The 'Hundred Days' of F.D.R.

This is from a small collection of NY Times articles by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. It's about the New Deal and Roosevelt's first hundred days in office:

The 'Hundred Days' of F.D.R., by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Commentary, NY Times, 1983: Exactly half a century ago, the Republic plunged into the Hundred Days - that time of tumultuous change when a flood of legislation swept away venerable market practices and gave the American economic system a new contour.

In the frenzied weeks from March to June 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent 15 messages to Congress and steered 15 major laws to enactment: among them, central planning for industry and for agriculture, new regulation for banking and for the securities exchanges, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps and a national system of unemployment relief.

''At the end of February,'' Walter Lippmann wrote when the special session adjourned, ''we were a con-geries of disorderly panicstricken mobs and factions. In the hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.''

The Hundred Days were only the start of a process that ended by transforming American society. Who can now imagine a day when America offered no Social Security, no unemployment compensation, no food stamps, no Federal guarantee of bank deposits, no Federal supervision of the stock market, no Federal protection for collective bargaining, no Federal standards for wages and hours, no Federal support for farm prices or rural electrification, no Federal refinancing for farm and home mortgages, no Federal commitment to high employment or to equal opportunity - in short, no Federal responsibility for Americans who found themselves, through no fault of their own, in economic or social distress?

These social changes have won general approval. Even the Reagan counterrevolution, for all its 19th-century laissez-faire and Social Darwinist passions, shrinks from abolishing the framework of social protection -the ''safety nets'' - created by the New Deal.

But what of the narrowly economic results? How effective was the New Deal in reducing unemployment, promoting economic growth and altering the distribution of income? And does the experience of half a century ago offer any guidance to the nation in its economic perplexities today?

The technique of the New Deal was improvisation and experiment. ''It is common sense to take a method and try it,'' F.D.R. said in the 1932 campaign: ''If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.''

Except for that part about admitting failure frankly, this continued the rule for Roosevelt's 12 years in the White House. In the intellectual circumstances of the time, there was really no alternative to experiment. The Hundred Days found the country in a state of invincible ignorance. No one knew the causes of the Depression. No one knew the cure. Business leaders and academic economists alike were analytically baffled and impotent.

A fortnight before Roosevelt took office, the Senate Finance Committee summoned a procession of business leaders to testify on the crisis. ''I have nothing to offer, either of fact or theory,'' said John W. Davis, the head of the American bar. ''There is no panacea,'' said W.W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Economists had been so wrong in the recent past and were in such hot disagreement in the urgent present that no non-economist could take the profession seriously.

In its detail, New Deal experimentation was often chaotic and not seldom contradictory. But it was unified by F.D.R.'s definite conviction about the ends of economic policy - ends prescribed not only by the miseries of the Great Depression but by the President's alert, resourceful and generous-hearted personality.

Born in the Hudson River aristocracy, he inherited a sense of obligation to land and to community. He was indeed, as John T. Flynn labeled him in a once famous polemic, a country squire in the White House. The Republic was Hyde Park writ large, and he saw himself as trustee for a national estate that required vigilant protection and cultivation.

There was more than a touch of paternalism and noblesse oblige in all this, but there was also a vivid feeling of responsibility for the national community as a whole, especially its most defenseless members.

F.D.R. had had a reasonable exposure to the economic thought of his time. At Harvard he had taken more credits in economics than in any field except history and English. His teachers -William Z. Ripley, A. Piatt Andrew, O.M.W. Sprague - were in the reformist school that hoped to mitigate laissez-faire by regulation.

In the 1920's he had been active in the business self-regulation movement. As Governor of New York, he had pioneered in regional planning, conservation, electric power development and welfare legislation.

The President-elect emerged from this varied experience with a patrician disdain for business wisdom and a curiosity about economists. ''This nation asks for action, and action now,'' he said in his inaugural address.

He looked first to national planning, ''a fair and just concert of interests,'' with business, labor, agriculture and consumers working together under government leadership. Each unit ''must think of itself as a part of a greater whole; one piece in a large design.''

This integrative approach sprang from his sense of the nation as a great community. It found particular expression in the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. These mechanisms of negotiation and coordination soon arrested the fall in production and prices and brought about a measure of re-employment.

But they also encountered difficulties. N.R.A. especially tried to run too much; and, though it gave new status to organized labor, business used its dominating position in many industrial codes to fix prices and restrict production. In the end, the laws fell afoul of the Supreme Court.

The Second New Deal After 1935 Roosevelt embarked on a new tack: leftward in rhetoric, rightward in policy. Instead of seeking business partnership in the reorganization of economic institutions, the Second New Deal embraced the theory of a competitive economy and strove for recovery through a three-pronged reform campaign.

One prong, which naturally outraged those businessmen who endorsed competition in principle but hated it in practice, was a campaign against the ''economic royalists'' and the concentration of private economic power. The thesis, Roosevelt said in 1938, ''is not that the system of free private enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried.''

A second prong aimed at the stimulus of the economy through deficit spending. Keynes in his 1936 book ''The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money'' gave compensatory fiscal policy its classic rationale.

But the New Deal came to public spending earlier and for its own reasons. It created deficits to combat human suffering, and it found its early justification in the arguments of the Utah banker Marriner Eccles, whom Roosevelt made chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

He took his ideas from two now forgotten American economic writers, William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, whose irreverent critique of Say's Law in the 1920's had demonstrated the perils of oversaving, concluding with the brisk injunction: ''When business begins to look rotten, more public spending.''

F.D.R. had scrawled in his copy of the Foster-Catchings book ''The Road to Plenty'' (1928), ''Too good to be true - You can't get something for nothing.'' Very likely he continued to prefer structural to fiscal remedies. But ''above all, try something.''

The third prong in the Second New Deal was targeted attention to weak sectors in the economy - the South, the West, housing, railroads. Here the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, headed by a Texas banker, Jesse Jones, played a key role. The R.F.C., and later its wartime subsidiary, the Defense Plant Corporation, liberated the colonial South and West from the New York capital market and used government money to lay the foundation for the postwar boom in the Sun Belt.

(The Sun Belt today repays Washington's initiative by opposing, in the sacred name of free enterprise, government intervention on behalf of other parts of the country, as, for example, the decaying industrial heartland of the Middle West and Northeast.)

All this Rooseveltian hyperactivity brought the country through the worst of the Depression. By 1940 the gross national product was higher than in 1929 and over 60 percent higher than in 1933.

As has been often noted, the New Deal did not solve the problem of unemployment. By 1940 the jobless rate had been cut by nearly two-thirds, to 9.3 percent of the labor force from 25.2 percent in 1933. Still five million people lacked jobs.

So much re-employment in half a dozen years was a not inconsiderable accomplishment, as Reagan economists, faced with their own problems of reducing unemployment, will perhaps agree.

A Budget Balancer The reason the New Deal did not do even better was that Roosevelt, though much denounced at the time as a profligate spender, remained at heart a budget-balancer and a planner. In any event, the hysterical opposition of businessmen to public spending for anyone but themselves made it politically impossible for him to spend very much.

The largest peacetime deficit the big spender produced was a feeble $3.5 billion in 1936. The increase in public debt through the 1930's hardly offset the contraction in private debt. It was not until war legitimized really effective deficits - $18 billion in 1942, $54 billion in 1943 - that unemployment disappeared; proving incidentally how right Eccles and Keynes were.

The New Deal, aided by wartime full employment, also had some impact on the distribution of income. The top fifth of American families received only 46 percent of aggregate personal income in 1946, down from 54.4 percent in 1929, while the share of the lowest two-fifths rose to 16 percent from 12.5 percent.

This was not a great change. But it was the only reversal in the trend of income distribution in American history before or since (except for a brief moment in the 1960's), and is thereby an achievement.

The Inflation Legacy Roosevelt was concerned not only with getting out of the Depression but with preventing new depressions in the future. For the Great Depression was a traumatic experience. Mass unemployment, doubt whether democratic institutions could master economic crisis, the waiting specters of Communism and fascism - all this gave democratic society such a scare in the 1930's that a primary New Deal goal was to make the American economy depression-proof.

Before the New Deal, in those glorious days of the gold standard and the unregulated marketplace, the nation had gone through a bad depression every 20 years or so - 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1921, 1929. The New Deal now moved to equip the economy with built-in stabilizers designed to protect individuals against unemployment, businesses against bankruptcy and society as a whole against the roller coaster of boom-and-bust.

This effort to make the economy depression-proof was remarkably successful - as proven by the fact that, for the first time in American history, the nation has gone 40 years without a major depression. If we avoid such a depression today, it will be not because of voodoo economics, but because of the stabilizers that Franklin Roosevelt built into the economy.

The drive to secure the economy against depression had, however, one unforeseen consequence. The traditional cure for inflation had been to put the whole economy through the wringer. Denied that ancient remedy, the post-New Deal economy has experienced a chronic propensity to inflation, before which businessmen and economists appear as analytically impotent as they were before the chronic propensity to depression half a century ago.

By making the economy relatively depression-proof, we made it at the same time inflation-prone.

A Third New Deal? In dealing with the problems of our time, have we anything to learn from the brilliant experiments of the 1930's? In so far as New Deal issues remain, like mass unemployment, regional poverty, conservation and income distribution, it does no harm to consider New Deal remedies. Felix Rohatyn has long called for a resurrection of the R.F.C. The House of Representatives recently voted to establish an American Conservation Corps. Secretary Watt's effort to deliver the public domain to private greed has revitalized the conservation cause.

But what about problems unknown to the 1930's, like inflation? Here we may note the changing light that the rush of years casts on New Deal policies. For a long time historians condemned Roosevelt's First New Deal, with its focus on structure, negotiation and planning, as a bad turn on a wrong road. This judgment prevailed so long as fiscal and monetary fine-tuning appeared to contain the solution to our economic dilemmas.

But we have come to understand that, in an economy dominated by market power concentrated in large corporations and unions, fiscal and monetary policy can restrain inflation only by very crude-tuning - to put it bluntly, by inducing mass unemployment.

The economic logic of N.R.A. was perhaps not so irrelevant as conventional critics have assumed. Perhaps it was the Second New Deal that made the bad turn down the wrong road when it sought to revive the pure competitive model in an economy whose commanding heights had been seized by concentrated market power.

The First New Deal aimed to replace the institutionalized warfare of government against business, labor against management, by negotiation and coordination under government direction: instead of the adversarial cockpit, social partnership. The institutions of the early 1930's were too sketchy and improvised, too sweeping in their reach, too distorted by special interests, too confused by melodrama, to attain effective coordination.

But what is experiment, after all, but trial and error? The First New Deal at least operated in terms of a realistic model of the market.

If N.R.A. and A.A.A. could stop prices from plummeting in the 1930's, it is not beyond possibility that they may conceivably offer some clues as to how to stop prices from soaring in the 1980's. Nor will we ever get high employment, high utilization of plant and steady expansion if our only remedy for inflation continues to be recession.

We must evolve an incomes policy that effectively relates wage rates and profit margins to productivity growth - and we can only do that through experiment, through trial and error.

In the search for such a policy and for other pressing reasons - the deterioration of our infrastructure, the decline of Smokestack America, the global redivision of labor - we can no longer reject the idea of a concert of interests that F.D.R. affirmed in the 1932 campaign nor dodge the challenge of coordination he set out to explore in the Hundred Days.

There may also be something of value in the moral philosophy that animated the Hundred Days. We all recall from F.D.R.'s first inaugural that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

While magnificent rhetoric, that line isn't much help now. It didn't really make great sense even then. We had quite a number of things to fear in 1933 besides fear itself. Nor would the rejection of fear have sent our troubles away.

Rereading the inaugural today, one is struck by a different passage - by Roosevelt's stinging indictment of the ethic of the ''money changers'' who, ''stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership ... have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.''

The time had come, Roosevelt said, to ''restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. ... These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.''

Perhaps our nation will be more united, more equitable and more prosperous, too, if we abandon the current program of cutting taxes for the rich and social programs for the poor and recall the proposition Roosevelt set forth in his second inaugural:

''The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

Comments

[anne]

Nice touch, reminding me not to be completely in despair over the turning away from the Supreme Court turing away from Brown v. Board of Education among other radical court decisions this session.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html?ex=1284696000&en=c7225b818a2f5ced&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

September 18, 2005

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.

THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.

In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing.

Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1971.

Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the time.

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).

Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")

The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection." In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.

Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for my generation....

[evagrius]

"The time had come, Roosevelt said, to ''restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. ... These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.''

Good quote. I wonder who will say the same thing today?

[evagrius]

I suppose that the Great Depression should have continued, perhaps to this very day.

Think what glorious freedom all would have had.

[evagrius]

Really?

"As has been often noted, the New Deal did not solve the problem of unemployment. By 1940 the jobless rate had been cut by nearly two-thirds, to 9.3 percent of the labor force from 25.2 percent in 1933. Still five million people lacked jobs."

That 25% unemployment rate would have gone down soooo much faster, right?

[kthomas]

TB, your brainwashing is complete. I must say...

"They will be seen as the 100 days that were the beginning of the end of the great experiment conducted by the Founders, the end of the time when people can live free, with sovereignty over their own lives, free from oppression and coercion, free from the ideology of others being imposed upon them."

LOL Are you saying you're not living free? Whatever the heck that means....free to what? Own another human being, like Founder Jefferson? Sovreignty over your own life? Uh, what? Free from the ideology of others being imposed on them...now THAT is nonsense. Ideologies are like a%^&holes...everyone's got one.

I'd recommend you move to the Bahamas, with the rest of the Ayn Rand crew, if FDR's troublesome policies and overbearing ideology becomes too much to bear.

[spencer]

I love TB-- without him we wouldn't believe the ignorance that so much of the population has.

For example, he says with one hand the recession ended in March, 1933 -- the exact month that Roosevelt took office and stated doing things like the bank holiday and raising the price of gold that ended the depression -- yet blames FDR for extending the depression.

How can one person really hold such internally inconsistent beliefs?

[anne]

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/froos1.htm

March 4, 1933

The First Inaugural Address
By Franklin Roosevelt

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now....

[dogfacegeorge]

I don't know, spencer, I read TB as saying that the New Deal had no significant effect on the economy, but did have and continues to have a seriously adverse effect on our political freedom. Now, for example, we must pay social security taxes or go to prison.

Ooh, the oppression! the coercion! Where is Thomas Paine when we need him?

[evagrius]

"Why would you suppose such a thing? The depression hit bottome in March 1933 and started climbing out of it from that point on. The worst was over by the tim FDR started working on these policies."

Could you provide proof?

spencer;"For example, he says with one hand the recession ended in March, 1933 "

"The depression hit bottome in March 1933 and started climbing out of it from that point on. The worst was over by the tim FDR started working on these policies."

This is the direct quote. Nothing contradicting what spencer wrote.

"See how progressives lie, completely distorting what I posted, I have found this to be very common when discussing with progressives. It permeates their whole life, they don't see what is, but only what they want to see."

Of course, regressives are very realistic.

spencer says..."yet blames FDR for extending the depression."

True- you didn't write anything about the depression continuing.

"See, more lies, progressives just can't help themselves."

No. It's just that regressives like you often accuse FDR of such a thing.

[real person from the real world]

I am amazed at the range of people who now villify FDR. A relative, who is a committed evangelical, is more conservative then my parents who grew up in Republican states, even tho he is financially hurting from Republican policies. Who suddently convinced everyone that FDR was wrong-headed after enjoying decades of comfortable living among parks that FDR's ccc put together, and the positive economic environment that came out of his policies? And why do these people now support Republican policies that keep larger and larger numbers of their fellow Americans without health care or decent wages? Where did all these selfish, angry egoists like TB who want to survive and live well so badly themselves, they don't care about anyone else, come from?

[evagrius]

THE FIRST 100 DAYS

Roosevelt entered office at a time when fear and panic had paralyzed the nation. In a famous passage, historian Arthur Schlesinger described the mood at FDR's inauguration: "It was now a matter of seeing whether a representative democracy could conquer economic collapse. It was a matter of staving off violence -- even, some though -- revolution."

FDR's natural air of confidence and optimism did much to reassure the nation. His inauguration on March 4 occurred literally in the middle of a terrifying bank panic -- hence the backdrop for his famous words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The very next day, to prevent a run on banks, he declared a "bank holiday," closing all banks indefinitely until bankers and government could regain control of the situation. The term "holiday" was meant to give a festive air to what was actually a desperate situation, but such was FDR's desire to provide hope to the nation.

Congress was almost entirely compliant and gave the President everything he wanted. The Emergency Banking Bill, which strengthened, reorganized and reopened the most solvent banks, was passed overwhelmingly by Congress with little debate. On March 12, Roosevelt announced that the soundest banks would reopen. On March 13, deposits at those banks exceeded withdrawals -- a tremendous relief to a worried nation. "Capitalism was saved in eight days," said Raymond Moley, a member of the President's Brain Trust.

The bank holiday was a vivid example of the effectiveness of government intervention in an economic crisis. Hoover had allowed two previous bank panics to run their course, which contributed to over 10,000 bank failures and $2 billion in lost deposits. The bank holiday secured Roosevelt's political reputation, and convinced both Congress and the public that the New Deal was the right road to follow.

Roosevelt's strategy consisted of two parts: first, provide relief for those who needed it most, which often involved a redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Second, provide long-lasting reform to the nation's economy, through reorganization and the creation of new agencies. Most of Roosevelt's policies can be described as "taking from one pocket to put in the other." Fixated with a balanced budget, and fretful when it was not, Roosevelt made sure that anything given to one sector of the economy was taken from somewhere else. He did not accept Keynes' recommendation to begin heavy deficit spending, and did not do so until the threat of World War II forced him to.

Roosevelt's legendary "First 100 Days" concentrated on the first part of his strategy: immediate relief. From March 9 to June 16, 1933, FDR sent Congress a record number of bills, all of which passed easily. These included the creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Congress also gave the Federal Trade Commission broad new regulatory powers, and provided mortgage relief to millions of farmers and homeowners.

The success of the First 100 Days was important, because it got the New Deal off to a strong and early start. Later, the conservative Supreme Court would declare much of the New Deal unconstitutional, and Roosevelt's political prestige would decline as his policies failed to resolve the Depression. If Roosevelt had not passed his agenda early, we would probably be without many New Deal programs we take for granted today.

Return to Timeline

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/First100days.htm

[evagrius]

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-- James Madison

http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/8610

And it continues today, bit by bit our freedoms are abridged.

Yes...as Dick Cheney has proven.

[evagrius]

No, you list list the freedoms that have been taken away.

[Elvis]

We can debate forever whether FDR can claim credit for ending/mitigating the Great Depression.

In the end, it's a question of taste.

a. government helps the little folk.
b. government helps the big folk.

[hint: the answer is 'a'.]

It really is that simple. The Greatest Generation could figure that out and most of them didn't have a college education.

[evagrius]

Oh you mean that what was voted for by democratically elected representatives, ( obviously liked by the voters since they were re-elected quite often), is undemocratic?

"The freedom to not have what is ours stolen from us and given to others."

A little confusing.

You mean; the freedom not to have what is ours stolen...etc; ?

[Isabel]

Freedom is just another word
For nothing left to lose

[Elvis]

The freedom to not be forced to pay for others healthcare, homes, welfare.

The freedom to not have what is ours stolen from us and given to others

In return, we have been blessed with the freedom to pay for a war Iraq. Lovely.
We have also been freedom from our sense of security, replaced by puerile fear mongering [set alert to red!]
We have been freed from the onerous weight of Habeas Corpus.
We have been freed from the right to know what our elected officials are doing.
We have been freed from the truth.

Folks who love W. and Cheney should quickly move to Bagdad. It really is your kind of place. Pitiful war mongerers, all.

[Elvis]

TB--you've been smoking Ann Rand's brand

TB, Bagdad is waiting for you! No government, dude! It's cool. Totally awesome. And Bush/Cheney have set up this sweet deal where you can get paid to go! Blackwater will take care of you!

Hint it is neither, our government wasn't created to help anybody, the sole existance for our government is to protect individual rights.
So... when Bush/Cheney were protecting Enron--you know, before W decided he didn't know Ken Lay-- Whose individual rights was he protecting?

When a bunch of Attorney Generals get fired for suspicious reasons (like they were good), how have our individual rights been protected?

And, oh, that pesky Securities Exchange Commission! How could FDR have burdened us with that? How have we managed?

Let's sell the Earth to the highest bidder! TB--you've been smoking Ann Rand's brand

[evagrius]

"Yes, not have what is our stolen from us by the government and given to others."

You'd be a big hit on the Rez.

[Elvis]

"We have been freed from the onerous weight of Habeas Corpus.
You are welcome to show me where it has been rescinded.
I'd start looking around Gitmo.

I forgot to mention we've also been freed from privacy. I always hated the feeling of not being watched.

Thank God the war mongerers are watching us!

[Elvis]

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
-- Benjamin Franklin

team Bush/Cheney and their Republican Congress have been ever so careful with the money, haven't they?

"When the people find that they have voted a cocaine-addled awol rich brat, that will herald the end of the republic."
-- me

[Elvis]

As I said the governments sole existence is to protect our individual rights, you can disagree on the means but that is what we are doing in Iraq.

I can assure you, sir, not a single one of my individual rights are in Iraq.

You, obviously, have some there--get on with it! Go! Don't burden your neighbors or family any longer! Get to Iraq and start defending your individual rights!

What part of this equation don't you get? War mongerers belong in Iraq! Otherwise, you are a hot-aired coward.

[Elvis]

The truth hurts (some)
27 year CIA vet speaks out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Au_OqNCYk

[Elvis]

Bush is a coward.
Cheney is a coward.
Rove is a coward.

Anyone who cheerleaded Vietnam and didn't GO THERE, iscategorically a coward!

I'm not a coward-loving, Ann Rand Brand smoking, idiot, ergo I did not vote for W. Did you?

People who support W need to stop being blowhards and enlist-- real soon! The Army is having trouble meeting its enlistment targets.

Whatever can your excuse be for supporting W and his war and not enlisting? Could it be your calling in this war is to stay behind the lines evangelizing this war to us non-believers? coward.

Put your money and your body where your mouth is, you coward. If you're too old, then enlist your kids. You can still pay. We need a tax raise to pay for this war, you coward.

Christ was no coward. Bush is. He ain't no Christian. He's a coward. And a dumb one at that.

[evagrius]

Yes, not have what is our stolen from us by the government and given to others."

You'd be a big hit on the Rez."

"At least you aren't denying the government's theft of what belongs to some to give to others."

There's an irony here that obviously escapes you.

[evagrius]

"AGain you don't deny government's theft"

Again you don't see irony.

[evagrius]

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/

[Arne (not anne)]

"It must really bug you that bill clinton agrees with Bush that invading was the correct thing to do."

Please provide a link.

[elvis]

TB, buddy, I'm giving you a clear opportunity to prove yourself. Join now! The Army needs you.

About Habeas Corpus: The president has provided himself with the means of suspending it by declaring anyone an "enemy combatant" Whether he has employed it or not is not the point. The point is he has given himself the authority.

About lost privacy. Ask Ashcroft. He wouldn't sign off on Bush's idea because it was too extreme even for him. Ask ATT about the domestic monitoring program.

I've got to go to work now. Why don't you answer this simple question;
Why don't you join the Armed forces to protect you individual rights which somehow ended up in Iraq.

Don't ask me how they got there. I keep mine close to me.

[elvis]

They haven't been stealing from some to give to others.
TB, you provide a lot of low-hanging fruit. Ask the Iraqi's what happened to their country's
BBC report

TB, cut back on the wacky tabbacky.

[elvis]

To get back to the original thread:

Rand has nothing to do with it, it is all about the Founders and the principles this country was founded upon.

Which would include slavery and disenfranchising most of the folk. The little folk, naturally.

Bush and Co. are out to protect the big folks (Haliburton, et al.) They are not about helping the little folks (New Orleans, etc.)

They are not about individual rights:
Loss of privacy
BBC report on loss of privacy

Habeas Corpus:
BBC report

In Bed with Crooks (and then denying it)
Guardina report
[let's remember the California Blackout crisis which was orchestrated by Enron cronies to rip off little folk]
BBC report on California

TB said:
So now that you couldn't provied any proof of your first ridiculous claim, you make another unsuported ridiculous claim.

I retort:
Put up or shut up, coward.

TB said:
I can assure you sir that if you are dead you have no rights.

I retort:
What? How was Iraq threatening me? Where's your proof? If you really believe that, why haven't you put your uniform on and lived out your convictions--- or are you a coward. Or worse, a war-mongering coward, like Bush/Cheney?

You talk a lot-- "the govimint is stealing our money! Iraq is about protecting our individual rights! Cut welfare to pay for this war & reduce our taxes."

You are a whining coward, sir. Retreat to your isolated shelter in the middle of backwater USA. Come out with your uniform on when you support a war.

[kthomas]

I'm not sure the Army would take TB.

TB is not easily swayed, and would very much not like Army indoctrination techniques.

[evagrius]

I believe TB is over 42 years old, ( that's the age limit nowadays- NPR today had a report on this change in age limits ).

[evagrius]

Interesting.

So what, exactly, freedoms have been taken away by anybody?

[Elvis]

When I served I gave an oath to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you are by far the worst kind of enemy of the Constitution.

I will continue defending the Constitution from things like you.

Now I am a thing, like your "founding fathers" considered a good chunk of the population.

Go study American history, the people at that time did not consider the slaves humans, they considered them an intelligent ape. As for disenfranchising most folk, more evidence you haven’t studied American history.
So labeling fellow humans as apes and denying them the vote (even after the greatest Republican president we have yet known freed them) means they weren't really disenfranchised. Call me an idiot, but I really don't get it. Do the math: women (about 50%) + slaves = more than 50% of the common folk. I'd call that disenfranchising most folk, but then I continue to show my adolescent instability by counting women, unlanded men and ALL races as human beings--even you, sir. Calling me a "thing" is that how they train recruits? Get the mindset to torture--yet another great legacy of Bush/Cheney. What would Christ do?

If you want to defend the Constitution, check out Ron Paul. He had the balls to stand up to the current ghost of a man in the white house. Bush is a coward.

The man quoted in your www.defenselink.mil link (dated Jan. 29, 2004) said this LATER
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
link to article
Which Bush did, as he had to. They gave up the search for WMD. Now they search for plain old vanilla-wrap weapons that were looted from Saddam's arsenals while our soldiers secured oil fields.

Read the Downing Street memo--facts where being fixed to the program. Fear was being generated. Is this something a Christian would do? Fear thy neighbor? Would Christ cook up stories about "yellow cake" in Niger? And then leak out damaging facts about the man who tried to tell the truth. And finally intervene when justice was meted out to Skooter Libby?

I'm not afraid. I was never afraid of Iraq. Honestly. Events have, unfortunately, borne the validity of my postition. I say "unfortunately" with a heavy heart. The USA--my country, my family's country since its founding [yes, my blood goes to a founding father, as does that of many americans of all colors.] my country would not look as foolish and hubristic if Saddam had actually been a real threat.

Here's a real soldier: John Batiste

Pre-emptive war is not an American tradition.

[Elvis]

What has happened to the Republican Party since Reagan?
During Reagan we had to be afraid of Nicaraguan Sandinistas-- there was the comical possibility floated that they could actually drive to the US border.
Reagan began a war on terror for some reason. I can't remember now because I wasn't very scared then, either.
Then we had to be afraid of drugs and the War on drugs began.
Then when Clinton came into office, the Republicans had to reveal their fear of the female [I can sympathise with this!]
Then Bush had the whole country hopped up on his new Terror: the smoking gun mushroom cloud.

Why are Republicans so afraid? They keep using terms like: Evil Empire, Axis of Evil.

Could it be they are cowards? Chicken Littles running around shouting "Star Wars!".

[Elvis]

Already served 8 years, how about you?
during peace-time, I suppose. Iraq is the biggest war since Vietnam. You support it-- indeed you are under the impression that our lives depended on a preemptive strike.

Why are you still here? Why aren't you blogging from the Green Zone?

I propose that you feel you have better things to do with your life (Cheney's excuse for defering out of Vietnam). I don't blame you. I also have better things to do with my life--such as building communities and marching in anti-war protests.

If you think this war is a matter of life and death, then start marching for a return to the draft! Let your neighbors know how deeply you feel that their children should join this war. Put a big sign on your lawn, Draft the Kids!

I've got to go--time to start praying [yes, I do that, too.] that we leave Iran alone.

[evagrius]

You mean taxes?

[Elvis]

Already served 8 years, how about you? Your rights are here not in Iraq, the US military is protecting your rights here.
That's what I said. My rights are here. Not in Iraq. What does Iraq have to do with my rights? Could you provide some concrete examples of how Saddam is impinging on my rights? Is it identity theft?

Seriously, I do not blame the military for anything that happens. How could I? They are under civilian control. Bush/Cheney bear the responsiblity.

[Elvis]

Iraqis: life is getting better
So we can leave now? Should I plan to visit Bagdad soon on my next vacation?

[Elvis]

I am atheist.
You have been smoking Ann Rand's brand.
You must love the Evangelical influence that's been creeping into our armed forces of late.

[Elvis]

Yes, you are a thing, a monster, an enemy of the Constitution.
And so you fear me, don't you? I use my right to free speech and that disturbs you.

Did your mother raise you to view other sentient beings as "things" when they didn't obey?

[Elvis]

closing italic

[evagrius]

You do mean taxes. How eslse are things taken away?

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

Sounds like taxes to me.

And I do love this quote, considering that Jefferson's "industry" depended on slave labor.

[Arne (not anne)]

I am torn on whether to respond TB again. He provides a link from CNN in which the headline agrees with what TB says, but in which the discussion of weapons inspectors in the body of the article makes it clear that Clinton did not agree with Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

I do not think TB deserves what some of you are dumping on him, but it seems clear he thinks I am wrong about the facts while I recognize that we have underlying philosophies that prevent us from agreeing which facts are most important.

[evagrius]

"And I do love this quote, considering that Jefferson's "industry" depended on slave labor."

His industry was law, and it didn't depend on slavery.

It makes no difference what you call the theft, taxes, contributions, it is still theft.

"Thomas Jefferson's income, like that of his father, was founded on slave labor and the hoe cultivation of tobacco."

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1301/features/archeology.htm

I suppose that Jefferson did not "steal" the labor of his slaves, ( who weren't human after all).

[evagrius]

"In 1767, after five years of work and study under Wythe, Jefferson was admitted to the practice of law in Virginia. He was reasonably successful as a lawyer, but he did not earn enough to support a Virginia gentleman. Jefferson's main source of income, like that of most other Virginia lawyers, was his land."

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:LZ1JjoJQP4oJ:encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761570282/Thomas_Jefferson.html+jefferson%27s+income&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=16&lr=lang_en|lang_fr

[elvis]

I feel no compunction to hold any punches with the man known as TB- For I have been labeled a thing.

Interesting that to be human or not is a matter of opinion.

I will say this for TB, he likes his fight and he does well.

Tom Jefferson--interesting, multifaceted human being. Freedom fighter, Founding Father, Slave-holder... yes, holding those slaves, especially at night when he was lonely.

Without him we would not have Malcom X.

[Arne (not anne)]

"The only disagreement was the timing, not the act."

Here is an example of understanding which facts are important. Clinton would not have gone in until the weapons inspectors did their job. Bush pulled them out while they were doing their job. Since there were no WMD, leaving them in would have prevented Saddam from providing al Qaeda with WMD and Clinton would NEVER have invaded Iraq.

That is not to say that he did not and would not have used force. (Pardon the double negative.)

[Arne (not anne)]

"I feel no compunction to hold any punches ..."

Trading insults gets you no points. Nor does the fact that you can get TB to respond the same way.

Looking back at TB's first post on this thread it boils down to "not everyone agrees" - hardly an excuse for the drawn out exchange.

[evagrius]

"Looking back at TB's first post on this thread it boils down to "not everyone agrees" - hardly an excuse for the drawn out exchange."

"Yes it was a sad 100 days. There will no doubt come a time when FDR will be vilified for the horror he has wrought."(TB).

It takes a bit of boiling to reduce villification to "not everyone agrees".

[Elvis]

Arne has spoken with maturity and grace, so I must capitulate. I respect TB's right to his opinions. He is my brother--I actually have a brother that matches TB's outlook very closely, so I mean this with sincerity.

I also meant it when I said TB fights a good fight. I enjoy it. It will hone my skills when next I meet my brother.

Nothing will come of our tussle. Voters will vote, hopefully wisely, and the great experiment; the proposition that government of, by and for the people will long endure continues.

TB, you're right to think I'm a Democrat. "Leaning Democrat" would be more apt. However, I don't venerate Bill Clinton. He was smart enough. He was glib enough. The times favored him enough. He was no FDR or Ike-- Lord knows he was no Lincoln.

The thought of Hillary becoming the Democratic candidate horrifies me. She voted for the Iraq resolution and now makes ugly noises about Iran. I was interested in Obama, but then he started promoting Ethanol and joined Hillary in the "Iran is a threat, let's be tough Democrats" theater of the bizzar.

Back to the (now matured) fight.
I was going to make a web page about the various threats to our rights and liberties by the current administration. But why reinvent the wheel? A quick web search came up with this web page.

The part about Habeas Corpus is good. TB, in your rebuttal, you pointed to some previous presidents that also attempted this. Previous wrongs do not make it any less palitable.

You also offered that preemptive war is indeed an American Tradition, by providing us with quotes of former presidents. To which I ask, did they pursue any preemptive wars?

You asked for a single example of a freedom lost due to Cheney. I offer the Freedom of Information. As you know, recently, Cheney has denied that his office is part of the Executive Branch and therefore not subject to the same oversight.

I had posited that we have lost the right to privacy. I don't think you have seriously considered this- in my haste at the time I probably provided a weak link. Here's a better one cnn link Of special note: members of the president's own party object to this and call for Gonzale's resignation for his part. Which brings us to...

Firing Attorney Generals. As you say, "They serve at the pleasure of the president". Allow me to be immature for one brief sentence: the intern Monica Lewinsky also served at the pleasure of a president.
Now let's return to maturity. It is true what you say. However, congress, in it's oversight role can ask questions. And, again, even members of the president's own party are upset. Why? Because these firings are evidence of using the law enforcement arm of the country to political ends. You can see the danger in that, of course.

It's getting late and I must get my beauty sleep. A few final points:
Go study American history, the people at that time did not consider the slaves humans, they considered them an intelligent ape.
I acknowledge that people at that time had different opinions on various matters. Thankfully we have evolved somewhat. I guess we can never really return to a pristine Constitution, nor would the Founding Fathers have wanted that, I'm sure. I guesss they saw themselves as imperfect humans, as even we are now, and in their collective genius saw fit to enable changes to be made to their work.

Thanks to those admendments, all genetically human beings are recognized as human. We all have the right to vote, also. Evolution has occurred, not only in Nature, but in the political arena as well.

Truly finally. I am not afraid of Iran or Iraq becoming engaged in the WMD trade--what countries aren't. Isn't Pakistan involved? Why weren't we more afraid of them? Israel apparently has the bomb. Should I duck and cover? The only terrorists to attack the US recently were Saudi nationals. Why haven't we invaded them?

Are there terrorists in Iraq? probably. In the USA? I seem to remember the Michigan Militia a while back. I think we have law enforcement agencies that can take care of investigating crimes.

I'm not afraid of international terrorism. Truly. I am a coward, though. I'm afraid of losing my job. The company my dad worked at went bankrupt and he lost his pension. Thank goodness for Social Security. My kids getting sick terrifies me. Physical discomfort also scares me.

Bigger issue things that scare me are Peak oil-which would moot our bickering. I fear that the real reason we needed to invade Iraq was to insure China and Russia wouldn't have first dibs to Iraqi oil [Saddam wasn't a big fan of ours]. The oceans filling with plastic and the potential collapse of fisheries also scares me.

See? I do have fears. I am a coward. I just fear different things.

[Arne (not anne)]

'It takes a bit of boiling to reduce villification to "not everyone agrees".'

When you boil something, the most volatile stuff is driven off first. In that particular post, removing the volatiles leaves little behind.

[evagrius]

" By the morality of the day slaves were not humans."

I don't think you're completely correct. You need to do some thinking about this. Otherwise you'll have to concede that FDR is also exempt from your judgement.

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-61879/Thomas-Jefferson

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1678026

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffdec.html

From Wikipedia;

Jefferson owned many slaves over his lifetime. Some find it baffling that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves yet was outspoken in saying that slavery was immoral and it should be abolished. Biographers point out that Jefferson was deep in debt and had encumbered his slaves by notes and mortgages; he chose not to free them until he finally was debt-free, which he never was.[41] Jefferson seems to have suffered pangs and trials of conscience as a result.[42]

During his long career in public office, Jefferson attempted numerous times to abolish or limit the advance of slavery. According to a biographer, Jefferson "believed that it was the responsibility of the state and society to free all slaves".[43] In 1769, as a member of the House of Burgesses, Jefferson proposed for that body to emancipate slaves in Virginia, but he was unsuccessful.[44] In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776), Jefferson condemned the British crown for sponsoring the importation of slavery to the colonies, charging that the crown "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere." However, this language was dropped from the Declaration at the request of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia.

In 1778, the legislature passed a bill he proposed to ban further importation of slaves into Virginia; although this did not bring complete emancipation, in his words, it "stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication". In 1784, Jefferson's draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in any of the new states admitted to the Union from the Northwest Territory.[45] In 1807, he signed a bill abolishing the slave trade. Jefferson attacked the institution of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784):

“ There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.[46] ”

In this same work, Jefferson advanced his suspicion that black people were inferior to white people "in the endowments both of body and mind".[47] He also wrote, "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. [But] the two races...cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them." [10] According to historian Stephen Ambrose: "Jefferson, like all slaveholders and many other white members of American society, regarded Negroes as inferior, childlike, untrustworthy and, of course, as property. Jefferson, the genius of politics, could see no way for African-Americans to live in society as free people."[48] His solution seems to have been for slaves to be freed then deported peacefully failing which the same result would be imposed by war and that, in Jefferson's words, "human nature must shudder at the prospect held up [by war]. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent [the Spanish deportation or deletion] would fall far short of our case.[49]

On February 25, 1809, Jefferson repudiated his earlier view, writing:

“ Sir,--I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind to send me on the "Literature of Negroes". Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunity for the development of their genius were not favorable and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making toward their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief; and to be assured of the sentiments of high and just esteem and consideration which I tender to yourself with all sincerity.[50] ”

The downturn in land prices after 1819 pushed Jefferson further into debt. Jefferson finally emancipated his five most trusted slaves; the others were sold after his death to pay his debts.[51]

The Sally Hemings controversy
For more details on this topic, see Sally Hemings and Jefferson DNA Data.
Regarding marriage between blacks and whites, Jefferson wrote that "[t]he amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."[52] This is the subject of considerable controversy since Jefferson has been recognized as the father of at least some of the children of his slave Sally Hemings. In addition, Hemings was likely the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. The allegation that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings first gained widespread public attention in 1802, when journalist James T. Callender, wrote in a Richmond newspaper, "...[Jefferson] keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally." Jefferson never responded publicly about this issue but is said to have denied it in his private correspondence.[53]

A 1998 DNA study concluded that there was a DNA link between some of Hemings descendants and the Jefferson family, but did not conclusively prove that Jefferson himself was their ancestor. Three studies were released in the early 2000s, following the publication of the DNA evidence. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, appointed a multi-disciplinary, 9-member in-house research committee of Ph.D.s and an M.D. to study the matter of the paternity of Hemings's children. The committee concluded "it is very unlikely that any Jefferson other than Thomas Jefferson was the father of [Hemings's six] children."[54] In 2001, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society[55] commissioned a study by an independent 13-member Scholars Commission. The commission concluded that the Jefferson paternity thesis was not persuasive. The National Genealogical Society Quarterly then published articles reviewing the evidence from a genealogical perspective and concluded that the link between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was valid.[56]

[elvis]

Thanks to TB, I have been reviewing the Constitution and would like to examine the Preamble.

WE THE PEOPLE
to be sure what constituted a "person" was limited at the time, but I'm sure the Authors would be glad that the descendants of Sally Hemmings are now considered fully human.
You have to love the bold large lettering that clearly shouts "Power comes from the people". [amen]

in Order to form a more perfect Union
Sounds almost socialist. So forward thinking. Obviously, rugged individualism has its limits.

establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility
noble goals.

provide for the common defence
naturally

promote the general Welfare
Social Security and Universal Healthcare!

and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
Again, "posterity" now includes Sally Hemings'.

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
And thanks to our greatest Republican president, Lincoln, these United States survived a terrible insurrection.

[elvis]

on suspension of habeas corpus:
Yes, they have done it, FDR and the Japaneese internment camps, but it is only done for the protection of the country and it has always been only a temporary measure.

You seem to like FDR more than you let on. Again, my question was, is this something you approve of? The interment of Japanese-American citizens has in hindsight been viewed as a mistake and apologies offered. Also, in 1942, the nation was at war, declared in accordance to the Constitution. At present the USA is not at war officially--although that rhetoric is often employed [usually to question the patriotism of citizens].

You have omitted to address my suggestion that our right to know what our elected officials are doing-as provided in the Freedom of Information Act, has been undermined.

I would like to hear you views on the apparent pressure put on Attorney Generals to use their office for political purposes.

I don't think your rebuttal of the Downing Street memo was convincing. Could you elaborate on how this memo is not incriminating?

Finally, before I head off to work. [this is an honest, non threatening question, because I really want to know] I thought the president called off the search for WMD. Were significant stockpiles of chemical agents found?

[evagrius]

"There were some who considered the slaves humans, a tiny percentage however they were viewed at the time much as the general population looks at PETA when they make claims that animals have rights also."

You have a fascinating logic.

On the one hand, you concede that slaves actually were human beings.

You then argue that, at the time of the Constitution, the majority of people believed that black people were just a higher form of animal life and that, therefore, slavery was not morally wrong. You base your argument on the basis that anachronistic thinking about slavery is incorrect-one should not impose modern concepts to the past.

What you forget is that the reverse is also true. One should not demand that society retrogress to the 18th century in terms of what "the general welfare" of a nation is.

The "Founding Fathers" did not and could not envision a modern technological society, with its corporations, mass media, transportation, etc; etc;

Yet you seek to impose an 18th century view of society on our modern one.

Your view isn't conservative, nor libertarian, nor "classic liberalism", ( which, again it may be pointed out did not envisage the modern technological society).

It's sheer retrograde thinking, completely illogical and based on faulty logic and worse, a faulty perception of reality.

As for FDR, the argument is quite simple. The majority of people did not consider his New Deal to be an affront to freedom. Since they did not, you cannot accuse him, or them, of being wrong at the time.

[evagrius]

Well, enought of this.

It's obvious you have your fixations.

So, stay in your fixations.

I leave in peace.

[Elvis]

I am not the one who made the ridiculous claim that we have to have healthcare to live, nor the even more ridiculous claim that they had healthcare 20,000 years ago.
medicinal herbs, leeches if you had them. Most of all healthcare is about people taking care of each other. I'm sure they had that.

[Elvis]

japan terrorists use sarin in subway attack
Funny you should mention this. I was in Japan at the time. Interesting time.

After the first attack, the police and media jumped on a guy who had some chemicals in his apartment. They had their man! He was villanized. It was ugly. It wasn't him.

Later, the big attack in the subway. Shocking. The police surrounded the cult's headquarters. Investigations found more shocking things. Arrests were made.

There are similarities to the "War on Terror" such as Fanatical Religious Beliefs (I will refrain from mentioning that 'Creation Science' borders on the fanatical)

However the response was different. Mainly it was treated as a crimminal act. The leaders were rounded up and their trials are now progressing. Extraordinary actions in secret were not required.
Bush's "War on Terror", seems to be neglecting rounding up the leaders.

[Elvis]

TB:
on Habeas Corpus, you have merely offered,
It has since been recognized as a necessarry wrong,
You have not denied that Habeas Corpus has been suspended (in the case of persons labeled as "terrorists" by the president).
Therefore I claim the victory in your challenge:
Why don't you list a single freedom Cheney has taken from us?
Just one.
But I will go further. The right to privacy. wpost article
President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.
Again your rubuttal that my "freedom to call terrorists" doesn't count as a true freedom misses the point. The issue here is the skirting of the law- a law designed to protect our freedom. Some politicians in the past wisely decided that there needs to be a check on the executive branch when conducting surveillance. We are a nation of laws.
Please concede the point.

The Downing Street Memo:
Yes, there is a difference in usage of English between the US and Britain [and even within, of course]. Some are very subtle. However, to say such variations exist does not prove that this [i.e. the Memo] is an example of that.
Here is a link to a veteran of the CIA speaking out about this issue link. In it this veteran called his colleague in Britain and asked if the usage was similar to the US. It was and is.
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. It means what it says. Our policy wasn't being guided by facts.
TB:
But more to the point the intel that was used was in the public domain long before Bush took office
Indeed, it was quite stale, yet presented as so fresh. I believe Blair used some college boy's old paper for his "45 minute" alert. [Blair has paid his political price. Bush will, too.]

Another point for me.

Weapons of Mass Destruction:
"approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent" had been found scattered throughout the country.
About as stale as the intel used to justify the war.
Link to WMD wiki here
The wiki has some interesting tidbits of US, UK and other countries supplying Saddam with material. Those were the good ole days.

Like most inhabitants of planet Earth, I was correct in feeling unthreatened by Saddam. I am now quite unfazed by anything Hillary or Obamma say about Iran. More people die from alcohol poisoning than terrorists.

I had floated a real fear of mine- that the war's real motive was to secure oil, or failing that, deny China and Russia access to it. Thoughts? Opinions?

Attorney General Firings:
my point:these firings are evidence of using the law enforcement arm of the country to political ends. You can see the danger in that, of course.
your rebuttal:
As for the firings of the attorneys, since they were political appointees, that their firings may have been policitical is of no consequence.
Members of the president's own party disagree with you. The use [abuse] of law enforcement for political ends is of consequence. Had Clinton done something similar you would have been justified in outrage. Please concede the point.

[elvis]

TB,
This thread is getting old. I thank you for your many insights (truly) I am grateful for the chance to review the Constitution and especially for the info on Clinton dismissing attorneys that were investigating him. I am outraged. As I said, I am not particularly fond of him. His recent criticism of the commuting of Libby's sentence smelled bad.

As for the war not being about oil, well, that's what they say.
Pax