The Zinn Reader (28 page)

IV.

When Roosevelt told students at Ogelthorpe University during his 1932 campaign that he was in favor of a "larger measure of social planning," it was not clear how large this measure was. Was he willing to go as far as his own advisor, Columbia professor Rexford Guy Tugwell? Tugwell attacked the profit motive, said that "planning for production means planning for consumption too," declared that "profits must be limited and their uses controlled," and said he meant by planning "something not unlike an integrated group of enterprises run for its consumers rather than for its owners." The statement, he said, that "business will logically be required to disappear" is "literally meant" because: "Planning also implies adjustment of production to consumption; and there is no way of accomplishing this except through a control of prices and of profit margins. To limit business in all these ways, he said, meant in effect "to destroy it as business and to make of it something else."

Raymond Moley, who played a direct role in shaping Roosevelt's early legislation, also deplored the lack of planning in the New Deal. But Moley was interested in planning for quite different groups. Tugwell was concerned with the lower classes' lack of purchasing power. Moley, although he too was moved by a measure of genuine concern for deprived people, was most worried about "the narrow margin of profit" and "business confidence." In the end, Roosevelt rejected both ideas. Whatever planning he would do would try to help the lower classes, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority. On the other hand, the planning would not be national; nor would it interfere with the fundamental character of the American economy, based as it was on corporate profit; nor would it attempt any fundamental redistribution of wealth in the nation. And the TVA embodied these too because it represented
piecemeal
planning.

David Lilienthal's defense of this method, in his book on the TVA, comes closest to the New Deal approach. "We move step by step— from where we are," wrote Lilienthal. Not only was any notion of national economic planning never seriously considered, but after the TVA, the moving "step by step" did not carry very far. Housing developments and several planned communities were inspiring, but came nowhere near matching the enormity of the national need.

Ambiguity persisted longest in the policy towards monopoly and oligopoly. The NRA was a frank recognition of the usefulness—or at least, the inevitability—of large enterprise, when ordered by codes. The Securities Exchange Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act moved back (but weakly, as William O. Douglas recognized at the time) to the Brandeis idea of trying to curb the size and strength of large enterprises. Roosevelt's basic policy towards giantism in business, although he vigorously attacked "economic royalists" in 1936, remained undetermined until 1938, when he asked Congress for a sweeping investigation of monopoly. And although he was clearly returning to the idea of restraining the power of big business, one sentence in his message to Congress reveals his continuing uncertainty: "The power of the few to manage the economic life of the Nation must be diffused among the many or be transferred to the public and its democratically responsible government."

The first alternative was an obviously romantic notion; the second was really much farther than either Congress or FDR was prepared to go. Hence, the Temporary National Economic Committee, after hearing enough testimony to fill thirty-one volumes and forty-three monographs, was unwilling, as William Leuchtenburg writes, "to tackle the more difficult problems or to make recommendations which might disturb vested interests." Roosevelt had come close to expressing, but he still did not possess, nor did he communicate to the nation, a clear, resolute goal of transferring giant and irresponsible economic power "to the public and its democratically responsible government." The restraints on the New Dealers' thinking is shown best perhaps by Adolf A. Berle, who said that prosperity depended on either a gigantic expansion of private activity or nationalization of key industries. Yet, knowing private industry was not going to fill the need, he did not advocate nationalization—nor did any other New Dealer.

Roosevelt was experimental, shifting, and opportunistic in his espousal of public enterprise and the spending that had to accompany such governmental activity. As James MacGregor Burns says: "Roosevelt had tried rigid economy, then heady spending, then restriction of spending again. He had shifted back and forth from spending on direct relief to spending on public works." The significant measure, however, was not the swings of the pendulum, but the width of the arcs. When FDR went all-out for spending, it was still only a fraction of what the British economist John Maynard Keynes was urging as a way of bringing recovery. An American Keynesian, Professor Alvin Hansen, was arguing that the economy was "mature" and therefore required much more continuous and powerful injections of governmental spending than was being given.

Roosevelt himself had introduced into public discussion the idea of a "yardstick," which the Tennessee Valley Authority represented—a public enterprise that would, by competing with private producers, force them to bend more towards the needs of the consumer. (Later FDR tried, unsuccessfully, to get Congress to introduce "seven little TVAs" in other river valleys.) But the vast implications of the concept were left unexplored. When political scientist Max Lerner called for government-owned radio stations and government-subsidized newspapers to break into the growing monopolization of public opinion by giant chains, there was no response. TVA, a brief golden period of federal theater, a thin spread of public housing, and a public works program called into play only at times of desperation, represented the New Deal's ideological and emotional limits in the creation of public enterprise.

It is one thing to experiment to discover the best means of achieving a certain objective; it is quite another thing to fail to recognize that objective. The Social Security System, as set up, was not an experiment to find the best type of system. Roosevelt knew from the beginning that it was not the most effective way to handle the problems of poverty for the aged, the unemployed, and the helpless. Behind the basic political problem of getting the bill passed lay fundamental narrowness of vision. Social security expert Abraham Epstein pointed this out at the time, and it was noted on the floor of Congress. Henry E. Sigerist, a physician and student of welfare medicine in other countries, wrote patiently and clearly about the need for socialized medicine, answered the arguments against it, and explained how it might operate.

Thus, if the concept of New Deal thought is widened to include a large circle of thinkers—some close to the administration itself, others at varying distances from it—we get not panaceas, or infallible schemes but larger commitments, bolder goals, and greater expectations of what "equality" and "justice" and "security" meant.

V.

For our view of the New Deal as a particularly energetic gyroscopic motion putting the traditional structure aright again, we have what the natural scientists might call a set of "controls"—a way of checking up on the hypothesis—one in the area of race relations, another in the experience of war.

In the field of racial equality, where there was no crisis as in economics, where the gyroscope did not confront a sharply titled mechanism, there was no "new deal." The special encumbrances of the depression were lifted for Negroes as for many other Americans, but the permanent caste structure remained unaltered by the kind of innovations that at least threatened the traditional edifice in economics. The white South was left, as it had been since the Compromise of 1877, to deal with Negroes as it chose—by murder, by beatings, by ruthless exclusion from political and economic life; the Fourteenth Amendment waited as fruitlessly for executive enforcement as it had in all earlier administrations since Grant. Washington, D.C., itself remained a tightly segregated city. And the Harlems of the North continued as great symbols of national failure.

The warm belief in equal rights held by Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as by FDR himself, the appointments of Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, and others to important secondary posts in the government, even the wide distribution of relief and WPA jobs, were not enough to alter the fundamental injustice attached to being a Negro in the United States. The disposition of the New Deal to experiment could have led to important accomplishments, but the clear goal of ending segregation, as with comparable objectives in economics, was never established.

With the coming of World War II, economic and social experimentation blossomed under Roosevelt's leadership and involved a good measure of national planning, jobs for everyone, and a vast system of post war educational benefits to eighteen million veterans. There was little inhibition; new, radically different national goals were not required for the traditional objective of winning at war. With such an aim, policy could be fearless and far-reaching.

Some coming generation perhaps, while paying proper respects to the spirit of the New Deal, may find, as William James put it, "the moral equivalent of war"—in new social goals, new expectations, with imaginative, undoctrinaire experimentation to attain them. If, in such an adventure, the thought of the past can help, it should be put to work.

6

W
HO
O
WNS THE
S
UN?

I take this title from a 1996 book by Daniel Berman and John O'Connor
(Who Owns the Sun? People, Politics, and the Struggle for a Solar Economy),
in which they make out a powerful case for the control of solar energy by the citizenry instead of by the corporate utilities. The article here that I wrote twenty years ago for the
Boston Globe
(February 28, 1975) may be out of date in its specific proposals for action, but it suggests that problems of class, of poverty and deprivation, were as true in the Seventies (a decade often presented as a prosperous one) as any other time. The spirit of the article, I believe, is still pertinent today.

As kids, we never came straight home from school. Those were the depression years, and I was growing up in New York. The sun set early on winter evenings, and I remember coming home to find my father, who had walked the streets all day looking for work (he was a waiter and a window-washer, a hard-working man who never finished elementary school) sitting with my mother and three brothers in the darkness, in our four-room flat, because we hadn't paid our electric bill. It happened more than once.

When I learned that Boston Edison had shut off the electricity in over 1200 homes last month because people did not pay their bills, an old anger returned.

Why should rich corporations have the right to deprive families of electricity, of gas to cook with, of fuel to heat their homes. These are life's necessities, like food, air, water. They should not be the private property of corporations, which use them to hold us hostage to the dark, to the cold, until we pay their price.

It is as if, all over this country, families lived in intensive-care units, with the dials controlling their supply of precious life fluids manipulated in some office far away, turned on or off, depending on the payment of a fee.

Legally, that is not extortion. But I think it is. Officially, it does not lead to loss of life. But then we have to find some way to describe the act of the Massachusetts Electric Company, cutting off power to that family in Athol earlier this month because a bill was not paid, forcing it to rely on a makeshift kerosene stove for heat, resulting in a fire that killed six children and a woman.

How many families in Dorchester and Roxbury and Somerville are freezing this winter, how many eating cold suppers, how many living by candlelight, because they didn't pass the supreme test of worth in our society, the test of money?

The anger against this is growing. The helplessness, the frustration are turning into action:

L A consumer group called Fair Share walked into a Boston Edison stockholders' meeting last week trying to present proposals against shutoffs and high rates. But there is as much democracy in stockholders' meetings as in an army regiment, and the chairman hurriedly adjourned the session.

2. In the Massachusetts Legislature, a bill supported by the signatures of 97,000 voters would put all new electric power production in the hands of the state, and possibly take existing plants away from the power companies. With publicly owned power, our bills would be much lower. The Federal Power Commission reported in 1970 that municipal electrical systems charged about 40 percent less than private companies.

3. If you think your electric bill is too high, you can appeal to the state Department of Public Utilities. Then your service cannot be shut off and you don't have to pay your bill until you get a hearing, which can take months. A group called CAP-Energy (Citizens Action Program on Energy, 129 South St. Boston) is trying to get at least 20,000 customers of Boston Edison to pledge to withhold payment of exorbitant bills, through this legal method, until rates come down.

Shouldn't it be an elementary rule of civilization that no human being should be deprived of heat or light or cooking fuel because of lack of money? Where does all that gas and electricity come from anyway? From coal, from oil, from the earth, from the stored energy of the sun, shining down for a billion years. Who took it on themselves, in some distant past, to sell the sun to Boston Edison? And what must the public do to get it back?

7

T
HE
S
ECRET
W
ORD

This article appeared in the
Boston Globe
January 24, 1976. Twenty years later, the Soviet Union and other countries in Eastern Europe which called themselves "socialist" have overturned their governments and do not call themselves that any more. This is just as well for those of us who think socialism is an honorable idea, and that it was badly tainted by those ugly dictatorships. With those governments fallen, and capitalism failing to solve basic problems of human rights (an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as stated in the Declaration of Independence) this may be a good time to revive the word and the idea.

Do you remember the old Groucho Marx quiz program where, if a contestant happened to mention a certain secret word, the word dropped down and he or she won a big prize?

Well, there's a secret word I've been waiting many years for someone on TV to say—some news commentator, political figure, panelist, entertainer, anyone.

Lately, I've been especially careful in listening for it. On news programs, I've seen lines of unemployed people getting longer and longer. I've seen a movie made inside a welfare office, where old people were shunted around like cattle.

I've seen a program about citrus-fruit pickers in Florida, forced to take their little kids out of school to pick oranges with them so they could pay the rent. Meanwhile, the citrus owners were celebrating their prosperity with champagne and making speeches about how wonderful life was for everybody in the citrus industry.

I've watched the President at news conferences and his economic advisers at other news conferences, all pretending that things were going to be all right, but obviously bumbling and incapable of dealing with rising food prices, spreading unemployment, high rents, impossible medical costs and the shameful fact of a fabulously rich country unable to take care of the most basic needs of its people.

Not one of these people, on network programs watched by millions, mentioned the word which, with the obvious failure of our economic system, I thought someone was bound to blurt out.

The word? Socialism.

Of course, it's not just saying the word that is important. It's the idea of it— an idea too threatening to those who profit from the present system to be allowed adequate exploration on TV, radio, the newspapers, the motion pictures.

Let's hasten to say: I don't mean the "socialism" of Soviet Russia or any other oppressive regime claiming to be socialist. Rather, a genuine socialism which not only distributes the wealth but maintains liberty.

That may not exist anywhere in its best form, but the idea has caught the imagination of many people in world history, famous and obscure, who were sensitive to poverty and injustice and wanted a truly democratic world society, without war, without hunger, without discrimination.

There were Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Also, George Bernard Shaw, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, W.E.B. DuBois.

Socialism was once an important movement in the United States. There was Eugene Debs, who organized the railroad workers in the big strike of 1894, went to prison for that, and there, reading and thinking, became a socialist: "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free."

There was Mother Jones, who at 82 fought alongside the coal miners against the Rockefeller interests in Colorado. There was Jack London, the adventure writer. And Heywood Broun, who organized newspapermen into a union and defended Sacco and Vanzetti against the cold authority of the governor of Massachusetts and the presidents of MIT and Harvard. And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who as an Irish rebel girl, helped the women textile workers of Lawrence in their successful strike of 1912. Socialists all.

In 1776, the time was right for Tom Paine to speak "Common Sense" about Independence, and the idea spread through the country. (It has just reached Gerald Ford.) Isn't the time right, in 1976, for us to begin discussing the idea of socialism?

To break the hold of corporations over our food, our rent, our work, our lives—to produce things people need, and give everyone useful work to do and distribute the wealth of the country with approximate equality—whether you call it socialism or not, isn't it common sense?