> No, it's true; he declared a bank holiday to prevent a run on
> deposits. I
> don't know how much this is talked about in the history books, but it
> had an
> impact on popular consciousness. My own late grandmother, who was a
> teenager
> at the time, always talked about how "the first thing Roosevelt did"
> when he
> got into office was to shut down all the banks.
Yes, I know about the bank holiday, but I was referring to just before FDR was inaugurated. From David M. Kennedy: _Freedom From Fear_, pp. 111f.:
"As Hoover's last days in office slipped away, he continued to dun Roosevelt with requests for some reassuring public statement, but the president-elect kept his own counsel. The outgoing president, drained of power and nerve, was unable to lead; the incoming president, as yet, was unwilling. The country, numb and nearly broken, anxiously awaited deliverance from this deadening paralysis. As Roosevelt's entourage filtered into Washington in preparation for the inaugural ceremonies, virtually all the banks in the nation were barred shut. American capitalism seemed to be creaking to a dead halt. The thought tormented many Americans that they were witnessing the end of a historic era an era of progress and confidence whose whimpering climax boded nothing good for the future. 'When we arrived in Washington on the night of March 2,' [Raymond] Moley wrote, 'terror held the country in grip.' "
Kennedy describes in some detail Hoover's gradual, very reluctant conversion from orthodox laissez faire capitalist political economy to a view that saw a need for much more government intervention, so that some of his ideas for dealing with the slump prefigured what the FDR administration would do, and conversely FDR's largely untheoretical, trial-and-error groping for solutions, even as he continued to hold to a rather orthodox, federal budget balancing position. Apparently, both the outgoing and incoming administrations were so shocked by the steady plunge of the economy that they were disoriented theoretically.
Kennedy also makes clear that FDR was not a reader, like Bush -- he learned just about everything he knew about the situation of the economy and what to do about it from conversing with others. But of course he learned very different things than Bush <g>, and also very much unlike Bush, he had a lively, curious mind which was never set in a rut.
The current "jobless recovery" is a pale reflection, one might say, of the conditions in 1932-33, and is similarly confounding the orthodox economic thinkers of today. I see a new consensus emerging (reflected, for example, in a NY Times background story today) that the real culprits are productivity and "just-in-time hiring," which are making workers more and more redundant, though the deep bourgeois thinkers don't know just yet what to do about it. Probably they will conclude that nothing can be done -- it's just another one of those economic "laws of nature" or "acts of God."
Maybe these folks will get around finally to reading their Marx (especially the Grundrisse) and finding out why this is happening, but I'm not betting the farm on it.
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