The stock market has tanked. Entire industries are in peril. Americans fear for their savings if they have any left. Jobs are disappearing. The government is lurching from position to position, uncertain, confused, and worried.
Who says history does not repeat itself? The above scenario sounds like a summary of today’s headlines. It also sounds like a short-hand description of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Only a few months ago, Republican presidential candidates were trying to run as the next Ronald Reagan. Now, commentators say we need the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Who would have thought it would come to this? While FDR remains one of the nation’s most remembered presidents, recent surveys of popular opinion have not been kind to FDR’s legacy.
A few months ago, before we realized that nearly everything we had been told about our economy was false, – “the fundamentals are sound” – a poll showed that Americans no longer considered FDR one of the five greatest presidents. The poll’s respondents chose George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, the other Roosevelt (Teddy) and, surprisingly, Bill Clinton. Those 1990s are beginning to look better and better!
You could argue about some of these choices all day. But I was struck not by who was on the list, but by who was absent: the man who led the nation through the greatest economic crisis in its history.
Franklin Roosevelt was the man who managed to put together a coalition that included Irish Catholics and Southern Protestants.
That was no small trick in the 1930s. I’ll leave it to somebody else to explain his appeal to southerners, but it’s fairly clear why Irish Catholics rallied to him. Roosevelt spoke of social justice, of our obligation to each other, at a time when Irish Catholic clergymen, like Monsignor John Ryan, and Irish Catholic political leaders, like Mayor Kelly of Chicago, were singing from the same hymnal.
The question for today is this: Will Irish Americans rally around the President-elect as he confronts an economic calamity not unlike the 1930s?
There seems no doubt that Barack Obama and other Democrats want to spend federal dollars to help ailing industries and individuals who made poor decisions during the fat years and who now stand to lose their homes or their savings, or both.
The rugged individualists will insist that we have no obligation to help those who borrowed too much, who spent recklessly, who were either too greedy or too blind to see the consequences of their bad behavior.
They have a point. But generations ago, when the Irish rallied to the New Deal, Americans decided that we were indeed our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper as well. We decided that true justice demanded not the brutal consequences of bad decisions, but a collective effort to help out those in need.
If that approach sounds vaguely familiar, well, perhaps it should. That’s how the old Irish political machines worked as well.
If you’ve read anything about Tammany Hall and its equivalents around the country, you know that small time political leaders were constantly confronted with the consequences of poor decisions or bad behavior.
George Washington Plunkitt, son of famine immigrants, told of being summoned to courts, where he posted bail for constituents accused of all manner of small time offenses.
It’s not hard to imagine that Plunkitt and people like him occasionally put in a word with a judge, or a landlord, or a police officer, to soften or perhaps even erase a mistake, a lapse in judgment.
Isn’t that, on a grand scale, what Washington wants to do today for delinquent homeowners, greedy corporations, and exhausted industries?
Is it a fact that too many Americans borrowed too much money, often to buy more house than they could afford? Absolutely!
Is it a fact that American carmakers have been scandalously stupid for a generation? Of course!
Is it beyond question that financial institutions and regulators turned a blind eye to irregular practices as long as they led to short term profits? Yes!
Does that mean we as a nation, as a society, ought to stand aside and let the market extract its pound of flesh?
That’s the question we face as we prepare for a new administration and for a future that looks grimmer with each day. Nearly 80 years ago, many Irish Americans decided that the market’s justice was far too rough, that society ought to be more concerned with making things right than in doling out punishment.
Imbued with their church’s teachings, led by politicians who were more interested in helping people than in passing moral judgments, they saw the New deal as a repudiation of the old order’s hostile individualism.
Today, as a result of the New Deal, we have more than a few protections from the market’s rage. A new generation, unmindful of the past, agitated to remove those protections so that the market might bring us even more riches. We live with the consequences of those policies.
We should continue to haul the malefactors of our current troubles before Congress, for if there is blame to be assigned, it surely belongs in the boardrooms inhabited by those who made a bundle out of easy credit, who decided to build absurdly large cars, who demanded less regulation so they could line their own pockets. These people ought to be called to account. If they committed crimes, they should be prosecuted.
That would be civil justice, not market justice. The market’s punishments can be more fearsome than our penal code. It is one thing to be sent to a country club jail for committing fraud; it is another thing for a family to be thrown out of a house and left to its own devices.
Times are hard enough. People need not be hard-hearted as well. Sure, identify the problems and assign responsibility to those truly at fault. But let’s not deny a helping hand to those who need it.
