"Yeah, Shep, it sure did sound like it to me!"
"Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else." FDR.
March 4th FDR sworn in.
March 5th declares bank holiday
March 9th Emergency Banking Act
March 12th first Fireside Chat
March 31st establishes the Reforestation Relief Act and the CCC giving employment to a quarter million youth aged 18 to 26.
April 19th takes the country off the gold standard
May 12th Federal Emergency Relief Act authorizing immediate grants to states
For relief projects
May 12th Agricultural Adjustment Act to help farmers to raise prices
May 18th establishes the Tennessee Valley Authority
May 27th Federal Securities Act to regulate and monitor stocks and bonds
June 6th National Employment System Act to act as a national clearinghouse for the unemployed
June 13th Home Owners Refinance Act, using Hoover's two billion dollars
Loans for industry money. The Federal government bought and held over one million home mortgages in one year. The program eventually returned a surplus to the treasury before going out of business.
June 16th National Industrial Recovery Act
June 16th Public Works Administration predecessor of the WPA
But what is missing? What did Mr. Roosevelt, in all his his wisdom, forget? Tax cuts! No tax cuts for industry or for investors holding onto their stocks. What was he thinking? Everyone today knows that tax cuts cure every ill.
"His is a relationship to his little local bank or local loan company. It is a sad fact that even though the local lender in many cases does not want to evict the farmer or homeowner by foreclosure proceedings, he is forced to do so in order to keep his bank or company solvent. Here should be an objective of government itself, to provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations. That is another example of building from the bottom up.
"One other objective closely related to the problem of selling American products is to provide a tariff policy based upon economic common sense rather than upon politics--hot air--pull." FDR
"The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.
"Now, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud." FDR
"Shep, did he just say the Republicans were a fraud?"
"Yeah, he did."
"I don't understand why a President would have to resort to such gutter politics, Shawn."
"We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back." FDR
"Now, there is an old and somewhat lugubrious adage, which says: 'Never speak of rope in the house of a man who has been hanged.' In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is that word 'depression.'"
He went straight at them and pulled no punches and cut no deals nor took prisoners. But as he was speaking about the end of World War Two he said something that to me at least was so poignant and insightful of his understanding.
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