| The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, February 20 2009, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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Two crises, two presidents. In the depths of economic crisis, Americans would have been relieved to see a change in the White House no matter who the new president was. But this new president was nothing less than inspirational. "He was so confident and charismatic, he spoke so eloquently and with such compassion, that the American people, whose hope had been all but defeated, trusted him unreservedly," writes Adam Cohen of the New York Times. The past tense gives the game away, of course. The president is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the subject of Nothing to Fear, Cohen's wonderful new history of the first 100 days of FDR's presidency. In book publishing, timing is all, and Cohen's couldn't be better. It's impossible to read Nothing to Fear without experiencing periodic chills as the similarities between two crises, two presidents, throw sparks from the page. But first, a word of caution. There's lots of loose talk -- not least from the current president -- about the current economic troubles being "the worst since the Great Depression," or worse, "another Great Depression." In one instantly infamous formulation, a senior British minister even went so far as to say the current crisis will prove to be "worse than the Great Depression." Cohen's first paragraph is a useful corrective. "Edmund Wilson, the well-known writer, toured Chicago in 1932 and found 'a sea of misery,'" it begins. "In the summer heat, when 'the flies were thick,' a hundred people descended on one dump, 'falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the truck had pulled out and digging in it with sticks and hands.'" Even spoiled meat was grabbed by the hungry. Wilson observed "a widowed housekeeper" scavenging alongside her 14-year-old son. Before picking up discarded meat, Wilson wrote, "she would always take off her glasses so that she would not be able to see the maggots." That said, we are in an economic crisis. And a central element of that crisis is a financial crisis -- the distinction between "financial" and "economic" has never been more important -- which certainly is the worst of its kind since the Great Depression. The lifeblood of a functioning financial system is not so much money as it is trust, and so, to stop banks from collapsing -- the first step to economic recovery -- Roosevelt had to restore people's trust in the system. Barack Obama faces the same challenge. So there are parallels in the two economic crises. More are found in the two men. In the campaign of 1932, the Republicans thought little of the Democratic challenger. "(President Herbert) Hoover's supporters argued that Roosevelt was a dilettante, unsuited to leading the nation even in the best of times," Cohen writes. "He was the sort of politician who told people what they wanted to hear, they charged -- a 'chameleon in plaid.' Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist of his day, dismissed Roosevelt, in a much-quoted putdown, as 'a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President'."
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As for Roosevelt's promised "New Deal," it was nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Hoover called it "inchoate." Hoover was right. Roosevelt's ideas were undeveloped. And a serious contradiction lay within that vagueness. Roosevelt rejected the Republican notion that government must not offer relief. The state must help those who struggle, he declared, "not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty." The Roosevelt administration got government involved in the economy and people's lives like never before. Hoover said this made the election more than "a contest between two men." It was a "contest between two philosophies of government." John McCain would say the same 76 years later. Roosevelt's "philosophy" was clearly expensive. And yet Roosevelt not only hammered Hoover for leading "the greatest spending Administration in peace time in all our history," he promised to cut federal spending by 25 per cent. While Barack Obama was never that rash, he did pair fiscal-conservative themes with activist goals. And he, like FDR, later settled the contradiction in favour of the latter. Roosevelt agonized before agreeing to run a massive deficit. Whether Obama was as reluctant to inflate the already ballooning deficit he inherited remains to be revealed. The parallels between the two men extend to their cabinets. At the start of the 1932 campaign, Roosevelt asked an academic adviser to bring together a panel of academics to talk policy. Several members of this "Brain Trust," as the press dubbed it, later joined Roosevelt's cabinet. They were far from lock-step thinkers. "A more ideological president would have surrounded himself with people who shared his single-minded vision," writes Cohen, but "Roosevelt chose Cabinet members and top aides with a range of beliefs, reflecting his own conflicted views. In the Hundred Days, his advisers included social workers who advocated ambitious relief programs and businessmen who argued for cutting the budget. Factory workers, farmers, and bankers all had their champions. The pragmatic Roosevelt listened to them all, looking for ideas that work." The press came up with a new word for this empirically grounded mode of government: "factocracy." There are plenty of academics around Obama's White House, too. And plenty of contrary views. One academic contrarian is Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, Obama's point man on regulatory affairs. Obama is not guided by any ideological agenda, Sunstein told me in an interview a few months ago. "He is thoroughly pragmatic and empirical."
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In a campaign speech, Roosevelt promised "bold, persistent experimentation." It was "common sense," he insisted, "to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." That is how the New Deal came together. Far from the well-defined package of policies we imagine now, FDR's creation was ad hoc. "To look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan," wrote Raymond Moley, Roosevelt's top aide, "was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior designer." Obama's ad hocery is obvious. And he's being pummelled for it. It seems pundits expected the new president to reveal a world-changing master plan that would be up and running by the time Washington's cherry trees blossom. Of course, the clutter of Obama's bedroom -- to extend Raymond Moley's metaphor -- will ultimately be forgotten if the United States rebounds and Obama is remembered as a great president, or even a good one. Then, we can be sure his actions will cohere in memory and form the master plan that never existed. Another thing that will be forgotten if there is a successful Obama presidency is the opposition. At the time, the left was contemptuous of FDR. The New Deal, declared Socialist Norman Thomas, was an attempt "to cure tuberculosis with cough drops." The right seethed. H.L. Mencken called the Brain Trust "the sorriest mob of mountebanks ever gathered together at one time." William Randolph Hurst mobilized his media empire to oust Roosevelt in the 1936 election. "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today," FDR said as the vote loomed. "They are unanimous in their hatred of me -- and I welcome their hatred." These are early days but Obama is already encountering scorn from the left and naked hostility from the right. The president's talk of inclusiveness seems unlikely to last to the next election, though I wouldn't put money on him welcoming his opponents' hatred. As to the outcome of that election, that's anyone's guess. But there can't be much doubt that when Obama closes his eyes to daydream, his mind occasionally drifts back to 1936. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |