In anticipation of Barack Obama’s inauguration next week Lance Mannion has posted a spirited defense of the New Deal focusing on Roosevelt’s first inaugural address which I think deserves to be read in full. Here’s the kernel of his piece:
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.
I agree with Lance that the New Deal as it’s come down to us was essential. However, I also think we should recall that what’s come to us is only a fraction of the measures that made up the original programs that comprised the New Deal. Those included the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the provisions of the Economy Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the National Planning Board, the National Recovery Administration, and literally dozens of others, large and small.
I don’t think that what we need now is a new New Deal but a completely new balance. I want to retain the provisions of the New Deal’s compact that continue to work or can be made to continue to work, which includes Social Security. I think that we’re in desperate need of something like the Economy Act although I despair of anything resembling it being enacted. For some reason or other I don’t think that most folks who admire the New Deal are thinking of it.
The day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural speech the total percentage of our gross domestic product that was devoted to government in all forms was roughly 13%. Now it’s upwards of 30%. That’s why I think of a new balance. We’re not going to devote an additional 15% of GDP to government spending. That would be ruinous, confiscatory. We need to revise how we’re spending what we’re spending, dropping programs whose usefulness has ended and reforming programs that continue to be useful so that they’re leaner and more efficient. Our government teeters between institutions of the Federalist period and those of the Machine Age while the rest of the country is post-industrial.
So many gored oxes, so little time.
Not being familiar with the Economy Act, I googled. Maybe some of your readers are unfamiliar as well. I assume this is the aspect of the Economy Act you like:
“The Act also tried to balance the federal budget by cutting the salaries of government employees and reducing pensions to veterans by as much as 15 percent, and by cutting the budgets of government departments by 25 percent. Nearly a billion dollars was saved by these measures.”
Wikipedia
It’s certainly something that doesn’t figure particularly prominently in the New Deal’s mythology.
Definitely – especially ideas like the policy via the National Industrial Recovery Act among others to create “cartels” of American industries made up of labor and industry management. Just look up some of the major Supreme Court decisions of that period. I don’t know what was (and is) worse – that or the AAA laws that basically created the modern abomination of agricultural subsidies and things like price floors and so forth.
It does no insult to the good programs of the New Deal (like Social Security, and the WPA – at least it kept people in work while keeping them from starvation) to point out that a lot of mistakes were made.