The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America is nothing new says historian Michael Barone.
The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America is nothing new, says historian Michael Barone, who for 40 years was the principal author of the magnificent Almanac of American Politics. Nor will he be surprised if the DSA suddenly declines.
Barone acknowledges that key policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — especially Social Security — are entrenched in American life. Our future challenge will be to build private-sector alternatives that allow people to save enough for their retirement and create jobs that reduce dependency on benefits.
But before FDR, Barone notes that the Woodrow Wilson administration took maximum control of the private-sector economy, including the dissemination of news and opinion.
Wilson and his fellow progressives were convinced that experts and technocrats were better suited to steer the economy than unpredictable markets. They got their chance to impose this ideology during World War I.
Historian Arnold Kling says that Wilson’s War Industries Board set out “to decide, for the whole nation, what got made, from what materials, in what quantities, at what price, and in what order of priority.”
The government seized the railroads and standardized products to the point that there was only one color of typewriter ribbon allowed, and the War Finance Corporation commandeered resources for a fleet of ships. Wilson’s food administrators imposed “‘meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays.’”
But Wilson went far beyond wartime economics and tried to enforce social engineering. He reimposed racial segregation in federal offices and closed German cultural clubs. His Justice Department jailed presidential candidate Eugene Debs for defending men who opposed the military draft.
But the inefficient economy and suppression of civil liberties prompted a backlash. The War Industries Board dissolved itself less than two months after the war ended, and other regulations and government impositions were lifted or returned to normal.
As important was the public’s reaction against government control. Wilson’s Democratic Party got only 34 percent of the vote for president in 1920. The Democratic candidate for vice president that year was none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt. As president, he later said that loss convinced him, when World War II began, that socialism wouldn’t work.
Roosevelt didn’t nationalize any industries, Barone writes, and “even the top-secret Manhattan Project got private firms to produce the weapons it invented.” FDR resolutely opposed the idea of government workers being allowed to join unions. Furthermore, “rationing and price controls were employed, but the government didn’t use Wilson’s overbroad Espionage Act — still on the books today! — to suppress opposition speech as Wilson had.”
Barone says that even in the darkest period of U.S. history, Roosevelt decided that socialism was not the way to secure victory and would retard the economic recovery afterward.