Arthur Schlesinger R.I.P.
Inside Liberty Watch Today - March 7, 2007
One of big government's history writers died last week, double Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A prolific scribbler, Schlesinger not only wrote books, op-eds and feature articles, but also was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, was on JFK's staff from 1961-1964 and was considered the intellectual-in-residence at Camelot. In his last years he was a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.
It sounds like the Pulitzer winner was a fun guy to be around. "He loved parties, martinis, politics, the movies, bow ties (which he favored because FDR and Churchill did) and bourbon whisky," according to Newsweek's Jon Meacham, and he always had an eye for attractive women.
But Schlesinger's passion was Kennedy and FDR-style liberalism. He was harshly critical of unregulated capitalism while at the same time being against communism. His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A reviewer on Amazon describes the book as "the Liberal Manifesto." Until the day he passed, Schlesinger, along with his colleague and friend John Kenneth Galbraith, was an ardent and articulate voice for Kennedyism and the Great Society agenda.
Unfortunately Schlesinger's agenda shows up when he was supposed to have been writing history. At only 28, he bagged his first Pulitzer for history writing with The Age of Jackson. The young author tried in his book to make the case that Jackson was a proto-FDR. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Andrew Jackson and his administration were libertarians. They favored minimal government at both the state and the federal levels. The Jacksonians were all for free trade and free enterprise, while opposing special subsidies and monopoly privileges provided by government. They believed government should protect private property rights and that's it. In fact, the federal debt was paid off under the Jackson administration.
Conversely, FDR's New Deal created a myriad of government programs between 1933â€"1937 carried out by dozens of alphabet agencies. FDR expanded the reach of government exponentially, using Mussolini's Italian fascist state as the template. Two New Deal remnants still with us are Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Monetary policy is an example of the dramatic differences between Jackson and FDR. Jackson believed that government should get out of the money business. He believed that government's paper money should be replaced with pure specie and that banks should be confined to 100-percent reserves. Jackson managed to shut down the nation's central bank, The Bank of the United States. Jackson knew that central banks were a continual source of inflation, and the public was with him, re-electing Jackson on the bank issue in 1832.
The Jacksonians also knew that to have a true gold and silver standard that people must do their trading in gold and silver coins instead of paper money. Jackson knew that it was average Americans that "were bilked by inflated paper money," economist Murray Rothbard wrote.
Jackson's Coinage Acts provided the impetus for gold and silver coins (foreign and domestic) to trade side by side until the early 1850s.
FDR on the other hand wasted no time in taking the country off the gold standard in April of 1933. He confiscated nearly all of the public's gold with the metal then becoming the property of the Federal Reserve. Roosevelt then devalued the dollar to 35 to the gold ounce, a 40 percent diminishment.
The Banking Act of 1933 was then passed. The Act called for the separation of commercial and investment banking, prohibited banks from paying interest on demand deposits and provided for federal insurance of all bank deposits, "thereby cartelizing the industry and supposedly guaranteeing every bank's success," Rothbard explained.
The Banking Act also changed how the Federal Reserve operated, transferring power from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to political appointees in Washington with the creation of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Roosevelt's policies set America on the inflation course that is still with us today. Schlesinger had a vision of a big powerful omnipotent government making everyone's lives complete, putting a chicken in every pot and a Chevy in every driveway, at the direction of kind and benevolent leaders. Andrew Jackson would never support such nonsense. But linking the charismatic military hero with big government liberalism made for a good story, and a Pulitzer Prize.
Doug French, Liberty Watch Columnist
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