My father is a retired educator and labor leader who continues to be active in political causes. He writes a monthly column for AFT Retirees of New Jersey. Visit their website by clicking here.
Below you can read his monthly column for November 2008.
We Need More Than Another FDR
Back in my younger days, after l929, we had a Great Depression. Nearly everyone in our neighborhood was hurting financially but we didn't hurt as much as some of our neighbors. My father had a job. He didn't always get paid on time, but we had some money coming in.One of my memories was of seeing the men working on the WPA- the Works Projects Administration. They were maintaining the roads and the bridges. When I was in the seventh grade, one of my classmates joined the CCC- The Civilian Conservation Corps. They were building our national parks and clearing the roads and forests. In the South, there was the TVA- the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought dams and electricity to the land of Sergeant York and many others who served in World War II.
The Great Depression was worldwide, and in Europe, they were looking for someone to blame. Adolph Hitler and his friend, Benito Mussolini, found millions of scapegoats, and their people, for the most part, bought a "solution" that most of us didn't know about for several years. In the Spring of 1945, we got the rest of the story .Subsequently, the worst of the war criminals were sent to prison, and some were executed.
During World War II,the atmosphere was different. Most of the "free world" realized that we were all in this together. We contributed to the war effort in many ways. We collected scrap metal for the war effort, and we bought "defense stamps' in school which could be converted to
war bonds worth $18.75 when we had the stamp book filled. Ten years later, the bonds were worth $25 , which helped to buy post-war cars, furniture, and whatever else a family needed. We enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces, and by 1945, Congress and the President
had enacted The GI Bill of Rights, which helped many of us through college, and the government also backed low-cost loans that enabled us to buy a house or a business.
Today, we find ourselves confronted with some of the problems that confronted us in 1932. But some of the consumer protection aspects of the FDR Era have survived. Bank accounts, insured by the government up to $100,000 , have just been increased to $250,000. The federal
minimum wage has been updated from time to time,but state minimums have varied significantly. One of the greatest legacies of FDR's New Deal was Social Security, an insurance program that covered deceased and injured workers, their dependents, and also provided for
pensions in retirement .Medicare was enacted during the Johnson Administration. But at least one of the protections enacted in the 1930s has been eroded, the regulations that protected investors in the Stock Market. So, things are not as bad as they were in the 1930s.
We have a new set of problems. I hope that we will do what Tom Brokaw wrote about in his book about The Greatest Generation. We are all in the same boat ,and we face the same national and world problems. Among those problems that come to mind are; global warming,
the war against terrorism, the federal budget, national health insurance, the role of money in politics, the electoral college, the tax structure, the education of our young, immigration, runaway industries, our world image, and the energy crisis, just to name a few. Just as we put our shoulders to the wheel in the 1930s and '40s, we need the same kind of involvement today.
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