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IMPress Polly
09-09-2013, 09:14 AM
I've offered commentary on a few parts of American history at this point, but thought I'd offer my take on the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt next because FDR really was one of our overall best presidents, IMO. I'd rank him as our second-best president ever, right behind Abe Lincoln. Here I aim to clarify why. I think this commentary will also make it clear that the Roosevelt electoral coalition is dead and can't be revived. As one more note, FDR's presidency is particularly important to me because, in my mind, World War 2 was the dividing line between the period when American patriotism was essentially progressive and justified and when it became essentially reactionary on unjustified. I'll divide this commentary into three parts. Unlike in my past threads here, this commentary I'm only just starting, so I'll just do the first part today. One should hence stay tuned to this thread for parts 2 and 3 later.

Background

The year 1920 was an important hallmark in American history, for it was in that year that this country became a majority-urban nation. Migration to the cities, a natural outgrowth of capitalist development (though, as everywhere, a harsh one resisted for a long time by farmers, including in political ways) had been accelerated by the recent war mobilization. This rapid industrial development combined with a lack of war damage at home to render the American economy now the most robust on Earth. It was for this reason that what existed of a global capitalist economy at the time now came to be led by the United States following the war.

Though many believe the stock market crash of late 1929 that resulted from the financial sector's excesses throughout the latter part of the decade marked the onset of the Great Depression, in truth the 'natural' outcome of that was simply an ordinary depression. America had had a lot of those by that point. The said situation turned into what we know as the GREAT Depression only after Germany went bankrupt in the summer of 1931. The historical significance of this fact is that it exposes a truth uglier than many would prefer to acknowledge even today: that it wasn't merely the post-1926 economic growth (that which was divorced from an increase in the consumption of goods) that was fake, but that, in fact, ALL the economic growth from the post-war era was fake. The capitalist world never recovered from World War 1: it simply redistributed the leftover wealth. The First World War's victors (ourselves chief among them) subsequently fueled their economies by systematically draining the coffers of the defeated Germany until there was nothing left to drain, and then it all collapsed. Big surprise: exploiting Germany wasn't a sustainable economic growth plan. (It was precisely for this reason that the Communist International designated 1928 as marking the onset of a new, "third period" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Period) in the history of their struggle to achieve a communist future.) The German bankruptcy was a development sufficient to convince even President Hoover of the need to abandon his previous regime of essentially hands-off economic policies in favor of increased government intervention in the economy to meet the emergency that he had previously predicted would soon abate. He now established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and undertook various other petty measures aimed principally at shoring up the profitability of the American capitalist class on that age-old theory that they'd generously pass on at least a share of it to the masses facing severe economic distress. (Nope, such thinking isn't new at all.) So reliable was the generosity of the rich that only continued deterioration was seen. Hoover went down to a resounding defeat in his re-election bid the following year. The incoming president was a Democrat and a distant cousin of that famous progressive Teddy Roosevelt: one Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had pledged himself to "a new deal for the American people".

The First New Deal

Roosevelt's initial policies can be largely be described as Hoover's second, more activist regime on steroids. Although many of his more famous early policies, easily rammed through a willing Democratic Congress, included such measures as the Emergency Banking Act (which erected a wall between financial and commercial banking, thus preventing the financial excesses of the late 1920s from being repeated until the said wall was torn down by default in 1999 by a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, leading directly to our recent Great Recession), the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (which temporarily brought a very successful system of economic planning to the troubled Tennessee Valley area), and the organization of the Civilian Conservation Corps (which put unemployed youth to work on conservation projects in barracks), in truth the president's main and most important two early policy initiatives were the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act, both of which were designed principally to benefit business interests and promote a top-down model of economic reorganization and recovery. The Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farm owners to destroy crops in order to artificially increase the price of food amidst conditions of widespread hunger. This benefited farmers at the expense of the urban poor in particular. The National Industrial Recovery Act, meanwhile, was seen as Roosevelt's defining initiative for economic reorganization early on. Long advocated by many business owners, this measure's principal feature was the reorganization of much of the American economy into trade associations (industry groups, in other words). Such a measure required the suspension of many previous anti-trust policies, for it authorized trade associations to set industry-wide prices, wages, and so on, with the natural and intended result that consumer prices rose amidst conditions of widespread poverty. This was a kind of collectivism for business owners that was in their interests. Anti-trust laws are supposed to mandate bourgeois individualism in order that consumers might ultimately rule a capitalist society rather than capitalists themselves. By forcing capitalists, including within a given industry, to compete against each other, the consumer, at least in theory, the consumer gains the upper hand, for businesses are compelled to compete for customers and thus to concede substantially to their demands in terms of prices, product standards, etc. It works, in this sense, as a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy benefiting consumers. America learned during the monopolistic Gilded Age what happens when capitalists are allowed to stop competing and set the terms of business for themselves. Bourgeois collectivism, such as promoted by the NIRA, is harmful to the masses. To the extent that one is progressive, one seeks to advance only PROLETARIAN collectivism, not BOURGEOIS collectivism. Solidarity for workers, not for capitalists! It was for these sorts of reasons that the Communist Party USA initially rejected the New Deal. But there was an important caveat to the NIRA's basic programmic aim: it also authorized a dose of proletarian collectivism, for it gave workers the right to organize labor unions as a sort of counterbalance to the bourgeois collectivism that the new law mainly promoted. The latter provision was the most contentious and barely passed the U.S. Senate, but it was ultimately included in the final bill. Roosevelt desired to promote a sort of society in which competition in general was lessened: a sort of new national unity in which businesses worked together instead of competing against each other and in which labor and business agreed to terms rather than fighting. This vision of recovery through bourgeois-leaning harmony though was torn asunder when the business community turned against the NIRA over its advancement of organized labor. Their mouthpiece Republican Party used the power of the Supreme Court (the only federal institution they still controlled, and which they only controlled because Supreme Court justices aren't popularly elected) to overturn a number of New Deal programs, including the two core ones, the NIRA (in 1935) and the AAA (in 1936), frustrating the president and prompting his politics to move in a new, more completely populistic direction out of the increasing recognition that the rich (from whence he himself came, incidentally) wanted nothing to do with his vision of general harmony, but only to run society. Thus a second incarnation of the New Deal was born that replaced the earlier top-down economics of Hooverism-on-steroids with a rare regime of grassroots economics concerned nigh exclusively with the well-being of workers and farmers.

Stay tuned to this thread for part two, which I'll write at a later date.

IMPress Polly
09-13-2013, 08:34 AM
PART TWO:


The Second New Deal


The 1934 midterm elections, effectively a referendum on the governing Democrats' policies, produced an unqualified endorsement by the American people: Democrats further increased their already-considerable majorities in both chambers of Congress. The economy was finally starting to slowly recover: the rate of unemployment was going down, more workers were finding themselves able to join unions, and economic growth was finally resuming. Despite these developments, the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court defiantly struck down the president's main initiative, the National Industrial Recovery Act, in early 1935 (which, as discussed above, had become unpopular with businessmen not because of the many favors it bestowed upon them of course, but because it authorized workers to organize unions for their protection), along with a string of other New Deal policies. President Roosevelt and the Congressional Democrats responding by abandoning the rich. Almost immediately after the NIRA was struck down, the Congress passed, and the president signed, new laws authorizing workers to organize unions and authorizing the president to directly create public works programs and projects to put people back to work in the service of the national interest. These measures effectively replicated the populistic aspects of the NIRA. In contrast, there was no effort made to reauthorize governance of the economy by trade associations: the defining, corporatist aspect of the NIRA. Businessmen were simply abandoned. The marked the beginning of a second incarnation of the New Deal wherein it henceforth took on an expressly populistic form, seeking to aid only workers and farmers. The new Works Progress Administration quickly created numerous public projects that put hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers back to work. Meanwhile, the president signed the Social Security Act (long demanded by socialists and other progressives) into law, establishing federal retirement pensions for all Americans over 65 years of age (an age that was reached by only a minority of the population back then), as well as a system of emergency payouts to needy families (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was replaced in 1996 by a much harsher regime designed to force welfare dependents into low-paying jobs).


The first major test of the popularity of this new agenda and approach of seeking economic growth from the bottom of the economy up rather than from the top down was the 1936 election, which the New Deal's second incarnation passed with flying colors. The Republicans fielded newspaper executive and former oil tycoon Alf Landon as their presidential candidate. He ran on a platform opposing the New Deal that quickly garnered the energetic endorsement of the business community in general (which was now politically organized into the American Liberty League) and an overwhelming majority of newspapers in particular. The Roosevelt re-election campaign, by contrast, made no effort to appeal to the business community, but only to workers and farmers. The election then broke down along class lines, with capitalists proper lining up with one candidate and the workers and struggling farmers who composed the lion's share of the population lining up with the other. The election results showed that if the first incarnation of the New Deal had proven popular, this new one was even more so. Whereas Roosevelt had won 57% of the popular vote in 1932, he garnered 61% in 1936 to Landon's 36.5% in one of the biggest landslides in the history of the nation. The president was even able to win over most of people who had voted for the Socialist Party's candidate, Norman Thomas, four years previous. (The Socialist Party had been the most significant third party in the 1932 elections, winning just over 3% of the popular vote.) Even the traditionally belligerent Communist Party could find little to actually object to in the president's new line and ran only a half-hearted campaign against him. In the House of Representatives, the 1936 elections gave the Democrats 328 seats and the Republicans a mere 107 and in the Senate, the Democrats were now 77 seats strong, with the Republicans commanding just 19 seats. However, the president was soon to learn the hard way that his party was not a unit.


President Roosevelt's second inauguration included plenty of commentary to verify his belief in every word that I've written so far: that the origins of the economic crash the nation was now steadily climbing out of dated back well before 1926, that the experiment of corporate government was a failure, that the rich hated him unanimously, and that he no longer cared. "I welcome their hatred", he proclaimed. And, as you can hear from the excerpt below, the audience, clearly on his side, cheered his confrontational words. That was the political climate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9yoZHs6PsU

Nevertheless, his second term was to be a real struggle.


The president began his second term by launching a plan to "democratize" the Supreme Court and thus remove the last vestige of political power that corporate America had at its disposal. The bill introduced to Congress provided that Supreme Court justices be permitted to retire at age 70, that the president be allowed to appoint an additional justice for each one who at 70 refused to retire, and put the Court's maximum size at 15 rather than 9 justices. Though the measure, described as "court-packing" by its opponents, was defeated by a coalition led by Republicans and Southern Democrats (who tended to be more conservative and right-leaning), it nonetheless achieved its immediate objective, for even before the Congressional debate on judicial reform had ended, the Court, evidently scared into submission by the very prospect of reform, handed down a number of pro-New-Deal verdicts, including on the constitutionality of Social Security and the right of workers to organize unions. What's more, a series of judicial retirements the debate seemed to have prompted soon enabled the president to fill the Court with progressive Democrats who would generally endorse the New Deal program. Thus was Roosevelt's conquest of the last opposition-controlled vestige of political power successful. However, the victory had come at a price in terms of his political capital since he had alienated the Southern branch of his party in the process. This result persuaded Roosevelt that, while he'd been able to secure the future of the existing New Deal measures, he could only actually move forward with the New Deal agenda by reorganizing the Democratic Party into a party composed exclusively of liberals and leftists. He was, unfortunately, ahead of his time on that one. In the 1938 primaries, Roosevelt singled out several Democratic candidates (all of whom but one was from the South) as conservatives and rightists and asked voters to defeat them. Only one of those candidates (the non-Southerner) was rejected by voters. (In another notable measure toward this end, the president's wife, Eleanor, was permitted to campaign in favor of a ban on lynching in 1938 in a move certain to further offend the South.) Meanwhile the president was able to see the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 (which established a federal minimum wage, a maximum legal work week of 40 hours, and the prohibition of child labor in most industries) as well as a new Agricultural Adjustment Act identical to the original in all but the source of taxation to replace the original bill the Supreme Court has struck down two years previous.


A certain self-imposed disaster befell Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1937 when they responded to the onset of what otherwise would likely have been a mild recession by, for the first time, reducing spending on social welfare programs in order to keep the budget balanced amidst conditions of a shrinking tax base resulting from rising unemployment and falling wages. The cuts worsened the crisis by reducing the purchasing power of the population and creating more poverty and were accordingly reversed the following year, after which point the recession quickly abated (thus proving the existence of a close connection between American economic growth and spending on the public welfare). A government investigation conducted in 1938 found that the central cause of the recession had been the increasing concentration of economic forces. Accordingly President Roosevelt -- the very same man who had once promoted such curbing of competition by way of the NIRA -- now launched a trust-busting campaign comparable to that of a certain earlier Roosevelt, with the same results: a number of legal battles won over the ensuing years, but the proverbial war lost, as economic concentration continued at a steady pace despite the various corporate (and yes also sometimes union) break-ups the Administration was able to win. Despite reversing course on the cuts and taking steps to address the root causes of the recession though, the political damage was done, as Republicans gained new seats in Congress in the 1938 midterm elections for the first time in a decade. The New Deal, as a reform agenda anyway, was effectively dead from that point...or at least until well into the Second World War anyway. It was now, with no real ability to pass domestic legislation, that the president opted to turn his attention to developments abroad, which he saw as leading to a new, inevitable world war.


Stay tuned to this thread for part three, which I'll write at a later date.

Chris
09-13-2013, 08:49 AM
You forgot to mention that FDR admired and model his programs on those of Mussolini and Hitler.

IMPress Polly
09-13-2013, 11:13 AM
Yeah, which explains why he subsequently went to war with them. :rollseyes:

Chris
09-13-2013, 11:31 AM
Yeah, which explains why he subsequently went to war with them. :rollseyes:



Yes, in a way, it was a power trip.

IMPress Polly
09-21-2013, 08:11 AM
I've decided to divide my commentary into four parts because part three is turning out longer than I'd originally anticipated. Anyway, here's part three:

PART THREE:

An Anti-Militarist Prepares for War

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's early foreign policy could not be described as one of particular aggression.

In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt committed the United States to a so-called Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America aimed at improving our image amongst those countries. The Good Neighbor Policy terminated the U.S. Marines occupation of Nicaragua in 1933 and occupation of Haiti in 1934, and led to the annulment of the Platt Amendment by the Treaty of Relations with Cuba in 1934 (which had authorized American military intervention in the country) and the negotiation of compensation for Mexico's nationalization of foreign-owned assets in 1938. This policy also led Roosevelt created the Office of the Coordinator Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) in August of 1940. The CIAA was essentially a propaganda tool used by the United States to define Latin American society, as they perceived it. The sister division to the CIAA, the Motion Picture Division, was constructed with the main intent to abolish preexisting stereotypes of Latin Americans that were prevalent throughout American society. These policy changes were pretty effective, for by the end of World War 2, Latin America was, according to one historian, the region of the world most supportive of American foreign policy. (See Greg Gandin's Empires Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism.)

Beyond Latin America as well, American foreign policy under Roosevelt was distinctly less aggressive than it had been under the Republican administrations of the '20s. For example, Roosevelt right away dramatically lowered tariffs in a bid to appeal to the capitalists of foreign countries (and also to meet the longstanding demands of the American landed gentry in the South that his party had always appealed to). He also normalized diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in late 1933, which America hitherto had refused to recognize as a legitimate government. What's more, assuming we consider Native American tribes to be nations in their own right (which I would argue we should), we can consider the Roosevelt Administration's policy change toward them another example of comparatively friendly foreign policy. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 rescinded the previous American policy of terminating Native American tribes and forcibly assimilating their populations into the American mainstream. The new policy allowed Native American tribes to retain their traditional collective ownership and forbade the U.S. government from further dividing their lands into individually-owned parcels.

Hence when Roosevelt started preparing for war beginning in 1939, it came as a shock to many of his traditional supporters. The progressives in the grain-growing Midwest abandoned Roosevelt as he shifted away from his economic reform agenda to focus on a pro-war foreign agenda, while the new policy shift was viewed favorably by the South that he had just worked so hard to offend. Another notable indicator of how politically significant this policy shift was lies in that it was completely opposed by the Communist Party, which opposed any new war after Stalin reached a non-aggression agreement with Hitler in 1939. As you can gather then, this new shift away from economic reform and toward war preparations basically alienated the administration's left wing supporters and heartened the Democratic Party's rightists. Only the Northeastern and Far Western cities supported Roosevelt's policies consistently, for only they agreed both with the administration's domestic and foreign policy objectives. The president was able to win an unprecedented third term in 1940, but his margin of victory was much smaller than in the previous two presidential election cycles. His Republican opponent, Wall Street-based business executive Wendell Willkie, ran on an anti-war platform that also continued Republican opposition to the New Deal. The public's appetite for tearing up the New Deal was very minimal, but so was its appetite for war under the prevailing economic misery (which, although considerably more tolerable than when Roosevelt had first taken office, was still nowhere near to fully abating). The appeal of Willkie's non-interventionism was so significant that Roosevelt felt compelled to promise in the course of the campaign that there would be no American involvement in foreign wars if he were re-elected, as to reassure many elements of his base. He easily won re-election, but this time only by a margin of 10 percent points (55% to 45%), as compared with his 1936 margin of greater than 24 and his 1932 margin of nearly 18.

Despite the campaign promise of non-intervention, America was not a neutral country. Practically from the onset of World War 2, this nation actively aided the Allies in various and continually escalating ways until finally attacked by Japan on December 7th of 1941. The Empire of Japan saw the attack as a preventative action aimed at keeping the U.S. Pacific Fleet from intervening in its forthcoming military campaign in southeast Asia aimed at conquering overseas territories of the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States itself. The real-word effect was the opposite: with virtually unanimous consent in the Congress, America now joined World War 2 properly, prompting declarations of war upon the United States by Japan's Axis allies Germany and Italy.

I'll try to get around to wrapping up my commentary tomorrow if I can. My fourth and definitely final entry will be entitled "The Second World War and the Third New Deal That Never Was".

Peter1469
09-21-2013, 08:41 AM
Yes, the American public definitely was not for war (until Pearl Harbor) and FDR wanted the US in the war regardless of what public opinion was. The US oil embargo against Japan all but ensured war. It reminds me of another President that many said "_____ lied, and people died". Except a lot more Americans died in WWII.

Regarding the New Deal, I have mixed reactions. I certainly agree with the need for a safety net (not hammock); I agree with building the interstate system. But I don't agree with the massive shift in separation of powers from the legislature to the executive bureaucracy, and with the shift in SCOTUS which allowed this shift.

President Wayne
09-22-2013, 08:49 AM
You failed to mention that he banned private ownership of gold, confiscated it from American citizens and gave them a "fair" payment, then once he held it all, he raised the overall price of gold to instantly raise the wealth of the nation. I agree with pieces of the New Deal, but the man pushed us for war. Nice opinion piece though. :smiley:

IMPress Polly
09-24-2013, 06:47 AM
PART FOUR:

The Second World War and the Third New Deal That Never Was

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt clearly shared the view of his British and Soviet counterparts that the principal enemy in the war was Germany and that hence it was the defeat of the German forces that should be the subject of primary focus. This policy proved unpopular with many Americans who wished to obtain immediate revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor and were appalled by the ease with which Japan enlarged its empire in the weeks following American entry into the war. But even with the bulk of the Allies' efforts focused on the European theater, it was nevertheless but a matter of months before the tide of the war in the Pacific began to turn in their favor as well.

Right from the very beginning, the Soviet Union (which had joined the Allies in the summer of 1941 after being invaded by the Germans in flagrant betrayal of their mutual non-aggression agreement) petitioned the United States and Britain for the opening of a second front in the European theater in the form of an invasion of Europe, but to no avail for years. Instead, British and American efforts were focused on the slow conquest of German-held North Africa and then upon defeat of Italy. While the Western powers were busy with that, Soviet soldiers and citizens were bearing the brunt of German aggression, being butchered in the tens of thousands daily defending their homes from the onslaught of the Nazis. Moscow was all but alone until well after they had already turned the tide on the Germans during the harsh winter of 1942-43. The Western Allies managed to find it in their hearts to at last seriously come to the aid of their Soviet ally at the Tehran Conference in late 1943, wherein, in exchange for a Soviet commitment that the Communist International would be closed (which was subsequently honored), they finally agreed to open a second, European front in the fight against Germany, which of course took the form of the famous invasion of Normandy (codenamed "D-Day") in the summer of 1944, following which the crumbling of the Nazis' newly-established European empire unfolded rapidly, for Hitler's forces to hardly stave off a two-sided attack from the Allies.

Following the fall of Berlin to the Soviet Red Army, America's focus turned to the Japanese theater at last. With the atomic bomb now at its disposal, America was able to quickly and brutally force this last Axis Power to surrender. The outcome of the war proved quite beneficial to America's standing in world affairs, as, much unlike its European counterparts, the United States had taken no real war damage. It was for that very reason that America was subsequently able to underwrite Western Europe's recovery, thus strategically isolating the newly-established rival Soviet block. Following the war, the Soviets had few resources left that weren't badly needed for reconstruction purposes at home, so they could hardly afford to do for their sphere of influence in Europe what America had done for its. Historians estimate that about 24 million Soviet citizens, out of a population of less than 200 million, were killed during the Second World War, amounting to at least 13% of the country's population and also to about half the total war dead. A large percentage of those who survived came out missing a limb or two and most found themselves displaced. For these sorts of reasons, the Soviets, much unlike this country, weren't subsequently in much of a forgiving mood vis-a-vis Germany for a while. 2.5% of the world's total population was killed in the Second World War. In a set of factoids that makes it abundantly clear who the existential aggressor was, an estimated 83% of the war deaths were on the Allied side and 58% of all deaths resulting from the war were specifically Allied civilians. By comparison, Axis civilians composed just 4% of the war dead.

On the comparatively tranquil American home front, one interesting development was the contradiction that emerged in the way that different minority groups were treated. On the one hand, President Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1941 in order to prohibit racial discrimination in access to war industry and government jobs, which came to compose the bulk of the economy during the war years. (It was thus hardly coincidental then that a civil rights movement began to emerge in a big way following the war's end, which saw the economy return to a focus on the production of civilian consumer goods.) Indeed, African Americans, hitherto loyal to the party of Lincoln (which had done nothing for them since the Reconstruction era), rewarded this policy by switching their principal loyalties from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in each election cycle beginning in 1942. On the other hand, Japanese Americans were rounded up in the hundreds of thousands and shipped off concentration camps immediately following the nation's declaration of war in a move that for a long time was protested only by the Socialist Party, which also took a neutral position on the war itself even after the attack on Pearl Harbor (previous to which the party had opposed American entry outright). The imprisoned Japanese Americans were not released until after the war.

In terms of domestic economics, the war years were the most socialistic, and the most successful, in American history. Massive war mobilization efforts and projects -- the large mass mobilizations the nation has ever seen -- eliminated unemployment as a significant problem in American society in a development that perhaps best concentrated the nation's recovery from the doldrums of the Depression era under Roosevelt's leadership. In 1933, when Roosevelt had first taken office, the American rate of unemployment stood at a record high of 25%. By 1944, in contrast, it had plummeted to a record low of just 1%. The American worker also benefited from the government's wartime policy of offering arbitration between unions and employers to determine the wages and other terms of new contracts so long as unions agreed not strike during the war and likewise from governmental pressure on employers to recognize unions during the war years. These measures were aimed at ensuring social and economic stability during the emergency of war, as were the price and wage controls the government imposed. The aforementioned labor policy proved to be a blanket of security for the organization of the workforce, as shown by the fact that the percentage of American workers belonging to unions more than doubled to approximate record highs in excess of 30% of the total during the war years. As a result of the government's arbitration efforts, employers gave workers new untaxed benefits such as vacation time, pensions, and health insurance, which increased the workers' disposal income even when wage rates were frozen. But while, resulting from policies like these, personal incomes were reaching all-time highs and the average American was experiencing unprecedented prosperity, the pool of products available for them to consume was shrinking as a result of the reorganization of the economy to focus on war production. To put it in market terms, demand for consumer goods came to far outstrip the supply thereof and thus shortages developed. Or to put it in layman's terms, people now literally had more money than they knew what to do with. The government's vigorous daily cajoling of the population into the purchase of war bonds, which was tantamount to post-war spending during the war years, helped siphon off some of the surplus while price and wage controls and high rates of taxation helped minimize resultant increases in the cost of living. Meanwhile rationing was used to guarantee minimum amounts of necessities like food and clothing to everyone (especially poor people) and prevent inflation. The plight of the American wage-worker was furthermore of growing importance as well because there were a lot more of them beginning in the war years, for not only had the war mobilization as such accelerated the gradual movement of the population from rural to urban areas, but the invention of the automated cotton picker during this same period eliminated rapidly eliminated the need of American farmer for much in the way of hired help, thus even further accelerating the aforementioned migration, particularly amongst African Americans (whom, up to that point, had remained principally tied to the South's post-slavery system of virtual serfdom known as sharecropping and now moved to urban areas in droves to become concentrated, class conscious wage-workers, thus propelling the nation into the era of civil rights struggles.) The gender composition of the American workforce also underwent a notable, if temporary, change during the war years. With so many men fighting abroad and in need of combat supplies, war industries (including notably war manufacturers) began to employ women on the home front. Illustrating this shift, and its temporary nature, the female share of the paid workforce rose from 25% in 1941 to 29% by 1943, where it remained for the duration of the war until dropping back off to less than 28% in 1946 (the first post-war year) in what would become a post-war trend of women returning to the household.

IMPress Polly
09-24-2013, 06:49 AM
PART FIVE:


In addition to price and wage controls, another measure the government undertook to minimize inflation (as well as to control skyrocketing government debts resulting from sky high military spending) during the war years was a dramatic increase in taxation generally. Whereas Roosevelt had launched his administration with tax cuts, everyone now saw the need for taxes generally to be increased; the only question was how much. Top marginal tax rates ranged from 81 to 94% for the duration of the war, and the income level subject to the highest rate was lowered from $5 million to $200,000. Roosevelt, feeling it immoral and unpatriotic for businessmen to be making huge sums of money amidst the war, tried unsuccessfully, by executive order 9250, to impose a 100% surtax on after-tax incomes over $25,000 (equal in purchasing power to roughly $332,000 in today's money). However, Roosevelt did manage to impose caps on executive pay in corporations with government contracts. Congress also enlarged the tax base by lowering the minimum income to pay taxes, and by reducing personal exemptions and deductions. By 1944 nearly every employed person was paying federal income taxes, as compared to 10% in 1940.

By the start of 1944, the president was beginning to look at the matter of what post-war policy would be. It was well understood that most of government's wartime policies were temporary and would be terminated with the conclusion of the war. With the end coming into closer and closer view, the question emerging now was that of what policies would replace the wartime regime, and there the president had some new ideas. Namely, in a radio speech he delivered on January 11th of 1944, he laid out plans for a third incarnation of the New Deal: plans to ratify a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution: an economic bill of rights aimed at legally guaranteeing every American adequate food, clothing, housing, health care, education, careers, retirement pensions, freedom from monopolistic business practices, and more. His reasoning particularly was that history, and particularly recent history, had shown that "People who are hungry, people who are out of a job, are the stuff of which dictatorships are made" and thus that it had "become self-evident" that "necessitous men are not free men". To sum that up, he was contending that the fascism America was at war with had its roots in the economic insecurities of the respective populations and that, accordingly, the prevention of the emergence of a comparable regime here at home required a lasting redress of such grievances; that the protection of America's first bill of rights (social and political rights) hinged on the creation of a second (an economic bill of rights). You can here his words and his reasoning on this subject for yourself in the radio speech linked below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwUL9tJmypI

The idea of an economic bill of rights was not original to Roosevelt's speech, for such a bill of rights already existed in one country with which the United States was allied at the time: the Soviet Union. The linked remarks by the president make it clear that he had no intention of implementing a socialist system. However, it does seem rather an inescapable conclusion that Roosevelt had been this regard (the idea for an economic bill of rights) influenced on some level by the Soviet example.

Even before the election season, the president and the Democrats had already moved to secure for a generation the right to a college education at least in regular law with the introduction of what became known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, which granted free college to all war veterans.

By the time election season rolled around in 1944, it was obvious that Roosevelt was in poor health and thus the Democrats now concerned themselves more seriously than usual with the matter of who his replacement would be in the event that he should pass away in office. The president preferred his then-current vice president Henry Wallace: a solid progressive. The city machines and Southern delegates to the Democratic National Convention, however, preferred Senator Harry Truman of Missouri: a comparative moderate. The latter side easily won out. Post-war events make it clear that this was an important decision for the nation's subsequent direction, for Wallace subsequently opposed Truman's policy of hostility toward the Soviet Union and the corresponding onset of the Cold War. As to the election itself, Republican candidate Thomas Dewey ran yet another of the party's campaigns against the New Deal, furthermore calling for an immediate return to civilian control of the economy, even with the war not yet won. The Republicans once more found themselves faced with the problem that they were literally arguing with success, in this case both at home and on the battlefield and correspondingly went down to yet another easy defeat in the presidential race. Indeed the defeat was felt even more broadly. Whereas in the 1942 midterm elections, with the war effort thus far going mediocre at best, the Republicans had picked up 34 seats in the House of Representatives and 8 in the Senate, in the 1944 general elections, with the war effort going well and the end now in sight, the Democrats regained 21 seats in the House, held their own in the Senate, and won a majority of state governorships, in addition to re-electing the president to an unprecedented fourth term. It was to be a very short fourth term though, as Roosevelt would die in office the following April with the war almost, but not yet quite, won. With him in many respects died an era in American politics.

IMPress Polly
09-24-2013, 06:50 AM
PART SIX:

From Anti-Fascism to Anti-Communism: America's Post-War Class Composition

The Communist Party achieved its zenith of popularity and influence during World War 2, reaching a total membership of 80,000 Americans, mainly because the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was a positive one during this period. After the Germans invaded the USSR, the Communist Party renewed its calls for an attack on Germany in order to save the Soviet Union. They became perhaps the strongest supporters of the war effort, helping out in every mobilization they could, turning in enemy agents, and so on. Since the war was popular, the Communists gained in popularity as a result of their support for it. Their support for Roosevelt was so solid that shortly after the Communist International was dissolved in early 1944, the Communist Party USA opted to go a step further and dissolve entirely because the party leader, Earl Browder, failed to see the point in their continued existence as a centralized organization. He had come to believe that social harmony was being realized in the United States: that the contradiction between American workers and American capitalists was becoming non-antagonistic, observing that even sections of the business community were now getting on board with a left wing political trajectory beneficial to the workers. Such illusions were quickly shot down upon the war's end, whereupon the Communist Party was reconstituted under new, more leftist leadership. The question though is why. Why did America suddenly turn to the right after the war's conclusion?

(And yes, the nation's politics DID take a right wing turn following WW2! There are many ways of illustrating this even besides the post-war crackdown on communists and socialists (both real and more often imagined), but perhaps none is clearer than the overwhelming victory of the Republican Party in the 1946 midterm elections, followed by the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which remains on the books today, alongside now even harsher anti-labor laws. The Taft-Hartley Act permitted company management to sue unions that did not abide by their contracts, outlawed the closed (i.e. union members only) shop, restricted the union shop, allowed the states to pass so-called "right to work" laws (wherein union members cannot be obliged to pay dues, which tends to undermine their financial viability), forbade campaign contributions by unions, gave employers the right to refuse to institute a check-off, required that union leaders sign an affidavit swearing in a legally binding way that they were not communists, and made a 60-day "cooling off" prerequisite to all strikes. Following the passage of this legislation, the American labor movement, hitherto on the rise, fell into a slow decline that continues to this day.)

In 1965, looking back on the 20 years that had passed since World War 2 from a communist perspective, Mao Zedong's top army commander Lin Biao had this observation concerning a post-WW2 shift in the nature of the global struggle for a socialist and ultimately a communist future (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lin-biao/1965/09/peoples_war/ch07.htm) (and I think we must understand communism as the epitome of leftism),which he formulated as a "global people's war" similar in nature to the protracted people's war he had helped lead under Mao in China:

“Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called ‘the cities of the world’, then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute ‘the rural areas of the world’. Since World War II, the proletarian revolutionary movement has for various reasons been temporarily held back in the North American and West European capitalist countries, while the people’s revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America has been growing vigorously. In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of cities by the rural areas. In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population.”

It was a good observation, for the balance of the aforementioned struggle had shifted, seemingly spontaneously, from being principally centered in North America and Western Europe previous to the Second World War to now being centered principally in Third World countries following the Second World War. But why had this shift occurred? Lin Biao gave only a generic, unspecific "for various reasons" answer, indicating that he probably didn't know himself. Some curious communists began to subsequently investigate possible explanations. The conclusion arrived at was that the global capitalist class, concentrated principally in the United States, had bought the loyalties of certain populations, transforming them into net beneficiaries of the capitalist system; into bourgeois (middle class) elements. In accordance with this shift in the class composition of said populations, they would now mostly align with the capitalist class, particularly in international class conflicts. I observe this class analysis to be exactly correct. During the Second World War, most Americans began to experience unprecedented prosperity, encountering such First World problems as having too much money. Though the methods by which this feat had been accomplished revolved around quasi-socialist measures and the growing strength of organized labor, such are the ironies of history (much like the irony of how its most consistently the producers and distributors of food who wind up going hungry). Money changes people. People have short memories and quickly forget where they came from once they have money. As the rule, people tend to ideologically follow their own class interests, even as those class interests change. Economic security tends to conservatize people's attitudes. My point is that, contrary to prior Marxist beliefs, it was now discovered that, in reality, proletarian status doesn't essentially correspond to one's relationship to production or distribution (i.e. one's status as a wage-worker) so much as it does to one's wealth level (i.e. to poverty or relative poverty). The international proletariat is the global poor. This reality contradicts the previous belief that humanity had entered into a truly unique period with the emergence of the urban working class that rendered a communist future inevitable because it suggests that, in reality, the social base corresponding to collectivist interests has always existed, and also that such a reorganization is impossible in countries like the United States at this time because the aforementioned social base is not in the majority here at present. That will probably eventually change though through the very workings of increasingly globalized capitalism itself.

The buy-off of populations was by no means wholly an abstraction, by the way. The Marshall Plan whereby the United States agreed to underwrite Europe's recovery from the war following the eruption of a communist-led rebellion in Greece in order to prevent the furtherance of communist influence was overt political bribery; a process whereby America bought the loyalty of Western Europe to the capitalist system and was only prevented from doing so for Eastern Europe by the presence of Soviet troops. And where the Marshall Plan supplied the carrot, the formation of NATO supplied the stick.

America has been a largely bourgeois, right wing nation since World War 2. That has to do mainly with the way the war-era changes in the class composition, and therefore the class loyalties, of the population during the war. Genuine proletarian internationalists side with the global proletariat more essentially than with their nations. Nations are only progressive in as far as they're proletarian nations and this one is not. American patriotism therefore has been largely unjustified from a proletarian standpoint since the Second World War.

Chris
09-24-2013, 06:52 AM
With him in many respects died an era in American politics.

Beg to differ. Progressivism is not only alive and well but thriving today. FDR was only the beginning of the end.