Frank R. Kent

Who was Frank R. Kent?

Frank Richardson Kent was an American journalist and political theorist of the 1920s and 1930s. Although a Democrat, by the 1930s he was one of the leading conservative critics of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a daily column that reached millions of newspaper readers across the country.Historians group him with David Lawrence, Walter Lippmann, Mark Sullivan, and Arthur Krock as influential political commentators in the 1930s.

He was based in Baltimore, where he started as a cub reporter for the Baltimore Sun in 1900. After 1922 the Sun papers syndicated his daily column of political commentary to 140 papers nationwide. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1922 so admired Kent that he helped him to get his column syndicated. He was one of the big-name journalists who covered the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925.

But by 1934 Kent, a lifelong Democrat, turned against the New Deal. He criticized FDR and liberals who tried to disrupt his cherished Jeffersonian principles - the balanced budget, limited spending by the federal government, and a limited government. As his criticism became more severe, he charged that the Democrats no longer stood for states' rights.