This post has been a long time coming. Major media — print and television — even PBS and NPR — are under the sway of wealthy corporate interests as much as President Obama and the U.S. Congress. The article I reprint below is truth-telling as most Americans alive today — Americans who do not remember the Great Depression or the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt — have never heard.
The first generation of historians and biographers attentive to Roosevelt and the New Deal no longer lives; the second generation of such scholarship has reached its maturity. The third generation is up and coming. (Between the second and the third see, for example, H.W. Brands' fine biography published in 2008, "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.")
Roosevelt, as Professor Richard D. Wolff indicates in the article I reprint below, did not anticipate the ongoing power of the moneyed interests he managed to draw into what Professor Wolff appropriately calls his "grand social compromise." The New Deal was eviscerated after the Second World War, and was effectively buried in the 1980s under the bland presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its sole surviving symbol, the Social Security program, continues to nourish a generation of older Americans — including myself — a large portion of whom don't remember its origin in 1935.
It was my privilege during much of World War II to live in The White House with my mother, Anna Roosevelt, my grandfather, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and grandmother, Eleanor Roosevelt. I was a child, but the imprint of those formative years is vivid and indelible. For a tangle of reasons, none of them of importance and none of them very sound, it is an experience I've been reluctant to share, although I began to do so with a book I wrote over forty years ago, "A Love in Shadow: The Story of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, told by their son" (W.W. Norton, 1978). My grandfather died in office shortly after the beginning of his fourth term as president, on April 12, 1945, a casualty of the war he did so much to win. My grandmother Eleanor lived to age 78; she died in 1962. I lived with her during my undergraduate years at Amherst College, in the late 1950s almost until her death. She was my first and finest mentor. Her values still are bedrock.
The article reprinted below, drawn to my attention by a close friend, stirred memories of those early years. Reading it and related other literature has fed an evolving idea of experimentally revisiting that time in my current writing.
I haven't met the author, Richard D. Wolff, although he and I lived and worked very near each other, in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the years I was researching and writing "A Love in Shadow." He is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008.
The political, economic and social crises we face today, as Professor Wolff indicates, are every bit as grave as the circumstances FDR faced in crafting and piloting the New Deal in his twelve years as president. There are potent similarities between those times and our own. And there are enormous differences. There is not even much similarity between the Republican party of the 1930s and 40s and that of Mitt Romney, although both are hapless. The Southern Dixiecrats, so important and so limiting in FDR's coalition, have long ago turned Republican.
The currently most salient crisis of this country and this earth — the devastating impact of global warming, corporate pollution of life, the Wal-Martization of America, the utter failure of consumer capitalism to create a sustainable world — were not FDR's issues, although they bear some similarity. If there is a single most challenging difference, it is that the American people of the Great Depression tangibly knew they were suffering. Today's Americans, by and large, do not — at least not yet. If Professor Wolff's account and analysis below have a prominent failing, it is his inexplicable lack of attention to this most serious of challenges. As in FDR's time, the prevailing model of economic and political governance has failed. The need, now as then, is not for temporizing and modest initiative or continuing economic growth; the need is for paradigmatic change. I fear we don't have the leadership to make it happen. Grass roots and shoots may thrive, but there is no modern FDR to nourish them and make of them a dominant political movement. Some eloquent clarion calls are heard — I think of a recent collection of essays that appeared in Orion Magazine, "Change Everything Now," and its sibling collection of shorter pieces, "Fifty-Year Plan" — but it is hard, as yet, to see how they can turn into real bottom up systemic change.
True, we can't judge Barack Obama by the standards we apply in historical retrospect to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Obama is not as canny a political leader as Roosevelt, nor as gifted. Roosevelt had genuine magic, real mojo. Much as he needs and deserves our support, President Obama doesn't have magic. He leads a nation deeply divided against itself. He stands in a world in as much peril as that encountered by FDR in his presidency of unparalled length and accomplishment from 1933 to 1945 — through a great Depression and World War II. We must wish Obama well and work for his reelection in less than a month. The alternative would be terrible and unconscionable, though sadly it isn't inconceivable.
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Richard D. Wolff is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New Shool University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He writes for Truthout and is providing post-presidential debate analysis on Pacifica radio stations throughout the country.
Ghost of the New Deal Haunts Democrats' Agenda, but It's Time to Summon FDR
President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, at approximately 3:30 pm EST on August 14, 1935. (Photo: Social Security Online)
Obama and most Democrats are so dependent on contributions and support from business and the rich that they dare not discuss, let alone implement, the kinds of policies Roosevelt employed the last time US capitalism crashed.
While Bush's absence was obvious at the 2012 Republican convention, so was another president's absence at the Democratic convention. Romney banished Bush because his last year, 2008, linked Republicans in office with economic crisis and big bank bailouts: not a vote-getting association. The Democrats banished President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but for a different reason, and in a different way. They feared reminding people of what FDR did the last time US capitalism crashed. Obama and most Democrats are so dependent on contributions and support from business and the rich that they dare not discuss, let alone implement, Roosevelt-type policies. Obama's convention speech passingly referred to FDR's "bold, persistent experimentation." Obama said nothing about what FDR actually did in the last great collapse of capitalism, nothing about his policies' achievements or their shortcomings.
What FDR accomplished needs rescue from banishment by Obama and Democratic leaders. In the deep 1930s Depression, FDR massively assisted average Americans. He created the Social Security and unemployment compensation systems that directly helped tens of millions. His federal jobs programs provided jobs and incomes for additional tens of millions from 1934 to 1941. These "stimulus plans" helped average citizens with financial supports, jobs and paychecks. Those citizens then spent on goods and services that realized profits trickling up for businesses. FDR's trickle-up economics worked: far from perfectly, but better for most Americans than Bush's or Obama's policies.
Leading Democrats today lack the courage even to propose what FDR did. Obama keeps offering incentives for the private sector to hire more, but that policy failed over the last five years to return employment to pre-crisis levels. Obama refuses to expand Social Security as an anti-crisis policy. Instead, Obama and the Democrats pursue chiefly trickle-down policies: bail out banks and select mega-corporations, boost credit and stock markets with infusions of cheap money, and hope something trickles down to lift average peoples' incomes. Despite five years of failed trickle-down economics, Democrats today still fear to consider FDR's alternatives, acting as if they never happened.
Powerfully organized worker demands caused FDR's conversion to trickle-up economics. Stunningly successful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unionization campaigns in the 1930s coordinated with rising memberships, activities, and influences of socialist and communist parties. These forces demanded and obtained direct help for the mass of people, while some among them also advocated basic social change as the best crisis solution. Today, Obama and most Democrats try to repress emerging parallel forces such as Occupy Wall Street. They simultaneously excuse their weak, so-called "moderate" policies by blaming the supposed lack of public support for more progressive policies.
FDR leveraged and channeled organized worker pressures into a grand social compromise, his New Deal. It pleased majorities of the American public and of capitalists and the richest 5 percent. That won him repeated re-election. The New Deal got corporations and the wealthy to finance Washington's provision of help to average Americans in exchange for the CIO, socialists and communists muting demands within their ranks for system change. By warning capitalists and the rich that his New Deal was their only alternative to revolution along Soviet lines, FDR split their ranks and won support from many. He likewise got most in the CIO, socialist and communist parties to marginalize their anti-capitalism in return for a real social safety net. FDR never persuaded all capitalists and all the rich; serious, determined opposition arose. Likewise, dissenting socialists and communists persisted in fighting for basic economic and political changes. However, FDR's New Deal social compromise prevailed.
Corporations and the rich thus paid high taxes and made large loans to finance Social Security, unemployment compensation and federal jobs programs. From the 1940s to the 1960s, corporate income tax rates and tax rates on high-income individuals were much higher than today. FDR took the money his policies needed from corporations and the rich. That's where the money was then, and that's where it is now. But unlike FDR, today's Democrats have no plan or program to get it. So, discussing what FDR actually did got banished from their convention.
Choosing trickle-up economics to cope with capitalism's crash was key to FDR being re-elected four consecutive times. No other president in US history had such success. After FDR's death, Republicans moved to limit presidents to a maximum of two consecutive terms. Like FDR, Obama rode a capitalist crash into power, but Obama risks being ridden out because of failed economic policies. Yet Democrats dare not offend their financial backers to follow FDR's way or even acknowledge its relevance.
The New Deal also had flaws that enabled it to be destroyed. Those capitalists and rich individuals who never welcomed the New Deal were determined to undo it once the war ended in 1945. Because FDR's compromise had preserved the capitalist system, shareholders and the boards of directors they selected kept their positions inside the structure of corporations. There, they retained the incentives and accumulated the power and resources to undermine the New Deal and its major supports. Sometimes these enemies of the New Deal shaped government policies: for example, to eradicate communist and socialist parties (McCarthyism, etcetera) or to weaken unions (Taft-Hartley, etcetera). Sometimes, corporate owners and leaders directly funded foundations, think tanks and organizations molding public opinion. As dissenting socialists and communists had warned about FDR's grand compromise: by leaving enterprises in the hands of major shareholders and their boards of directors, the New Deal had signed its own death warrant.
By the 1980s, corporations and the rich had sufficiently weakened labor and the left to more openly dismantle what remained of the New Deal. Market deregulation, tax cuts, neoliberalism, neo-conservatism and privatization were the new era's processes and watchwords - with Reagan as mascot. Because they developed no effective counterstrategy to affirmatively defend what the business community and the rich assaulted, Democrats lost parts of their electoral base and, thus, strengthened the Republicans. Keeping FDR's achievements away from their 2012 convention marked another step in the Democrats' decline.