07/16/2014
Thought this up the other day:
So let's do a little history. Pres Teddy Roosevelt gave us the first truly progressive period of our history and did a lot of good for everyday people and changed the power structure of the corporations and got corporate money out of politics. He turned the movement over to Pres Taft who betrayed that movement and let the conservatives take over once again. Pres Roosevelt then tried to run on a third party platform, lost and we got the conservative Dem W Wilson a known racist, who stopped a lot of integration in unions, and schools.
We then had Pres Hardin, Republican and then 8 years of Pres Coolidge another Republican Conservative and businesses were let loose in the biggest Laissez-faire period of our history. Wall Street speculation was a really big deal and everything was great.
Then in March of 1929 Pres Hoover who actually wrote the book that gave us Rugged Individualism, took office. The stock market crashed in Oct 1929. The Depression was set over his term huge unemployment, hunger, and multiple business failures. He relied on Charitable, Private, Local, and State relief efforts only as his conservative principles did not allow the Federal government to intervene.
This is the same man who is hailed in Europe for all the people he helped feed during WW I. Yet nothing for his own people. All the aforementioned relief agencies were overwhelmed.
During the election in 1932 he campaigned that he was the business leader that would turn all of this around and that businesses would fix it. He was the one who knew how. Sound familiar? After FDR won Hoover continued to try and saddle the new president elect with his plans because he knew how to fix it. Right up to the day before FDR took office.
Now what I recently learned and wonder how many others realize that it was only a month before FDR took office that the banks failed. Now to Hoover's credit he did do some serious investigations that exposed the worst of the banking practices that led to the failures. But it was a month before when the banks failed. Started in Michigan and the bank that started it applied to Henry Ford for help and he turned them away. That failure caused the cascade that led to nationwide failure. That FDR inherited from Hoover.
I find it interesting that the Crash is the big event we all think about and we know the banks failed. But as I said I did not know they did not fail until the very end of the Hoover administration as they held on to the belief that business would correct it self and his entire administration was full of. It's getting better and about to turn as it continued to get worse and worse.
Now this is a very brief synopsis but I hope it might be helpful and give you something to ponder, if you have not already.