In a classic illustration of the maxim that political arguments are never truly settled but just cycle round every 80 years or so, I print this cartoon from the 1934 Chicago Tribune that Robert DeGoff sent over.
I forwarded this to a few of my conservative friends and readers and received some interesting responses.
From MMWB:
The progressives of the 1920's and 1930's travelled to Europe and Russia to see how we, the United States should be changed and follow the socialist/communist ways. The same arguments offered by those people are being offered again by the progressives of today. Just as the Roosevelt entitlements and attempted take over's show the failures of Big Government, history is repeating itself in real time. Although schools today teach that everything and everyone came out of that time period smiling, the truth is otherwise.
In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes writes about the Yale Philosopher William Graham Sumner and his lecture about the progressives of the day. "The lecture eventually become an essay, titled "The Forgotten Man." Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote:
In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes writes about the Yale Philosopher William Graham Sumner and his lecture about the progressives of the day. "The lecture eventually become an essay, titled "The Forgotten Man." Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote:
"As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine...What A, B and C shall do for X." But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, "the man who never is thought of."
"...the New Deal made X the forgotten man....Roosevelt's work on behalf of his version of the forgotten man generated a new tradition. To justify giving to one forgotten man the administration found, it had to make a scapegoat of another. Businessmen and businesses were the targets."
This is amazingly descriptive of the Obama family plan, as stated by Michelle Obama, "The truth is, in order to get things like Universal Health Care and a revamped Education System, the someone is gong to have to give up a piece of the pie so that someone else can have more."
Different era, same problems.
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Bill M. had this to say:.
"Hi Robert,
"Hi Robert,
I presume you believe this is more of the same folly. Personally, I think it is equally accurate and will likely have a very different outcome without (hopefully) something akin to WWII.
Bill
I wonder if Bill was referring to a World War II "civil war"? Could be, the way things are going. And that pie MMWB was talking about has been going to the upper one percent of the population for a long time. They tend to write the rules of engagement in these matters. Wonder if it would be such a bad thing for the middle class to get a slice?
Obviously my conservative cronies are every bit as smart as me or my liberal friends if not smarter. And they tend to be much more successful. I think it is healthy to not seal yourself in and to get the other side of the story. In the Yeshiva the back and forth is called pilpul. Any skilled debater must be prepared to defend either side of the debate, the affirmative or the negative. Develops critical thinking and objectivity.
Obviously my conservative cronies are every bit as smart as me or my liberal friends if not smarter. And they tend to be much more successful. I think it is healthy to not seal yourself in and to get the other side of the story. In the Yeshiva the back and forth is called pilpul. Any skilled debater must be prepared to defend either side of the debate, the affirmative or the negative. Develops critical thinking and objectivity.
Now in the case illustrated above, I think it is easy to pick a winner. The doldrums of the Hoover years and the depression were vanquished in grand Keynesian style by the New Deal and massive war spending. The stimulation clearly brought America back to its feet. And the oligarch state is still plenty sore about the whole state of affairs, with the institution of social security, medicaire, what have you. It was kind of laughable to have these bitter GOPers bring up the, gasp, horrors, of slashing programs and a safety net that they have been pissed off about for the last 70 years.
But hey, If I had the luxury of having a lot of dough, I might view the rest of society as greedy sponges out to steal the family silver and profit from my good fortune and hard labor as well. I think it all depends on your vantage point. I just appreciate that they still read me and frankly speak to me, with all of my pinko beliefs. Because we need to listen to what everybody has to say.
And in the spirit of fair play and objectivity, may I point out that the bankrupt Air America, which promised to never sell it's rolodex and email lists to a third party, has done just that, selling the whole kit and kaboodle to that anti zionist, marxist rag, The Nation, for 46 thousand dollars. How's that for crummy?
6 comments:
Your view of the 'salvation' of the 1930s by the skinning of the rich to save the downtrodden man has one big fat problem with it. The lofty heights that were reached by the stock market in the last year of the 1920s was not to be seen again till, you guessed it, the first year of the reign of the next Republican administration, 1953......24 FUCKING years!!
God help us all from your self hatred.
Ciao,
Ike
Hey Einstein, are those lofty heights you speak of the towers that people were jumping out of in 1929 when your whole freaking deck of cards collapsed on itself and their money became only suitable for wiping their soiled keisters? You guys love to live rich and guess who once again has to clean up your mess?
Uh, if you care to look it up, the face-plants into concrete from tall buildings is one recurring myth that refuses to go away. If it happened at all it was one or two isolated instances. For the most part they all picked themselves up, dusted their keisters and waited till Adlai got HIS keister wiped before taking a day off.
Ciao,
Alger Hiss
Oh, I see. The depression was an overblown media driven market correction. The people selling apples on the corner were merely early experimenters of a vegan lifestyle. The dust bowl hobos were wealthy citizens who had heard about the healthy benefits of walking 1600 miles on the heart. Dorothea Lange's subjects were fashionable followers of appalachian chic. It was all going according to plan until that louse Roosevelt had to screw things up. I got it.
Tom Joad
I was looking up some of the names in the cartoon and found some interesting stuff about Harold Ickes on Wikipedia. He was a Secretary of the Interior who proposed among other things, resettling the jews in Alaska.
Harold LeClair Ickes (March 15, 1874 – February 3, 1952) was a United States administrator and politician. He served as Secretary of the Interior for 13 years, from 1933 to 1946, the longest tenure of anyone to hold the office. Ickes was responsible for implementing much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" and is the father of Harold M. Ickes. He and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins were the only original members of the Roosevelt cabinet who remained in offices for his entire presidency.Initially a Republican in Chicago, Ickes was never part of the establishment. He was unsatisfied with Republican policies and joined Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose movement in 1912.
He fought lengthy and legendary battles first with Chicago figures Samuel Insull, the utilities magnate, William Hale Thompson, the mayor, and Robert R. McCormick, the owner of The Chicago Tribune. Later he had an ongoing battle with Thomas E. Dewey, the presidential candidate.
As part of this involvement, Ickes was involved in Chicago's social and political affairs; among his many activities include his work for the City Club of Chicago. After Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he began putting together his cabinet. His advisers thought the Democratic president needed a progressive Republican to attract middle-of-the-road voters. He sought out Hiram Johnson, a Republican Senator at the time who had supported Roosevelt in the campaign, but Johnson was uninterested. Johnson did, however, recommend an old ally, Ickes.
Ickes was a strong supporter of both civil rights and civil liberties. He had been the president of the Chicago NAACP, and supported African American contralto Marian Anderson when the Daughters of the American Revolution prohibited her from performing in DAR Constitution Hall. He was an outspoken critic of the Japanese American internment during World War II. Also, as an official delegate to the founding United Nations conference in San Francisco, Ickes advocated for stronger language promoting self-rule and eventual independence for the world's colonies.[3]
In a news conference on the eve of Thanksgiving 1938, Ickes proposed offering Alaska as a "haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions." This proposal was designed to bypass normal immigration quotas, because Alaska was not a state. Ickes had toured Alaska that summer, meeting with local officials to discuss how to attract greater development, both for economic reasons and to bolster security in an area so close to Japan and Russia and to develop a plan to attract international professionals, including European Jews. In his press conference, he pointed out that 200 families had been relocated from the Dust Bowl to Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna Valley. The Department of the Interior prepared a report detailing the advantages of the plan, which was introduced as a bill by Utah's Senator William H. King and California's Democratic Representative Franck R. Havenner. The plan met with little support from American Jews, however, with the exception of the Labor Zionists of America; most Jews agreed with Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise of the American Jewish Congress that the plan, if implemented, would deliver "a wrong and hurtful impression ... that Jews are taking over some part of the country for settlement". The final blow was dealt when Roosevelt suggested a limit of only 10,000 immigrants a year for five years, with a maximum of 10 percent Jews. He later reduced even that number and never publicly mentioned the plan.[6][7]
Ooh, that's ickeee!
WTF
Mamie Van Doren
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