Republicans are rewriting history. FDR, who won 4 terms, has been in wild acclaim for decades. And now Republicans insist FDR was a failure. George Will says:
Before we go into a New Deal can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal did not work?
Similar statements were made by Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Jiuliani, Mark Sanford, Jon Kyl, Mike Pence and other Republican luminaries. These Republicans get their ideas that the New Deal was ineffective in solving the Great Depression from a book by Amity Shlaes called The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. As the title suggests, it is a rewrite of history. It presents an extremely biased view. One example: according to Jonathan Chait in the New Republic, Shlaes played around with unemployment figures:
Meanwhile, as the historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, her unemployment figures exclude those employed by the Works Progress Administration and other workrelief agencies. Shlaes has explained in an op-ed piece that she did this because "to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects." So, if you worked twelve hours per day in a coal mine hoping not to contract black lung or suffer an injury that would render you useless, you were employed. But if you constructed the Lincoln Tunnel, you had an anxiety-inducing make-work job.
When I read this it hit a nerve. My family lived through the Great Depression in a dilapidated tenement house with no heat. We just barely had enough to eat. My father could not find work. We were wondering how we would get along. Then Roosevelt established the Public Works Administration (PWA) and my father got a job. It wasn't a wonderful job and he did not like it very much - he was part of an army shoveling snow. But it kept our family of 7 - 2 parents, 4 kids and a grandma - a step away from starvation.
Some time later I pounded the pavements daily in search of a job. I found nothing because there was nothing available. So I applied to the National Youth Administration (NYA), another part of FDR's stimulus program, and I landed a job researching ship manifests in Ellis Island to determine whether people arrived in the U.S. illegally. Surprisingly, I enjoyed this job. It built my confidence to the point where I decided I could go to college (CCNY) at night and work in the daytime.
Don't tell me and the many other poor people who were helped by FDR's programs that FDR's stimulus program did not work. It lifted many out of poverty and got the economy going again. The number of unemployed decreased. True, the unemployment figures did not decrease fast enough because, in 1936, FDR weakened and introduced tax cuts, which halted the economic improvement.
Republicans insist that we did not completely get out of the Great Depression until after we entered World War II. Why did the economy improve so much then? Because of war spending.
Spending, not tax cuts, are the way to extricate ourselves from the economic misery we are in. FDR proved it and Obama is correct in following his example.
Roosevelt's New Deal changed not only our economy, but the nation. President Barack Obama is going abroad and asking other nations to spend as well. Obama is delivering an International New Deal that will resound to America's benefit for decades to come.
Comment here.
