Reviews for The Great Depression and the New Deal

The average rating for The Great Depression and the New Deal based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-21 00:00:00 Lawrence Mulholland I read Anne Schraff’s book, The Great Depression and the New Deal, published in 1990. The foreword was written by the president’s grandson, Elliott Roosevelt. This short read provided a concise summary of the New Deal programs Roosevelt enacted or tried to enact. Some of the common sense programs included creation of the FDIC designed to protect the savings of a bank depositor. The loss of a person’s life savings was disastrous as the Depression swept through America and elsewhere across the world. Never again. Today, the FDIC insures a bank account up to $250,000. Another good program was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Act, which helped struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure during the Depression. For example, 300,000 federally guaranteed loans were granted to Americans in one year. Not only that but these federally refinanced loans could be paid off “over a longer period at lower monthly payments . . . eventually about a million people kept homes that would otherwise have been taken from them.” The Bad With the Good One of the poorly thought out programs was Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), designed to maintain balance between production and consumption of commodities. Quite simply, the government felt that production had to be controlled. It seems to me that in a time of crisis, this left-leaning U.S. government acted swiftly to control markets instead of focusing on providing direct aid to its citizens. America through to the 1920s and 1930s was predominantly agrarian. Roosevelt and his agricultural team told farmers they could no longer produce as much as they could of anything without justification. A supply-and-demand principle was regulated tightly and aggressively enforced. The overlay AAA “authorized the Department of Agriculture to send county agents in every state out to the farms to check on what was being produced.” Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA), Schraff writes, “would turn out to be as popular with the business sector as an army of ants at a picnic.” The NRA drafted codes for every industry, compelling collective bargaining between labor and industry. However, employers had to negotiate with groups of workers formed into unions, not with individual workers, in order to decide such things as wages and working conditions. The NRA set up maximum work hours beyond which people were not allowed to work. Also, a minimum wage for workers was established. Schraff adds, “Section 7A promised a living wage for labor and a reasonable profit for business. In all, the [NRA] drafted 746 different codes to apply to various industries.” The federal government itself was sponsoring monopolistic price-fixing, something it had earlier forbade private companies from engaging in. Government also told every business how much they could produce of everything. Business people bitterly resented this intrusion into their activities. Advertising was also strictly controlled. Even worse, Schraff notes, “A controversial code forbade industries to make technical advances that might lead to laying off workers. This restriction was ominous for the future of American industry because manufacturers were stuck with the horse-and-buggy methods while other nations modernized and produced the same goods cheaper and more efficiently.” Many Americans believed the NRA was a threat to American freedoms. A businessman in the Northeast complained, “We are being condemned to the gray mediocrity of government-imposed tyranny.” Government codes, Schraff reports, “stifled the very creativity that would help America get out of the depression.” Roosevelt’s NRA was so unpopular that the people said the NRA should be renamed the National Run Around. For example, by the summer of 1934, the American Liberty League was formed. Schraff adds, “Conservative lawyers and even Democratic politicians like Al Smith joined with big business to blast the New Deal. They condemned the growing bureaucracy as well as the ‘Presidential tyranny’ of the New Deal. Roosevelt, they said with growing anger, was taking America too far left.” The Left Can Never Go Left Enough, Fast Enough There were also radical Democrats unhappy with Roosevelt for not taking the party further left, towards outright socialism or even communism. “Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, though he supported Roosevelt in 1932, joined the chorus of voices in 1934 complaining that the president wasn’t doing enough,” Schraff writes. “He favored free homesteads, free education, and cheap food. Long felt that every American should be guaranteed an annual income of $2,000 as part of a ‘Share the Wealth’ program. He wanted one-third of the nation’s money to be divided up among all the people. It was an old populist theory . . . He was assassinated in 1935 by an old enemy.” This messaging by Long, more than 85 years ago, was echoed by left-wing Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and others during the 2020 Democratic primaries. They advocate that almost everything should be free, and almost no one should work for it. In 1934 Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, joined the chorus that further leftist policies should be enacted. He relocated to California, joined the Democratic party and ran for governor on his “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) platform. He believed the government should own all the factories, and people should live on big cooperative farms where all contributed to the common good. He urged that the rich be taxed much more than Roosevelt was taxing them. Another bad idea. Even fascism had its day in the sun during the 1930s. Germany’s Adolph Hitler, for example, “gained the vocal admiration of more than a few Americans.” Members of Wall Street and academia lauded the progress Hitler made in reorganizing the German economy and targeting its Jewish population. Schraff writes, “Lawrence Dennis, a former Wall Street banker from Exeter and Harvard, wrote The Coming of American Fascism, in support of this philosophy. Other troubling programs included Roosevelt’s Revenue Act of 1936, referred to as the wealth tax bill, allowing the government to take as much as 70 percent of incomes [1]; and, packing the Supreme Court to liberalize it by adding six justices to increase the seated jurors from 9 to 15. The latter program went nowhere, and the former program was finally reigned in. Missing from this narrative was the racist views of Roosevelt and how he courted the Ku Klux Klan. But there are other books available to address these socially-charged issues. --------------- [1] Schraff did not address the fact that Roosevelt went even further with tax increases. He later introduced the almost 100 percent marginal tax rate. In 1941, FDR proposed a 99.5 percent tax rate on anyone earning over $100,000 a year. In 1942, he went further, signing an executive order taxing all personal income over $25,000 (which is $300,000 in 2018 money) at 100 percent. Even his Democratic Congress balked and lowered the top rate to 90 percent, though it crept up to a high of 94 percent during World War II.” Roosevelt, who owned a yacht, insisted that Americans who earned enough to live comfortably, as he defined it, should not be allowed to keep any more income beyond such an arbitrary level. As another writer observed, “This amounts to nothing less than serfdom and destroys the incentive to work, a direct parallel to unionism where you are ‘encouraged’ to perform at the level of bare minimum.”

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-28 00:00:00 Seong Kang I picked this one out of my pile one Saturday for a quick read. It is short and to the point. It paints a bit too rosey a picture of FDR, however to come across as unbiased. After reading this, you would think he was the next Messiah. He was, however, the right man for the times.