What Would the Roosevelts Do?

FDR Biographer and noted conservative Conrad Black wrote recently from his Florida retreat about how Franklin Delano Roosevelt put America to work rebuilding the nation:

Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees clearing the land for soil conservation.

"The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock."

In his own time, Teddy Roosevelt was almost as busy creating a new green America: He founded the Forest service, created the first National Bird Preserve, and according to Wikipedia:

Roosevelt set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres . In all, by 1909, the Roosevelt administration had created an unprecedented 42 million acres of national forests, 53 national wildlife refuges and 18 areas of "special interest", including the Grand Canyon.

Across America, companies are shedding jobs; probably 200,000 people in October alone. Soon it won't be just banks needing a bailout; soon we may need an intervention in job creation as big as the New Deal.

Civilian Conservation Corps at an experimental farm in Beltsville, Maryland. (Circa 1933)

What would the Roosevelts do? Perhaps Teddy would see this as an opportunity to plant more trees, protect more natural landmarks, clean our air and water and fight climate change. He would certainly approve of Franklin's Conservation Corps.

Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees on the fire line in a big forest fire in the West.

Perhaps Franklin would listen to Van Jones and put the unemployed to work insulating buildings and houses that consume 46% of our energy. Perhaps he would electrify the railroads the way the way he he did rural electrification.

Both would probably turn this crisis into an opportunity to put people to work building a more efficient and durable infrastructure and to achieve energy independence. Let's hope that our next President is a good student of history.

More in Huffington Post and TreeHugger:
Get Recession Ready! -- 7 Tips
Imagine: Another "New Deal" - Greener Than The First
A Green New Deal: 100 Months to Save the World from Climate Change
We all live in Pottersville Now

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Comments

[staticnoise]

Will today's unemployed will work that hard for wages, that may insure survival, but not but cell phones, Ipods, etc. ? Something tells me they won't. In that event, I believe we see anarchy for at least a short term. At least until those in the financial community who brought this on loose everything, along with their grip people elected to govern.

[Doofus]

TR, erstwhile McCain hero & BFF, endorses Obama...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/opinion/27morris.html

[KevinMast]

The Roosevelts really were the best of both parties.

[Pdubya]

woodrow wilson intervened quite a bit when the tycoons were faced with a market correction of their stolen wealth. he helped pave the way for the creation of the federal reserve, a private banking cartel that centrally controls our monetary policy and money supply. except then, FDR's intervention worked somewhat as far as jobs go, but we were still a manufacturing based/production based economy with savings....savings at the national level and individual level. and, our currency was backed by gold. that went out the window completely in 1971. wilson, in his memoirs, was very apologetic and regretful that he helped form the Federal Reserve. Since then, we've only had a few NWO outsiders challenge it: Ike, Kennedy, and Reagan. I'm not defending any of their policies, just speaking truth. All other administrations have done things to further the NWO. W. prepped the constitution for the NWO. Obama will sell it to us.

[Pdubya]

we will see deflation followed by hyper inflation. the same FDR proposals won't do much because there is no trust in our currency....not even residual trust that we've lived off of since 1971.

I am less fearful of a Greater Depression than I am of the potential solution that will be proposed.

We had our chance for the free market to trump the managed market we've had for the last 95 years (don't be fooled that we've had a free market). One can't exist within a Federal Reserve structure like we have. We could have had a deep, painful recession and gone back to work and savings in about a year. But no, we didn't allow failure or bankcruptcy or jail time (free market principle). We propped up failure and crime, dumped more fiat currency into the economy, diluting our dollar valuation.

Now that the residual trust in our currency is gone, we will have a GREATER DEPRESSION.

Until we end the Fed and return to sound money we will cycle through this again and again. And no one can convince me that we will have more liberties, economic freedom, or sovereignty this time.

"Allow me to issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes its laws!" Amshell Rothschild

[rbdc]

I believe you're right. The federal government is infusing money into banks, but apparently they don't intend to lend it out -- so how's that going to help the economy? I was appalled by McCain's attempt to bring the first debate back all the time to the excesses of earmarks, and stil his campaign emphasizes cutting back on government spending. The government is probably going to have to spend an awful lot to keep people employed, and it would be a good idea to spend it as wisely as possible, seeing as we have so much we need to do as a nation -- rebuilding infrastructure, creating an energy efficient and independent country, educating our people, etc.

Teddy Roosevelt, who McCain claims is his Republican prototype, also believed in a progressive, graduated income tax -- did not refer to it as resembling socialism.

[ChicagoMolly]

Not only was Theodore Roosevelt a strong proponent of the progressive income tax on wages, as early as 1906 he also called on Congress to impose a federal inheritance tax on enormous estates (like Rockefeller, Astor, Morgan, ... that whole crowd).

TR: “The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”

Or, as that other radical socialist, Adam Smith, put it, “It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of valuable property can sleep a single night in security.”

Interestingly enough, Andrew Carnegie also supported an inheritance tax on huge estates, as does Warren Buffett today.

[alvdh1]

McCain always leaves this part out of his hero speech on Teddy.

[fpie]

The analogy to the Great Depression is exactly right. The circumstaces are obviously different but the tragectory of this crisis (as well as many of the root causes) is quite similar. By acting quickly much suffering can be avoided. Failure to act will only allow the problems to fester and become more intractable. This machine took a long time for the deregulators to break and it is not going to fix itself. FDR and Teddy are the great economic mechanics of america and are the role models to look to.