Web Letters: Why the New Deal Matters

Richard Parker wrote, "It was FDR who pushed through--in the form of the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank--the architecture of internationalism that Woodrow Wilson had dreamed of but failed to achieve." Given the impact of the IMF and the World Bank on developing countries over the past fifty years or so, it is shocking to see them lauded in the pages of The Nation. A true internationalism would call for their abolition.

Louis Proyect

New York, NY

As Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal retreats into an ever-more-mythical past, those for whom Roosevelt's economic policies represent a fundamental violation of natural law as embodied--they believe--in the unrestricted working of The Market find him and it an easier target for historical revision. Amity Shlaes's book is simply the latest salvo in the long war against the New Deal. The assault began with the American Liberty League and continued with the reactionary think tanks founded and funded by the same plutocratic dynasties eager to free themselves of taxes and other responsibilities that, Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted, make for civilization.

In a December 31 column in the Wall Street Journal, Shlaes buttressed her unoriginal argument that New Deal agencies "did their work inefficiently" by citing a colorful anecdote of a boondoggle from which to damn the market interference of the TVA and what she calls the "infamous Public Utilities Holding Company Act." She neglected to mention the catastrophic crash of Sam Insull that led to such infamy. Gone, too, down the useful memory hole was what an unregulated Enron so spectacularly did to a myriad of stockholders and employees, not to mention the State of California.

Like those before her, Shlaes lambastes New Deal programs for not fully lifting the nation out of the Great Depression without considering the long-term contributions made to the economy by the physical and cultural infrastructure that the Roosevelt Administration ingeniously constructed in less than a decade. The public picked up the costly overhead for systems such as water supply and disposal, dams and farm-to-market roads that developers were unwilling or unable to finance so that they could, unwittingly, build post-war prosperity and Sunbelt cities upon the back of New Deal public works. Those systems were often so well built that seventy years later everyone uses them daily without knowing they are doing so until tax-cutting neglect fells them.

Shlaes builds the superstructure of her argument upon an impressive but understandable foundation of gelatinous ignorance, since an inventory of all New Deal public works has never been compiled--until now. The California Living New Deal Project is an attempt to do that for the State of California. Like an archaeological dig, it is revealing the lost civilization that was our own, as well as the extent to which we--and the market--are indebted to agencies that few today can identify. We have yet to generously acknowledge--as we do the efforts of wartime veterans--the vast contributions made by the forgotten men and women whom those agencies saved from destitution, desperation and revolutionary violence that would not have served Wall Street well. As Shlaes once again demonstrates, it has never forgiven Roosevelt for doing so.

Gray Brechin
California Living New Deal Project

Berkeley, CA