Do Americans in general today have a clue about the Depression, its causes, its cure?
Viscerally they do. Intuitively Americans know that you have to help yourself across a bad patch. There was a component to the Great Depression that was like Hurricane Katrina that you couldn’t do anything about. That component was the banking component, the international component, the monetary component. But there were other components, such as what Washington did — and they did all sorts of crazy things — that did slow things down. There is this general view of the 1930s that the New Deal made everything magical and it was a good thing that Americans suspended disbelief and followed Roosevelt all those years. But that wasn’t the reality. The suspension of disbelief also shut out common sense. For one example, Roosevelt prosecuted business all the years of the Depression as the class enemy and cause of the Depression. At his second inaugural he said, “We are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power.” People to the left of Al Gore know today that you don’t tell the American peop
