I have been hoping for years to find a contemporary conservative account of Roosevelt and the New Deal. All we learned in school was that there were reactionary revanchists led by that know-nothing McCormick at the Chicago Tribune who tried to stop the flow of history but were unsuccessful.
That letter and a few other things that I have seen lead me to believe that there is much we can learn from the resistance in the 1930s, including perhaps discovering why they were unsuccessful.
Thank you for posting this letter. It is very interesting.
It was recommended right here on Free Republic a few months ago.
If you FReepmail me your address, I will pass along my copy.
I am reading the 3 volume set entitled The Age of Roosevelt written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Dr. Schlesinger is a liberal in every sense of the word, so you have to take some of the pontificating in the direction of FDR with a grain of salt. With that having been said, He is a very good historian. This book has opened my eyes to many things that happened then and are happening now. For instance, the allusion to the killing of millions of pigs and the destruction of crops was a real effort by FDR’s AG department to increase food and crop prices. You can see as you read this book all the cockamamie ideas that were spawned in the New Deal era.
The other thing I have realized is that the Obama era cannot be likened to the New Deal era. It is most likely similar to the Hoover era. Why you ask? Because Hoover ignored the high jobless rate and the low productivity of the depression and its effect on the people. In essence He ignored what the people of this country were concerned about, just as Obama is doing now.