Background
He was the son of John Flynn, a lawyer, and Margaret O'Donnell.
(In 1932, John T. Flynn had begun to rethink his old-style...)
In 1932, John T. Flynn had begun to rethink his old-style "progressivism" and develop intellectually into a defender of markets as against the regimentation of government management. A first product of these steps was this classic and extraordinary full biography of John D. Rockefeller. In this highly sympathetic portrayal, Flynn shows how Rockefeller employed the tools of capitalism to become enormously rich in the service of others, and how this unleashed the most unexpected backlash from anticapitalists of all sorts, culminating in the breakup of Standard Oil. Flynn sees that this was done at the behest of Rockefeller's competition, and not in the public interest. This is the first and probably still the best biography of an American original. To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and LvMI (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute); e.g., Depression LvMI
https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Gold-Story-Rockefeller-Times-ebook/dp/B0076DGI9G?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0076DGI9G
(LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. "T...)
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."
https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Lessons-Large-Print-Selected/dp/1493544527?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1493544527
(The story of twelve significant fortunes from the Renaiss...)
The story of twelve significant fortunes from the Renaissance to the present day. Biographies of: Fugger the Rich (organizer of capitalism), John Law, The Rothschilds, Robert Owen, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Hetty Green, Mitsui, Cecil Rhodes, Basil Zaharoff, Mark Hanna, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan
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He was the son of John Flynn, a lawyer, and Margaret O'Donnell.
He attended local public schools and Catholic schools in New York City before entering Georgetown University. He earned an LL. B. there in 1902 but did not follow his father into law.
Flynn was a press officer for the German embassy before World War I and a reporter for the New Haven Register during the war, and later city editor.
In the early 1920's he became both city editor and managing editor of the New York Globe. When the paper folded in 1923, he turned to free-lance work. Only in middle age did Flynn step into national political debate as a columnist, lecturer, and broadcaster.
He was forty-seven when his first book was published. But his short career of political commentary was too long for many of Flynn's one-time allies. His column in the New Republic, "Other People's Money, " was dropped in 1940, when the editors concluded that Flynn had strayed from both economic affairs and liberalism.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Flynn had supported in 1932, proposed in 1939 that Flynn "should be barred hereafter from the column of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly. . " When Flynn turned to the far right after World War II, his conservative readers and editors again found the drift of his ideas maddening.
In the early 1930's Flynn was a liberal. He urged stricter regulation of the securities market, enlarged public works budgets, antitrust prosecutions, and income redistribution. But the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 marked Flynn's apostasy from the New Deal.
He argued that the National Recovery Administration, which it established, encouraged corporate control of American society and the death of competitive markets. His articles reminded Americans that under Roosevelt mass unemployment continued, the national debt grew, and Wall Street maintained its shady practices.
Flynn did support reformers in Congress: he was an adviser to the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency in the investigation of the New York Stock Exchange (1933 - 1934) and an economic consultant to the Special Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (1934 - 1935).
In 1936 he campaigned for Norman Thomas, the Socialist party candidate for president.
After 1939 he crusaded against American intervention in the war, and in 1940 he became chairman of the New York chapter of the America First Committee. Both in public and in private Flynn denounced anti-Semitism within that diverse organization.
For him, racial hatred was neither the heart of fascism nor a sufficient reason to fight the Axis. As We Go Marching (1944) was one of the few books published during World War II to break with the consensus of support.
Before the end of the war, Flynn published his claims that American intervention was part of a conspiracy: President Roosevelt, he said, had provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor and cynically exploited the disaster. Flynn's conclusions often differed so sharply from those of his contemporaries because he took little account of the events that guided their thought. He wrote little about the stock market crash of 1929 (in his first book, Investment Trusts Gone Wrong! [1930], he did not mention the event in the first hundred pages).
In the 1940's Flynn glimpsed threats to freedom that few Americans could see: the growth in power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the blacklisting that was practiced, he said, by liberals. What was truly remarkable about Flynn's support for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the early 1950's was that he was able to join such a broad political movement. (Flynn broke with McCarthy in 1956 only because the senator supported Britain and France during the Suez Crisis. ) Flynn's view of power combined the intellectual agility of his Jesuit education with, on occasion, the cynicism of many newspaper editors.
He could celebrate loyalty while he scoffed at patriotic conceits. Leaders without a political philosophy, or with an overreaching one, earned his scorn--Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Foster Dulles, for example.
After World War II, Flynn agreed with the right that American interests abroad had been sold out by a conspiracy on the left, but he thought that freedom would be lost if conservatives built a state powerful enough to fight communism around the world. His cautionary lectures to his allies on the right amounted to a critique of anti-Communist foreign policy; and many of his warnings, especially his denunciations of American aid to the French in Vietnam, anticipated voices on the left in the 1960's.
However warmly Flynn may be embraced as a prophet, he should not be ranked among the best journalists of his generation. He was a good deal more familiar with the New York Public Library (where he did prodigious research) than with the citizens and statesmen he criticized. He began as an investigator of economic life, but over the years the "workers" and "bureaucrats" and "communists" and "imperialists" became abstractions in his work. In fourteen books on contemporary affairs, Flynn rarely claimed to have talked with the leading figures of the day.
When Roosevelt asked for a private meeting to discuss Flynn's economic ideas, the journalist refused. As a polemicist Flynn was, perhaps, aided by his lack of interest in personality. A rousing public speaker, he was at the same time self-effacing; he did not brag or bluster, and could charge a person with treason in a perfectly courteous manner. Roosevelt was the only man in public life who caused Flynn to attempt character assassination.
Flynn died at Amityville, New York.
(The story of twelve significant fortunes from the Renaiss...)
(LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. "T...)
(In 1932, John T. Flynn had begun to rethink his old-style...)
(Biography)
Flynn's view of power combined the intellectual agility of his Jesuit education with, on occasion, the cynicism of many newspaper editors.
In 1936 he campaigned for Norman Thomas, the Socialist party candidate for president.
After World War II, Flynn agreed with the right that American interests abroad had been sold out by a conspiracy on the left, but he thought that freedom would be lost if conservatives built a state powerful enough to fight communism around the world.
He wrote about the danger of Roosevelt's program and personality, not Hitler's or Stalin's. He said little about the noneconomic policies of totalitarian states.
He was a good deal more familiar with the New York Public Library (where he did prodigious research) than with the citizens and statesmen he criticized.
A rousing public speaker, he was at the same time self-effacing; he did not brag or bluster, and could charge a person with treason in a perfectly courteous manner.
Quotations: Flynn believed that mobilization caused America to move toward fascism: "At this moment, in the midst of the war, we have a very close approach to national socialism. "
He was a member of the America First Committee (AFC).
Quotes from others about the person
"He is without mercy, justice or fairness, " the New York Times said of Flynn's 1940 biography of Roosevelt, "yet he is neither spiteful nor venomous. " Flynn battled ideas, not the Americans who believed them.
On April 7, 1910, Flynn married Alice Bell; they had two sons.