New Deals

By Tom Lamia

Soon after he was elected president in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) unveiled his New Deal program to save the nation from the Great Depression. The Wall Street stock and bond markets had collapsed in the 1929 crash. Bank failures, unemployment, drought and crop failures had destroyed traditional sources of capital. To fund a recovery, President Herbert Hoover, who preceded FDR, looked to private capital, volunteerism, state projects and American resolve to put matters right. Hoover thought that using federal money to stimulate the economy would lead to socialism, a radical departure from American traditions.

By 1932 it was clear that Hoover’s policies had failed. Roosevelt was elected in November and took office four months later. He charged out of the gate with a program of unparalleled legislation that became known as the New Deal. His long-time associate, New York State Industrial Commissioner Frances Perkins, had developed a program of labor initiatives to help workers. Perkins agreed to be FDR’s labor secretary on the condition that her program be adopted. The list included Social Security and federal minimum wage laws among other pioneering legislation. That list became FDR’s New Deal. Perkins was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet and did so throughout FDR’s four elected terms in office from 1933 to 1945.

The New Deal was revolutionary, creating an array of federal programs that would put Americans back to work and federalize activities from agriculture to zoology. Using the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause Congress invoked federal jurisdiction over a vast array of American life. Not everyone was happy about that. In 1938 cases seeking to restrict the federal government from asserting its power reached a Supreme Court that had six Republican appointees ─ a majority ─ and most were resistant to the New Deal. There were wins and losses. In 1937 FDR tried “packing” the Court to add justices favorable to his New Deal. By January 1938 retirements had created two vacancies that were filled by Roosevelt nominees ending the need for hardball tactics.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was an aggressive form of governance that was radical and transforming. It is still controversial. The sum of its effects is now viewed as having saved lives, built institutions and a middle class and made rural life decent, if not comfortable, and prevented starvation and revolution.

The United States was not alone in suffering the disaster of falling prices, unemployment and lost investment. As Roosevelt’s New Deal was pulling America up by its bootstraps, Hitler, Stalin and Tojo were following different, authoritarian paths to recovery in their parts of the world. They, too, launched their own New Deals. For Russia: communism. For Germany: National Socialism. For Italy: Mussolini’s fascism. For Japan: absolute monarchy under a divine emperor.

Any New Deal carries the immediate allure of change. Authoritarian political leadership can exploit this allure by conquest (adding territory, people and assets) or by suppression (property appropriation, corruption, confiscatory taxation). Both their own people and foreigners can be sources of profit. But authoritarian control contains the seeds of its own demise. The exploited will, in time, organize and confront their oppressors and gain their freedom.

In the worldwide economic and political collapse of the 1930s, authoritarian governments directed their attentions to geographical conquest. For every annexation of land and peoples there was a price. Resources, physical and human, were appropriated to serve the invaders. Slave labor was implemented in Germany and elsewhere to maintain or increase production. All that ended in 1945 with the defeat of the authoritarian powers, who had their inefficient, persecution-centered authoritarian political systems to blame for their defeat.

In 1945 in San Francisco, the U.N. Charter was signed by 51 countries. In October the U.N. came into existence. This, too, was a New Deal ─ one, perhaps, without precedent in its ambition, but one that falls short of world government. It is not authoritarian; it is too dispersed and ethnically amorphous for that. Its lack of a cockpit from which to reliably steer its course makes it beyond the control of any one nation or group. The United States has led world economic recovery since 1945: Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, UNRRA (enabling WWII displaced persons to return home or find new ones). Its record of maintaining peace and security for itself and its allies reflects its moral and military strength: NATO, SEATO, ANZUS, bilateral mutual defense treaties, the Western Hemisphere Rio Treaty, and more.

But now our country has embarked on an unprecedented, harmful and immoral New Deal. We have elected a president whose charter is Project 2025, a program for authoritarian government. This New Deal would sublimate our rule of law, our election processes and our system of justice into a corrupt leadership that would reject our history and expose us to a hostile world of enemies and scorned allies. Trump may be immune from prosecution for now, but not immune from a legacy of opprobrium and disgrace. The Constitution he swore to preserve, protect and defend may be unintelligible or antithetical to him but ignorance provides no license for him to violate his oath. He says he knows nothing about Project 2025. He often claims ignorance of facts as a shield against responsibility. These claims are not credible. He works hard to avoid evidence of being informed. Does he know that ignorance of the law is no excuse? His New Deal is authoritarian and a license for illegality. The dictators of the1930s are gone, but there are present day models that Trump praises and seeks to emulate. His model would be a fiefdom: England before Magna Carta. We did not vote for this. It is tyranny and it is evil.