Here’s one way Joe can be like FDR
In the fall of the first year of the Roosevelt administration, the emphasis was on speed – speed in putting men and women to work and in getting back to some semblance of normality, after three horrible years – years of mounting unemployment and public and personal dislocations.
The Great Depression twisted most of what passed for normal life into a tangled heap of lost dreams, lost hopes, and lost security.
It sounds a little bit like today, in the wake of the pandemic, although there are several critical differences.
In autumn 1933, the administration’s No. 1 priority was to reemploy as many people as possible in as short a period of time as possible.
The same priority held sway at the grassroots. Clarence Gallagher was the New Deal’s Civil Works Administration (CWA) chief in Fayette County. After conferring in Harrisburg with state officials working under a Republican governor, Gallagher notified local government officers to get their public works proposals to him in a hurry.
“We want these projects submitted … in a shape that they may be approved and work started within 48 hours of submission,” Gallagher said.
Underlining the need to move with dispatch, Gallagher gave his home telephone number – Connellsville 1800 – to newspaper reporters for publication.
Mayors and township supervisors responded with troves of proposals to redo streets and sewer lines, refurbish hospitals, repair school buildings, and build athletic fields.
By December, more than $750,000 – the equivalent today to $15.2 million – was flowing the county’s way, thanks to the CWA.
“No wonder citizens are enthusiastic about the work of the 73rd Congress and President Roosevelt’s activities,” Congressman J. Buell Snyder said.
Ten or so months into his presidency, President Roosevelt’s popularity was soaring. It was easy enough to see why: almost daily in the press headlines and stories blazed away with news of money from Washington being spent to employ more and more people – people who only a short time ago had been down-and-out.
The administration was delivering jobs, as the president himself pointed out time after time. At a November press conference, FDR touted the fact that two million bread winners would soon be going back to work, with another two million expected to be on a payroll soon thereafter.
“At least two-thirds of the families … now receiving relief will (soon) be placed on a self-serving basis,” the president assured the nation.
That was then, this is now. Much has changed. According to historian Jill Lapore, a whole lot has changed, beginning with the fact that Joe Biden faces a set of societal and political norms far removed from Franklin Roosevelt and the 1930s.
“Our spirit of endeavor has changed,” Lapore, who teaches at Harvard and writes for the New Yorker, told a podcast last week.
Roosevelt “communicated with Americans that we were in the same boat,” Lapore said. “Americans were persuadable on that point.”
Roosevelt not only worked with Republican governors and lawmakers; in some cases, they were his staunch allies.
Joe Biden faces Republican brush back if not down right hostility.
According to Lapore, the country is different because the people are different.
Unlike during the Great Depression, Americans in small towns and in rural parts of the country are not in tune with the vibes coming out of Washington, a fact confirmed by recent polling by Rural Objective PAC.
The poll conducted in nine “swing” states, including Pennsylvania, found that voters such as may be found in central and western Pennsylvania are not giving credit where credit is due.
While 68% of rural and small town Americans supported the recent $1,400 pandemic stimulus checks enacted by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and friends, Democrats and Joe Biden are not getting full credit for their efforts.
Only 50% of such Americans, the poll found, associated the stimulus checks with the Democratic Party.
To add injury to insult, 32% believed the checks came from congressional Republicans, despite unanimous GOP opposition.
Paul Waldman of the Washington Post recently advised that the Biden administration should remind Americans at every opportunity of Democratic largesse. It’s one way that Joe Biden can emulate FDR.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.