Book Review: "9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her," by McClanahan

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Book Review: "9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her," by McClanahan

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly​

American Presidents

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/thomas-dilorenzo/sorta-good-bad-extremely-ugly/

By Thomas DiLorenzo
December 30, 2015

In his brilliant classic, A Disquisition on Government, John C. Calhoun warned that a written constitution would never be sufficient to restrain the governmental leviathan. The net tax consumers (those who received more in government benefits than they paid in taxes), especially government employees, would relentlessly argue away the effectiveness of constitutional restrictions on government, he predicted. The net tax payers would inevitably be overwhelmed and defeated. There was never a truer political prediction.

In his new book, 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her, Brion McClanahan presents a masterful and superbly-scholarly discussion of how nine presidents, beginning with George Washington himself, effectively destroyed constitutional government. On the brighter side, he also explains how four presidents – Jefferson, Tyler, Cleveland, and Coolidge – did their best to preserve the Jeffersonian vision of limited constitutional government.

In a sense, the book demonstrates the futility of “limited constitutional government” for precisely the reasons given by Calhoun. For example, even George Washington acted in ways that were destructive of constitutional government. McClanahan describes how slick political manipulators like Alexander Hamilton were able to talk Washington into things that were either of dubious constitutionality or plainly unconstitutional. Washington wanted America to stay out of foreign wars, so he issued a “Proclamation of Neutrality.” That sounds fine, but there was no constitutional authority for the president to intervene in foreign policy in that way. Nor did Washington have the constitutional authority to call up the state militia (only Congress does) to invade Pennsylvania during the Whiskey rebellion – another one of Hamilton’s heavy-handed, tyrannical adventures.

What this shows is that even with the best intentions on the part of the most selfless president in American history, the poison of politics will inevitably prevail to chip away at constitutional liberty.

Every chapter is a mini-book on the various presidents that McClanahan examines. Andrew Jackson is praised for some things that he did, such as defunding the Bank of the United States, but is rightfully condemned for some of his more tyrannical acts, such as threatening force during the nullification crisis of the late 1820s, following passage of the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations.”

Lincoln is accurately portrayed as the most tyrannical of all presidents. He had a “careless disregard for executive restraint” and achieved “the wholesale transformation of the American political system from a federal republic to a consolidated nation.” “Every [subsequent] president who screwed things up could use Lincoln’s example to justify his actions,” writes McClanahan.

Teddy Roosevelt continued the assault on the Constitution, which was despised by all “progressives” like himself, by bastardizing the Commerce Clause to justify myriad economic policy interventions; passing a Food and Drug Act based on the “fabricated lies of a socialist” (Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle); confiscating “public” land; and foreign interventionism without congressional authorization. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, the “twentieth-century pioneer in unconstitutional executive authority” who nationalized industries, destroyed capitalism in America by adopting “war socialism”; attacked civil liberties with his alien and sedition acts; was a sworn enemy of the Constitution; and plunged the country into a senseless war that killed more than 100,000 Americans for no good reason. Naturally, he is always ranked near the top of every American historian’s list of “great presidents.”

McClanahan offers an excellent summary of FDR’s unconstitutional New Deal interventions, with the entire First New Deal being ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, followed by FDR’s famous “court packing” scheme. He was a Lincolnian dictator gone wild, adopting war socialism, placing Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, confiscating privately-held gold, adopting an American version of Soviet central planning, and scheming to get Americans into the European War to save his own political hide after eight years of the “New Deal” had proven to be not only failures, but made things worse.

Truman “perfected the art of the demagogue” with even more “Fair Deal” economic intervention, the senseless Korean War, the initiation of the Cold War, “emergency” seizure of private businesses, and worse. Then there is Lyndon Johnson, the only man to rival FDR during the twentieth century in terms of constitutional destruction. McClanahan’s summary of the Johnson administration’s policies is infinitely superior to – and hundreds of pages shorter than — the hagiography of Johnson written by regime propagandist and court historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin.

McClanahan’s discussion of Jefferson, the first good president, is masterful. He details his anti-tax, pro-civil liberties policies and his strict constructionism. He does not portray Jefferson as a perfect libertarian specimen, but as a real, live human being who was involved in politics. He was not perfect in every way, but he was better than all the rest in demonstrating his belief that that government is best which governs least.

The nineteenth-century Jeffersonian John Tyler is described as “arguably the best president in American history,” which is why most Americans have never even heard of him. He was a hardcore Jeffersonian who, as president, vetoed the entire “American System” of Henry Clay and the Whig Party (protectionist tariffs, a national bank, and corporate welfare), after which the Whigs kicked him out of his own party.

I have called Grover Cleveland “The Last Good Democrat”; McClanahan correctly labels him as the last Jeffersonian president. He vetoed more legislation than all of his predecessors combined, which of course is why most Americans know almost nothing about him. He opposed foreign policy imperialism, including the annexation of Hawaii; was a free trader; and opposed the beginnings of a welfare state, arguing that “though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” He vetoed numerous schemes to turn veterans’ pensions into welfare handouts. For this he has been pilloried by the history profession for the past 120 years.

Another object of leftist hatred is Calvin Coolidge, a somewhat sad figure in that he was, as McClanahan describes him, “a Jeffersonian whose vision had given way [by 1933, the year of his death] to the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt.” His tax-cutting policies and his foreign policy non-interventionism earned him eternal ridicule at the hands of the American history profession.

McClanahan’s final chapter proposes several constitutional amendments that would curtail executive power, decentralize government, and begin to breathe life back into American federalism. This is all fine and good, but in my humble opinion, American history – including the history as so brilliantly told by Brion McClanahan – amply proves that any and all constitutional limitations on governmental power will always be easily and cleverly evaded by our ruling class of master politicians, once defined with perfect precision by Murray Rothbard as masterful liars, connivers, and manipulators.

 

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Re: Book Review: "9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her," by McClanah

How FDR Made the Depression Worse​

Link: https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse

02/01/1995•Robert Higgs
The Free Market 13, no. 2 (February 1995)

Franklin Roosevelt "did bring us out of the Depression," Newt Gingrich told a group of Republicans after the recent election, and that makes FDR "the greatest figure of the 20th century." As political rhetoric, the statement is likely to come from someone who does not support a market economy. The New Deal, after all, was the largest peacetime expansion of federal government power in this century. Moreover, Gingrich's view that FDR saved us from the Depression is indefensible; Roosevelt's policies prolonged and deepened it.

There's no doubt that Roosevelt changed the character of the American government—for the worse. Many of the reforms of the 1930s remain embedded in policy today: acreage allotments, price supports and marketing controls in agriculture, extensive regulation of private securities, federal intrusion into union-management relations, government lending and insurance activities, the minimum wage, national unemployment insurance, Social Security and welfare payments, production and sale of electrical power by the federal government, fiat money—the list goes on.

Roosevelt's revolution began with his inaugural address, which left no doubt about his intentions to seize the moment and harness it to his purposes. Best remembered for its patently false line that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," it also called for extraordinary emergency governmental powers.

The day after FDR took the oath of office, he issued a proclamation calling Congress into a special session. Before it met, he proclaimed a national banking holiday—an action he had refused to endorse when Hoover suggested it three days earlier.

Invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, Roosevelt declared that "all banking transactions shall be suspended." Banks were permitted to reopen only after case-by-case inspection and approval by the government, a procedure that dragged on for months. This action heightened the public's sense of crisis and allowed him to ignore traditional restraints on the power of the central government.

In their understanding of the Depression, Roosevelt and his economic advisers had cause and effect reversed. They did not recognize that prices had fallen because of the Depression. They believed that the Depression prevailed because prices had fallen. The obvious remedy, then, was to raise prices, which they decided to do by creating artificial shortages. Hence arose a collection of crackpot policies designed to cure the Depression by cutting back on production. The scheme was so patently self-defeating that it's hard to believe anyone seriously believed it would work.

The goofiest application of the theory had to do with the price of gold. Starting with the bank holiday and proceeding through a massive gold-buying program, Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard, the bedrock restraint on inflation and government growth. He nationalized the monetary gold stock, forbade the private ownership of gold (except for jewelry, scientific or industrial uses, and foreign payments), and nullified all contractual promises—whether public or private, past or future—to pay in gold.

Besides being theft, gold confiscation didn't work. The price of gold was increased from $20.67 to $35.00 per ounce, a 69% increase, but the domestic price level increased only 7% between 1933 and 1934, and over rest of the decade it hardly increased at all. FDR's devaluation provoked retaliation by other countries, further strangling international trade and throwing the world's economies further into depression.

Having hobbled the banking system and destroyed the gold standard, he turned next to agriculture. Working with the politically influential Farm Bureau and the Bernard Baruch gang, Roosevelt pushed through the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. It provided for acreage and production controls, restrictive marketing agreements, and regulatory licensing of processors and dealers "to eliminate unfair practices and charges." It authorized new lending, taxed processors of agricultural commodities, and rewarded farmers who cut back production.

The objective was to raise farm commodity prices until they reached a much higher "parity" level. The millions who could hardly feed and clothe their families can be forgiven for questioning the nobility of a program designed to make food and fiber more expensive. Though this was called an "emergency" measure, no President since has seen fit to declare the emergency over.

Industry was virtually nationalized under Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Like most New Deal legislation, this resulted from a compromise of special interests: businessmen seeking higher prices and barriers to competition, labor unionists seeking governmental sponsorship and protection, social workers wanting to control working conditions and forbid child labor, and the proponents of massive spending on public works.

The legislation allowed the President to license businesses or control imports to achieve the vaguely identified objectives of the act. Every industry had to have a code of fair competition. The codes contained provisions setting minimum wages, maximum hours, and "decent" working conditions. The policy rested on the dubious notion that what the country needed most was cartelized business, higher prices, less work, and steep labor costs.

To administer the act, Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration and named General Hugh Johnson, a crony of Baruch's and a former draft administrator, as head. Johnson adopted the famous Blue Eagle emblem and forced businesses to display it and abide by NRA codes. There were parades, billboards, posters, buttons, and radio ads, all designed to silence those who questioned the policy. Not since the First World War had there been anything like the outpouring of hoopla and coercion. Cutting prices became "chiseling" and the equivalent of treason. The policy was enforced by a vast system of agents and informers.

Eventually the NRA approved 557 basic and 189 supplementary codes, covering about 95% of all industrial employees. Big businessmen dominated the writing and implementing of the documents. They generally aimed to suppress competition. Figuring prominently in this effort were minimum prices, open price schedules, standardization of products and services, and advance notice of intent to change prices. Having gained the government's commitment to stilling competition, the tycoons looked forward to profitable repose.

But the initial enthusiasm evaporated when the NRA did not deliver, and for obvious reasons. Even its corporate boosters began to object to the regimentation it required. By the time the Supreme Court invalidated the whole undertaking in early 1935, most of its former supporters had lost their taste for it.

Striking down the NRA, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that "extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power." Congress "cannot delegate legislative power to the President to exercise an unfettered discretion to make whatever laws he thinks may be needed."

Despite the decision, the NRA-approach did not disappear completely. Its economic logic reappeared in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, reinstating union privileges, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, stipulating regulations for wages and working hours. The Bituminous Coal Act of 1937 reinstated an NRA-type code for the coal industry, including price-fixing. The Works Progress Administration made the government the employer of last resort. Using the Connally Act of 1935, Roosevelt cartelized the oil industry. Eventually, of course, the Supreme Court came around to Roosevelt's way of thinking.

Yet after all this, the grand promise of an end to the suffering was never fulfilled. As the state sector drained the private sector, controlling it in alarming detail, the economy continued to wallow in depression. The combined impact of Herbert Hoover's and Roosevelt's interventions meant that the market was never allowed to correct itself. Far from having gotten us out of the Depression, FDR prolonged and deepened it, and brought unnecessary suffering to millions.

Even more tragic is the lasting legacy of Roosevelt. The commitment of both masses and elites to individualism, free markets, and limited government suffered a blow in the 1930s from which it has yet to recover fully. The theory of the mixed economy is still the dominant ideology backing government policy. In place of old beliefs about liberty, we have greater toleration of, and even positive demand for, collectivist schemes that promise social security, protection from the rigors of market competition, and something for nothing.

"You can never study Franklin Delano Roosevelt too much," Gingrich says. But if we study FDR with admiration, the lesson we take away is this: government is an immensely useful means for achieving one's private aspirations, and resorting to this reservoir of potentially appropriable benefits is perfectly legitimate. One thing we have to fear is politicians who believe this.


Author:

Robert Higgs

Dr. Robert Higgs is retired and lives in Mexico. He was a senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and longtime editor of The Independent Review; he was also a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty, and the 2015 Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom.

 

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Re: Book Review: "9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America – And Four Who Tried to Save Her," by McClanah

Teddy Roosevelt's Complicated Legacy 100 Years After His Death​

Link: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/03/21/teddy-roosevelt-legacy-100-years

March 21, 2019
By Jeremy Hobson

This article is more than 2 years old.

The 26th U.S. president died 100 years ago (1919) this year.

Theodore Roosevelt was an environmentalist and progressive social reformer who laid the groundwork for the modern Democratic party. But he was also an advocate for white nationalism and eugenics.

So how should his presidency be remembered?

Roosevelt's views were racist, says Gary Gerstle (@glgerstle), a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge. But he was very much "a man of his time."

“I think his legacy was in constructing a modern liberalism that would come to full fruition in the presidency of his cousin [Franklin D. Roosevelt],” Gerstle tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson. “The idea that one could not allow private wealth to accumulate without regulation; that the government had a role to play in regulating the economy; that it had a role to play in evening the playing field between the rich and the poor.”

Perhaps the most visible piece of Roosevelt’s legacy is the National Park System, which grew during his presidency, Gerstle says.

“He was a great believer that America's greatness lay in its wilderness, and he became determined to protect that wilderness for all generations coming after him,” Gerstle says.

Interview Highlights

On the political divide over Roosevelt’s legacy

“He called himself a 'new nationalist,' and he felt very strongly that America had to be reconstructed on a more egalitarian foundation. He slipped out of the news in our memory because neither party really knows what to do with him right now because he, in essence, he anticipates the modern Democratic Party, but he's a Republican. So the Democrats really don't want him. And because he anticipates so much of what the Democratic Party will become, the Republicans don't want to recognize him as one of their own. So there is a conspiracy of silence about the man.

“He's known as someone who carries a big stick and a loud mouth and antagonizes opponents. He was a man of his time in the sense that he had many racist views about how America ought to be constructed and those views have to be understood, and both in the context of that time and from the perspective of our own. But I would not want his reform program to be lost sight of because it sets the terms for much of the politics of the 20th century.”

"There is a conspiracy of silence about the man."

On Roosevelt’s passion for the wilderness

“He was a very sickly, asthmatic boy who spent countless years of his childhood pretty much confined to his room because he was so sickly. And in those circumstances, he began to dream of a very different kind of life, and he was determined by the force of his personality to make himself into another man and that meant strong, muscular, conquering his infirmity. And so in a sense, his own experience of infirmity became a motivation for him to test himself and make himself into a very different kind of man.

“He also was a member of a New York elite, gentry elite, but it was old wealth rather than new wealth. And while they were comfortably elite in New York City of the 1860s and 1870s, by 1900, 1910, they were being supplanted by the fortunes of [Andrew Carnegie], [John D. Rockefeller], the other so-called robber barons. And he became critical of them for being entirely consumed with the struggle for wealth. And he began to articulate an ethic of life, which could not be achieved simply by the accumulation of fortune, but by man as an individual testing himself constantly against the elements. And he imagined the wilderness as a place to be preserved, not just so Americans could experience the sublime, but so that they could test themselves against the elements and against their antagonists.

“[The Badlands were] where he went to find himself [after his wife and mother’s deaths], and he repeatedly put himself in those situations in moments of extreme hardship. It was a place that he felt utterly comfortable, and I think we have trouble understanding that. But this is where he felt at home, personally at home.”

On his economic legacy being similar to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren

“If we brought him back, that's exactly where he would fit on the political spectrum. And it's extraordinary to have a mainstream figure of a major political party speaking in these terms. On another occasion, he said this, 'The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to the prophet must now give way to the advocate of human welfare who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require.' That puts him squarely in Bernie Sanders' camp. Now, he was not a socialist, but everyone who was running for president in 1912 understood that the biggest issue facing America was the inequality between rich and poor. And a candidate who did not stand up for the poor in 1912 was not going to get himself elected to the presidency of the United States.”

"I see Teddy Roosevelt as a figure who fully expresses the two most important nationalist traditions in American life."

On his belief in eugenics and other pseudo-scientific ideas of racial hierarchy

“Well, he had very well-developed and racist views towards both Indians and blacks. He regarded Indians as savages. He respected them because they were ardent warriors. But he expected that they would be eliminated, exterminated from America in contest with the white men who were settling the continent, to the people who he hailed as backwoodsmen. And he required the Indians to be there to be the strenuous opponent through which Americans could prove their valor. But he was very clear that in a modern America that he was building, he expected they would be exterminated either through battle or through simply the inability to adjust to modern life.

“He would have had no patience with the indigenous and original inhabitants of a sacred American space interfering with his conception of the American sublime. He was a white supremacist, but he was a fierce opponent of slavery. He regarded slavery as a sin visited upon America by aristocratic Englishmen who came close to ruining the experiment of America by placing people of African descent on his glorious continent.”

On what we should take away from Roosevelt today

“I see Teddy Roosevelt as a figure who fully expresses the two most important nationalist traditions in American life. On the one hand, there's a civic nationalist tradition, which says any person can succeed in America irrespective of their race, religion, class, gender as long as they proclaim fealty to American ideals, agree to obey the law, work hard for self advancement. There's a part of Roosevelt who believes sincerely and deeply in America as an opportunity for every man and every woman. But he also believes deeply in racial nationalism, America as a land for racially superior peoples descended from Europeans, not a place for Asians, not a place for blacks, not a place for Indians, not a place for Latinos.

“It's easy for us today to say Obama is the great civic nationalist, and Trump is the great racial nationalist, and that's a true statement. But for much of American history, these two nationalist traditions have been mixed up in the minds of the same individuals. And once we understand that both civic aspirations and racist aspirations are present in so many Americans, it helps us to understand the difficulty America has had in terms of eradicating racial nationalism from American soil. It is so deeply ingrained in the American experiment, in the American republic. There are constantly efforts to reform it, but it always comes back. It is, in a sense, America's original sin. Roosevelt, I'm drawn to him because he encompasses those two nationalisms so fully, and they cohabit in his mind, in his personality, in his presidency, in his America.”