Maybe they weren’t as free as we thought. After all, it wasn’t too far down the road that communist organizations like the ACLU started showing up. There were lots of statist experiments, one of the biggest being nationalization of the railroads (between 1917 and 1920; yes, before Amtrak and Conrail, there was the
USRA); people like Henry Ford were big admirers of people like Adolf, too.