FDR Warns Congress That Concentrated Corporate Power Threatens American Democracy with Fascism

On April 29, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sends a special message to Congress warning that concentrated corporate power poses an existential threat to American democracy, using language that explicitly links economic monopoly with the rise of fascism. Roosevelt declares that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

The message requests congressional authorization for the Temporary National Economic Committee investigation and calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up concentrated corporate power. Roosevelt argues that monopolies harm consumers through administered prices, harm workers through suppressed wages, harm small businesses through unfair competition, and ultimately harm democracy itself by concentrating economic and political power in unaccountable private hands. He warns that Americans “have no right to expect that we should continue indefinitely to subordinate human welfare and human opportunity to the ever-accumulating demands of organized money-power.”

Roosevelt’s monopoly message represents the most explicit articulation of his view that concentrated corporate power threatens democratic self-government—a perspective shared by earlier progressives but rarely stated so directly by a sitting president. The message comes during the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937-38, which FDR partly attributes to monopolistic pricing practices, and sets the stage for Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold’s aggressive antitrust enforcement campaign. However, the outbreak of World War II shifts priorities to war production, and the investigation’s recommendations are never fully implemented. Roosevelt’s warning that private power concentrated beyond democratic control “is fascism” echoes through subsequent debates over corporate influence in politics, from the Powell Memo (1971) through Citizens United (2010), though later generations largely forget this New Deal critique of corporate power as inherently anti-democratic.