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PAUL JAY: Didn't socialize the banking system.
PETER KUZNICK: Right. He didn't nationalize the banking system the way many people had urged him to do. He kept it in the hands of the same people he had before. There were congressional hearings about banking. Certain individuals were fired, lost their positions, but in terms of fundamental reform of the banking system, that didn't happen.
PAUL JAY: A very critical point because the, as much as these measures, like these massive workfare programs and regulations, as much as they were called socialist by the right, and perhaps they have a certain kind of socialist character to them because it is a certain amount of government intervening in the economy, on this most critical point of how stuff is owned and the most critical would've been public owners of the banks, that would 've been quite a socialistic kind of measure. He didn 't go there.
PETER KUZNICK: No. Nor did he in any of the other programs. What we see, for example, is agriculture. Henry Wallace is secretary of agriculture and the initial approach was to cut farm production. The idea was recovery through scarcity, so by plowing under their crops, cotton especially, by killing the piglets, it was going to reduce the supply and therefore raise the demand and raise the prices. It worked. Wallace commented and said, "This was a horrible example to set. This is the wrong way to go about doing this," but it was necessary so they distributed the pigs that they had massacred to poor people.
They distributed the commodities to people in need, and it actually worked in terms of revitalizing the agricultural economy, which began to boom after that, propelling both Roosevelt's and Wallace 's popularity. The same thing with the industrial economy, National Industrial Recovery Act. Now, that was the one policy, the one area that did have more fascist overtones, especially under Hugh Johnson, who was a supporter of Mussolini, who was put in charge of that, and distributed Mussolini's programs and writings and other right-wing writings to people on his staff, but overall that was another place where they could 've taken a very, very different approach but the approach was a moderate approach during the first New Deal.
What they wanted to do was get people back to work so they set up the Civilian Conservation Corps, the various work programs and they put millions of people back to work during the New Deal. Government funded programs to put people to work, which meant-
PAUL JAY: Directly federally funded. They didn't go as much through cities and states. It was a direct federal program, is that right?
PETER KUZNICK: They were both, actually. Some of them did go through cities and states, some of them did go through private companies but there were massive federal programs as well to build dams, to build roads, build the national parks, to build airports, to build schools, housing, the kinds of things that we needed that would still make sense today, although it would've made sense for Obama to get out of the 2007/2008 recession, but there's an aversion to doing that kind of direct government aid at this point. In the 1930s, the American public was open to that partly because they had been through three and half years of complete misery and partly because we hadn't been divided along quite the same ideological lines at the time.
So, there was a massive federal spending program that lasted really until 1937 and part of what propels that is that in 1934, the midterm elections, the Democrats moved sharply to the left as the country is moving sharply to the left. In the 1934 election, Democrats controlled the Senate, 69 to 25. They controlled the House 32 to 103. So, we look at the narrow Republican majorities now, you compare with the Democratic majorities in 1934 or in the 1936 election was even more. Roosevelt won the election in 1936. The electoral college vote was 523 for the Democrats to eight for the Republicans.
The same before that was, the Republicans only won Vermont and Maine. The same before that was, as goes Maine, so goes the country. At that point, they joked, "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont," and that was all the Republicans could control in 1936. In the House, the Democrats controlled the House 331 to 89. They controlled the Senate, 76 to 16. So, the comments at the time was that the right-wing Republicans had been vanquished. Roosevelt, by this point, Harold Ickes had told him after the '34 election that the country is far to the left of the Democratic Party. Ickes urged him, with the support of Wallace and others, to move the policies to the left and Roosevelt responded appropriately.
As he says on the eve of the election, he makes a speech in Madison Square Garden and he says, "We have to struggle with the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism and war profiteering."
Roosevelt: We have to struggle with the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.
PETER KUZNICK: When is the last time you heard a Democrat talk like that, talk about the plutocrats and the banking interest as being the enemy of the people? Maybe Bernie Sanders sounded that note. You certainly didn't hear Hillary Clinton sounding that way, nor do we hear Barack Obama, even though they should've been making that kind of populist appeal, which we could do in the United States again if we look at the attitudes of the Democratic party, Democratic voters.
According to the pew values survey in 1994, 30% of Democrats were liberal left-leaning but according to the pew values survey, by 2017, 73% of Democrats are liberal left-leaning. There should be a Democratic Party that reflects that the same way that the Democrats reflected that in the 1930s. This was a period, as we mentioned a little bit last time, that the second wave of the New Deal, the more radical wave, was propelled by the upsurge in labor and by the sharp shift to the left. We have in 1935, '36 the popular front beginning where you've got a liberal-left coalition.
The communists are actually part of that but this reflects the labor surge. Beginning in '33, we see a sharp increase in strikes and in 1934, we've got general strikes led by the communists and socialists and musteites, or Trotskyism Musteites, that take over San Francisco, take over Minneapolis, take over Toledo, Ohio. We have national strikes with a very radical agenda, leading to '37 when we have these sit-in strikes in the auto industry. So, you've got a surge of labor radicalization during that time, the building of the CIO.
We also, this is a time when the scientists moved sharply to the left, when the African-American communities is sharply on the left but even America's intellectuals and writers. Pretty much every prominent American writer during this time is strongly on the left. We can maybe point to Fitzgerald and Faulkner as exceptions but every other prominent American writer is on the left. You see the same thing among all the creative areas.
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