Roosevelt Administration Research Articles

Vesting GAF Corporation: The Roosevelt Administration's Decision to Americanise I. G. Farben's American Affiliates in World War II

The wartime seizure by the US government of General Aniline & Film Corporation (GAF) was intended to create a powerful US owned business, able to compete with its former affiliate, the German behemoth I. G. Farben. The US government justified its actions by a careful study of the failed World War I sequestration of the German chemical industry. Considerable friction developed between key government agencies, including the Treasury and the Justice departments who both believed that they should control enemy property in wartime. In the end, President Roosevelt, mindful of the problems in World War I over enemy property, decided to resurrect the Alien Property Custodian to control seized property for the duration of the war. However, US law allowed legal redress for wrongfully seized property and this enabled I. G. Chemie to begin its long and ultimately successful lawsuit with the US government over ownership of GAF.

Bedrohliche Nahe: Die USA und die nationalsozialistische Herausforderung in Lateinamerika, 1937-1945 (Treatening proximity: The USA and the national socialist challenge in Latin America, 1937-1945)

Uwe Lübken's book Bedrohliche Nähe is based on a dissertation accepted by the University of Cologne in 2001. It forms part of the series Transatlantic Historical Studies published by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Lübken's central theme is the Roosevelt administration's manipulation of an alleged Nazi threat in Latin America. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the author believes, used this threat in order to win support for his interventionist policies. To what extent fdr himself believed in such an Axis menace is unclear. What is certain is the effect: Even “isolationists” often responded favorably to his appeals for the defense of the Monroe Doctrine against outside aggressors. But how could Adolf Hitler, one may wonder, whose armies were unable to cross the English Channel, invade the Americas? In addition, he had rarely shown much interest in Latin America, nor did he have plans to conquer it. On the other hand, Hitler's actions provoked another, equally legitimate question: Could anyone be safe if he seized nation after nation and created a world empire in Europe, Africa, and perhaps the Middle East? Hitler was also using German minorities in his campaigns to subvert and conquer Central Europe.

Economic liberties and the Constitution

In this seminal work, Bernard traces the history of onstitutional protection for economic liberties in the United States. He argues that the law began to change with respect to economic liberties in the late 1930s. At that time, the Supreme Court abdicated much of its authority to protect property rights, and instead condoned the expansion of state power over private property.Siegan brings the argument originally advanced in the .first edition completely up to date. He explores the moral position behind capitalism and discusses why former communist countries flirting with decentralization and a free market (for instance, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos) have become more progressive and prosperous as a result. He contrasts the benefits of a free, deregulated economy with the dangers of over-regulation and moves towards socialized welfare most specifically as happened during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Supporting his thesis with historical court cases, discusses the past and present status of economic liberties under the Constitution, clarifies constitutional interpretation and due process, and suggests ways of safeguarding economic liberties.About the original edition, Doug Bandow of Reason noted, Siegan has written a vitally important book that is sure to ignite an impassioned legal and philosophical debate. The reason the necessity for protecting economic liberty is no less than that guaranteeing political and civil liberty. Joseph Sobran of the National Review wrote, Siegan...makes a powerful general case for economic liberty, on both historical and more strictly empirical grounds.... has done a brilliant piece of work, not only where it was badly needed, but where the need had hardly been recognized until he addressed it. And Edwin Meese remarked that, timely and important book shows how far we have drifted from protecting basic liberties that the Framers of the Constitution sought to secure. I recommend it highly. This new, completely revised edition of Economic Liberties and the Constitution will be essential reading for students of economics, history, public policy, law, and political science.

New Deal, Raw Deal

Under the Roosevelt and Truman administration many progressive social policies were adopted. However, Black Americans were largely excluded as beneficiaries of these programs. “Affirmative action for whites” widened an already immense gap between white and Black Americans during the post-World War II era. 1Originally published in the Washington Post, September 27, 2005

The American Guide Series: Patriotism as Brand-Name Identification

The American Guide Series:Patriotism as Brand-Name Identification Andrew S. Gross (bio) The WPA American Guide Series has received a significant amount of scholarly attention, most of it historical or political in orientation rather than literary or cultural.1 This critical bias is not entirely unjustified. Among the most striking aspects of the Guide Series are the institutional conditions that produced it. Federal Project Number One was the Roosevelt administration's unprecedented response to the estimated 26,000 artists put out of work by the Great Depression, 6,000 of whom were writers.2 It was comprised of four separate departments, the most famous being the Federal Writers' Project directed by Henry Alsberg.3 Critics on the right and the left were suspicious of Federal One's enormous centralized bureaucracy.4 Even those generally supportive of relief projects were skeptical of the government's ability to act as patron of the arts. State and local directors and employees chafed against the dictates of Federal editors, who, with very few exceptions—Idaho being the most notable—had final control over both the form and the content of the Guides (McDonald 743).5 The Dies and Woodrum commissions, suspicious of big government budgets and communist plots, finally succeeded in dismantling most of the projects in 1939 (McDonald 305).6 The conflicts marking—and ending—the brief life of Federal One set the terms of subsequent critical evaluations, which tended to ignore the Guide's specific representational strategies, and the way these strategies mapped onto the landscape, and instead focused on the tensions between New Deal political factions: Federal [End Page 85] officials vs. local interest groups, progressives vs. conservatives, capitalists vs. communists, bureaucrats vs. artists, etc. More recent criticism has shifted the focus from the political conflict surrounding the Guides to the cultural and political work performed by the Guides themselves. In The WPA Guides: Mapping America (1999), Christine Bold argues that the New Deal "harnessed" the "generic features" of the travel guide—"their taxonomic representation of the landscape, their documentary status, and the trope of use," by which she means their practical application—in order to accomplish "particular cultural work: the guaranteeing of a united, harmoniously diverse citizenry; the demarcation of a safe, knowable (and hence controllable) space within all the changes and threats of modernity; and the demonstration of cultural maturity on the international stage" (17–18). Bold's approach represents an important step beyond the historicist orientation of earlier criticism. Since she does not consider culture to be the "reflection" of an economic base, she does not reduce the Guides to "evidence" of a big-government bias. Instead she shows how culture not only reflects but produces politics, paying particular attention to how specific rhetorical strategies transform the landscape. Bold is correct in stressing the importance of the tour form as a locus of cultural production; however, she does not pay enough attention to the way the Guides are themselves symptomatic of the social space they attempt to manage. The Guides do more than reflect a "big government" bias but less than produce the "harmonious" space that is their ideal. Both the ideals they strive for and the representational forms they deploy are legacies of consumer culture. To restate this point in Bold's terms, the Guides do not simply respond to "the changes and threats of modernity" but mobilize its promises. These are the promises of advertising. What is most striking about the Guides, if only because it has been consistently overlooked, is the way they appropriate commercial forms of representation for government purposes. The American Guide Series is propaganda, but not in the banal sense of representing history from a pro-government perspective. Rather it transforms local culture into a tourist attraction, and the tourist attraction into a symbol of national loyalty, in order to reproduce patriotism as a form of brand-name identification.7 This cultural-political innovation has outlasted the New Deal bureaucracy that engendered it, impacting even the strongly anti-New Deal bias of contemporary neo-conservatism. [End Page 86] Automobile guidebooks first emerged as a form of advertising. They were an established genre by the Great Depression because manufacturers had seized on...

The Monroe Doctrine: Meanings and Implications

This article presents a brief history of the Monroe Doctrine since its articulation in 1823. First conceived as a statement in opposition to European intrusions in the Americas, it became under President Theodore Roosevelt a justification for U.S. intervention. To cultivate Latin American trade and goodwill during the Great Depression and the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt's administration accepted the principle of nonintervention. Later with the onset of the Cold War, perceived international imperatives led to a series of new interventions in countries such as Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. Though typically couched in idealistic rhetoric emphasizing Pan‐American commitments to solidarity and democracy, the various versions of the Monroe Doctrine consistently served U.S. policy makers as a means for advancing what they understood as national strategic and economic interests.

Jews in American politics: Past and present

T response of leaders of the American Jewish Comittee to the crisis of German Jewry in the 1930s found sick and old men, lacking influence in the American political arena, insecure about being Jews and often more busy with business and family than with the plight of German Jewry. In sharp contrast to this period, a very different picture emerges of Jewish leaders and organizations in the 1970s and 1980s. At least four major differences are worth noting. First, a single organization, the American Jewish Committee, had an initial advantage on access and ties to the Roosevelt administration in Washington. It was the major Jewish organization in American politics. There were other establishment organizations on the scene with considerably less influence, including the American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith (with its AntiDefamation League), and the Jewish Labor Committee. In the 1970s, there were many Jewish organizations, establishment and grassroots, operating actively on local, regional, and national levels in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. Many had influence and access in Washington, D.C. There was active competition between the grassroots and the establishment and within the establishment. For example, the National Conference for Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) competed (and cooperated) on national and local levels with the Council for Jewish Federations (CJF), National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Councils (NJCRAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Coalition for Soviet Jewry as well as with the Union of Councils, representing the grassroots. All of these organizations had varying degrees of access and influence with Congress and the administration. A second significant difference is the quality of leadership. The top echelon of the American Jewish Committee of the 1930s consisted of very wealthy and professionally successful men. Many, however, were older, often sick and over extended; other commitments both professional and personal limited their time and involvement in concerns and activities of the Committee. For example, the Committee failed to find members to represent it "at home and abroad in meetings and conferences on the German Jewish crisis. The wealth and position of its members sometimes enabled contact with Europe and European Jewry, but when business did not permit a trip or vacation, the Committee was not represented." Family concerns also interfered. "In May 1939, realizing that the situation of Jews in Germany was desperate, the Committee wished to schedule additional meetings on Sunday. The plan failed, however, because in the spring so many of the members went to the country for weekends." Most of the organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had an overabundance of qualified and dynamic lay leadership, both men and women, with countless replacements waiting in the wings. Persons active in Jewish organizational life, often persons of means, dominated the lay leadership of the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement in the 1970s. Unlike their counterparts in the 1930s, however, most took leave from their other organizational, professional, and business pursuits and committed themselves full time to the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement. Importantly, tbr many, their personal, peer, and communal status was earned via activism in a particular Jewish organization. Many of these organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had extensive and expanding professional staffs especially in existing and long established organizations like CJF, NJCRAC, American Jewish Committee, American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). In sharp contrast, the ad hoc and newer organizations were hampered by staff shortages reflecting a lack of fiscal stability. The NCSJ, for example, suffered from a shortage of staff throughout which harmed its activities and effectiveness. Third, and most importantly, establishment Jewish leaders during the 1930s were insecure as American Jews. They often refrained from pressing Jewish issues and Jewish causes. They sought Christian allies to fight antiSemitism "without American Jews appearing in...[the struggle])." The American Jewish Committee, for example, adopted "quict diplomacy," "believing it to be

The Empire Meets the New Deal: Interwar Encounters in Conservation and Regional Planning

AbstractBritish imperial and American experiences in conservation and planning are providing fresh interdisciplinary challenges for university teaching and research. The Roosevelt administration's ‘New Deal’ included government‐sponsored interventions in soil erosion and water management and sophisticated regional development agendas. Reviewing samples of the latter areas of concern, this article explores the proposition that, although the British Empire was scarcely bereft of comparable interwar programmes and was becoming somewhat preoccupied with centrifugal tendencies, persistent porosity, exhausting struggles with postwar reconstruction, and comprehensive economic depression, New Deal evangelism was in fact variously anticipated, harnessed, challenged and ignored.A discussion of widely separated national and regional examples locates a layered interplay between uneven imperial and US pulsations, independent local manoeuvres, and critical inputs from key individual agents. The most important filters included the presence of comparatively robust bureaucratic infrastructures and the cultivation of international relationships by scientists and technologists. Encounters with convergent revisionism suggest cautionary leads for students, researchers and teachers alike. Reconstructions of selected contexts underline the presence of familiar posturing, opportunism, and astute patriotic deployment during the emergence of modern styles of globalization.

Cathy D. Knepper,Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 304 pp. $45.00 cloth.

A few years ago I began researching the evolution of the physical design and planning of the three greenbelt towns that were initiated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Administration. While I was quite familiar with the context and social milieu of one of those towns because it was close to my home, I had never before visited Greenbelt. On my first trip there, I arranged to meet a University of Maryland professor at a local café. Since she and her students had been conducting material culture studies of Greenbelt, I thought meeting her first would be a good way to introduce me to the town. While we talked over dinner, I learned she was also a Greenbelt resident. After dinner, she told me she was on a Greenbelt committee that was making a presentation to the City Council that evening, and she had arranged for the committee to join us in the café so they could plan their presentation. Shortly, three people arrived and joined us at the table, brainstorming ideas for the upcoming council presentation. After being in town less than two hours, I was in a Greenbelt committee meeting.

Introduction

Most historians and legal scholars agree that a major change in constitutional jurisprudence occurred in the 1930s. For decades before the Great Depression, according to this almost uncontested story, the Court had been resolute in its defense of the doctrine of liberty of contract—a position most clearly articulated by the 1905 Lochner decision and sustained ever since. The Court had also been generally, if not consistently, committed to a narrow reading of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, exemplified by the E. C. Knight decision of 1895. Together, these convictions sustained a constitutional regime that consistently limited the power of the state to intervene in the affairs of the private economy. That regime survived largely unchanged through the first third of the twentieth century and into the early years of the New Deal. By the end of 1936, the Court had struck down a series of legislative efforts by the Roosevelt administration to extend the federal government's role in shaping and regulating economic life. The president and his allies feared that the justices were on the verge of dismantling the New Deal's achievements altogether.

Commercial radio, public affairs discourse and the manipulation of sound scholarship Isolationism, wartime civil rights and the collapse of the attractiveness of communism in America, 1933–1945

Every Sunday from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) presented over its nationwide network of stations a unique program, the University of Chicago Round Table...

Creating the Kitchen Patriot: Media Promotion of Food Rationing and Nutrition Campaigns on the American Home Front during World War II

This study examines media responses to two important food rationing orders introduced by the Roosevelt administration in the spring of 1943 and subsequent drives for nutrition awareness as part of the nation's war effort. The analysis of news reports, advertising campaigns, trade publications and propaganda strategies shows the media s instrumental role in mobilizing civilian support for the wartime government's food initiatives. Focusing on women as their target audience, news, advertising and propaganda worked in tandem to help condition Americans to changes in food consumption and preparation. The study suggests the political significance of women s pages, an overlooked genre of news where the kitchen patriot emerged as a prominent role model for American women.

The Bonus Army: An American Epic (review)

Reviewed by: The Bonus Army: An American Epic G. Kurt Piehler The Bonus Army: An American Epic. By Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. New York: Walker and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-8027-1440-4. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 370. $27.00. Drawing on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, Bonus Army offers a riveting account of the struggle by World War I veterans to secure adjusted compensation—a bonus—from the federal government. Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen are not the first historians to write about the long struggle that began shortly after Armistice Day and continued until the bonus was finally paid in 1936, but they have offered a richly textured narrative that pays particular attention to experiences of the rank and file who participated in the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Dickson and Hart are at their best in describing how the corrosive impact of the Great Depression resulted in thousands of desperate veterans descending on the nation's capital in the summer of 1932 demanding an early payment of their bonuses. Living in abandoned government buildings and open fields in Anacostia Park in Washington, these proud veterans tried to maintain their dignity under trying circumstances. Despite the widely held belief of the Military Intelligence Division, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Hoover administration, more wives and children could be found among the bonus marchers than communists. For scholars, one of the strengths of Bonus Army is the focus on the question of race. Although the nation's capital remained a segregated southern city, the bonus encampments were integrated; moreover, black and white veterans marched together when they paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue or gathered on the Capitol grounds. Dickson and Allen are empathetic to the plight and grievances of the World War I veterans who sought a bonus. They skewer the Hoover administration for its insensitivity toward these veterans and lambast MacArthur for driving them out of Washington, D.C., at the point of a bayonet. They are also critical of the Roosevelt administration's effort to diffuse later bonus marches by sending destitute veterans to CCC camps in Florida where many would be killed tragically by a hurricane in 1935. Dickson and Allen write with sincere passion, but Bonus Army would have been a stronger book if the authors grappled with the question at the heart of the debate over the adjusted compensation: What does the nation owe to returning veterans? Do veterans have a special claim on the federal government? This reviewer wishes the authors had given the opponents of the bonus more of their due, especially given the diverse ideological opposition to it. Four presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt—were against it. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover opposed it because they envisioned a limited role for the federal government and feared the immense cost to the public treasury. Roosevelt had fewer reservations about an expanded federal role and believed the national government should aid Americans buffeted by the Great Depression. He did not, however, believe healthy veterans, by virtue of their wartime service, should receive special benefits. [End Page 857] Dickson and Allen see the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights in 1944 as a legacy of the Bonus March. Surprisingly, their account of the passage of this groundbreaking legislation does not draw upon the scholarship of either Davis R. B. Ross or Keith Olson, but relies on the superficial work of Milton Greenberg. In many ways, the Second World War veterans did not have to fight the same battles as their World War I counterparts. But the lingering debate over how to treat returning veterans continued after both Korea and Vietnam. In his forthcoming dissertation focusing on the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Vietnam Veteran, Mark Boulton of the University of Tennessee argues that the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights did not permanently settle the debate central to the Bonus March. As presidents, both Dwight Eisenhower (an aide to MacArthur during the Bonus March) and later Lyndon B. Johnson sought to place strict limits on veterans' benefits. Like his Republican counterparts of the interwar years, Eisenhower believed in a more limited...

Assessing the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Score Collection

Seeking to develop a better understanding of the collections they managed, and beginning a process of long-term planning, music librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) enlisted the assistance of the library's preservation administrator in assessing their collection's condition. This assessment gathered information about the collection's history and publication formats, circulation patterns, and preservation needs with the intent of generating a more complete picture of the collection's health. The data collected indicated directions the library should take to enhance the collection's management, and refuted long-held assumptions about the collection's preservation needs and the institution's ability to purchase replacement copies of damaged materials. The following article describes the project's planning and organization, reports on the assessment's findings, and proposes a series of recommendations to improve the cooperative preservation of our printed music collections. COLLECTION HISTORY The University of Illinois at Urbana--Champaign's printed music collections began as an integral part of the library's main collection. Housed in the Main Library's stacks until 1944, the library administration moved the 15,000-piece collection of scores and books to the second floor of the Smith Music Hall. Within twenty years, Smith Music Hall's inadequacy as a proper library became clear. The collection not only filled all of the available space in Smith Hall by the mid-1960s, but it resided within locked, wire-caged shelving that lined the building's non-air-conditioned hallways. In 1969, the library administration relocated the Music Library's listening services and circulating collections, excepting the scores, to the newly constructed Undergraduate Library. Nevertheless, this solution also proved unsatisfactory; the scores remained in an increasingly cramped Smith Hall, separated from the listening and general circulating collections. In August 1974, the university dedicated a new music building, consolidating the library's collections and the public services operations into a new, purpose-built library within the new building. At this time, the library administration relocated many of the valuable, older materials to secure, climate-controlled conditions in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSC). Those items not meeting RBSC's collection policies moved to a closed stack area within the new Music Library. Although this move did not represent a concerted effort to collocate all printed music materials published before a specific date, the identification and transfer of these items served to create a circulating collection consisting almost entirely of materials published after the early 1900s. The musical scores received substantial support in terms of physical treatment when compared to other collections within the library. This resulted, in large measure, from the forward thinking of personnel within the Music Library itself. Nearly every score is either commercially bound or pamphlet bound, and personnel in the Music Library received training on basic collection maintenance treatments such as tipping in loose pages and mending torn leaves long before most individuals within the University Libraries were so trained. Although the Music Library's staff actively participated in caring for the collection, there was no assessment of the collection's condition. The recently completed assessment project occurred, in part, because of the deteriorating condition of the older Dewey-classed materials. The most significant reason for doing so, however, was the appointment of the University Library's first full-time preservation administrator. Although the University Library supported the continuous operation of a small mending unit from its inception as part of the Roosevelt administration's Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the centralized preservation program is relatively young when compared to those of similar institutions. …

The Export-Import Bank and U.S. Foreign Economic Relations

This is a highly detailed account of the operations and development of the Export-Import Bank of Washington established in 1934 and renamed the Export-Import Bank in 1945. Its original purpose was to be the U.S. government agent for trading with the Soviet Union, which the Roosevelt administration had finally recognized the previous year. It was also intended that it should make some amends for the banking failure to provide export financing for U.S. companies. In fact its role vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was soon eclipsed, first by activities in the Western Hemisphere, then successively by wartime, Cold War, and post–Cold War activities, all geared to one extent or another toward promoting U.S. exports, overseas development, and U.S. foreign policy objectives. The bank gradually developed into “two institutions,” one for lending and one for guarantees and insurance (pp. 110–11). It also gathered different emphases over the years, especially in response to the decline in U.S. competitiveness and the serious balance of trade deficit that took hold in the early 1970s, and in the late 1990s it engaged with the difficulty caused by the flight of private capital from the Asian economies.

Ben Hebard Fuller and the Genesis of a Modern United States Marine Corps, 1891-1934

Historians of the smaller of the United States naval services have tended to dismiss or denigrate the career of the fifteenth Commandant of the Marine Corps, usually describing him as an avuncular and uninspiring sinecure holder. An examination of Fuller's tenure at the helm of the Corps at the time of the retrenchment imposed during the Herbert C. Hoover administration and the stimulus for naval growth that followed under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration reveals an officer far more adroit than usually depicted.

How to Eliminate Pyramidal Business Groups: The Double Taxation of Intercorporate Dividends and Other Incisive Uses of Tax Policy

Arguments for eliminating the double taxation of dividends apply only to dividends paid by corporations to individuals. The double (and multiple) taxation of dividends paid by one firm to another--intercorporate dividends--was explicitly included in the 1930s as part of a package of tax and other policies aimed at eliminating U.S. pyramidal business groups. These structures remain the predominant form of corporate organization outside the United States. The first Roosevelt administration associated them with corporate governance problems, corporate tax avoidance, market power, and highly concentrated economic power, and undertook a sustained program that rapidly broke up large American pyramidal groups.

Public Power: The Fight for Publicly Owned Electricity (review)

Reviewed by: Public Power: The Fight for Publicly Owned Electricity Kenneth C. Dewar (bio) Howard Hampton, with Bill Reno. Public Power: The Fight for Publicly Owned Electricity Insomniac. 298. $21.95 In the mid-1960s, around the time when Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican party candidate for president of the United States, a cartoon appeared in which Goldwater was depicted - in a photograph, dialogue cloud above his head - proposing that the US Postal Service be turned into a private corporation. The humour lay in the absurdity of the idea, which also exposed the lunatic-fringe extremism of Goldwater's conservative views. Today, few would see the joke. By the 1990s, what had been laughable thirty years earlier in both Canada and the US had become mainstream public policy in the form of deregulation and privatization. This book by Howard Hampton, leader of the New Democratic party of Ontario, traces a part of this paradigm shift and critically analyses its results. The book was written in anticipation of the Ontario provincial election of 2003, in which the NDP made the privatization of Ontario Hydro its leading issue, and it bears some of the marks of an election pamphlet. Claims are made hyperbolically; for example, in the opening paragraph, public power is described as an issue fundamental, among other things, 'to any semblance of social order in our daily lives,' and shortly afterward as the 'most essential' of public services. Hampton denies that his approach to the issue is 'ideological' - distinguishing himself from the Conservative government of then premier Ernie Eves - yet he also claims that the people of Ontario, in establishing a public power system in the early twentieth century, decided that 'public need must trump private greed.' The picture he draws of the origins of the system is highly idealized: they lay in a movement, he says, that 'transcended all social, economic and class differences,' a view not many serious historians today would endorse. In fact, the text relies heavily on older popular histories - notably W.R. Plewman's biography of Adam Beck and Merrill Denison's general history of Hydro - for its account of the origins and development of the public utility. Still, idealization - or myth - is not necessarily a bad thing. Here, it is put to effective use, as Hampton evokes a pantheon of founding heroes - Francis Spence, E.W.B. Snider, D.B. Detweiler, and, above all, Adam Beck, the London businessman who came to personify 'the Hydro' - who had the courage and imagination to create Ontario's (and one of Canada's) most important public enterprises. He describes the opposition they had to overcome from private power interests in Canada and the US, yet how Hydro also inspired imitation, especially in New York under Franklin Roosevelt's governorship and in the New Deal of Roosevelt's presidency during the 1930s. The echoes of medicare in modern times are impossible to miss. [End Page 526] The partisan purpose of this book takes nothing away from the substance of its argument. Hampton follows the progress of deregulation and privatization from it first trials in Augusto Pinochet's Chile, through Margaret Thatcher's Britain, to Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior's US. In all cases, consumers and taxpayers were stuck with huge unanticipated (if predictable) costs, partly because governments assumed the debts of publicly owned facilities to make them more attractive to private investors, and partly because the price of deregulated electricity went up instead of down. In Ontario, the Conservative governments of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves nevertheless persisted in their determination to privatize Ontario Hydro because, Hampton argues, unlike their early twentieth-century predecessors, they were blinded by their faith in free enterprise. Along the way, he also argues vigorously against nuclear power ('madness,' he calls it) and in favour of small-scale, diversified production and more efficient consumption, both of which are more environmentally friendly, as well as economically manageable, than the mega-projects of the old central station model of production and the encouragement of profligate consumption that often accompanied it. In doing so, he holds Ontario Hydro itself responsible for the policies and spending that undermined its legitimacy, though it might...

That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Robert H. Jackson was one of the giants of the Roosevelt era: an Attorney General, a still revered Supreme Court Justice and, not least important, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's close friends and advisers. His intimate memoir of FDR, written in the early 1950s before Jackson's untimely death, has remained unpublished for fifty years. Here is newly discovered memoir. Written with skill and grace, this is truly a unique account of the personality, conduct, greatness of character, and common humanity of that man in the White House, as outraged conservatives called FDR. Jackson simply but eloquently provides an insider's view of Roosevelt's presidency, including such crucial events as FDR's Court-packing plan, his battles with corporate America, his decision to seek a third term, and his bold move to aid Britain in 1940 with American destroyers. He also offers an intimate personal portrait of Roosevelt--on fishing trips, in late-night poker games, or approving legislation while eating breakfast in bed, where he routinely began his workday. We meet a president who is far-sighted but nimble in attacking the problems at hand; principled but flexible; charismatic and popular but unafraid to pick fights, take stands, and when necessary, make enemies. That Man is not simply a valuable historical document, but an engaging and insightful look at one of the most remarkable men in American history. In reading this memoir, we gain not only a new appreciation for Roosevelt, but also admiration for Jackson, who emerges as both a public servant of great integrity and skill and a wry, shrewd, and fair-minded observer of politics at the highest level.

Portrait of America: a Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project

How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word American? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history--and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke to much larger and longer-standing debates over the nature of American identity and culture and the very definition of who was an American. Hirsch reviews the founding of the FWP and the significance of its American Guide series, considering the choices made by administrators who wanted to celebrate diversity as a positive aspect of American cultural identity. In his exploration of the FWP's other writings, Hirsch discusses the project's pioneering use of oral history in interviews with ordinary southerners, ex-slaves, ethnic minorities, and industrial workers. He also examines congressional critics of the FWP vision; the occasional opposition of local Federal Writers, especially in the South; and how the FWP's vision changed in response to the challenge of World War II. In the course of this study, Hirsch raises thought-provoking questions about the relationships between diversity and unity, government and culture, and, ultimately, culture and democracy. |Hirsch explores the Federal Writers' Project, a WPA program that provided work relief and developed programs that spoke to longer-standing debates over the nature of American identity and culture and the very definition of who was an American. Hirsch raises thought-provoking questions about the relationship between diversity and unity, government and culture, and, ultimately, culture and democracy.