Amity Shlaes‘ most recent column for Forbes magazine discusses a key element missing from film producer Ken Burns’ 14-hour documentary on Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
When it came to activity, the 32nd President outdid the 26th. FDR created numerous agencies, including the National Recovery Administration to manage business and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to manage the farming sector. His New Deal intensified TR’s war on business. FDR labeled business owners “princes of property.” He promised and delivered a “momentous” law, the Wagner Act, which gave organized labor the political power to force employers to pay higher wages.
Roosevelt’s landslide reelection in 1936 proved the popularity of his overall promise: more jobs. Even after the Supreme Court found some of the New Deal agencies unconstitutional, the stock market didn’t return to its 1920s levels. Intimidated business leaders hesitated to rehire. Unemployment remained in the teens, a range that would provoke outrage today. Scholars Lee Ohanian of UCLA and Harold Cole of the University of Pennsylvania recently identified one reason for this: Employers couldn’t afford the higher wages; therefore, they hired fewer people.
What a shame Burns finds no spare moment to trace these results. Instead, he lavishes many minutes on the Roosevelts’ private lives: TR’s struggle with the loss of his first wife, FDR’s struggle with the crippling effects of polio. Such personal bravery is inspiring but takes viewers hostage. To demand suspension of Roosevelt nostalgia is to risk appearing indifferent to presidential trauma. Some takeaways: Punishing an industry can kill it; class assaults launched in the name of the poor deprive those very poor of jobs. These key points require addressing–perhaps in a documentary.
