Maynard dredges up yesteryear’s political cartoons
It’s not just politics. At a fundamental level, nothing ever changes.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:9
I guess it’s slightly reassuring that none of our problems are new. Although it’s pretty sad that we seem incapable of learning. Or we learn and then we forget. Ignorance is a renewable resource.
Here’s a political cartoon from the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” may have been necessary for psychological purposes, but it certainly didn’t solve the fundamental economic crisis. Here’s the comment of a contemporary pundit. Note the details which seem so fresh, such as the “young pinkies from Columbia and Harvard” who are drunk from a bottle marked “Power”. (By the way, the man labeled “Wallace” is Henry Wallace, an ultra-Leftie who was FDR’s VP. He was replaced by Truman in FDR’s 1944 campaign. So Obama isn’t the first kook to get close to the presidency. Next to Wallace are Donald Richberg and Harold Ickes. The man on the horse is Rexford Tugwell. These were the “czars” of the day.)
Before we had bomb-throwing Islamists from the Middle East, we had bomb-throwing anarchists from Europe. We’ve forgotten, but this was a pretty big deal in its day. For example, there was the Haymarket affair in Chicago. Note that the flier pictured in Wikipedia shows text in English and German.
Yesterday’s political correctness was to stand against Communism. Obviously Communism is a despicable philosophy, just as racism is a despicable philosophy. But the excesses of McCarthyism were counterproductive in fighting Communism, just as today’s rabid political correctness makes the endless charges of racism into a sick joke. This comic was printed in the Washington Post in 1949.
Nice post. I believe it was Frank Zappa who noted that the fundamental elements of the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Wow. I’ve seen that first cartoon before, but I noted the placard the guy in the lower left is painting:
“Plan of action for U.S.
Spend! Spend! Spend
under the guise of recovery–Bust the government–Blame the capitalists for the failure–junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship”
Sounds like what Glenn Beck has been saying about the whole “Cloward and Piven” thing. It’s certainly what the conservatives have been saying about what the health care bill will do to insurance companies.
It was noted earlier on this blog, though, that Henry Morganthau, Jr., FDR’s Treasury Secretary said in 1939:
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!”
So the “plan of action” from Morganthau’s point of view does not sound deliberate. And he was the “architect” of the New Deal!
One of the things that Thomas Sowell has talked about is that people with the “unconstrained vision” (from his book “A Conflict of Visions”) do not learn from history. He didn’t say this, but I’m getting the idea that what they do learn they have to experience for themselves.
The Left has deluded itself into believing that the reason FDR’s spending didn’t work during the Depression is that he didn’t spend *enough*. They point to an instance during the Depression when FDR’s stimulus spending ended, and unemployment got worse, and the stock market fell. They also look at the spending during WW II. They believe the narrative, which their own progressive ancestors fashioned, that it was WW II that caused the recovery. So they’re thinking “Depression Plus”, spend what was spent during the Depression AND WW II! That’ll do the trick! A more fine grained economic analysis, though, would show that this is not true. After WW II, and the end of rationing (1945), our economy suffered massive inflation. From what I understand from listening to Glenn Beck’s telling of history, it was only when the Republicans took over congress, and then the White House, and slashed public spending that the economy recovered, and America experienced the boom of the 1950s. Only thing is I am not clear if they cut taxes. I’ve head accounts from my grandparent’s generation that the top income tax bracket was more than 50%. I’m not sure, though, when this was. The recovery may have had more to do with reducing the public debt (the federal debt was 100%+ of GDP at the end of WW II) than anything else.
FWIW, U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History, 1913-2010. Punishingly high tax rates are not new. However, prior to WWII, high rates didn’t kick in until a level that was, in the context of the currency and wages, astronomical. After WWII, inflation gradually pushed the ordinary taxpayer into territory that was once the exclusive domain of the rich. Of course, the truly rich evaded those taxes by shifting income into royalties or capital gains or income that was otherwise sheltered. So it can be argued that today’s income taxes are relatively low, which is technically true, but as a practical matter it’s not. Not to mention all the other taxes that have been invented and imposed over the last century.
http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/marginal-tax-rates.gif
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php
it’s hoover’s boy andrew mellon who had him cut the top tax rate right before the crash from 73% to 24%. it did not work- but then again neither did spending the only options politicians then and now go for generally in a state of fervid panic. and taxes climbed right through the roof through the Depression and WW2. hoover bullied and begged business to keep their wages and work force set( part of the keynesian motif which would dominate western economies through the 70s) instead of adapting to the circumstances. he tried to recreate confidence, the real driving force of any economy, and it did not work.he gave into public spending even though he loathed it-they considered they had no options and Roosevelt beat that nag into the ground. it did not work. Hitler worked( and also solved germany’s significant economic woes by ignoring her debt entirely.).
what’s ignored is that americans were laboring under a new post agricultural/ frontier sort of economy that had just begun to be driven by consumer spending- the 20s saw the birth of advertising , large scale credit across economic classes and wall street speculation from the middle classes. no one knew what to do when it finally collapsed under sundry burdens (from a corrupt and dysfunction wall street that resembled the wild wild west to the new federal reserve to england pulling the gold standard from its currency to the global collapse of banks for an entire decade running to the decade long european slump in the wake of WW1 that the US tried to prop up). average americans were shouldering unheard of personal debt for the first time in our history -in a country far more likely to be almost puritanical, victorian in the equation of debt and poverty to be symptoms of some sort of depraved moral malfunction best not abetted with charity. the most significant elephant standing in the room of the Depression beyond the taxes and sick government spending was the complete collapse of the consumer who was just coming to the fore of our economic model previously driven by investment and industry- and we were still an exporting country then. we had no model like europe for the communal protection of the society in times of need( born of a feudal society and extended family units not marx’s theories). oh, pioneers.
we are a product of the 20s and the Depression- culturally and in our psychological relationship to our economy . and our prosperity is almost entirely consumer driven now. we still have no explanation( just many theories mostly politically driven) for what happened and how to stop it. and that we have expected since the late 20s that it was somehow the job of government to create and maintain the economy , the most damged idea of all from which the rest flows. perhaps that’s what holds us back from real solutions . the crash of 1929 was no worse that the one of 1921 which the market pulled itself back from.perhaps the depression could not have been stopped no matter who was in power but one thing is for certain- what urkel is doing is only making things worse.
“The Depression made it impossible to continue the tug of war between two worlds[ 19th and 20th centuries] that had given tension and form to the Twenties. Much of what we think of as the New Deal had been created by Hoover [Republican] or anticipated by him before Roosevelt’s election. In the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the government intervened directly in the peace time economy for the first time…In the Emergency Relief and Construction Act the federal government for the first time assumed responsibility for relief… With the creation of the Federal Farm Board the federal government assumed responsibility for making up the incomes of farmers with taxpayer’s money. The Federal Home Loan Banks made the federal government an active partner in promoting home ownership, The most important change, however, the one from which the others flowed, was the changed role of the presidency.
Hoover assumed complete responsibility for overcoming the Depression. Alas. there was no solution for it…Roosevelt, like Hoover, became a wound- dresser; he did however apply the bandages with more flair.
What made the Depression so appalling a human tragedy was that it could be overcome only by an event as awesome, as terrifying, and as irresistible as the Depression itself. And that was the Second World War… Only with the onset of the war was borrowing and spending on the scale required finally possible. A government can create money; it cannot create belief in it.
In trying to defeat the Depression, [Hoover]… had created the modern presidency- the presidency of wildly inflated expectations: the ‘ manger of the economy’ presidency… the crisis management presidency.”- “America in the Twenties: A History”, Geoffrey Perrett. p. 489-491.
As the wise man once said, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
“I guess it’s slightly reassuring that none of our problems are new. Although it’s pretty sad that we seem incapable of learning. Or we learn and then we forget. Ignorance is a renewable resource.”
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
That prove it! Americans are crazy, insane, and outta our minds!
when Katrina happened the first thing i thought was 1927- primarily because i collect 78 rpm records- the amount of songs about the levees breaking( most will probably know the led zeppelin cover ‘ when the levee breaks’ originally by memphis minnie and joe mcoy) and the great flood are staggering but also because it caused a fundamental shift in american politics, demography and the citizen’s relationship to government we still live with today.
and culturally would the blues as a musical genre have quite the same impact without the flood of 1927 and the depression?
( rev al may be a ridiculous on whole but he’s fairly correct in his observations here)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b8rj6Wx2sg
the flood created hoover the great humanitarian who stood in the face of the stock market crash with not a clue what to do except spend.
the nile defined ancient egyptian life top to bottom-agriculture, religion, governance. modern humans seem to think their technology will put them always above this fundamental relationship. the aftermath of 1927 involved the same failings of humanity and governments that katrina did. humans create governments and human nature itself rarely changes much at all.
Before all of this was the grandfather of political cartooning, Thomas Nast, who spent his career lampooning the “Boss Tweed” political dynasty in New York in the 1880’s.