The Scrapbook will go to great lengths to avoid being pedantic, but sometimes we are so astonished by the ignorance—the sheer bricks-for-brains philistinism—of certain journalistic celebrities that we feel constrained to set the historical record straight.
We are thinking, among other instances, of the Washington Post’s resident boy genius Ezra Klein, who once explained that many Americans misunderstand the U.S. Constitution since “the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago.” (That is, before 1912!) And of a similarly eye-popping observation we ran across last week by
Margaret Carlson, who these days writes for Bloomberg.com.
Carlson customarily tends to substitute a certain snarkiness of tone for actual knowledge—which, we suppose, entertains her readers. But in a tortured attempt to make the case that Mitt Romney, as a onetime businessman, is disqualified by experience for the presidency, she said the following:
The only successful candidate to run as a businessman—it was all he had—was Herbert Hoover. Look where that got us.
Now, The Scrapbook does not wish to enter into an extended discussion of the qualities and defects of the Hoover administration, or the virtues of Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corp. versus New Deal pump-priming, and so on. And of course, as a loyal Democrat, Carlson is entitled to express her opinion—“Look where that got us”—about Herbert Hoover’s place in history. But to suggest that Hoover ran “as a businessman” for the White House in 1928, and that his (spectacularly successful) commercial background “was all he had,” is not only unfair but profoundly and self-evidently wrong.
Herbert Hoover was, indeed, a businessman: He parlayed his training as a mining engineer (and member of Stanford’s first graduating class) into a storied career as a geologist, miner, and investor in the American West, in Australia, in China—where he was a hero of the resistance to the Boxer Rebellion—and in Europe before the outbreak of World War I.
As a wealthy American resident in London at the time, Hoover organized the (private, voluntary) Commission for Relief in Belgium, which successfully tackled the monumental problem of feeding and caring for the millions of refugees displaced by fighting across the continent; and after American entry into the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to the newly created U.S. Food Administration.
Hoover continued his work after the Armistice, founding the American Relief Commission to assist in the recovery and reconstruction of war-ravaged nations from Poland to Armenia, and as a consequence became (with the possible exception of Wilson) the most famous and beloved American in Europe.
So famous and beloved, indeed, that many of his friends and admirers (including his future rival Franklin D. Roosevelt) urged “the Great
Humanitarian” to run for president in 1920. Instead, Hoover opted to serve as secretary of commerce in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, where he influenced economic policy, reorganized domestic agencies, deployed the resources of the federal government to encourage growing industries (such as radio), and became the federal government’s point man for disaster relief, most notably in the devastating Mississippi River floods of 1927.
Which, of course, is only a partial description of Hoover’s private and public career before his election to the White House. So did he “run as a businessman” for president? Well, only in the sense that Jimmy Carter ran as a peanut farmer, and Barack Obama as a community organizer.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Imagine a president, any president, sitting in the Oval Office ending an address to the nation, in a slow, deliberate cadence, like this:
“Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.”
Yet that is how Franklin Roosevelt signed off that D-Day night.
Franklin Roosevelt is not remembered for his religious dogma. Yet 68 years ago on the night of June 6, as tens of thousands of American and Allied forces were flung into a caldron of fire in Western Europe, the president and commander in chief sought to calm an anxious nation as he spoke to his people. It was a presidential address that stands out as a testament to how much our nation has changed since that evening in the late spring of 1944.
Beginning around midnight the night before, elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions had landed behind enemy lines in France. They were followed seven hours later by massive landings on beaches in Normandy code-named Sword, Juneau, Gold, Omaha and Utah.
Americans began hearing special reports in the middle of the night and they continued to follow events closely throughout the day. At lunch counters and in offices and factories, people clustered around their radios. So it was both natural and necessary that the president say something.
Yet instead of giving a news account—something Americans had already heard from network radio news and read in their evening papers—Franklin Roosevelt chose a different course. He led the nation in prayer.
“Almighty God,” Roosevelt began, “Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”
Associated PressPresident Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. (more…)
Roosevelt reluctantly unleashed industry to win World War II, thereby laying the groundwork for America’s economic recovery.
By ARTHUR HERMANMr. Herman is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His newest book, “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II,” was published this week by Random House.
If President Obama still wants to turn our economy around, it’s time for him to act more like Franklin Roosevelt—but not in the way he might think. It takes a special kind of courage for a president to abandon a failed approach to economic policy and then embrace its opposite. Yet, faced in May 1940 with America’s greatest foreign policy crisis since the nation’s founding, that’s exactly what Franklin D. Roosevelt did. FDR—architect of the New Deal and outspoken opponent of Big Business—was forced by the collapse of Europe’s democracies under Hitler’s blitzkrieg to turn to the corporate sector to prepare America for war.
Roosevelt had almost no choice. In 1940, the United States had the 18th-largest army in the world, right behind tiny Holland. While not so small, its Navy was totally unprepared to face a determined invader. Gen. George Marshall, Army chief of staff, warned Roosevelt that if Hitler landed five divisions on American soil, there was nothing he could do to stop them.
Neither the War nor Navy Departments had a clue how to mobilize a $100-billion civilian economy for war. Their joint “plan” ran to fewer than 20 typed pages. America’s defense industry had been dismantled after World War I—”the war to end all wars.”
So, reluctantly, on May 28, 1940, Roosevelt picked up the phone and called his archnemesis, General Motors President William Knudsen.
Knudsen was a Motor City legend. The Danish immigrant had worked his way up from the shop floor to become president of Chevrolet and then GM. He was a mass-production wizard.
He was also a Republican, and one who remembered Roosevelt’s fierce denunciation of businessmen as “economic royalists who hide behind the flag and the Constitution.” He also knew what historians have since learned: that FDR’s vaunted New Deal, with its massive new government programs and antibusiness regulations, had done nothing to end the Great Depression. After six years of FDR, unemployment in 1939 still stood above 17%.
NOTE: All answers are “b.” – For details visit: www.NBRA.info
1. What Party was founded as the anti-slavery Party and fought to free blacks from slavery?
[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party
2. What is the Party of Abraham Lincoln who signed the emancipation proclamation that resulted in the Juneteenth celebrations that occur in black communities today?
[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party
3. What Party passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting blacks freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote?
[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party
4. What Party passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting blacks protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, and the Party of most blacks prior to the 1960’s, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party
5. What is the Party of the founding fathers of the NAACP?
[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party (more…)
Why the Democratic Party still lays claim to Americans’ affection.
By PEGGY NOONAN
The Republican Party continues to struggle with its brand. A Washington Post-ABC poll this week tells us that in spite of Barack Obama’s relative unpopularity, and in spite of the economy, the Democratic Party is still more popular with voters than the GOP. Forty-eight percent said they view the Democratic Party favorably, while the Republicans came in at 40%. (Neither of the parties in our two party system broke through to 50%, which tells you something about the moment we’re in.) Only 13% said their view of the GOP was “strongly” favorable, down from 19% in February 2010 and well below the 21% who “strongly” favor the Democrats. Also in the poll a nameless Democrat beats a nameless Republican for the presidency. Republicans are lucky the president has a name.
The first thing to say, and the reports on the poll said it, is that it has always been this way. The Democratic Party has always polled better than the Republican Party. But this is a good time to consider why.
The broad and overarching reason is that 20th-century branding is still culturally powerful.
What is the Democratic brand? It is the party of the little guy, the outsider. The party of “We Shall Overcome,” of great movements—civil rights, feminism, the environment. The party of “Listen, isn’t this country rich enough to afford a little for the old, the infirm, people who need a boost?” You can argue the facts and legitimacy of this all day, but it lingers as a powerful part of the Democratic Party brand. (more…)
How a much-derided Republican president actually succeeded in cutting the budget and fixing the economy.
Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh
October 24, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 06
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Dawes penned a warning:
“Some day, a President, if he is to save the country from bankruptcy and its people from ruin, must make the old fight over again, and this time the battle will be waged against desperate disadvantages. Against him will be arrayed the largest, strongest, and most formidably entrenched army of interested government spenders, wasters, and patronage-dispensing politicians the world has yet known.”
Dawes was prescient. As the old fight is once again being waged, we can only hope that the president Americans elect in 2012 will be as much of a “reactionary” as Warren G. Harding—and as much of a success.
The presidential campaign was heating up, and the progressives in office were nervous about their chances of holding the White House. It was unclear at first which contender for the Republican nomination would get the nod, but when the candidate eventually was chosen they denounced him as “a confirmed and hopeless reactionary.”
The year was 1920, and they were talking about Warren G. Harding. The editor of the New Republic foresaw dark days: Though no fan of the Democratic candidate (James Cox), Herbert Croly expected Harding’s Republicans to concede nothing to the progressives. The United States, he wrote shortly before the election, was about to enter eight years of “reaction, prolonged and untempered.”
And indeed, Warren G. Harding has come to be thought of as one of the worst presidents America has ever had. Yet the truth about his presidency is quite the opposite. He achieved a good deal more in the two and a half years he served before his sudden death than many presidents accomplish in a full term. A popular newspaper publisher and senator from Ohio, Harding won the presidency in a landslide, with 60 percent of the popular vote, the highest share ever recorded up until that time. The handsome, warm, gregarious, and modest Harding was a natural politician, known in the Senate for his ability to bring opposing sides together. He was as different from his predecessor—the by-then unpopular Woodrow Wilson, perceived by many as a rigid, unapproachable ideologue—as one could possibly be. (more…)
President Obama is cozying up to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, intending to make resentment of big business a central theme of his re-election campaign. Here he’s following the lead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tried to convince the public that Wall Street was to blame for the double-dip recession that plagued his second administration.
In late 1937 the American economy, which had been recovering slowly since 1932, contracted even more sharply than it had after the stock market crash in late 1929. Industrial production fell by a third, stock prices fell by 50%, durable goods production by almost 80%. Payrolls fell 35%, and unemployment climbed back to 20%.
Roosevelt was initially nonplused, slow to appreciate the severity of the downturn. But once he saw the need for action, he called Congress into special session and undertook a massive new public-spending program.
Roosevelt and his advisers blamed the recession on a “capital strike,” trying to deflect public alarm about the United Auto Workers’ sit-down strikes—really illegal occupations of assembly plants—onto the shoulders of corporations. They even claimed that big business was deliberately refusing to invest and increase payrolls as part of a political gambit to destroy the New Deal.
Privately, FDR told Robert Jackson, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division (and a future Supreme Court justice), “Bob, I’m sick of sitting here kissing [businessmen’s] asses to get them to” invest and increase employment. Publicly, Jackson agreed in a December 1937 speech that the country faced a “strike of capital” by business in order to get New Deal legislation repealed. He denounced the notion that the president’s program was antibusiness. Given the “astounding profits under the present administration,” he said, “big business will never be able to convince the American people that it has been imposed on, destroyed, or even threatened. It has merely been saved from ruin and restored to arrogance.”
Associated PressPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.
What if the weak recovery is all the recovery we are going to get?
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Barack Obama, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have been performing an intricate scorpion dance over spending, taxes and the debt ceiling, premised on the belief that this is the deal that would ignite the recovery.
But what if it’s too late? What if that first-quarter growth rate of 1.8% is a portent of the U.S.’s long-term future? What if below-normal U.S. GDP is, as the Obama folks like to say, the new normal?
Robert Lucas, the 1995 Nobel laureate in economics, has spent his career thinking about why economies grow, and in particular about the effect of policy making on growth. From his office at the University of Chicago, Prof. Lucas has been wondering, like the rest of us, why, if the recession officially ended in the first half of 2009, there hasn’t been more growth in the U.S. economy. He’s also been wondering why this delayed recovery resembles the long non-recovery years of the 1930s. And he has been thinking about the U.S. and Europe.
In May, Bob Lucas pulled his thoughts together and delivered them as the Milliman Lecture at the University of Washington, an exercise he described to me this week as “intelligent speculation.”
Here is the lecture’s provocative final thought: “Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get.” (more…)
