From the Easy Chair

The Great Depression

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 19-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AJ65

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AJ65, The Great Depression from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 169, May 9, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the Great Depression. Most of the people now living have no recollection of either the Depression or World War II, because most of the people in the world have been born since the war so that...

[Scott] Terrible, terrible thought.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Otto and I feel like people who are antediluvian. At any rate, when we talk about the Depression and the War we are talking about the days of our youth. In fact, I go back to World War I and I do have some dim memories of it.

First of all to discuss the Depression. One of the things I found out in the 60s when I did a great deal of speaking on campus, was that most of the ideas of students concerning the Depression was made up of mythology they had gotten from the professors. Ideas that were governed by political positions rather than reality. The Depression was a strange matter. First of all, just to give a little bit of an overview. When the market crashed in 1929 a million and a half people became unemployed. It hit those at the top hardest in the early days. After 1931 the unemployed increased to three million. Then Roosevelt was elected in 32 and supposedly he turned the country around. In reality, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, shortly after his election, unemployment increased to six million. And then by the time of his reelection and shortly thereafter, 13 and 16 million. Roosevelt never solved the problem of the Depression. Instead he intensified it and the only way he could get us out of the Depression, after a fashion, was to take us into the War.

Well, with that general overview, I will let Otto make some general statements and then we will get into some specifics.

[Scott] Well, the Depression... we were overseas living in Rio de Janeiro in 1930 although we were in New York in 1929. Somebody told me later that only 13 people had actually jumped to their deaths. And that may have been true. I have no means of knowing. But I do know that one of the 13 landed so close to my father who was downtown in Wall Street in those days, that the blood splashed on his suit. And he came home at two o'clock in the afternoon which is unprecedented to change his clothes. And that left quite an impression upon me.

Later on we went to Rio de Janeiro and while we were living down there, there were several things happened. First of al, a great civil war broke out in Brazil with a million casualties. And that was an immense, terrible struggle spearheaded from the state of San Carlos which is the industrial center of the country against Rio de Janeiro which is the governmental center. It was the South against the North in Brazilian terms. Most Americans never heard it... about it then, paid no attention to it and don’t know anything about it today. And I think that is a remarkable instance of the insularity of the American people, of the parochial nature of the American country and culture and our steady and fixed indifference to what happens in Latin America.

In any event, he came home, took 14 day to 15 days—I forgot which—on the luxury liner of the Furnace Prince Line at the time, landed in New York the day after New Years 1932 and were being driven up town. It was snowing. And there were men selling apples, five cents, on various street corners, sometimes two or three on the block.

And I recall my father said, “Why are all these men selling apples?”

And the cab driver said, “Don’t you know? There is a depression on.”

And, of course, you remember that the system was that city hall sold them the apples.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, gave them the apples. I have forgotten which. And the five cents that they got per apple was to sustain them. And that was ... that particular day that storm, the sight of the apple sellers and so forth was the beginning of what turned out for me to be a long acquaintance with the Depression.

[Rushdoony] Well, during the week of the crash I was in junior high. I had an assignment, as did everyone in our class. We had a number of mathematical problems to do. They were associated with computations connected with the market. So we were each to have either five or 10,000 imaginary dollars which we were to invest in the market, come to class and trade daily, compute our profits and loss and then make all kinds of solutions to various problems that were set by the teacher.

Well, that was the week of the crash that we had that project. So I am sure everyone in that class to this day remembers very vividly what happened, because suddenly we, as usual, turned to the paper in the morning to find out we had been wiped out. So had the teacher, by the way, who had invested his savings in the market. He was so shattered he never called for those papers. He did not want to see them.

The ... this incident took place when we were in Detroit for a time. Most of our life has been spent in California. A little later in 31 we came back to California. And under Roosevelt the condition of the farmers deepened in its distress. It was commonplace for one farmer after another to have his power turned off, because he could not pay his power bill. Many were losing their farms to the banks, because there was no income to make the payments. For example in the 20s the popular table grape in the early 20s was the malaga. And malagas sold at the beginning of the 20s for 100 dollars a ton and briefly went up to 200 dollars a ton green.

Not long after Roosevelt’s election, my cousins and I and my uncles picked malagas on his property and our farm to take to the winery and sell of a dollar a ton. Everybody thought it was ridiculous that anyone would waste time picking them, but with a number of children grade in high school whose labor was free my uncle felt that any money that came in was a help. So he sold them for a dollar a ton green.

Now that is the extent of the collapse of prices. And we must remember that, for example, the mansion in Hollywood owned by a prominent or, rather, in Beverly Hills, a prominent director which today is in the two, three million dollar class sold in 36 for 7500 dollars. That is how depressed everything was.

However, to me the most interesting fact of the Depression was that in spite of these problems and in spite of the fact that people were making due, people were having trouble putting food on the table, it was a happy time. The films of the day had a double characteristic. Comedies or crime dramas. Hollywood stressed the gangster movies very heavily in the 30s. But ironically with the Depression crime dropped dramatically. People were driven back to their roots out of the fluff and nonsense of the 20s. And to me that is a very important fact and I don’t think it is going to happen when the next crash comes, because I don’t think people have enough faith to be driven back to anything. They have no foundation to which they can return in a vast number of cases.

[Scott] Well, every one, of course, has personal recollections of the period. On the vessel that brought us back to New York there were a couple of things that happened. One was the change in the gold price, I believe. That might have been a little later. I am not sure. Another was the fact that there were considerable number of American executives aboard who were coming back to the United States because American companies were closing their international offices, the international trade had collapsed. And a gloomier bunch of men you will never see. All very well dressed going back to a very dismal future.

It is always difficult for anyone who works for a corporation overseas to get a job again inside the United States because the assumption is that you have been out of the country too long and you have adopted foreign attitudes and ways and so forth and so on. There is a certain prejudice in those days against foreign experience, just as there was a general widespread prejudice against foreign countries over all.

But I don’t recall the depression fastening with quite the tentacles that you are describing at that point. In... in looking back at the period I think there were several things that had not been properly described by the historians. One was the fact that the crash was in 29. When Time magazine reviewed its own issues for that year they found that 1930 had been a pretty good year. There was still plenty of automobiles. The restaurants did well. Movies did well, et cetera. Unemployment had increased, but not tremendously. And there was a bi-election in 1930. There was an election for Congress and for seats in the House and Senate which the Democrats won. And it was the first bi-election that they won in large ... in a large way and enough to give them control of Congress since the Wilson period. And they immediately proceeded to cut Mr. Hoover’s legs off at the knees.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They hamstrung the administration.

Now in ordinary circumstances that would have been bad enough, but Mr. Hoover made it worse by instituting the same policies that Mr. Roosevelt followed out later. He instituted a bunch of social welfare programs only he didn't give direct relief to the poor. He set up the reconstruction finance corporation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He fiddled with business subsidies of one sort or another and a number of sweeping societal programs because Mr. Hoover was a liberal.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Roosevelt ran against him on an ultra conservative platform and then proceeded to...

[Scott] ...adopt the same things.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And to intensify it.

[Scott] And to expand it. Got... the press... beginning with Charlie Michelson who was Democratic National Committee propagandist dumped on Hoover.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] From 1930 onward like you wouldn’t believe could be done to a sitting president. It was the first time that the press really... well, not the first time. I think they worked on Harding pretty well after he was dead. But they blamed the weather. Everything that could conceivably happen was Mr. Hoover’s fault. And by 1932 we had a full fledged crisis.

[Rushdoony] Yes. There are ... was a hatred of Hoover then which was lift up by the press that you could hardly believe. And, of course, you are right. Everything was blamed on him and there was a coincidence of a number of crises. The dust bowl developed in those days and continued.

Of course Roosevelt got none of the blame that it continued under him.

[Scott] No. That was a different thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That. That was The Grapes of Wrath.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That was the time for {?}. But you remember the Hoovervilles.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the homeless began to increase and they built shacks and they squatted all over the place. They were called Hoovervilles. To pull your pocket inside out was a Hoover flag. Two pieces of bread with nothing in them was a Hoover sandwich. And the jokes escalated all over the place. I mean, his campaign promise was a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage or whatever, was brought up every time. Not only Hoover. All businessmen were held in odium as though businessmen had gone broke deliberately in order to make other people to suffer.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was one of the stupidest campaigns. Even as a child I read... I watched as I felt, what is the matter with these people? Because we had friends who were stock brokers, or at least my father did. He had businessmen who were friends of his who were wiped out just as well as their customers. And they would practically have to tell a lie about what they used to do, because stock brokers were held responsible for the fact that the market crashed, just as they are being held responsible today.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, one of the things that we forget is that the two theme songs repeatedly used by the Democrats were Happy Days are Here Again...

[Scott] Yes. That was one.

[Rushdoony] And Who is Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

[Scott] But nobody every pointed out the irony of Happy Days are Here Again, you know, when they had soup kitchens and everything else.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, things got worse under Roosevelt, but you would never know it to read the history books. Moreover, at the time the first step taken by Roosevelt was the National Recovery Act, the NRA.

[Scott] The first step was the bank holiday.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the bank holiday. But the NRA wiped out the small businesses that had survived.

[Scott] Well, it froze big business in its place. It was the best thing that ever happened to big business.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Companies used to change the order of the top 50 companies up to ... up to 1930 used to change a lot more rapidly than... than you might imagine. But from 1930 on, the same 50 companies, almost up until about 10 or 15 years ago were ... they lasted an extra generation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...under the New Deal, because they got all kinds of breaks. I left home in 34 and 34, well, Mr. Roosevelt got in... when was it? April 15th. Was that inauguration day? Or March?

[Rushdoony] He was... elected in 32 and took office in...

[Scott] ...took office in March, I believe, March or April. Remember, they changed it...

[Rushdoony] It was March 15 and then they changed it to...

[Scott] They changed it back to January.

[Rushdoony] To January.

[Scott] Right. So it was in March. Well, I left home, I believe, February 34. And it is terrible to conceive of how long ago that was. I have been out on my own for a long time. And I traveled across the country.

Let’s see... I... I bought a train ticket to Buffalo, to Albany and then to save money I hitchhiked to Buffalo. I was turned down by the navy because they weren’t accepting any more recruits. And then I took... I rode box cars through Chicago and I had the distinction—and it was a distinction—but a private one, but it was real, of riding from one piece of the train to another all the way through the Chicago railroad yards and coming out the other end, the western end. And there were, as you remember, tens of thousands of homeless men and boys.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...wandering across the country at that time. The box cars would be studded with them. And sometimes the railroad detectives would throw you off or let you... or bar you. Other times they wouldn’t. I remember on one train they stopped it in the middle of the desert and they... and they came along with iron bars and forced us off the train. We had to walk for two days to the next town. I was so sunburned my eyes were all almost closed. Very... very tough period.

On the other hand, I have never seen so much kindness, got so much help, met so much decency anywhere, anytime. I had developed a considerable admiration for the American people. The poorer the family, the more generous they were. If they didn’t have any money they would find some work for you to do, cut wood or this or that and give you something to eat. Help you on your way. And the government set up a program for Mr. Roosevelt, set up a program for the relief of the transients, they called them. They have a bureaucratic name for everything. You know, siblings, transients, all this strange language. No brothers, no sisters, no hobos, no tramps. And they set up transient camps. And you could stay in the transient camp for, I think it was three days and... or maybe a week. I have forgotten exactly and they would have a place to sleep. You would have three meals. You did road work and things like that and you got 90 cents a week. And there were poker games. I played poker and I... I ... I was put in one of those camps in North Dakota as a clerk and that got me up to two dollars a week. That was a big, big thing. And also I could stay.

Then I moved from there to a clerk in the state capital building for the FERA, for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration interviewing farmers who were applying for loans. And I would screen them and list their assets and their debits and their acreage and so forth. We never knew until years later that they were all walking over a lake of oil. The oil companies would come in very privately and had bought his up from the farmers at a few dollars an acre.

At any rate, I was transferred from that job in the state capital building at, I think it was 16 or 18 dollars a week. I was rolling then. To Washington. And in Washington I got ... had a job with the Veteran’s Relief Administration, more camp stuff and so forth.

Well, at any rate, that is enough of that.

The thing was as I looked back on it... And even then I wasn’t particularly happy with that period and I got out of it when I got a job running the Dare County Times in Dare County. That... we were all being drawn into the governmental service and the governmental program in one way or another. And this was true of the entire nation.

Washington suddenly become the great magnet of power, the dispenser of jobs, the dispenser of relief, the dispenser of everything. And almost all the work that was done in the name of these activities—I know they are dressed up today—was made work, was non essential work. They didn’t really build bridges. They didn’t really improve roads. They did plant trees and things like that for the CC kids, but mainly it was nonsense bureaucratic idea of work. It wasn’t really industrial creative work.

[Rushdoony] Yes. There was a lot of humor in those days about WPA workers. And how their big... biggest job was leaning on a shovel. And, of course, it was meaningless work. So there was no point in doing anything.

[Scott] Well, no. It was foolish to... to do anything with that stuff. And finally I broke in to the newspapers. Well, then, of course, life became much different. But I recall the shock. And can I tell the story about Mr. Roosevelt and the... the United... the United Press?

[Rushdoony] Yes, of course.

[Scott] Well, I had finally ... I had gravitated finally. I had gotten back to New York and I remembered somebody went to my dad and said, “Otto is in New York and he is working on a newspaper.” And my father said, “How is that possible? He has no credentials.”

You didn’t need credentials then. In fact, credentials get in your way, because the employer, future employer assumed that if you had a graduate degree that you would be too good for the job. You wouldn’t stay. You would be constantly looking at the side of your eye for something else.

So I ... I worked for United Features Syndicate. It was a low level job. And it was a combination, gopher and what not. But it was United Features. It was New York. And it was a leg up.

So George Carlin, the general manager was invited to the White House for several weekends. And he sent us all little notes on White House stationery which was a real great thrill in those days, because Mr. Roosevelt, you know, was a demagogue. He really was. He was the dictator of the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In a... in a de facto sense. And he came back with an exclusive contract to publish and syndicate... to syndicate, rather, the public papers and addresses of FDR. And the editor of record was Justice Rosenman, Mike Mulligan, formerly of the Brooklyn Eagle was the editor. And I was Mulligan’s helper. I wouldn’t say... dare say I was anything better than that. I ... I did whatever he asked me to do, carried the manuscript back and forth and all kinds of lowly things of that sort.

And just before we were ready with this book, this syndication to be serialized...

[Rushdoony] ...with the speeches.

[Scott] Yeah. Public papers and addresses.

[Rushdoony] Public papers and addresses.

[Scott] Yes. The Liberty magazine, owned by that bizarre individual...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Bernard McFadden who was always posing in what looked like long winter underwear and showing his muscles. He was a vegetarian and a health nut and all of this. He came out with the same thing and h we suddenly realized that Mr. Roosevelt had sold an exclusive contract for 100,000 dollars to both parties.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the light blazed all night upstairs in the senior offices of the United Press who owned United Features Syndicate. And Mr. Carlin was devastated and I was shocked. Even though the Roosevelts were right across the river from my grandmother’s home and they were by no means strangers to us as a family, Delano... his mother came from Newburgh. I was shocked to think that the President of the United States was a common swindler.

[Rushdoony] Well, why not? Delano the grandfather was an opium dealer and that is where the family fortune began.

[Scott] Yeah, I remember that. Boy...

[Rushdoony] {?}

[Scott] Oh, he made much of that.

[Rushdoony] ... to remind the American people.

[Scott] That’s right.

[Rushdoony] Well, Otto, I recall vividly that the Depression started, first of all, with the farmers. Some years before...

[Scott] Well, I was in the 20s.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Farm prices hit their peak in 21. Then the collapsed.

[Scott] Well, the blue collar people had a hard time in the 20s.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And in every depression the farm collapse comes first. And we are seeing a collapse in the area of farmers and farming right now.

[Scott] You don’t read much about it. I think it was a year or two ago there was quite a bit. Right now there is not much being written.

[Rushdoony] Well, the value of farm properties continues to decline.

When the stock market crash occurred, the place where it first showed up outside of the people in the market who lost heavily was in Detroit and Pittsburgh, big steel and automobiles. Very few people realized how many makes of automobiles were being manufactured before 29. There were really dozens of different cars.

[Scott] Well, we could go through them: the Rio, the Auburn, all kinds.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Pierce Arrow and so on.

[Scott] Yes. Right.

[Rushdoony] A tremendous variety. But they were wiped out. Within a year or two they were all out of business. Then after it had hit big steel and big auto, the two basic industries of the day, it began to percolate downward. Now the interesting thing to me is that since last October the crash of 1987 it has been the people with the most money who are often the hardest hit and from whom I hear to the effect that they are having problems financially. Most people are still not affected, especially in some areas such as California where you really have a boom condition and real estate is going from one high to another almost every week in Los Angeles.

However, I would like to get on to another subject now.

When Roosevelt took office he was haled as a hero, as a kind of demagogue, demigod. He was a demagogue.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And he was virtually worshipped.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] It was hard to go into a house without a framed picture of Roosevelt on the wall.

[Scott] He really was.

[Rushdoony] Like an icon.

[Scott] Well, this is the essence of what the Athenians called the dangerous man, a man who was a danger to the state. Their system of exile was applied against those who become so popular that they threatened the stability of the society. They didn't exile their criminals. They punished their criminals. They exiled men who became too popular and too influential.

Now... and I remember Burckhardt talking about the despots of the city states of the Renaissance. He said everyone of them were the sort of men that could walk out into the crowd and call men by their first name. They were surrounded by admirers. They were cheerful. They were outgoing. They were fascinating in carrying what... what has been called the charismatic leader, because obviously you cannot be the ruler of a country if you are unpopular. That is such an obvious thing that an election isn’t going to do it. It couldn’t do it for Nixon in a million years, because he was not a man’s man.

But Roosevelt had that wonderful stage presence. He was a much greater, better actor than Reagan has eve been.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] His voice, is command of language. You can listen to his speeches today and you will be thrilled by the way he could use his voice, a great orator. As personally a terrible snob, but in any public gathering a complete democrat and he did have the manners of his generation which, incidentally, had beautiful manners.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I was in high school in those days and I very quickly found that one thing you dared not do in class or out of class was to express any kind of critical attitude towards the Roosevelt administration, because if you did, as I did at times, you got into a fight immediately. And if there were a teacher around who heard you, or if you did it in class he was all for you getting beat up.

[Scott] Darn right.

[Rushdoony] So you really had to fight and fight hard, because they were totally outraged at any criticism of Roosevelt.

[Scott] Well, don’t forget that generation. That generation grew up and... and had to work hard and the 20s were a tough period. No matter what they say now they make it sound like it was a great party going on. Only for a very small group of people. As a matter of fact, I remember it not only as a trivial period, but as an ugly period, a period of open prejudice.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... a period of lousy, dirty, crude language and behavior. Lots of drunks and so forth.

Well, the generation that grew up... the government was remote, very remote. I mean the was a place called Washington, but who cared?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The government was the local government. Government was the mayor, the chief of police, people like that.

[Rushdoony] And you didn’t see much of them.

[Scott] No, you didn’t. And... and then when the real crunch came and people began to feel poverty, they needed money, they needed food and this and that, along came the government to help them. They were pathetically grateful, pathetically grateful. Think that somebody in Washington actually knew us, was going to help us.

Well, Jimmy Hines, boss of the west side in Manhattan, silver haired Irishman, and he was the boss, I interviewed him and he played poker. I believe it was every Wednesday night and I interviewed him before the poker game and it was a rare interview. And he was very interesting. He hadn't gone far in school, maybe the seventh or eighth grade, but the seventh and the eighth grade in his generation was like high school today.

And he talked about Plato. He talked about Plato’s Republic. He talked about the guardians. He talked about the people who take care of the people. And he said, “Everything that Mr. Roosevelt knows, he learned from Tammany Hall.”

[Rushdoony] That is true.

[Scott] And he said, “We used to put out the food baskets and we used to get people out of trouble.” And he said, “Once we helped a family, we didn’t have to say anything else. They all voted for us.” And he said, “Mr. Roosevelt has transferred this policy to the White House. But,” he said, “when we did it, they knew who did it.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And when it is done from the White House who is doing it? He said, “Mr. Roosevelt may get the credit for a while, but if this persists, nobody is going to get the credit and everybody will expect it as their due.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And later on Jimmy Hines was sent to prison for corruption. He was sent to Singsing in a part of Dewey’s clean up of the city.

Well, I look at the city of New York today which has been recently described as the swamp of ethnic and racial hatred. I look at New York today and I look at New York as it was under the Irish or as Chicago was under Daily and I wonder at what people call progress.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it began with the worship of the state and worship of Roosevelt. I know that when I went to Berkeley to the University of California there was a very mediocre historian who had been briefly a part of Roosevelt’s brain trust and the reflected adoration of anything connected with the White House as such that when he came after losing his job very politely having decided to return to teaching, his courses were held in an auditorium instead of a classroom.

[Scott] He was that much revered.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That close to the king.

[Rushdoony] Because he had been that close to the king.

[Scott] Isn't that something?

[Rushdoony] He was an indifferent lecturer. The content was mediocre, but he had been there.

[Scott] Well, when I was in the federal... the... the veteran’s CCC, the Veteran’s Administration, whatever they called it. I have forgotten now. And I wasn’t there long. But I do remember that they were setting up a... a project along the Hatteras peninsula. They were building brush fences. They would consisted of a sort of a framework of lathes with rushes hammered inside to be stuck into the sands. And the idea was that the winds would... the wind over these brush fences would create a natural barrier against the erosion of the eastern Atlantic against the shore.

Well, of course King Knut, this foolish... and so was this project. And I knew it, but they were spending money in it and I was there. I was supposed to be writing it up for the people in Washington and putting a good face on it. And they had a man named Jones in charge who was a social worker who had worked with Harry Hopkins. And Mr. Jones was a nice man. He seemed a very pleasant fellow, but that was his qualification for this nice job. And we had a presidential yacht which took tours down through the whole Hatteras area and I was a passenger on it. And I remember thinking this was a great way to be poor. And that was a sort of a scramble period.

But I think the rise of Mussolini and the rise of Hitler out of distressed circumstances, the rise of Mr. Roosevelt were all very similar phenomenons. And this... this country was just as willing to sell its should for security as any country in the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I felt at the time and I have never changed my mind that the only difference between Hitler and Mussolini and Roosevelt was that the cultural context differed and therefore each went as far as their cultural context allowed.

[Scott] Exactly.

[Rushdoony] They took advantage of the situation and of the people and had the people grateful to be robbed of their freedom.

[Scott] Absolutely. Absolutely. Now it was a pact with the devil, really.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the devil always comes... well, after all, the devil is an angel. And the demons were angels. The devil comes as the ... as the angel of light. He always comes for your good.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

Well, one of the things that I referred to earlier, the return to the Church, the return to morality, the fact that people were more law abiding is a very significant fact, because it knocked the fluff out of people and out of the churches. And this is something that we must remember. One of the things, too, that marks the difference is that in those days in most states across the country society was still sufficiently under the influence of biblical law that mortgages were for five years only.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] And as a result, people were not as deeply in debt. The effect of the crash was not as far reaching as it is going to be this time when everyone is head over heels in debt for an indefinite period of time.

[Scott] Well, the whole culture was on such a different level. Hard working blue collar people like my mother’s people were accustomed to pinching pennies and to living simply. And people did live very simply.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They would go to the movies, perhaps once a week and the movies were cheap. During the Depression, of course, the movies were the great escape and then later on the radio. Movies and the radio, the great American dream machines. But the... but the movies, if you remember, were black and white. They had morality. There was a catharsis. The heroes used to win. The villain didn’t win.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It was one of the pleasures of going to the movies. You knew that no matter how bad things looked the fellow was going to... the right side was going to win. And you came out feeling better.

[Rushdoony] And the comedies were very good.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] A lot of the comedies... people wanted to laugh and they enjoyed laughing.

[Scott] Now that is... go back for a minute. The men who were running the country under Mr. Roosevelt were mainly the men whom he knew in World War I, General U. S. Johnson, John Foster Dulles, Franklin Roosevelt, or Roosevelt himself, but all these men Smedley. I couldn’t think of it, Josephus Daniels, all kinds of men who were young men in the administration of Woodrow Wilson updated 20 years later.

Now they all saw something in the Wilson Administration, very significant. They saw the United States changed by decree, by orders from White House. One observer said of World War I it was a remarkable thing to see the American people abandon liberties that their forebears had spent their lives to achieve and do it without a murmur. So when Mr. Roosevelt got into office, he brought in that crowd and they had decided under Wilson that that was the way this country would be governed and they began to govern that way. We are still being governed that way.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because of the enormous precedent that he established in the long period of his administration. How long was he alive? He... didn’t he? He ran through three full terms, 12 years. He died in the 13th year of his reign.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There were kids all over... the young people all over that didn’t remember any other president.

[Rushdoony] Then there is another aspect. One of the things Roosevelt did was to increase federal borrowing and federal lending...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ... to an unprecedented degree.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Now compared with Reagan has done, it doesn't look like much, but in terms of the economy of the day, in terms of American history, it was something unprecedented.

[Scott] Well, look. It was a period where 1200 dollars was a year’s salary.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...for a postal worker, sufficient to support his family. Twenty-five dollars a week was a fair wage. Thirty-five or 40 dollars a week was a good wage.

[Rushdoony] Well, if we go back to the Renaissance—and we look like the Renaissance era.

[Scott] Yes, very much.

[Rushdoony] There are tyrants and ...

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] Monstrous evils.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] One of the shrewdest people of the era was Cosimo D’Medici.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] A man of enormous wealth. He personally owned two and a half tons of gold. Now if you compute to that value of that by the ounce you can see that he was wealthier than most countries are today.

[Scott] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] And Cosimo D’Medici based his power on two things: borrowing money and lending money.

[Scott] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Because he recognized that if people lent him money they had a stake in him.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] They would not want him to go under. And... and if he were lending money to people, those people would also owe him something and want more from him and he would be able to control them.

[Scott] Well, that is why the pawn broker’s sign is still taken from the D’Medici coat of arms.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is what they were.

[Rushdoony] Now...

[Scott] They were tremendous money lenders.

[Rushdoony] Let me read is sentence from Cosimo D’Medici which sounded out his philosophy. It is not his exact words, but very close to it. I can’t locate his exact words. He would have liked best, said Cosimo, to have God also among his debtors. And then he would control him.

[Scott] Yes, of course.

[Rushdoony] All right. Now when William and Mary succeeded James II in the Glorious Revolution...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] One of the first things he did was to say that instead of taxing the people he was going to borrow money from the powerful banks and persons of Britain, because he wanted them to have a stake in his success.

[Scott] Very shrewd.

[Rushdoony] So he proceeded to do that. Now, again and again whenever a tyrant has gained power or some shrewd operator like William, they have followed this policy. And this was Roosevelt’s policy and it has been the policy of each administration every since.

[Scott] Well it certainly played that game of business.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And businesses for whom you play the game with here, because that is where the wealth is. That is the kind of wealth that the government would go after.

[Rushdoony] Well, today you no longer have the National Association of Manufacturers fighting for freedom as they did once. We can remember when they were champions of freedom. Now they are for whatever Washington does.

[Scott] Well, I would like to say something on that level. That ... when we go back to the kind of men that the Roosevelt administration recruited and consisted of. And, of course, one of the special qualities of Mr. Roosevelt was that he brought in people who had not before been part of the elite, political elite. He brought in a large number of what today is called ethnics, which is I think, a denigrative term, a term, a pejorative, practically, I don’t like to hear. Either we are Americans or not. But the did bring in a great number of Jewish people, Italian people and professors who had been kept out by the Republican administration which had been tilted in favor of businessmen, what they called the practical administrators. Businessmen found themselves cast into the outer darkness. They then ... that is why the NAM had to fight from the outside, because it was thrust out of the policy councils during the 30s.

And there was another item that I think is interesting and that is that men of a certain age are educated by the previous generation and most people do not continue their education through life. When they get out of school they go to work and they carry throughout life the ideas drilled into them in school and the ideas drilled into them in school are usually a generation out of date, or at least a generation earlier. So we have men like Harry Truman, for instance, who didn’t emerge until the 40s educated by the ideas of the 1890s. And the same thing was true of Mr. Roosevelt. His ideas were anti British, pro Authoritarian Socialism, a la Edward Bellamy looking backward...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and all that sort of thing. He and Colonel House, that whole crowd had the Wilson ideas.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They did not progress beyond Wilson. They didn't read books. Mr. Roosevelt didn’t bother with books. He... that wasn’t his pleasure. He wasn’t a scholar. He was... he was an innate politician. Oliver Wendell Holmes, no great man himself, said of Roosevelt, “A first rate personality in a second rate mind.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, these obsolete ideas were going to be applied and intuitively he moved in the direction of the D’Medicis that you mentioned, but this was intuitive.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Somebody has just written a book which I have obtained and I haven’t yet read and the title is Wind Over Sand and it is on the foreign policy of Mr. Roosevelt in which the author, a professor, feels that Roosevelt simply blew over barren landscape, had no ideas whatever.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Everything that he did he came from Wilson and everything that Wilson did came from the 80s and 90s.

[Rushdoony] A memoir written by a very prominent woman who was apparently his mistress says very baldly that not only did he not read and not only did he not have any ides of his own, but he was very, very resentful...

[Scott] Of those who did.

[Rushdoony] . ... of those who did. And so he was very hostile unto the service behind a smiling face towards Churchill.

[Scott] Oh, he could not like Churchill. And another thing. At Hyde Park, the records that he left have been carefully expurgated.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] When they have not been blocked out. And they do not reveal Mr. Roosevelt to be as democratic as his public persona indicated.

Incidentally, I know the book you are referring to and she always claims that he wanted her as a mistress, but she refused.

[Rushdoony] Yes. She hinted at that, but others have indicated there was some kind of relationship. I don’t know and it isn’t...

[Scott] It is not that important.

[Rushdoony] It isn’t important. But she does give a very telling account of the superficiality of Roosevelt.

[Scott] I... she.... her... her low regard leads me to believe that there was no relationship.

[Rushdoony] Well, any final comment? Our time is just about over.

[Scott] Well, to live through an era which has been so extensively written about and to have the opportunity compare what you have seen... Now I wandered all across the United States in that period as a... as a boy. I was homeless by self decision, of course. But, nevertheless, I was in that position. And it is an interesting thing to see society from the bottom. And also then I was in an observer’s position as a journalist in that period and I had that brief excursion with the government, et cetera. And then to read the nonsense that is written about it now.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... is to seriously diminish your reliability on conventional historians.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You realize how much propaganda is intermixed here. All these people like Arthur Schlesinger, Junior who transferred onto the Jackson administration the New Deal theory.

[Rushdoony] Exactly.

[Scott] Distortions of all sorts. So I... I think... this is a subject we ought to come back to one of these days.

[Rushdoony] Very good.

[Scott] We just barely touched it.

[Rushdoony] Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.