Rauchway post

David Yusupov

04/29/22

HIS 3410

Professor Griffin

Blog Assignment #4

Among the presidents in American history, none is more polarizing than Franklin D. Roosevelt. Supporters credit him with ending the Great Depression and ending World War II, while critics maintain that he had created a big government bureaucracy and was a quasi-dictator. Either way, nobody can deny that he was influential. One of the ways that supporters of FDR say he combatted the depression and brought an era of prosperity for the country was through the New Deal. This is precisely what the historian Eric Rauchway argues in the fourth chapter of his book  on the Great Depression and the New Deal. Essentially Rauchway’s main point was that Roosevelt was an innovator not afraid to use government power when necessary to go where no other President had gone before, to do what was necessary to alleviate the sufferings of the common man, and to save capitalism.

 Among the arguments that Rauchway uses to support his point that FDR was innovating is when he says “The Roosevelt agenda grew by experiment: the parts that worked, stuck, no matter their origin. Indeed, the program got its name by just that process: Roosevelt used the phrase “new deal” when accepting the Democratic nomination for president, and the press liked it. The “New Deal” said that Roosevelt offered a fresh start, but it promised nothing specific: it worked, so it stuck.” Essentially, Rauchway is portraying FDR as a man who was totally dedicated to fixing the crisis. He did not care about whether something was untried or untested, as long as it works. This is further confirmed when Rauchway writes: “As Isaiah Berlin afterward noted, Roosevelt’s “great social experiment was conducted with an isolationist disregard of the outside world.” So basically he is saying that Roosevelt was unbothered by what critics had to say. He stuck to his agenda.

To support his thesis about Roosevelt appealing to the common man, Rauchway says that :”Ever since the 1890s, when the Democratic Party first began to shift from its historic support for limited government, and when, under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan, it began to stand for the ordinary man against the great manufacturing corporations, the Democrats also had a soft spot for soft money. Bryan stood for the farmer and the worker against the gold standard, adherence to which was driving down the price of agricultural commodities. Instead, Bryan argued, the country should coin silver, inflating—or, properly, reflating—the currency and relieving the downward pressure on prices. Forty years on, the situation looked similar. Roosevelt not only depended on the farm vote, but like Bryan and many if not most Americans, he thought fondly of the nation’s long-vanishing family farms, and he hoped to provide them the same relief that Bryan had proposed: more money in circulation, higher dollar prices for their produce, and an easier time repaying their debts. As he said in January 1933, “If the fall in the price of commodities cannot be checked, we may be forced to an inflation of our currency. This may take the form of using silver as a base, or decreasing the amount of gold in the dollar. I have not decided how this inflation can be best and most safely accomplished.” Essentially Roosevelt was trying to emulate earlier progressive figures like WJB in support of helping the farmers.