Rethinking FDR

How to Think About the 1930s

Excerpt:

In Ms. Shlaes's account, Roosevelt's policies, by and large, do more damage than Hoover's. Whereas Hoover had a free-market lobe on one side of his brain, Roosevelt was all state action--most egregiously in his all-controlling National Recovery Administration of 1933-35, which tied the American economy in knots and was widely unpopular. Ms. Shlaes gives Roosevelt credit for the reciprocal trade program--a policy that at least gestured toward free trade--but he backed it reluctantly and implemented it lackadaisically. It did little for either American or world recovery. Hoover's justly reviled Smoot-Hawley act of 1930--raising tariffs just when they needed to be lowered--remained the basic trade law of the land. In Roosevelt's defense, one must note that protectionism was, at the time, a multinational disease of pandemic proportions.

Comment: We live in the long economic shadow of FDR's policies - eg. a Social Security system that lacks long term viability.

The Forgotten Man

For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s