declared<\/a>in one widely publicized address, \u201cwe cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.\u201d<\/p>\nRoosevelt\u2019s dozen years in the White House would indeed end with that \u201cwiser, more equitable distribution.\u201d But the Brains Trust behind FDR\u2019s call for \u201cbold, persistent experimentation\u201d had little \u2014 in the end \u2014 to do with that success.<\/p>\n
These progressive staffers didn\u2019t deliver unto us the great achievements we now associate with the New Deal. All the New Deal\u2019s great achievements \u2014 everything from Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act to stiff taxes on the rich and the forty-hour week \u2014 only materialized after intense struggles that mobilized Americans by the millions.<\/p>\n
These many millions mobilized because the initial reforms enacted in FDR\u2019s now near-mythic \u201cFirst Hundred Days\u201d in the spring of 1933 came nowhere close to fixing what ailed Great Depression America. New movements would arise to push for much more. The pushing would come from seemingly everywhere. From newly energized unions. From cities and states where the old Socialist Party had made some of its deepest inroads. From the rural South. From urban neighborhoods. From old people, a demographic that had never before mattered politically.<\/p>\n
In 1934, America\u2019s labor movement would re-emerge after a dozen sleepy, sinking years. In 1934 alone, a million and half workers staged an estimated 1,800 walkouts. In cities the nation over, newly organized \u201cUnemployed Councils\u201d demanded an adequate income for every jobless American and took direct action to put evicted families back in their homes.<\/p>\n
Out of California came a call to guarantee a decent income to every elderly American. This new \u201cTownsend Plan\u201d movement, led by a physician shocked by the sight of three old women scavenging in his garbage, demanded $200 a month for every senior over 60 who agreed to spend all that $200 within 30 days. By the end of 1934, Townsend Clubs had nearly a half-million dues-paying members.<\/p>\n
Out of Louisiana came an even grander effort, the Share-Our-Wealth campaign led by Huey Long, the state\u2019s former governor and sitting U.S. senator.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo cure all of our woes,\u201d Long told a national radio audience early in 1934, \u201cit is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all the people.\u201d<\/p>\n
In short order, Long\u2019s Share Our Wealth Society would claim a network of 27,000 local Share Our Wealth clubs, with over eight million names on file. Long\u2019s staff opened 60,000 letters a week.<\/p>\n
The campaign\u2019s national newspaper advocated a 100 percent tax on wealth over $8 million and income and inheritances over $1 million. Revenue from these taxes, Share Our Wealth told America, would fund a guaranteed annual family income of at least $2,000 a year, old-age pensions, and a vast series of job-creating public works.<\/p>\n
In the White House, Roosevelt could hear what these new movements were demanding \u2014 and feel the heat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe find our population suffering from old inequalities, little changed by past sporadic remedies,\u201d FDR candidly admitted in his 1935 State of the Union address. \u201cIn spite of our efforts and in spite of our talk we have not weeded out the overprivileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged.\u201d<\/p>\n
Privately, Roosevelt would confide in his Brain Truster Raymond Moley that something had to be done \u201cto steal Long\u2019s thunder.\u201d Out of the White House would soon come a series of measures to attack \u201cold inequalities.\u201d Collectively, they would make for a brilliant pre-emptive strike \u2014 against the growing sense that Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal had tread too timidly.<\/p>\n
These new initiatives would speak more directly to average Americans. The new Social Security Act FDR proposed would address the economic insecurity that had driven millions of elderly Americans to the Townsend Plan. For the millions of unemployed and their families, the new New Deal would offer a Public Works Administration with a $5 billion budget, a far more ambitious jobs effort than FDR had previously embraced. For workers demanding union representation, FDR would sign into law the National Labor Relations Act, a measure that created an apparatus for protecting the worker right to organize and bargain collectively over the wealth that American industry was creating.<\/p>\n
Then in June 1935, on the same day FDR\u2019s Social Security bill passed the Senate, Roosevelt delivered his first \u201cMessage to Congress on Tax Revision.\u201d No sitting President had ever so plainly made the case for taxing the wealthy and their works.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few,\u201d FDR acknowledged, \u201cand they have done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.\u201d<\/p>\n
Congress would go on to hike the top-bracket income tax rate from 63 to 79 percent, and FDR would go on to campaign in 1936 against \u201cthe forces of privilege and greed.\u201d This time around, he would throw no bones to keep corporate leaders content. Roosevelt now no longer needed the institutional base of the old Democratic Party. A new institutional partner had arrived on the scene, the newly organized mass industrial unions, the CIO of John Lewis and Sidney Hillman.<\/p>\n
With labor help, Roosevelt was ushering onto the American scene a new political line-up, notes historian Jean Edward Smith, \u201ca unique alliance of big-city bosses, the white South, farmers and workers, Jews and Irish Catholics, ethnic minorities, and African Americans that would dominate American politics for the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The energy for all this came \u201cfrom below,\u201d from the bold demands that the new movements of the 1930s shoved onto America\u2019s political stage.<\/p>\n
The obvious lesson for today: Nothing fundamental will change without new mass movements. And our sharpest progressive activists have internalized that truth. We \u201cneed to create political space for bolder action,\u201d says<\/a> Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the group that\u2019s helped elect progressive political talents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.<\/p>\n\u201cIf you don\u2019t create pressure,\u201d adds Shahid, \u201cnothing gets done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Economists come in many different stripes. We have microeconomists who study the intricacies of supply and demand and macroeconomists who search for overarching\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1427,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426\/revisions\/1427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}