Saving the New Deal that saved us

Yes, Mr Hume, we all know the New Deal was a failure, if by failing you mean that it didn't end the Great Depression.  We learned that in high school.

As an afterthought.

The New Deal didn't end the Depression.

It saved the nation!

Conservatives' current attempts to rewrite the history of the 1930s isn't new.  Undoing the New Deal has been their one over-riding idea for seventy-five years.  It's not even an idea.  It's a vendetta.  Circumstances---another instance of their beloved utterly unregulated, every man for himself brand of capitalism destroying the economy, the election of a Democratic President---have forced them to step up their efforts.  They have to harp on the failure of the New Deal, first, to justify sabotaging Democratic attempts to bring relief to the poor and aid to the middle and working class and, second, to set up their inevitable claims down the road that those attempts didn't actually bring the relief and aid they appeared to bring.

But to make the case that the New Deal failed, if what you mean is simply that it didn't end the Depression, you have to mean that the Depression was purely an economic problem, a perfect storm of economic crises, and that the New Deal was only an economic response, a bunch of government spending programs designed to return the country to prosperity.

The Depression was a political crisis.

The causes were economic, but the effects were political in that the entire body politic was on the verge of coming apart.

Roosevelt didn't set out in his first hundred days to put a chicken back in every pot and a car in every garage.  The New Deal wasn't designed to end the Depression, to the extent that it was designed at all---the legislation FDR introduced and the programs he implemented were a hodge-podge of experiments, ad hoc and stop-gap measures, items from a decades-old Progressive wish list, and familiar though with greatly increased budgets government building projects, not to mention a quick re-legalization of beer, much of it in conflict with itself, some parts of it canceling out others, all of it more full of hope and wish than of predictable positive result.  Roosevelt's first and primary intent wasn't to end the Depression.  It was to put the brakes on it.

He was out to keep things from getting worse while alleviating people's suffering and holding the country together.

This wasn't a matter of a lot of individuals losing their jobs and everybody else having to cut back on their spending.  It was a matter of whole neighborhoods losing their jobs at once and lots of people cutting back on eating and of having to give up their homes.

In Detroit and Pittsburgh, half the workforce was unemployed.

In Iowa, close to 17,000 farms a year had gone up for foreclosure.  In Mississippi, on inauguration day, more than a third of all the farms were on the auction block.

In Illinois, 2000 schools had to close.

When Roosevelt took office, the banks in 32 states had shut their doors.

People were starving.

Families were ruined.

Whole communities were disintegrating.

And it was all so crazy.  As H.W. Brands writes in new biography of Franklin Roosevelt, Traitor to His Class :

The most discouraging aspect of the Great Depression was that it defied common logic.  People went hungry while farmers dumped milk in ditches and left crops standing in the fields.  The thriftiest savers, cautious souls who had shunned the stock market as reckless speculation, saw their carefully tended nest eggs vanish overnight as banks collapsed.  Factories sat idle while millions wanted nothing more than to go back to work.

And for over three years, President Hoover kept treating the Depression as an economic problem and in the way business-friendly politicians like to treat economic problems, by telling people that the problem would fix itself, folks just needed to be patient, tighten their belts, maybe give a little more of the money they didn't have to local charities, an approach that as bad news followed bad news had begun to look to the People like neglect with a sugarcoat of sanctimony.  It had begun to look to the People that the government, supposedly their government, didn't care what happened to them, and what good was a government that was willing to sit by and watch while the lives of its citizens fell to pieces? 

The Depression wasn't just an emptying of the country's collective wallet.  It was a hollowing out of its collective soul.

The People had begun to doubt.

They doubted their government.  They doubted their form of government.  They doubted business.  They doubted capitalism.  They doubted their fellow Americans, they doubted their neighbors, they doubted their friends, they doubted themselves.

When FDR hauled himself up on his withered legs and stood at the podium to take his oath of office and deliver his inaugural address, he didn't see his job that day as addressing the nation's economic woes alone.

He was there to address the people's doubt.  He was there to address their fear.

I AM certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

The country, not just its economy, needed to be saved, and Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal saved it.

Of course conservatives ignore this part of the history when they call the New Deal a failure.  They prefer to focus on numbers, which they fudge when they're not just making them up, and they also like to talk as if the Depression itself, even as an economic event, came out of nowhere and all at once, as if hadn't been wearing America down for years before FDR took office, as if it blew in overnight like a storm and struck with full force on March 3, 1933 while Herbert Hoover was riding sullenly in the car with Roosevelt on the way to the Inauguration.  Their attacks depend on no one remembering that Hoover had been dealing with the Depression by doing  the pretty much nothing that conservatives want Obama to do now, while the crisis worsened and worsened.

And it depends on no one remembering that Roosevelt was often stymied by conservatives of his day in Congress and in the Courts.

But ultimately, it depends on people forgetting what the New Deal meant politically.

In his inaugural address----which by the way is almost entirely without any specific references to the economic problems as economic problems; they are discussed more as moral failures with moral solutions, the address is almost as much a spiritual and religious document, a sermon, as it is a political manifesto, and it is that, a manifesto---right after the line about fear itself, Roosevelt says:

In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Those two sentences gave a lot of people a shock.  They could sound as though Roosevelt is asking for the people to make him a dictator.  What they were, though, was the opening clause of the New Deal.

The deal Roosevelt was offering was this:  If the people would put their faith back in the government and work with it, the government would put its faith in them and work with them to solve the current problems, including the ongoing ones that weren't caused by the Depression but may have been caused by the same anti-democratic forces that had caused the Depression (i.e. the greedy rich), and any future problems.  In short, if the People were willing to work harder at governing themselves, the government would never again stand by while the nation bled and People suffered.

FDR's first inaugural address was a Revolutionary document, in that, like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, it harkened back to the Revolution, the the document of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and reiterated and expanded upon the essential theme that the government of the United States is government of the People, by the People, for the People.

No wonder conservatives hate Roosevelt and hate the New Deal.  Their idea of how the government works is that it's government of us, by them, for them.

Instinctively, if not always intellectually, conservatives understand that the New Deal did in fact save the country and it saved it from them.

(Top two uncredited photographs borrowed from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum website.  Bottom photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of Dr X.)

__________________________

Many conservatives aren't content with arguing that the New Deal didn't end the Depression.  They've added the lie that it actually made the Depression worse.

David Sirota and Adam Cohen have dealt with that whopper, Sirota in his syndicated column and Cohen in the New York Times.

Updated:  It wasn't all FDR on his lonesome, of course.  Read Digby on Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, and her role as conscience of the New Deal.

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Comments

[Linkmeister]

Well said. Buckley's descendents not only want to stand astride history and yell "Stop!," they now want to roll it back into an alternate reality.

[Linkmeister]

Aaargh! "descendAnts!"

[sfmike]

Beautiful history lesson. And when are the same old conservative hacks in the media going to be driven out of public life? They are not only consistently wrong but they are deeply shameless.

[Doug K]

bravo, thank you.

the other half of my grumpy old men hunting/fishing partnership characterized the Republicans as the seagulls in 'Finding Nemo': a mindless repetition of "mine! mine! mine!"
seems fair to me..

[BD]

The only thing the New Deal did was get people dependent on govt. What got us out of the Depression was WWII, and I have read that there was actually a recession during the New Deal that was caused by the New Deal. Google it and learn something.