New Deal Rebels, a new anthology published by the American Institute for Economic Research, is an antidote to the idea that there ever was a consensus behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to end the Great Depression by, among other things, forcing farmers to destroy crops the government deemed “surplus.”
A long, illuminating introduction from the volume’s editor, Amity Shlaes, is followed by 53 short selections from the New Deal era. Some are a bit tedious for bedtime reading, but many are jewels. These include “One From One Leaves Two,” a spunky poem by Ogden Nash from the perspective of a farmer wondering how to make his cow and hens stop “overproducing” milk and eggs (concluding lines: “I pray the Lord my soul to take/If the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake”); several exasperated Garet Garrett columns for The Saturday Evening Post; the text of the Supreme Court’s Schechter Poultry Corp. decision, which unanimously found the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional; and an editorial from the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, celebrating that ruling as a vindication of “the wisdom of the founders of the Republic.”
Best of all is a 1936 essay by Winston Churchill, not yet prime minister of the United Kingdom, who did not hold back in excoriating Roosevelt’s disdain for the U.S. Constitution. The piece begins by imploring readers to decide, first and foremost, whether they “value the State above the citizen, or the citizen above the State? Does a government exist for the individual, or do individuals exist for the government?” His answer was clear. Ours should be as well.
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