Re: [Marxism] Seeking a source on FDR's New Deal

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I hate to recommend SWP books, but this is very valuable. Of course 
it is not "scholarly".

http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.326/.f?category=

Roosevelt As A 'Friend Of Labor' Is Just A Myth
By Art Preis, in the Militant,
Vol. 61, no. 8, 24 February, 1997

Below we print an excerpt from Labor's Giant Step - The First Twenty 
Years of the CIO: 1936-55 about Franklin Roosevelt, president of the 
United States from 1933-45. To this day he is held up by liberals, 
Stalinists, and the labor officialdom as a "friend of the working 
class." This selection from the chapter " 'New Deal' - Myth and Fact" 
gives the true picture of what the Roosevelt administration 
represented. It is copyright 1964 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted with 
permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

Roosevelt's big election campaign pitch was "government saving." He 
said in his nomination acceptance speech of July 2, 1932: "For three 
long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that 
Government - federal, state and local -costs are too much...I propose 
to you, my friends, and through you, that Government of all kinds, 
big and little, be made solvent and that the example be set by the 
President of the United States and his cabinet."

As for unemployment relief, he explained that "primary responsibility 
for relief rests with localities, now, as ever" - that is, with 
bankrupt local communities. He wound up with the oft-quoted 
declaration: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the 
American people."

After Roosevelt's death in 1945, his Secretary of Labor Frances 
Perkins, in her naively revealing The Roosevelt I Knew, spilled the 
beans about the "New Deal." She wrote that when Roosevelt took office 
in March 1933, "the New Deal was not a plan with form or content. It 
was a happy phrase he had coined during the campaign, and its value 
was psychological. It made people feel better....

This "happy phrase" concealed the real purpose of the medicine in 
Roosevelt's prescription. He was intent on saving dying American 
capitalism and he was ready to use all means to that end.

His first major official act after he took office on March 4, 1933, 
was to save the big banks and big depositors at the expense of the 
small banks and small depositors. His bank moratorium on withdrawal 
of deposits and other emergency bank measures consolidated the big 
banks while thousands of the small ones never opened again or paid 
back only a fraction of deposits....

The picture of Roosevelt as a "friend of labor" giving the people 
concessions out of the tenderness of his heart - this portrait 
painted by both the conservative trade union officialdom and the 
Stalinists - is completely false. Roosevelt was a clever, adroit 
politician who carefully gauged popular sentiment. His slightest 
concession to the workers was given grudgingly out of fear of the 
masses and to prevent their moving left....

Paltry relief for the unemployed

The labor leaders and liberals who have built up the popular myth 
about Roosevelt's "humanitarianism" and "love for the little man," 
rest their case mainly on two claims: (1) that he "gave relief and 
jobs to the unemployed"; (2) that he "gave labor the right to organize."

Let us examine his aid to the unemployed. Speaking of the annual 
average of more than 12 million unemployed during Roosevelt's first 
term, his relief administrator and intimate colleague Harry L. 
Hopkins boasted in his book, Spending to Save, published in 1936, 
that "in the last three and a half years we have spent almost six 
billion dollars in helping these families maintain themselves." The 
average annual expenditure for the unemployed ran about $1- 1/2 
billion, while the total yearly cost of government was a little more 
than $7 billion. When it came to war, however, Roosevelt was to spend 
$79 billion in 1943, $95 billion in 1944 and more than $100 billion in 1945.

The Emergency Relief Act of 1933 granted only $500 million to the 
states to continue the starvation doles previously given some of the 
unemployed. By 1935, Roosevelt was to declare his intention to "get 
out of this business of relief" and to abandon three-quarters of the 
unemployed to the tender mercies of local relief agencies without funds.

Roosevelt's works program never provided jobs for more than 25% of 
the jobless. His first such program, the Civil Works Administration 
started in November 1933, lasted only three months. It paid $15 a 
week, with minimum wages of 40 cents an hour in the South, 45 cents 
in the Midwest and 60 cents in the Northeast. The Federal Emergency 
Relief Administration program, which got under way in the summer of 
1934, began to fold up in the spring of 1935. It employed an average 
of fewer than 2,000,000 workers, at a wage of $12 a week.

The peak of the work relief program was reached under the Works 
Progress Administration (WPA). This paid the "prevailing wage rates" 
of the local communities - as low as $19 a month in the South and $40 
a month in the North for common labor....

Throughout the entire first two terms of the Roosevelt 
administration, there were continuous unemployed demonstrations, 
relief works strikes and riots. The highest relief, the most relief 
jobs and the biggest wages were in direct proportion to the number of 
unemployed struggles....

Roosevelt's program for the unemployed seemed generous only by 
comparison with Hoover's. But in terms of even minimum subsistence 
standards it was, as the Unemployed League put it, "not enough to 
live on and just too much to die on."

The main prop of the Roosevelt myth is that he gave American labor 
"the right to organize." This claim is based on Section 7(a) inserted 
into Roosevelt's chief piece of early "stabilization" legislation, 
the National Industrial Recovery Act, known as NRA, enacted in June 
1933. Actually, the right to organize had been fully sanctioned in 
the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932, adopted in Hoover's 
administration.

To be sure, labor already had that right to organize - whenever it 
exercised the right and fought to maintain it. If there were no such 
right, how could the AFL have existed at all? In fact, 14 years 
earlier the AFL had organized more than four million workers. Had the 
workers not been ready and eager for organization, Section 7(a), 
affirming their right to organize and bargain collectively and to 
pick their own union representatives free from employer interference, 
would have had no effect in any sense.

The facts are that the workers were already on the move when 
Roosevelt took office and Section 7(a) was a reluctant response to 
labor pressure. The same upsurge of protest against conditions that 
had swept Roosevelt into office was also expressed at the start of 
1933 in the biggest strike wave since the early twenties. These 
strikes were especially significant because many occurred in 
unorganized, company-dominated basic industries, particularly auto. 


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