.
Posted on 04/05/2008 9:07:13 AM PDT by OESY
The Great Depression... hit in waves, making everyone feel helpless. First came the crash of the stock market, then the failure of the local banks, then the failure of larger ones, then joblessness, and more joblessness, and hunger. By the time the country elected Franklin Roosevelt on his New Deal platform in 1932, one in four was unemployed.... Overly efficient factories, [economists] said, were producing too many goods for a market that could not keep up. Factories therefore had to lay off workers. It all amounted to "vicious industrial Darwinism," as Nick Taylor terms it in "American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work" (Bantam, 640 pages, $27)....
Roosevelt's response was almost biblical: "Let them build." His New Dealers jumped in with a number of what we would today call infrastructure projects, designed to improve the quality of life generally, spur demand, and occupy the idle. The most dramatic of these was the Tennessee Valley Authority, a program so vast it changed an entire region. Nominally the TVA was about flood control, job creation and the generation of hydropower....
Harry Hopkins, a former social worker, headed the WPA....
Lilienthal's ally Roosevelt joined hands with progressives to pass the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, a law that so vastly limited private utilities that it became known as the "death sentence act." At the PWA, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes meanwhile busied himself bribing municipalities into contracting with public power companies instead of private ones. New Dealers were similarly aggressive in other sectors to similar result.
The New Deal conveyed the message that only government could do "big" — that the private sector was simply incapable of marshalling the financial resources to build serious infrastructure. Today we know that that is not true....
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
.
***By the time the country elected Franklin Roosevelt on his New Deal platform in 1932,***
Was he elected for the new deal or because he promised to end prohibition.
THE OLD AGE PENSION CHECK
Roy Acuff & His Smoky Mountain Boys - 1939
When our old age pension check comes to our door,
We won’t have to dread the poor house anymore.
Though we’re old and thin and gray,
Good times will be back to stay,
When our old age pension check comes to our door.
When her old age pension check comes to her door,
Dear old grandma won’t be lonesome any more.
She’ll be waiting at the gate,
Every night she’ll have a date,
When her old age pension check comes to her door.
Grow a flowing long white beard and use a cane,
‘Cause you’re in your second childhood, don’t complain.
Life will just begin at sixty,
We’ll all feel very frisky,
When our old age pension check comes to our door.
Powder and paint will be abolished on that day,
And hoop skirts will then be brought back into play.
Painted cheeks will be the rage,
And old maids will tell their age,
When their old age pension check comes to their door.
All the drug stores will go bankrupt on that day,
For cosmetics, they will all be put away.
I’ll put a flapper on the shelf,
Get a grandma for myself,
When her old age pension check comes to her door.
There’s a man that turned this country upside-down
With his old age pension rumor going ‘round.
If you want in on the fun,
Send your dime to Washington,
And that old age pension man will be around.
Because the tenth time was the try? Or because of the war.
A recession became a depression when the Hoover Administration created high tariffs in 1930, and in 1932 raised the rate for upper-level income earners to over 60%. An inconvenient truth big-government interventionalists want you to ignore.
Looks like a poster one would see in Stalinist Russia or El Loco Hugo’s Venezuela.
Another thing you won’t read from the politically correct history books is that FDR’s policies were just bigger versions of Hoover’s, and instead of ending the depression, lengthened it by about 7-8 years.
The part I like the best is the full text of the party platforms. I wish someone would put something like this togather for our current election cycle. As it stands we really have no idea of what our current parties intentions.
In fact, in 1938 (I believe), the unemployment rate went up even higher to almost 25%. The recession did not officially end until almost a year after Pearl Harbor. The statist policies of Hoover and FDR were a disaster, and sound very much like the rhetoric of Obama and Clinton.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.