGB.
The USSR condemned ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the arts because it was internationalist and anti-tradition, while the CIA, and US oligarchs established the Congress for Cultural Freedom to recruit anti-Soviet leftists to promote cultural excrescence thoughout the world, especially Abstract Expressionism as epitomizing the achievement of ‘democracy’ US-style.
Edward G Griffin was a notable spokesman for The John Birch Society. Their obsession with Russia put them off track, such as in their belief that the UNO was a Soviet plot to rule the world, thereby missing the point that the UNO was a ‘US conspiracy to rule the world’, that was rejected by the USSR (along with the Baruch Plan). Senator McCarthy made the same mistake in seeing the enemy in Moscow rather than Wall Street. As soon as he started directing his attention to the latter he was finished.
Thanks a lot for this comment. I try to expose the fakery of Bezmenov whenever it comes up on online exchanges as well. Since he made it into the new Call of Duty videogame lots of people might look him up. Nice disinfo strategy.
The current destructive Leftism might appear to stem from the 2008 economic crisis, but the crisis itself stems from an uninterrupted stream of Leftism that began with FDR and that led to Negro and nonWhite Worship by the 1950s.
The 2008 economic crisis was just one more symptom of Black/Brown worship in which we must lower standards in order to pretend that these savages are just like Whites. So the egregious George W. Bush and his cronies told the banks that in order to avoid government-supported lawsuits and other sanctions that they would give loans to Blacks and Browns even if it meant lowering lending standards to almost none at all. The results were predictable: They defaulted.
All of this Black/Brown Worship has its origins in the Communist Jews that FDR embraced and injected into the power structure. They are the ones who foisted the lies about racial equality, “civil rights”, rule by lawsuit, immorality as transcendent moral superiority, the victim and loser as Promethean hero.
What’s happening now is nothing new. It represents just one more victory by the Left; one in a long string of Leftist victories since the 1930s. All Jewish funded, litigated and led.
And don’t talk to me about Reagan. All that empty suit accomplished was another victory by the Jews in taking over the Republican Party in the name of neo-Conservativism. Reagan even signed as huge illegal-alien amnesty bill after he publicly stated that it was a BAD IDEA! What a moron.
Decent White people have won NO VICTORIES AT ALL since the anti-immigrant legislation in the 1920s. Since then it’s been one defeat after another.
a huge element in play through this steady march of the left is the destruction of the american farmer as a yeoman and by the time of reagan in the farm crisis in the midwest, the final total corporate dominance of what was the stereotypical peasant image, now there is total prolitarianization of all americans. what american alive today can say to themselves they own their own means of production.
the idea of a free market republic is going to always allow racial aliens to come to dominate the republic itself because the nature of exchange allows monopolies to dominate, why would any yankee care about the plight of irrelevant middle eastern desert people? if those industries which the oligarchy fabricate their powerbase out of require coordination with foreign monopolies and resources how will they keep the foreign racial aliens from coming to dominate the oligarchy and then the republic itself? its too bad belloc’s ideas and some of other 3rd path ideas cannot seem to penetrate the mind prison of american liberalism. I think the new right will cast itself into the mold of the irrelevant party politics of the 20th century (trump being the swan song of the “boomer” epoch).
the left is going to use the current economic disaster to enact their “solution” to capitalism which will just lead to belloc’s servile state, using digital currency and mass surveillence and the “green new deal” to fabricate this architecture of total control, how will the new right maneuver through this phase of western society? the covid operation has single handedly ended the “free market” in america. How can classical liberalism save america from “deadly illness” and overpowered medical bureaucracies? wasn’t the “free market” of the 20th century just the military bureaucracies and auto bureaucracies forcing the plebs to drive ford?
this is the struggle, how we will provide a context and path to survival for our own people in this country as this global oligarchy creates its servile state on the entire globalist empire.
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