12.31.08
People were starving and they did nothing
At this time, with our nation in a bad economic situation, it’s key to have the facts about what really happened the last time something like this occurred. Via Bondad, The Great Depression, Pt. I:
This article is the first in a series on the Great Depression. I am writing this with the help of New Deal Democrat (who blogs over at Economic Populist). The purpose of this series is simply to talk about the Great Depression. The reason for writing this article is the emergence of the “FDR made the Depression worse” talking point from the Right Wing Noise Machine — econ division. While none of the stories using this line have any facts to back them up — no charts, no graphs no data — they continue to spew this talking point. So, let’s get some data — as in facts — to see that actually happened.
Of course one the GOP and wing-nuts in particular have been trying to tear down what FDR and our leaders accomplished in the 30′s and 40′s economically since they took office in March of 1933. So their effort to change history is not new, but just more shameful now. Especially taking this into consideration, another excerpt from Bondad:
So the short version is pretty clear. From 1929 – 1933 the US economy experienced the worst economic slowdown in its history:
[By 1932,] National Income which had been $87.4 billion in 1929, fell with the value of the dollar to $41.7 billion in 1932. Unemployment rose: 4 million in 1930, 8 million in 1931, 12 million in 1932. … Net Investment in 1931 was minus $358 million (in 1929 prices); then next year it fell to a disheartening minus $5.8 billion. .. Wage payments [went down] from $50 billion to $30 billion. And, as prices and income fell, the burdens of indebtedness — farm mortgages, railroad bonds, municipal and state debts — became unsupportable.
(- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Crisis of the Old Order”, p.248)
In case you were wondering:
The President was a Republican
The Senate was controlled by Republicans
The House was controlled by Republicans from March 4, 1929 – March 3, 1931. From March 4, 1931 to March 3, 1933 the House was tied.
And one thing the Republicans and the plutocrats of the day were sure of, was that government should do absolutely nothing to help its destitute citizenry. When in 1930 a long summer drought killed cattle and crops in the southwest, Hoover asked Congress to appropriate money for government loans to enable farmers to buy seed, fertilizer, and cattle feed. But when Democratic senators sough to apply the same program to human beings in addition to livestock, Hoover “reaffirmed his unwavering opposition to such proposals.” (Schlesinger, p. 170)
Hoover appointed Walter S. Gifford, president of AT&T, to the “President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief.” Appearing before a Senate committee,“Gifford disclosed imerturbably that he did not know how many people were idle, that he did not know how many were receiving aid, that he did not know that the standards of assistance were in the various states, that he did not know how much money had been raised in his own campaign, that he knew nothing of the ability of local communities to raise relief funds ,, that he did not consider most of this information as of much importance to his job….
But on one question Gifford was clear: he was against federal aid.”…that it would reduce the size of private charity.” His “sober and considered judgment” was that “federal aid would be a ‘disservice’ to the jobless.”Gifford was hardly the only precursor of the malign right wing ideology of today:
Albert H. Wiggin of the Chase Manhattan Bank said, “There is no commission or any brain in the world that can prevent [business downturns].” Senator La Follette asked “whether he thought the capacity of human suffering to be unlimited.” ”I think so.” the banker replied.
….
“The fact that we have let nature take its course,” said Richard Whitney of the Stock Exchange, “may augur well for the ultimate prosperity of the country.” And if recovery were inevitable, then the state must take care to do nothing which might hold it back….
….
Of all the threatened forms of governmental interference, the most sinister, in the judgment of many businessmen, was the dole for the jobless.
….
“If this country ever voted a dole, said Silas Strawn, now head of the United States Chamber of Commerce, “we’ve hit the toboggan as a nation.”…[M]any conservatives affected to regard federal aid to idle men and women as spelling the end of the republic.”(Schlesinger, pp.177-180)
It is worth re-reading the first vignette from Schlesinger above. Republicans today, just like Republicans then, believe that the appropriate response in the face of the ultimate failure of the economic system to provide jobs, housing, or even to prevent a large percentage of its citizenry from starving, was to DO NOTHING.
There’s much more in the post and this and subsequent parts of the series are required reading. The part about the Great Depression that needs to be kept in perspective is that the stock market crash came in October 1929 - Hoover’s first year as president. It was his and his party’s inability to deal with it over the next three years that made the depression so “Great”. We can only hope with their descendants now in the majority so early in this economic decline, that this economic downturn will only be historic because it did not become as great. It was avoided by doing something, what was needed, much earlier and we didn’t sit idle.