To Quote Teddy Roosevelt, "Bully! Bully!"
Back in the mid 1950's, Westbrook Peglar, Hearst's fair haired Op/Ed
writer, continued to trash FDR, dead for a dozen years, and even
carried the attack forward to Eleanor Roosevelt.
Hearst, like so many "self-made" millionaires of the day, was so full
of himself that he never did figure out that his well being was
directly tied to FDR's New Deal.
When FDR first ran in 1932, my folks were just courting. Married in
April of 1933, they lived in what today would be considered to be
Shacks. A single dangling light bulb, a wood stove, a water pump just
outside the kitchen door, and a path to the Out House. After four
years of President Herbert Hoover, they grabbed onto the New Deal as
if it were the last life boat on the Titanic.
Carl Jarvis, just one of the Depression Babies.
On 4/19/19, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2019/04/19/the-new-deal-roosevelts-answer-to-radicalism/
The New Deal: Roosevelt’s answer to ‘radicalism’
/ 8 hours ago
April 2019 Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By DAVID RIEHLE
Four score and seven years ago … Franklin Roosevelt brought forth in
this country a New Deal. Not a Square Deal (Teddy Roosevelt) or a Fair
Deal (Truman) but a NEW DEAL. New York Governor Roosevelt was nominated
for president at the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago on
July 2, 1932. In his acceptance speech he said, “I pledge you and I
pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.”*
FDR’s Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, revealed that when Roosevelt
took office in March 1933, “the New Deal was not a plan with form or
content. It was a happy phrase he had coined during the campaign and its
value was psychological. It made people feel better.”
Fundamentally, the New Deal was a series of recovery programs designed
as aids to businesses and banks. Congress passed and Roosevelt signed
during his first 100 days in office the First New Deal Program (1933–5),
including an Emergency Banking Act (March 1933), an Economy Act (March
1933), and the establishment of a Federal Emergency Relief
Administration (March 1933), to be followed in June by the creation of a
National Recovery Administration.
Participation in the NRA was merely voluntary, and participating
businesses were supposed to put the NRA’s symbol, the Blue Eagle, in
their windows. The Wobblies called it “The Blue Vulture.” At the same
time, there was a program of public works legislation, the WPA. Most
significant and enduring for workers are three measures:
1) The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, which gives unions
whatever legal status they have in this country.
2) The Social Security Act, passed in 1935, was a watered down version
of Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party Representative Ernest Lundeen’s bill
proposing a comprehensive social insurance system “for all workers,
including all wage earners, all salaried workers, farmers, professional
workers and the self-employed.” The bill provided for compensation equal
to average earnings for wages lost due to layoffs, injuries, illnesses,
maternity, and old age. Mothers of children under 18 also would receive
allowances if they lacked male support.
The Lundeen Bill was reported out of the House Labor Committee in 1935,
but Congress failed to enact it. Instead, the Congress passed and
President Roosevelt signed the restrictive and discriminatory Social
Security Act, which excluded almost all African American workers—i.e.,
agricultural laborers, as in the cotton fields—and (mostly African
American) female domestic workers.
3) The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, which required overtime
pay after 40 hours at the time and one half rate, outlawed most child
labor and established a national minimum wage. Most embedded in the
memory of the working class, perhaps, is the public works program known
as the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. I happen to remember that
Mad magazine, reviewing FDR’s first term in office, with its alphabet
soup of new federal agencies and programs, (NIRA, AAA, FCA, FSA, CCC,
TVA, WPA, CCC, FHA FTC) said “Roosevelt’s first term was an initial
success.” It’s probably needless to say that all three of these
threshold standards are under relentless attack and have been for the
last 40 years or so.
In July 1932, Roosevelt was speaking as unemployment, which had surged
up from around 4% after the October 1929 stock market crash, was now,
nearly three years into the Depression, approaching 25% and still
rising. There was virtually no social safety net, and people were
obviously desperate.
Men Waiting Outside Al Capone Soup Kitchen
Despite the New Deal, high unemployment persisted during the Roosevelt
administration until the beginning of World War II.
There had been depressions before in American history, but FDR assured
the delegates that “the great social phenomenon of this depression,
unlike others before it, is that it has produced but a few of the
disorderly manifestations that too often attend upon such times.
“Wild radicalism has made few converts, and the greatest tribute that I
can pay to my countrymen is that in these days of crushing want there
persists an orderly and hopeful spirit on the part of the millions of
our people who have suffered so much. To fail to offer them a new chance
is not only to betray their hopes but to misunderstand their patience.”
Of course, this was in July 1932. Their patience wore thin pretty
quickly. “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite
disaster,” Roosevelt said. “Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is
a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a
workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the
party with clean hands.”
Why did FDR have the danger of “wild radicalism” on his mind? This was
not just an abstract consideration, or even simply a recollection of the
social turmoil during the depressions of the late 19th century.
Roosevelt, in fact, had every reason to be especially aware of and
sensitive to “wild radicalism.”
FDR had been involved in New York and national politics for decades. At
the time of his nomination for president he had been serving as governor
of New York for the previous four years, and he had earlier been a
member of the New York state legislature. New York, and New York City in
particular, was the center of working-class radicalism in the United
States, with tens of thousands of workers who supported left-wing
parties and made up the membership of militant unions, particularly in
the garment industry. In 1920, five socialists whom workers in New York
City had elected to the state legislature were denied their seats by the
Democratic/Republican majority on the grounds that they were “elected on
a platform that is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the
state of New York and the United States.”
By 1938, when FDR was serving his second term, “wild radicalism” had
made enough converts to produce a wave of mass strikes in 1934, the
formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations by the seceding
unions from the American Federation of Labor, and the semi-revolutionary
occupation in late 1936 of the giant General Motors plant in Flint
Michigan, led by radical autoworkers.
As socialist journalist Art Preis wrote in “Labor’s Giant Step,” his
history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), “The picture
of Roosevelt as a ‘friend of labor’ giving the people concessions out of
the tenderness of his heart—this portrait painted by both the
conservative trade union officialdom and the Stalinists—is completely
false. Roosevelt was a clever, adroit politician who carefully gauged
popular sentiment. His slightest concession to the workers was given
grudgingly out of fear of the masses and to prevent their moving left.
“He voiced this in his 1932 acceptance speech, saying that ‘a resentment
against the failure of Republican leadership … the failure of Republican
leaders to solve our troubles may degenerate into unreasoning
radicalism. … To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite
disaster.’”
Preis quotes Raymond Moley, one of Roosevelt’s closest associates of the
early “New Deal,” who wrote in his book, “After Seven Years”: “It cannot
be emphasized too strongly that the policies which vanquished the bank
crisis were thoroughly conservative policies. If ever there was a moment
when things hung in a balance, it was on March 5, 1933—when unorthodoxy
would have drained the last remaining strength of the capitalist system.
Capitalism was saved in eight days.”
And he cites Ferdinand Lundberg, in “America’s 60 Families,” the classic
study of the big capitalists who run this country, who concluded that
the New Deal was neither “revolutionary nor radical; in reality it was
‘conservative.’ He wrote that ‘its mild tentative reformist coloration’
was a concession in the face of widespread unrest.”
The original draft of NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Administration)
said nothing about collective bargaining rights. Long afterwards, Miss
Perkins admitted that Section 7(a) was written into the bill only after
protests by William Green (then president of the American Federation of
Labor). She comments: “Written in general terms, 7(a) was a problem in
semantics. It was a set of words to suit labor leaders, William Green in
particular.”
Of course, everyone knows that FDR came from the upper class, but does
anybody really know where the family got its wealth? It wasn’t from
operating a farm in upstate New York (FDR identified himself on the
census as a “farmer.”) Franklin Roosevelt was a member of the oldest
section of the American ruling class, what is sometimes called the
“Knickerbocker Aristocracy.” This group’s original fortunes derived from
vast land grants along the Hudson River from the Dutch West Indies
Company in the 17th century. Eventually the Roosevelt family fortunes
came to rest on banking, railroads, and shipping. FDR’s grandfather,
Warren Delano II, made a fortune in the highly profitable China opium
trade.
It is interesting to note that no less than five members of the extended
Roosevelt clan served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy: Theodore
Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. who served from
1921 through 1924 under Harding and Coolidge, Theodore Douglas Robinson
(the son of Corinne Roosevelt) who served from 1924 through 1929 under
Coolidge, and finally Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, a descendant of Robert
Fulton’s old friend “Steamboat Nicholas” Roosevelt, who served from 1933
through 1936 under FDR.
FDR, who received presidential compensation of $75,000 annually, also
was given a $75,000 yearly allowance by his mother, Sara Delano
Roosevelt, while he was in the White House. If Roosevelt knew anything
about poor people, it was that God must have loved them, because he made
so many of them.
Now: The Green New Deal
The first problem in calling for a Green New Deal is that it
misrepresents the original, which was, if anything, miserly and
conservative. It happened to coincide with the most massive labor
uprising in U.S. history, but it didn’t create it. At this point in
time, it is doubtful if many people under 60 years old except students
of history and Democratic Party politicians have ever heard of the “New
Deal.” And trying to rally people around a false version of history has
obvious complications, to say the least.
The “Green New Deal” that we’re hearing about now is a response to an
October 2018 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which found that in order to avoid catastrophic
consequences worldwide, the global temperature must be prevented from
increasing by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 12 years. To
reach this goal, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be 45 percent
below 2010 levels by 2030 and be net zero by 2050.
This will require, they say, in a very limited time frame,
“extraordinary transitions in transportation; in energy, land, and
building infrastructure; and in industrial systems.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has achieved instant
celebrity as an electoral phenom, at least presents the GND proposition
in more sweeping terms. She calls the Green New Deal proposed in Obama’s
2008 platform a “half measure” that “will not work.” She says, “The
Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the
mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. It will
require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of
millions of high-wage jobs. We must again invest in the development,
manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy but this time
green energy.”
In other words, if this statement is to be taken seriously, the model is
not FDR’s “New Deal,” but an all-out and continuing mobilization of
national (and international) resources of the scale and intensity of
World War II, but directed at saving the ecosystem, and not destroying
it in the name of “democracy.”
The Marshall Plan, it should be noted, was a forthright attempt, largely
successful, to resuscitate capitalist Western Europe and inaugurate the
Cold War, notably with the help of Nazi war criminals in West Germany.
This at least has the merit of posing or strongly implying that the
challenge to humanity demands an unprecedented social, economic and
political effort. However, it is historically out of context. The
economic, military, and human mobilizations by the United States during
World War II were directed towards achieving maximum human and material
destruction, the only goal around which the ruling class could coalesce
effectively. The greatest technical accomplishment was at the same time
the most sinister—the atom bomb—used to immediately extinguish the lives
of more than 200,000 non-combatant human beings in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.
All these things were carried out with the full force and credit of the
U.S. ruling class, and primarily through executive fiat by FDR. (Nuclear
war against Japan was authorized by Harry Truman after FDR’s death in
April 1945.)
But how is this green transformation to be accomplished? Several
socialist organizations have explored this question.
For example, Socialist Alternative, the newspaper of the organization of
the same name, writes (Dec. 18, 2018), “We have seen young people
propelled into action on this issue, as shown by the occupations of
Nancy Pelosi’s office in November demanding a ‘Green New Deal,’ and it
is likely this movement for climate justice will develop further in the
coming year. We need a massive green infrastructure program to create
millions of good paying jobs transitioning the U.S. away from fossil
fuels and to renewable energy!”
The goals enunciated are compelling, but vague. There is little sense
here of the utter urgency of taking on the unpostponable crisis of
climate change. While Socialist Alternative scores what it calls the
“corporate Democrats,” like Pelosi, it champions the Democratic Party’s
main proponent of the Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This
reinforces the delusion that any progress can be achieved by people of
good will, through the medium of the capitalist Democratic Party, not to
say the Congress of the United States.
Directing this movement into the Democratic Party, and the U.S.
Congress, will suffocate it: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate”
(”Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”).
Even FDR, with all the unilateral power of the Oval Office and the
momentum of a landslide victory, was repeatedly stymied by the Supreme
Court and reactionary inertia and sabotage of Congress. And all he was
trying to do was save capitalism.
It is absolutely true that the emerging crisis cannot be seriously and
effectively addressed without the elimination of fossil fuels. But the
extraction and use of fossil fuels is not even slowing down; pipelines,
crude oil trains, supertankers—it’s too fabulously profitable and it has
been so for over a century. This is the most arrogant and richest class
in the history of the world—and the most destructive. They will not give
this up; they are incapable of it. They want more. What are they doing
in Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil?
Leon Trotsky explained, in his introduction to “The History of the
Russian Revolution,” what makes a revolution possible: “The most
indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct intervention of the
masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it
monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history
is made by specialists in that line of business—kings, ministers,
bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments
when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break
over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside
their traditional representatives, and create by their own intervention
the initial groundwork for a new regime….
“The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the
forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their
own destiny.”
It’s no accident that the majority of young people express a preference
for socialism over capitalism. They don’t know much about the theory of
surplus value or dialectical materialism, but they sense that capitalism
is dog-eat-dog and that socialism holds out the promise of a society of
peace and human solidarity, and a genuinely green planet.
And they are beginning to move into the streets to demand change. We’ve
recently seen demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of young
people—people under 18—in many countries. This is the beginning. This is
the vanguard that doesn’t want to compromise with self-serving
politicians, that demands action now. These are the youthful legions
that are on the threshold of becoming the vanguard of the working class
of the world—a movement in the streets that can begin to express
political independence and can educate and inspire others.
It is clear from the testimony of history that there is no other social
force that can push aside, overthrow, and repress the architects of the
overwhelming disaster facing the human race other than the masses, the
workers, the farmers, the wretched of the earth. Can it be done in time?
That is, of course, impossible to say. But we do know that when a window
opens up, when an opening is created by a social and human crisis of
unprecedented depth and intensity, the historic possibility is there.
If a crucial minority has been assembled that is prepared to act
decisively to “create by their own intervention the initial groundwork
for a new regime,” it can be done. And all history shows there is no
other way.
*FDR’s distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had introduced the “Square
Deal: “…if there is one thing that I do desire to stand for it is for a
square deal, for an attitude of kindly justice as between man and man,
without regard to what any man’s creed or birthplace or social position
may be, so long as, in his life and in his work, he shows the qualities
that entitle him to the respect of his fellows.”
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April 19, 2019 in Economy, Environment, Marxist Theory & History.
Related posts
The Real Deal on the ‘New Deal’
Challenges posed by the ‘Green New Deal’
Democrats fail symbolic vote on Green New Deal
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“ What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without
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― Christopher Hitchens,