90 years on, evergreen objections & evergreen coup talk:
People who are against social programs have grandchildren who are against social programs. Today’s arguments against big spending on infrastructure and social needs are the very same as the objections hurled at Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal 90 years ago. Not a few of those hurlers dreamt of a coup, too.
I think of Karl Rove, campaign manager for George W. Bush and then co-founder of a committee that successfully raises money for Republican candidates, as one of the Wall Street Journal’s least enraging columnists. I read the Journal faithfully, respect its reporting and, in the interest of seeing what’s happening outside my bubble, sometimes drop in on its op-ed pages.
Though of a different ideological camp than most of its opinion writers, I miss – even occasionally am enlightened by – grounded conservative comment. Really. But 21st century conservative commentary has largely devolved into making stuff up and parroting whatever dog whistle the whacky-est Republican leaders are blowing at the moment. (Putatively liberal commentary, to be fair, has generally devolved into being shocked by the latest political hypocrisy.) If you’re hoping for a mild, sunny future, look elsewhere.
Rove’s column conveniently appears next to the day’s book review. (The Journal’s book reviews, btw, are consistently excellent.) He’s a good writer and fitfully diverts from the day’s talking points, so I read his column of July 29th to get a reasoned assessment of the American Jobs Plan. He proceeded to clearly lay out what has been every cautious observer’s argument against piling the massively expensive (another $3.5 trillion) Jobs Plan on top of a massively expensive infrastructure bill ($550 billion in new spending, as of this writing).
He ticks down what he considers inevitable results: “runaway inflation,” “confiscatory taxes,” a debt that can never be reduced, and a suffocating “cradle-to-grave welfare state.”
Like his op-ed forebears, however, Rove then careens into hyperbole. These bills, he says, lead to nothing less than “transforming the U.S.” in all the wrong ways. Something dark awaits.
Missing from his analysis is who is funding the broad attacks on social programs, voting rights, election integrity, regulators and anything else purporting to amend the course of certain humans’ events. Americans don’t like to acknowledge social classes, much less class warfare. But some serious scholarship suggests we should. See: the upper-crust network of “conservative” cells and individuals who share money and directorships with the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.
Researching my next book brought me to long-ago predictions of what Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s was going to cause.
It was familiar ground. Herbert Hoover, an embittered ex-president, was calling The New Deal “class hatred … preached from the White House.” He saw “despotism” leading to “universal bankruptcy.”
Roosevelt’s storm of new social programs am to treat the specific woes of Depression-era agriculture, industry, unemployment, foreclosure, finance and banking, stalled economic development, areas without electricity, and even income inequality.
Substitute “internet access” for “electricity,” and add “climate” to Roosevelt’s concerns, and you’ve got a list of modern-day holes we’re still trying to fill.
Filling those holes someday would indeed transform America, although apparently not to Rove’s tastes.
Most of the New Deal programs, in fact, struggled. They fell short of their objectives or were compromised by a conservative Supreme Court not unlike today’s. Some had troubled sunsets. Their banking reform measures (Glass-Steagall, which stopped banks from investing consumers’ deposits in ventures that could – and did – collapse ) were ultimately repealed in 1999. It opened the door to a speculative rebirth (e.g., “collateralized debt obligations.”). Congress erected new guardrails (the Dodd-Frank act), but those were emasculated in 2018.
Social Security, one of the few surviving New Deal programs, remains under constant congressional threat of cutbacks.
Like today, the hyperbole from the Right in the 1930s (there was plenty from the left, too) was significantly financed by Wall Street. An all-star cast of owners and business leaders, conservative Democrats and the Republican Party founded the American Liberty League to promote the cause and support friendly politicians.
The DuPont family provided about 30% of its $1.2 million ($19.2 million today) budget, and was joined by the heads of General Motors, General Foods, Sun Oil, J.P. Morgan, Hearst newspapers and the Carnegie Institute.
It’s founding worry was that social supports had ground American individualism to a halt. Decades later, historian Frederick Rudolph unearthed a chillingly royal exchange of letters from 1934 between two of the one-percenters on the need to respond. One, retired DuPont executive R.R.M. Carpenter, mourned that “Five negroes in my place in South Carolina refused work this spring . . . saying they had easy jobs with the government. A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”
A response was crucial. Someone, Carpenter suggested, should get FDR to do something about “the general direction of the country.”
“At the time,” Rudolph noted, “the Republican Party was bankrupt of leadership and purpose.” Then, too, there was opportunity for private parties to fill the power vacuum.
Their League’s complaints generally centered on fear of losing some of their wealth (redistributing it through the still-reviled estate tax), federal overreach, and, per Rudolph, defining “freedom” as a license to do as one pleased.
It escalated onto a “Business Plot” to replace Roosevelt with a compliant, un-elected “secretary of general affairs” who would not only reverse the offending programs but quickly return the United States to the gold standard.
For this, some Liberty League leaders – wealthy men from J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, E.F. Hutton, General Motors, Sun Oil, and the ubiquitous DuPont company – tried to convince a Marine hero, the two-time medal of honor winner Gen. Smedley Butler, to gather and lead an army of 500,000 veterans to the White House. FDR, awed, would step aside.
Butler, like Gen. Miley today, wanted nothing to do with it. He blew the whistle at congressional hearings about the conspiracy to recruit him for a coup. The committee’s report found ample reason to believe him, but not unlike today’s guardians of democracy, representatives ultimately decided not to investigate.
This may not be equivalent to insurrectionists storming the Capitol Building and politicians cynically denying what the rest of us see, but it’s close.