Public Employee Press

Book Review
FDR battles the Great Depression

President Obama has called the current economic crisis the worst since the Great Depression. Eric Rauchway’s new 133-page book, “The Great Depression and The New Deal,” is a good short introduction to the 1930s.

Wild stock market speculation, vast wealth for a few and ­inadequate purchasing power for most had crippled the economy and pushed unemployment to 25 percent as President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. His predecessor, Republican “free market” ideologue Herbert Hoover, opposed government action to help working people who were losing their jobs, their homes, their savings and their hope.

Roosevelt reorganized the banking system, pumped money into the economy with relief programs and tackled unemployment head on with government hiring in massive infrastructure, construction, conservation and arts projects.

Yet this great leader needed pressure from his allies in labor and Congress to create much of his New Deal. Roosevelt came to believe that collective bargaining would raise living standards — along with a national safety net of Social Security, ­unemployment insurance and the fair wage and hours law. Still, it took strikes and sit-ins by millions of workers to win the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it easier to organize unions.

Roosevelt was more conservative than many in Congress, who wanted to fund ­Social Security with general revenues ­instead of a payroll tax and to make unemployment insurance a truly national program instead of deferring to the Southern “states’ rights” segregationists.

By 1937, the New Deal had cut joblessness in half, but when the economy improved Roosevelt reduced the deficit spending that had fueled the recovery and set off the renewed downturn of 1937-39.

By fighting for the hungry and unemployed against the “malefactors of great wealth” (who called him a socialist), Roosevelt saved capitalism from its own worst excesses.

One of the lessons this period holds for us is that sometimes pressure from the people helps great leaders achieve great things.

Rauchway’s is one of many books on the Depression, the New Deal and thelabor upsurge of the 1930s available in the DC 37 Education Fund Library in Room 211.

— Ken Nash,
Librarian