Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.

President Obama is right to hold Congress accountable for the shortcomings that many progressives have identified in his legislation to date. He is also correct when he says that the unprecedented use of the filibuster in recent years has had a profound negative effect on the workings of our democracy. Given the nature our political system, the demise of the liberal republican, and the willingness of the Republican Party to pursue an obstructionist political strategy, his passage of the stimulus package, the health care bill and financial reform deserve at least a measure of qualified support among the progressive community.

He is dead wrong, however, when he says that FDR waited for six months to act on what he termed an "unprecedented national emergency." No president before or since acted with greater speed and with greater urgency than FDR. Within hours of his inauguration, FDR had declared a bank holiday to deal with the collapse of the US banking system, called Congress back into emergency session, and ordered his Brains Trust to work 24/7 with outgoing officials from the Hoover Treasury to come up with emergency banking legislation. That legislation would be ready for passage on the first day of the emergency session of Congress, March 9, just five days after FDR was sworn into office. He then went on to oversee the passage of 14 additional major pieces of legislation, including the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment from commercial banking and brought us the FDIC; the 1933 Securities Act, which set the stage for the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934; the Home Owners Loan Act, which saved 1 million homes and in the next two years would re-finance over 20% of all urban mortgages in the US; the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, which created the TVA and provided flood control, electricity and jobs for thousands in the Southeast; and the creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and much more.

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Incredibly, all of this was accomplished within the first hundred days of FDR taking office -- and no other president has come close to this record. Certainly FDR deserves a great deal of credit for this remarkable achievement. But so too does the US Congress, which in 1933 understood that it had a responsibility to follow FDR's most popular line in his first inaugural: "this nation asks for action, and action now."

Unfortunately for all of us, but especially for President Obama, who is no doubt sincere in his desire to move the country toward a shared sense of economic prosperity, the Congress he inherited in 2009 was nothing like the Congress that FDR faced in 1933. In FDR's day, some of his strongest critics were conservative Democrats, while some of his strongest supporters were liberal Republicans. Congress also understood and agreed that the country was indeed facing an "unprecedented national emergency," and as such tended to put the needs of the nation ahead of partisan political interests. In this much healthier political environment, the filibuster was a rare event and it was not only possible, but fairly common, for New Deal legislation to pass with both Republican and Democratic support. That is something for which all of us can be thankful, as many of the measures passed by Congress and the President more than seventy years ago have helped stop today's Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.

Obama should heed Keynes's warning to FDR: You can't get reform until you have recovery, which means, in a word, JOBS.

After the "shellacking" the Democrats and Obama took in November's election, it is clear that the old time religion of classical economics will come back into fashion. The result is likely to be further economic disaster.

I am not surprised by the Obama administration's failure to win over the American people to a progressive economic program. On pages 13 to 18 of my book "The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity," I compared what I expected of Obama vis-à-vis what Roosevelt did in the first few years of his administration. I cited a letter written by Keynes and published in December 1933 in the New York Times in which Keynes warned the president that there were two goals -- recovery and overdue social reforms. But Keynes warned that if one goes for the social reforms before full economic recovery was achieved, then they "will upset the confidence of business... And it will confuse thought." Instead, Keynes recommended concentrating on policies for recovery. Once the president succeeds at achieving that goal, reforms will come much more easily. I suggested that if Obama followed the "jump start" advice of his economic advisors for a small stimulus program just to get the private economy turned around, then the nation would not get the full recovery we needed. All reform, as well as full recovery, would be jeopardized.

Given the current politics of austerity, we face maybe a decade more of economic disaster. Progressive economists must get out in front with Keynes-style economic thinking -- for Keynes' analytical framework is the only complete one that is not just a variant of classical theory. Keynes' theory of liquidity can deal with achieving full employment, correcting international trade imbalances, preventing inflation and deflation, and understanding of the role of financial markets in a money using entrepreneurial economy (in other words, an economy where entrepreneurs organize production and exchange transactions via monetary contracts for performance and payment in the future).

It is necessary to immediately put forth a consistent plan for not only the domestic economy, but also internationally in order to end huge trade imbalances. Mr. Geithner's call for devaluing the dollar relative to the Chinese yuan will not do it. Nor will relying on Old or New Keynesian variants of classical economics, such as Stiglitz's asymmetric information or some other MIT or Harvard New Keynesianism. All of these mislabeled "Keynesian" models assume that the economic system is classical except for some presumed ad hoc restraint on the flexibility of prices or on obtaining complete information about the future as determined by today's market fundamentals. In the long run, all these mainstream "Keynesian" models will create full employment when price and wage fixities are removed and full information about the future is provided. These theories state that it is only the ad hoc constraints that prevent short-run optimal results. Therefore, the implication is to get government out of the way and the market, in the long run, will prove to be optimal. Keynes's response to these classical theory's long run conclusions was, "In the long run we are all dead."

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My book provides a complete alternative to the various classical models that are going to dominate Washington in the next few years as Obama tries to compromise with the conservatives and Tea Party people.

The American people's votes in the midterms are being interpreted as saying no to more deficits -- but what they really want is prosperity and jobs for all who are willing to work. So we must show them why these goals require government deficits. We have to get the kind of progressive programs of the Roosevelt tradition into the public forum and create an economic foundation that provides a good future for years to come.

Until we can provide a single, consistent program for economic prosperity, all the other progressive goals will remain in the dustbin. The conservatives and their classical theories will dominate, even though they are wrong -- because, as they say in politics, "You cannot beat Somebody with Nobody." The only body of economic thinking available that can beat classical thinking is Keynes' original analytical foundation -- not Samuelson's Keynesianism or Stiglitz's New Keynesianism.

The original Keynes analysis stated that the economic future is always uncertain in the sense that it cannot be reliably predicted on the basis of current and past market data. Thus, consumers and entrepreneurs "know" that they do not know the future. All classical theories, on the other hand, presume the future can be reliably known by analyzing existing market data.

In Keynes' analysis, when people are optimistic about the future they believe they will always have enough contractual cash inflows to match their contractual cash outflows, so they are wiling to contract to buy more goods and services. The more people fear an uncertain future, on the other hand, the more liquidity they will demand, for liquidity means one has or can obtain enough cash to meet all known and possible future contractual cash outflow obligations. In other words, when people fear uncertainty they demand more liquidity, rather than goods and services. And given all the cash bankers and businesses are sitting on, no one can doubt that the problem is one of too much uncertainty and private demands for liquidity, with the resulting lack of aggregate demand for goods and services.

Paul Davidson is the Editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and the author of The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity.

Setting the record straight will protect FDR's greatest achievements.

Whether or not right-wingers such as Fox News "entertainer and enlightener" Glenn Beck, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and Texas Governor Rick Perry actually uphold Ronald Reagan's conservatism, they are clearly sustaining his practice of using and abusing the past to reshape popular memory and the politics of the present. In particular, they're mimicking his efforts to hijack the Founding Fathers and Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Beck and Company have actually broken with Reagan's perverse "historical labors" in a very significant way.

In their respective books -- "Broke", "Saving Freedom", and "FED UP!" -- Beck, DeMint, and Perry, like their late Republican hero Reagan, celebrate the Founders as freedom-loving, God-fearing, small-government and States' Rights folk. They variably ignore or downplay not only their revolutionary sins such as slavery, but also their finest revolutionary commitments and accomplishments like the separation of church and state. However, in contrast to Reagan, who did his best (worst?) to try to lay claim to FDR to historically bolster his own political agenda, Beck and Co. portray FDR and the New Dealers as subversives who ruined American life and liberties.

Reagan, himself a former New Deal Democrat, knew how much most Americans loved FDR and continued to revere his name. So he regularly sought to appropriate Roosevelt's words in his campaigns, even as he set about trying to undo, and suppress the memory of, what FDR and his fellow citizens achieved in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples abound. Recall that to appeal to working and middle-class Americans, Reagan -- to the dismay of conservatives such as George Will -- enthusiastically cited and quoted both Thomas Paine and FDR in his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican National Convention. And recall that in July 1987 Reagan audaciously re-stated FDR's Four Freedoms -- freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear -- as "the freedom to work", "the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one's labor", "the freedom to own and control one's property", and "the freedom to participate in a free market."

Breaking with the Gipper, Beck and his ilk not only have no desire to lay claim to FDR's memory and legacy, they also want to bury them. Truly, they talk as if they want to march on Washington and level the Roosevelt Memorial in favor of erecting a monument to the Gilded Age. Despite thirty years of conservative politics and policies -- three decades of intensifying insecurities, deepening inequalities, and subordinating the public good to corporate priorities and private greed -- they actually assert, as DeMint himself writes, that "America is clearly sliding towards socialism." And they hold Franklin Delano Roosevelt most responsible for the slide.

Following Amity Shlaes' crackpot history of the New Deal, "The Forgotten Man", Beck, DeMint, and Perry link the New Deal to fascism (Fascism? Socialism? What's the difference? It's all godless statism) and insist that it was World War II, not the New Deal, that rescued America from the Great Depression. Here they ignore how the New Deal, by way of the CCC, WPA, and PWA, dramatically transformed and improved the American landscape; how the New Deal energetically engaged a generation in rebuilding the nation and themselves; how the New Deal empowered working people and democratically expanded the "We" in "We the People"; and how the New Deal progressively nationalized the Bill of Rights. All of this afforded Americans the wherewithal, confidence, and courage to fight Nazism, fascism, and Japanese imperialism and extend and deepen freedom, equality, and democracy overseas and at home.

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In the name of the Four Freedoms, 16,000,000 Americans donned uniforms to fight fascism in the 1940s. But DeMint apparently wants us to forget that. You can hear it when he states unabashedly: "Socialists are now marching under the banner of a new secular-progressive style of freedom: the freedom from responsibility, the freedom to behave destructively without moral judgment, the freedom from risk and failure, the freedom from want, the freedom from religion, and the freedom to have material equality with those who work and accomplish more."

Moreover, Beck and his buddies have nothing to say about the G.I. Bill that helped turn the Greatest Generation into the American middle class of the 1950s and 1960s. Sounding like American Liberty Leaguers of the 1930s, Beck and Co. also go on to lambaste Social Security as both the source of Americans' loss of freedom and -- failing to mention things like the Reagan and Bush tax cuts -- the reason for the ballooning federal deficit. In that vein, Rick Perry not only exaggerates. He lies: "We are fed up that Social Security... teeter[s] on the verge of bankruptcy..."

And fancying himself a preacher -- a preacher of "frugality", I would note -- Beck charges FDR with not only leading us away from our founding principles, but also from God: "The United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which embraced personal giving and charity as fundamental. And that was the way most Americans lived: charity through voluntary giving, in service of God. Then FDR and progressives came along and changed all of that. Charity still meant fulfilling your financial obligations to a higher power, but that higher power went from being God to being the United States government."

Sure, it's all laughable as "history." But we cannot leave it at that.

Reagan knew he could not denigrate Roosevelt because Americans not only revered him, but recognized how much they owed to the President and people who fought the Great Depression and struggled against fascism. But time is passing. The Greatest Generation is passing away. And the children of that generation -- myself included -- are turning 60. To defend the great democratic advances of the 1930s and 1940s and to build upon them, we must remember what they were and how they were secured, which means we must not only speak smartly of politics and policy, but also of the past.

Indeed, let us not forget Roosevelt's words at the dedication of the FDR Library at Hyde Park on June 30, 1941:

[A] Nation must believe in three things.
It must believe in the past.
It must believe in the future
It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He serves as an historical adviser to the Four Freedoms Park project.

Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.

The success enjoyed by the Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections and the loss of the House of Representatives by the Democrats has raised questions about President Obama's future relationship with Congress. Given the sharp partisan divide that has characterized the relationship between Congressional Republicans and Democrats in the past two years, there are fears among some analysts that the next two years will be even more difficult. As such, President Obama may find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to advance even a watered-down version of his legislative agenda.

In some ways, the predicament faced by President Obama is not unlike that faced by President Roosevelt in the wake of the 1938 midterm elections. In both cases the state of the economy was a major issue. FDR had just weathered the so-called "Roosevelt recession", brought on in large part by his administration's misguided decision to cut the federal budget (and raise interest rates) after four plus years of strong economic growth.

This policy was quickly abandoned in favor of further expenditures to bolster employment and shore up the sagging economy, which brought an end to the recession and a resumption of growth. But not before FDR paid a fairly hefty political price at the polls, especially in comparison with the Democrats' stunning victories in 1932, 1934 and 1936. Indeed, for the first time in three election cycles, the Democrats actually lost seats in 1938, while the Republicans picked up eight seats in the Senate and an impressive 81 seats in the House.

Given the size of the Democratic majorities, however, even these gains were not nearly enough to bring about the Republican control of either chamber. Still, numbers can often be misleading. In spite of the fact that the Democrats continued to control both houses, FDR faced a much more difficult time with Congress from 1938 on. A good deal of this difficulty can be attributed to the political make-up of the parties themselves, which, unlike today, were much less monolithic in their outlook. On the Democratic side, for example, some of FDR's harshest critics -- particularly with respect to New Deal expenditures -- came from the conservative wing of the Democratic party. On the other hand, many of the staunchest supporters of the New Deal's social policies were Republicans, drawn from the populist/progressive wing of the Republican Party. It was the combination of liberal Democrats aligned with liberal Republicans that made much of the New Deal possible. By 1938, however, support for the New Deal began to wane. In the wake of the 1937-38 recession, the conservative wings of both parties began to coalesce into an anti-New Deal coalition that was greatly strengthened by the results of the 1938 midterm election. And it was not just the gains on the Republican side that were important -- 1938 also saw the reelection of a number of conservative Democrats, many of whom FDR had unsuccessfully tried to replace with more liberal candidates in the run up to the election.

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By 1939, the Congress FDR had to work with was a far more conservative body than that which helped him usher in the New Deal in his first term. This made it much more difficult for FDR to pursue further social reform. Aside from the G.I Bill, which was passed in 1944, no new major pieces of domestic social reform legislation were passed in the wake of the 1938 election.

This is not to say that FDR did not enjoy any additional legislative successes. On the contrary, his transformation of American foreign policy and of America's place in the world during World War II involved a number of legislative initiatives that required all the political skill he could muster. These included the revision of the Neutrality Act; the unprecedented peace and wartime expenditures that brought an end to unemployment and turned the United States into the most powerful nation on the planet; the passage of the Lend-Lease Act; the adoption of selective service; the re-organization of the executive branch and the establishment of a number of wartime boards and agencies; and shortly after his death, the creation of the United Nations Organization with the full backing of both the Republican and Democratic Party establishment.

Still, for all of this, major domestic reform for all intents and purposes was dead. Unable to move Congress toward further expansion of the New Deal at home, FDR concentrated on extending American moral, political and economic leadership abroad -- with great success.

The result -- a new multilateral world order that not only prevented a third world war, but led to perhaps the greatest period of economic expansion in history -- remains one of FDR's greatest legacies.

President Obama has made considerable, though largely unrecognized successes, to date in stemming the downward spiral of the US economy and in pushing through health and financial reform. But now prospects are bleak that the new Congress will grant him the opportunity to further his domestic agenda. Given this, perhaps he too should steal a page from FDR and shift more of his attention abroad. After nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, an enormous effort to bring about a stable and peaceful Iraq, and 60 plus years of conflict and strife between Israelis and Palestinians, using his talents as a conciliator to bring peace to the world is something that people everywhere would herald as an unprecedented achievement.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.