Mr. Roosevelt on Stilts (1933 TNR editorial)

[Recursion]

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/78943/mr-roosevelt-stilts

What is it that makes the Roosevelt administration tick? For anyone wishing to investigate this problem, I have a few small suggestions. The first is that the administration is essentially a coalition government. From its inception, it has been made up of clearly recognizable Right and Left wings. On the Right, you find Mr. Lewis W. Douglas and what is now called the "Treasury crowd"; on the Left stand Mr. Tugwell, Mr. Berle, Dr. Wolman and a long list of liberal and radical lawyers, college professors and economists.

You find this principle of coalition running straight down through the administration. In the N.R.A.* you find Mr. Roosevelt's deputy. General Johnson, perched between an Industrial Advisory Board representing employers, and a Labor Advisory Board, representing the workers. In the words of General Johnson: "Our whole organization is designed to maintain balance. An industrialist and a labor leader sit in on everything we do." Over in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, you discover authority almost evenly balanced between a group unabashedly representing Big Business andthe group headed by Mr. Tugwell. Perhaps the most startling application of the coalition principle was Mr. Roosevelt's selection, last summer, of professor George F. Warren, exponent of the commodity dollar, and Professor O. M. W. Sprague, strait-laced economic classicist, as the two chief experts of the administration's unofficial committee on monetary policy. Here the coalition has signally failed to coalesce and—as is apparent in Mr. Roosevelt's recent pronouncements—the administration still lacks a permanent, agreed-upon monetary program.

I suggest that this coalition principle is the thing which gives the Roosevelt administration its great mobility. In a sense, a coalition government can be looked upon as simply a parliamentary form of dictatorship. If you are Adolf Hitler, you beat up your opponents with rubber clubs, fling them into concentration camps, or kill them. In a democratic country you bring the opposition inside your administration. In either case, you succeed in rendering your opponents temporarily voiceless, and ensure yourself such freedom of action as a partisan government can never have.

...

The head of a coalition government, accordingly, can exercise his freedom of action only within limits; the moment he irrevocably alienates his support on either the Right or Left, he is through. In the case of Mr. Roosevelt, you find that while he has acted with amazing boldness and imagination on a multitude of questions, he has shown great reluctance in facing up to a fight on any single clear-cut issue.

(Last paragraph pulled by Sullivan from Behind The Paywall.)


Just found that interesting. I think part of the problem now is there's no actual labor involved in finance, so there's no labor voice where it's important.

* Not the National Rifle Association, but the National Recovery Administration, a sort of roundtable of business leaders that had agreed to move in a group on hiring, prices, and wages. It was ruled unconstitutional by the still-hostile Supreme Court (like nearly all of the legislation in Roosevelt's first term).

[Recursion]

1. With hindsight, however, the lack of a monetary policy was anything but

There ended up being a huge monetary stimulus throughout FDR's first term (much larger in relation to GDP than QE1 and QE2) because that was all FDR could do until he got more SCOTUS appointments.

[OHdem10]

2. NO Labor No Liberals No Progressives. Therefore they just

move farther farther right to satisfy Business and "the haves"

Liberals/Progressive irrelevant..