There was one other anniversary that I forgot to mention yesterday. Sixty-four years ago, Franklin Roosevelt breathed his last, and with his departure from this world, so ended his war on the free market, and the economic depression that he had so nurtured for a dozen long years. It was not mere coincidence that the post-war economic growth was so large — there was no FDR to continue to hinder it with his whimsical and arbitrary tinkering. RIP to both.
14 thoughts on “The End Of The Depression”
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Truman was just as bad on domestic economic policy; maybe even more of a grandstanding populist. The real end of the Depression came in 1946 when the Republicans recaptured Congress and dismantled much of the Depression/WWII economic control apparatus, culminating in the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1948, which mitigated the worst abuses of the Wagner Act. This laid the real foundation for postwar expansion and prosperity, which was not at all assured in 1945.
We should be studying 1946-48 carefully. We might be needing to use the precedents in a few years if the Dems can be booted out of Congress. The 1946 Congress achieved much even with Truman in the White House.
Interesting Wikipedia reading about Taft-Hartley. Passed over Truman’s veto. Ralph Nader’s against it so there must be something good to it!
Confusingly, FDR apparently was a life-long supporter of free trade.
Yes, he does deserve credit for undoing Smoot-Hawley.
Any idea where this contradiction comes from?
I’m not sure it’s a “contradiction.” What do you mean by that?
Liberals of FDR’s era, and even JFK’s, still shared some intellectual assumptions with classical liberals; free trade was one of them. The DLC liberals continued in this tradition — after all, it was Clinton and Gore who pushed through NAFTA and continued the WTO processes. The contradictions are between this logical position and the increasingly idiotic-populist agenda that has mostly taken over the Democrats.
We should be studying 1946-48 carefully. We might be needing to use the precedents in a few years if the Dems can be booted out of Congress. The 1946 Congress achieved much even with Truman in the White House.
Didn’t the candidate from the Pendergast Machine campaign against them as the “do-nothing congress” in ’48? So it would seem that Congress only does something when it is to further Dem corporatism and progressivism.
And except for the first couple of years of Eisenhower, that was the last GOP run congress until ’94 (if you ignore the 6 years the me-too GOP ran the Senate in the ’80s.)
(And I will say something in Truman’s favor: he wasn’t Henry Wallace, his predecessor as VP. Talk about dodging a disaster.)
For all the yammering about FDR’s supposed support of free trade, it’s worth noting that the Smoot Hawley act never was overturned during FDR’s presidency. The first move to free trade (so I understand) occured months after FDR death with the Bretton Woods agreement. That strikes me as remarkably weak support.
Winston Churchill was tossed out of the Prime Minister
Ship in 1946 also, and the British Economy had a post
war boom.
Should I deduce that Conservative Government in
the UK was stifling growth?
Jack, the Labour government instituted “privation measures” after the fall of the Churchill Government. It got so bad that by the early 1950s, even the (still-devastated!) Continent was considered a place of relative wealth. Anthony Burgess in the first half of his book “1985” provides some remarkable background on the immediate-postwar if you’re interested in the period.
Don’t confuse Jack with facts (better, ignore him completely)….
Actually, comparing Britain’s postwar economy to that of the US is a remarkably good exercise, if one wants to see the failures of Fabian socialism. The US (which despite the best efforts of the FDR Democrats) adopted far less statist policies, and experienced an enormous postwar boom. The UK, which travelled down Labour’s primrose path (Bevan is a superb example of that sort of thinking), experienced privation and relative decline. What small growth Britain did enjoy was largely from rebuilding the damage from the war (both physical and economic), and even there it took well over a decade to regain their prewar position.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee:
The government he led put in place the post-war consensus, based upon the assumption that full employment would be maintained by Keynesian policies, and that a greatly enlarged system of social services would be created […] After initial Conservative opposition, this settlement was by and large accepted by all parties until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in the 1970s. […] His leadership style of consensual government, acting as a chairman rather than a president, won him much praise from historians and politicians alike. Even Thatcherites confess to admiring him. Christopher Soames, a Cabinet Minister under Thatcher, remarked that “Mrs Thatcher was not really running a team. Every time you have a Prime Minister who wants to make all the decisions, it mainly leads to bad results. Attlee didn’t. That’s why he was so damn good.” Even Thatcher herself wrote in her 1995 memoirs, which charted her beginnings in Grantham to her victory in the 1979 General Election, that she admired Attlee saying: “Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show”.
I admire Neville Chamberlin as a human being, even as a serious man of principle and conviction, though I still retain enough presence of mind to note that he was an utter fool and a blithering incompetent.
Britain’s consensus didn’t work out all that well, did it? I mean, those long lines at the dole queue came from somewhere…