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A sharply critical new look at Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency reveals government policies that hindered economic recovery from the Great Depression -- and are still hurting America today.
In this shocking and groundbreaking new book, economic historian Burton W. Folsom exposes the idyllic legend of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a myth of epic proportions. With questionable moral character and a vendetta against the business elite, Roosevelt created New Deal programs marked by inconsistent planning, wasteful spending, and opportunity for political gain -- ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America so desperately needed from the Great Depression. Folsom takes a critical, revisionist look at Roosevelt's presidency, his economic policies, and his personal life.
Elected in 1932 on a buoyant tide of promises to balance the increasingly uncontrollable national budget and reduce the catastrophic unemployment rate, the charismatic thirty-second president not only neglected to pursue those goals, he made dramatic changes to federal programming that directly contradicted his campaign promises. Price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism were all hidden inside the alphabet soup of his popular New Deal, putting a financial strain on the already suffering lower classes and discouraging the upper classes from taking business risks that potentially could have jostled national cash flow from dormancy. Many government programs that are widely used today have their seeds in the New Deal. Farm subsidies, minimum wage, and welfare, among others, all stifle economic growth -- encouraging decreased productivity and exacerbating unemployment.
Roosevelt's imperious approach to the presidency changed American politics forever, and as he manipulated public opinion, American citizens became unwitting accomplices to the stilted economic growth of the 1930s. More than sixty years after FDR died in office, we still struggle with the damaging repercussions of his legacy.
- Sales Rank: #165079 in Books
- Published on: 2009-11-17
- Released on: 2009-11-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .80" w x 5.31" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Review
"I have been proud to support research for this book." -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
"History books and politicians in both parties sing the praises for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency and its measures to get America out of the Great Depression. What goes unappreciated is the fact that many of those measures exacerbated and extended the economic downturn of the 1930s. New Deal or Raw Deal? is a careful documentation and analysis of those measures that allows us to reach only one conclusion: While President Roosevelt was a great man in some respects, his economic policy was a disaster. What's worse is that public ignorance of those policy failures has lent support for similar policies in later years. Professor Burt Folsom has produced a highly readable book and has done a yeoman's job in exposing the New Deal." -- Walter E. Williams, John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, George Mason University
About the Author
Burton W. Folsom, Jr., Ph.D., a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan, is the author of several books. A regular columnist for The Freeman, he has also written for The Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, Policy Review, and Human Events.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
THE MAKING OF THE MYTH:
FDR AND THE NEW DEAL
On May 9, 1939, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the treasury and one of the most powerful men in America, had a startling confession to make. He made this remarkable admission before the influential Democrats who ran the House Ways and Means Committee. As he bared his soul before his fellow Democrats, Morgenthau may have pondered the irony of his situation.
Here he was -- a major cabinet head, a man of great authority. The source of his power, of course, was his intimate friendship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Morgenthau was the president's longtime neighbor, close confidant, and -- would be for over a decade -- his loyal secretary of the treasury. Few men knew the president better, talked with him more, or defended him more faithfully. Eleanor Roosevelt once said Morgenthau was one of only two men who could tell her husband "categorically" that he was wrong and get away with it. Roosevelt and Morgenthau liked to banter back and forth at cabinet meetings, pass each other secret notes, meet regularly for lunch, and talk frequently on the phone. Morgenthau cherished a photo of himself and the president in a car, side by side, friends forever, with Roosevelt's inscription: "To Henry," it read, "from one of two of a kind."
But in May 1939, Morgenthau had a problem. The Great Depression -- the most devastating economic catastrophe in American history -- was not only persisting, in some ways it was getting worse. Unemployment, for example, the previous month had again passed the 20 percent mark. Here was Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury, an expert on finance, a fount of statistics on the American economy during the 1930s; his best friend was the president of the United States and the author of the New Deal; key public policy decisions had to go through Morgenthau to get a hearing. And yet, with all this power, Morgenthau felt helpless. After almost two full terms of Roosevelt and the New Deal, here are Morgenthau's startling words -- his confession -- spoken candidly before his fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee:
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises....I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started....And an enormous debt to boot!
In these words, Morgenthau summarized a decade of disaster, especially during the years Roosevelt was in power. Indeed average unemployment for the whole year in 1939 would be higher than that in 1931, the year before Roosevelt captured the presidency from Herbert Hoover. Fully 17.2 percent of Americans, or 9,480,000, remained unemployed in 1939, up from 16.3 percent, or 8,020,000 in 1931. On the positive side, 1939 was better than 1932 and 1933, when the Great Depression was at its nadir, but 1939 was still worse than 1931, which at that time was almost the worst unemployment year in U.S. history. No depression, or recession, had ever lasted even half this long.
Put another way, if the unemployed in 1931 under Hoover would have been lined up one after the other in three separate lines side by side, they would have extended from Los Angeles across the country to the border of Maine. In 1939, eight years later, the three lines of unemployed Americans would have lengthened, heading from the border of Maine south to Boston, then to New York City, to Philadelphia, to Washington, D.C., and finally into Virginia. That line of unemployed people from the border of Maine into Virginia was mostly added when Roosevelt was president.
We can visualize this hypothetical line of unemployed Americans, but what about the human story of their suffering. Who were some of them, and what were they thinking? In the line at Chicago, we would encounter salesman Ben Isaacs. "Wherever I went to get a job, I couldn't get no job," Isaacs said of the prolonged depression. "I went around selling razor blades and shoe laces. There was a day I would go over all the streets and come home with fifty cents, making a sale. That kept going until 1940, practically." Letters to President Roosevelt tell other stories. For example, in Chicago, a twelve-year-old Chicago boy wrote the president, "We haven't paid the gas bill, and the electric bill, haven't paid grocery bill for 3 months....My father he staying home. All the time he's crying because he can't find work. I told him why are you crying daddy, and daddy said why shouldn't I cry when there is nothing in the house." In our hypothetical unemployment line at Latrobe, Pennsylvania, we might see the man who wrote in 1934, "No home, no work, no money. We cannot go along this way. They have shut the water supply from us. No means of sanitation. We cannot keep the children clean and tidy as they should be." From Augusta, Georgia, in 1935 came this letter to the president: "I am eating flour bread and drinking water, and no grease and nothing in the bread....I aint even got bed[d]ing to sleep on...." But even he was better off than the man from Beaver Dam, Virginia, who wrote the president, "We right now, have no work, no winter bed clothes....Wife don't even have a winter coat. What are we going to do through these cold times coming on? Just looks we will have to freeze and starve together."
High unemployment was just one of many tragic areas that made the 1930s a decade of disaster. The Historical Statistics of the United States, compiled by the Census Bureau, fills out the rest of the grim picture. The stock market, which picked up in the mid-1930s, had a collapse later in the decade. The value of all stocks dropped almost in half from 1937 to 1939. Car sales plummeted one-third in those same years, and were lower in 1939 than in any of the last seven years of the 1920s. Business failures jumped 50 percent from 1937 to 1939; patent applications for inventions were lower in 1939 than for any year of the 1920s. Real estate foreclosures, which did decrease steadily during the 1930s, were still higher in 1939 than in any year during the next two decades.
Another disaster sign in the 1930s was the spiraling national debt. The United States had budget surpluses in 1930 and 1931, but soon government spending ballooned and far outstripped revenue from taxes. The national debt stood at $16 billion in 1931; by the end of the decade the debt had more than doubled to more than $40 billion. Put another way, the national debt during the last eight years of the 1930s, less than one decade, grew more than it had in the previous 150 years of our country's existence. From 1776 to 1931, the spending to support seven wars and at least five recessions was more than offset by the debt acquired during the 1930s. Put yet another way, if Christopher Columbus, on that October day when he discovered the New World, could have arranged to put $100 a minute in a special account to defray the American debt, by 1939 his account would not yet have accumulated enough cash to pay for just the national debt acquired in the 1930s alone. In other words, if we were to pay $100 a minute (in 1930s dollars) into a special '30s debt account, we would need more than 450 years to raise enough money to pay off the debt of that decade.
The economic travail of the New Deal years can also be seen in the seven consecutive years of unbalanced trade from 1934 to 1940. Much of our government spending during the decade went to prop up prices of wheat, shirts, steel, and other exports, which in turn, because of the higher prices, made them less desirable as exports to other countries. From 1870 to 1970, only during the depression years plus the year 1888 did the United States have an unfavorable balance of trade.
Hard times are often followed by social problems. The United States in the 1930s was no exception. For example, the American birthrate dropped sharply, and the country's population increased only 7 percent in that decade. During the more prosperous 1920s, by contrast, the birthrate was higher and the country's population increased 16 percent.
For many Americans, the prolonged Great Depression of the 1930s became a time of death. As one eighty-year-old wrote, "Now [December 1934] there are a lot of us [who] will choose suicide in preference to being herded into the poor house." Apparently, thousands of Americans agreed with her, because suicides increased from 1929 to 1930 and remained high throughout the 1930s. Equally sad were the people who gave up on life after prolonged despair and took their lives more subtly, through an accidental fall, reckless driving, or being hit by a train. All three of these categories hit record numbers of deaths per capita during the New Deal years.
The loss of the will to live was also reflected in life expectancy during the 1930s. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, life expectancy in the United States was 63.3 years. Since 1900, it had steadily increased sixteen years -- almost half a year each year of the first third of the twentieth century. In 1940, however, after more than seven years of the New Deal, life expectancy had dropped to 62.9 years. Granted, the slight decline during these years was not consistent -- two of the seven years showed an increase over 1933. But the steady increase in life expectancy from 1900 to 1933 and from 1940 to the end of the century was clearly interrupted only during the New Deal years.
The halt in improved life expectancy hit blacks even harder than whites. In 1933, black Americans could expect to live only 54.7 years, but in 1940 that had dropped to 53.1 years. Both before and after the Great Depression, the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites had narrowed, but from 1933 to 1940 it actually widened. Strong indications are that blacks suffered more than whites during Roosevelt's first ter...
Most helpful customer reviews
107 of 138 people found the following review helpful.
Please, no more new deals
By M. Randall
Folsom has delivered a book that is tough to put down. While flying to a conference the other day, I was reading New Deal or Raw Deal and telling my friend (who was reading another book) how great Folsom's book is and talking about some key points brought up by Dr. Folsom. I left my seat for a moment; when I returned, my friend was reading Folsom's book, and I had a hard time getting it back.
Roosevelt helped create major rifts between those who were wealthy and those who were poor and middle class. He even indicated he did that to win the election rather than pursue what was best for the country. He tried to stack the Supreme Court and used the IRS to harass his major critics.
I've had to remind myself repeatedly that this is not a fictional work and that it is about a president in the USA rather than a dictator in some distant country. For example, the New Deal's birth of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was bizarre. "It allowed American industrialists to collaborate to set the prices of their products and even the wages and hours that went into making them. Leaders in all industries, from steel and coal to shoulder pads and dog food, were invited to sit down and write codes of fair competition that would be binding on all producers in their industry. Laborers were often allowed to organize, and anti-trust laws were suspended." (pp. 43-44) The result was that many big companies could easily take business from smaller companies because the larger companies controlled the price fixing. An example Folsom uses is Jacob Maged of Jersey City, NJ. After 22 years of running a successful small business pressing clothes, Maged's reputation was one of quality work at a reasonable cost. The NRA then demanded that he charge 40 cents to press a suit instead of 35 cents. He was sent to jail and given a $100 fine for refusing to increase his prices.
Folsom has thoroughly documented the facts in the book, including several pages of sources.
By the end of the book, it is no mystery whether Roosevelt orchestrated the New Deal or a raw deal.
This book is incredibly timely. The most disturbing part is it seems like we are headed in the same direction today.
20 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
One of many Must Reads for New Deal
By E. G. Bradford
I read the book.
I thought it was revealing and showed how FDR
thought and operated. Does anyone doubt that FDR did a lot
of things with reelection in mind? In 1938 unemployment was
still over 20%. Eight years of New Deal had little to nothing
to show as mentioned in the Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau quote:
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than
we have ever spent before and it does not work. ...
After eight years of this Administration, we have just as
much unemployment as when we started ...."
Folsom's review of the current literature on the New Deal
and FDR is informative. He points to Leuchtenburg and others as
the standard histories of the New Deal and suggests that they
paint a biased picture of FDR. He questions whether these
historians have let their political ideology guide their writings.
It has become a standard trait of historians to embed
their viewpoints in the presentation. They let their political
philosopy guide the story. That is also true of Folsom. The saving grace
of Folsom is that he lists extentsive references to the facts he
presents and references some the opposing viewpoints. Furthermore, he is
readable. If you want to understand the New Deal you must read this
book. However, once you have read it you won't understand the New Deal.
It seems to fully understand the New Deal, there is not a single book
to be read that can be trusted. What must be done is to read many of
them and only then, come to your own conclusions. Folsom provides an extensive list of references for those who wish to learn more.
24 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Work for the General Reader Demolishing Many New Deal Myths
By David M. Dougherty
Although this work is scholarly, it is written in prose more suitable for the general reader who is not heavily into New Deal and economic history. There is much more that could have been added to reinforce the author's points, but undoubtedly the necessity to keep the book under 300 pages and hold down the cost and length for the general reader came into play to render the book a little less than totally satisfying. The problem which lowers my rating from five to four start comes from that aspect -- namely when there were (for example) five points to be made on a subject, three supporting the author's viewpoint and two that didn't, the author cut one of the points opposing his viewpoint. Allow me to hastened to add, however, that one should not accept these ratios as given in every case -- merely as an illustration.
In another book review I took the author to task on a subject with very contradictory evidence where the author had included two items supporting his viewpoint and none for the opposition. This work is much, much better -- but still suffers a little from incompleteness and a lack of fully developing both sides. An example is the figures on unemployment -- during the thirties the unemployment figures were always less than accurate -- sometimes due to not being able to collect proper data, and sometimes during the New Deal when there was an attempt to lower the numbers for political purposes. For example even today when a worker has been out of work for 18 months his status is changed from "unemployed" to "discouraged" and unemployment goes down. Neat huh? What a way to cook the books.
At any rate, the author's discussion of the glorification of the New Deal by Commanger, Morris, Schlesinger and Leuchtenburg is dead on, and this is how the New Deal has been taught to schoolchildren since World War II. If you want to see examples of the impact of challenging what has been accepted uncritically in school (& in universities), read the two and one star reviews. Above all, they should convince the reader to read this book. The other factor is that the current administration likewise believes in the leftist take on the New Deal, and we are seeing many of Roosevelt's mistakes and unsuccessful policies being resurrected. Like what, you ask? Like spending by the Federal Government will lift the US out of a depression. It didn't work under Roosevelt, it didn't for the Japanese in the 90s, and it won't work this time.
Morgenthal made many mistakes, most notably the scheme to confiscate bullion gold from all American citizens, but most of his economic views in the 30s have stood the test of time. The author's presentation of the opposing viewpoints of Roosevelt and Morgenthal are illuminating, with Roosevelt ALWAYS being incorrect (the plan to turn Germany into a pastoral state notwithstanding -- one could not give Germany's best agricultural land to Poland and Russia and then attempt to rebuild their economy on agriculture.)
The NRA was, of course, a disaster and ultimately unconstitutional, and the WPA was used essentially for political purposes. The AAA hardly helped agriculture, and the idea of a minimum wage, so loved by labor unions, can be seen to be hinder employment even today. It has all but eliminated employment of America's youth and has replaced those jobs with ones given to illegal immigrants under the table. One can simply not legislate wages or prices in spite of the vested interests that moe to raise the minimum wage every few years.
So what did Roosevelt do that was right? The repeal of the Smoot-Hawley Act was a terrific boon, as was the bank holiday. The formation of the SEC was positive although we have found that it has become a dumping ground for incompetent bureaucrats that don't do their job, and so was the elimination of the gold standard. Pretty much everything else was negative, and within the next twenty years we will be faced with the collapse of the most horrible Ponzi scheme ever concocted by man -- Social Security. Roosevelt promised that Social Security taxes would never rise above one percent of income. Tell that to a self-employed person who pays a self-employment tax (both sides of Social Security and Medicare) today of 15.3%. The government doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's just a tax whose revenue is spent every year by Congress. There is no lock box, no social security trust fund, no nothing -- it's all spent (and more) every year.
With respect to income taxes, read carefully Roosevelt's attempt to tax individuals making over certain amounts ar rates of 100% and 90% for all of their income over those amounts. Sounds rather like Congress today taking the AIG bonuses at 90%. The problem is that what we think we know from the New Deal is wrong.
In short, read this book for an idea -- and an incomplete one at that -- of what you think you know that is dead wrong. And then give the whole subject some thought -- don't simply scream that these points are not what you know from school of even things you know from what your parents told you. Roosevelt didn't take office and eliminate unemployment the next day, week, month or year. That was Hitler, and his ideas on how to take a country out of a depression were even worse than Roosevelt's.
I recommend this book to all -- I only wish the author had been more thorough and served up more information on the issues so that the far-left today couldn't dismiss the book as simply "lies." And remember, Roosevelt's administration was thoroughly penetrated by Soviet agents like Hiss and White who did the best they could to move the US into the socialist/communist camp.
Other good books include "The Road To Serfdom", "The Forgotten Man", "FDR's Folly" and "Pride, Prejudice and Politics: Roosevelt Versus Recovery."
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