Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

12 The Betrayal of the American Right
Most of this loose coalition of individualistic radicals was totally
disillusioned with the political process, but to the extent that they
distinguished between existing parties, the Republican Party was
clearly the major enemy. Eternal Hamiltonian champions of Big
Government and intimate government “partnership” with Big
Business through tariffs, subsidies, and contracts, long-time brandishers
of the Imperial big stick, the Republicans had capped their
antilibertarian sins by being the party most dedicated to the
tyranny of Prohibition, an evil that particularly enraged H.L.
Mencken. Much of the opposition (e.g., Mencken, Villard) supported
the short-lived LaFollette Progressive movement of 1924,
and the Progressive Senator William E. Borah (R-Idaho) was an
opposition hero in leading the fight against the war and the League
of Nations, and in advocating recognition of Soviet Russia. But the
nearest political home was the conservative Bourbon, non-Wilsonian
or “Cleveland” wing of the Democratic Party, a wing that at
least tended to be “wet,” was opposed to war and foreign intervention,
and favored free trade and strictly minimal government.
Mencken, the most politically minded of the group, felt closest in
politics to Governor Albert Ritchie, the states-rights Democrat
from Maryland, and to Senator James Reed, Democrat of Missouri,
a man staunchly “isolationist” and anti-intervention in foreign
affairs and pro-laissez-faire at home.
It was this conservative wing of the Democratic Party, headed
by Charles Michelson, Jouett Shouse, and John J. Raskob, which
launched a determined attack on Herbert Hoover in the late 1920s
for his adherence to Prohibition and to Big Government generally.
It was this wing that would later give rise to the much-maligned
Liberty League.
To Mencken and to Nock, in fact, Herbert Hoover—the prowar
Wilsonian and interventionist, the Food Czar of the war, the
champion of Big Government, of high tariffs and business cartels,
the pious moralist and apologist for Prohibition—embodied everything
they abhorred in American political life. They were clearly
leaders of the individualist opposition to Hoover’s conservative statism.