American Liberty League Founded by Du Pont Family and Corporate Elite to Oppose New Deal

On August 22, 1934, the American Liberty League is announced in Washington, D.C., as a purportedly bipartisan organization to defend the U.S. Constitution against “radical” New Deal policies, with Jouett Shouse appointed as president. The League’s formation represents the first major organized corporate propaganda campaign against Roosevelt’s economic reforms, bankrolled primarily by the Du Pont family and allied industrial interests including General Motors, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, and major banking houses. The moving force behind the League’s creation is John Jacob Raskob, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, former director of General Motors, and Du Pont board member, who recruits former Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith (1928) and John W. Davis (1924) to provide political cover for what is fundamentally a corporate lobbying operation.

The Du Pont family dominates the League’s financing, with Irénée du Pont and seven other family members each contributing $5,000 at founding, eventually providing 30 percent of the League’s total funding through 1935. By December 1935, Du Pont family members and top business associates contribute $152,622, plus loans totaling $114,000 ($79,750 from Irénée alone). The League raises $500,000 in its first year—giving it resources exceeding the Republican Party by January 1936—and uses these funds to conduct “educational campaigns” against Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, the National Labor Relations Act, and other New Deal programs. The League calls upon businessmen to defy federal labor law, hoping the Supreme Court will declare the Wagner Act unconstitutional, while portraying Roosevelt’s modest reforms as a “perilous journey towards socialism, bankruptcy, and dictatorship.”

The American Liberty League establishes the template for modern corporate-funded political advocacy organizations disguised as grassroots movements, coordinating wealthy donors to influence public opinion against democratic reforms. Following Roosevelt’s landslide 1936 re-election victory, the League sharply curtails public activities and restricts operations, eventually closing its Washington office in September 1940 after the Du Ponts redirect resources to Republican Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign. The League’s legacy endures in the infrastructure of corporate resistance to regulation, with its organizational model and propaganda techniques influencing subsequent anti-democratic movements from the Powell Memo network (1971) to Americans for Prosperity (2004) and other dark money operations that oppose economic reforms threatening corporate power.