Harrop: Biden’s policies more aligned with Truman than FDR

On issues related to economic equity and civil rights, Biden’s plans recall Truman’s Fair Deal.

By Froma Harrop / syndicated columnist

Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar plans to revive the economy, fix America’s infrastructure and ease poverty have spawned comparisons between him and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the 100-day mark of the Biden presidency, David Gergen, who has advised presidents of both parties, wrote, “Biden is off to an excellent start;arguably, one of the best since Roosevelt.”

And Biden hasn’t discouraged such talk. He now has a giant portrait of FDR in the Oval Office, right across from the Resolute Desk.

But while there may be likenesses between those two presidents’ agendas, the less glamorous Harry Truman also deserves inspirational face time. Truman and Biden both came from modest small-town origins. Unlike the aristocratic Roosevelt, they knew firsthand about middle-class striving.

It’s not surprising, then, that the Biden agenda seeks to recreate the Golden Age for the American middle class: the postwar years of 1947 through 1973, when productivity doubled but so did the median compensation of full-time workers. Truman was instrumental in launching it.

Truman understood that the well-being of workers depended on factors beyond the magic of the market. Widespread prosperity needed a third player in addition to business and labor. That player was a government willing to impose social norms through tax policy, the minimum wage and protection for organized labor.

As World War II was ending, impatient workers launched destabilizing strikes. And so, in November 1945, Truman held a conference to create a new labor policy through which postwar abundance would be broadly shared. The participants came from business, the labor movement and — at Truman’s insistence — government.

The business community came eagerly on board. As Eric Johnston, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the conference: “Labor unions are woven into our economic pattern of American life, and collective bargaining is a part of the democratic process. I say recognize this fact not only with our lips but with our hearts.”

Truman proposed a national health care plan, which didn’t happen, and higher taxes on the top incomes, which did. Biden’s agenda both strengthens the Affordable Care Act and seeks to raise taxes on the top incomes.

Unlike Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal took a strong stance on civil rights. New Deal programs broadly discriminated against Blacks. The National Recovery Administration, for example, gave preferences to white job seekers and allowed lower pay scales for Blacks.

Roosevelt appointed a few Blacks to token jobs. Truman put nonwhites in positions of real power, notably William Henry Hastie, the first African American federal appellate judge.

Biden just announced a racially diverse slate of judicial nominees. It includes sending Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered a springboard for the Supreme Court.

Biden is pursuing racial equity in some controversial ways. The covid-19 relief bill includes a $5 billion fund for minority farmers only. And the infrastructure package says that 40 percent of the benefits of clean energy must go to “disadvantaged communities.” How that would work is unclear.

The offshoring of American jobs and technological change of course accelerated workers’ loss of economic security; and helped end the Golden Age. But the ditching of norms that only government could enforce also played a part.

Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the rich. Then George W. Bush did, and then Donald Trump. The federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 an hour. In 1973, it was equivalent to $9.81 in today’s dollars.

Biden seems to be summoning his inner Harry Truman and bringing back the third player. In assuring a stable and happy middle class, the market has a job to do, but so does government.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. Email her at fharrop@gmail.com.

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THis is an editorial cartoon by Michael de Adder . Michael de Adder was born in Moncton, New Brunswick. He studied art at Mount Allison University where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drawing and painting. He began his career working for The Coast, a Halifax-based alternative weekly, drawing a popular comic strip called Walterworld which lampooned the then-current mayor of Halifax, Walter Fitzgerald. This led to freelance jobs at The Chronicle-Herald and The Hill Times in Ottawa, Ontario.

 

After freelancing for a few years, de Adder landed his first full time cartooning job at the Halifax Daily News. After the Daily News folded in 2008, he became the full-time freelance cartoonist at New Brunswick Publishing. He was let go for political views expressed through his work including a cartoon depicting U.S. President Donald Trump’s border policies. He now freelances for the Halifax Chronicle Herald, the Toronto Star, Ottawa Hill Times and Counterpoint in the USA. He has over a million readers per day and is considered the most read cartoonist in Canada.

 

Michael de Adder has won numerous awards for his work, including seven Atlantic Journalism Awards plus a Gold Innovation Award for news animation in 2008. He won the Association of Editorial Cartoonists' 2002 Golden Spike Award for best editorial cartoon spiked by an editor and the Association of Canadian Cartoonists 2014 Townsend Award. The National Cartoonists Society for the Reuben Award has shortlisted him in the Editorial Cartooning category. He is a past president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists and spent 10 years on the board of the Cartoonists Rights Network.
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