This week (March 5) in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his first full day as president of the United States and, to put it mildly, the policies he subsequently enacted as president differed mightily from the policies he and the Democratic Party had promised the American electorate when he campaigned for office.
Recall that the stock market crash of 1929 and America’s subsequent economic depression were being blamed on the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, who, in a vain attempt to stimulate the economy, had increased government spending on myriad new government programs, thereby causing large federal deficits (relatively speaking).
Sensing that they had, for the first time in decades, a golden opportunity to regain the presidency, Democrats began formulating policies in stark contrast to Hoover’s. Indeed, the Democratic Party Platform in 1932 called for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the Federal Government.”
Taking his cue, in accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, FDR said, “For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government costs too much. I shall not stop preaching that. As an immediate program of action we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government that are not definitely essential to the continuance of government.” In addition, on the campaign trail FDR blasted Hoover for attempting to “centralize control of everything in Washington.”
The American people listened and FDR was elected president in a landslide.
But once in office, FDR’s about face was astonishing. Under his “New Deal” program he initiated massive government spending that sent the federal deficit into the stratosphere, while creating hundreds of government programs and initiatives — centralized in Washington — with an alphabet-soup collection of regulatory bodies to oversee them. They included, just to name a few, the WPA, PWA, CCC, FWP, REA, NYA, AAA and NPB.
Historians still argue the effectiveness of these programs, which were designed to stimulate the economy and create jobs, but there is no argument that they flew in the face of FDR’s and the Democrats’ promises to reduce government spending and downsize government.
To that end, in 1944, in his annual address to Congress, FDR proclaimed that the federal government would no longer be confined to guaranteeing Americans their natural rights — life, liberty, property — but would henceforth also guarantee them economic, social and moral rights, such as the right to a good job, the right to a decent home and medical care, the right to economic security in their old age.
Henceforth government grew even larger. Make that much larger.
