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The New Deal effectively killed off what was left of the ninth and tenth amendments, the ones that protect unenumerated individual rights and states’ rights. Occupational-licensing laws that restricted entry into a growing number of occupations to an educated few in the name of consumer safety, for example, trounced the ancient, commonsense, and hence unenumerated right of occupational choice. Claims that licensing aided consumers were largely bogus, however, as Americans had survived long periods when occupational licensing, even for doctors, was not in place. It turns out that markets are pretty darn good at weeding out subpar suppliers or, more usually, giving the poorest people affordable access to lower quality (but not deadly) providers, be they doctors or stockbrokers. Although the federal government was not the main purveyor of junk occupational-licensing laws, New Dealers made clear that they would not interfere with their proliferation because they supported the administration’s misguided “high-wage” agenda.
FDR failed to achieve his infamous Supreme Court court-packing scheme, but he won the war of jurisprudence by transforming high-court doctrine anyway. New Deal legislation struck down as unconstitutional, like the National Industrial Recovery Act, came back piecemeal and passed constitutional muster with the votes of Hugo Black and eventually seven other FDR appointees and several justices cowed by the blatant court-packing attack.
Taking cues from FDR’s administration, the new Supreme Court reset numerous crucial constitutional concepts into powerful tools of federal oppression. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), for example, the court gave the interstate commerce clause dark totalitarian-like powers by upholding the federal government’s power to regulate what a small farmer could grow on his own property for his own consumption. Ever since, the rapid growth of the federal government’s power has proven virtually impossible to rein in.
As Beito — and Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher in Black Liberation Through the Marketplace — show, FDR condoned policies so racist that progressives should have cancelled him and pulled his statues down in 2020. In addition to the concentration camps for Japanese Americans and the deliberate snubbing of prominent blacks who dared to remain Republican, the New Deal crushed unskilled black, Hispanic, and indigenous laborers by pricing them out of the market with minimum-wage and pro-union laws, while simultaneously reducing their access to mortgages via the earliest versions of red lining. The Depression, it should be noted, particularly decimated blacks. At the end of the 1930s, almost nine out of 10 black families lived below the federal poverty threshold. Overall life expectancy dropped, but much more for blacks than for whites.
Even federal relief efforts were relatively stingy because blacks and other people of color tended to live in safe Democrat districts while FDR’s minions sent disproportionate amounts of relief to swing states. To be reelected to the presidency twice while the economy languished, FDR needed all the votes that taxpayer money could buy. Contrary to myth, FDR and his policies became increasingly unpopular after 1934. Many Americans saw that FDR was coming to have more in common with Mussolini, whom many of his lieutenants adored, and even that guy in Germany, than with great American presidents like Washington and Lincoln. Many members of FDR’s cabinet, “brain trust” advisory council, and political party eventually turned against him. His own vice-president, “Cactus Jack” Garner, even tried to deny the burgeoning dictator the Democratic Party nomination in 1940.
FDR, though, had amassed too much power to be ousted by anything other than the Grim Reaper. Where dole payments were insufficient to ensure victory, he turned the increasingly powerful executive branch on his adversaries, going after radio stations with the FCC, newspapers with the Internal Revenue Service, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI on prominent conservative black leaders like George Schuyler. He also used New Deal regulators, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, to collect information on his opponents, including his 1940 general election challenger Wendell Willkie. The outbreak of World War II further enlarged FDR’s “snoopocracy” by giving him easier “national security” excuses for such misbehavior. How progressives, much less conservatives, can tolerate, much less laud, such misconduct without suffering massive cognitive dissonance remains a mystery.
Equally mysterious is how anyone still believes that the New Deal helped the economy when it clearly kept the Depression going for far longer than it otherwise would have or could have. Had Americans understood how the New Deal had stymied recovery from the Great Depression, FDR would have been booted in 1936, as some prominent polls predicted. As Jason Taylor shows in Deconstructing the Monolith, the Blue Eagle and NRA codes crushed the natural rebound from the economic nadir hit as FDR took office in March 1933. Reflating the money supply — not confiscating Americans’ gold, raising taxes, and regulating and scaring the bejesus out of business owners — would have allowed that natural economic recovery to continue. As George Selgin shows in his forthcoming False Dawn, New Deal, monetary policy, not the gold standard or greedy financiers, also derailed expansion.
New Dealers, though, could not have pulled off their Great Reset if the masses had not been paralyzed by fear and made dependent on the federal dole. Thereafter, as detailed in my Liberty Lost, Americans increasingly turned away from their long tradition of ameliorating social problems through self-reliance and voluntary association and toward asking Uncle Sam for succor at every turn. Many purely private nonprofits have since become “nongovernment organizations” dependent upon government grants instead of charitable donations from virtuous citizens. Instead of helping the downtrodden directly, Americans today typically ask politicians to do something. They respond with costly, ineffective programs that signal virtue and garner votes without aiding anyone in need, while hurting others with higher taxes and a ripple of unintended consequences.
My new book FDR’s Long New Deal (Palgrave, December 2024) explores these issues, and many more, in greater detail. Some points, like the fact that New Dealers destroyed food while Americans starved, are widely known. Others, like the fact that New Deal land policies forced many small farmers off their land and into collectives, are less widely understood. In a nutshell, every alleged New Deal “triumph” is government misinformation, the product of censorship, hagiography, unconstrained thinking, and/or the radicalization of history departments.
That’s tragic, because without the truth about the New Deal, Americans appeared poised to repeat many of its worst features, with potentially devastating results. America’s international relations lodestone, peace through strength, for example, failed in the 1930s. Had the American economy continued to rebound in 1933 and 1934, the nation would have been better prepared for World War II, which may have taken a much different and less destructive path if the nation had not appeared so economically weak and rationality-challenged to aggressors.
I beseech anyone contemplating replicating the New Deal to read my new book FDR’s Long New Deal, any of the books referenced in it, or those mentioned above. You may not have read books critical of the New Deal in school, but you should have, and would have, had FDR’s intellectual spawn not seized the power of the purse and twisted the educational system toward its own collectivist, statist intellectual ends.
This article was originally published in the December 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
