by Thomas Frank
7. Amy Gardner, “Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America,” Washington Post, October 24, 2010.
Chapter 1. End Times
1. Christina Romer, “Lessons from the Great Depression for Economic Recovery in 2009,” a paper presented at the Brookings Institution, March 9, 2009, p. 2.
2. All of these facts are drawn from chapters 8 and 12 of Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010 [1969]). The quotes are found on pages 317 and 422.
3. According to Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 2.
4. I am relying here on the summary of economic orthodoxy found in Richard Parker’s biography of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was studying economics at Harvard at the time. See Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 12, 48, 77.
5. The line comes from The Green Pastures, a popular 1930 play by Marc Connelly.
6. Similar statements litter Drucker’s first book. In the economic collapse of the thirties, man “can no longer explain or understand his existence as rationally correlated and co-ordinated to the world in which he lives; nor can he coordinate the world and the social reality to his existence. The function of the individual in society has become entirely irrational and senseless.” Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (New York: The John Day Company, 1939), p. 55.
7. Nation’s Business: as quoted in William E. Leuchtenberg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. Another passage that once struck me as overwrought but which now, in the aftermath of 2008, seems bluntly accurate is this summation by the historian Richard Pells in his 1973 book about writers and thinkers in the thirties, Radical Vision and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973):
The sense of total collapse, of a society in various stages of decomposition, had a profound effect on most Americans—intellectuals as well as ordinary citizens. The depression meant more than simply the failure of business; it was to many people an overwhelming natural catastrophe, much like an earthquake that uprooted and destroyed whatever lay in its path.… It gave Americans the feeling that their whole world was literally falling apart, that their traditional expectations and beliefs were absolutely meaningless, that there was no personal escape from the common disaster. It propelled the individual into a void of bewilderment and terror (p. 72).
8. Calvin Coolidge, quoted in Charles A. Andrews, “‘I’m All Burned Out,’” Good Housekeeping, June 1935, p. 209. Wrote Coolidge’s biographer William Allen White of the same period, “The whole world of Calvin Coolidge and his pride in the power of brains and wealth was toppling.” White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), p. 432.
9. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 172. Writers and intellectuals: see Malcolm Cowley, “The 1930s Were An Age of Faith,” New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1964. Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), p. 202.
On the other hand, in Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnam calls the thirties an era of “civic drought,” because membership in all manner of professional and civic associations shrank instead of increasing as in the periods before and after.
10. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 22.
11. “But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed,” Keynes continued. John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” Yale Review 22 (1933): 761.
12. Andrew Mellon is quoted in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 30.
13. One place the idea was tried was in Detroit in February 1933, where the local tycoon Henry Ford refused to join the effort to rescue a large local bank. “‘Let the crash come,’” RFC chairman Jesse Jones quotes Ford as saying. Jones continues thusly: “If everything went down the chute there would be a cleaning-up process, [Ford] said, and everybody would then have to get to work. Whatever happened, he said he was sure he could again build up a business, as he still felt young.” The result, though, was the catastrophic Michigan bank panic and a “bank holiday” that led to the complete national bank shutdown the next month. Jesse Jones with Edward Angly, Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 62.
14. William Randolph Hearst: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 85. The president of the American Liberty League was Jouett Shouse, a former Kansas congressman, but its main backers were the DuPont family, the Koch brothers of their day. The speech in which this passage occurs was called “The New Deal vs. Democracy” and was issued as a pamphlet by the league in 1936.
15. See the account of the American Liberty League in Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 13.
16. Remley J. Glass, “Gentlemen, the Corn Belt!” Harper’s, July 1933, pp. 199–202.
17. “Virtually impossible”: cited in Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Twentieth Century Populism: Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West 1900–1939 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1951), p. 448. “We pledge ourselves”: as quoted in Gilbert Seldes, The Years of the Locust (America, 1929–1932) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), p. 286.
18. “The days of 1776”: Seldes, The Years of the Locust, p. 284. “They say blockading the highway’s illegal”: Mary Heaton Vorse, “Rebellion in the Cornbelt,” 1932, reprinted in David Shannon, ed., The Great Depression (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), p. 125. A South Dakota participant in the farm strike told Studs Terkel in 1970 that “it was close in spirit to the American Revolution.” Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 256.
Chapter 2. 1929: The Sequel
1. Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Three Marketeers,” Time, February 15, 1999.
2. On financial innovation and its application to real estate, see Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Pantheon, 2010), pp. 105–13.
3. These examples are all drawn from the first eighty pages of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).
4. John Lippert, “Friedman Would Be Roiled as Chicago Disciples Rue Repudiation,” Bloomberg, December 23, 2008.
5. Gary Becker, quoted in John Cassidy, “After the Blowup,” New Yorker, January 11, 2010. His colleagues, Becker further confessed, had not fully understood derivatives, deregulation, or the problem of banks that were “too big to fail.” Becker also admitted that federal intervention had spared the nation a much greater disaster.
6. Richard Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 306. The crash was the result, Posner wrote, of “innate limitations of the free market—limitations rooted in individuals’ incentives, in irresponsible monetary policy adopted and executed by conservative officials inspired by conservative economists … and in excessive, ideologically motivated deregulation of banking and finance compounded by lax enforcement of the remaining regulations.” See the similar argument made by Jacob Weisberg in “The End of Libertarianism,” Slate, October 18, 2008.
7. In 2008, Charles Koch wrote that we “could” be facing this “loss of liberty”; in his January 2009 missive, “Perspective,” Discovery, the Quarterly Newsletter of Koch Companies, J
anuary 2009, he announced that “that prediction is coming true.”
8. Moe Tkacik, “Waiting for CNBC,” Columbia Journalism Review, May–June 2009.
9. See Max Abelson, “The New Doom,” New York Observer, July 13, 2010.
10. “Never underestimate the capacity of angry populism in times of economic stress,” Robert Reich told the New York Times on March 16, 2009. “A big challenge for President Obama will be to maintain a rational and tactical public discussion in the midst of this severe downturn. The desire for culprits at times like this is strong.”
11. See the account in The Hill dated January 21, 2010. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/77365-afl-cio-cites-working-class-revolt-in-special-election-aftermath?page=2.
12. The story by Amy Gardner ran in the Washington Post on February 18, 2010; the main figure she followed, Representative Rick Boucher of western Virginia, was defeated in November.
13. “57 percent [of whites with no college education] wanted to repeal the health care law—even though they are uninsured at much higher rates than whites with more advanced education.” Ronald Brownstein, “White Flight,” National Journal, January 7, 2011, http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/in-2012-obama-may-need-a-new-coalition-20110105?page=1. See also Brownstein’s article “Populists Versus Managers,” National Journal, December 17, 2010, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/populists-versus-managers-in-the-gop-race-20101217.
Chapter 3. Hold the Note and Change the Key
1. “Simply working people”: John M. O’Hara, A New American Tea Party (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), p. 2. It is worth noting here that John O’Hara, the author of the above sentence, had been an employee of the U.S. Department of Labor during the Bush administration. Surely he would be in a position to know that what workers wanted was to go untroubled by the needs of their neighbors.
2. “Plain-speaking-little-man”: Frank Ahrens, “Five Questions for Rick Santelli,” November 13, 2008, WashingtonPost.com.
3. The TARP, write Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe in their Tea Party book, is the device that “ignited the firestorm we see today.” Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty, p. 37.
4. See ibid., p. 68.
5. Ibid., p. 38, my emphasis. See also the appendix to Give Us Liberty, in which the value of the home owned by a Tea Party activist plunges, but she doesn’t complain. “‘We cut our budget and I went back to work. That was my bailout plan,’” she says. “Meanwhile, politicians in Washington were bailing out companies and rewarding people who had made bad investments in homes and mortgage-backed securities,” write Armey and Kibbe. “The contrast between her experience and the soft landings for Citigroup, GM, and AIG was galling” (p. 228).
In his Tea Party book, the radio talker Michael Graham devotes an entire chapter of denunciation (“Honk If I’m Paying Your Mortgage”) to the subject of shiftless mortgage borrowers who are now hoping to get off the hook. “Normal Americans,” he writes, were going “bonkers” at the bailouts because
the bailout regime that began under President Bush and blossomed under Obama has repeatedly rewarded those who engaged in bad behavior—and the worse the behavior, the bigger the bailout. The people left holding the bag are those who’ve sacrificed immediate gratification to do the right thing. They were dumping their change every night into a blue water bottle in the closet of their dumpy apartment, saving for a down payment on their future dream home. Meanwhile, their neighbor was moving into a house he couldn’t afford, on a no-money-down, interest-only subprime loan backed by Freddie and Fannie, hoping to ride the real estate bubble and flip it at a profit. (Michael Graham, That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom: Team Obama’s Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans [Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010], p. 77.)
6. Broke is even the title of one of Beck’s 2010 books: Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010). The “Laws of Nature” are referenced in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), p. 15.
7. “There’s no need to bring progressivism back … because it never left,” writes Glenn Beck in a characteristic passage of Arguing with Idiots. The history of the last century, he believes, with the exception of the magical eighties, was merely a gigantic extension of the Progressive era.
Over the years, it hasn’t seemed to matter whether a Republican or Democrat was in office—the government just kept growing and growing. Very few presidents met an agency, department, or program that they didn’t want to create or expand and our debates have become less about big vs. small government and more about obscenely large vs. really large government. (Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government [New York: Threshold Editions, 2009], pp. 214, 231.)
A slightly more intellectual example of the same blind view of history can be found in a blogger’s review of a 2011 book by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who criticized what he saw as the long reign of “libertarianism” in Washington. In response, a libertarian blogger exploded in outrage: “What the hell is he talking about? Spitzer’s ‘libertarian period’ is the most regulated period in the history of the United Sates [sic].” The conventional view of the period is upside down, he argued, since the Federal Reserve existed, regulations continued to exist, and true free-marketeers never got to do everything they wanted.
Thirty years of libertarianism? A period when the United States central bank, the Federal Reserve, boosted the money supply from $1.6 trillion to $7.7 trillion. A period during which it became near impossible to start a brokerage firm to compete against the banksters, without spending literally millions to pass through all the regulatory hurdles. A period during which government attempts to regulate every nook and cranny of our lives exploded. This Spitzer tells us was a period of libertarianism.
See http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/07/eliot-spitzers-outrageous-attack-on.html.
8. Moore’s article compared the Paulson scene with scenes from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in order to establish that book’s amazing prescience. Stephen Moore, “‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2009.
9. All of these quotations are from Glenn Beck’s TV show for March 18, 2009.
10. Beck’s populism continued to evolve. In July of 2009, he announced that the government bailed out AIG because Goldman Sachs had an interest in AIG’s solvency—in other words, because government was a puppet of big money. (See his radio show for July 14, 2009, according to the transcript available at http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/27840/.) A few weeks later, he suggested that the AIG logo, along with some other corporate emblems, should take the place of the stars on the U.S. flag, since government and corporations had been so thoroughly merged. Then, in the novel Beck published in the summer of 2010, The Overton Window (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010), the blame for the financial crisis and the bailout was fixed firmly on Wall Street itself, with government and bankers both being steered by the “all-powerful puppetmaster behind it all, Goldman Sachs” (p. 247).
11. Erick Erickson and Lewis K. Uhler, Red State Uprising: How to Take Back America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010), pp. xv and xvii.
Chapter 4. Nervous System
1. Glenn Beck describes his admiration for Orson Welles on pages 186 and 187 of The Real America: Messages from the Heart and Heartland (New York: Pocket Books, 2005). The fact about the Daily Worker comes from the historian Michael Denning’s account of left culture in the thirties, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1996). Given Beck’s obsession with the fascist threat, it is interesting to recall Denning’s observation that much of Welles’s work from that period consisted of “allegories of anti-fascism”; in particular, the 1938 radio show about the Martian invasion was part of a then-familiar genre about fascist atrocities. Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 367, 371, 382.
2. These lines were used, respectively, by Glenn Beck
on November 19, 2009; Rush Limbaugh on September 30, 2009; and Jim Quinn on January 5, 2010. All of these and many more panic-screaming accounts were compiled by the good folks at Media Matters for America at http://mediamatters.org/research/201003220034.
3. The full quote goes as follows: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” The book’s subtitle identifies the “secular-socialist machine” with the Obama administration. Newt Gingrich, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010), pp. 4, 5.
4. Erickson and Uhler, Red State Uprising, 2010, p. xiv.
5. “Indoctrination”: this was a favorite persecution fantasy of September 2009. “The coming insurrection”: a French anarchist pamphlet with this title was rescued from obscurity by Glenn Beck in 2009. “Persecution”: I am referring to The Persecution of Sarah Palin by Matthew Continetti (New York: Sentinel, 2010). “Systematic assault”: see David Limbaugh, Crimes Against Liberty (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010), p. 12. “Gulag Bound”: read about it at http://gulagbound.com/we-are-gulag-bound-2.
