History?!?!?! That's So BORING!!!
Especially When It's Inconvenient To One's Side Of The Partisan Divide
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Featured Stories | History — Comments (36) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Kevin Drum seems not to like it when I get exercised over a particular bloggable issue so let me address him that I basically sat in my chair and had a good bellylaugh over this. Apparently--and this is the latest pronouncement from the Reality-Based Community--we are not supposed to study things that happened 74 years ago, or perhaps longer. We're certainly not supposed to pay attention when it is revealed that an icon of the Democratic party (a) violated free market principles by assigning to himself the power to decide what the price of gold was on a particular day; and (b) did so by using the quack "science" of numerology to guide him.
Dude: I don't care how long ago this pathetic and frightening policymaking fiasco occurred. It is appalling that it ever happened and in order to make sure that no President ever again thinks of arrogating unto himself/herself the authority to engage in command-and-control decisions concerning issues best left to the market, it behooves those of us who actually are serious about policymaking and historical lessons attendant to policymaking to point out such travesties for the historical record . . . the better to avoid such trainwrecks in the future. As anyone familiar with basic price theory will tell you, prices need to be determined in a free market because only then will we have genuine and accurate information concerning the supply of the priced commodities relative to the demand for those commodities. When some would-be political demigod comes along and decides that he knows better than the free market and starts determining prices willy-nilly, that tends to demolish any chance that the rest of us will have accurate information concerning commodities whose prices are governed the capricious and arbitrary whims and fancies of that would-be demigod.
Price controls don't work. Price controls never have worked. Price controls never will work. Meaningless excuse-mongering concerning Roosevelt's desire to induce inflation does precisely nothing to explain away his arrogance and his breathless disregard for any semblance of intellectual rigor and policymaking discipline when it came to setting prices. It doesn't even pass the laugh test. I'll agree with Kevin Drum when he says that "there was method" to Roosevelt's madness. Yeah. Said "method" involved using the number seven in random mathematical combinations without any rhyme or reason to the combinations to set the price of gold on the world market. No Hollywood screenwriter could think up something so mind-bogglingly insane.
Of course, if a Republican President engaged in this kind of nightmarish policymaking, we would never hear the end of it . . . even if this hypothetical Republican President was in office 74 years ago, or longer. And Kevin--Dude, if I may--if you're so hung up on the need not to beat dead historical horses, why don't you write a post telling Democrats to stop raising the specter of Herbert Hoover at the drop of a hat?
Or did you suddenly get excited and passionate about history again upon reading that last sentence?
UPDATE: A grammatical edit has been made in response to this kind comment from one who is certainly aware of the embarrassment that comes with the commission of grammatical errors.
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History?!?!?! That's So BORING!!! 36 Comments (0 topical, 36 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
On the one hand, he played a major role in putting down the Nazis. That's gotta count for something.
On the other, he also played a major role in making the Soviet Union into a world superpower. He pursued economic policies that at best helped some but generally failed, and at worst knowingly prolonged the Depression in order to create permanent constituencies ("labor, retirees, farmers, union members") that would vote Democrat.
To some extent the USSR thing can be excused because he was helping an ally in a war. On the other, a better man would have seen the problem ahead of time, and a better man, Churchill, did. Had FDR reduced aid to the Soviets once they got they got the upper hand on the Eastern Front, then perhaps the US/UK could have been able to occupy all of Europe. Maybe even overthrow the Communists (considering the nuclear alignment in the late 40's). Think about that. No Cold War. No Communist China. No Korean War. Probably no Vietnam or Communist Cuba, and certainly no Cuban missile crisis. And without the USSR-Afghan war, possibly no rise of radical Islam and no 9-11.
Maybe that's too "hindsight is 20/20." Who knows how world events would have turned out if FDR had pursued different policies. Still, I think there is a case to be made the FDR was not all that great of a president.
So how to explain the perception of Roosevelt's greatness? It is exactly that: "perception." FDR was very good at making speeches and making people feel good, even if things weren't good. This is the classic argument of Locke vs. Rousseau, Individualists vs. Corporatists. What is more important: to have people actually be better, or simply to make them feel better? FDR was good at the latter, but in many ways not so much at the former.
Frankly, I think it's worse than that. Before "Lend Lease" there was "Cash & Carry". That policy basically bankrupted England, and you can make the arguement that this was Roosevelt's intent. As for being a great war leader, was he, or was the nation great enough to prevail under any halfway competent leadership?
....learn from history's mistakes are condemned to repeat them.
"Peace in our time." People danced in the streets of London and Paris upon hearing those words. A different sort of man, inclined to do a lot less wishful thinking, would be doing his dance some twenty one months later, when the untimely deaths of fifty million people were well underway.
"Whereas...it hath been found by experience that limitations upon the prices of commodities are not only ineffectual for the purposes projected, but likewise productive of very evil consequences to the great detriment of the public service and grievous oppression of individuals...resolved, that it be recommended to the several states to repeal or suspend all laws or resolutions within the said states respectively limiting, regulating or restraining the Price of any Article, Manufacture or Commodity."
This was passed on June 4, 1778 following the near starvation of Washington's army as a result of Pennsylvania's price controls.
Its ok though, modern left wingers can make price controls work.... despite 4,000 years of repeated failure. See: Insane, definition of
Evil prevails only when good men do nothing.
...for those of us who remember getting change back from a dollar for burger/fries/coke at McDonalds?
I still have "W.I.N." button, too.
--furious
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
I remember clearly that during Nixon's wage and price freeze my job title changed about every month so my boss could give me a raise. Most of the job titles did not exist the month before and were just to get around the freeze.
Butcher shops came out with all sorts of "new" ways to cut steaks so that the "new" one could have a new higher price.
And there was a rush just before they were implemented to jack up prices just because they would be frozen.
The states all had to abolish usury laws because the inflation rate was as high as the allowed interest rates and no one could make loans at a profit without breaking the usury laws.
It was a shining example of why wage and price controls don't work!
Dude
It's "arrogating unto himself/herself" not "aggregating" Learn your own language.Stick to words like "dude" & "Whoa" until then.
When correcting another for a slip of the tongue, use proper punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Hit the Contact form if you think you can be polite in the future.
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We are all heroes, you and Boo and I. Hamsters and rangers everywhere, rejoice!
Remember, the idea is to respond to the debate, not offer a weak and failed attempt to show yourself cute.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
Yesterday, I argued that essentially US politicians were just as stupid about economics as Robert Mugabe. It was our system that kept them in check. If FDR really decided that he should personally set the price of gold, I could care less whether he used numerology, or consulted John Von Nuemann, he was still as stupid as Robert Mugabe, in this particular respect.
I'd rather see Gore get oxed than my ox get gored.
According to Drum's post quoted in Pej's piece, FDR
...wanted the price to rise gradually and erratically so that speculators couldn't take advantage of predictable movements.
Unlike Drum, FDR wasn't stupid. He would have known exactly what would happen, which is that speculators (including the government of France) immediately jumped all over the plainly predictable movements that he caused.
What FDR did do to prevent American-based speculators from taking advantage of him was to make private gold ownership by Americans illegal, nearly a full year before the devaluation, thus clearly telegraphing the punch to anyone with eyes in his head.
As George Soros taught the Bank of England in 1992, you can spank your own subjects, but you can't limit the freedom of others. FDR knew that too.
That if Bush had seized the nation's gold and closed the nation's bank based on the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1917, Drum wouldn't be so calm. Indeed, that we'd still be hearing about it 74 years later.
Tell that to the commodities guys ;-)
Someone needs to read up on fiat currency....
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
Contributor to The Minority Report
As it turns out, I do know a couple of things about fiat currency.
I know plenty of commodities traders, and I know what they think. (And I know how Steve Forbes thinks about this, too.) I still say that gold is a commodity metal with industrial uses.
Gold does have a certain privileged status in US law (there still is an "official" dollar-gold rate), but gold is no longer money in the practical sense of constituting a monetary base underneath the banking system.
I wasn't responding to you, only the previous gold standard comment.
The commodities comment was tongue-in-cheek.
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
Contributor to The Minority Report
Don't you think that if I knew that the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1917 was the purported justification for closing the nation's banks that I'd know the currency in 1934. :-)
My point is just that Drum's "I'm glad that FDR was President in 1934" is certainly reminiscent of Republicans' "I'm just glad that Bush is President today and not Gore/Kerry" comments today, except Drum's is made to justify much more serious abuses of executive authority.
For one thing, at some time or another, it almost always shakes out in such a manner that we are able to tell whether or not a president, or other historical figure, was great, or merely adequate, or had feet of clay.
In FDRs case, I think time has tarnished his reputation to such an extent that he will never fully recover his original luster. Sometimes it takes a long time (74 years, even). Other times, not so long (last minute pardons, trashing the WH, stealing the furniture).
I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful 100 percent.
Pejman, I am sorry. You are right about this specific point but your attitude, expressed in many articles here, is not good in my opinion. The free market is the answer to the free market; it is not the answer to all social ills.
Oh there is a hodgepodge of carefully selected tidbits, a winding road through vague memories, but history viewed as myriad facts, occurrences, and reasons, carefully interpreted, no pun but forget it.
You can't even remind liberals of Bill Clinton, try it, you think you're going to remind them of FDR?
Now Nixon or Joe McCarthy, that's a different story. There is a play running on Broadway in which Nixon is a central figure. That kind of history comes alive, no Move On crap there, it must and is seared in our minds, as a warning you know.
The kind of mind and level of morals of people who struggle to slice and dice what they only want to remember is to be wondered at, but it ain't healthy.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
the laws of economics really are.
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Allow me to carefully take exception with the idea FDR was by and large a disaster and bad for America. Believe it or not, it is possible for a conservative to argue his merits. A clear view of history is all that's needed.
In its historical context, the FDR administration was generally quite positive and effective in the short term, and much more negative in the long term. I'm of course simplifying here to give a basic overview.
FDR's aims can be broken down into three policies: relief, recovery and reform.
Relief - short term policy of 3-4 years. Creation of the SEC (a good thing initially, though putting Joe Kennedy at the helm wasn't the wisest of choices). Ending prohibition (providing new revenues, some of which directly funded the TVA, a positive and temporary program which provided immediate relief). Increased funding for FERA, a sound program started by Hoover which FDR wisely continued (he also expanded Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corp.). In addition, FDR pursued some tough (and rather unliberal) policies to drastically cut the federal budget, like huge cuts in veterans benefits and taking a half a million people off of pension rolls (which of course ignited riots).
Recovery - policy of around 10-12 years which sought to energize the economy and return America to growth. His recovery policies were much more precarious, and indeed the most positive effect he had in this area was to instill much-needed confidence among Americans. That was really the key during this time period, and a reason why many felt (including Hoover) that the depression hit America so hard-- simply a lack of confidence in the American system. Let us not forget that FDR's first year (1933) was the low point of the depression. Industrial production plummeted by 50%. A quarter of workers were out of jobs. Farmers watched prices tumble by 60 and 70%. These are Ginormous percentages which were caused, and exacerbated, by a tremendous lack of confidence. That in mind, Roosevelt's confidence, his historic words 'The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself', his unfailing optimism and reassurance during his 'fireside chats', all should not be underestimated in building the confidence that was necessary to pull out of such a terrible mess. Hoover got 3 years with the depression and the problem only worsened. In FDR's first 3 years he brought unemployment from 25% down to 15%, and put America on a clear path of recovery.
But his recovery policies were also riddled with mistakes and miscalculations, namely the idiotic push for the National Industrial Recovery Act, which sought to control prices and instill no compete clauses and restrictions on production. Fortunately, this Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in a unanimous ruling and represents FDR's biggest failure in his first term. Another failure was his hands on approach to the economy, with one aspect - controlling the price of gold - highlighted by George Will's recent article. I have nothing critical to say of Will's article, it was accurate and well-written. I would only say that highlighting this aspect of FDR's administration risks pulling it too far out of context for those who do not care for the complexities of history. FDR's dominant, personal control of the economy was the reason why, in my opinion, America failed to bring down the national debt until the start of the war, and created more obstacles than avenues for growth.
But FDR's legacy is a complicated one. He was a man of his time and his time was a low point in American history. That required a fundamental shift in the operations of the federal government. I would argue that shift was necessary in the short term, but in the long term (FDR's 'reform' policy) created a huge and plodding government littered with entitlement programs that has acted as a brake to our nation's growth ever since.
My final grade of FDR (out of 10):
Relief: 9
Recovery: 6
Reform: 3
And, what we cannot forget, he also kicked some Nazi ass, which brings him up a few notches.
Concerning the Soviet Union, I think FDR and later Truman handled the Communist threat rather well. To keep pushing east, as Patton would have preferred, might well have been disastrous, and could very well have strengthened the socialist cause. To assume that, had we not been so 'kind' to the Soviets, there would have never been a Cold War, Korean War, Missile Crisis, Vietnam, even radical Islam and 9-11 (!) is a ridiculous distortion of history. I only bring this up because someone had mentioned it above. Look at it this way, if there were no Cold War, there may have never been a Reagan Presidency.
I hope this isn't a threadjack. Sorry for the length.
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History is all that will help us with the future
...to one thing, and it's entirely relevant to this thread.
By March 1933, when FDR moved into the WH, the American people were ready to give control over the economy to the Federal Government. He was astute enough to realize this, and capable enough to make it happen. And we've never looked back. That's it in a nutshell.
The credibility of the independent Federal Reserve (which had been extremely high in the Twenties, a decade punctuated nonetheless by countless financial panics and bank failures) was at a low ebb by the early Thirties. And according to a contemporary survey, about half of all non-federal government debt was in distress or default. US Treasury obligations were the only asset class that suffered no particular distress throughout the Depression.
And given that we're all free-traders now (at least in terms of lip service), it's hard to imagine that in the Thirties, free markets were seen as part of the problem, not the solution.
Agreed. And outside the particular ideological leanings of us (looking back) or individuals then (looking on), history shows substantial evidence that much of the federal consolidation of economic power from '33 to '39 was a great help in the short term that turned into a great hindrance over the decades.
Also, one important aspect of FDR which I don't think has been mentioned: his administration was initially not so radically left. The issues of the times necessitated, in FDR's view, some radical shifts, but the machinery of his administration had a multiplicity of views and was not so virulently leftist, at least initially. It was only after the 1940 election that FDR's administration started shifted permanently to the left, in an effort to consolidate gains and create enduring 'reforms' to the economy and government. An example of this shift is seen in Roosevelt picking the uber-liberal intellectual Henry Wallace as VP after 1940, replacing his pervious Veep John Nance Garner, a Texan conservative.
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History is all that will help us with the future
but inconsistently & selectively. For example, how do you say FDR's turn to the left was located in the Wallace pick yet years before he implemented the National Recovery Act of Blue Eagle fame? His crushing of the Axis? He had George Marshall and Adm. Ernest King sitting on him, and still he blundered inexcusably at the Casablanca Conference with his ill fated "unconditional Surrender" comment, lives lost?
His not so gradual turn away from Churchill to Stalin had it's roots early on, and Yalta needs no comment, hat tip to Alger Hiss.
I could, as you could and can, go on. Forget the holy unemployment rate, what I've heard is considerably higher then 15%, but the introduction of the mass welfare state, class bribery & class envy, encouraged by an immoral but ambitious political & professional clique has the seeds of both strife and decadence, a citizenry that holds it's hands up to government for alms. Or squabbles for the privilege.
If not democracy at it's lowest, how low do we go?
May I add that the low unemployment rate hasn't done Bush any good. Success is also selective, as is History.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
Thanks for your reply. That's always the risk in talking history, that selectivity masks more than it reveals, and it's precisely why I felt compelled to write, that FDR's legacy here was at risk of becoming too selective.
No doubt I do not disagree with the bulk of your post, I can only say that surely, looking back on FDR and America from '33 to '45 with eyes as unfiltered as possible, I think he steered the ship well through the rapids, but in the general direction of darker waters.
I do not say FDR's leftward turn is located in the Wallace pick, merely that it is emblematic of a larger shift in an effort to consolidate liberal gains. No doubt there is much evidence to support the idea that FDR, from 1940 on, was much more concerned with the future of the Democrats and liberalism in America. His thoughts shifted from short term recovery to long term political capital. Much of his writings of this time show great concern for the enduring presence of his policies. He felt he had remade the Democratic party (and I agree with him) and he wanted history to look upon that kindly.
You speak of the National Recovery Act and other deeply leftist policies of the earlier FDR terms, and what I tried to write is that many of these policies were a direct consequence of the times- formed out of a need for immediate relief and recovery- not out of FDR's attempts to reshape the history and direction of America. Those attempts came later, in my opinion, after his 1940 election victory and under the canvas of war, when he sought to pour the footings for a more permanent foundation of liberalism and social government.
For the unemployment of 1936, I've seen no statistics over 16%, but I do not doubt they are out there. I've seen one statistic at 9%, as WPA workers were counted as employed.
Concerning wartime FDR, I think it's important not to get too picky here, as FDR oversaw and pushed for two critically important war strategies: the refusal to focus merely on Japan (which gave America a long-term presence in Europe, thereby SAVING Europe, one might argue); and his insistence on a concentrated and relentless bombing campaign on Germany, in conjunction with the RAF. Lastly, FDR's support for the Manhattan Project should not be underestimated. In November 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor, he authorized an all out effort for the development of nuclear weapons. FDR was as instrumental as anyone in our nuclear arsenal development, outside Einstein and Hungarians of course (de mindenki a Magyar).
I hope my long-windedness isn't too much of a bother. I'm retired and it's always a treat to ramble on and on about history. Torture for others, but a treat for me!
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History is all that will help us with the future
“…history shows substantial evidence that much of the federal consolidation of economic power from '33 to '39 was a great help in the short term that turned into a great hindrance over the decades.”
What? I am hard pressed to come up with much in the way of short term economic benefits created by FDR. I just keep keep coming back to things like the Roosevelt Recession.
P.S. What little I am able to come up with pertains to public psychology.
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
And given that we're all free-traders now (at least in terms of lip service), it's hard to imagine that in the Thirties, free markets were seen as part of the problem, not the solution.
Free trade is not free markets. The equation is false and, in my view, the position is unnecessarily extreme. You and Pejman and many of this blog's readers are free traders, but we are not all free traders. See here and here and here and here, among others. You'll not find much "lip service" there.
Markets are indeed often the solution. They are also occasionally the problem, especially when the markets in question are international markets. It does not hurt us to acknowledge this.
Meaningless excuse-mongering concerning Roosevelt's desire to induce inflation does precisely nothing to explain away his arrogance and his breathless disregard for any semblance of intellectual rigor and policymaking discipline when it came to setting prices.
FDR's Press Secretary has just stated that he'll never do it again.
Price manipulation is all around us. Ever see a Republican Congress work on the price of gas?
Of course, if a Republican President engaged in this kind of nightmarish policymaking, we would never hear the end of it
And here, 74 years later, we can at least say our sense of irony has survived intact.
we all spin but blatant dishonesty of this scope is more than I can stomach.
From the article you didn't read
The price-gouging measure would impose criminal penalties and fines of up to $150 million for companies found to be cheating consumers. The legislation would give the Federal Trade Commission the power to define what constitutes excessive pricing, and allow the FTC, the Justice Department, and state attorneys general to investigate oil companies and impose fines.
Bit of a difference, donchathink, between giving the FTC extra powers to investigate "price gouging", whatever that is, and rolling out the rack and raising the price of gold by 21 cents because 21 is 3 times lucky 7? No?
This level of dishonesty indicates you have a relationship with the truth so casual as to be anonymous or you think we're all morons.
Enough's enough. If you think you can foreswear this type of numbskullery in the future, drop me an email. If not, have a nice life.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
I've written extensively here on my views towards New Deal Era labor and agriculture policies. If they did nothing else, they did eliminate the vicious cycle of poverty caused by the surplus of semi-skilled and unskilled agricultural and industrial labor in the Country. Something our national leadership today seems Hellbent on reinstituting. That said, enough on New Deal economics.
To The War: Roosevelt had advisors who were entirely too solictious of the Soviet Union and some were outright Soviet sympathizers if not agents. Nonetheless, American policy essentially made a virtue of necessity. As much as we pride ourselves in having "won" the Second World War, the Allies never faced more than about 15% of the Wehrmacht and had a bloody grind with that 15%; the Soviets faced the other 85%. By the Winter of 44-45, America was a very, very war weary nation, troop morale in the European Theater was less than stellar, and it very much suited our purposes to let the Soviets make the final push to Berlin so that we could begin reprioritizing resources to finish the job in the Pacific where the Soviets had only ambitions, but we and the British and French had vital interests. A push far into eastern Germany, Poland, or Central Europe, which the Soviets claimed as their sphere of influence, had at least some possibility of taking the Soviets out of the Alliance if not the War. Soviet withdrawal from either would have unleashed the American and European Left in opposition to anything that the Soviets opposed, which would have been anything The West wanted. Almost certainly there would have been much more of a confrontation with the Soviets over who got what in the Far East. For that reason alone, one can easily argue that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped on Moscow as much as on Japan in a geopolitical sense.
Post-war, the American diplomatic and intelligence establishments were riddled with Soviet sympathizers and in some instances outright Soviet agents. Consequently, we were very slow, much slower than the British, to recognize the threat posed by a Soviet Union with an intractible ideological animus towards The West and with military superpower status. In purely conventional military terms, there was only one superpower in the postwar years and I submit that remained true into the early '80s when our technology gave us enough qualitative superiority to have at least a fighting chance against the Soviet's quantitative superiority - and in some systems qualitative superiority, e.g., tanks before the M1A1. Only Soviet fear of an American nuclear response, the only effective response we could have made, kept them in check.
I cannot assess the extent to which FDR was blind to the Soviet sympathies in his administration or whether he simply considered it something he had to contend with because of the fragility of the necessary alliance with them. I think Truman was in large measure caught unawares by it and thus we had a decade and more of Red Scares and spy incidents. And by the way, I think some of them are still there.
In Vino Veritas
Achance- always a pleasure to read your posts. Our inability to understand the complexities of the international arena during this time and the nefarious Soviet threat was quite clearly a product of our near complete lack of an international intelligence apparatus. Of course, the OSS, while doing an admirable job with limited resources, was far behind the NKVD, British and Nazi intelligence services. The vast and competing 'double cross' system largely baffled the OSS, at least in the beginning. Our lack of intelligence in this respect certainly allowed the Soviets to infiltrate levels of the US government in rather shocking depth, in particular the Dept. of State.
But there are other reasons for our failure to see fully the communist threat, mainly the reality that WWII operated by and large on the fringes and extremes of politics and society. While we fought valiantly and warred heroically, I think the severity of the war, and the brutality of the Soviets, was difficult for us to grasp from the period of 1939-1943.
But had we grasped the reality, perhaps events would have turned out no better. Our relative naivety perhaps allowed us to aid the Soviets through the lend-lease program, despite strong reservations by the British (who were of course competing for lend lease funds). Our presence on the Eastern Front in the form of tractors, jeeps and critical materiel has been well-documented and was clearly significant in turning back the Nazi war machine (but the Soviets didn't have much need for our tanks, since the T-35 was far and away the most effective WWII tank). Stalingrad is an excellent case in point here, and in my opinion the true turning point of the entire war.
The Cold War which followed WWII allowed America to hone her international intelligence skills in such a way as to become one of the elite agencies in the world, but don't ask me - I'm biased. I think the Cold War was by and large good for America, we developed into a true global power, and it allowed, in largely peaceful ways, to prove the effectiveness and enduring strength of democratic capitalism. I yearn for the day when we had one main enemy, and every night we knew where he slept.
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History is all that will help us with the future
FDR had 9 before WWII, to end the depression.
Hoover, like many presidents was bad at getting out the message, but blaming him for the depression is idiocy. Most of the problem for him was the issue of the Bonus Army (I just read an amazing book on this story)...ironically, FDR agreed with Hoover on the Bonus Issue, and in fact cut veteran's benefits in his first budget...but the issue had already been used to push Hoover out of the White House.