Daily Inspiration Quote by John T. Flynn

Flynn’s “be fair” is doing more than clearing his throat; it’s laying a trap. He affects judicial balance while smuggling in a devastating charge: that the architects of a new political order were amateurs around dynamite. By insisting that “neither Roosevelt nor Lewis realized” what they were doing, Flynn sidesteps the easier accusation of malice and opts for something more corrosive in a democracy: incompetence at the top, dressed up as confidence.

The pairing is surgical. Franklin Roosevelt, symbol of federal ambition during the New Deal, and John L. Lewis, the volcanic labor leader of the CIO, become a single mechanism in Flynn’s sentence: state power and mass organization moving in tandem. “Exposing both the unions and the country” frames labor unrest not as a contained workplace dispute but as a national security problem. It also subtly reassigns blame. If unions end up weakened, it’s not because capital crushed them, but because their own champion led them into “peril.”

Context matters: Flynn wrote from a skeptical, often anti-interventionist perch as the New Deal expanded government authority and as industrial unionism surged, with strikes and sit-downs testing the limits of legality and public patience. His intent is to puncture the romantic story that bold leadership equals progress. The subtext is a warning about unintended consequences: once you normalize emergency measures and mass mobilization, you don’t control where the escalation stops. Even the compliment of “fairness” becomes a weapon: absolution, here, is the harshest indictment.