The Spoils of War by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

Author:Bruce Bueno De Mesquita
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610396646
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

The First Roosevelt: 1932–1940

BEFORE CONSIDERING OUR MAIN THEME—FDR’S VANITY AND URGE FOR power at the expense of decisive leadership—we pause to set the stage by recalling the Roosevelt who led from 1933 until the 1940 election. That Roosevelt came to office with the Depression in full swing. His hands were certainly full. He was confronted with no less than having to find a way to utterly reconstruct the American economy, the national standard of living, and the American way of life. He faced an uphill battle and he knew it. One of the great strengths he brought to his new job was his indomitable commitment to find a way through the morass and rescue the American people. Roosevelt certainly understood that he was not an economist; he was not a successful entrepreneur; he was not the common working man—the forgotten man—or a homemaker wondering where the children’s next meal would come from; he was not a philosopher; and he was not a magician. He was a politician with the practical bent of a success-oriented competitor for high office. He had no illusion that he knew the solution to the country’s economic woes. Nor did he have any illusion that economists or anyone else had squarely worked out the logic of macroeconomics and, therefore, knew how to fix the terribly broken economy.

What he knew or, at least, what he believed he knew, was that a solution waited to be discovered and, further, that he knew the means to discover it. As he said in his speech at Oglethorpe University in May 1932, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”5 And try something, and then something else, is just what he did. He had no roadmap to lead the way to economic recovery, but neither did he fear to go down untrodden paths, bringing the people along with him. He knew no fear. He did not retreat from his vision when others accused him of socialism or dictatorship. Rather, he pressed forward boldly, looking for a way to make true his declaration that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Roosevelt inspirationally argued that it was prudent to roll the dice, run social experiments, and see what might salvage the people of the United States. He earned enormous popularity—and not a little hostility—for his frank willingness to gamble on new solutions. His New Deal inspired many by the boldness of its vision and its contents. Departing from the laissez-faire economics that had been the engine of investment, entrepreneurship, and enormous economic growth in America’s first century and a half, Roosevelt recast the country’s predominant economic philosophy as a philosophy that had produced great inequalities in opportunity and in outcomes. In redirecting economic thought and redefining social goals, Roosevelt made himself into the beloved champion of the ordinary, forgotten American rather than the extraordinary American.

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