Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism by Lawrence Reed

Author:Lawrence Reed [Reed, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

#32

“FDR WAS ELECTED IN 1932 ON A PROGRESSIVE PLATFORM TO PLAN THE ECONOMY”

BY LAWRENCE W. REED

HARRY TRUMAN ONCE SAID, “THE ONLY THING NEW IN THE WORLD IS THE HISTORY you don’t know.” That observation applies especially well to what tens of millions of Americans have been taught about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man under whom Truman served as vice president for about a month.

Recent scholarship (including a highly acclaimed book, New Deal or Raw Deal, by Young America’s Foundation’s speaker and a FEE senior historian Burton Folsom) is thankfully disabusing Americans of the once-popular myth that FDR saved us from the Great Depression.

Another example is a 2004 article by two UCLA economists—Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian—in the important mainstream Journal of Political Economy. They observed that Franklin Roosevelt extended the Great Depression by seven long years. “The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery,” the authors show, “but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

In a commentary on Cole and Ohanian’s research (“The New Deal Debunked (again),” available on Mises.org), Loyola University economist Thomas DiLorenzo pointed out that six years after FDR took office, unemployment was almost six times the pre-Depression level. Per capita GDP, personal consumption expenditures, and net private investment were all lower in 1939 than they were in 1929.

“The fact that it has taken ‘mainstream’ neoclassical economists so long to recognize [that FDR’s policies exacerbated the disaster],” notes DiLorenzo, “is truly astounding,” but still “better late than never.”

A considerable degree of central planning in Washington is certainly what Franklin Roosevelt delivered, but it was not what he promised when he was first elected in 1932. My own essay on this period, “Great Myths of the Great Depression” found on FEE.org) provides many details, based on the very platform and promises on which FDR ran. But until recently, I was unaware of a long-forgotten book that makes the case as well as any.

Hell Bent for Election was written by James P. Warburg, a banker who witnessed the 1932 election and the first two years of Roosevelt’s first term from the inside. Warburg, the son of prominent financier and Federal Reserve cofounder Paul Warburg, was no less than a high-level financial adviser to FDR himself. Disillusioned with the President, he left the administration in 1934 and wrote his book a year later.

Warburg voted for the man who said this on March 2, 1930, as Governor of New York:

The doctrine of regulation and legislation by “master minds,” in whose judgment and will all the people may gladly and quietly acquiesce, has been too glaringly apparent at Washington during these last ten years. Were it possible to find “master minds” so unselfish, so willing to decide unhesitatingly against their own personal interests or private prejudices, men almost godlike in their ability to hold the scales of justice with an even hand, such a government might be to the interests of the country; but there are none such on our political horizon, and we cannot expect a complete reversal of all the teachings of history.

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