Thoughts

I have just completed The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes (Harper Collins, 2007, New York). It is not "just" a book about the Great Depression, but it also chronicles the methods used by Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal Brain Trust to transform the Federal Government into the overarching mammoth it is today.

I especially recommend Chapter Eight, "The Chicken Versus The Eagle", telling the story about how a family of kosher butchers from Brooklyn, the Schechters, were pers I mean prosecuted under the National Reconstruction Act, and succesfully defended themselves before the Supreme Court. (Especially inspiring to anyone who is suspicious of Congressional attempts to use the Commerce Clause to control every aspect of life.)(Note that this also led directly to Roosevelt's attempts/threats to "pack" the Supreme Court.)

Aside from Chapter Eight--too long to quote here--two items stand out in my mind.

The first is talking about Wendel Wilkie's from a staunch Democrat to... Well, when he tried to run for President as a Republican, he didn't fit--then. Today, however...

In discovering the old British Whigs, {Wilkie} discovered their liberalism--a liberalism that antedated {President Woodrow} Wilson* and focused on the individual. It resembled the liberalism of Europe that he had heard about in childhood. Revisiting that old liberalism, he could see that while Roosevelt might call himself a liberal, the inexorable New Deal emphasis on the group over the individual was not liberal in the classic sense. Liberalism had historically included liberal economics, and Roosevelt had turned away from that. Wilkie was finding the intellectual ammunition for his battles...

*Whom Wilkie had previously been described as being a "follower" of.

(Page 329.)

Later, author Shlaes describes Wilkie's speech accepting the Republican candidacy for President in 1940:

...Wilkie asked the public to think about what it meant to be an American liberal. Was a liberal merely a left progressive? Or was a liberal someone who believed in liberalism in the classic sense, in the primacy of the individual and his freedom? Wilkie railed against Roosevelt's "philosophy of distributed scarcity." And he argued, speaking of both the United States and Europe, that it was "from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power...

"American liberalism does not consist merely in reforming things. It consists also in making things. The ability to grow, the ability to make things." Redistribution was a loser's game: "I am a liberal because I believe that in our industrial age there is no limit to the productive capacity of any man." Growth, not government action, would lift the United States out of its troubles: "I say that we must substitute for the philosophy of distributed scarcity the philosophy of unlimited productivity. I stand for the restoration of full production and reemployment by private enterprise in America."

{Pages 374-375.}
(Okay, so he might fit better with today's libertarians, but the libertarians who have a chance in hell of getting elected all run as Republicans.)

All of which brings to mind my post Liberals, Conservatives, ???

Anyway.

For some reason, reading the post entitled The president as hack ideologue at Powerline Blog reminded me of this paragraph on pages 358-359 of The Forgotten Man:

The extent of the political patronage of {the 1936 national elections} had finally sunk in. So had Roosevelt's method of operation. Roosevelt might quote Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson had deplored the creation of unnecessary government offices. With their new strength, {Republican} lawmakers prepared a law that would pass in 1939. The Hatch Act would limit political activities by government employees of the sort that had been so effective in the presidential election. The nation was beginning to know Roosevelt's pattern. Writer Turner Carledge laid that pattern out in detail. "First, there is the early 'idea' period, when either the President or some group of his associates hatches the rather rough form of what is to be attempted. Then there is the selling stage, in which the person or group who thinks up the idea has to 'sell' it the other. There follows in third place the 'method' stage when the modus operandi is evolved. Then there comes the final 'publicity' stage when the program is announced and the argument is submitted both to Congress and the public in behalf of it's adoption."

Of course, these days, the "pattern" seems to be "idea" first, but "selling" is irrelevant, as What Obama Wants, Obama Gets. Then, "publicity" comes before any "evolution" that should take place during the "method" stage... "Familiar with it? No, I haven't read it, why should I read it?"