krebscycle

Here’s FDR’s banking program, in his own words:

Remember that the essential accomplishment of the new legislation is that it makes it possible for banks more readily to convert their assets into cash than was the case before. More liberal provision has been made for banks to borrow on these assets at the Reserve Banks and more liberal provision has also been made for issuing currency on the security of those good assets. This currency is not fiat currency. It is issued only on adequate security – and every good bank has an abundance of such security. [Fireside Chat 1]

Weirdly enough, both the far right and the poutrage “left” considers FDR to have been at least somewhat anti-capitalist. Here’s Eric Rauchway writing at Crooked Timber.

But the problem comes partly from Roosevelt himself: he is unrepackageable for modern America. He had too little reverence for the financiers who are the acknowledged masters of our universe – his attitude toward them ranged from what one banker called merely “naughty” to sadism – when his program to raise commodity prices brought squeals from short-sellers, he ordered Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to “squeeze the life out of the shorts and put the price up just as far as you can.” He said so, Morgenthau wrote at the time, “with fight in his tone of voice.” Remnick and Stewart notwithstanding, whatever restrained contempt the President was able to show for Mitt Romney in the second debate (“Please proceed” surely has a fine Anglo-Saxon subtext) he’s not likely to show Rooseveltian fight against the Wall Street titans. Citizens United means he can’t, and his career – like that of all modern Democrats of presidential timbre – suggests he doesn’t want to.

Of course, the right wing bankers hated FDR with  passion. But they hate PBO just as much.

Here’s Roosevelt in Fireside chat #3

For years the Government had not lived within its income. The immediate task was to bring our regular expenses within our revenues. That has been done. It may seem inconsistent for a government to cut down its regular expenses and at the same time to borrow and to spend billions for an emergency. But it is not inconsistent because a large portion of the emergency money has been paid out in the form of sound loans which will be repaid to the Treasury over a period of years; and to cover the rest of the emergency money we have imposed taxes to pay the interest and the installments on that part of the debt. So you will see that we have kept our credit good.

Not exactly a call for the destruction of the plutocracy is it? Fireside chat #6

In our efforts for recovery we have avoided on the one hand the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all-embracing Government. We have avoided on the other hand the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help. The course we have followed fits the American practice of Government – a practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet concrete needs – a practice of courageous recognition of change.

Why he sounds just like another President in favor of “taking action step by step”.

Different from a great part of the world, we in America persist in our belief in individual enterprise and in the profit motive; but we realize we must continually seek improved practices to insure the continuance of reasonable profits, together with scientific progress, individual initiative, opportunities for the little fellow, fair prices, decent wages and continuing employment.[13]

And then there were the critics:

“The only difference between Hoover and Roosevelt is that Hoover is a hoot owl and Roosevelt is a scrootch owl. A hoot owl bangs into the roost and knocks the hen clean off, and catches her while she’s falling. But a scrootch owl slips into the roost and talks softly to her. And she just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know, there ain’t no hen.” – Huey Long.

Now in the third year of his [Roosevelt’s] administration, we find more of our people unemployed than at any other time. We find our houses empty and our people hungry, many of them half-clothed and many of them not clothed at all.

Some more Senator Long:

had Mr. Roosevelt proceeded along the lines that he stated were necessary for the decentralization of wealth, he would have gone, my friends, a long way already, and within a few months he would have probably reached a solution of all of the problems that afflict this country. said

Here’s Howard Zinn summarizing that famous 100 days:

That first objective-to stabilize the system for its own protection- was most obvious in the major law of Roosevelt’s first months in office, the National Recovery Act (NRA). It was designed to take control of the economy through a series of codes agreed on by management, labor, and the government, fixing prices and wages, limiting competition. From the first, the NRA was dominated by big businesses and served their interests. As Bernard Bellush says (The Failure of the N.R.A.), its Title I, it turned much of the nation’s power over to highly organized, well-financed trade associations and industrial combines. The unorganized public, otherwise known as the consumer, along with the members of the fledgling trade-union movement, had virtually nothing to say about the initial organization of the National Recovery Administration, or the formulation of basic policy.“ Where organized labor was strong, Roosevelt moved to make some concessions to working people. But: "Where organized labor was weak, Roosevelt was unprepared to withstand the pressures of industrial spokesmen to control the … NRA codes.” Barton Bernstein (Towards a New Past) confirms this: “Despite the annoyance of some big businessmen with Section 7a, the NRA reaffirmed and consolidated their power… .” Bellush sums up his view of the NRA: The White House permitted the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and allied business and trade associations to assume overriding authority… . Indeed, private administration became public administration, and private government became public government, insuring the marriage of capitalism with statism.

The socialist Norman Thomas described the New Deal as an attempt “to cure tuberculosis with cough drops.”

An angrier populist named Glenn Beck Father Coughlin said:

“Mr. Roosevelt who was very loquacious in 1933 about driving the money changers from the temple, is now bent upon another policy I think, that of driving the workman out of decent annual wages” […] We’re through with the sham battle of politicians.

That guy didn’t like the Federal Reserve one bit. Even as the war was about to start, not everyone was too happy.

And it is the Democratic Party, Franklin Roosevelt’s party which controls the state governments in the South. Argue with these Democrats about the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, which “guarantee” the political rights of the Negroes. If you insist you will get fourteen or fifteen bullets. That is the only kind of amendment the Southern Democrats have allowed the Negroes for many years. So that the vast majority of Negroes in the South will tell Roosevelt and Hull, “What is this democracy I am to fight for? Where is it? Since when are Cotton Ed Smith and Senator Bilbo and the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt my good friends? Why must I die for them? I am not afraid to fight. Negroes have been some of the greatest fighters in history. But the democracy that I want to fight for, Hitler is not depriving me of. I know the people who have kept me away from it for seventy-five years by rifles and revolvers, by state law and lynch law. You, Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Jack Garner, tell us why we must go and shed our blood for something that we have never had.” “We Americans must fight against aggression,” say Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, seeking to drive American workers, white and black, into war. No wonder all of these politicians are so scared of raising the question of war directly to the Negroes. Every word they say turns to ashes in their mouths. Let us agree that Negroes must fight against aggression. But who are the aggressors against the Negroes? Hitler? Nonsense. The Southerners of the Democratic Party are the greatest aggressors against the Negroes in American history, and the North is not far behind them. “Oh! but we mean aggression in foreign countries, aggression by Mussolini, Hitler and Japan,” say Roosevelt and Hull. http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1939/xx/war.htm

By the way, CLR James who said that lived a life that a novelist could not make up.