Tag Archives: Roosevelt

The Radosh-Horowitz riddle

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Suppose Diana West had written the worst book ever on Roosevelt, Stalin and the Cold War. She hasn’t – she’s crafted one of the best books on this issue ever written – but suppose she had written one of the worst. Suppose the facts didn’t stack up. Suppose there were large gaps in her logic and in the analysis. Suppose it was a pot boiler badly crafted and convincing to no one. Suppose she had done that.

Well so what if she had. Throw it out there for others to deal with. Let it be refuted by those on the left if they have the nerve and the knowledge to do it. Let them unpick her errors and mistakes. Let them take the time and the trouble. If she can establish a case, even on really flimsy grounds, that Roosevelt’s White House was riddled with Soviet agents and that America’s strategy during World War II was shaped in major ways to suit the Soviet Union and Stalin, well, where’s the problem with that? It is an idea worth pursuing and even if the evidence had been thin, it’s not for people on our side to knock it over. There is nothing to be gained by doing the left’s work for them. Put it out and let it be debated.

And the fact is that there is no value whatsoever on the conservative side of politics for anyone on the right to attack West’s book, whether it is good, bad or mediocre. This is politics at its most dangerous, not some useless academic tearoom debate. This really matters if we are to understand the world we live in. Who cares whether there are some obscure errors in what she wrote that no one can see unless they have spent thirty years in an archive. How moronic and politically stupid do you have to be to challenge such a book, even if it is badly done. Whose interests are being served, and exactly why are they being served by seeking some pristine purity and perfection that no one else has ever achieved or could be expected to.

If people are such idiots that they actually think that the interests of the conservative side of politics are served by ridiculously high standards of scholarship that no one can meet, then they should get out of the political arena and sit in their archive and stay in the tearoom because they are useless to any kind of political debate.

The only interests that are served in attacking Diana West’s book are the interests of the left. No other. If that is not 100% obvious then these people are political fools of the highest order. And if they do understand that, who are they really and where are we then?

Herbert Hoover on the Great Depression

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One of the most extraordinary sentences I ever came across, and I no longer have any idea where, was from something written in around 1939 where whoever it was wrote that the 1930s are going to be completely mis-remebered, and this had entered his head because he’d heard someone the other day refer to “The Hungry Thirties”. He thought such a notion was preposterous and could say so then because everyone would have understood what he meant. Now “The Hungry Thirties” is exactly how the period is remembered and my political education began at the hand of my Father for whom the Great Depression was the most important personal landmark of his life. His socialism had arisen then and it stayed with him till his last days on earth.

The following passage, though, is from Herbert Hoover who was enraged by the way the 1930s have entered into our common consciousness. He, of course, has his own reasons for wishing our historical memory was other than it was, but he couldn’t write what he wrote if it were so off centre that everyone who was there then would see it for themselves. The first para in the quoted passage below is from the editor but the rest is Hoover himself. It is from an excerpt contained in a review of a manuscript that was discovered in 2009 of Hoover’s writings during his post-presidential period. The book is The Crusade Years, 1933–1955 and edited by George H. Nash.

In the presidential contest of 1944, Hoover’s indignation boiled over. Democratic Party leaders and pro–Roosevelt campaigners repeatedly sought to discredit the Republican presidential nominee, Thomas Dewey, by portraying him as an intellectual lightweight who would be a puppet and “mouthpiece” for Hoover and reactionary ‘Hooverism’ if elected. Unwilling to countenance any longer the Democrats’ attacks upon his record, Hoover composed the scathing rejoinder printed here.
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The greatest lie told in this whole campaign has been that the Depression of 1930–32 was caused by the Republican Party; that the Republicans did nothing about it; that the people were allowed to starve and were compelled to sell apples; that the country was in ruins; and that Roosevelt rescued it from complete wreck.

This lie has been promulgated in a thousand speeches, in millions of scurrilous pamphlets and circulars. Mr. Roosevelt has himself given currency to it. . . .

The broader facts are and history will record that the depression was world-wide; that its major origins were in Europe; that it swept in on the United States like a hurricane; that it originated from the aftermaths of World War I, including the Treaty of Versailles; that by action of the Republican Administration 18,000,000 people were under organized relief and that any consequential hunger and cold were prevented; that the Republican Administration took drastic measures to protect the peoples’ savings from the storm by creating the R.F.C., the Home Loan Banks and by expanding agricultural credit institutions. There were failures mostly in State Banks not under Federal control.

History will also record that the depression was turned world-wide in June and July of 1932; that we were on our way out with employment increasing but that recovery was halted when business confidence was shaken by the impending election of the New Deal; that with the election the whole country further hesitated awaiting the new policies; that rumors quickly spread that Mr. Roosevelt would devalue the currency; that in consequence, people tried to get their money from the banks and that speculators tried to ship it out of the country; that Mr. Roosevelt upon Mr. Hoover’s request refused to reaffirm the promises he had made the night before election not to tinker with the currency; that Mr. Roosevelt refused to cooperate in other directions with Mr. Hoover to stem the tide of fear—fear of what? It was of the New Deal, not of a retiring administration. It was a panic of bank depositors induced by the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt. After the banks were reopened it was found that 98% of their deposits were good.

History will also record that the rest of the world, not having a “new deal,” went straight out of the depression and recovered its employment by 1934–35; that unemployment here in the United States continued on a vast scale for six years of the New Deal; and that it took a war to get us out of it.

The whole of the story put over by the New Deal orators is the most gigantic dishonesty ever known in American politics.

Nothing Hoover wrote here is contradicted by anything I know and quite a bit fits into what I have seen for myself. Literally every other market economy emerged from the Great Depression in 1932-33 with the sole exception being the United States. But Hoover himself has a lot to answer for, including the public spending, his wages policy, the higher interest rates and the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But that Roosevelt might have created the very uncertainty he needed to win the election, and then brought along with him the far left ideologues who ran his policies for him, the truth about the New Deal is far different from what you might otherwise have thought from looking at the standard histories.