FIRST YEAR OF MR ROOSEVELT

Waipa Post, Volume 48, Issue 3471, 26 May 1934, Page 10

FIRST YEAR OF MR ROOSEVELT

CHANGING STRUCTURE OF

AMERICA

THE REVOLUTIONARY CHAPTER.

LOYALTY OF THE WEST. On 4th March President Roosevelt completed 12 months of office, and the time has therefore come to revieAv the results of his first year’s work. Whether we agree with Mr Roosevelt or not, there can be no doubt that this first year will form one of the most revolutionary chapters in the history of the post-war Avorld. Mr Roosevelt has thoroughly broken Avith the past. Like Andrew Jackson, he has known how to rally the West; he has all Andrew Jackson’s prejudice of “ financial interests ”; but there is something more in him. Mr Roosevelt hopes to change the A\Tiole structure of America.

The question confronting the American people last March, when one out of every three of the normally employed Avere cut of work, Avas Avhether their political system Avould folloav the economic system into collapse. President Roosevelt saved the body politic. He did so by assujming the responsibility for Avhat one of his advisers has called a reconstructed individualism. It is President Roosevelt’s distinctive contribution that he has turned American hopes of relief, recovery, and reform to a Federal Government Avhich a pioneering tradition of aggressive individualism bald hitherto taught them simply to tolerate. These three R.’s of relief, recovery, and reform are in no order at all. They have never been properly coordinated, nor have they been rationalised as steps to autai’chy or an approach to a sane economic internationalism. They have tripped each other up so frequently that the picture of the first year’s achievements is still blurred.' But all three have been dramatised by the President’s personality with the object of restoring a national morale Avhich had become disintegrated under the hammer bloAvs of America’s Avorst de-

pression

GOVERNMENT SPENDING. , First among the President’s striking departures was the opening of the Federal Government’s coffers to relief. President Hoover set his face sternly against State charity. His inflexibility inducted the Red Cross to refuse to distribute twenty-five million dollars Avhich Congress Avas prepared l tc vote for relief. The production of credits—yes, even for the feeding of farm livestock. But that sense of individual responsibility which had been almost sanctified by a pioneer background would be undermined by helping the destitute farmers out of the national exchequer. So private and municipal charity had been almost pumped dry Avhen Mr Roosevelt became President. President Roosevelt’s conversion to the concept of free Government spending and maximum Government relief did not come immediately. It Avas hoped at first that reform would bring recovery and that recovery would save much relief. But reform was too deflationary, recovery consequently too slow. The former got off to a bad, because vengeful, start. M3r Roosevelt’s electrifying denunciations of the “money-changers” in his

Inaugural was perhaps responsible. It articulated the rumbling anger of the “forgGtten” farmers and workers who had been the losers in, and victims of, Ajmerica’s great scramble for self-enrichment. Reform has therefore, been regulatory and punitive. Day after day exposures of past misdeeds at Senatorial investigations have blackened the newspapers. A threat of curbs on profits enveloped business before it had had much chance to return to profit making. Financial legislation had been wholly restrictive.

AWAY WITH FISCAL RECTITUDE.

So the President on the eve of this extremely severe winter threw overboard his last scruples of fiscal rectitude, as viewed by the orthodox. The Government is now spending twice as much money as it is receiving in current revenues. The edict has gone forth that none shall starve. But spending back to prosperity is accompanied by evidence of increasing assurances that the purpose behind it is to encourage private enterprise into activity. This effort to recapture business confidence is having marked success, as the huge repatriation of American funds from Europe testifies. It is the outstanding sign as the Administration’s first year draws to a close. Yet reform comes first, last, and all the time with this New Deal Administration. Mr Roosevelt went to the Wihite House with a predilection for some form of social planning in co-operation-—the word he most often uses with reconstructed industry. Perhaps the project closest to his heart is the ambitious schqme of social and economic development under way in the Tennessee Valley.

This is under an authority “clothed with the power of government, but possessed with the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise.” If success attends this social laboratory the President hopes to “march on step by step in a like development of other great territorial units.” Like Tcpsy, the United States has just growed, the President thinks. It must be made to re-grow.

LONG TERM PLANNING

Long-term planning called for more than laboratories. It called for the reorganisation of a chaotic and jungle-like industry into trade associations, pledged against unfair practices, and of exuberant agriculture into co-operatives pledged to control production. Thfere has been a 20 per cent, betterment in industrial conditions since March, though there are still, according to the American Federation of Labour, ten and a-half million unemployed, a residue which in part may be due to “chiselling” by many N.R.A. films. Under the A.A.A. the price objective is to give the farmer a return to his pre-war purchasingpower, and in the last twelve months the farmer has climbed from 50 to 60 per cent, of this parity. Together with the bounty-received for reducing acreage the additional income has been sufficient to keep the farmers of the great American W|est, who hold the balance of political power and know it, firmly attached to the Roosevelt column.