Its membership consisted primarily of wealthy business elites and prominent political figures, who were for the most part conservatives opposed to the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It included: John W. Davis and Al Smith, former Democratic candidates for president; wealthy businessman Irénée du Pont, who left the Republicans to support Al Smith in 1928 and Roosevelt in 1932; and two New York Republicans, Nathan L. Miller, the state's former governor, and Representative James W.
[2] The moving spirit behind the launch of the organization was John Jacob Raskob, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the foremost opponent of Prohibition, former director of General Motors and a board member of DuPont.
Among the notable exceptions were Hollywood movie producer Hal Roach and naval hero Richmond Pearson Hobson.
[9] Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, alleged in November 1934 that a bond salesman named Gerald C. MacGuire told him that leaders in the League wanted Butler to lead 500,000 veterans in a coup to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt.
[10] Roosevelt's campaign manager accused the Liberty League of being an "ally of the Republican National Committee" which would "squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.
"[19] Shouse said that he had "deep sympathy" with the goals of the NRA, explaining, "While I feel very strongly that the prohibition of child labor, the maintenance of a minimum wage and the limitation of the hours of work belong under our form of government in the realm of the affairs of the different states, yet I am entirely willing to agree that in the case of an overwhelming national emergency the Federal Government for a limited period should be permitted to assume jurisdiction of them.
[22] On the national level, the league's total expenditures over its six-year life amounted to $1,200,000, with more than a million of that being spent during its most active months before the 1936 election.
[23] Wealthy donors dominated, so that "fewer than two dozen bankers, industrialists, and businessmen" accounted for more than half the league's 1935 monies on the national level, with the du Pont family responsible for 30% of the total.
"[13] 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.
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.
[25] In 1950, Roosevelt's successor Harry Truman branded critics who labelled his programs "socialism" as the heirs of the Liberty League of the 1930s.