FDR A Four Term Progressive--Part 7

In 1936 Roosevelt won in a landslide against Alf Landon, the Republican Governor from Kansas. The Democrats took every state except Maine and Vermont. FDR was entering his second term with his second New Deal.

The congressional elections of 1934 had given Roosevelt an overwhelming majority in both the Senate and House. In 1934 he initiated the Works Progress Administration or WPA. It was to be a national relief agency and was suppose to deal with lowering the unemployment problem. It employed close to two million people who were the heads of the family. It never fully solved the unemployment problem. The unemployment figure was at 12.5% in 1938 when the WPA was at its peak.

Two other major pieces of legislation were passed in the year prior to the 1936 election. They were the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, a law that allowed federal workers to organize unions, strike and engage in negotiations.

With his second victory Roosevelt came to Congress and asked for more. More for the WPA that saw its employment peak at 3.3 million in 1938. In addition to this a new Agricultural Adjustment Act came on board in 1938. This time Congress left out the processing taxes and did not impose any production quotas on farmers. They did, however, put marketing quotas into place for cotton, wheat, corn, rice and tobacco. When the Secretary of Agriculture found that production of one of these crops had gone too high, he had the power to impose a marketing quota as long as two-thirds of the producers of said crop agreed with him via a referendum. The Secretary was able to assign quotas for each farm and impose severe penalties for going over the quotas.

What was truly amazing was that the Court, many members having been frightened out of their wits by the Court Packing Plan, found this Agricultural Adjustment Act to be constitutional. This would go on and on and on through FDR's second term. In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, the Court allowed that a minimum wage was constitutional. In National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act that had put into place very extensive and detailed controls upon labor-management relations. This decision began the constant use of the commerce clause to beat industries over the head in order to favor the unions. These are just a few of what would be many cases that took this nation down the road of liberal nationalism or, if you will, the so called Progressivism we have today. Please keep in mind that if we do not stand up to this, we will be a collectivized country.

Don't believe me? Listen to candidate Obama who tells us that we must think of the rest of the world. We are consuming to much. We shouldn't be driving our big SUVs. We shouldn't burn all that petroleum. We should not eat all that food or consume all that energy.

Look at Speaker Pelosi. She tells the president to go to the Middle East and get them to drill more oil and make the price cheaper for us. Meanwhile no drilling in ANWR, off the American Coasts or in the Gulf of Mexico. Drill somewhere else. Keep Americans dependent on foreign oil. Put Americans in teeny unsafe cars. Where are the producers, the creators, the Captains of Industry, the Robber Barons? Where in the world is John Galt?

FDR A Four Term Progressive--Part 4

The Roosevelt administration moved quickly to establish control of the government. Within days they had 15 major pieces of legislation drawn up and presented to Congress. Ultimately a tremendous amount of power was gathered by the national government while stripping rights and responsibilities from the people. In the process of initiating and passing this legislation a welfare nation was created.

In order to get the legislation ready the Executive Branch all but ignored the Legislative Branch. The National Industrial Recovery Act passed in 1933 had as its mission ending cutthroat competition. In order to do this the government was going to force industries to come up with codes that would govern all the companies in a certain industry. The leaders of said industries wrote the codes, sound familiar, and the NIRA officials then approved them. In order to get this approval the industries had to raise wages. On top of that, the NIRA encouraged industries to accept unions and in return anti-trust laws were suspended. Ultimately the NIRA was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of all the legislation passed in the early days of the New Deal, the Agricultural Act was the most odious. This legislation was designed to assist American farmers. The intent of the Act was to balance the supply and demand for farm products, an age old problem for farmers. It was also suppose to address the matter of farm income and it was so written into the Act. This was going to be accomplished by paying farmers not to grow certain crops namely corn, wheat, cotton and peanuts, produce dairy products or raise some animals like sheep and pigs. In return, the government paid the farmers for not growing or raising these items. The money for the payment came from those who took the crops and manufactured products from them. Thus the guy who ground the grain paid a tax which in turn went to a farmer who was not producing. The goal was to put the farmer in a position where his wages were keeping up with his costs. There were only two problems with this. Some farmers, those who raised steers, were left out of the program. The other was the fact that despite the fact that land was taken out of production, as it is today, farmers raised more food due to fertilization and improved technology.

In 1937 the U.S. Supreme Court declared AAA to be unconstitutional in United States v Butler. The administration had attempted to get this by on the welfare clause in that the government was "to provide for the common defense and general welfare" of the nation. Justice Roberts consulted Madison and Hamilton on the matter. He found that Madison stated that said clause was simply an introduction to the enumerated powers while Hamilton viewed it as the government having the power to so provide. Roberts found two reasons to declare it unconstitutional. First, the processing tax levied on the manufacturers was not a proper tax under the taxing power in that one group was being taxed to support another group. Next he found that crops did not fall under the welfare clause in that "they were a system of agricultural regulations projected under the guise of appropriations for the general welfare" and these thing actually came under the Tenth Amendment. Roberts went on to note that the farmer was not given a choice in the matter and had to "accept the benefits and submit to regulation." In this decision Roberts recognized the right to appropriate under the general welfare clause but the government could not put conditions on those who accepted the funds. The government could give away their money but could not tell the recipient what to do with them.

Roosevelt was furious. Not only was AAA shot down, and rightly so, but it was going to cause great consternation within the Administration. Coming up on the SCOTUS's docket was the issue of Social Security, the greatest Ponzi scheme approved by man. This in turn lead to Roosevelt's infamous Court Packing Plan

The decision was 6-3 in Butler. There were decent arguments on both sides. The Act itself was re-written and became law. As such the farmers, who to this day accept subsidies in bloated farm bills, went on to become wards of the state with many bad ones hanging on when they should have moved on to other jobs.