1 1 The Social and Political Contexts of the Great Depression and Great Recession
At a time when domestic government spending is derided as “socialist” and government attempts to right systemic wrongs, however limited, are seen by many as threats to individual liberties, it seems unfathomable that there was a time when government was seen by a significant sector of the population as beneficent. Yet the Great Depression, after the initiation of the New Deal, was just such a time. How is it that the public attitude toward government was so different in the 1930s? The answer to that question lies in (1) the timing of events and the existence and character of popular social movements; (2) the cultural currents at work in the society; (3) the changing nature of the communications environment and its effect on politics; (4) the strength and composition of the president’s party in Congress; (5) the political skills of the president himself; (6) the relative political power and cohesiveness of the business class; (7) the international political context; and (8) the environmental context. This chapter teases out the influences of each of these contextual factors on the public’s attitude toward government intervention in the economy during the Great Depression and the Great Recession.
Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama both entered office having inherited from their predecessors two of the worst economic crises in American history. The conditions that brought about the two periods of economic collapse bear striking resemblances. Yet the policy responses of both presidents to the crises and the attitude of the public toward the role of the federal government in both periods are quite different.
When Roosevelt took office in 1933, the Great Depression had been underway for over three years, and for several more before that in rural America. Unemployment engulfed a quarter of the working population, Wall Street had crashed, the American banking system had shut down completely, thousands of businesses had failed, shanties dubbed “Hoovervilles” filled the landscape, bread lines appeared in every major city—in short, the vaunted capitalist economy that just a few years before had been declared by Herbert Hoover to be entering “the greatest era of commercial expansion in history”1 was in complete collapse. By the time Roosevelt took office, local relief, under the pressure of need and protest movements, had expanded, and most states had begun to provide some relief, but it was not nearly enough. State and local governments were overwhelmed by the extent of need, and the American people had become restive. There were large demonstrations in 1930 in every major city. In 1932 a “Bonus Army,” composed of impoverished World War I veterans and their families, had descended on Washington, vowing to camp out at the nation’s capital until they got the veterans’ pensions immediately that had been promised for 1945, only to be ruthlessly routed and sent packing by President Hoover’s army. Unemployed Councils had formed in cities across the land, and rent strikes and resistance to evictions were prevalent. It had taken nearly four years for at least a segment of the population, which had been deeply socialized in the virtues of individualism, to come to the realization that the destitution they were experiencing was not their fault but that of some basic flaw in the system. With state budgets unable to cope, they turned to the federal government for help and to a president who, though not knowing exactly what to do, had said he would do something to ease their pain. Within 100 days of Roosevelt’s inauguration, a series of programs was instituted that would begin to permanently enlarge the role of the federal government in the lives of ordinary Americans, bringing hope to millions of the impoverished and unemployed, and stimulating economic recovery.
In contrast, when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the economic meltdown, though potentially as serious as the Great Depression, was less than a year old; however, as a result of technological changes in the banking system, the panic that gripped investors was much less visible to the average person. Unemployment, though high, was, at 7.8 percent, nowhere near a quarter of the work force. Moreover, reforms that had been put in place by the New Deal such as Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and federal deposit insurance, as well as Johnson-era programs like Medicare and Medicaid, had helped to cushion the shock of economic decline. Having learned something from the failure of the Hoover administration to halt the economic slide, George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, had urged Congress to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, a $700 billion bailout of those banks that had brought the global economy to the brink of meltdown.2 This and subsequent Federal Reserve loans helped stem the erosion of confidence in the credit system and forestalled a complete economic collapse.3
With an economy merely stagnating, rather than collapsing entirely, public reaction to the Great Recession was understandably muted in comparison to the Great Depression. After a nearly forty-year corporate and Republican-led campaign to crush labor and discredit the role of the federal government, the only early, popular response came in the form of the right-wing Tea Party movement. Though initially a response to the bank bailout, the Tea Party was quickly co-opted by elements of the financial and corporate elite, becoming an anti-government movement that elected Republicans to office who supported the very policies responsible for the economic breakdown in the first place. It was not until 2011 that a populist movement on the Left arose; but the Occupy Wall Street movement, rather than calling for greater government intervention in the economy or making specific demands of it, took on an anarchist character, in effect, saying a plague on both Wall Street and government.
Cultural differences between the era of the Great Depression and today also played a role in the differing responses of the public to government efforts to relieve economic distress. Although there had always been in American political culture a fear of “big government,” with the exception of the Civil War and World War I exigencies, the federal government had been largely absent in the lives and consciousness of most Americans. When it was clear that the private economy had collapsed and that the state governments with which the public was most familiar could not cope, there was only one remedy left. Thus, with no real personal residue of resentment against the federal government, most were willing to trust it to respond to their distress.
Trust in the federal government was facilitated by the cultural currents that had shaped many of the New Deal’s top players. Foremost among these was the culture of progressivism, a versatile set of ideas that had at its heart a spirit of social reform and optimism in the perfectibility of human society.4 While historians often tend to think of the Progressive era as having ended around 1919, its cultural influence lived on through the 1920s influencing those who would undertake the reforms that came to be known as the New Deal. Two strains of progressivism, in particular, had had an effect on several of the New Deal architects. One strain was the “social gospel,” an intellectual movement that had arisen among some middle-class Christian clergymen toward the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a reaction to the intense socioeconomic turbulence of the Industrial Revolution, its spokespersons preached that Christianity had a mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of equality, freedom, and community.5 Walter Rauschenbush, one of its major proponents, foresaw a society that embodied the teachings and example of Jesus as a cooperative commonwealth in which producers would be organized on a cooperative basis, distribution would be organized on principles of justice, workers would be treated as valuable ends, not as means to a commercial end, and parasitic wealth and predatory commerce would be abolished.6 By 1908 the social gospel had succeeded in penetrating the institutional structures of the churches with a “social creed” that was adopted by the mainline denominations. Anticipating by three or four decades many of the reforms enacted in New Deal legislation, the social creed called for the alleviation of Sunday working hours, the abolition of child labor, a living wage, the negotiation and arbitration of labor disputes, social security for workers in old age, disability insurance, poverty reduction, and a fairer distribution of wealth. For about thirty years, the movement called attention to poverty and urban distress, the harsh conditions of working people and immigrants, militarism, and racism.
The still relatively young field of social work with its settlement house work in many of the major cities was another strain that deeply infused the thinking and values of these New Dealers. Settlement houses were established by middle-class reformers appalled by the harsh realities of urban industrial life faced by poor immigrants during the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Imbued with progressivism’s spirit of reform, some settlement workers helped assimilate and ease the transition of their impoverished charges into American life by providing them with literacy classes; social services such as health care, daycare, homeless shelters, public kitchens, and baths; recreational activities; and even exposure to and classes in the arts. Settlement houses like Chicago’s Hull House and New York’s Henry Street Settlement were also a nexus for political activism and research on social conditions, with reformers like Jane Addams (Hull House) and Lillian Wald (Henry Street Settlement) becoming involved in campaigns around public health, against child labor, for civil and human rights (including women’s suffrage), fair labor legislation, and world peace.7 Several of the New Dealers had early experience as social workers in settlement houses like Hull House and the Henry Street Settlement and/or had grown up in households infused with the social gospel.8 Eleanor Roosevelt considered Addams and Wald her “great mentors and models.”9
By the time Roosevelt was elected, progressivism was in the process of being transformed from an evangelical belief in the perfectibility of human society to what Leuchtenburg refers to as a “new style liberalism”—which was less interested in moral reform and more in using the power of the federal government to correct certain economic inequities; less rooted in the “old stock middle class of the small towns and cities” and more in the urban masses.10
In addition to the kind of social-democratic vision exhibited by progressive New Deal reformers, social movements during the 1930s were setting forth alternative visions of how society and the economy might be reordered.. An activist Communist Party looked to the collective experience of the Soviet Union; the Socialist Party in its “Declaration of Principles” called for resistance to international war and the “bogus democracy of capitalist parliamentarism” in favor of a “genuine workers’ democracy”; Townsend Clubs advocated an old age pension financed by a federal sales tax; Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” movement sought a decent standard of living for all Americans by capping personal fortunes through a restructured progressive tax code whose benefits would go into public benefits and public works. Long also called for free higher and vocational education, a guaranteed annual income, a thirty-hour work week, a four-week vacation for every worker, veterans’ benefits and health care, a limit on inheritances, and greater regulation of commodities. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking writer, whose exposé of conditions in the meatpacking industry had led to significant social reform, ran as a Democrat for governor of California on a platform of ending poverty by having the State of California take over idle factories and farmland and run them as cooperatives. On the other side of the political spectrum, fascism also claimed some adherents, among them radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Alive in the culture of the 1930s, this variety of alternative ideas offered a mix of solutions from which New Dealers could draw. In doing so, they could also arrest public support for the more radical of these approaches, at the same time demonstrating that the government was, in some measure, responding to public demands.
By the time Barack Obama was elected president, however, the country had experienced over three-quarters of a century of “big government.” The military–industrial complex that had emerged from World War II had given the U.S. government unimaginable global power, and increasing areas of private and economic life were being regulated and surveilled by the federal government. Moreover, there was now a permanent revolving door between big government and big business, which had the effect of corrupting the democratic process and skewing public policy toward the wealthy and powerful. The result was increasing polarization within the polity and in Congress. One side, while still believing that government could help, despaired of a federal government that seemed to side most of the time with big business and acted as an imperialist abroad, while the other side, employing a faux populism, argued that big government was the problem and that, with the exception of defense, it should be cut back as far as possible.
Moreover, the period of optimism in the perfectibility of human society that had characterized many of the architects of the New Deal had given way to a cynicism about large-scale social engineering. Alternatives to the left of the Democratic Party had been thoroughly crushed by anti-communism, by the eclipse of labor militancy as early as the late 1930s, by the globalization of labor (encouraged by government policies) that began in the early 1970s, as well as by continual factional fighting within the left.
A brief resurgence of political optimism accompanying mass movements of the left had erupted in the 1960s, but without an institutional base to codify the message and translate it into political power, it had evolved into a set of postmodern preoccupations centered on race, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle that competed with each other and generated a conservative political backlash that was able to use these as wedge issues to divide what was left of the New Deal coalition and to reassert the values of laissez-faire and limited government.11 The brief optimism during the Johnson administration that society could be massively restructured was quickly crushed by the intransigence of economic racism, by the series of assassinations of political leaders, and by disillusionment over the Vietnam War. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King was especially devastating, as he had been moving at the end of his life toward a far more radical critique of American power and capitalism and had been in the process of planning a massive Poor People’s Campaign with a campout at the capital similar to the Bonus Army campaign of 1932. Thereafter, the only alternative to the commercial Keynesianism of the postwar period was the return of the idea of laissez-faire, which became the rallying cry for a resurgent right that for the next forty years promulgated its benefits through a highly funded campaign consisting of think tanks, research institutes, conservative media outlets, and the religious right, which, for its part, had managed to destroy whatever was left of the vestiges of social gospel thinking in the mainstream denominations.12 Thus, to insist that government could be a force for good was that much harder in 2009 than it was in 1933.
When the Great Depression broke out, the only media available to the American public to learn about politics were newspapers—which were much more prevalent and varied in every city than they are today—news and opinion magazines, weekly newsreels offered in local theaters, and the radio, which in the 1930s was a relatively new medium. Of all these media, radio was the only one that had the quality of simultaneity.13 Roosevelt was quick to grasp the potential of the radio to reach a mass audience and used it brilliantly in his “fireside chats”—a series of informal talks in which families gathered in their living rooms around a crackling radio to listen to their president, much as they would gather around a fireplace.14 Because the radio was such a new phenomenon and seemed almost magical to an audience that had never before heard a live broadcast, these talks—homey, educational, exhortative—“helped make participants—even activists out of his audience.”15 Typical broadcasts would begin with the salutation, “My friends,” and then the president would proceed to tell his listeners about what was happening around the country, describe what the New Deal was doing for people in ways that made it personal and brought it home to those listening, tell them what he was planning to do to meet some new problem, exhort them to support these efforts, and ask them to tell him about their troubles and give him their ideas and advice. And the people responded. Hundreds of thousands of letters poured into the White House after each of these chats, some in the grammar of the barely literate, and others in the grammar of the highly educated. “They enclosed editorials, articles, cartoons, and pamphlets they thought the President should see, as well as poems, drawings, photos, stories, jokes, and recipes they wanted to share with him.”16 The fireside chats connected people to their government as well as to other citizens from very different walks and conditions of life in ways that they never had before and probably have not been connected since.
One letter of the many thousands that Roosevelt received sums up the effect he had on ordinary citizens.
We listened with great interest to your “fireside chat” last evening, and are in accord with your plans and ambitions for the farmer and the less fortunate of our people in this United States. The fact that you go about and observe personally and take the keen interest and have the intelligence to know how to correct the evils which exist, make you the outstanding President of all History. It is such a relief to hear about human beings and natural resources, and not “gold” and “statistics” by the yard. I am one former Republican who voted for you, and been your most devout follower. Your indomitable courage; your never finding any problem insurmountable is a guiding spirit to this nation.17
The letter was signed by a woman living in Waltham, Massachusetts. From her language, it is obvious that she was educated and cultured and probably not suffering as much as some others from the Depression. The president had been speaking that day about a trip he took to visit nine states affected by the Dust Bowl.18 In concretely descriptive language he spoke about the environmental and human devastation he had seen and the farmers who needed government help. The talk created a feeling of empathy between this listener and farmers in another part of the country whose values and lifestyle were probably very different from hers and generated a sense of solidarity and desire to help, turning even a former Republican into a supporter of the Democratic regime.
Roosevelt also made effective use of other sources of communication that were available in his day to inform and educate the public about the programs he was initiating and to tout their benefits. He was the first to initiate the presidential press conference and was more accessible to the press than any president up to that time had been. He also turned the signing of bills into political theater. Public speeches were, of course, staples, and he was a master at political speech. He made ample use of the “special message” accompanying these messages with draft bills.19 Roosevelt’s speeches portray him as having an uncanny ability to give new meaning to traditional values so that they resonated with the American people. Many of his speeches and “fireside chats” were used to educate the public about history, ecology, finance, or any number of other subjects, as well as what his programs were doing to help the economy. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat, delivered on the heels of the banking crisis of 1933, is a perfect example. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be,” he began. “I recognize that the many proclamations from state capitols and from Washington, the legislation, the Treasury regulations, and so forth, couched for the most part in banking and legal terms, ought to be explained for the benefit of the average citizen.”20 He then went on to describe in simple terms how the banking system works, why the run on the banks had happened, what effect it had had on the economy, why he had instituted the bank holiday, and how that holiday was to be resolved. He finished, as he usually did, by reassuring the American people and by inviting them to cooperate in resolving the problems.
The New Deal arts programs also provided a variety of ways to promote the role of government—through posters announcing New Deal programs and events, mural paintings placed in public buildings across the country, documentary films, signs and billboards, music, photography, and film. Wherever a New Deal program was in operation, one could usually find a sign or billboard announcing that this was courtesy of the New Deal. And of course, the works programs of the administration directly employing millions of people made their own case for the government.
Although there are many more ways a president today can use the media to reach mass audiences—from television addresses and press conferences to various forms of social media—the effectiveness of that message is drowned out by the multiplicity of competing sources of information and communication that now exist. The wired world of modern-day communications makes the president’s voice less salient than it was in Roosevelt’s day and, moreover, has fragmented the audience. This fragmentation has had enormous implications for the American presidency. According to Martin P. Wattenberg, the new media landscape has diminished the role of the president and denied him a mass audience for important speeches. As late as the early 1980s, when just three networks dominated the listening public’s access to political news, presidents were guaranteed that at least half the public would tune in to important presidential messages and that their message would continue to permeate the public consciousness through news reports for days afterwards.21 For example, when President Reagan outlined his proposed policies for economic recovery to Congress on prime-time television on February 18, 1981, he received a Nielson rating of 60 percent. In contrast, when President Obama addressed the country on the economic crisis on February 24, 2009—despite the fact that he was covered by more media outlets—his combined rating was only 32.5 percent—a little over half as much. Since the use of the “bully pulpit” has long been considered one of the president’s greatest leadership tools, the lack of such public access makes governing all the more difficult.
Changes in the media over the past thirty years have also changed the nature of the audience for political news. When the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) dominated the airwaves, Americans tuned in to a fairly consistent national narrative. However, with the rise of cable TV, talk radio, the Internet, blogging, and social media, as well as the decline in newspaper reading, Americans are increasingly talking to and hearing from people who think and vote as they do. This echo chamber makes any kind of national consensus about where the country should be going extremely difficult, if not impossible, and even gives rise to disputes about basic “facts.” For example, a CBS News/New York Times poll taken as late as April 2011 found that at least 45 percent of Republicans and Tea Party members believed that Obama was not born in the United States, despite his 1961 birth announcement printed in two Hawaii newspapers, verification of his birth by the governor of Hawaii and by Obama himself, who was forced to produce a long copy of his birth certificate.22
Despite the difficulties today in attracting attention, the president still commands a bully pulpit, and Obama could have used it to much greater advantage. Given the fact that a third of the stimulus money went for tax breaks rather than jobs (a concession to the incessant Republican mantra against taxes), he could have made more of the fact that an estimated 500,000 to 3.3 million full-time jobs were saved or created by the stimulus.23 Though Obama touted a figure of 2.5 million jobs in a number of speeches, the fact that those jobs came indirectly through grants to states and were often used to save jobs rather than create new ones made it more difficult for people to see the connection. Still, as economist Alan Blinder has pointed out, Obama was not nearly as effective as Roosevelt in communicating clearly to the American public about what was happening, why it was happening, and what the government was doing about it. The stimulus, Blinder argues, although still insufficient, was much more effective than Obama has been given credit for, and this lack of credit is largely because of the communications failure of his administration.24 Although some of the infrastructure projects bore signs labeling them a product of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most of the projects consisted of repair of existing infrastructure—road, bridge, and sewer repair, etc.—and thus did not have the same panache as the new dams, hospitals, schools, and post offices to which the Roosevelt administration could point. As Jonathan Alter pointed out, “The bill funded only a fraction of the infrastructure projects listed by the American Society of Civil Engineers as in need of construction or repair. Worse, the project did little to stir the imagination of the public.”25
Another difference in the two periods consists of the relative strength and ideological composition of the president’s party in Congress. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 by a landslide, with 57.4 percent of the popular vote to Hoover’s 39.7 percent and 472 electoral votes to Hoover’s fifty nine (an eight to one advantage). Between 1933 and 1935 Democrats held fifty-nine Senate seats to the Republicans’ thirty-six, while in the House the Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than two and one-half to one. Thus, Roosevelt had a sweeping mandate to change the direction of the country and especially the people’s relationship to the federal government. With the economy starting to improve and people being put to work, the midterm elections in 1934 yielded an even greater Democratic majority—more than two thirds—in both houses. Many members of the Seventy-fifth Congress were now clearly to the left of the president, while the election, according to the New York Times, had “literally destroyed the right wing of the Republican Party.”26 However, Roosevelt’s decision to balance the budget in 1937–1938, which sent the economy once more into depression, resulted in large Republican House gains in the 1938 midterm election.27 Democrats lost a net of seventy-two House seats, bringing to nearly even the balance of power in the House ((D–48.6 percent to R–47 percent). While losing six seats in the Senate, Democrats continued to hold a commanding lead there (more than two-thirds). The president, however, faced divisions within his own party. Conservative Southern Democrats, by dint of seniority, chaired most of the committees, forcing Roosevelt to bend his programs to mollify their states’ rights and racist agenda. Nonetheless, as several chapters in this book attest, while ideological and regional divisions within the Democratic party modified what Roosevelt might have wanted to do, he was able to work with them most of the time, and the New Deal programs, for all their limitations, were the result. By 1938, however, Southern Democrats were becoming more hostile to the president’s designs, strengthening a Republican-conservative Democratic coalition that weakened the president’s ability to expand New Deal style innovations. In the opinion of most historians, this effectively brought the New Deal to a halt, although, as Leuchtenburg has pointed out, the country still placed more faith in the Democrats, and it wanted none of the reforms undone.28
Obama was elected in 2008 with 52.9 percent of the popular vote to McCain’s 45.7 percent and 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173 (a two to one advantage). Democrats held a fifty-seven to forty-one majority in the Senate and a 256 to 178 majority in the House. Since the Democratic majority was half that of FDR’s, Obama’s mandate was not nearly as dramatic as Roosevelt’s had been in 1932 or 1936, nor as big as Lyndon Johnson’s in 1965–1966 when the bulk of the Great Society programs were enacted.29 Thus, the opportunity for enacting Obama’s agenda was a narrower one. Yet Obama had an advantage that neither FDR nor Lyndon Johnson had in the fact that his Democratic party was more consistently liberal than his predecessors’.30 As a result, he was able to pass the first major reform of the health care system as well as a massive stimulus bill in his first year in office. These were major accomplishments comparable in significance to some of Roosevelt’s reforms, yet not a single Republican voted for the health care bill, and only three Republican senators voted for the stimulus, whereas in 1935 sizable majorities of Republicans in both the House and Senate had voted for the Social Security Act, albeit after offering some resistance in committee.31 Instead of fueling a resurgence of support for government intervention, as Roosevelt’s policies had done, Obama’s initiatives were met with hostility from Republicans and tepid support, if not criticism, from many Democrats. With a victory that seemed less than triumphant and unemployment running higher than when Obama took office, the 2010 midterm election turned into a rout for the Democrats, who lost sixty-three House seats, giving Republicans the majority. Although the president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections, this was the largest seat change since the midterm elections of 1938. Thereafter, the intensely partisan—even hostile—nature of the Republicans who had been elected, fueled by Tea Party anger and a rigidly held ideological commitment to reducing government, made getting almost anything done extremely difficult.
The Democratic rout in the 2010 midterm election resulted, in part, from the surge in radical right-wing candidates elected by the Tea Party and the political gridlock that followed was a function of the redistricting accomplished by Republican legislatures. This gerrymandering enabled Republicans to win congressional seats out of proportion to their numbers.32 Gridlock was also aided by the increased use by Republicans of the threat of a filibuster. Legislation could be killed by a minority simply by threatening a filibuster. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that politics today, where a Republican minority can win victories that are at odds with the moderate center of public opinion—or where they can halt any legislative action—defy the logic of the way in which the American political system is supposed to work.33 Although the right wing rails at the power of the executive branch, in reality, a dysfunctional Congress has become more important and powerful than the president. This makes the role of the legislator in chief, despite being elected by a popular majority, subject to the stranglehold of a minority ideology.
While Obama faces a far more difficult political context than that faced by Roosevelt, at least part of the blame must also rest on the shoulders of the man elected president. To be an effective president requires being a good politician, and this involves a set of the specific political skills and experience that Roosevelt possessed in abundance. Among those skills is the ability to know which advice to listen to, which usually means evaluating not just the person giving the advice but the incentives and political context surrounding that person. During his first term Obama continually misjudged his adversaries. Having come into office with the self-image of someone who could heal the deep polarization that had been building in both the electorate and the Congress for over forty years through the power of reason alone, he failed to understand the emotional undercurrents that govern so much of political life. Fear of an America that was on the decline, fear of a way of life that was changing rapidly and of a population that was becoming less white—a fear personified in the president—was surely fueling much of the animosity among the Republican rank and file. In failing to grasp this fear, Obama could not acknowledge it, could not sympathize with it, could not address it in the way that Roosevelt had been able to do in his 1933 inauguration address and thereafter.
Nor could Obama, whose own economic appointees had failed to place strict limits on Wall Street speculation, challenge the moneyed interests that were exploiting this fear with anything like the candor that Roosevelt did when he excoriated the bankers as “unscrupulous money lenders” and “self-seekers” who had abdicated their responsibility to the American people.34 Thus, Obama ended up not only alienating members of the opposing party, but disillusioning many of those who had voted for him thinking that he would do something to curb the power of the big banks and restore fairness to the home mortgage industry. The large Democratic loss in the 2010 midterm election was partly due to the fact that a portion of those who had turned out enthusiastically to vote for Obama in 2008—especially the young—failed to go to the polls in 2010.35
Even before becoming president, Roosevelt had proven to be a master reconciler, demonstrating his ability to bring together urban working-class machine voters with anti-urban agrarian voters, and after becoming president to reconciling southern conservative Democrats with northern liberal Democrats, at least until 1938.36 Carefully cultivating the new urban working class ethnic groups (mostly Catholic) that would become the base of his support, he was also careful not to neglect his fellow (mostly middle-class) Protestants, who were thought to be predominantly Republican.37 Obama, on the other hand, tended to neglect his poor and working-class black and Hispanic base, ignoring the gross inequalities that shaped their lives in his attempt to woo middle class whites and upwardly mobile minorities. Although large majorities of his base continued to vote for him, they had become less enthusiastic by 2010. Despite his attempt to woo white voters, he was able to win no more than 39 percent of the white vote in his 2012 re-election, although it should be noted that it was about the same percentage as won by Clinton in a three-way race in 1992 and exceeded the percentage of the white vote earned by Walter Mondale in 1984, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George McGovern in 1972.38
Political judgment also involves knowing when to stand one’s ground, when to compromise, and how to read the public mood. Roosevelt was a canny politician in this regard, although his Supreme Court–packing scheme may seem to be an exception. Paul H. Appleby, who served in the administration, wrote, “Roosevelt would never have expressed himself about a legislative proposal in terms that deprived him of alternative positions and lines of retreat and modification.”39 Rhetorically, at times he could appear very progressive, but when judging that the political context for what he had wanted to accomplish was going to make that impossible, he could draw back to a compromise position, getting some measure of what he had wanted but not giving away the entire store. Obama, on the other hand, made the mistake when he had a Democratic majority of caving in to the opposition too soon, thus giving away whatever leverage he might have had to achieve a compromise that allowed some part of his agenda to be enacted. Having, perhaps, learned that no matter how far he went to appease the Republicans, they would not meet him halfway, he appeared, at the beginning of this second term, to be laying some clearer markers for what he would not accept and asserting that he would go around Congress by issuing executive orders and taking his message to the American people. However, his offer in the 2013 budget standoff with Republicans to reduce Social Security and Medicare, two pillars of the Democratic coalition, in exchange for increased revenue from taxes only angered his base and failed to win over any Republicans. By then it was too late.
It is common knowledge that presidents today live in a self-isolating bubble. Surrounded by layers of security and people who live and work within the radius of Washington, they have few opportunities to mingle for any length of time with ordinary people. Although the technology for gauging the public mood is today vastly superior to that which existed in the 1930s as the science of public opinion polling, focus groups, survey instruments, and sophisticated marketing tools has been perfected, it is doubtful that presidents today have a better way of judging the public mind than they did in Roosevelt’s time. Those who have studied public opinion polling have exposed the ways in which polls can often be skewed depending on the way a question is asked or by what are offered and not offered as responses. Polls cannot get at the contradictory opinions most people hold and may only gauge a superficial level of opinion and one that is highly volatile. Since most Americans today do not pay much attention to politics and their knowledge of issues is often confused, they may answer a pollster’s questions out of ignorance.
Although limited physically by polio, Roosevelt may have had an advantage in judging the public mood that Obama lacked. Eleanor Roosevelt and the journalists Lorena Hickock and Martha Gellhorn spent time traveling the country listening to the complaints of people suffering from the Depression, gathering data about conditions and feeding back stories and information to Roosevelt and members of the administration. The president himself took several trips around the country during the Depression to survey conditions and to talk to people who were suffering. The feedback he received from the letters sent in response to his fireside chats was another way of gauging the public mood and in Roosevelt’s own opinion, constituted the “most perfect index to the state of mind of the people.”40
The existence of those letters, which can be read at the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, attest also to Roosevelt’s ability to connect with and inspire the American people, perhaps the most important quality for a president. Roosevelt had a unique gift for doing this. Frances Perkins wrote in her memoir of Roosevelt,
His voice and his facial expression as he spoke were those of an intimate friend. After he became President, I often was at the White House when he broadcast.… As he talked his head would nod and his hands would move in simple, natural, comfortable gestures. His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them. People felt this, and it bound them to him in affection.…
…It was this quality [of being one with the people] that made the people trust him and do gladly what he explained was necessary for them to do.41
Some of the skills needed for effectiveness in the presidential office can be learned through experience in jobs with similar requirements. When Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, he had already had significant legislative and executive experience as a member of the New York State Senate, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York State during the difficult, early Depression years. Such experience not only develops managerial skills and enhances one’s understanding of political context, but it also provides a president with a much wider universe of persons whom he can draw on to serve the administration. Many of Roosevelt’s choices were distinctly unusual. Roosevelt brought into his “Brain Trust” a large mix of people. Some were bankers and businessmen, but others were farmers and academics and social workers. Moreover, as noted earlier, several of his appointees and advisors—such as Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, Adolph Berle, Jr., Henry Wallace, Rexford Tugwell, Harold Ickes, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr.—had had experience in the field of social work and/or had been influenced by the social gospel and Progressivism’s reform agenda.42 This background gave some of them a strong incentive to treat government responses to the Depression, not simply as technical economic fixes, but as remedies that would restore human dignity to those who had been beaten down by the Depression and a sense of pride in the culture, history, and landscape of the country.
In contrast, Obama came into office having served as a member of the Illinois Senate for seven years, but less than one term as a U.S. senator, part of which time he was running for president. As a relative newcomer to national office with no executive experience, he lacked the variety of political experience that Roosevelt had. The result was a naïveté about how to get things done and an over-dependence on Clinton-era appointees, inside-the-Beltway politicians, and Republican defense officials, rather than on people who had come to their offices from varied backgrounds. In contrast to Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., whose Treasury Department funded several of the work programs for artists, and his Federal Reserve Chairman, Marriner Eccles, who, though a banker, was a Keynesian even before Keynes, Obama’s economic team, drawn from the Clinton era, consisted of men with deep ties to Wall Street and to the deregulatory anti-government ethos that contributed to the meltdown.43 Consequently, their approach to economic relief lacked the undergirding in humane values that Roosevelt’s advisors had exhibited.
But other presidential skills are not just a matter of previous political experience. They also have to do with personality and character. The most effective presidents have been those who enjoyed the rough and tumble nature of politics. FDR, in particular, was a master politician who reveled in the job. He was said to possess an “irrepressible vitality” whose “vibrant good cheer was contagious.”44 Kenneth S. Davis, while acknowledging that there was a darker side to Roosevelt’s personality, wrote that for the most part he exuded an optimistic faith and a joie de vivre that “bordered often on the miraculous.”
Every day, in steady stream, people came to him with troubling problems and because of their troubles. Often enough, waiting in the anteroom or their appointed times, they showed themselves unhappy; they were tense, anxious, despairing, angry, their faces drawn with fatigue, their gestures nervous. But almost always, after a quarter hour in his presence, they departed his office smiling and refreshed, their spirits uplifted, their confidence restored, as if they had taken a bath in liquid sunlight and been soaked through by it.45
Obama, while praised for his sometimes soaring rhetoric, appeared uncomfortable in the job and often expressed disinterest in playing the “games” that effective politicians must play in order to forge coalitions and win over adversaries. Aloof and reserved, he rarely consulted with members of Congress or met informally with them until his second term and often came across as arrogant, even if that was not his intention. Part of Obama’s difficulty, of course, might be traced to the fact that as a black man he had had to earn his way into the elite white male club from which so many presidents are drawn through the strength of his intellect rather than through the circumstances of his birth. And there was no doubt that racism was at the heart of some of the animosity that was generated against him.46 Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a patrician and perhaps because of his security in this class status could argue that “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that … build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,”47 and he could talk passionately about the inequality that was sapping American freedom and announce to a roaring crowd that he “welcomed the hatred” of the forces of “organized money.”48
Although both Roosevelt and Obama have been labeled pragmatists, perhaps the most important difference between the two presidents lies in the broader vision for the country that Roosevelt possessed and Obama lacked, a vision that could rally the country to re-elect him four times over. Leuchtenburg has called it his “grasp of the interrelationship of the larger aspects of public policy.”49 This broader vision was most visible in the New Deal arts and culture and environmental programs. But it was also visible in his conception that a new age required a new conception of such old American ideals as “liberty,” “security,” and “freedom” that could be implemented in new types of public policies. Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights” incorporated in his 1944 State of the Union message spells out that broader vision.
Both the periods leading up to the Great Depression and Great Recession were characterized by increases in mergers and acquisitions resulting in deepening wealth and income inequality. However, the inequality that characterized the two periods was somewhat different. Picketty and Saez,50 who have done extensive research on income and wealth disparity using tax data, point out that the post–World War I depression and the Great Depression destroyed many businesses and thus significantly reduced top capital incomes. The [income] share of the top decile on the eve of the Great Depression was around 45 percent but dropped during the Great Depression and again during World War II. From the end of that war until the 1970s, it was around 33 percent, when it began to pick up again. Emmanuel Saez, the author of one of the studies, attributes this drop to the regulatory and tax policies enacted by the New Deal as well as to the shock of the war. By the eve of the Great Recession, however, the income share of the top decile had climbed to beyond where it was on the eve of the Great Depression—to 49.7 percent, a level higher than any other year since 1917. While the Great Recession erased some of that income growth for the top decile, it did not do so for long, and the regulatory and tax policies currently on offer by Congress are not likely to undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s.
What is even more interesting about Picketty and Saez’s work than what they show about the income share of the top decile over time is what they show about the fluctuations of the income share of the top percentile—the one percent decried by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The top percentile, they point out,
has gone through enormous fluctuations along the course of the twentieth century, from about 18 percent before WW I, to a peak of almost 24 percent in the late 1920s, to only about 9 percent during the 1960s–1970s, and back to almost 23.5 percent by 2007. Those at the very top of the income distribution therefore play a central role in the evolution of U.S. inequality over the course of the twentieth century.51
Top one percent incomes captured more than half of the overall economic growth of real incomes per family over the period from 1993 to 2011, but between 2000 and 2007, the years preceding the meltdown, the top one percent captured even more—two-thirds of income growth.52
Even more interesting is the composition of the income of the top one percent. During the Great Depression and World War II periods, most of the income of the top one percent came from capital income (mostly dividend income) and to a smaller extent business income, the wage share being very modest, and thus drops in the stock market seem to account for the large fluctuations during this period.53 Whereas top wage shares were flat from the 1920s to 1940 and dropped precipitously during the war, top wage shares are now higher than before World War II. Picketty and Saez conclude from this that the working rich have now replaced the coupon-clipping rentiers.54 The high compensation packages that chief executive officers have given themselves and the failure of Congress to limit these packages, even when government money was helping the banks to stay afloat, may be one reason for this.
The precipitous drop in the income of the top one percent in the Great Depression served for a time to weaken and divide the creditor class, making it possible for more progressive government intervention in the economy, including reforms of the financial system that served to reduce income inequality until the 1970s. Today, however, because a greater share of their income comes from wages rather than dividends, the drop in the income of the one percent in 2008 was not as great as in the early 1930s and rather quickly rebounded. In fact, the richest one percent captured 93 percent of income growth during the first year of recovery (2009–2010) while the bottom 99 percent saw income growth of only 0.2 percent.55 The ability of contemporary CEOs to give themselves enormous salaries and bonuses, even as their businesses face losses, attests to the profound disconnection not only between the managers and shareholders, but between what is good for managers and what is good for the country’s economy. This may be one reason why, unlike a significant proportion of the ruling class during the Great Depression, they have vehemently ruled out any measures to redistribute income, in fact, in order to avoid this, calling for more cuts in domestic spending, especially in those areas that benefit the majority and ultimately the economy as a whole. Today, the revolving door between big government and big business—a phenomenon that barely existed in Roosevelt’s day—makes government redistribution that much harder. The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) that allows corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on advertisements and other political tools calling for the election or defeat of individual candidates is both a reflection of this change in the cohesion of the ruling class and a further enforcer of it. In the absence of tax and regulatory policies that curb the wages of the very rich, as well as changes in campaign financing, the political and economic power and cohesion of the corporate and financial elite will continue to corrupt our democracy and weaken faith that government can be a source for good.
Roosevelt took office at a time of deep disillusionment over foreign entanglements. World War I—“a dirty, unheroic war”—with its terrible toll of trench warfare and horrendous casualties had been called the “war to end all wars.” The American population and much of the Congress vowed never to fight again. As Leuchtenburg put it, “at no time in our history has the hold of pacifism been stronger than in the interlude between the first and second world wars.”56 With the exception of Latin America—in which the United States was engaged in a largely invisible imperialist domination (except, of course, to those who were dominated)—and its Pacific colonies, demobilization had returned the United States to an inward-looking country. Deep protectionist currents in the Congress had resulted in the erection of tariffs on international trade, which, at any rate, the United States was not heavily reliant on, as it had escaped the war with its economy unscathed. With the Crash of 1929, moreover, world trade had come to a grinding halt. Even foreign entanglements meant to keep the peace, such as the League of Nations and the World Court, had been rejected by the Senate. So strong was the isolationist sentiment in Congress that a series of Neutrality Acts was passed that prohibited American ships and citizens from becoming entangled in outside conflicts. While the refusal to use American power to try to mitigate the factors that would eventually lead to World War II seems, in retrospect, mistaken,57 the absence of foreign entanglement meant that when the Depression hit, the Roosevelt administration could focus on fixing its domestic economy. The end of the war had also turned the United States into a creditor nation, and no military–industrial complex existed to vie for a large chunk of the national treasury. No treaties bound the United States to protect foreign states if they were invaded. No fear of imminent attack led the American people to welcome a national security state.
By the time Obama took office, the United States had become a major superpower with over 700 military bases around the world, a military budget amounting to 58 percent of spending by the top ten military powers in the world58 and one that ate up by some estimates 58 percent of domestic discretionary spending,59 the largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world, and a national security state with vast powers of surveillance and coercion. Moreover, it was engaged in waging two wars at once—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and had committed itself to an unending asymmetrical war against a non-state terrorist enemy that could strike at any time. It existed within an international context of swiftly changing geopolitical dynamics that posed grave and seemingly intractable challenges to world peace and stability and was entangled in a vast web of international trade, investment, and labor flows that dwarfed anything in the 1930s. In addition, unlike the United States in the 1930s that had yet to become an empire, the United States was now an empire in decline, a major debtor facing a rising China and maintaining its self-image of superiority largely in respect to its military might.
While the Roosevelt administration faced environmental problems of unprecedented proportions, these problems—deforestation, soil erosion, the need for flood control, the lack of rural electrification—were largely containable within the borders of the United States and, with concentrated attention, could and would be mitigated through wise stewardship and reclamation policies. Though in use, fossil fuels had not yet spawned the massive international cartel that in the twenty-first century would dominate the politics of nations; and the chemical industry had not yet reached its deadly zenith. It was not until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 that the country would become aware of what the chemical industry had been pouring into the environment. Nor had nuclear power become an industry that generated a waste stream so deadly that it would have to be sequestered for tens of thousands of years.
The United States now faces an environmental crisis of far greater dimensions and far more complexity than that faced by the Roosevelt administration, and the crisis is now global. Species extinction and climate change, not to mention pollution from the chemicals that are poured into our environment as well as wastes from industrial agriculture, have reached crisis proportions and, in the case of climate change, the timeline for fixing them is very short, if not past. As the world’s leading climate scientists had predicted, natural disasters are now occurring more frequently and with greater intensity, causing not only massive human and physical dislocations but straining the ability of even most advanced country governments to deal with them. These problems can no longer be contained within the borders of one country, and thus solutions must be found through international negotiations and treaties. But meeting the environmental challenge in the United States is made all the harder by a powerful campaign funded by the fossil fuel lobby that has convinced the Republican party (a party deeply beholden to this lobby) and a portion of the population that climate change is a “hoax,” and that evidence-based science is not a reliable guide for public policy. What is more, we have a Congress that is so ideologically fixated on deficit reduction that it is making it almost impossible to fund the kinds of programs at the level that is necessary to bring about economic recovery and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. All of these differences in both the international geopolitical climate and the environment make the job of a President of the United States today infinitely harder than it was in the 1930s, notwithstanding the fact that the economy in those years had collapsed entirely, whereas the United States finds itself today in a long, fragile, job-poor recovery.
Despite the fact that the political, cultural, and environmental differences between the Great Depression and Great Recession make it harder today to assert a role for government in mitigating the problems that now beset us—from poverty, unemployment, inequality, lack of affordable housing and healthcare, to environmental degradation and climate change—the contributors to this book still believe that government can and must be part of the solution and that there is much that we can learn from a time when government was indeed viewed as the solution, not the problem.
1. Herbert Hoover, Speech at San Francisco, July 27, 1928, accessed January 28, 2013, available at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5063.
2. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), whereby the government was authorized to purchase distressed assets, especially mortgage-backed securities, and supply cash directly to banks.
3. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, altogether the Federal Reserve had, by March 2009, committed $7.77 trillion to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year. Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz, “Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress,” Bloomberg Markets Magazine, November 28, 2011, accessed January 17, 2013, available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html.
4. Trust-busting; federal income taxation; fair labor standards including the prohibition of child labor; the secret ballot; the direct election of senators; the primary, initiative, referendum, and recall in electoral politics; women’s suffrage; and environmental conservation were all a legacy of the Progressive era. So too was the settlement movement that brought together middle-class reformers with impoverished immigrants who were socialized into American society and provided with education, healthcare, and daycare.
5. In addition to New Deal administrators, the social gospel movement contributed leaders to such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, among others. Major social gospel clergymen included Walter Rauschenbush, Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, Richard Ely, Shailer Mathews, George Herron, and Harry Ward. While most of the social gospel spokesmen adhered to a loose set of social-democratic values, Harry Ward was an anti-capitalist revolutionary who called for the complete “overthrow of militarism and of capitalistic industrialism.” Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: The Interpretation of an American Tradition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 113.
6. Ibid., 96.
7. American settlement workers engaged in “the meticulous empirical reconstruction of the ethnic, occupational, industrial and housing patterns within city neighborhoods,” contributing to the emerging field of urban sociology. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 159. Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, was the most prominent reformer of the Progressive era. She fought corruption in Chicago, fostered a more equitable distribution of city services, modernized inspection practices, worked with the Chicago Board of Health, served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America, was elected president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, attended the International Woman’s Conference in The Hague, and was chosen to head the commission to find an end to the war. In 1931, Addams was the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, pioneered public health nursing, helping to found the National Organization for Public Health Nursing and Columbia University’s School of Nursing. Wald also helped institute the NAACP, the United States Children’s Bureau, the National Child Labor Committee, and the National Women’s Trade Union League.
8. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins had once worked at Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement in Chicago and later with immigrant girls in Philadelphia. She earned a master’s degree in social work and worked for a while with the National Consumers League. Harry Hopkins, FDR’s relief administrator and close confidant, had worked in New York City at the Christadora settlement house and then as a case worker for the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Subsequent work as executive secretary of the New York City Bureau of Child Welfare, as director of disaster relief for the Red Cross on the Gulf coast, as general director of the New York Tuberculosis Association, as well as his role as drafter of the charter of the American Association of Social Workers and president of the Association, made him particularly sensitive to the social context in which economic problems arise as well as gave him tremendous experience in the management of large social programs. Adolph Berle, Jr., a member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust and an academic and corporate lawyer, was a critic of corporate concentration and a proponent of government regulation and planning. He had grown up as the son of a Progressive Congregationalist minister who preached the social gospel. He had also worked at the Henry Street settlement in New York City. Henry Wallace, FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture, came from a line of committed Progressives. His grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister and farmer who preached the social gospel and viewed his life’s mission as helping his fellow farmers, a legacy he passed on to his son and grandson. Rexford Tugwell, an economist and also a member of the Brain Trust, was appointed first as Assistant Secretary and then Undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture. Like Berle, he had also been influenced by the social gospel. Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior and director of the Public Works Administration, was a strong supporter of both civil rights and civil liberties. He had been the president of the Chicago NAACP and supported African American contralto Marian Anderson when the Daughters of the American Revolution prohibited her from performing in the DAR Constitution Hall. Ickes had worked at a settlement house in Chicago and had absorbed the settlement workers’ idealism for social justice. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had worked at the Henry Street settlement in New York and shared Progressivism’s concern for social improvement, although he also hewed to the then-dominant belief in balanced budgets and was responsible for pushing Roosevelt to balance the budget in 1937, with disastrous results.
9. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2, 1933–1938 (New York: Viking, 1999), 430–431.
10. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 137–138.
11. Isserman and Kazin contend that although the New Left of the 1960s was thought to have accomplished “nothing,” the United States was left both a more politically and socially contentious society but also a more just, open, and egalitarian one as a result of its presence. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, “The Failure and Success of the New Radicalism,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 214. Katznelson, however, argues that the Progressive possibilities of the New Deal had already been delimited by the war and postwar policies of the 1940s. Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” Fraser and Gerstle, 185–211.
12. For histories of the way in which the right wing engineered a massive sea change in American politics and culture, see: Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Leon Howell, Religion, Politics and Power (Washington, D.C.: The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, undated); Leon Howell, Funding the War of Ideas, A Report to the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries (October 1995); Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Thomas B. Edsell, Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and Sheila D. Collins, Washington’s New Poor Law: Welfare “Reform” and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present (New York: The Apex Press, 2001), Chapter 5, 103–125.
13. Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America’s Conversation with FDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 1.
14. Huey Long and Father Coughlin also grasped the power of the radio and used it brilliantly.
15. Levine and Levine, 5.
16. Ibid.
17. Letter from Gertrude Irene Falk, Waltham, Massachusetts, to President Roosevelt, September 7, 1936, in Levine and Levine, 153.
18. Franklin D. Roosevelt Fireside Chat, Labor Day 1936, accessed February 19, 2013, available at http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3306.
19. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 16.
20. Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Fireside Chat, March 12, 1933, accessed February 19, 2013, available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrfirstfiresidechat.html.
21. The average rating for presidential speeches has dropped by at least 40 percent compared to the 1970s and early 1980s. Martin P. Wattenburg, “The Presidential Media Environment in the Age of Obama,” in Obama Year One, Thomas R. Dye et al., eds. (New York: Longman/Pearson, 2010), 56–58.
22. Another 18 percent of Americans said they did not know where he was born. Stephanie Condon, “One in Four Americans Think Obama Was Not Born in U.S,” CBS News/New York Times poll, April 21, 2011, accessed August 30, 2011, available at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056061-503544.html.
23. Josh Boak, “CBO: Stimulus Added Up to 3.3M Jobs,” Politico, November 22, 2011, accessed March 3, 2013, available at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68965.html. Estimates of the number of jobs saved or created have varied according to the time frame considered as well as the difficulty in estimating such figures.
24. Alan S. Blinder, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013). Journalist Michael Grunwald also argues that Obama’s stimulus was much more significant than he has been given credit for. See Michael Grunwald, The New, New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
25. Jonathan Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 128.
26. Levine and Levine, 128.
27. While the continued economic downturn and high unemployment probably played the strongest role in Republican gains, other factors included Roosevelt’s much-disliked Court-packing scheme and his effort to defeat certain conservative Southern Democrats in the primaries.
28. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 274.
29. Brendan Nyhan, “Obama versus FDR and LBJ,” March 3, 2010, blog post, accessed February 12, 2013, available at http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2010/03/obama-versus-fdr-and-lbj.html.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. FDR and LBJ, however, had two major advantages relative to Obama—more moderate Republicans and fewer filibusters.
32. For an explanation of the way in which the Republicans have used the gerrymander to increase their congressional power out of proportion to their numbers, see Sam Wang, “The Great Gerrymander of 2012,” New York Times, February 3, 2013, Sunday Review, 1.
33. Hacker and Pierson.
34. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933. National Archives, accessed March 3, 2013, available at http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-inaugural.
35. John Nichols, “Young Voter Turnout Fell 60 percent from 2008 to 2010; Dems Won’t Win in 2012 if the Trend Continues,” The Nation, November 16, 2010, accessed December 5, 2013, available at http://www.thenation.com/blog/156470/young-voter-turnout-fell-60-2008-2010-dems-wont-win-2012-if-trend-continues#. The youth vote was down by 10 percent from the last mid-term election of 2006 when Obama wasn’t on the ballot.
36. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 97.
37. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 128–129.
38. Chris Cillizza, “The Fix,” The Washington Post, November 8, 2012, blog post, accessed February 12, 2013, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/11/08/president-obama-and-the-white-vote-no-problem.
39. Paul H. Abbleby in a letter to William Leuchtenburg, August 30, 1950, in Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 193.
40. Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in Levine and Levine, 5; originally in Louis McHenry Howe, “The President’s Mail Bag,” American Magazine, June 1934, 23.
41. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Harper & Row, 1946/1964), 72.
42. See note 7 for the influence of Progressivism and the social gospel on New Deal leaders.
43. Most of Obama’s economic team were protégés of Robert Rubin, who played a role in mentoring people for political office similar to the role Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School had played for Roosevelt. Rubin had been Clinton’s Treasury Secretary but his résumé also included stints as board member and co-chair of Goldman Sachs and director and senior counselor and chair of Citigroup. Unlike the role played by Frankfurter, however, the U.S. government did not have to bail out Harvard Law School as it did Citigroup. Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, had been head of the Federal Reserve of New York, which had failed to regulate the banks in the run-up to the 2008 meltdown; Larry Summers, director of Obama’s National Economic Council, had helped tear down the wall between commercial and investment banking as Treasury Secretary under Clinton and had been a part-time hedge fund manager. Other Rubin protégés included Jason Furman, Peter Orzag, Michael Froman, Philip Murphy, Gene Sperling, Jacob Lew, Gary Gensler, Diana Farrell, Lewis Alexander, Lael Brainar, and David Lipton. All continued to maintain their ties to Rubin. Alter, The Promise, 28–29. The one similarity between Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Obama’s economic advisors was his belief in balanced budgets.
44. Kennedy, 112.
45. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1979), 202.
46. For an analysis of the racialist underpinnings of the ideology of the Republican party, see Sam Tanenhaus, “Original Sin: Why the GOP Is and Will Continue to Be the Party of White People,” The New Republic, February 10, 2013, accessed February 12, 2013, available at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112365/why-republicans-are-party-white-people.
47. Roosevelt, radio address, Albany, N.Y., April 7, 1932 in Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 1, 1928–1932, (New York: Random House, 1938), 624.
48. Roosevelt, speech before the 1936 Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 27, 1936, accessed February 8, 2013, available at http://www.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his2341/fdr36acceptancespeech.htm
49. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 28.
50. Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, no. 1, 2003. The authors define income as the sum of all income components reported on tax returns (wages and salaries; pensions received; profits from businesses; capital income such as dividends, interest, or rents; and realized capital gains) before individual income taxes and excluding government transfers such as Social Security retirement benefits or unemployment compensation benefits.
51. Ibid., 12.
52. Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of the Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2011 Estimates),” January 23, 2013, 4, accessed February 13, 2013, available at http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/#Country:United%20States.
53. Ibid.
54. Picketty and Saez. In 2011, the top decile share dropped slightly to 48.2 percent but was expected to pick up in 2012, Saez, “Striking it Richer,” 3
55. Saez, “Striking it Richer,” 4.
56. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 104.
57. See Leuchtenburg’s argument on this issue in ibid., 104–119.
58. International Institute for Strategic Studies, “Military Balance,” accessed January 30, 2013, chart available at http://www.iiss.org/publications/military-balance/the-military-balance-2012/press-statement/figure-comparative-defence-statistics.
59. See “Cost of War, Security Spending Primer Fact Sheet #2,” no author, accessed January 30, 2013, available at http://costofwar.com/media/uploads/security_spending_primer/discretionary_budget_m_vs_nm.pdf.