Salon.com > FDR

Slow growth creates debt, not the other way around

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:11:00 +0000

In the election of 1952 my father voted for Dwight Eisenhower. When I asked him why he explained that “FDR’s debt” was still burdening the economy — and that I and my children and my grandchildren would be paying it down for as long as we lived.

I was only six years old and had no idea what a “debt” was, let alone FDR’s. But I had nightmares about it for weeks.

Yet as the years went by my father stopped talking about “FDR’s debt,” and since I was old enough to know something about economics I never worried about it. My children have never once mentioned FDR’s debt. My four-year-old grandchild hasn’t uttered a single word about it.

By the end of World War II, the national debt was 120 percent of the entire economy. But by the mid-1950s, it was half that.

Why did it shrink? Not because the nation stopped spending. We had a Korean War, a Cold War, we rebuilt Germany and Japan, sent our GI’s to college and helped them buy homes, expanded education at all levels, and began constructing the largest public-works program in the nation’s history — the interstate highway system.

“FDR’s debt” shrank in proportion to the national economy because the national economy grew so fast.

Can women save the economy?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:47:00 +0000

The participation of women in the American work force has expanded dramatically in the 78 years since the Roosevelt administration launched the WPA to provide jobs to Americans out of work and on relief. Today women comprise nearly half the work force and typically work through the life cycle, not episodically, before and after childrearing, which for so long was considered their principal occupation.

Today married, as well as single, women play a critical role in the U.S. economy. In nearly half the country’s dual income families, women earn as much or more than men. And as a percentage of the total, there are many more single women heading households today. For these reasons, today’s employment policies must be sensitive to gender in ways they never have been before.

Women were an afterthought of policymakers back in the Roosevelt years. Prevailing cultural mores still viewed work among married women as a threat to the sanctity and moral fabric of the family. New Dealers actually passed legislation (over the objection of Eleanor Roosevelt and others with feminist leanings) that prevented two workers in any one family from claiming a government salary, which meant that women during the Depression often were fired or forced to quit their jobs.

Minimum wage critics are “hopelessly reactionary”

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:32:00 +0000

Our Nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours.

Enlightened business is learning that competition ought not to cause bad social consequences which inevitably react upon the profits of business itself. All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of man power, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor and the exploitation of unorganized labor. –FDR, May 1937

Ed Asner released from hospital, shows canceled

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:52:00 +0000

Ed Asner, the 83-year-old actor best known for his roles in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and its spinoff "Lou Grant," has been released from a Chicago hospital, reports the Associated Press. Asner was originally hospitalized due to exhaustion on Tuesday night, when he was taken off the stage during a performance in Gary, Ind.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting that Asner's local performance of his one-man show, "FDR," has been canceled tonight, and the AP reports that additional performances in the national tour may be postponed as Asner recovers.

He is currently headed home to Los Angeles, says publicist Charles Sherman.

Time to march on Washington again for jobs and freedom

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:46:00 +0000

Dear Brother Trumka:

Next year will mark the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rallied by the great black union leader A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, with the assistance of civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin and UAW president Walter Reuther, 250,000 Americans of every color and creed turned out on the National Mall on August 28, 1963 to demonstrate their support for guaranteeing equal rights and affording “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to all Americans. And it is a day that generations will forever remember because of the words spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream.”

No doubt plans are already underway to commemorate that event. But we who believe in America’s purpose and promise of extending and deepening freedom, equality, and democracy must do more than commemorate it. We must truly honor it. And to do that, we cannot wait until August, 2013.

The final defeat of backlash politics

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:21:00 +0000

Despite its reinforcement of the status quo and the lack of debate about large issues during the campaign, the election of 2012 will go down in history as the end of the backlash against mid-20th century liberalism. A new, increasingly liberal electorate has ratified the results of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution. Republican conservatives will still be able to win victories, but their hopes of overturning the outcomes of the 1930s and the 1960s have been doomed by cultural and demographic change.

From the 1970s to the present, American politics has been driven by the backlash against the two liberal revolutions of the mid-20th century — the New Deal economic revolution and the Civil Rights Revolution and the attendant wave of cultural liberalization. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George Wallace led many working-class whites upset with racial integration and the '60s cultural revolution out of the Democratic Party. From the 1970s until recently, these working-class white “Reagan Democrats” — socially conservative, pro-military and suspicious of government in the abstract, while fond of government benefits — were the swing voters in national elections for whom Reagan Republicans and Clintonian New Democrats competed.

Too bad we can’t re-reelect FDR

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:25:00 +0000

On Oct. 19, former President Bill Clinton, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg all turned out for the dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City. And all of them, along with newsman Tom Brokaw, who hosted the proceedings, and Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel, who led the campaign to construct the long-delayed memorial park, spoke eloquently of FDR’s greatness in leading the nation through the Great Depression and Second World War and proclaiming the promise of the Four Freedoms -- “Freedom of speech and expression … Freedom of worship … Freedom from want … Freedom from fear …” – a promise that has inspired generations ever since he pronounced it on Jan. 6, 1941.

Decades late, FDR memorial park is opening in NYC

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:31:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City memorial park honoring President Franklin Roosevelt has been completed 40 years after the original design.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is located on the southern tip of 2-mile-long Roosevelt Island in the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens. It's being dedicated Wednesday in a ceremony to be attended by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton.

The triangular park is named after Roosevelt's State of the Union address famously known as the Four Freedoms Speech. He delivered it on Jan. 6, 1941.

The park has a colossal bust of the 32nd president and an open-air granite plaza with excerpts of the speech etched into the stone.

The park will open to the public once arrangements for its operation and maintenance are final.

What 100 years of voting looks like

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 11:00:00 +0000

The story of American politics over the last few generations is one of ever increasing partisan polarization. Barack Obama was able to pick off a few Republican states in 2008, but ideology and party identity have largely synced up, draining the electoral map of much of its fluidity. When it comes to presidential politics, there are a lot of red states, a lot of blue states, and only a few true swing states.

Over the years, the partisan divide at the top of the ticket has steadily crept down the ballot. And if there was a moment that the red state/blue state divide we now know was formalized, it was the 2000 election, when George W. Bush swept the South and the Great Plains but was shut out on the Pacific Coast, in much of the Midwest, and (except for New Hampshire) north of the Mason-Dixon line. This marked the culmination of two trends: 1) the South’s steady march away from the Democratic Party, which began sometime around the Depression but didn’t really kick into gear until the national Democratic Party embraced racial equality – first at its 1948 convention, then through the Civil Right Act of 1964 (Al Gore couldn’t even carry his native Tennessee); 2) the mass rejection of the modern, Southern-dominated, religion-infused national Republican Party by culturally moderate voters in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast.

The 47 percent: What FDR fought against

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:48:00 +0000

But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life…

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937