Franklin D. Roosevelt Enlightened Administrator In The 1930's

Enlightened Administrator Essay As the Great Depression hit in the 1930’s, Franklin D. Roosevelt saw a problem in the current structure of the economy and political policies and, in his Commonwealth Club Address, he offers a solution with the regulatory state and “enlightened administrator”. One area that desperately needed a solution was the agriculture industry, specifically in the dust bowl, as detailed in Timothy Egan’s novel The Worst Hard Time. The unchecked production and prevailing individualistic mindset of the farmers had created an ecological problem of disastrous proportions. With the aid of new programs and leaders, the people struggled to solve the problem, with uncertain success, as with many of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. In Roosevelt’s speech to the Commonwealth Club, he gives a brief history of America and, while commending American industry, offers a solution to the depression by the creation of a regulatory state, restricting business where needed for the good of the people as a whole. In speaking of Hamilton and Jefferson’s opposing ideals, Roosevelt comments on the birth of individualism in America, the expansion into the frontier where every man could be his own master, own his own land, and the government was a distant body. However, with the Industrial Revolution, the structure of economy changed. Instead of the government regulating the industry, power was placed in the hands of a select few, the titans of industry, and the government was complacent, willing to allow it in the name of progress. But, as the events of the Depression are unfolding, Roosevelt argues that this system needs to be checked, with the regulatory state and the “enlightened administrator”. Roosevelt does not want to dismantle corporations, what he wants is the creation of an economic bill of rights, so that the property of individuals are not harmed; he wants “that the responsible heads of finance and industry instead of acting each for himself, must work together to achieve the common end.”(6). One of the industries that went unchecked post-WWI was the agriculture industry. A post-war boom led prices of wheat to remain extremely high. At two dollars a bushel, it became extremely easy for anyone to make a good living off the land. In the 1920s, farming became a very lucrative business, spawning the “suitcase farmer” who did not settle, but would drop some seed and come back a year later and profit. It also beckoned families from the east, immigrants of all sorts, to come and claim a piece of the shrinking frontier that Roosevelt mentions in the Commonwealth Club Address. The prevailing opinion was that if you had the gumption and the will to get there, any man could make his own life, beholden to no one. With this ideal, and with the help of technological advances that let farmers harvest at a fraction of the time and an unusually wet period of years in the Midwest, particularly in the Oklahoma panhandle and Texas, the ground of the prairie was torn up at an exorbitantly fast rate and everyone made a profit. As the Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted, that cannot be used up.”(Egan 51). More ironic words have never been said, for as the depression hit and wheat prices dropped to less than …show more content…
Why a group of individualistic farmers were supportive of the federal government’s aid can be explained in one citizen of the dust bowl’s words “If Roosevelt burned down the capital we would cheer and say ‘Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.”(304). The hardworking farmers found faith in the fact that someone somewhere was doing something, anything at all. When Roosevelt’s visit to Amarillo brought rain, it was an almost unimaginably symbolic reassurance that times would get better. And get better they did, the drought ended in the 1940s, and, almost laughably, the farmers ripped up the shelterbelt trees to plant more wheat and by using up not the soil but the water in the Ogallala aquifer, were able to become prosperous again. This in a way shows the transient nature of the conservation project, similar to the many projects and agencies of the New Deal