Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of the New Deal in literally saving the nation. It would take the industrial revival of the Second World War to genuinely restart the economy, but the necessary infrastructure that had been neglected for half a century was put in place in less than a decade. Eighty years later, we struggle with a situation nearly identical to that faced by FDR in 1933, but without an FDR anywhere in sight, we are far less likely to come through so well.
The History Chef is a clever idea for a blog: every post somehow manages to find some connection between a nugget of presidential history and food. I’ve been following it for a couple of months now, and the blogger, Suzy Evans, seems to have no trouble coming up with material every couple of days.
Today’s post is about Franklin Roosevelt and his beloved dog, Fala. Apparently, everybody in the White House loved the little Scottie and so many people gave him treats and scraps that it wasn’t too long before the dog developed intestinal problems. Roosevelt subsequently gave orders to White House staff that only he was to feed the dog.
But the intrigue to this post is how the Republicans made up total bullshit about Roosevelt and the dog. They claimed that FDR had accidentally left Fala behind on a trip to Alaska and dispatched a U.S. Navy destroyer to Alaska to retrieve the dog at a cost to the taxpayers of $20 million, during the middle of the war, no less.
Sixty-six years and a few extra zeros later, and the Republicans are STILL making up lies whenever it suits them. The difference is that in 1944, Roosevelt was able to turn it around and nail the Republicans with his famous “Fala Speech”:
If you watch that entire film clip (the part about Fala is near the end), you’ll also hear FDR chastise Republicans for trying to disenfranchise the average voter in favor of the millionaires and corporations that even then were the Republican “base”. He also speaks out about Republican efforts to blame the Great Depression on the Democrats. Some things just never change, I guess.
To go along with my rant, here are some linky items about the economy:
We’ll start with this illustrated audio clip of Franklin Roosevelt speaking in front of Madison Square Garden in 1936, as he was running for his second term (via Crooks & Liars). Though there are some crying “enough” with the comparisons of Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the simple reality is that there is a great deal to compare, if not in the men themselves, then certainly in the situations they found themselves in as they took office. By 1936, the initial efforts of the Roosevelt administration to resolve the banking crisis had been successful, and he was trying to move forward with the broader stimulus efforts of the New Deal, and yet FDR was still faced with stubborn do-nothing opposition from the Republican Party. Roosevelt, however, recognized the position he was in as one of strength and used it to clobber the Republicans into near-total irrelevance for the next dozen years. A certain secret Muslim non-American Communist terrorist gun-hating bomb-thrower-loving scary black man I can think of ought to be keeping this in mind.
One of the key players in the Roosevelt Administration was Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins. Perkins had served under FDR while he was governor of New York as the state’s Commissioner of Industry and had fought for many reforms to the state: minimum wage laws, capping the number of work hours in a week for women, and unemployment insurance among them. She was the first woman to hold a cabinet position and was one of only two members of FDR’s cabinet to serve for the entire duration of his presidency. As Secretary of Labor, it was her agenda that led to the creation of Social Security and federal minimum-wage laws. Writing at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, University of Chicago historian Christine Stansell reviews a new biography of Perkins that tries to expand on the personal side of Perkins’ life more than the professional, but Perkins is not generally well-known in modern times so any book about her remakrable accomplishments is worth a look.
Here’s Captain Obvious with a bulletin for you: Advertising Age reports that the struggling economy and huge increase in the number of people out of work has been a serious boom for job-hunter social networking site LinkedIn. They’ve doubled their monthly number of visitors over this time last year, snagging 7.7 million visitors per month, and presently have 36 million registered users. Now, by comparison, Facebook has over 90 million members, but most of them are already employed and spending their days goofing off playing on Facebook.
Just in case you missed it, on Tuesday the New York Times editorial board came right out and said what a lot of us have been saying lately: it’s time for President Obama to stop bailing out the banks, nationalize them temporarily, eliminate the bad ones, stabilize the good ones, and tell the fucking Republicans to STFU about “socialism”. If it were me, I’d also fire Timothy Geithner and find somebody to run Treasury who wasn’t beholden to Wall Street, and then I’d sharpen up my guillotine and start publicly executing some bank executives, but I guess that’s why Obama’s the president and not me.
Everybody’s favorite “jealous putz”, the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, wasn’t very happy with the non-answers he was getting from Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben “Bailout” Bernanke about where the money was going, so now he’s proposing legislation to force the Fed to disclose the names of institutions they have lent money to since March 2008 and provide full details about the amounts and the rationales for making said loans. Bernie’s website includes the text of the legislation and a video clip of him chewing on Bernanke’s ass.
Lastly, I’m sure you remember that I have posted a couple of times about the severity of the economic situation in Iceland. Iceland, Latvia, and a few other small nations have been hit especially hard because their tiny economies were not capable of withstanding the strain from the failures of their national banks due to overzealous speculation. The government in Iceland collapsed recently (with the unintended and somewhat irrelevant side effect of bringing to power the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister), people are beginning to protest with pitchforks and torches (literally), and it’s looking like Iceland will have to adopt the Euro as its currency, because the Icelandic krona is now worthless (take THAT Zimbabwe!).
The latest issue of Vanity Fair has a fantastic in-depth feature piece by journalist Michael Lewis about what’s going on in Iceland these days and how they screwed the pooch in the first place. Turns out it’s all the fault of the men, who basically still act like drunken Vikings on shore leave. And, in case you’re wondering, everybody in Iceland DOES know Björk, so shut up about it.
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Time to freshen up the look of the site again, and I’ve been inspired by the current zeitgeist that has everybody remembering FDR and the Great Depression to try to come up with some visual thematics that would be reminiscent of WPA posters and other graphics. Not so much the WWII propaganda stuff that got played to death by bloggers at the time of the beginning of the Iraq War, but stuff like this or this.
I’ve got four first-draft ideas to show you after the jump.
Well this is a rather strange situation: Conrad Black, the Canadian newspaper publisher who went to prison in the U.S. last year for fraud (he was skimming the profits from selling off his newspaper empire), is now a featured columnist at former New Yorker editor Tina Brown’s latest media effort, a Huffington Post wannabe site called “The Daily Beast”. Black is still in prison, but obviously he’s in one of those cushy rich-guy “minimum security” prisons where the warden punishes misbehavior by taking away your tennis court reservations.
We’re going to get a big dose of attention to FDR in the next year or two. I will guarantee you there are probably a whole slew of historians and magazine journalistas getting their book proposals put together so that they can start cranking them out before we’re all too poor to spend $39.95 on a hardcover book. So maybe Black is just keeping his avenues open for a book deal; he’s got a lot of free time these days, it seems.
The Stock Market Crash of 1929 was the triggering event for the Great Depression, but today we tend to forget that it didn’t all happen at once. Catastrophic bank failures, widespread panic, and the dispossession of millions of Americans happened in a series of waves that occurred through most of the 1930s. The inaction of the Hoover administration swept the Republicans out of office in 1932 and ushered in a dozen years’ duration of the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. FDR spent his entire first term dealing with the aftershocks, only to scarcely have time to move the nation forward before the Second World War would engulf us and become the engine of the national economy for the rest of his time in office.
Given the behavior of John McCain this week, all I can say is imagine if Roosevelt had decided to call “time out” to stage some pointless photo opportunities and make some political hay over the survival of this country. Even as the corporate leaders of the day attempted to organize a coup to steal the government away from President Roosevelt and replace it with a fascist military dictatorship during some of the bleakest times of the Depression, Roosevelt was not deterred. Critics of FDR make many good points about his pushing the envelope on Constitutional issues (though with the exception of the “court packing” scheme, what Roosevelt did isn’t even in the same ballpark with what Bush and Cheney have done), and the Supreme Court did eventually push much of the New Deal back in the closet (though not until the worst was over). The argument that extraordinary times may require extraordinary means is worth considering and even acceding to, as long as the people who take on those extraordinary measures do so with some degree of transparency and an absolute committment to the resolution of the crisis — NOT the indefinite extension of the crisis to extend that power, NOR for the political benefit of one party.
In 1933, the country was gripped by bank failures and panic runs that became so widespread and severe that the President declared a “bank holiday”, which temporarily closed the banks and gave the government time to review the status of all the banks in the country. The “holiday” lasted one week, and then banks were re-opened in a staggered mechanism depending on their relative security. It was an unprecedented move in American history and remains so even now. Roosevelt decided to address the nation via radio, thus inaugurating his famous “Fireside Chats” that would be his most direct communication with the public for his entire time in office.
Here is a recording of the first address, which explained the situation and the plan for the return to operation of the nation’s banking system. Compare Roosevelt’s remarks to Bush’s speech on Wednesday night, which tried to deflect any focus of criticism on the greed of the investment banks or the quarter-century of deregulation that undid the system of protections that Roosevelt’s administration enacted to prevent another meltdown like 1929 from happening. As Jon Stewart so astutely observed, Bush is reading from the same script that he used in 2003 to scare people into going along with his plan for the Iraq War. If Roosevelt’s address is a bit condescending (and it is), that stems in part from the greater psychological distance between average Americans and their government in those pre-media-saturation years, but in the fina analysis he makes a cogent explanation of the situation and the plan and offers an optimistic branch for people to grasp onto in the middle of what was a very frightening time. Bush, on the other hand, tells us that we’re all going to lose our homes and our jobs if we don’t do what he says and right now, not unlike the way he told us Saddam Hussein was going to kill us all with his weapons of mass destruction.
The two candidates for President have given us some significant insights into how we might expect them to respond to this crisis, which will surely outlast Bush and might even outlast them. Barack Obama has comported himself better than McCain, but has failed to demonstrate any initiative or real leadership, letting events simply go along as they will, controlled by the actions of others in Congress and Treasury Secretary Paulson. McCain, on the other hand, once again demonstrates his unsuitability to lead this country in a time of crisis; his flip-flopping on the very issue itself is disgraceful and blatantly cynical and his grandstanding demonstrates a complete lack of insight into the severity of the hardship that will befall the majority of Americans.
We are being failed by our political leadership at every level and on both sides of the political divide. Seventy-five years ago we were lucky enough to have as a national leader a man who understood the need to use political power for the greater good rather than personal gain or for the advantage of his supporters. Now we are saddled with a lame-duck president trying one last time to wrest power from government and hand it to a few powerful unaccountable figures and with two men, one of whom will definitely BE president in less than six weeks, but neither of whom has demonstrated where their leadership might take us.
