On February 1, 1933 the distinguished newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann — the sage, sane voice of the American establishment — travelled to Georgia with an important message for the president-elect.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt would take office in a month’s time amid a banking crisis and was preparing his inaugural address. He should, said Lippmann, be prepared to assume the powers of a dictator. Things were that bad. “A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead”.
It is impossible to read this now without shuddering. Only two days before Lippmann’s Georgia trip, Adolf Hitler had become German chancellor. We know, therefore, how the advice the journalist was offering might have ended.
The MGM feature film, Gabriel Over the