FDR

I just watched a very interesting documentary on the first half of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. I learned, or relearned, some really neat things:

1) I guess that I really didn't know that polio completely paralyzed him from the waist down. So much so that, even while sitting down, he had to grab on to something because he didn't have the muscles in his butt to hold up his upper body. It's astounding, as well as a sign of the irrelevance of TV at the time, that at his death, hardly any of the public knew that Roosevelt could not walk. In all of those photos we see of him, smiling and vibrant, he is using rigid, metal, and painful leg casts. In addition, he supports one side with his cane and the other by grabbing on to someone.

I am astounded at that courage and will to persevere.

2) Whatever his private feelings on race, he was, at best, indifferent to the plight of blacks in the South. The excuse offered by some historians in the documentary, and one that the History Channel seems to smooth over as being OK, is that Roosevelt did not tackle segregation because he needed the Southern votes to quickly pass all of his New Deal legislations.

That is a shameful mark against him, in my book.

3) It appears, just using some of the numbers offered in the documentary, that for all the hoopla surrounding the New Deal, not much changed in his first two terms. Unemployment started at around 20% nationwide (an astounding number). After tripling taxes and overstepping the powers of the President (as ruled by the Supreme Court at the time) by essentially socializing the American economy with the National Industrial Recovery Act, unemployment had only decreased by around 5% by 1940, and the industrial and agricultural output of the country had barely changed.

Now, perhaps putting 5% of the country back to work in nothing to scoff at, but I had a now disproved notion that Roosevelt's New Deal was a great silver bullet that cured the Great Depression in the United States.

I will definitely need to read more on his Presidency, especially the first eight years. However, based on what I just heard and saw, it seems like FDR would not even be in consideration for the "best" President without World War II. His policies essentially failed during the first eight years.

More worrisome, and relevant to today, is that FDR's ideas and institutions for the New Deal sound a whole lot like Obama's proposed "stimulus" bill. In an admittedly broad summary, Obama proposes (FDR's parallel in quotes) to rebuild the nation's infrastructure (CWA, CCC, PWA), use the government to mandate the nation's industrial output (NRA), upgrade/modify how we create power (REA, TVA), and nationalize, at least in some sense, the banking industry (SEC).

I certainly want our economy to recover as quickly as possible, but this documentary certainly made me wonder if the Obama administration is not going about it in the wrong way.

PS. I realize that it's certainly not fair of me to criticize Obama or FDR, or even compare them and their policies, without being more versed on the histories and detailed policies of both. Just consider this the first in an argument that I'll have with myself on this blog.