Damon W. Root, writing for Reason, reviews two books on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and race policies:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt ranks near or at the very top of almost every standard list of America’s greatest presidents. But there is a substantial part of the American public for whom the legendary four-termer did little: African Americans. Despite the determined efforts of his do-gooder wife Eleanor, for example, he failed to support federal anti-lynching legislation and refused to integrate the armed forces. (Successor Harry Truman finally did the latter in 1948.) Although supposedly sympathetic to the plight of black America, FDR was not about to risk losing either his New Deal or World War II by alienating Southern supporters or moving too far ahead of public opinion.Two recent books, one generally liberal and the other libertarian, offer interesting and divergent viewpoints on what Roosevelt and his New Deal did, and did not do, to improve life for American blacks. In Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown, Kevin J. McMahon credits the New Deal with establishing a judiciary “eager to defer” to the executive branch’s authority and expertise, allowing the Justice Department to “instruct” the courts on civil rights cases. In FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Depression, Jim Powell argues that New Deal economic and regulatory policies were bad for many Americans, especially poor blacks.
Both books offer original and persuasive arguments and engage each other in a number of challenging ways. Ultimately, Powell’s case is both more convincing and damning. His evidence reveals that the New Deal threw African Americans out of work, raised the price of food during the depths of the Depression, and granted monopoly bargaining powers to racist unions. In short, Powell writes, “Black people were among the major victims of the New Deal.” Such a conclusion doesn’t merely reveal FDR’s often indifferent attitude toward minorities — in passing wartime travel restrictions and internment rules on Italian Americans, for instance, he derided them as “a bunch of opera singers” — it suggests that a thorough, fact-based re-evaluation of FDR’s mythic status as a champion of the underdog is long overdue.
Of more interest to me is the second book, which I may read. I like the book’s provocative title and its thesis: The New Deal was a raw deal, especially for blacks.
You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to know that government programs cost money or that the government doesn’t have money of its own. One way or another at some point or another, someone will have to pay for what the government does.
If there are readers out there with expertise (or just opinions) on the New Deal, feel free to add your thoughts. This is an interesting view.
