Franklin Roosevelt was able to connect with ordinary American people during the Depression despite coming from an immensely wealthy family (and a family that had been in the White House before) because he knew that all good fortune can be taken away at a moment’s notice. He knew that because he had the rare misfortune to contract infant paralysis (polio) at the age of thirty-nine.
The Roosevelt family had a summer home on Campobello Island, off New Brunswick, Canada. On August 9, 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell into the water while sailing. Reboarding the boat he felt chilled. Awaking the next day he felt extremely tired. His usual routine was to go swimming to refresh himself. “I didn’t feel the usual reaction…,” Roosevelt wrote later. “When I reached the house, the mail was in, with several newspapers I hadn’t seen. I sat reading for a while, too tired even to dress.” The next morning, Roosevelt recalled, “my left leg lagged…Presently it refused to work, and then the other.”
By August 12, Mr. Roosevelt found it difficult to stand and even to move his legs. The pain in his legs were almost too much to endure. He further experienced partial paralysis in his back, arms, and hands.
Just like that, Roosevelt went from being a vigorous, athletic man to needing leg braces and a wheelchair. The Roosevelt family had been benevolent-minded and progressive before Franklin’s illness, but there’s no doubt that his experience colored and deepened Franklin’s affinity for the lower strata of American society. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ but he knew hardship and ill fate.
Barack Obama comes to the presidency from the opposite direction. Born biracial in a racist society, abandoned by his father and (for a time) by his mother, Obama knew hardship from the beginning. Polio almost sidetracked FDR’s road to the White House, but Obama had to overcome more than 400 years of history just to get the chance to run.
I don’t think we should expect the two of them to draw the same lessons or govern the same way. When Roosevelt went after southern conservative Democrats in the 1938 primaries, he lost, and he lost credibility and power. I don’t think Obama would ever attempt something like that, which is both good and bad. It’s good, because he would probably lose, too. It’s bad because despite failing, FDR’s willingness to take on the moral blemish in his own party was indicative of a fighting spirit that paid off on many other issues.
I have a question for you, Boo. Would FDR have reappointed Bernanke? Especially knowing how much Bernanke was a party to the present crisis? Did FDR worry about pissing off the financial elite? We know Obama is(otherwise why let people like Summers, Geithner and Bernanke hang around .. and don’t even get me started on Bob Rubin) … we also know that Stiglitz would have taken the Fed Chair job if offered(Cenk of The Young Turks asked him flat out) .. would markets have freaked out if Stiglitz was offered the job? .. probably .. and we both know why .. but it would be Obama’s job to explain that to the people .. but I think what’s more important is that messaging is lacking .. and I wonder whether they get that .. it’s super important given the media culture we have today
FDR’s federal reserve chairman was Marriner S. Eccles, a Latter-Day Saint businessman/banker from Utah.
During his term, the Fed was subordinate to the Treasury Dept. But Eccles helped change that after his term, while he continued service on the Board of Governors.
You raise a complicated question. Would FDR have kept on Hoover’s economic advisers? No. But that doesn’t really answer your question. A better question is how does Bernanke’s approach differ from Eccles’ approach. Ironically, they were both fans of cheap money, but Eccles only supported that policy during the Depression and the War. In the post-war period, he argued that it was inflationary, which it was.
By contrast, Bernanke didn’t have a Depression to deal with, but he did have massive deficit spending. Cheap money meant real estate was a better investment than loaning money (buying bonds). New real estate financial products were created to provide an outlet for investment, leading to a housing bubble. I have no idea how Eccles would have viewed the situation in the last decade, and how he would have acted differently.
That’s just the point. Who would have thought that a Mormon Republican from Utah(under a Democratic president) would be the best central banker we’ve ever had. But Bernanke was supposed to be a student of the Depression.
I don’t know that he was a Republican. If he was, it was before the 1929 crash. At least, I’ve never heard of him being a Republican.
I believe I read it in Lords of Finance
Well, I don’t know. I’ve read that his perceptions were transformed by the crash of 1929. It would be understandable that a business-minded kid from a successful family would side with Coolidge and Hoover. And given the racist makeup of the Democratic Party in the 1920’s, I probably would have been a Republican back then myself. There were no good guys in American politics back then, after the progressives collapsed. And even the progressives were filled with temperance goons. In any case, he was a faithful FDR Democrat at least until Truman fired his ass.
I wish I had the book in front of me .. but I believe(IIRC) that the Depression transformed him .. much more so than our present crisis caused someone like Greenspan to question his prior beliefs
The progressive movement in the 19th century started with “temperance goons”. They were women who were getting beat up every weekend when their husbands got drunk. You might call it a result of Civil War PTSD.
The biggest accomplishment of the progressive movement in the Post World War I period was the passage and ratification of women’s suffrage.
The progressive movement of the 1960s was chauvinistic and homophobic. Would you have been a Republican then? Remember that the conservative movement was a minority movement within the Republican Party until the 1972 election, which swept in conservatives like Jesse Helms.
Right, but I would have been thoroughly for women’s suffrage and thoroughly opposed to Blue Light Laws and the temperance movement, at least as federal law. The common feature is a prejudice against the government legislating people’s morality. So, I probably would have been a Teddy Roosevelt Republican who followed him into the Bull Moose Party, and then drifted politically until FDR came along. Even with FDR, it would have taken me awhile to embrace a party I saw as racist (in the South) and corrupt (in the North).
And I forgot to add .. Eccles wasn’t dogmatic .. meaning … while he was a Republican .. if an approach didn’t work .. he wasn’t afraid to try a different approach .. I guess you could say .. he realized that being a small town banker and being The Fed Chief requires different approaches .. and he eventually came closer to FDR’s view .. I haven’t seen much evidence that Bernanke is as open minded
well, I don’t really know what you’re arguing? I get that you see Bernanke as bad, but you haven’t said why. I mean, presumably, you’re talking about his current policies, not what came before. I can’t really respond to such an amorphous critique.
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Bernanke is student of Greenspan and got us into this economic mess because of unregulated capitalism. Their concern is to save big corporations, not the elements for mainstreet recovery and avoid poverty, destitution and unemployment. FDR worked on policy to bring hope and a future for the workforce. Of course, after the SCOTUS ruling, the next ‘democratic’ election will be decided by corporate money and not the people of the United States.
FDR had to cope with a recession within the depression in 1937, cut spending and imposed a big increase in Social Security taxes. He reversed course in the spring of 1938 with a big increase in spending for economic recovery. World War II did the rest, see also The Employment Act of 1946 [pdf].
While Barack Obama’s economics team hammers out its $800 billion fiscal stimulus plan, the commentariat is battling over the effectiveness of what some consider the prototype stimulus package, the New Deal.* The suppressed (and problematic) conclusion to all this punditry seems to be: Because government spending under the New Deal helped/didn’t help to end the Great Depression, the Obama stimulus plan will/won’t help to end the current recession.
The first sense considers the New Deal as a stimulus program to revive the economy; the second considers it as a welfare program to aid the poor. The two notions are far from equivalent. My reading of the literature suggests that the New Deal did little as an economic stimulus, but it did provide welfare benefits.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Very interesting to think about these two, where they overlap, where they don’t, etc. I think there is a subtext that isn’t discussed too often in the progressive blogosphere that perhaps deserves more attention: that is, the extent to which Obama himself factors in the race issue. I think that’s one thing that makes his course more difficult and complicated than FDR ever had it, and it’s something that the Arianna Huffingtons of the world could never wrap their minds around.
I’ve commented on a number of recent threads here about the fact that Obama has no illusions about bipartisanship from the Republicans. Why does he still go through the motions? For political reasons. By the time the 2010 elections roll around, if he is seen by the majority of voters as having reached out again and again to Republicans, he inoculates himself from at least some of the right’s disinformation and hate mongering. But the unspoken subtext is racisim. We are not post-racial enough, and he is always mindful about that. This was why the change in tone in the SOTU and Friday in Baltimore was so important. He has worked towards the present where he is able to step to the forefront. He went into the Republican lion’s den and took them on, in a firm but jocular way. Of course the right responded to both the SOTU and Baltimore by talking about “arrogance” and “lecturing”–they never really bother to disguise their attempts to cash in on the uppity ni**er meme. But by being disciplined over the past year he has begun to have the upper hand, which he most certainly did not have in August when HCR devolved into a proxy war about race and class.
This is uncharted territory. FDR had the benefit of being OF the upper class, and therefore, while accused of being a traitor, he was always still a member of the club. Teddy Kennedy is a similar case. This is not to minimize FDR or Teddy, it’s simply to point out that Obama is having to bridge a racial divide that, politically, no one before him has ever had to deal with. I was one of those who felt that Hillary and Bill (and Penn and Lannie Davis and their ilk) were up to their necks in using race against Obama. It disgusts me that they did it. But it also, ironically, helped him see just how complex and deep-seated the feelings are, and how fraught with political peril this has been for Obama ever since he took office. His aim, as far as I can see, is to be a two-term President and slowly bring the country along as he goes. It makes sense that after a year he is beginning to find the ways to step forward more boldly since he’s laid the groundwork with such discipline.
That’s all well and good, but the question remains: Will he leave this country better off? What help will he be to Democrats running this fall? How will he implement the agenda he campaigned on?
Damn right he’ll leave the country better off. He just hasn’t, and won’t, heal a diseased society overnight. And neither did FDR.
For fall 2010, the emerging blueprint is to make the Republicans pay a price for their nonsense. It is akin to triangulation without adopting their positions. The proposed spending freeze is a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick that will allow Obama to strike tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations from the budget while increasing money for education. I heard Paul Krugman echoing Obama this morning on ABC, slapping down Will and Ailes with simple, stark statements of fact. Make them vote against taxing rescued banks. Make them vote against a whole range of things that can be reframed quite easily.
The reason I ask about the elections later this year is because Democrats aren’t in very good shape .. especially because like Dodd .. incumbents are pretty unpopular .. and since we have fairly large majorities .. we will suffer .. but I think what’s most important .. is keeping the House(while culling the Blue Dogs) and concentrating on trying to increase our majorities in the Senate .. I hope Obama(and by extension Axelrod) know that his agenda won’t be furthered by helping to elect more Blue Dogs(or spineless Dems like Lee Fisher)
But Republican incumbents are also unpopular, and there are a lot of them who have created open seats already.
If Scott Brown can win in Massachusetts, there is a possible realignment in which a Democrat could take Bob Bennett’s seat in Utah–for example.
Red state/blue state is dead. It’s Congressional Districts and counties now. No state is reliably for one party or the other.
I think Utah .. is one of the few safe places for Republicans right now
One doesn’t know that until one tests it.
The same was said of Massachusetts a month ago.
You bring up a subtext that encompasses class as much as race. FDR was a rich white guy from a “good family”. That automatically gave him abundant capital to spend on getting the people behind him before his class peers quite knew what was happening. Obama’s story is of the up-by-his-own-bootstraps kind that we pretend to revere in this country but in fact regard with fear, suspicion, and envy.
Truman is probably a better comparison to Obama. He, too, suffered the ignominy of coming from mere home-town merchants. If you look at his treatment by the press and the powers of the day you’ll notice a dismissiveness that FDR, for all the pure hate he inspired, never received.
Obama has to deal with the racial and social hurdles at the same time. When you step back and remember what things were like before 2009, you recall what a remarkable transformation is taking place, and from what an unlikely quarter. I think the amazement, for better or for worse, has scarcely yet begun.
Good points. The gestures of bipartisanship, even if ultimately an issue gets a party line vote, also serve to lessen the bitterness from, at least some, gop-ers when dems push through a given issue. Here also racism would intensify the level of bitterness and make it more difficult to address the next issue.
Tremendous insights (some of the best out there) on the multiple hurdles the President faces.
He is clearly aware of power — its uses and misuses — and has documented his struggle with his identity — who he is and where he fits in on the continuum of race, family, clan/tribe, social circle, community and nation.
And he’s very very very bright. I think the real question is the role his innate pragmatism and caution will play. Does it lead us to a point where Republicans are clearly viewed as obstructionists with a bankrupt ideology? Or is it seen as weakness and feeds into the Democrats are weak and lack leaders meme?
I think the jury is still out on where we end up. But the race and class is something that clearly impacts progressive critiques to this presidency as well as right-wing reaction to President Barack Hussein Obama.
Interestingly enough…a clearer identification with Labor and Labor’s economic agenda might actually be the best way to bridge the race/class divide, but that would put the President clearly at odds with Wall Street and the technocratic elite.
My father kept this quote from Teddy on his desk.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910.
I’m afraid we’re hoping for too much passion from Obama, but he has learned that its diplay can cause a lot of trouble. Accepting your own limitations can teach you a lot about living with others.
not sure what you mean by limitations, maybe of context- Obama grew up Black in the USA, a factor in having a rational, cerebral one his default public response.
In making the FDR comparison we seem to forget how different the circumstances of their presidencies are. The Big Recession has been painful and enraging, but has failed to produce or sustain a leftist presence that threatens the established order. In Hoover’s and FDR’s time there were mainstream magazines openly speculating about whether turning to a communist or socialist system was our last hope. The demonstrations, the Hoovervilles, are well-known.
FDR had people like Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, and powerful unions behind him. They put enough of a scare into the old aristocracy to give him leverage. Obama has next to nothing out there to make space on his left. He’s pretty much expected to go it alone while the “left blogosphere” natters to itself about Overton windows and “optics”.
From the New Deal as FDR was from the Civil War.
FDR & LBJ too often serve as projections and “marble men” in discussions vis-a-vis Obama.
Obama has next to nothing out there to make space on his left. He’s pretty much expected to go it alone while the “left blogosphere” natters to itself about Overton windows and “optics”.
Can you please expand on this?
Just that there has been no real Left in this country for decades. What passes for the Left mostly concerns itself with strategy and tactics, not with proposing big ideas. Who has been out there in the past 30 years promoting medical care as a right? Seriously questioning the “free market’s” wisdom? Countering the propaganda about “big government” being the ultimate threat to freedom? The whole issue of class and privilege?
Can you really even define the Left? I can’t. I can list a lot of issues promoted by separate groups, but not a single agenda. Which does not seem to have been the case in FDR’s day.
It will piss some people off, but I think one problem has been our obsession with hotbutton social issues stealing the spotlight and energy from more fundamental economic and systemic visions. How is it, for example, that after the stolen, flawed, anti-democratic election of 2000 there’s been scarcely a peep about abolishing the electoral college and radically taking the money out of politics? No real questioning of the Supreme Court’s power and the way judges are selected and approved? How come Harkin proposes a plan to fix the dysfunctional Senate and hardly anyone even notes it, much less rallies around it?
FDR could bring change because there was a left that scared the establishment. The New Deal was a compromise that seemed better than full-out socialism or full-out class war. Now, on the other hand, nothing threatens the establishment except its own corruption. That leaves little leverage to maneuver toward the left, and yet we seem to expect Obama to accomplish that all by himself.
Pro Choice, pro-gay-rights, pro-Labor, anti-Republican. Everything else is a mishmash…
I know a lot of people on the left are pro-choice but can’t someone be “pro-life” too? An example I’ll give is Flavia Colgan. Boo probably knows who she is.
I’m Pro Life and I don’t fit too comfortably on The Left™, but I’m definitely a Democrat and a partisan one at that – on economics I’m probably left of most people on this site. The thing is that if you deviate from orthodoxy on abortion and homosexuality then you are not welcome in The Left, per se. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I believe most people on the left would accept that description.
I think people on the left could live with a different view on abortion. Gay rights, not so much. As Democrats are about equal rights for all(as I understand it anyway).
I’ve received equal amounts of venom wrt both issues – one apparently oppresses women while the other apparently oppresses gays…
Booman—good, thoughtful post (and discussion), as usual.
I’d add Obama’s background and education as a community organizer as an important factor in his strategic view of politics. The organizers at the Gamaliel Foundation who supervised Obama, like their counterparts at similar organizing networks (Industrial Areas Foundation, PICO, DART, IVP, etc.) had survived the breakup of the social movements of the 1960s and had—by the mid 1980s when Obama went to Chicago—begun to figure out how to build broad-based, multi-racial organizations that crossed class and geographic boundaries, and that sustained over time and could wield political power effectively.
These organizers stayed away from “single-issue” politics, were intensely nonpartisan (at least professionally), emphasized the importance of building relationships around common stories and values, and the importance of understanding and acting on self-interest. They were often scornful of “liberals” and “activists”. Their heroes were leaders (people who could deliver a following for collective action) who were deeply rooted in their communities—pastors and deacons, local union officers and nuns, rabbis and imams, leaders of neighborhood associations and tenants’ groups. They wanted to build enough power to get to the bargaining table and cut a deal—not a perfect deal because (they taught) you don’t get a perfect deal in this life, but a better deal for their people.
They understood that in Reagan’s America, to be pigeonholed as “liberal” was political death for leaders from poor and working-class communities. So they set about creating a political culture that allowed them to work successfully for traditional “economic liberal” ends—living wage jobs, affordable housing, community policing, access to quality education—by building alliances with leaders and institutions that defined themselves as “conservative” or “moderate”.
For better or worse (mostly for better I’d argue), this is how Obama has operated—both during the presidential campaign, and during his first year in office. For self-identified liberals and progressives who don’t come out of that organizing culture, it can be bewildering—even when Obama’s end goal is similar to yours.
Don’t even compare them. Obama is the anti-Roosevelt. Rather you you should be comparing his policies to W’s. You will see a large congruence there.
that’s ridiculous.
Obama and Carter are the only two presidents since Eisenhower that I’d trust with my car keys, let alone my life. You compare Obama to Dubya? One is too dumb to understand why he’s robbing you. The other is the as decent as Carter and as politically talented as Clinton or Reagan. You need to do a reality check. You’ve been spending too much time with the Poutrage Club.
From The Independent:
Obama is no FDR, and the American public in 1930 wasn’t kept in a state of sedation by a corporate media.
I think just as significant as his having polio, was the fact that FDR came from the ruling class. That background allowed him to see the country “directly”, through his own personal experience. Obama in contrast is a modern politician, who sees the world through the eyes of his advisers. To quote Bush the Elder, he lacks “the vision thing”.
He’s also shown that he’s much better at being a candidate than he is at governing.