By Michael F. Duggan
[Originally posted on Facebook on April 12, 2025]
Eighty years ago today, the greatest modern U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, died at Warm Springs, Georgia, at the age of 63. His death, coming so close to victory in WWII, struck many Americans as not only as shocking and tragic, but ironic.
Roosevelt had shepherd the nation through the Great Depression, his policies regulated the economy toward the public’s interest (Social Security, the FDIC, the NLRB, just to name a few things), resulting in a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity. It is striking that the period of greatest government intervention in the economy and taxation of the rich–1945-early 1970s–was also our period of greatest prosperity.
As a second act, he quietly put the country on a war footing that allowed for the mobilization of industry. With the help of George C. Marshall, he expanded the US Army 48-fold to win WWII. Like a number of others in his administration, he likely worked himself to death during the war.
The dismantling of the New Deal social democracy in favor of an economy of efficiency beginning in the 1970s, and taking off under Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, has been nothing short of catastrophic for our nation. It undercut organized labor, off-shored jobs, embraced the efficient flow of wealth from the many to the few, and gave rise to the populist right. By the 1980s, even Democrats had pretty much abandoned the New Deal.
I wish we had people like him today.