What FDR Got Right and Biden Got Wrong About Relief
Democrats wanted another New Deal. They neglected the most important part.
FDR sold his jobs program over the radio.
Photographer: Fotosearch/Getty ImagesOn Labor Day, 7.5 million Americans lost their federal unemployment benefits, and another 3 million unemployed lost the $300 bonus that had been in place since March. That’s a lot of people with no immediate way to support themselves and their families, and it got me to wondering: What would Franklin Roosevelt — who put America to work during the Great Depression — make of the way Washington has responded to this economic crisis?
I began thinking about FDR last month, when my wife Laurel and I visited Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, where he and Eleanor spent many summers and where, at age 39, Franklin fell ill and lost use of his legs. I had recently finished reading an excellent history of the Works Progress Administration, “American-Made,” by Nick Taylor. And a trip to Campobello offered the chance to see the home that Roosevelt visited in June 1933, just days after the close of the Hundred Days that “start[ed] the wheels of the New Deal,” as he said that summer.