FDR made depression worse

Amity Shlaes:

One evening in the 1930s, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

William's father was laid up in Kings County Hospital awaiting surgery for an injury he'd suffered on the job at Brooklyn Edison. A federal jobs program was paying William's older brother Harold for temporary work. But the amount wasn't nearly enough to make ends meet. Gas and electricity to the family's apartment had been shut off for half a year. Harold told a New York Times reporter that both hunger and modesty had driven William to act. "He was reluctant about asking for food," read the headline in the paper.

The surprising part of this story is not that it happened; most Americans know that after the 1929 stock-market crash, hard times sometimes led to suicide. The surprising part is that William Troeller killed himself not in 1930, when Herbert Hoover was president, but in 1937, in Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term. The New Deal was almost five years old, but the economy was not back. In fact, the country seemed farther from recovery than before. A new sense of futility was overcoming Americans. The British magazine the Economist sneered that the United States "seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, how to grow."

The date matters, because our new president has made it clear that his model is Roosevelt. Barack Obama has spoken of creating 3 million jobs with his stimulus plan. As a new president in 1933, Roosevelt spoke of creating "one million jobs by October 1" through his spending packages. At about $850 billion, Obama's stimulus represents about 5.9 percent of gross domestic product. The spending programs of Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration amounted to almost precisely the same share. Then as now, the country was in what we might call an "illions" moment, when a nation contemplates federal spending of a magnitude previously unimaginable. The only difference is that today, we're discussing trillions instead of billions.

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The second goal of the New Deal was to stimulate the private sector. Instead, it supplanted it. To justify their own work, New Dealers attacked not merely those guilty of white-collar crimes but the entire business community -- the "princes of property," FDR called them. Washington's policy evolved into a lethal combo of spending and retribution. Never did either U.S. investors or foreigners get a sense that the United States was now open for business. As a result, the Depression lasted half a decade longer than it had to, from 1929 to 1940 rather than, say, 1929 to 1936. The Dow Jones industrial average didn't return to its summer 1929 high until 1954. The monetary shock of the first years of the Depression was immense, but it was this duration that made the Depression Great.

This outcome is worth reviewing, component by component, for what it suggests about individual Obama administration projects. The first of these would be ambitious spending on infrastructure. Obama has said that he wants to "put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges and schools." In addition, he would like to modernize 75 percent of government buildings, as well as equip tens of thousands of schools with new technology.

Roosevelt, too, proceeded boldly on infrastructure. The budget of his Public Works Administration was so large that it shocked even the man who ran it, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Sounding a bit like Republicans today, Ickes said of his $3.3 billion allowance: "It helped me to estimate its size by figuring that if we had it all in currency and should load it into trucks, we could set out with it from Washington for the Pacific Coast, shovel off one million dollars at every milepost and still have enough left to build a fleet of battleships."

New Deal public-works spending did have a short-term effect, creating jobs and economic activity during Roosevelt's first term. Americans took heart at the sight of schools, swimming pools and auditoriums rising in nearly every county in the country. FDR so pumped up the federal government that 1936 was the first peacetime year when it spent more than states and towns. A master of timing, he even managed to get unemployment down to a low of 13.9 percent in November of that year, the month of the presidential election. The voters rewarded him by giving him 46 of 48 states.

But many of the jobs that the early New Deal produced were not merely temporary but also limited in economic value. It was in these years that the political term "boondoggle," to describe costly make-work, was coined. It came from "boondoggling," the word for leather craft projects subsidized by New Deal work-relief programs. As was the case for the Troeller brothers, work-relief earnings were usually not sufficient to offset other Depression losses.

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Obama and the Democrats are now proposing the biggest boondoggle in history and leaving out the elements that really stimulate the economy--tax cuts and military spending. Meanwhile the Democrats are showing a willful ignorance of the failure of New Deal policies.