I don’t fully understand where Morgenthau was coming from. He may have been frustrated by out of control spending, and if so, I wish he would have focused on that. What he said addressed unemployment also. And unemployment in 1932 pegged at roughly 22.5 to 25.0%, was reduced by the end of Roosevelt’s second term to around 1.5%.
For that reason, I think his unemployment or “hungry” comments were ill-advised.
He may have had a very good point to make about our nation’s building debt. It would be a lot easier to identify with those comments if he had kept to that, and he would have made an important point that the nation needed to hear.
What was the public to think, when all those people had been returned to work, the GNP had gone up roughly 50% since 1932, perhaps more? If you’ve got your job back and are feeding your family, are you going to grasp the validity of Morgenthau’s comments, when they touch on unemployment, and totally miss the fact that all but 1.5% of the workers in the U.S. were back to work?
Perhaps I’m not getting the time frame correct, but the end of Roosevelt’s second term (eight years in), was 1940. At that time the unemployment rate was pegged at 1.5%.
The years from 1937 to 1938 were called a “Depression within a Depression.” Companies who had struggled to survive, like the Auburn Automobile Company, gave up the ghost.
In 1936, private domestic investment was 21% below the level of 1929. Government expenditures surged by 46% between 1929 and 1936. The coming war in Europe, and the actual outbreak of hostilities, helped nudge manufacturing up as Allied countries started buying weapons and supplies. My own father worked during the Depression first for government via the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey then later as part of the “Arsenal of Democracy” with Douglas Aircraft.
Between 1936 and 1940, U.S. military spending had increased $173 million, and increase of over $2.5 billion today. WWII took 14 million men off the streets and put them in uniform. That really helped the unemployment rate!
Morgenthau knew exactly what he was talking about. FDR saving the economy was a myth. He made decisions based on personal whims, like raising the price of gold 21 cents since that was “three times seven.” FDR was the American Caesar, the Yankee flip side of European style fascism and Stalinism that swept the whole world in the 1930’s.