Re: The New Deal
Jonah Goldberg
The Corner
I have a piece in the next issue about the hysterical reaction to any suggestion that the New Deal might have prolonged the Great Depression. But if I might add to Jim Powell's point: Another bit of hype about the New Deal is that it was about helping the little guy, the forgotten man, and all that. Whereas Republicans want to reward their cronies in Big Business, liberals, as loyal followers of FDR, are all about putting the people before the powerful. Why Republicans even allow lobbyists to influence legislation! FDR would never do anything like that. Well. From my book (which came out 1 year ago today, by the way):
<<< The propaganda of the New Deal—“malefactors of great wealth” and all that—to the contrary, FDR simply endeavored to re-create the corporatism of the last war. The New Dealers invited one industry after another to write the codes under which they would be regulated (as they had been begging to do in many cases). The National Recovery Administration, or NRA, was even more aggressive in forcing industries to fix prices and in other ways collude with one another. The NRA approved 557 basic and 189 supplementary codes, covering roughly 95 percent of all industrial workers.
It was not only inevitable but intended for big business to get bigger and the little guy to get screwed. For example, the owners of the big chain movie houses wrote the codes in such a way that independents were nearly run out of business, even though 13,571 of the 18,321 movie theaters in America were independently owned. In business after business, the little guy was crushed or at least severely disadvantaged in the name of “efficiency” and “progress.” The codes for industries dealing in cotton, wool, carpet, and sugar were — “down to the last comma”—simply the trade association agreements from the Hoover administration. And in almost every case big business came out the winner. In “virtually all the codes we have examined,” reported Clarence Darrow in his final report investigating Hugh Johnson’s NRA, “one condition has been persistent . . . In Industry after Industry, the larger units, sometimes through the agency of . . . [a trade association], sometimes by other means, have for their own advantage written the codes, and then, in effect and for their own advantage, assumed the administration of the code they have framed.” We may believe that FDR fashioned the New Deal out of concern for the “forgotten man.” But as one historian put it, “The principle . . . seemed to be: to him that hath it shall be given.” >>>
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