Taking Care of Our Own

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The dominant figures of the 1930s came to power almost simultaneously: Adolf Hitler on Jan. 30, 1933; Franklin D. Roosevelt 33 days later. It was no coincidence. Each embodied drive and vision--one diabolic, the other democratic--at the very moment their respective countries, and the world, had reached a nadir of economic and social despair.

It had taken more than three years to plumb that bottom. Long after the 1929 stock-market crash filled Wall Street with eerily silent crowds gaping in stunned apprehension, President Herbert Hoover was still clinging to the deeply held--and widely shared--belief that good old rugged individualism, with just a dash of government help (nothing so radical as a federal dole), would dispel the gathering Depression. But the economy only spiraled lower. By 1933 unemployment had hit 25%; people were foraging in garbage dumps for food; outside almost every large city, shantytowns, known as "Hoovervilles," drew the newly homeless. On the eve of F.D.R.'s Inauguration, panicky runs on banks threatened to bring down the entire financial system.

Roosevelt promised--and delivered--"action and action now." His New Deal was an amalgam of "alphabet" agencies (AAA, NRA, WPA, SEC, FDIC, NLRB) and work-relief projects that set the jobless to work building dams, bridges, highways and airports. Congress enacted such now hallowed (but then seemingly radical) reforms as Social Security, unemployment compensation and federal insurance of bank deposits.

To some, all this spelled revolution, though except for the bloody battles fought by union organizers, strikers and company goons at some factory gates, it was a remarkably peaceful one. The New Deal, after all, reflected another deeply held belief with roots in the nation's pioneer past: that Americans take care of their own. Though there were those who hated him, F.D.R. by 1936 had inspired enough public hope and confidence to win one of the most overwhelming electoral victories in U.S. history.

Which made him something of an anomaly. Outside the U.S. the 1930s was an era of dictatorship and, increasingly, of death. In the Soviet Union millions perished in the Ukraine famine of 1932-33 and the Great Terror of 1936-38. Hitler, meanwhile, was ending German unemployment largely by building a war machine that had to be turned loose eventually--and was, on Sept. 1, 1939.

Probably more than any of Roosevelt's social programs, it was the war that ultimately wrenched America free from the Depression. But the apparent success of the New Deal raised the softer, more charitable side of the national psyche to an ascendancy over reliance on rugged individualism. Big Government would later expand far beyond anything the New Dealers had ever imagined--first during World War II, then in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon campaigned as philosophical opponents of Big Government, but once in power they made no real attempt to cut it back. Even Ronald Reagan could do little more than put a lid on its expansion. It took Democrat Bill Clinton to declare the era of Big Government finally over. And by then its most important institutions had become widely accepted provisions of the nation's contract with itself.