King needs history lesson about New Deal

From the Omaha World Herald; MIDLANDS VOICES
Facts are against New Deal’s foes

BY JIM BECHTEL

The writer, of Omaha, teaches at a local community college. He holds a master’s degree in modern American history.

In a Feb. 6 Midlands Voices essay, U.S. Rep. Steve King, (R) ­Iowa, echoes claims made by Wall Street Journal editors and Public Pulse writers: The New Deal is a bad model for Presi­dent Barack Obama’s recovery program because it failed. This is untrue.
Historian David McCullough warns that amnesia is as harm­ful for a country as it is for an individual. Let’s remember the realities.

In the first place, the New Deal consisted of many parts, including bank deposit insur­ance (there were 4,004 bank failures the year before it be­gan, zero the year after), Social Security, unemployment com­pensation, accessible Federal Housing Administration mort­gages, a minimum wage and the Glass-Steagall Act, which sepa­rated risky investment banking from commercial banking. (This was later rescinded, to our current misfortune.) Because it was so successful, the New Deal was overwhelm­ingly endorsed by Americans the first chance they had. In the 1934 midterm elections, the Re­publican Party suffered its worst defeat since its founding. Some haven’t gotten over it.

Then, as now, collapse meant private investment had dried up, so public investment had to fill the gap. Public workers built New York City’s Tribo­rough Bridge and Lincoln Tun­nel and the beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. They went to work on 2,500 hos­pitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads and a thousand airfields.
The University of Nebraska at Omaha has a grand old build­ing, built by the Works Pro­gress Administration, that is still in use three-quarters of a century later. Now called Arts and Sciences Hall, you can see it at the northeast corner of the campus as you drive down Dodge Street.

It’s ironic that the South has become the core of the Republi­can base. History texts note that the modern South was born as a result of New Deal pro­grams. For example, the Ten­nessee Valley Authority, cham­pioned by Nebraska’s own U.S. Sen. George W. Norris, brought progress to many parts of Ap­palachia. Cheap electricity from its hydroelectric plants sparked the rebirth of Mem­phis, Tenn., and Atlanta.

With millions of workers re­building the nation’s infra­structure, as President Obama proposes doing, the unemploy­ment rate dropped by nearly 43 percent [I had "an average of five perect a year"] from 1933 to 1937! This is a simple fact of record.

Now, unemployment did bounce back up in 1937 when President Franklin D. Roose­velt, listening to conservatives, thought the economy had re­covered enough that he could cut social programs. This “turn to the right,” as it has been called, taught him a lesson. He resumed the stimulus pro­grams, and unemployment re­sumed its steady downward march.

Congressman King claims that the Depression was the “result” of the New Deal. This defies logic: A “result” must, by definition, come after its cause. The New Deal was launched in response to 25 percent unem­ployment. You can rewrite his­tory, but you can’t make time run backward. As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.

And yet, right-wing publi­cists like Amity Shlaes persist in claiming the New Deal failed. How do they get away with it? Simple. They say “tem­porary jobs in emergency pro­grams” don’t count. That is, if your paycheck came from the WPA, then building that grand old structure at UNO was somehow not a “real” job.

Never mind increased pride in being usefully employed or the new shoes for the kids and the food on the kitchen table. Forget the grocer’s smile; ig­nore the decrease in human suffering. The jobs must be erased from history because they fly in the face of fervently held ideological dogmas about supply-side economics.

It seems like the obstruction­ists in Congress would rather sacrifice the common good to their “Invisible Hand” mythol­ogy and subordinate the public interest to partisanship.