Quote:
Originally Posted by saltwn
If my mother was sitting next to you, she would slap you into next week to suggest that Roosevelt was responsible for the depression!
The policies of deregulation combined with keeping wages low as the article indicates were some of the things responsible. Others were unforeseen agricultural catastrophes and people (average citizens as well) playing the stock market.
Roosevelt saved the very lives of people who had lost EVERYTHING.
A man (one of many travelers) came to my grandmother's door (in Florida) to ask or work. He had WALKED all the way from NY State looking for work and living off the land along the way.
When I was in college, and we were studying that time period in history, A big ol' boy in the back of the room (who worked for DOW Chemical), stood at attention every time the instructor mentioned the WPA. He later explained that the work program Roosevelt put in place prevented him and his mother from dying.
Our parks and dams were built with such work programs. These people built us out of the depression with no help from deregulation or monopoly barons.
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All of this operates on the assumption that the Depression would have been there all along regardless. I don't believe that this is the case. The Depression happened and the gov't was powerless to stop it, but the steps they took to stop made it worse and longer than it needed to be. Essentially, the gov't took a bad situation and made it worse and then set themselves up as the hero for saving people from the mess they created. Had the gov't taken a hands-off approach and only addressed the underlying issues of the robber barons and unregulated trading of stocks, the Depression would have been shorter and far less severe. Businesses would have stayed solvent and people would have stayed employed. But the gov't destroyed businesses by taxing them to the point where they had no recourse but to close down. Tax rates for corporations were severe and this stopped them from making the changes necessary to adjust to the new labor/management paradigm and the shift from a primarily agragrain society to a primarily industrialized one. The gov't basically pulled the rug out from under the very people with the financial ability to adjust and instead made itself out as everyone's hero, when the fact is that the gov't was the cause for the severity and longevity of the Depression.
BTW - If my grandparents were still alive, they'd walk out of the room if you suggested that FDR was anything more than an idiot. All of them lived through the depression and all of them were pissed off that they lost good paying jobs (welders, schoolteachers, timberfallers) and had to take CCC/WPA jobs. Yeah, they paid the bills, but they also paid far less than what they were making and should have still been making had the gov't not taxed their employers into bankruptcy. My grandfathers had little use for each other, but one thing they could always agree on - FDR was an idiot.