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ECONOMIC POLICY: THE CRITICS
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ECONOMIC POLICY: THE CRITICSAs I mentioned, there are lots of people that won’t let 70-year-old policies go. One of them is Robert Higgs, the conservative economic theorist, who admits that “In the construction of the American regulatory and welfare state, no one looms larger than FDR.” He does not say this as a compliment. Sure, Higgs writes, “with few exceptions, historians have taken a positive view of the New Deal” -- but, to him, such programs as massive relief programs for the unemployed; the expanded federal regulation of agriculture, industry, finance, and labor relations; the establishment of a legal minimum wage; and the creation of Social Security with its old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and income supplements for dependent children in single-parent families, the aged poor, the physically handicapped, and the blind are not beneficent ideas designed to make the functioning of government and economy more humane. Nope, these policies are a power grab by liberal economists! For this accomplishment, along with his wartime leadership, historians and the general public alike rank Franklin D. Roosevelt among the greatest of American presidents. Roosevelt, it is said repeatedly, restored hope to the American people when they had fallen into despair because of the seemingly endless depression, and his policies “saved capitalism” by mitigating its intrinsic cruelties and inequalities. In a 1936 book called The Menace of Roosevelt and his Policies, Howard E. Kershner came closer to the truth when he wrote that Roosevelt took charge of our government when it was comparatively simple, and for the most part confined to the essential functions of government, and transformed it into a highly complex, bungling agency for throttling business and bedeviling the private lives of free people. It is no exaggeration to say that he took the government when it was a small racket and made a large racket out of it. Of course, he doesn’t mention that Kershner was a paranoid, pathological anti-communist who saw such things as laws against child labor as a sign of the creeping red tide, and was arguing in the 1950s and 1960s along with Joe McCarthy that Communists were infiltrating the American government. It’s also pretty interesting how he skips over free-market conservative Herbert Hoover, who was president when the Great Depression started in 1929, and who continued to adopt laissez-faire policies that deepened the depression until 1932, when voters unceremoniously dumped him in favor of FDR. Higgs and the like paint FDR as a big-government liberal who created federal agencies for their own sake and no other. As evidence, Higgs breaks out the organizational chart of the federal government. He points to such agencies as the Export-Import Bank, the Farm Credit Administration, the Rural Development Administration (formerly the Farmers Home Administration), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Rural Utility Service (formerly the Rural Electrification Administration), the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority as “the offspring of the New Deal” and argues that they are pernicious in their effects. “Each in its own fashion,” he writes, “interferes with the effective operation of the free market. By subsidizing, financing, insuring, regulating, and thereby diverting resources from the uses most valued by consumers, each renders the economy less productive than it could be-and all in the service of one special interest or another.” Regardless of how one feels about each of these individual agencies, and one can certainly debate about the impacts of some of them, it seems the argument here is that NO federal agency is EVER justified in helping to stimulate the economy or to ameliorate the effects on a market collapse on average people. Even if you’ve got a problem with, say, the Export-Import Bank, isn’t it a good rather than a bad thing that farmers get subsidies that help family farms stay afloat; that students have their college loans federally provided, so even (gasp!) the middle class and below can attend universities; that old people with no family can rely on Social Security checks rather than cat food in order to eat? WAR POLICYIt’s unfortunate that we have to sum up FDR’s World War II actions in so short a space, but that’s the way it is. To his credit, William J. vanden Heuvel has noted, FDR was the first (and, vanden Heuvel argues, the ONLY) political leader to stand against Hitler from the very beginning. Five weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt became President of the United States. Roosevelt's loathing of the whole Nazi regime was known the moment he took office. Alone among the leaders of the world, he stood in opposition to Hitler from the very beginning. In a book published in 1937, Winston Churchill--to whom free humanity everywhere must be eternally indebted and without whose courage and strength the defeat of Nazi Germany could never have been achieved--described Hitler's treatment of the Jews, stating that "concentration camps pock-mark the German soil..." and concluding his essay by writing that "the world lives on hopes that the worst is over and that we may live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age..." Roosevelt had no such hopes. He never wavered in his belief that the pagan malignancy of Hitler and his followers had to be destroyed. Thomas Mann, the most famous of the non-Jewish refugees from the Nazis, met with FDR at the White House in 1935 and confided that for the first time he believed the Nazis would be beaten because in Roosevelt he had met someone who truly understood the evil of Adolf Hitler. Considering that this made him alone not only among the political leaders of the world, but virtually alone among prominent Americans (many of whom, including Henry Ford, who praised Hitler and continued to trade with Nazi Germany AFTER World War II began), it certainly serves as a major mark in Roosevelt’s favor. It also helps to explain the hatred of FDR by the anti-Semitic right, who didn’t see the murder of European Jews as any of out business, and didn’t think Roosevelt should be sticking his nose in Hitler’s business as the German leader committed the most horrific act of the 20th century. The nutty right spread rumors that Roosevelt’s real name was “Rosenfeld,” and called his policies “the Jew Deal,” playing to racist notions of wealthy Jews running the government. Charming. This nonsense about Roosevelt and about Jews continues to this day among the racist right, by the way, including Holocaust deniers like David Irving and his ilk. One would think, being a victim of race-baiting himself, FDR would have seen the folly in his most shameful act of the war. Sadly, this was not the case. Famously, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which consigned over 100,000 loyal Americans of Japanese descent to prison camps for years. Their property was seized. The vast majority of it was never returned. The legal precedent that justified this vile act, Korematsu v. United States, was upheld by the Supreme Court and stands a valid legal precedent to this day. No similar policies were enacted for Americans of German or Italian descent, though the U.S. was at war with them, too. No act of espionage by any Japanese American was ever proven. CONCLUSION FDR might be the most important president of the 20th century. Love him or give in to insane and illogical hatred of him, this much is undeniable. And what about all those that got their jollies in hating Roosevelt? My favorite story is this one, told by William E. Leuchtenberg: “In Kansas a man went down into his cyclone cellar and announced he would not emerge until Roosevelt was out of office. (Which he was there, his wife ran off with a traveling salesman.)” Sometimes, only sometimes, narratives end with perfect poetic justice.
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