TheMillerCircle.org

FDR

I have always believed, more so now than ever before, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was far and away the best President we have ever had. We don’t discuss him much these days because the Conservative Republicans, who seem to control our political dialogue, are afraid that if we review what he did for this country, we just might insist on doing it all over again. FDR’s solutions seem to have a currency that applies to many of our present circumstances, especially those that seem to be unraveling the core of our country’s stability and values. America’s problems today would be a no-brainer for FDR: he would know exactly what to do and have sage advice on getting some of these things done before the bottom drops any further. But, the Republicans would rather talk about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom are completely irrelevant for today’s problems. The great Founders of our Nation, including Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the other luminary statesmen who fashioned our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, found themselves in the enviable position of forming a new government based more on high hopes and a theory for good government, as opposed to concrete experience with the type of government they were trying to create. But give them credit. They launched a noble, if flawed experiment. The government they conceived was more of a high calling and a hope that good people would be energized by the new government and prove generous of spirit and high minded enough to solve social problems on their own, rather than requiring government intervention–a kind of moral version of Adam Smith. But, it was Adam Smith’s version of Adam Smith that showed up in America.

When it came to the one major flaw in the new government, the inability to deal with the slavery issue, the good people who profited from the slave trade and those who depended on the slave economy of the South, refused to change the system and the American experiment generated an ugly, deadly civil war, whose toll included about 6% of the population, either dead or wounded during the conflict.

After the civil war came the Industrial Revolution and, roughly every twenty years, we had a depression. But when big business became the dominant, supposedly permanent system we would live under, the good people at the top decided they would not fix the biggest of our depressions, the one that came in like a Katrina in 1929. One part of the experiment was over: good people at the top remain strictly self-serving as long as possible and will not or cannot fix or even see the problem that they often help to create. Does this in any way sound like the current iteration of the Republican Party and the hedge fund managers across the financial centers of America? Those that profit from tearing a country apart rather than putting one together? So, except for demanding return of our rights under the Constitution that GWB has taken away, forget the Founding Fathers, they had good intentions and were interesting, perhaps noble chaps, but to repeat– their program is utterly irrelevant for the major problems we face today, particularly those of our economy and the environment. But, then too, during their deliberations they never thought they might have to think about saving our planet. What they did give us is a foundation for our interactions, a governmental blueprint and structure for our deliberations, however flawed that too has become. It was FDR who had to fight members of his own party as well as the opposition, to remake the country and overturn the business model that many had assumed would make the country permanently prosperous.

In the Roaring Twenties business profits soared, but the business entrepreneurs did not let their profits, which were generated by increased productivity, go partly to the working class who did the labor. Instead, the profits of the 20s were largely retained by the corporations, showing greater and greater profits, which they used to leverage more investment in stocks and factory expansions until the champagne glass suddenly snapped in 1929. Many of the business leaders who created the messy depression that resulted from their greed complained that it was up to the government to solve the problem. The roaring twenties happened all over again to this country beginning with Ronald Reagan, through Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. Increased profits were used to once again heavily inflate the stock market through increased corporate profits, which in turn were used to leverage additional investment and expansion. A companion more sinister component was to downsize corporations, further enhancing the stock, with huge profits awaiting the CEO who did the dirty work. A gold parachute became far more important than a gold watch: wealthy America became a Darwinian playground. As the stock market went through hyperinflation, Middle Class salaries were more or less frozen. The sub-prime disaster that has yet to run its full course is merely another component of this behavior–the attempt to further inflate the value of the stock market and leverage more wealth. Will it take a depression for the American Public to see the Deja Vu of this behavior?

By the time FDR came along as President, inaugurated in 1933, 150 years into the new American experiment, we were no longer an experiment, or to put it more bluntly, the American experiment had failed. People were starving during the depression and America had basically shut down. The forces that brought people from the farms to the cities was now depriving them of food and shelter. Factories were idle, food lines grew and grew until the budgets for these aids were exceeded and severe rationing had to be implemented. Children were malnourished. Salaries for those employed continued to go down. Those who had jobs found their days of work reduced to three, two or one day a week. People borrowed on their life insurance policies, on their possessions until they were completely broke and evicted from their homes. The unemployed lived in shacks, collections of which were known as “Hoovervilles,” which sprouted up all across the country. When a prominent Senator from California proposed that the Farm Board America buy American wheat and distribute it to the unemployed, Hoover rejected the idea and insisted that this type of benevolence was un-American.

America was desperate for a new vision of itself, but until FDR came along and firmly cemented one, taped it on all the walls and telephone poles across America, hounding Americans through his radio transmissions, no one could express what was needed. But FDR’s special gift was articulating what the country intuitively grasped was a solution or at least a beginning of one. He brought outstanding academics into his inner circle, tossed ideas around, but most of all, knitted these ideas into a plan that was sewn by FDR’s special crafting skill. He saw what was needed to be done, and, with a lot of insight, experience and help, created a new vision that went beyond the hero worship of individualism, or a Jeffersonian kind of principle, to talk about the values and needs of a community. He emphasized that in the new world order, the one he would help create, would be one in which individual liberties would be supported so long as they didn’t violate the perceived public good. In that clash, the public need came first. His initial interest in citing this conclusion related to deforestation practices he saw in New York as a state Senator. But this new vision, no matter what it was, could no longer be derived from theory, because the starving people of America had no doubt that something went terribly wrong with experimental America and a new sharp turn was badly needed. America waited and FDR answered the call.

Herbert Hoover, whose government ruled during and well into the depression, insisted that the “free market solution” or “business model” as it was referred to then, would solve the problem. Just give it time (economist Friedrich Hayek was saying the same thing–he was the predecessor to Milton Friedman). If the problem was created from a set of top down flaws, then letting the top down engine restart itself would also solve the problem. The system wasn’t flawed, it was merely stalled. Though Hoover was a competent engineer and had solved human distribution problems during his career, by the time he was the Republican President, he was an ideologue, who drew an imaginary line in the sand and said on this side we have “American principles” of independent people finding their own way, but on the other side, we no longer have an America of individuals, but we create a dependency that no longer represents American values and results in the enslavement of our people. So Hoover’s line in the sand gave failing banks loans while people starved and food lines grew. The human crime committed by Hoover was that while we had starving, unemployed people living in the cities who went without food or shelter for long periods, the American farmer had produced an abundance of food that, with the right distribution and compensation program, could easily have fed the country: the depression was not an Irish Potato Famine , but a simple distribution issue that merely needed an emergency shift away from ideology to solve the simple problem of food distribution. The engineer Hoover had solved this problem many times in other countries, but the President Hoover refused to solve it for his own country. On the eve of his second term as President (1928), Herbert Hoover said “we are close to the day when poverty will be eliminated from our nation.”

Starving and threatened people began to search for solutions to the American failure on their own. For some, this search focused on the success of the new Russian model of collectivism and the Communist Party in America grew in membership, though it was never a real threat to topple the American government. Nevertheless riots took place, people were killed during riot containment. Ideas for compensation for soldiers from WW I, were met with hostility and violence.

To give you some idea of FDR’s effectiveness, during the 1928 Presidential campaign, Roosevelt was recovering from polio, which very nearly took his life. He had discovered Warm Springs Georgia as a place where he could recover some function to his legs through swimming and wanted to continue swimming there for three months a year (he was so impressed with what he perceived was a benefit from his exercise there, that he bought the place with his own money and set up a camp for others stricken with polio to come: when he was there, he would lead the polio victims (mostly children) in swimming exercises. He never got any money back from his generosity, though others later donated to keep the program going). But at that time, Al Smith of New York was the Democratic nominee, running against the incumbent Herbert Hoover. Smith wanted FDR to run for the governor of New York, feeling that if FDR could win as governor, his coat tails would carry New York for Smith in the Presidential race. Most of Roosevelt’s advisers warned him against running, as they felt it was something of a trap, and FDR himself wanted to continue with his exercise program in Georgia. However, he felt he had no choice under the circumstances, so he threw his hat in the ring for Governor of New York and campaigned vigorously, which probably cost him any further chance of recovery through swimming exercises in Georgia. Roosevelt had the dual responsibility in 1928 of campaigning for governor, while as the same time campaigning for Al Smith, who was a Tammany Hall politician and who would later turn against Roosevelt. In FDR’s campaign message he would say (speaking of Smith’s programs for New York, while Smith was governor of New York):

“If his [Smith's] program for the reduction of hours of women and children is Socialistic, we are all Socialists; and if his program for public improvements for the hospitals of the State and the prisons of the State is Socialistic, then we are all Socialists. And if his program for bettering health in this State, for his great aid to the educational program of this State if they are Socialistic, we are Socialists and we are proud of the name.”

Just imagine any candidate uttering those words today, without just about everyone thinking that he was instantaneously sinking his own political ship. Yet, what no one understood was that when Roosevelt mentioned how government had forgotten about the little people at the bottom, and began to forcefully talk about his plans for a more centralized economy, his message resonated deeply with Americans as if Roosevelt was somehow talking to each of them with a message they could finally understand, one that made sense. His use of radio was instrumental in getting his highly personalized style over to Americans. As he talked it seemed like he was talking to each one of them individually, with a calm reassuring message that, though many things had to be done, persuaded people to believe that everything would work out. The result of the 1928 election was astounding: while Al Smith had lost the Presidential election by a landslide, including his own home state of New York by 100,000 votes, Roosevelt carried the New York Governorship by 25,000 votes and was the sole Democratic light in an otherwise gloomy election for the Democrats.

By 1932, the depression was deeper and darker than ever, with no end in sight and no ideas emanating from the Hoover administration on what was wrong or how to fix it. Hoover had gone through many theories of the cause of the depression, but missed the mark on each occasion. In the meantime, Roosevelt practiced and refined his policies while Governor of New York and honed his political skills, extending his range of contacts to prepare for the Democratic nomination for the 1932 Presidential race. Although he had strong opposition from Al Smith and others who preferred a more business-based platform, unknown to any other politician, FDR had finely tuned his message and policies so that he could fuse the interests of labor, farmers and many progressive businessmen into a powerful political alliance that secured his nomination and election. FDR rejected the past and called for a new future, a future with more government control and sensitivity towards those at the bottom of the economic ladder. He addressed the depression head-on and, for the first time, four years into the depression, began articulating what the real causes of the depression were. He pointed out that the enormous increase in productivity in the 1920s had not generated lower prices or better wages or even adequately better dividends, but went instead into new an unnecessary plants and financial speculation and when it came to his formula of what to do immediately, he demanded that government should give relief to all groups, from the top to the bottom and help fix the structural failures of the economy and establish mechanisms that could help in the distribution of wealth and opportunity. Roosevelt’s opposition during the 1932 election was Herbert Hoover whom he soundly defeated by 472 to 59 electoral college votes. Thus began the greatest presidential run in American history, from 1933 to his sudden death in 1945, Roosevelt was elected to the Presidency four times and created reforms of government that put society on a new footing by addressing the kinds of issues that the pre-industrial Founding Fathers could not have foreseen–how to create a fair and stable government, when big business wanted it all, just as it does today.

What we need to do is revive discussion of the era of FDR, something that every Republican politician would prefer to avoid. But if we are going to bail out the financial service sector for misdeeds, support the mismanaged airline industry and force energy costs at reasonable values, we must demand control of the very industries that have violated these simple, fair standards of practice. FDR would tell us we are all crazy if we don’t insist that the American people, the American government, does not get huge controlling interests in the very industries and organizations that we have to bail out, among which are those needed to sustain a normal lifestyle. To privatize profit and allow the public to assume all risk to every sector of our economy, without demanding firm control and fair principles of practice is shear nonsense and should be denounced as FDR would surely do if he were here today.