“We have tried spending money. We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just none interest, and if I am wrong . . . somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job, I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. . . . I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”
FDR’s Treasury Secretary Morgenthau
I don’t fully understand where Morgenthau was coming from. He may have been frustrated by out of control spending, and if so, I wish he would have focused on that. What he said addressed unemployment also. And unemployment in 1932 pegged at roughly 22.5 to 25.0%, was reduced by the end of Roosevelt’s second term to around 1.5%.
For that reason, I think his unemployment or “hungry” comments were ill-advised.
He may have had a very good point to make about our nation’s building debt. It would be a lot easier to identify with those comments if he had kept to that, and he would have made an important point that the nation needed to hear.
What was the public to think, when all those people had been returned to work, the GNP had gone up roughly 50% since 1932, perhaps more? If you’ve got your job back and are feeding your family, are you going to grasp the validity of Morgenthau’s comments, when they touch on unemployment, and totally miss the fact that all but 1.5% of the workers in the U.S. were back to work?
Perhaps I’m not getting the time frame correct, but the end of Roosevelt’s second term (eight years in), was 1940. At that time the unemployment rate was pegged at 1.5%.
BTW, SoCal Pubbie, for the record, I do not support the government spending vast sums of money to create jobs. I don’t believe it works. When the money is gone, the jobs are gone, and that money is essentially vaporized.