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Moser, John E. Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 277 pp. $45.
In the 1930s, influential columnist, author, and radio commentator John T. Flynn routinely excoriated President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as too conservative. The fiery economics expert charged it stroked big business and slammed working people and predicted it would nationalize banks and ban holding companies. He endorsed Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas in 1936.
Twenty years later the far right revered Flynn as a god, and in 2000, the ultra-right John Birch Society saluted him as one of twenty-five "heroes for all time." What happened? His ideological odyssey unfolds like a mystery in John E. Moser's richly researched and highly readable biography of a contradictory crusader. Besides resurrecting one of the twentieth century's most influential political commentators, Right Turn is important for its insights about the origins of the New !light's ascendance at the end of the century.
The text traces Flynn's career from pacifist union organizer to rabid McCarthyite who labeled the civil rights movement a communist plot. He always maintained it was not he who changed but liberalism....