Can’t help with the copyright status.
All other arguments aside–in case you didn’t notice, the Depression had already been going for over three years when FDR was inaugurated.
As, ahem, yours truly pointed out in my first post to this thread above.
I’m nothing if not modest.
Also, re the gold standard, which was mentioned I believe in the Independent article, that had already been killed worldwide (IMO by WWI rather than because of it being a “barbarous relic”, but that’s another thread entirely) by the time FDR got around to devaluing the dollar and prohibiting the ownership of bullion.
Well any time Mircrosoft introduces a major new program it changes the computer landscape. Royal Dutch Shell’s business decisions are really important in the petroleum field. Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill Corp. pretty much run the US market in grains and some other commodities.
You don’t have much control over the government but you don’t have any control over Mircosoft. Unless you think that not using Windows will bring them to heel.
The varigated, well distributed, and free market system of small, independent producers and laborers described by Adam Smith didn’t exist then, as Smith pointed out in talking about the dangers posed by associations of producers, and doesn’t exist now. It is so “ivory tower” that it makes the ideas of a professor of “new age” philosophy look down-to-earth.
No, conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression was caused by a hideous triple blunder during the Hoover administration–raising income taxes, raising tariffs, and pursuing a restrictive monetary policy during what should have been an ordinary recession. Blame for the first two must be apportioned between Hoover and Congress, and blame for the third belonged to the bungling and largely leaderless Federal Reserve. None of these three policies should be confused with laissez-faire capitalism.
Why don’t we ask people who actually lived through FDR’s programs what they thought of them? That’s who they were aimed at…not a generation or two later.
Does anyone have parents or grandparents that lived during the era? Ask them what they thought of getting a bit of money when there were no jobs…(unemployment benefits). Ask them what a small job (ccc, wpa) was worth to them.
FDR had no idea he was passing on government programs. He was trying to help the common man. Must have worked, he was elected four times.
But…
Don’t get me started on him and Pearl Harbor.
David Simmons,
We are discussing here whether the blame for a government program is more properly assigned primarily to the ones who initiated it, or whether it is equally shared with subsequent legislatures and presidents who failed to repeal it. Your recent post has no apparent connection to this issue.
It appeared to me that your post was headed toward the “Governmental action is bad because it sets the rules whereas private action doesn’t” angle. My only point was that in this day of huge, international financial conglomerates that no longer applies because such combinations also “make the rules.” Sorry if I misread you.
My father and mother both lived then…dad was born in 1913 and mom in 1916. Both despise FDR.
Dad grew up in central West Virginia and worked throughout the Depression, either for the railroad or the gas company - 10 hours a day, 10 cents an hour.
As he put it, “FDR is the one who made it OK to be a bum.”
The posters who credit FDR with lifting the national mood are missing the point. FDR was the president, not an entertainer. It was his job to get the nations economy back on track, to help people out of poverty, not help people feel better about being poor. He failed utterly at his job.
the TVA still exists? Seems to me that an agency that has accomplished most of its chartered goalsought to be on the chopping block. However, the TVA (with its thousands of weel-paid workers) still hums along…it’sprobably be around for a second century!
So it was the President’s job to manage the national economy? I disagree. The stock market crash on top of the farm depression of the 20’s followed by the general depression of the early 30’s simply knocked the wind completely out of people’s sails. Stirring things up, trying things to show people that someone was trying to help could enable people to get over the funk and maybe start things going again.
I don’t think Roosevelt knew what to do, economically, or had any cure-all solution to the depression. But neither did anyone else. Even getting people to arguing about his programs might stimulate some new thinking. Just sitting there, counting on private enterprise, with volunteerism to aid the unemployed, a la Hoover, wasn’t working either.
My only real point is that by stirring things up he converted what could have been a rather violent revolution into a peaceful one.