"THE NEW DEAL" -- THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER!

"THE NEW DEAL" – THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 3, 2010

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A READER WRITES:

Jim,

We were only babies in the Great Depression. It seems to me that if FDR hadn’t stimulated the nation’s economy with a jobs program my dad and others like him would have been unemployed for a long, long time.

The Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1933 gave my dad a job and economic relief from the Great Depression. He didn’t have to wait until 1941 when America entered WWII.

No doubt World War II helped the economy. But people like my parents needed work in 1933. FDR provided it with the WPA.

Eight years would have been a long time to stand in bread lines without a job waiting for the economy to fix itself!

Have I missed something here in the analysis of past history? Does history repeat itself?

Nothing is ever exactly the same. I don’t think we can make judgments of where we were to where we are now.

It’s likely we won’t ever know how Obama’s stimulus package might have worked because the public is impatient. People don’t want to wait beyond 18 months to see results. They want immediate gratification.

Do people want us to return to the policies that got us into this economic fix?
I enjoy your writing a lot but sometimes you stimulate me to respond!

A Clintonian

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Clintonian,

It is seventy-seven years since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) deserted his own aristocratic class and launched a radical approach to governance.

FDR called it "The New Deal,” and he ran into trouble almost immediately with the Supreme Court with his National Recovery Act (NRC).

The NRC was the broad umbrella under which the WPA and several others programs were initiated.

FDR boldly abandoned the policy of our own Iowa president, Herbert Hoover, our only president, who thought the economy would correct itself, and that government interference was the last thing that was necessary.

FDR had a 100-day moratorium on banks, and was not afraid to try anything his brain trusts came up with. The country was papered with slogans, brazen colored posters, archival photographs, and reproductions of art. This was all designed to celebrate a wide-ranging smorgasbord of programs that was to become, “The New Deal.”

If you read a biography of FDR, you will find he was not the cerebral type that President Obama is. Nor was he a president obsessed with his place in history.

He had one focus, get the economy going. A simple man, said to have a second rate mind but a first rate personality, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs was his attack strategy.

He not only established the WPA, but also the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Unemployment was greater than twenty-five (25) percent. So, he did everything he could to get millions of unemployed able bodied men and women to build roads, bridges, stadiums, parks, playgrounds, schools, and yes, the Hoover Dam, a monument to his drive and devotion.

FDR also created the Social Security System, which was meant to provide something of a safety net for those unable to save for their golden years.

My da worked on the WPA, too, and helped to build Riverview Stadium and Eagle Point Park, among other projects in our hometown. So, I feel something of the poignancy of your words. I come from the same class and circumstances.

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Where I respectfully differ with you, and why I think Obama’s critics have been more than kind, is that as I have said in a recent missive, he missed his opportunity, and now it is gone.

Was it because of the people he surrounds himself, people who had him charging off on tangents when his primary focus should have been jobs? I don’t know.

Healthcare, finance reform, and the surge in the Afghanistan War replaced jobs as the focus with the economy taking a backseat.

Consider this: we are still very much in a recession while Europe is doing very well, thank you very much.

If it sounds as if I am angry, you get a sense of my disappointment. I voted for Obama and expected him to set realistic priorities putting the will of the people first instead of following his own agenda.

I suspect FDR’s eyes would glass over with incomprehension listening to Obama the way they did when he had a conversation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

FDR kept his ducks in a row, but historians tell us his economic impact was more psychic than real before the war. Be that as it may, you could never convince my da that was true, and I doubt seriously if you could your father as well.

Leadership is primarily symbolic and ordinary men and women felt FDR was doing something for them, that they counted for something! He didn't do it with words. He did it with actions, sometimes ineffectively but always with deep appreciation and affection of the intended. Small wonder he was elected president four times!

Had WWII not come along, which was his moment, history might have judged him quite differently.

Be always well,

Jim