No Rats Allowed

Jimmy Durante promoting the National Recovery Administration.

I am consistently amazed at FDR’s propaganda network. I can only imagine what conservatives would say if Obama tried something like this.

….From Michael Hiltzik’s book on the New Deal:

Ickes groused about having been forced at a movie theatre to sit through a film clip featuring “a most disgusting exhibition put on by a low-class comedian as NRA propaganda” before the main show began. (The unnamed comedian was Jimmy Durante.)

“It would hardly appeal to the lowest order of human intelligence,” Ickes recorded in his diary, “and I am wondering if this sort of thing is being put on extensively. If it is, it will do the NRA more harm than good.” Frances Perkins, overhearing Ickes complain, volunteered that she had heard that “movie audiences in New York City were booing NRA propaganda.”