Legacy
In 1940, Pulitzer-prize winning Washington reporter and later columnist Thomas L. Stokes looked back on the American Liberty League and called it "a very vulnerable straw man" for New Deal Democrats. FDR wanted to run in 1936, he wrote, without emphasizing his Democratic identity. The League's alliance of conservative Democrats "in whom the rank and file long ago had lost confidence" like Al Smith with "conservative Republicans, among whom were lawyers for great corporations" helped President Roosevelt's backers to present him as a man independent of traditional politicians and political alliances.
In 1950, President Harry Truman branded critics who labeled his programs "socialism" as the heirs of the Liberty League of the 1930s.
Read more about this topic: American Liberty League
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)