According to Perlstein, Hamby compares Roosevelt's approach to fighting the depression with those adopted by the British and German governments. Perlstein says, "Britain's response to the Depression, a civilized diet of national sacrifice, balanced budgets and a lack of charisma, Hamby finds splendid," and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin comes off as the book's "unlikely hero." Perlstein continues:
"The grim spectacle of Hitler provides the counterexample. So where does that place Franklin Roosevelt? In a rather awkward spot, as it turns out: closer in many of his economic policies to Hitler than to Baldwin, Hamby suggests. That the New Deal approached the status of fascism was a common if 'crude libel' of Roosevelt's enemies at the time, Hamby says at one point. But faint echoes of that libel can be found in this book."
The similarity Hamby sees is primarily that both appeared to use a corporatist approach -- "an economic system driven by the planning decisions of large cartels." Of course,
"Hamby hedges the comparison. Yet Roosevelt's traditional enemies would have found much to applaud in statements like: 'The Nazi recovery program organized the economy in ways that bore a clear surface resemblance to the early New Deal.' "
I'm not an expert in New Deal history by any means, but it seems to me that Hamby's thesis is not particularly new. And in any case, I think it applies, if at all, only to the *early* New Deal -- after the NRA was killed by the SC, Roosevelt didn't proceed in a Nazi-like course at all, and given the very different political institutions and characters of the two countries, he couldn't have even if he'd wanted to. Perlstein also has the following very pertinent observations:
"Hamby also makes some scholarly omissions. To take one example, his criticism of Roosevelt's '100-proof soak-the-rich' tax politics is oblivious of work arguing that Roosevelt was actually employing opportunistic rhetoric to obscure tax policies that were on balance regressive. And by repeating the orthodox wisdom about the universality of classical liberalism in American political culture, Hamby fails to acknowledge recent demonstrations that, for instance, American labor law before Roosevelt was in fact based in feudalism. Before the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, courts habitually struck down laws reforming the workplace by following common-law doctrine -- that the 'master-servant' relationship could not be interfered with through legislation. It is therefore false to claim, as Hamby does, that American trade unions achieved justice and benefits only for their members."
The language has changed, but there is certainly a lot of "feudalism" left in employer-worker relationships.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt