The writer of the Friday letter “State employees outrank citizens” gets it exactly wrong in criticizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his (alleged) failure to conquer the Great Depression. He repeats the right-wing mantra that government cannot create jobs and needs to “get out of the way of millions of entrepreneurs,” who he apparently believes would have succeeded in overcoming America’s worst economic downturn 70-some years ago.
When Roosevelt took office unemployment was above 20 percent, as the writer noted. But that was after four years of government “getting out of the way” under his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. The stock market collapsed in 1929; Roosevelt didn’t take office until 1933. Indeed, Roosevelt was elected overwhelmingly on a platform of strong government intervention to restore the jobs that had disappeared and restart the economic growth that had plummeted the previous four years.
Second, the writer argued that the Roosevelt administration’s programs failed to create jobs, since he noted that unemployment was only slightly lower in 1941 than it had been in 1933. Then he stated that, “An event took place in 1941 that put everyone to work: the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II.”
And what, pray tell, was the key factor in that scenario? A huge increase in federal spending on both the military and with contractors, as factories were converted to the full-scale war production that provided employment for everyone.
There’s a name for that process: It’s called “government creating jobs in the private sector.”
Dan Murphy
Everett
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