Myth and ideology aside, the data show that from through the New Deal produced double-digit annual growth in GDP , production, after-tax income and private investment, with strong consumer spending and job growth exceeding their peaks in the bubble.
The Great Depression ended by late While a new, severe recession began in May because FDR prematurely slashed public spending on New Deal programs, rapid growth quickly resumed in late when funding was restored. Today, the U. The largely unregulated private financial and commercial sector has utterly bankrupted itself.
I personally believe the recent and current bailout and stimulus packages are grossly misdirected and inadequate when compared with the remarkable trade and industrial policy strategies being implemented elsewhere, particularly in China. But history has shown that crisis can bring people together in common, public purpose or it can set them against one another.
Our circumstances are far too dangerous to leave uncorrected the antigovernment disinformation and myths from the s, and in our own generation. Charles W. About Archive Breakfast. Submit Donate Subscribe. Follow Follow. But unprecedented political bungling instead prolonged the misery for twelve long years.
Unemployment in averaged a mildly recessionary 8. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in Until March , these were the years of President Herbert Hoover—the man that anti-capitalists depict as a champion of noninterventionist, laissez-faire economics.
During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions of people on the dole. It came on top of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of , which had already put American agriculture in a tailspin during the preceding decade. The most protectionist legislation in U. Professor Barry Poulson notes that not only were tariffs sharply increased, but the act broadened the list of dutiable commodities to 3, items as well.
Officials in the administration and in Congress believed that raising trade barriers would force Americans to buy more goods made at home, which would solve the nagging unemployment problem.
They ignored an important principle of international commerce: trade is ultimately a two-way street; if foreigners cannot sell their goods here, then they cannot earn the dollars they need to buy here. With their ability to sell in the American market severely hampered, they curtailed their purchases of American goods. American agriculture was particularly hard hit. With a stroke of the presidential pen, farmers in this country lost nearly a third of their markets.
Farm prices plummeted and tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt. With the collapse of agriculture, rural banks failed in record numbers, dragging down hundreds of thousands of their customers. Hoover dramatically increased government spending for subsidy and relief schemes.
His Reconstruction Finance Corporation ladled out billions more in business subsidies. To compound the folly of high tariffs and huge subsidies, Congress then passed and Hoover signed the Revenue Act of It doubled the income tax for most Americans; the top bracket more than doubled, going from 24 percent to 63 percent.
Exemptions were lowered; the earned income credit was abolished; corporate and estate taxes were raised; new gift, gasoline, and auto taxes were imposed; and postal rates were sharply hiked. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidential election in a landslide, collecting electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover.
This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered. Between and , government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent. In dictating his entry for November 25, Stimson may subconsciously have put some of his own ideas, and perhaps his own words, into the President's mouth.
A speculative answer is that Roosevelt may have been thinking along these lines: Japan's leaders seem to be on the point of going to war somewhere in Southeast Asia. Our hands are tied until their army and navy commit the first act.
The responsibility for resorting to hostilities must rest on Japan's armed forces, where it properly belongs. At the same time, the United States must minimize the risk entailed in sitting back and waiting for something to happen. In his diary Stimson remarked, "It was a difficult proposition.
Operation "Magic" was concurrently producing translations of intercepted Japanese diplomatic and consular messages that caused growing concern on the part of the few officials who had access to their contents, but the problem was greater than they realized. We now know that in this top secret army-navy project was burdened by operating procedures and personnel shortages that prevented it from achieving its potential.
This was the case not only in the analysis but also in the dissemination of the extraordinary information "Magic" was plucking from the air waves. The emphasis that was placed on the maintenance of secrecy is as understandable now as it was then, but in some instances security concerns stood in the way of maximizing the benefits that could have been derived from the revelations the intercepts contained.
Human error—not conspiracy—lay at the base of this problem. Badly needed, but absent from the scene, was a "Magic" coordinator—an intelligence czar empowered by the President to reassess intercepts on a regular basis and to provide continuity of interpretation from week to week. Although Roosevelt personally had to avoid getting bogged down in details, he should have been briefed more fully in than the system in place during that year allowed.
Messages between the Foreign Office in Tokyo and Japanese embassies in various parts of the world in dealt with foreign relations, not with strategy and tactics. Despite some claims to the contrary, none of the diplomatic messages that were intercepted and translated prior to December 7 ever pointed to Hawaii as a target that might be imminently hit. Confusion has arisen in this regard because intercepts obtained from consular traffic revealed that Tokyo was definitely interested in ship movements in and out of Pearl Harbor, an interest that "Magic" had begun monitoring a year before the attack took place.
Drawing correct conclusions was difficult because Japanese espionage was by no means limited to the Hawaiian Islands or to ship movements. Tokyo's appetite for useful data, including information about military installations, covered other vital areas: the Panama Canal, the Philippines, Southeast Asia including the Dutch East Indies , and major West Coast ports in the United States and Canada.
Even American warships anchored in Guantanamo Bay on the southeast coast of Cuba, in July , merited a report to Tokyo from a Japanese source in Havana. Far more important than odd items of this nature was Telegram No. It was sent on September 24 but was not translated by "Magic" until October 9.
The agent was told to divide the waters of Pearl Harbor into five areas, each of which was precisely defined. Henceforth he was to report on the types and classes of U. Navy ships that were anchored or moored in each of these areas. In practical terms, these instructions meant that Tokyo was placing a bombing grid over the target. Two officers in Washington were troubled by Telegram No.
The Japanese message was seen as an effort to encourage Tokyo's agent to condense his reports, to focus on essentials, to economize on wording. No one saw any reason to send warnings to Pearl Harbor. If war came, the Pacific Fleet would put to sea in plenty of time to cope with the Japanese threat or so everyone thought.
After the raid, the implications that had been missed earlier seemed to jump out at every analyst who read Telegram No. Today we can study the intercepts both serially and selectively, in the luxury of freedom from the pressures that existed at the time, and with the clarity of vision that the incandescent light of hindsight provides.
We can readily see that the espionage exchanges between the Foreign Office in Tokyo and Japan's consulate general in Honolulu contained important clues that were not detected by key military and naval personnel in the War Plans and Intelligence Divisions in Washington.
As a consequence, the hostile intentions that were implicit in these telegrams were not conveyed to commanders in the field who should have been alerted immediately. Several messages that might have saved the day, at the very last moment, ended up falling "between the cracks" in the processing system, which could not always keep up with the flow of intercepts. Two inquiries from Tokyo during the first week of December, for example, produced a reply from Honolulu that "Magic" intercepted on December 6.
In my opinion the battleships do not have torpedo nets. This report also contained a dead-giveaway sentence: "I imagine that in all probability there is considerable opportunity left to take advantage for a surprise attack against these places. Anyone would think that an intercept of this nature would have awakened Washington and triggered warnings to Pearl Harbor. The problem was that no one saw it in time.
It was not translated until December 8, the day after the attack. This was also the fate that befell still another telegram that was sent to Tokyo on December 6 by the Imperial Japanese Navy spy in Honolulu: "It appears that no air reconnaissance is being conducted by the fleet air arm.
Translation delays should not be attributed to skulduggery or incompetence. At the processing level, Operation "Magic" was understaffed and overworked; diplomatic messages in top-secret "Purple," the most difficult of the machine ciphers that were used in these transmissions, had a higher priority than consular messages encrypted in systems such as J and PA-K2; the volume of deciphered intercepts grew from a trickle in to a flood in ; expert translators with "top secret" security clearances were so scarce they could have been described as an endangered species.
The wonder is that the men and women of "Magic" performed as well as they did in these circumstances. By late November events were moving at a rapid pace. Even before Stimson dictated his controversial entry for November 25, Secretary Hull had learned, from a "Magic" intercept, that the foreign minister in Tokyo had informed Japan's representatives in Washington that diplomatic efforts to reach what he called "the solution we desire" must be concluded by November They were told: "[This] deadline absolutely cannot be changed.
In a message to Winston Churchill, the President revealed that he was aware of the danger from Japan: "We must all be prepared for real trouble, possibly soon. Intelligence derived from sources other than "Magic" reinforced the idea that war was near. The Japanese were sending a large expedition to sea from Shanghai in occupied China.
This armada was heading toward Indochina, but American policymakers were in the dark concerning its ultimate destination. Why did Japan's leaders reject the American offer? Did they do so because the note was an "ultimatum" as the revisionists claim or for other reasons?
The evidence suggests that the terms outlined by Hull were unacceptable to the decision makers in Tokyo because they wanted a diplomatic capitulation by the United States. If Washington did not oblige, they were prepared to resort to force. The commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet had already issued top secret operational orders for the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had done this three weeks before the American note reached the Foreign Office.
Even before the fighting started, Tokyo sought to undermine the Hull note, dismissing it as a "humiliating proposal" that the government could not possibly accept. The note was tendered on a "Tentative and Without Commitment" basis; it outlined reciprocal undertakings and offered room to maneuver.
On the critical issue of Japanese troops on the continent of Asia, for instance, Hull stipulated a withdrawal of "all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indochina.
We still have hope. If that occurs, we can also take some steps of a concrete character designed to improve the general situation. Army Chief of Staff George C. Stark were frankly opposed to doing anything that might precipitate war. They were eager to buy time to develop enough strength to cope effectively with whatever action the Japanese government might take in the southwestern Pacific—the area where the Imperial Army and Navy were most likely to strike. Until the Philippines could be reinforced more fully, General Marshall and Admiral Stark recommended that military counteraction against Japan be considered only if the Japanese attacked or directly threatened American, British, or Dutch territory in Southeast Asia.
When a joint committee of the Congress asked Hull, in , to comment on an assertion to the effect that his note of November 26, , had pushed the button that started the war, the anger felt by the former secretary of state was evident in his reply. At the White House on Wednesday, December 3, , FDR was alert to what was happening in East Asia, but he was not entirely correct in his assessment of the situation. He erroneously thought "he had the Japanese running around like a lot of wet hens" because he had asked them why they were pouring military forces into Indochina.
He came much closer to the truth when he said: "I think the Japanese are doing everything they can to stall until they are ready. The next day, Roosevelt's naval aide called his attention to a "Magic" intercept that ordered the Japanese embassy to burn most of its "telegraphic codes," to destroy one of the two machines it used to encrypt and decrypt messages, and to dispose of all secret documents. This meant that Japan was on the point of kicking over the traces—of opting for war.
FDR wondered aloud when this would occur. No one knew, but the President's naval aide offered a wide-open guess: "Most any time," he said. Secretary of War Stimson remembered Saturday, December 6, as a day of foreboding. As the morning wore on his diary reads , "the news got worse and worse and the atmosphere indicated that something was going to happen. The Japanese expedition that had departed from Shanghai was now reported to be steaming in the direction of the Kra Isthmus in the north-central portion of the Malay Peninsula.
A week earlier, during a meeting with his most important civil and military advisers, FDR himself had pointed to the isthmus as the place where the Japanese might begin an offensive.
No one had forgotten about the potential threat to Pearl Harbor, the Panama Canal, or any other base close to home, but the indications were that the Imperial Army and Navy were going to break out somewhere in the distant western Pacific, an area rich in the resources they were eager to obtain. This was the context in which the President reacted to the first thirteen parts of a fourteen-part message from the foreign minister in Tokyo to Ambassador Nomura in Washington; it arrived in the form of a "Memorandum" that would soon prove to be Japan's final note to the United States.
The incomplete intercept was brought to FDR around Saturday evening, December 6, as he was sitting in the oval room that served as his study on the second floor of the White House, talking with his friend and adviser Harry Hopkins. The text of Japan's "Memorandum," Telegram No. Only one sentence in Part 13 hinted at what might be said in the still-missing final segment of the telegram.
The Japanese government, this sentence declared, "cannot accept the [Hull] proposal [of November 26] as a basis of negotiation. This announcement, together with the negative tenor of the "Memorandum" as a whole, allowed FDR to put two and two together.
After reading through the document, the President turned to Hopkins and said, in substance: This. The exact words Roosevelt used will never be known, because the naval officer who had brought the message to the oval study, and who was the only surviving witness after the war to what had transpired there, could not remember, later, precisely what had been said. Roosevelt is the most sainted president of the 20th century. You have to look far and wide to discover the truth about his character and policies.
But as John T. Flynn noted in this landmark volume, FDR actually prolonged the Great Depression and deliberately dragged the country into a war that seriously compromised American liberties. What's more, he did this despite campaign promises to slash bureaucracy and cut spending.
He ran as a small-government liberal, a fact among a million that has been completely forgotten today. This new edition has an introduction by historian Ralph Raico , who shows that this work still remains the best overall book on the FDR era.
Flynn wrote a devastating indictment.
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