As I looked back on the history of American politics leading up to and during the Second World War, I discovered that many of the forces and tactics that the Republicans and other conservatives arrayed against FDR and his New Deal, are very the same ones that they are being used to oppose Barack Obama today.
Herbert Hoover, our Thirty-first President, is emblematic of many of these problems, although he was not directly responsible for the October 1929 Stock Market Crash that most economists agree marks the start of the Great Depression. That honor belongs to Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, who was the American government's primary culprit in Black Tuesday. Mellon argued for and Congress reduced taxes for the rich (who at the time were the only one's paying the income tax), and colluded with financial and banking concerns to bypass Federal anti-trust and other laws that allowed unchecked manipulation by Wall Street to run rampant in America's financial markets. (This sounds strangely familiar.) Recent history has taught us again that if our wealthiest citizens are not taxed sufficiently to prevent their engaging in financially dangerous speculations--whether it is wildly speculative Wall Street trading and the Florida Land Boom of the 1920's, or the credit default swaps and derivatives trading in the last decade--they will create a financial bubble that, when it bursts, takes the rest of the economy with it. Secretary Mellon resigned his Treasury post, and went on an art buying tour of Europe in 1932, just ahead of a Congressional investigation into his collusion with Wall Street and other financiers.
It was Hoover's actions after the Crash, however, which insured that we were not getting out of the financial hole that had been dug for us at any time in the near future. He started a number of public works programs, like the Hoover Dam, which would have helped America's economy, by causing its money supply to grow--despite the hoarding of money by the rich--if Hoover had not also attempted to balance the Federal Budget at the same time, which caused a deflationary reduction of available money during the recession that immediately followed the Crash. Deflation plus a recession is the textbook definition of a depression. Today's Republicans and oligarchs still have not learned this basic economic lesson, more than eighty years after the Great Depression. [Or perhaps they have, and they are hoarding money until they get: 1) Obama the Black Man out of the White House; 2) the American people become so desperate that they will take any job, even if it doesn't pay enough to support themselves or their family. Always remember: the oligarch's primary goal is to destroy all aspects of the New Deal, including the minimum wage.]
Hoover's biggest mistake came from promoting the now infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which the President signed into law on June 17, 1930. This legislation was passed over the objections of 1028 American economists, who petitioned Hoover and the Congress to not pass the bill, or sign it into law. This led to a tariff war among the industrialized nations of Europe and North America, which damaged the economic situation of the poor, working, and middle classes (as well as the economies) of those nations far more than it did the rich, when the industrial nations of Europe and Canada followed America's lead.
Herbert Hoover is reckoned by many historians to be our greatest Secretary of Commerce. As a willing puppet for America's financial and manufacturing firms, there can be no doubt as to his ascendancy. However, he is in my opinion our third worst President, right after James Buchanan and George W. Bush. Buchanan did nothing to try and stop the Civil War, still the greatest single disaster in American History. George W. Bush took a budget surplus, and by: 1) needlessly expanding the size of the Federal Government with the Department of Homeland Security after September 11, 2001; 2) involving us in two foreign wars for no good reason, without paying for them; and then, by giving tax cuts primarily to his main constituencies -- "the haves and have mores," doubling our national debt; 3) George W. Bush, through both his personal and his Administration's inattentiveness (for which he is still responsible, because as the sign on Harry Truman's desk said when Truman was President, "The Buck Stops Here" ) to the financial sector; saddled his successor, Barack Obama, with the worst economic crisis this country has seen since the Great Depression. At least Hoover didn't double the national debt for FDR. For these reasons, Hoover only places third on my all-time worst Presidents list.
President Hoover was and is a perfect example of the Republican Party's historic long-term lack of vision, as well as the narrowness of that vision. As the then head of General Motors, Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, stated during his Senate confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense (in January 1953), "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country." Or as it has come down to us through the last sixty years, "What's good for (insert name of giant American conglomerate of your choice), is good for America." Hoover bought in, heart and soul, to the primacy of the oligarchs and their giant corporate surrogates over the needs and best interests of the American people as a whole. To someone like Hoover, or "Engine Charlie" Wilson, or Paul Ryan, or Mitt Romney, whatever is good for the oligarchs must automatically be good for the rest of the country, and the World.
If I was as myopic in real-life as these gentlemen are in real-life economics, and its effects on the average American, I would be legally blind. Because something is good for the wealthiest members of a society does not mean that it is good for the other members of that society. Ask the peons of Mexico.
This intentionally cultivated myopic view is combined with the conservatives' historical distrust of, and disdain for, the common man. To quote Edmund Burke in his 1756 monograph, A Vindication of Natural Society , "The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness of the rich." Conservatives have long known that they must keep the poor quiet, as well as ignorant, if they are to successfully "keep them in their place." Organized religion--especially one like Calvinism, which states that the rich are the elect of God, or a literalist fundamentalism, that demands an absolute adherence to a denomination's "literal" interpretation of the Bible--is one method the One Percenters have used historically to help keep the poor in their place. Another method is to use racism and other forms of bigotry and divisiveness to divide the non-rich so that they fight against each other, rather than oppose the rich. As the Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould once said, "I can hire half the poor to kill the other half."
Today, the oligarchs have become aware that they also have to keep the poor "just poor enough," so that the poor do not have enough money to combine their funds for an effective political movement. At the same time, they have learned you cannot have the poor so destitute that they become desperate, and decide it is time to revolt, kill the rich, and take their wealth. People who are a little bit hungry do not foment a revolution; those whose children are starving will man the barricades in an instant. As French artist Marcel Duchamp once stated, " Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes." ( Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, chapter 4; edited by Pierre Cabanne, 1967.) For many of the poor, it is what some of us call discretionary income, which differentiates between a human being living in poverty, and a member of the working or lower middle class.
As I first stated in my February 15, 2011 OpEdNews article, " The Ghost of Ancient Hellas ," I believe that the Greek philosopher Aristotle discovered the answer for the best form of government almost twenty-five centuries ago, including the who, where, and how of the economic classes that should dominate it:
"Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes [poor or rich], or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant"The reason [for failure of these states when established] is that the middle class is seldom numerous in them, and whichever party, whether the rich or the common people [poor], transgresses the mean and predominates, draws the constitution its own way, and thus arises either oligarchy or democracy [mob rule]." Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, Chapter 11; translated by Benjamin Jowett.
Why is a political community whose ruling power base is the middle class so superior to the rule of either the oligarchs or the poor?
First, the middle class's investment in the nation's material wealth is neither too little, as is the case with the poor, nor too much, as is the case of the rich. They understand, from their own life experience, that there are times that the sacrifices of material things must be made in order to achieve a goal for the long-term greater good. The poor, who have known nothing but want and sacrifice, have a difficult time understanding the need for further sacrifice once they have attained power. The wealthy, having never known real want, and having had all of their needs and many of their desires met for their entire lives, cannot understand why any sort of sacrifice might be called for by themselves.
Second, the middle class understands that their stewardship of the nation and its institutions is a privilege: a privilege they they have earned, and of which they are justly proud, but a privilege none the less. They understand what Thomas Jefferson was writing of when he stated that the Tree of Liberty requires the blood of patriots and tyrants once every twenty years or so if it is to remain healthy.
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