Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, the Good Neighbor Policy, and World War II
* What: The New Deal committed the federal government to intervening for average people for the first time, not just wealthy elites. The Good Neighbor Policy for a decade and a half brought an end to constant US invasions of Latin America.
* Though the Axis powers were mostly defeated by the Soviet Union, Roosevelt did lead the US in playing a major part in their defeat.
* The Number of Lives Saved: There were 35 invasions in the 42 years before Roosevelt was in office, occupations lasting from weeks to up to twenty years in Haiti's case. Because of Roosevelt, there was not one single US invasion of Latin America during the twelve years he was in office. Based on averages of previous years, there would typically have been ten or more US invasions of Latin America during those twelve years, with deaths ranging from several hundred to several thousand each. US control of these nations also retarded local democracy and self sufficient economies.
* There would not be an American invasion in Latin America again until Eisenhower was president. There were two cases of US government support for coups, in Panama in 1941 and El Salvador in 1944. Panama's government was fascist and pro-Axis, but El Salvador's was a new democracy.
* The New Deal led to measurably better lives for all Americans. Social Security is the most successful anti poverty program in US history, and poverty is the biggest cause and most reliable predictor of early deaths. Recognition of unions, unemployment insurance, a 40 hour work week, and child labor laws all are successful anti poverty practices that led to longer, healthier lives. Roosevelt's New Deal for Indians also brought self determination for Native tribes, leading to their economic success and longer life spans.
* World War II, along with the Civil War, is one of the only two righteous and justifiable wars in US history. Roosevelt's alliance with other Allied nations defeated the Axis powers, preventing further atrocities in the millions and Axis domination of the world for the next half century. Credit for the Axis defeat belongs mostly to the Soviet Union, but also Britain, the US, Allies across the world, and resistance fighters within Axis occupied nations.
* Who Also Gets the Credit:
* Huey Long and Francis Townsend first proposed and popularized Social Security. Long was both a US Senator and Governor of Louisiana. Townsend was a doctor and elderly activist. Together with Reverend Charles Coughlin, they formed the Union of Social Justice Party, a leftist coalition opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal as not going far enough. Coughlin is often falsely portrayed as a fascist because of his later anti Antisemitism, but had not made his hatred of Jews public at the time the Union Party was formed.
* John Collier, Director of the Indian Bureau, formulated the New Deal for Indians. This ended the utter control that white government agents had on reservations and returned self rule to Native tribes. The New Deal for Indians also ended forced assimilation in boarding schools that killed thousands of Native children and destroyed cultures and languages. (See Section Eleven.) In its place came bilingual and bi cultural education that preserved Native cultures and taught self sufficiency on Native terms.
* Allotment, the breakup of tribal land bases, also came to an end. Tribal councils unfortunately today often resemble boards of directors for corporations more than traditional councils. Collier's laws set up councils based on majority rule, where most tribes traditionally ruled by consensus or by councils of respected elders. Some tribes like the Navajo chose to create tribal governments outside of the new rules and closer to their traditions, and they are today far more representative and responsive to tribal needs than Collier's creations.
* Roosevelt's advisers, often called the Brain Trust, especially Frances Perkins, Louis Brandeis, Harry Hopkins, Felix Frankfurter, and Harold Ickes, formulated the New Deal. FDR himself was very non-dogmatic, willing to try one idea after another and discard any part of the New Deal that either did not work or faced too much opposition.
* Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs Sumner Wells formulated the Good Neighbor Policy with Roosevelt and carried it out.
* The opposition of insurgent and protest movements in Latin America, especially populist leaders like Lazaro Cardenas, President of Mexico, and rebel leaders like Ernesto Sandino of Nicaragua, played a role in how Roosevelt adopted and carried out his new policy. Cardenas pushed Roosevelt to take his policy further than FDR expected. The cost of occupation in nations such as Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, in addition it being inhumane and undemocratic, was also a reason for ending US invasions. Sandino was such a symbol of resistance that the later Sandinista movement is named after him.
* Almost 80 years later, the New Deal remains controversial. Many conservatives despise it, understandably since its success contradicts much of their philosophy. Some wealthy elites hated Roosevelt so much they plotted to overthrow him and put in a fascist dictatorship. (See Section Eleven.)
* In his own time, Roosevelt was often falsely accused of being a socialist by those on the right. In fact, Roosevelt was from one of the wealthiest and most elite families in US history. No other president had so many ancestors on the Mayflower, or a family fortune so large.
* Actual socialists opposed Roosevelt almost as strongly as those on the right. Huey Long, for example, was a Socialist Party member as a young man. Under his proposed Share the Wealth program every family was to have a guaranteed minimum income of $5000. No family fortune could be over $50 million while no person could make over $5 million per year. (In today’s terms, multiply by five.) Long’s Share the Wealth Clubs had over 8 million members.
* Roosevelt’s New Deal was corporate liberalism, not socialism. Corporate liberalism, like the name implies, benefits large business as much as the public and has as its goal just enough reform to satisfy the public and avoid truly radical solutions. Roosevelt bailed out the banks and had the government insure them. A socialist would seize the banks. Roosevelt regulated Wall Street to make it safer for investors. A socialist would take over Wall Street or shut it down.
* Roosevelt also passed the Wagner Act, recognizing union rights for the first time. But where a socialist would bring unions into the government, Roosevelt sought government control over unions. Unions now had to apply to the federal government to be certified. The federal government today routinely de certifies and strips of recognition over 400 union locals each year. Imagine how hard a time any other lobbyists would have, from gun rights to abortion to feminists to religious groups, were the government to shut down 400 of their chapters every year.
* The New Deal also turned to using the federal government to boost the economy by creating demand. The government bought up crops and meat, or paid farmers to grow less to raise the price. Again, a socialist would buy or seize farms to make them government run, not buy farmers’ goods to make farmers more money.
* The government hired over 9 million workers for public works projects, building roads, dams, bridges, bringing electric power to rural America for the first time, and creating 800 new national parks. In terms of building infrastructure and providing relief, public works were a double success. These government created jobs were the closest the New Deal ever came to partial socialism. But broader measures of the New Deal called the National Recovery Act were shut down by the courts.
* What infuriates conservatives the most is that the New Deal worked, and that conservative and libertarian economic practices obviously both created and worsened the Depression. What much of the public does not realize is that there were actually two waves to the Great Depression, the better known one starting in 1929, another in FDR’s second term. What created the first was over reliance on wealthy elites' spending, in other words, inequality.
* Libertarian economists like Milton Friedman claimed the opposite, that the government caused the Depression by failing to expand the money supply. It is more than a little ironic, a libertarian complaining of not enough government intervention. The bigger criticism of Libertarianism generally is that there has never been a nation or society where it is shown to have existed, let alone worked. For all their claims of loving, wanting, and promoting freedom, Libertarian policies have been tried exactly twice, first under the military dictatorship of Chile, where they worsened the lives of most Chileans, enriching elites while others were worse off. Friedman's disciples in the dictatorship gave Chile higher unemployment, more debt, more bankruptcies, a sharp drop in wages, and almost destroyed Chilean public education.
* After military dictators, Friedman’s second best known disciple was Alan Greenspan, longtime Chairman of the Federal Reserve. His reliance on Friedman’s ideas was one the biggest causes of the Great Recession in 2007. Greenspan publicly apologized before Congress for his failures, admitting his mistakes, including that he did not even fully understand what happened.
* What caused the second economic slump in the Great Depression was cuts in government spending. Much like many of today’s conservatives, elites in the 1930s worried about a growing federal deficit. So to lower that deficit, New Deal programs were cut during FDR's second term. Predictably, cutting back on demand led to another economic slump. When World War II began, high wartime demand led to greater prosperity, for once shared by the majority. The destruction of World War II removed most economic competition, continuing American boom times.
* Unions helped spread that prosperity. Unions plus FDR plus World War II turned the US from a mostly poor nation to a mostly middle class nation, both in incomes and attitudes. Today the US is the only nation where most working class people from janitors to secretaries think of themselves as middle class. Many well off professionals such as lawyers and upper management pose as middle class as well.
* Perhaps the greatest accomplishment the New Deal could point to was Social Security. The elderly, who had been the poorest age group in the US, are now the wealthiest. Like many other Roosevelt accomplishments, he was pushed from farther to the left but then altered the idea in line with corporate liberalism.
* Social Security in the beginning was not only less generous than Long and Townsend wanted. It was limited to only about half of all workers. Farmers, farm workers, servants, merchant marines, and manual laborers were left out, which meant that a much higher number of American Indians, Asians, Blacks, and Latinos were not eligible. Most women could not get SS either, except through their husbands. Some scholars have misinterpreted early SS to be deliberately racist. This is false. In part FDR agreed to these exclusions to please southern racists. In part these exclusions were because the program was at first partly under the control of state governments, and their leaders were often racist.
* It is also worth noting, given all the resistance to Obama care and complaints about its slowness, that SS was passed in 1935. No one received an SS check until five years later, in 1940. And just like with Obama care, there was enormous resistance, with many of the people it would help the most trying to avoid signing up. One of my grandfathers, a sawmill worker during the Great Depression, thought the worst about SS for decades and believed every falsehood put out by opponents. But when he was finally old enough to need it, he accepted it and was glad for the help.
* The more important and often overlooked point about SS is how it was passed and why it has remained so long. The SS tax is regressive, meaning that the wealthy pay less than everyone else. By law, one only pays SS tax on the first $110,000 of income. So someone making $110,000 a year pays the same as Bill Gates, who is worth over $60 billion. Even noted liberals like Ted Kennedy never tried to challenge this reverse Robin Hood tax. SS supporters fear that if the wealthy have to pay more than the middle and working class, or even the same, elites will try to overturn the law.
* Fear of losing elite support is also the reason that SS is paid to the wealthy who do not need it. In a fairer system, the wealthy would pay a progressive SS tax much like on income tax, and only the working class (including the many who imagine themselves to be middle class) would get Social Security. Such a fairer system would also not be facing funding problems. Seemingly the only way to permanently protect SS would be either to break the power of wealthy elites or, more realistically, protect SS by passing a constitutional amendment.
* On Latin America, Roosevelt was also a far greater president than those before or after him. The first invasion of Latin America from the US was only ten years after independence. American mercenaries or the US government tried to take over or take away pieces of Latin American nations right up to the time FDR became president. US President Polk provoked a war with Mexico to steal half its land and a tenth of its people. (See Section Three.) President McKinley even conquered Puerto Rico, an island the US was supposed to be freeing from Spanish tyranny, even though Spain had actually granted self rule to Puerto Rico only a month before. (See Section Three again.)
* At the time FDR came into office, US troops were in control of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. All three countries had been invaded multiple times by the US, and had been run by the US for anywhere from 15-20 years. The US government under Herbert Hoover had also just supported the crushing of a popular uprising in El Salvador, its dictator Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez killing perhaps 30,000. Hoover had been prepared to send US ships and troops to take part in La Matanza (“the massacre”).
* One of the biggest reasons for US control of Latin America was paternalistic racism. As in the Philippines, some American presidents believed nonwhites were unable to run their own nations. They thought of nonwhites as their “little brown brothers” and were utterly convinced by pseudo scientific racism that whites knew far better what was best. (See Section Three.) When Roosevelt took office, all three of these nations had been under US control since Woodrow Wilson, who holds the record for most countries invaded by a US president. (See Section Five.)
* Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Wells were all determined to change that. For one thing, the three men were not racists as McKinley and Wilson were. But human rights were not the only reason to halt the constant invasions. Troops and ships cost money the US did not have during a depression.
* More than the cost was the amount of time it took for the US government to run other nations. From Teddy Roosevelt to Hoover, each US president spent much of their time trying to sort out local politics in Central America and the Caribbean, decide who should be supported, who should be fought, when elections should be held if ever, how education should be run locally, etc. Paternalistic racism was definitely racist, but it also insisted upon as much time as a parent spends raising a child. The US President during a depression did not have time to spare.
* The Good Neighbor Policy began almost immediately when Roosevelt took office. In March 1933 he announced, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.”
* That year, US troops left Cuba and Nicaragua. The next year they left Haiti. FDR also renounced the Platt Amendment, where the US required Cuba to accept invasion any time the US government wished. Unlike every other US president during the Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan Wars, Roosevelt did not delay for year after year or make excuses.
* FDR also hoped better relations with Latin America would lead to more trade. Perhaps the biggest challenge came in 1938. President Lazaro Cardenas of Mexico took over US oil companies in Mexico, putting them under Mexican government control. The seizure made him one of the most popular presidents in Mexican history, a national hero still on their money and monuments. The day US oil companies were taken is still a Mexican national holiday.
* In the US, many called for a blockade or invasion, to punish Mexico by a mix of force and economic and diplomatic weapons. Under any prior US president from McKinley to Hoover, an invasion would have been almost certain. Cardenas was a leftist president, leading the Institutional Revolution Party, with a Mexican constitution influenced by the anarchist and indigenous ideas of Ricardo Flores Magon and Emiliano Zapata. Cardenas even gave refuge to Communist leader Leon Trotsky. The red baiting hysteria in the US was not long before this.
* But Roosevelt immediately rejected any call to use force. Instead he sent diplomats to sit down and discuss paying US oil companies. Actually the US oil companies had long been very predatory. They took Mexican oil under very favorable rates because contracts had been negotiated while Mexico was still under the very corrupt dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Just prior to Cardenas' takeover, US companies tried to break Mexican oil workers unions, firing three entire workforces, then defying two orders from Mexican courts ruling in favor of the unions.
* In the end, US oil companies got market value for “their” property. Nationalized Mexican oil helped Mexico pay for industrialization. Mexico today is still poorer than the US, but not nearly as poor as it would have been without Cardenas’s actions. In recent decades Mexicans have even begun to suffer from a new problem, an obesity epidemic.
* World War II brought a new challenge to Roosevelt’s policy. In Panama, the local dictator was fascist and pro-Axis. The US government did not overthrow him, but did support a movement that did. In El Salvador, FDR’s actions were less excusable.
* In El Salvador, as FDR came to power, military dictator Maximiliano Hernandez openly supported the Axis and had German military advisers. But when the US and Germany went to war, El Salvador’s markets in Europe were cut off. Hernandez kept his fascist beliefs restrained, even declaring war on Germany. US pressure forced him to allow some free speech. His opponents succeeded in overthrowing him in 1944. These very same opponents were then overthrown only months later. FDR recognized this coup and was very harshly criticized for it.
* The Good Neighbor Policy did not survive Roosevelt. Only two years after FDR’s death, Truman sent B-29 bombers, used to deliver A-bombs, to the inauguration of the President of Uruguay, a very unsubtle threat. Three years after that US troops crushed an independence uprising in Puerto Rico. * From Truman to Obama, every US president except Carter and Ford either invaded nations in Latin America or supported dictatorships and the overthrow of Latino democracies. Obama supported two coups, in Honduras and Uruguay, while Hillary Clinton’s adviser worked with Republicans to publicly campaign for crushing democracy in Honduras. (See Section Eleven.)
* A return to a Good Neighbor Policy may seem needed more than ever. But it may be less necessary since Latin America is the most independent from US control it has ever been. For the first time, every major nation in the region except Mexico and Peru is entirely free from US control, as are most smaller nations.
* In part this is due to the Bolivarian movement, led by leftist populists like Evo Morales and formerly by Hugo Chavez. But even without Bolivarianism, most of the area turned away from the US, which is good for all. Colonialism harms the colonizer almost as much as colonial subjects. The US would be far better off no longer being an empire or acting like one.
* Roosevelt also deserves credit as one of the US's greatest wartime leaders, the equal of Lincoln. It is more than a little strange to see conservatives rewrite history and claim World War II as their victory when it was won by the most liberal president the US ever had, with advisers often to his left. Most conservatives in the 1930s and 40s were isolationists. Some were pro fascist, even working with Hitler and taking part in the Holocaust or plotting to overthrow FDR and install fascism in the US. (See Sections Two and Nine.) Some like John Wayne dodged the draft, while others like Reagan played token roles at best.
* Roosevelt united the US in a war effort in ways few other potential presidents at the time could have. He was enormously charismatic and adept at using the media. It is difficult to imagine a Republican President Wilkie, Lindbergh, or Taft doing the same. Indeed Lindbergh or Taft as dedicated isolationists would try to stay neutral for longer. Lindbergh also believed in pseudo-scientific racism and truly admired the Nazis, though he would not have pushed the US to join the Axis. Potential Democratic Presidents Huey Long or Henry Wallace would have joined the war at similar points as FDR. But being to Roosevelt's left, they may have been less able to rally US society as a whole. Long was also notoriously corrupt and that likely would carry over to running the wartime effort. While he despised Hitler, Long was also an isolationist, and so prior to Pearl Harbor would have avoided not just war, but even preparing for war as FDR did with a draft and military buildup in 1940.
* The defeat of the Axis prevented likely tens of millions of future atrocities. This includes not only continuing deaths in the Holocaust but widespread deaths in Slavic countries, especially Poland. Axis collaborators would continue to persecute their fellow countrymen. The number of dissidents killed every year would remain high. In Asia, Japanese militarists were notoriously brutal in their treatment of other Asians, mass executions of civilians, forced labor camps, rape camps filled with local “comfort women,” even germ warfare experiments. Allied defeat of the Axis, with FDR playing as a central part, prevented that. Though fascism would have fallen on its own eventually, as it did in Spain, many years of fascism avoided was a great humanitarian achievement that saved many millions.
* After the start of the Cold War, many argued the US should have joined World War II earlier, or Britain and France should have confronted Hitler sooner. Isolationism became almost a swear word, appeasement even more so. The failure to stop Hitler sooner became a potent argument for strong anti Communist sentiment.
* But while defenders of war and big defense budgets agree, fewer scholars today accept this argument. Soviets and Nazis were not the same enemy with the same resources or defenses. Germany was and is highly industrial and thus more able to launch overseas invasions. Germany also is more able to be conquered since it is a medium sized nation in the middle of Europe. Russia with its huge size and brutal winters is almost unconquerable. (Thus claims that Germany could defeat it in World War II are suspect, and it took a unique set of circumstances to bring Russian surrender in World War I.) The Soviet system had severe internal problems from the start that meant it would die eventually. Fascism, as simply the more extreme version of capitalism and nationalism, might continue longer. The Soviets also never had the ability to successfully invade the US across oceans dominated by the US Navy, or frozen Alaska.
* In any case, how could anyone have gotten the US public to back war earlier, given the failed effort to halt war and imperialism with the League of Nations? That failure was, again, one caused by US conservatives' own prior isolationism, yet strangely their criticism was aimed at peace activists on the left. Britain and France's alleged failure to confront Hitler is also often falsely portrayed. Britain and France were, in fact, confronting him. Appeasement of Hitler was an effort to buy time and build up their militaries, not a way to pretend there was no problem, and certainly not a surrender.
* The New Deal and his leadership during World War II are why Roosevelt is rightly deemed by scholars as one of the most important and accomplished American presidents. The Good Neighbor Policy is often overlooked and needs as much attention as the other two, for curbing American aggression for so long is impressive. His three huge failures, doing nothing on the Holocaust, targeting Axis civilians with carpet bombing and some US civilians with mass repression, prevent him from being an unqualified great president.
* How does one reconcile his greatness with such massive ethical failures? In all three cases he failed to challenge the experts around him, failed to see the bigoted immorality of old money anti Semites in the State Department, Anglo-American farmers and scientific racists, and the amorality of military planners in love with their own weapons. These failures are as troubling as his successes are inspiring.