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Dwight Macdonald
Sparks in the News
The Stalinists Discover Who Roosevelt Is
(21 January 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 3, 21 January 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Jekyll into Hyde
In the past year, President Roosevelt has openly put himself at
the head of the reactionary crusade to cut down relief and
reintroduce Hoover starvation for the unemployed. (Hoover gave them
breadlines and played with the idea of processing and sterilizing
garbage for use by the nation’s jobless. Roosevelt gives them
surplus commodities – and they have to dig out their own
garbage, unprocessed and unsterilized.)
This has provoked a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among
Roosevelt’s friends or ex-friends in the labor movement. Since
his budget message, advocating drastic WPA cuts, there has begun in
some quarters a campaign to put across the fairy tale that Roosevelt
has only now “yielded” to reactionary pressure on relief,
that up to 1939, he was the peerless champion of the unemployed. This
line is now being peddled in the Daily Worker and the CIO
News. It is an attempt to get out from under. These papers now
claim the Roosevelt they so loyally supported for so long was a
different fellow entirely from the Roosevelt of today. The good Dr.
Jekyll has suddenly changed into the wicked Mr. Hyde.
Nothing Left but the Smile
Today’s paper brings a report of the convention of the New
York state Workers Alliance. The Alliance has now become very
critical of Roosevelt, for reasons which have nothing to do with the
interests of the unemployed but a great deal to do with the interests
of Stalin – and Hitler. “There has been a drastic change
in the policies of President Roosevelt in the past year,”
reported the Alliance bureaucrats, and they led the convention in
singing a song which began:
There was a man named Roosevelt
Began to do what the people felt;
The New Deal came and stayed a while,
But all that’s left is Roosevelt’s smile.
|
Especially disillusioned by Roosevelt’s recent actions was
Herbert Benjamin, the Stalinist secretary of the Alliance. “WPA
is not what she used to be,” he said sadly. As for Roosevelt –
“His beautiful phrases of yesterday ring hollow today.”
A Glance at the Record
Let’s look at the record as to Roosevelt and relief. When
did he begin his campaign against the unemployed ? I told the story
in great detail in the September 1939 issue of the New
International, but a few of the basic facts may well be repeated
here.
- The only time in the entire history of the Roosevelt
Administration that its relief program came anywhere near providing
for all the unemployed was during the four months of November
through February, 1933–1934, when the Civil Works
Administration works program gave jobs to some 4,000,000 of the
8,000,000 then unemployed, while Federal grants-in-aid to the states
took care of most of the rest. (MOST, by no means all.)
- Roosevelt has been for years trying to cut Federal relief
expenditures. Opening shot in the campaign was fired not in his
budget message of a few weeks ago, but in the one he sent to
Congress on January 4, 1935. This proposed that Federal relief aid
to the states be discontinued and that the Government limit itself
to WPA work relief. This new program was laid down at a joint
meeting of the National Industrial Conference Board and the National
Association of Manufacturers. The keynote of this 1935 relief
message was the flat statement by Roosevelt: ‘‘The
Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.”
- In theory, WPA was to provide jobs for all able-bodied
unemployed. In practice, it has never provided more than 3,500,000
jobs, while the total number of such unemployed has varied between
8,000,000 and 12,000,000. At no time has WPA provided jobs for more
than a third of the ABLE-BODIED, EMPLOYABLE unemployed. This means
that the great majority of the employables and ALL the unemployables
have been left to the mercies of the states and localities –
where relief standards are only from half to a TENTH of even the
very low WPA wage rates. The recent breakdown of relief in Cleveland
was as much due to Roosevelt’s policies as to the brutal
inhumanity of the Republican Governor of Ohio.
- There has been a lot of pious moaning about Roosevelt’s
insistence on cutting the union wage scale out of WPA last summer,
and his vicious smashing of the strike that resulted. Actually, it
was merely a repeat performance. The first event in the history of
WPA, in the summer of 1935, was a now forgotten strike against
Roosevelt’s insistence on eliminating union wage rates from
the newborn WPA. At that time, too, he issued “You can’t
strike against the government!” statements, and did his best
to cut strikers off all relief rolls, Federal or local. He lost out
that time because the union movement was too strong for him. But he
waited his chance and last summer, when labor was already in
retreat, he struck his blow again – this time successfully.
- Finally, it is interesting to note that as early as
October 23, 1935, Roosevelt was “disappointing” his
left-wing admirers. The Nation of that date lamented: “The
fine social consciousness which characterized the early days of the
New Deal appears to have faded.” Alas!
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