Adapted from an excerpt from Presidents' Body Counts: The Twelve Worst and Four Best American Presidents Based on How Many Lived or Died Because of Their Actions.
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Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Compared to Obamacare
The New Deal committed the federal government to intervening for average people for the first time, not just wealthy elites. It 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.
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, the American Liberty League’s “business plot.”
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 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.
