David Woolner

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow
Roosevelt Institute Profile

Recent Posts by David Woolner

  • Is the Drought a New Dust Bowl? No, Thanks to the New Deal

    Jul 26, 2012David Woolner

    When FDR tackled an environmental crisis, he didn't just put people to work to fix it in the short-term -- he solved it for the long-run.

    When FDR tackled an environmental crisis, he didn't just put people to work to fix it in the short-term -- he solved it for the long-run.

    The severe drought that has afflicted more than half of the country this summer has led some commentators to wonder whether the country might be headed for another Dust Bowl. The consensus among most experts is that the answer is no – and the reasons for this stem in part from the lessons learned and the actions taken by the Roosevelt administration in response to the unprecedented environmental crisis that the nation suffered in the early to mid-1930s.

    As those who lived through it will attest, the Dust Bowl was unlike any previous environmental catastrophe the United States had ever experienced. The dust storms it generated buried homes and farm equipment, killed livestock, and on some occasions even darkened cities on the East Coast. The dust storms also represented a serious health risk to humans. At the height of the crisis, for example, physicians across the Midwest reported thousands of cases of what came to be known as “dust pneumonia,” which sometimes resulted in the death of the patient. The Dust Bowl laid bare millions of acres of farmland, left roughly half a million Americans homeless, and forced hundreds of thousands of people off the land. Indeed, between 1932 and 1940 it is estimated that 2.5 million people abandoned the plains for other regions of the country, with an estimated three to four hundred thousand heading to California alone.

    In response to this unprecedented social and environmental catastrophe, the Roosevelt administration established a number of programs, such as the Resettlement Administration, that were designed to help those who had been driven off the land by the disaster. But it also recognized that the only way to deal with the crisis over the long term was to attack the root causes. In other words, it had to address the environmental degradation that led to the conditions that helped give rise to the Dust Bowl in the first place. Foremost among these was the state of the soil, which, thanks to over-plowing and grazing, the planting of inappropriate crops, and poor husbandry, was in abysmal shape.

    Thanks in part to his experience as an amateur farmer and forester, FDR recognized that the key issue was soil conservation, and he established the Soil Erosion Service within his first six months in office. This initiative, which in 1935 became the Soil Conservation Service and later the Natural Resources Conservation Service, marked the first major federal commitment to the preservation of privately held natural resources. Under the auspices of this program, farmers learned new agricultural techniques, such as contour plowing, that helped preserve and protect the fertility of the soil. Equally significant was FDR’s initiation of the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. Here the goal was to create a “shelter belt” from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border. This program literally changed the face of the nation. Over the course of the next seven years, the U.S Forestry Service, working in conjunction with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the newly established Works Progress Administration (WPA), and local farmers, planted roughly 220 million trees, creating 18,000 miles of windbreaks on some 30,000 farms.

    It is thanks to the New Deal’s establishment of the Soil Conservation Service and the planting of the Great Plains Shelter Belt that we have not experienced another Dust Bowl—even in the face of such severe conditions as this summer’s dry spell or the even more extensive drought the nation experienced in 1956. As was typical of most New Deal infrastructure projects, the programs the government designed to combat this unprecedented environmental disaster were not developed merely as a means to provide jobs and short-term work relief to those who were suffering unemployment. Rather, they were part of a large-scale effort to bring about a long-term solution to a very difficult environmental problem. This emphasis on long-term environmental planning, which recognizes the need create a balance between stewardship and managed exploitation and which sees the federal government as playing a crucial role in establishing the parameters of that balance, is now referred to as sustainable development.

    In confronting the terrible conditions of the Dust Bowl, FDR once urged the American people to be ready “to fit and not fight the ways of nature.” Today, as we face the consequences of what the vast majority of scientific opinion recognizes as climate change—whatever its immediate causes—we would do well build on this lesson. If nothing else, this summer’s drought should remind us of our responsibility to ourselves and to our children to protect and preserve both our environment and our natural resources. With the right vision and political will, we too could turn the onset of the Great Drought of 2012 into an opportunity to provide millions of unemployed Americans work in developing green energy while at the same time building a cleaner, more secure future for our children. 

    David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

     

    Drought land image via Shutterstock.com.

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  • Is Obama Using FDR's Playbook in Attacking Mitt Romney With Bain Capital?

    Jul 16, 2012David Woolner

    Obama's attacks on Bain follow in FDR's 1936 re-election footsteps except for one key aspect: a full-throated case for government.

    Yes, there are still determined groups…[who would]…steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to carry the property and the interests entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics…

    Obama's attacks on Bain follow in FDR's 1936 re-election footsteps except for one key aspect: a full-throated case for government.

    Yes, there are still determined groups…[who would]…steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to carry the property and the interests entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics…

    The principle that they would instill into government if they succeed in seizing power is well shown by the principles which many of them have instilled into their own affairs: autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment. Autocrats in smaller things, they seek autocracy in bigger things. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

    In seeking to identify Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as an unfeeling member of the nation’s wealthy elite, President Obama is using tactics reminiscent of those used by Franklin Roosevelt in his own bid for re-election in 1936. In that campaign, FDR sought to draw a clear distinction between what he and his Democratic colleagues represented—the interests of the average working American—versus what he saw as the Republican promotion of a return to the economic status quo. But unlike FDR, President Obama is shying away the argument that government must be the countervailing force against entrenched financial interests.

    By 1936, conservative critics of the New Deal had launched a persistent and hard-hitting campaign against FDR's policies, labeling them un-American and contrary to the Constitution. At the forefront of this effort was the American Liberty League, a privately funded anti-government organization that ruthlessly attacked his economic policies as little more than a drive to usurp the constitution and take the United States down the path toward socialism. But thanks to the fact that the Liberty League was never a truly populist movement (although it tried to portray itself as such), as well as the fact that it was financed by some of the most powerful business interests in the county, including the leaders of the DuPont Company, Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, and a number of other wealthy individuals and corporations, FDR was able to discredit its efforts as little more than a poorly concealed attempt to restore the country to the laissez-faire economic policies of the past.

    In doing so, FDR reminded the American people again and again that the rightwing drive to restore these policies was not based on the elite’s desire to protect and promote free enterprise, but rather based on their unabashed desire to protect and promote their own wealth and power. Under such an economic system, which had been in place during the 1920s, the “savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age,” what FDR rightly called “other people’s money,” were the tools with which the economic elite dug itself in. Indeed, as he went on in perhaps his most famous 1936 campaign address, it was critical not to forget how:

    Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

    In our own era marked by declining wages, the outsourcing of jobs, and an ever-increasing share of the nation’s wealth residing in the hands of the financial barons of Wall Street—whose willingness to risk “other people’s money” has hardly diminished—FDR’s assault on what he identified as “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties” rings as true today as it did in the mid 1930s.

    It is for this reason that President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record as the head of Bain Capital have proven so effective. Having been burned in the 2007-2008 financial collapse that led to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people still harbor a good deal of hostility towards the bonus- and bailout-receiving bank executives whose reckless behavior brought the nation and the rest of the world to the brink of economic ruin. Based on the response to the president’s efforts to paint Romney as one of these elite, it also appears that they remain skeptical of the financial titans' ability to pull us out of the Great Recession. What is missing from the president's attacks, however, is the one key element that FDR used in convincing the American people that they should support his re-election in 1936: the clear and unequivocal case for government.

    In the wake of the more than 30-year assault on government launched by Ronald Reagan in 1980, President Obama and the Democratic Party may be loath to use the case for government as part of their strategy to win the 2012 election. But as FDR pointed out in the mid 1930s, we have now reached a point like the 1920s where for too many of us “the political equality we once had won” has become “meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” Why? Because, as was the case in America’s gilded age, “a small group” has “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other  people's labor—other people's lives.”  As a consequence, we also find, as FDR did, that “for too many of us life…[is] no longer free; liberty no longer real; men…[can] no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.”

    To counter such entrenched economic interests, FDR insisted that “the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government,” and he urged his fellow citizens to vote for him and his party as the best means to ensure that government by, of, and for the people would continue to flourish. For, as he often noted, what was really at stake in this struggle between the average citizen and the interests of the wealthy was the state of democracy itself. In the same election speech, for example, he also observed:

    Unhappy events abroad have re-taught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself.

    The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

    FDR’s belief in the need for government to serve as an active instrument of social and economic justice won him the greatest electoral landslide in American history. It also helped preserve American democracy in an age when democratic government was under siege worldwide. Surely these are two lessons the Obama administration might turn to as it struggles to win the hearts and minds of the American people at this critical moment in our history.

    David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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  • President Obama and FDR: Rumors of Political Demise at the Hands of the Supreme Court Greatly Exaggerated

    Jun 28, 2012David Woolner

    Despite the handwringing, neither president suffered a huge political blow at the hands of the Supreme Court.

    Despite the handwringing, neither president suffered a huge political blow at the hands of the Supreme Court.

    There is no question that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act represents a major victory for Barak Obama’s presidency. Struggling in the polls thanks to the continued sluggish performance of the economy, a defeat on the constitutionality of this signature piece of legislation had led many analysts to predict that, had the decision gone the other way, President Obama’s ability to effect further change would be finished. Others argued that a ruling striking down the health care law would have meant the end of President Obama’s political career. But if history is any guide, these dire predictions may have been too severe.

    Roughly 75 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt was engaged in his own struggle with the Supreme Court, it appeared for a time as if the fate of his presidency—and the New Deal—also hung in the balance. In May of 1935, for example, the Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, two key provisions of the New Deal. FDR was livid and, fearing for the fate of such landmark pieces of legislation as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and Social Security Act, he eventually decided to take on the Supreme Court by unleashing his famous “Court Packing Plan” in February 1937. The plan argued that the president should be allowed to add up to six new judges to the bench in cases where a sitting justice who had served at least ten years on the bench refused to retire after reaching his seventieth birthday.

    The president was perfectly within his legal bounds to request a change in the make-up of the Court, and he certainly was not alone in his call for judicial reform. But given the widespread support for the make-up at the time and the means by which the president unveiled his proposal—it was launched without warning and without any effort to secure congressional support before it was put forward—the plan soon ran into fierce opposition, even from some members of Roosevelt’s own party. As time went on, what congressional support there was for the plan eroded, and after some months the bill was quietly allowed to die in the Senate before it ever came to a vote.

    Most historians agree that the launch and demise of FDR’s court packing scheme was a major political blow which, when coupled with the Roosevelt recession of 1937, resulted in the strengthening of the anti-New Deal coalition in Congress in the midterm elections of 1938. This certainly made it harder for FDR to push further New Deal reforms in the coming years, but it did not bring about the judicial reversals that FDR feared. On the contrary, from that moment forward the Court upheld every New Deal statute that came before it, launching a new era of jurisprudence that fundamentally altered its character and the nature of its decisions.

    The setbacks that President Roosevelt experienced at the hands of the Court in the mid 1930s, then, did not result in the undermining of the New Deal. Thanks to a shift in attitude in the Court about the role of government in the maintenance of the social and economic health of the nation, we still enjoy Social Security, unemployment insurance, a federal minimum wage, and a host of other New Deal provisions. Nor did the Court’s action’s result in the political demise of Franklin Roosevelt, who would go on to win reelection to an unprecedented third and fourth terms.

    In the decades since Roosevelt’s showdown with the Supreme Court, a debate has raged about how much his decision to confront the Court may have led to the change in attitude among the justices regarding the constitutionality of the New Deal. A number of historians—and Roosevelt himself—have claimed that the president may have lost the battle but won the war. In other words, it was the pressure from the president that led to the shift in the Court’s outlook.

    But more recent scholarship tends to support the idea that the Court’s about-face reflects the slow evolution of 20th century constitutional law that predates the New Deal. The court, in essence, was heading toward supporting greater federal intervention in the economy, but had not quite reached this point when FDR launched his flurry of programs and reforms. One strong argument in favor of this view stems from the fact that in early 1937—before FDR announced his court reform proposal—the court reversed itself and ruled in favor of two other New Deal provisions that had been brought before it. Ironically, one of the justices who changed his position was Owen Roberts, a conservative Hoover appointee who would continue to serve on the court until 1945. Given his change in attitude, it is Associate Justice Owen Roberts—a man whom the current chief Justice John G. Roberts (no relation) apparently admires—who is most often credited with saving the New Deal or, as was said at the time, carrying out “the switch in time that saved nine.” Today, it appears that it was Chief Justice Roberts, who cast the decisive vote in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, who will make it possible for millions of uninsured Americans to finally gain access to what many consider a fundamental human right: affordable health care. 

    David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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  • The Senate’s Dimon Hearing Was Sadly No Pecora Commission

    Jun 14, 2012David Woolner

    Rather than digging up the truth behind Wall Street's behavior, Congress seems content to let the possibility of another crash loom.

    Rather than digging up the truth behind Wall Street's behavior, Congress seems content to let the possibility of another crash loom.

    Jamie Dimon’s testimony before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday has led some critics to charge that the Senators tasked with getting to the bottom of what led to JPMorgan Chase’s staggering $2-to-$5 billion dollar loss in the derivatives market have dropped the ball. In spite of Mr. Dimon’s frank admission that JPMorgan Chase, like the nation’s other big banks, was sometimes led astray by “greed, arrogance, hubris [and] lack of attention to detail,” and his additional observation that the instigation of the yet-to-be imposed Volcker Rule could have reduced the losses, Dimon faced few really tough questions. As a result, we learned little, if anything, from the hearings about the true nature of the decisions that led to the loss, or how Mr. Dimon and the CEOs of our nation’s other too big to fail banks might avoid such large losses in the future. This is particularly important if what he calls the “vague and unnecessary” Volcker Rule is ultimately watered down to the point of ineffectiveness.

    Given the level of campaign contributions members of the Senate Banking Committee—on both sides of the aisle—have received from the banking industry, perhaps we should not be surprised by the coddling Mr. Dimon received in the Senate hearing room. But things were not always so cordial. Roughly 80 years ago, in the wake of the 1929 financial sector crash, the very same Senate Banking Committee, under the leadership of the committee’s indomitable chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora, excoriated members of Wall Street’s financial elite. The result was a series of revelations about the behavior—what Mr. Dimon accurately calls the “greed, arrogance [and] hubris”—of Wall Street that outraged the nation and shocked Congress into action.

    In the spring of 1933, for example, under the grilling many top executives received at the hands of Pecora, who cut his teeth as a prosecutor as the Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York, the Senate Banking Committee learned that top executives at National City Bank (now Citibank) had bundled a series of bad loans to Latin American countries into securities and sold them to unsuspecting investors. The Committee also learned that these same executives had received large interest-free loans from National City’s coffers and that, as J.P. Morgan, Jr. admitted, it was fairly common practice among the members of Wall Street’s banking and financial elite to keep a list of influential “friends” who were given the opportunity to purchase stocks at drastically reduced prices. Most shocking, however, was the revelation that Mr. Morgan, who as head of the nation’s largest bank was the Warren Buffet of his day, had paid no income taxes between 1930 and 1933. Nor was he alone, for the committee soon learned that many of the nation’s other top bankers had also paid little or no income tax in the years since the 1929 crash.

    These disclosures, coupled with additional revelations about excessive salaries and bonuses, outraged the public and helped inspire the incoming Roosevelt administration and Congress to push through some of the most important banking and financial reforms in American history. It is thanks in part to the work of the Senate Banking Committee, then, that the nation benefitted from such reforms as the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking and gave us the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; the 1933 Truth in Securities Act, which required the securities industry to provide potential investors with complete and accurate financial information about any financial product individuals or firms might wish to purchase; and the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act, which created the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    Of course, the vast majority of the financial sector in 1933 and '34 vehemently opposed these reforms. But thanks to the willingness of the Senate Banking Committee to root out and expose many of the unethical practices that contributed to the collapse of the American economy, all Americans, from Wall Street to Main Street, were able to reap the benefits of a properly regulated financial sector for decades to come.

    Today, most mainstream economists agree that it has been our return to the reckless and largely unregulated financial practices we saw in the 1920s, coupled with the dismantling of such key New Deal reforms as the Glass-Stegall Act, that led to the 2007-08 collapse of the world’s economy and the onset of the Great Recession. Yet the gentle treatment Mr. Dimon received at the hands of the current Senate Banking Committee pales in comparison to the penetrating line of inquiry pursued by its predecessors. This is unfortunate, for it represents yet another lost opportunity at the hands of our dysfunctional government to provide the kind of leadership required to bring about meaningful financial reform. Sadly, it seems that we would rather run the risk of another financial collapse than confront the truth about the unsustainable nature of an industry driven solely by the desire to accumulate vast quantities of wealth by whatever means necessary, no matter what the cost to the millions of Americans who still believe in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.

    David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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  • Bloomberg's Soda Ban Recalls New Deal-era Nutrition Programs

    Jun 1, 2012David Woolner

    Despite conservatives' recoiling at food and nutrition standards set by the government, they have a long and important history.

    Despite conservatives' recoiling at food and nutrition standards set by the government, they have a long and important history.

    New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent announcement that his administration plans to ban the sale of large size sugary drinks to combat the growing problem of obesity has once again brought the question of the government’s role in nutrition and public health to the forefront of the nation’s discourse. In a similar move earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that it was issuing new rules for the nation’s subsidized school meal program, which would add more fruit and green vegetables to school breakfasts and lunches, also as a means of combatting the growing problem of obesity among our nation’s youth.

    Most Americans are highly supportive of these moves and regard the school meal program—formally the National School Lunch Program—with favor. But like so many of the social programs that we now take for granted, few Americans probably realize that its history and its relationship to concerns over the nourishment of the nation’s children is rooted in the New Deal.

    Prior to the New Deal, at the beginning of the 20th century, it had become more and more obvious that millions of Americans were suffering from malnutrition. This fact was confirmed by the initiation of the military draft in World War I, where it was determined that a shocking number of young men across the country were ineligible for military service due to their poor physical condition. Equally important was the simultaneous realization that widespread malnutrition among the nation’s school children was having an enormous negative effect on the ability of millions of young people to achieve basic academic standards. Armed with this alarming information, an emerging class of experts trained in the science of nutrition began to argue that it was time to instigate programs aimed at alleviating this critical problem.

    One of the suggested reforms was the initiation of a national school lunch program designed to help lessen the problem of hunger among the nation’s youth. The idea of serving hot lunches to hungry students in the nation’s public schools was in fact not new, as many progressive-minded reformers had been advocating for it for some time. One result of these early efforts was the establishment of privately funded school lunch programs in a number of American cities, including New York and Chicago, which by the early 1920s had been partially embraced by their local school boards. However, it would not be until the onset of the Great Depression and the subsequent arrival of the New Deal that we would see direct federal involvement in the issue.

    Like many of the locally based public or private relief programs that were in place by the early 1930s, most establshed local and state school lunch programs found it impossible to continue in the face of the crisis that now confronted the nation. The devastating drop in local revenue due to the drastic downturn in the economy was one reason; a second was the inability of the millions of impoverished students to pay even the meager “at cost” fees that many districts charged in exchange for school lunches.

    The economic collapse also meant that a good share of the nation’s farm production went begging for a market. Moreover, as surpluses of farm products continued to mount, their prices declined to a point where farm income provided only a meager subsistence. It soon became apparent that one way to tackle the growing problem of malnutrition among Depression-era young people was to link it to agricultural aid through the school lunch program. In 1935, therefore, under the auspices of an Amendment to Agricultural Adjustment Act, Congress passed Public Law 320, which created the Commodity Donation Program. Under its terms, the Secretary of Agriculture was provided the funds and charged with the responsibility for removing “price-depressing surplus foods from the market through government purchase” and disposing of this surplus “through exports and domestic donations to consumers in such a way as not to interfere with normal sales."

    Needy families and school lunch programs became constructive outlets for the commodities purchased by the Department of Agriculture under the terms of this legislation. And as the food used for school lunches would not otherwise be purchased in the marketplace, farmers benefitted by obtaining an outlet for their products at a reasonable price. The purchase and distribution of the food was assigned to the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, which had been established in 1933 as the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to distribute surplus dairy products, pork, and wheat to the needy. By March 1937, nearly 4,000 schools were receiving food and serving 342,031 children daily. Two years later, the number of schools participating had grown to just over 14,000 and the number of children being served had climbed to 892,259.

    As was the case with many New Deal programs, the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation employed special representatives in each state to work with state and local school authorities, parent teacher associations, and similar organizations in an effort to expand the school lunch program. These efforts were enormously successful, and by 1942 the number of schools participating increased by over 75,000 and the number of pupils participating exceeded 6 million.

    As a further benefit to the economy, many of the individuals involved in preparing and distributing the school lunches were employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Community Service Division of the WPA employed thousands of needy women in nearly every city, town, and rural community of the country. The supervisory staff chosen to spearhead the effort to prepare and distribute the lunches was most often chosen from people who had special knowledge in the preparation of food. In addition, manuals were developed at the state and district supervisory levels, which did much to improve the quality of the meals served as well as to set standards for equipment, sanitation, and safety in the lunch program. A further benefit of the WPA’s involvement in the program was that much of the labor was provided without cost to a school district. As such, lunch prices were held to a minimum and more children were able to participate, with the result that the program expanded rapidly throughout the nation.

    Not surprisingly, the onset of World War II had a significant effect on the school lunch program. The rise of defense industries, for example, resulted in a sharp drop in the number of people employed by the WPA, and in early 1943 the agency's activities came to a close. In the meantime, the enormous amount of food required to support the U.S. Armed Forces and the Allied war effort soon depleted farm surpluses, and the quantities of food available for the school lunch programs declined sharply. But by this point federal government support for the school lunch program had gained enormous popularity, both among the public and in Congress, and in 1943 the latter voted to authorize the funding needed to continue the program for another year. Similar laws were enacted in 1944 and 1945, so that the school lunch program continued in spite of the demands of the war.

    Congress finally decided to make the program permanent with the passage of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which among other things declared that “as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities” the federal government would provide assistance to the States to provide “an adequate supply of food and other facilities for the establishment, maintenance, operation and expansion of nonprofit school lunch programs.”

    The national school lunch program that emerged from the New Deal is just one more example of how the sensible use of nation’s national resources—including government revenue—may be used to improve our nation’s economic and physical well-being. In the years since the New Deal, however, the school lunch program has often come under assault from conservatives as too expensive. One result was an effort to privatize much of the program in the 1970s and '80s. As a result, many districts adopted “kid friendly” fast foods menus of pizza and fries while allowing vending machines – which dispensed the very sugary drinks Mayor Bloomberg is now limiting – to be placed within school buildings. Most experts now agree that this was a mistake and that, as was the case in the 1930s, it is critical for those in a position of responsibility to ensure that the food served to our young people meets basic nutritional standards.

    Given all of this, it would appear that attacks on government nutrition programs follow the same pattern of our abandonment of the Glass-Steagall Act, our move away from proper regulation of the banking and financial sector, and our refusal to recognize the short- and long-term benefits of a massive infrastructure building program. We turn away from the common-sense ideas of the New Deal at our peril.

    David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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