"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Having spent my spring break poring over two biographies of FDR, both of which contained extremely vivid and detailed descriptions of American life in 1932 and 1933, I feel very comfortable saying that there is NO comparison between then and now in terms of sheer suffering and deprivation. The Depression of the 1930s was several orders of magnitude worse than anything going on in the U.S. today. Anybody who compares our current predicament to that of the Depression simply doesn't know what they're talking about. To assert that today's problems are on par with the 1930s is not merely inaccurate. It's utterly ahistorical.
Arguably the most vital, enduring, and effective feature of FDR's New Deal was the creation of the FDIC (federal bank deposit insurance), which effectively ended the age of massive bank runs that was the key ingredient in every depression in U.S. history.
I was stunned to learn (after reading two biographies of FDR over Spring Break) that Roosevelt was VEHEMENTLY opposed to the creation of federal deposit insurance, and repeatedly threatened to veto any banking legislation that contained deposit insurance!
The creation of the FDIC was largely the work of a Senate Republican, Arthur Vandenburg, and a House Democrat, Congressman Steagall. As the result of crafty parliamentary maneuvering of FDR's vice-president, John Nance Garner (who believed fervently in deposit insurance but apparently no other government activities), Vandenburg's FDIC was tacked on as an amendment to larger banking legislation, which FDR reluctantly signed only when confronted with the likelihood that his veto would suffer an override.
The most successful aspect of the New Deal was in large measure the work of a Senate Republican, and was fiercely opposed by Dr. New Deal himself!
I was flabbergasted. I double-checked and triple-checked the story. It's true!! All this time I'd given FDR great credit for the far-seeing wisdom of his FDIC proposal, when it was never his proposal, and he kept threatening to strangle it in its cradle!
The things that history nerds find compelling...
FDR, patron saint of contemporary liberalism, was decidedly NOT sympathetic to the struggle of teachers.
In Jonathan Alter's eminently fair and fascinating biography of Roosevelt and his First Hundred Days in office, The Defining Moment, we come across this rather striking nugget...
"Shortly after the Inaugural, Josephus Daniels, FDR's old boss at the Navy Department, wrote him to urge that he join a campaign to prevent cutting teachers' salaries even further...Roosevelt's reply to Daniels was cool: ' The past decade has seen a very large increase in teachers' salaries, and even if all the teachers were cut 15 percent like government employees, they would still be getting relatively more than in 1914!' In April, five thousand unpaid Chicago teachers occupied banks and City Hall...The president was unmoved."
Interesting...
Evidently the Celtics have decided that the absence of KG from their playoff lineup is the cue to check out and pack it in for the summer...or in their case, spring. This morning's 105-103 sleepwalking loss to the Bulls at home in Boston should grievously offend all fans of what used to be the NBA's proudest franchise.
You're still getting paid millions (OK, maybe not you Marbury...), could you please exert some effort and show some skill to justify your exalted position?
I was more than a little incensed by an article in today's San Francisco Chronicle discussing the dispensation of federal budgetary largesse to buttress the battered finances of California public schools.
While state schools chief Jack O'Connell exulted over the arrival of $2.6 billion from Obamanon and the feds ("We're happy people...we jumped on it right away, and we're going to make it very easy for school districts to access these funds."), the article sounded a note of grim futility in subsequent paragraphs.
According to the Chronicle, "...though the federal money is specifically meant to help districts rescind layoffs, many school officials say they're hesitant to use the one-time money for ongoing costs like salaries at a time when state finances are so uncertain."
The article quotes an East Bay school district superintendent, Dick Nicoll, who said that if state voters refuse to approve the six ballot measures in the May 19th election, "the stimulus money will be of little help."
"...most districts are going ahead with their final layoff notices," Nicoll is quoted as saying in the article.
So what was the point of the stimulus check from D.C.? What WILL that one-time fed money be spent on, if not to retain teachers and stanch the bleeding employment stats for California?
The purpose of a Keynesian measure such as deficit spending is to reduce unemployment. That's why we're all supposed to grit our teeth and blithely accept the whopping increase in the national debt that accompanies this deficit spending. If we still get increased unemployment to go with our increased debt, what was the point of the exercise?
Maddening...
Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.
-Ronald Reagan
