Capitalism in America by Alan Greenspan & Adrian Wooldridge

Author:Alan Greenspan & Adrian Wooldridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Uncertainty rules the tax situation, the Labor situation, the monetary situation, and practically every legal condition under which industry must operate. Are taxes to go higher, lower or stay where they are? We don’t know. Is labor to be union or non-union? . . . Are we to have inflation or deflation, more government spending or less? . . . Are new restrictions to be placed on capital, new limits on profits? . . . It is impossible to even guess at the answers.45

FDR made uncertainty worse by attacking businesspeople as a class, and worse still by attacking some leading businesspeople as individuals. During the 1930s, the IRS showed a worrying habit of carrying out audits of anti-Roosevelt business leaders such as Andrew Mellon, scion of the banking dynasty and Hoover’s treasury secretary. It turned out that FDR’s “first-class personality” contained a malicious and indeed vindictive streak. Such overt class warfare made businesspeople nervous as well as angry: why invest if you were going to be demonized as a speculator and perhaps singled out by the IRS? Even Roosevelt’s own side worried that his antibusiness vituperations were proving counterproductive. Raymond Moley reflected that he was “stunned by the violence, the bombast, the naked demagoguery” of Roosevelt’s Madison Square Garden speech. “I began to wonder whether he wasn’t beginning to feel that the proof of a measure’s merit was the extent to which it offended the business community.”46 Roy Howard, a sympathetic reporter, warned FDR that “there can be no real recovery until the fears of business have been allayed.”47 Adolf Berle warned that “you could not have a government perpetually at war with its economic machinery.” He noted that business was demoralized for good reason: “Practically no business group in the country has escaped investigation or other attack in the last five years. . . . The result has been shattered morale. . . . It is therefore necessary to make that group pull itself together.”48

If FDR’s relationship with business was conflicted at best and hostile at worst, his relationship with labor was almost fawning—Roosevelt the patrician was a friend of the workingman and an ally of the workingman’s organizations, particularly trade unions. Labor was an important part of FDR’s New Deal army: trade unionists came out in large numbers in both 1932 and 1936, not just to vote for him but also to burn shoe leather for him. The National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, of 1935 placed tight limits on what firms could do against unions, but few limits on what unions could do against firms: unions had the right to organize while employers had an obligation to deal with “duly recognized union representatives.” The act also imposed a policy of “equal pay for equal work,” which made it all but impossible for companies to pay people according to their seniority, let alone their individual merit.49

The unions immediately capitalized on the combination of constitutional power and economic recovery to press home their advantage, mounting successful membership drives and shifting the locus of popular protest from hunger marches to trade union halls.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.