perhaps it’s a little late to be looking at this, now, but Amity Shales in today’s Wall Street Journal as, as the byline says “reconsidering our reverence for FDR.” [1]
It’s about bloody time.
The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal. Rather, the question is why it has taken us all so long. Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: “to put people to work.” Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. International factors and monetary errors cannot entirely account for these abysmal showings.
…
The premier line in the standard history is that Herbert Hoover was a right-winger whose laissez-faire politics helped convert the 1929 Crash into the Great Depression. But a review of the new president’s actions reveals him to be a control freak, an interventionist in spite of himself. Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened a global downturn, even though he had long lived in London and understood better than almost anyone the interconnectedness of markets. He also bullied companies into maintaining high wages and keeping employees on their payrolls when they could ill afford to do so. Perhaps worst of all, he berated the stock market as a speculative sinner even though he knew better. For example, Hoover opposed shorting as a practice, a policy that frightened markets at an especially vulnerable time.
So much for blaming the 29 crash of conservatves. Hoover wasn’t. That aside, what FDR did, didn’t help:
A think tank produced a report of 900 pages in 1935 concluding the NRA “on the whole retarded recovery” (that think tank was the Brookings Institution). Some of the great heroes of the period were the Schechter brothers, kosher butchers who fought the NRA all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Their case was not only jurisprudential but also based on common sense--management from above was killing recovery.
(Emph is mine)
A worthy look back, if a little late. But the conclusion, here, is unmistakable; the farther left our leadership leaned, the more power people went wanting.
Sadly, that’s a lesson the Democrats of today, still haven’t learned. They are completely unwilling, and possibly mentally unable to critically examine their own history, and come to a factually correct conclusion.