didn't seek it, didn't choose it, but it's up to you to use it. you must suffer if you lose it! give an account if you abuse it. just a tiny little minute, but your eternity is in it. conservatives will not surrender. [cheers and applause] >> another guest speaker at the conservative student conference was hillsdale college history professor burt folsom. this is an hour. [inaudible conversations] >> greetings. i'm an intern scholar here at

young america's foundation. we're the nation's leading group for young conservative students. if you're a conservative student, please join us in the fight for freedom and liberty and visit us online at www.yaf.org or you can give us a call at 1-800-usa-1776. we can help you start a club and even bring a campus speaker to your campus. past speakers include anne coulter, newt gingrich, ben stein and many others. please, join us in our fight for freedom today. give us a call. our next speaker is dr. burt folsom. [cheers and applause] dr. folsom first realized he wanted to be a teacher when he was in the eighth grade, and i

think his mom would be proud because he's blossomed into an awesome conservative academic. he's a professor of history at hillsdale college and works every day to help insure liberals fail in their quest to rewrite history. he's spent years teaching young people history the left would love to have forgotten. his latest book is entitled new deal or raw deal, and he's here to talk to you about just that today. this book exposes how fdr didn't get us ott of the -- out of the big depression, but it made it worse. he educates young minds so that the negative consequences of history are not ever repeated. please help me welcome dr. burt folsom. [cheers and applause]

>> thank you, brad, and thanks to ron robinson and the young americas foundation and the good work they do and you for coming because i have something very important to talk about this afternoon, no less than my be candidate for the greatest myth taught about u.s. history. the greatest myth. the greatest falsehood perpetuated in the classrooms about u.s. history. and it relates to the great depression where we had in some points over 20 percent unemployment, it relates to the 1930s and the presidency of franklin roosevelt. the greatest myth in united states history is that the new deal, franklin roosevelt's program for are recovery -- recovery, that the new deal got

us out of the great depression. [applause] as brad mentioned in his original statement of introduction there, the new deal often perpetuated the great depression. i think it's useful just to start this off to quote henry more again thaw who was franklin roosevelt's secretary of treasury. i felt the subject was important enough to research heavily and write a book on. franklin roosevelt was rated in the schlessinger poll as the greatest president in u.s. history with the possible exception of abraham lincoln. they were up there together, roosevelt was ranked ahead of george washington. here, here is the quotation from his secretary of treasury. henry morgan that would and

roosevelt were friends. he was in his position because of his friendship with roosevelt. the two had known each other for decades. their wives were both named eleanor, they'd been good friends, and roosevelt wanted a friend in the treasury department. henry was reeling at the end of roosevelt's second term mr. the latest -- from the latest unemployment statistics from april 1939 which revealed that 20.7 percent of americans were unemployed. in other words, more than twice the number we have today were unemployed after almost two full terms of franklin roosevelt in his spending programs in the new deal. he finally was so frustrated with the latest wave of statistics that he said this: we have tried spending money.

we are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. and i have just one interest, and if i am wrong, somebody else can have my job. i want to see this country prosperous. i want to see people get a job, i want to see people get enough to eat. we have never made good on our promises. i say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot. we had, indeed, doubled the national debt in roosevelt's first two terms. what we had then is all the presidents up to 1932, we had a national debt of $20 billion. at the end of two terms of franklin roosevelt, a national

debt of over $40 billion. the question is what many the world -- in the world went wrong? and i mean, it went wrong. let's look at other indicators. unemployment is an obvious indicator that things were going very poorly. let's look at other indicators. in 1900 the average life expectancy because of the disease and other problems, the life expectancy that americans had in 1900 was 47 years. that's it. half the americans made it to 47, half did not make it that far. that rate increased gradually with disease control, improvements in quality of life, improvements in nutrition. we had about half a year every year improvement on life expectancy until we get to 1933, the first year that roosevelt took office, and life expectancy

had climbed to 63.3. so in other words, it had increased a little over 16 years in the first 33 years of the last century. then we have eight years of franklin roosevelt in the new deal, and in 1940 life expectancy is 62.#. it had dropped. it had slightly dropped. so we go up steadily, and then we level off and even slightly drop. we can look at arrests. arrests doubled during the 1930s, murders went up and then went down after the great depression was over. the period of the 1930s and the new deal was a disaster. one simple reason we rook to explain -- look to explain this. you cannot use the stimulus package concept which roosevelt liked to apply. to use that concept, to pour

money into projects to complete jobs, it seems like you're doing it. you have road building, you put people to work on roads -- that sounds important because roads always need to be improved, sometimes they were building schoolhouses, seemed to be creating jobs, yet when we would measure the jobs at the end of the year, invariably they'd declined, stayed the same, maybe fluctuated, but no steady gain because every time you're spending money, you have to get the money from somewhere, and that somewhere was always someone, and that someone was the taxpayers. when you are raiding the taxpayers to pour money into a federal project, you are taking money from people who could have used that money to buy things that would have created jobs. so instead of having people create jobs through the money that they invest in buying

things that they want, the money was taken from them, and we consolidated a little bit of job creation doing road building. it's no net gain. we take the jobs from one source, we lose them at another source. we have no net job creation. plus, it's worse, and this is why we had, again, so little recovery. once you take that revenue, that has an impact because you're raising tax rates. we had tax rates -- it's almost hard to believe because you hear, oh, obama may take the top rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. you know, this is a definite possibility. it could go back up to 39.6 at a top level. under franklin roosevelt he raised the income tax, he raised a variety of taxes actually, but the one that i'm going to focus on here for a minute is the

income tax. he raised the top rate on the income tax to 79 percent. that's on top incomes, and that's after your income reaches a certain level you have to pay four out of every five dollars to the united states government. this gets to be kind of contagious. once you get the idea, oh, we'll tax the rich to pay for these programs, roosevelt couldn't let it alone. once you get the idea, oh, they can pay 79 percent, then why not more? roosevelt proposed at one point 99.5 percent on all income over $100,000. let me let that sink in a minute. 9 #.5 percent -- 99.5 percent on all income over $100,000. i guess we're going to have to look to our math majors again.

[laughter] if you made $200,000 -- of course, that's a good income back in 1935, 1940. if you made $200,000, what would be the amount you would get to keep out of that second hundred thousand dollars? at a rate of 99.5 percent? i know a lot of you get as in history, but i'm not hearing the a in math. yeah, 500. no, you don't get to keep a thousand, that's too much. you get to keep 500 and send 99,500 to washington. now, i say that to try to give you a sense, roosevelt tried to get this passed. when he didn't get it, he later issued an executive order for a 100 percent tax on all income over $25,000. so in other words, for a while in our history, a brief period,

we had 100 percent tax. now, congress overrode this executive order, so they got it down to 90 percent. but i say this to indicate, try to think, jobs are created by entrepreneurs. they're not going out there saying, i want to create jobs. that's a by-product. they're saying i want to create a product that people will buy, i want to create a profitable product, and in the process of creating that profitable product, i'll have people work for me, so that creates jobs. but if you tell the person, aha, 90 percent or thereabouts of your money will be taken in taxes, what impact does that have on people who have the potential to create jobs? roosevelt gave us the answer. it had a huge impact. they ceased to create jobs. all the innovations that we had when we had a low-tax era the previous decade of the 1920s we see go down the drain n. 1 --

in the 1920s we cut tax rates to a maximum of 25 percent, and when that happened we saw entrepreneurs come out, oh, i get to keep what i invest in. we get the first commercial wide distribution of air-conditioning, and it's interesting to think, you think, well, yeah, i'm sure glad on a day like this in washington, d.c. that we have air-conditioning, right? yes. oddly enough, air-conditioning was first used on a wide scale for movie theaters. summer was a slump month, and so movie theaters found if they used air-conditioning, they could pump up their ticket sales. so once it was successful in movie theaters in the 1920s, then others began to buy air-conditioning. we started getting factories. we don't really get home

air-conditioning developing because the efficiencies and economies have to come into play. we don't really get that into the '50s and '60s. so probably your parents and grandparents will remember when they had their first air conditioner in the home. that was one of the developments of the '20s. the greatest thing since sliced bread, sliced bread was invented in the 1920s, right? how else can we get those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? and we had the zipper invented in the 1920s. the invebter of the -- inventer of the zipper took it into the patent officer, and they were so concerned that they said, well, we're going to give it a patent, but i can't imagine a use for it. because that's often the thing, we often have narrow vision until somebody invents something, and then once we have it, we wonder how we ever did

without it. those were the kinds of invetions -- inventions, many of you know radio was developed in the 1920s and became a household item by the end of the decade. vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, it was an incredibly innovative decade. that comes to an absolute halt when we tell people, no, now most of what you produce gets sent to washington. the tax rate would vary sometimes from year to year, but when you tell people most of what you make -- and sometimes it was over 90 percent when we get into the 1940s -- when we tell people most of what you make we send it somewhere else and then you see what they're spending it on, most people say, oh, i don't want to risk that. and all the tall end and creativity that people have, yeah, you need some

encouragement. that was lacking in the 1930s. it perpetuated and the great depression persisted all throughout the decade, it was a disaster. now, i have some people when we talk about this who say, well, okay, i mean, you're making a good point. if unemployment is 20 percent in 1939, you know, it's fluctuating. i mean, obviously, we're not getting out. the highest unemployment before the great depression that we'd ever had in our history was 18 percent. ten years into the great depression we have 20 percent. i mean, that is hard times that a whole generation had to bear. now, i have some people who say, well, okay. maybe it's a bit of a myth that the new deal got us out of the great depression, but wasn't it in some ways a step in the right depression -- a step in the right direction? [laughter] it was a step in continuing the great depression it turns out.

the answer is, though w the step in the right direction is, no. i've been general, i want to get a bit specific with some programs. a couple of the main ones. now, you take the farm program, the agricultural adjustment administration. some of you may see this in the textbooks, aaa, agricultural adjustment act. that was a big program for agriculture. now, here's the idea, and see if you can comprehend the justification for this. farmers are losing money. farmers are getting low prices for their crops. well, one of the reasons they're getting low prices is because we had passed under the hoover administration the largest tariff in the history of the united states. it's called the smoot holly tariff. that tariff made it difficult to import goods into the united states.

because of the high cost to get the product in that other countries said, well, if you won't buy our stuff, we won't buy your stuff. and farmers export a lot of what they produce. and so farm markets over in europe and elsewhere just got shut off. you won't buy our goods, we won't buy your wheat, your corn, and your cotton. when we got shut out, you can see what happens. well, all of a sudden we can't sell, the prices go down. well, now, roosevelt i have to give him credit at the start of his campaign he said, gee, we ought to repeal the smoot-holly tariff. it's nice to say a good idea crept swoop the picture, but unfortunately he didn't act on that. he did eventually help in that area, but he didn't do it quickly, he did it very slowly and not methodically. so what he did instead, you say, well, you're not going to act immediately on getting rid of it, what are you going to do?

he said, here's my idea. farmers are getting low prices, let's pay them not to produce. wow. you see, if you pay them not to produce, then you won't have overproduction as much because they're not producing as much. they're not producing as much because they're being paid not to produce. that's an idea that is so bizarre that only a college professor could think it up. [applause] i'm happy to report that my fellow college professors were very instrumental in that plan. i mean, it was one of these whoo-hoo i've got the idea, pay 'em not to produce. one of the justices of the supreme court said what about somebody if you were overproducing shoes? what do we do, pay everybody not to produce whatever it is they're producing? well, that was a good question

when the supreme court took up a case that struck this law down as being unconstitutional. but it took a while for that to happen, and then it was readily replaced due to a tech technica, so it was sustained, and in various forms it's still in effect today. you pay people not to produce. now, the way this works, you have a big stretch of land and you have, say, 160 acres, and let's say you're not going to produce on a fourth of that. you are allowed to take a fourth of your land and be paid not to produce on a fourth of it. well, now, the costs vary, and the secretary of agriculture was authorized to help fix the cost, it typically was about $10 an acre. well, if you're going to pay people not to produce and give them $10 an acre, most people said, yeah, i want to do that. so we have massive numbers of farmers participating in this program, to be paid not to produce. wow. well, the government discovered

something when we paid people not to produce. we told everyone, okay, i want to be paid, i'm not going to produce on 40 acres, okay. and we were getting ready and sending the checks out, and the department of agriculture discovered something so unpleasant that they just hated almost to admit it publicly. it's just hard to believe. i know some of you will be astonished. some of the farmers were paid not to produce, and then when no one was looking, they produced on that land anyway. and then they were going to sell the results. we've got a response for that one. [laughter] don't you pull that one. we sent inspectors around. [laughter] tens of thousands of inspectors. on to everybody's land and they had measuring equipment. and they were going to measure every inch of that land to make

sure that they were not producing. and if they were, they had to dig it all up. okay. that fixes that. whoo. they can go back to the department of agriculture patting themselves on the back except they found something else unpleasant that developed. if it's too painful, feel free to put your fingers in your ears. your view of human nature is going to be shattered. some of the farmers who were being paid not to produce offered bribes to the inspectors. [laughter] we'll take some of the government money we're getting, and we'll pay it to you if you'll go away. oh. we had an answer. you know, kind of the initial, and then we're going to send inspectors to inspect the inspectors. [laughter]

so we have tens of thousands of inspectors inspecting the other inspectors to see what kind of job they were doing. well, then we found out that even the inspectors who were inspecting the inspectors were getting bribed, but we had an answer to that, we got a fleet of airplanes, and we ran around ux and we took pictures of their land to see what they were producing, and then we would know whether they were complying with the rules or not. does anybody see why the department of agriculture was the biggest federal department except for the department of defense when the pentagon got built? that's the biggest department that we have in the federal government. hundreds, every a hundred thousand inspectors going around all of these airplanes and aerial photographs. it was a program that -- and plus we were paying people not to produce.

well, i guess some of you know what happened then, you're paying people not to produce cotton, you're paying people not to produce corn, you're paying people not to produce wheat. well, in 1935 we had shortages of those crops, in some cases because of drought, and so what we have is we're now going to import corn -- 35 million bushels of corn, 13 million bushels of wheat and over 30 million bales of cotton -- in order to offset the amounts we were not producing. we're paying cotton farmers not to produce cotton, and we're importing cotton. so now we're paying on imports for the farm products that we're not producing because we're paying the farmers not to produce, and we have an army of bureaucrats around who are also paying to make sure they don't

produce. now, if that program is, quote, a step in the right direction, it's a step i don't think we really want to go down. but that was a critical part of the new deal. that program. well, now let me get to the bad programs. [laughter] i've begin you one of -- given you one of the better ones, now let me give you one of the bad ones. the national recovery act. it was the nra of the 1930s. the national -- now, see if this is going to be in your mind recovery. under the national recovery act, we were concerned that people weren't making enough on things that they sold, and so we allowed businesses and industries to get together in groups and determine what prices ought to be paid for whatever it was they were selling. and so you would have people getting together and set a price for cars, clothes, i'm going to give one example here for pressing a pair of pants.

all of us are going toffees for that, and they're going to be legally binding, and if you're caught giving a customer a discount, you might go to jail. that is our national recovery act. naturally, people said, oh, you mean i can set the prices where we want? and a lot of the businessmen would set very high prices, but, of course, the businesses would be down, but we also had this whole business about the possibility of going to jail. jacob mcget was -- identify researched -- i've researched several people who ended up going to jail for giving people discounts. one of them was jacob maged. he was a hungarian immigrant,

came over to this country, he was working in jersey city, new jersey, and he had a tailor shop where he was pressing pairs of pants, and he was doing that off the main drag because he couldn't afford a shop on the congested main street. well, the tailor code under the nra, the national recovery act, had a rule that said that you could, you had to charge to press a pair of pants 40 cents. that's equivalent today of about $4 to press a pair of pants. in other words, you could not legally charge anybody less to press a pair of pants. now, jacob made an interesting point. he said, look, you have tailors and pants pressers who are on main street. the law says they have to charge 40 cents. i am way off the main street, and i charge 40 cents. what are people going to do, go where it's close or go drive far

away and pay 40 cents? he said, listen, the reason i've been in business is because i give discounts. i get people to go off the main street, come to my shop, and i give them a discount. that's how i stay in business. i came over here from hungary to this land of opportunity, i'm happy to press panels, and i'm going to give discounts to my customers, they're happy when i do it. and so he said, and i quote from the book here, he made the statement when he was under investigation, he said, you can't tell me how to run my business. when they threatened him with jail, he said, go ahead, send me to jail. that probably wasn't the most diplomatic thing to say. [laughter] they did throw him in jail. and he was in jail, but i think it's interesting that it was such an extreme move. and many others were in jail, too, for giving discounts to

customers. there he was in jail, and even some newspapers who you wouldn't normally would think would be on his side turned up on his side. "the washington post" said this: if measuring aged had to charge less, if he wanted to continue to exist, the law said he could not. the new york herald tribune said this, quote, for a parallel it is necessary to go to the fascist or communist states of europe. wow. to find a parallel, send somebody to jail for giving a customer a discount. can everybody see the national recovery act is probably not going to produce recovery? unless you count reducing up employment, putting people in jail where they can no longer be counted as unemployed, then maybe, but that's the sort of unemployment we get in the gulag in the soviet union, not that we expect here in the united

states. the national recovery act was a failure. when the supreme court looked at the constitutionality of this bill, they looked at it, and at one point they ended up laughing at it. you don't very often get the supreme court hearing someone say, oh, here's our bill, here it is, and then just have ha, ha, ha. not a good sign before they go into chambers. what had happened was a chicken producer, the schechter brothers in new york, had chickens that they were selling. well, of course, he had to charge exactly the same price for be every chicken. i mean, you can see where that's going. well, some people would look in the chicken coop, and they'd say, hmm, do i want that big, fat, healthy-looking chicken or that sickly-looking chicken? see, again, you're not allowed to give discounts. and so in order to get around that, all the chicken sellers said everybody's picking the healthy ones, and nobody wants to buy the sick ones.

so they made the rules that when you bought a chicken, you had to turn the other way and stick your hand in the chicken coop and pull out a chicken randomly. [laughter] that was the law of the land. justice sutherland on the u.s. supreme court heard this, he went kind of, and then he made the statement, what happens if all the chickens run off to one side when he sticks his hand in? and this prompted ha, ha, ha. the end result of this, franklin roosevelt's key program, the national recovery act, was the supreme court decided by a 9-0 margin that that was unconstitutional, a total violation of the constitution, to tell people what price they had to charge for their products, to tell people they couldn't give discounts, it was absolutely unconstitutional. roosevelt could not get one justice on the supreme court on his side when the case came up.

now, part of this prompted roosevelt in his second term, as many of you know, to pack the supreme court. he wanted a bill that would allow him, in effect, to under some conditions add as many as six new justices to the supreme court. roosevelt was a clever one though. he didn't just say, they're deciding cases against me. i want people who will vote that the nra is constitutional. instead of saying that, he said, the justices, oh, they work so hard. they're overworked. if we had six new justices which i'll volunteer to appoint, then they won't have to work so hard and will share the load. nobody bought that. and the senate finally said, do you think we're total idiots? they ended up rejecting his supreme court packing, and that was going to be part of roosevelt's undoing. he was head of one executive, of the executive branch, he tried

to usurp power into another branch of government, then he tried to get the democrats' majority leader who he wanted selected, and they said, wait a minute, he's got his hands in every branch, he's exceeding his power limits. congress said, no, and it was at that point, the next election 1938 roosevelt lost 80 seats, the democrats in the house of representatives. and the republicans began to make a comeback. but nonetheless, i would similarly say the new deal was not a step in the right direction. the aaa, the nra both major programs and disasters. i get some people -- and this is my final point -- i get some people who say, well, hmm, the new deal didn't get us out of the great depression, unemployment's still 20 percent, maybe it wasn't a step in the right direction, but it was well intentioned. were they people who cared about

us? they wanted to do good. it just kind of went, it backfired. but they were well intentioned. i think we can look at these programs, and i think that's very important because you get this sometimes. we have massive spending, isn't this well intentioned? i think it was useful to take a look at this. i had a couple chapters on the main government spending agency which is the wpa, the works projects administration. the wpa received a huge federal grant, almost $35 billion. -- $5 billion. i mean, our national debt's only 20, 25 billion, so you're getting something that's a fifth of the entire national debt in the 1930s so go around and spend. roosevelt spent the must money n places where the election was uncertain. in order, in swing districts, in swing states that he wanted to carry roosevelt was just absolutely plowing money.

if you think about it, everybody wants roads built, the question is do you live in a district which roosevelt leads to carry? if you did, you got your roads built. pennsylvania and other states had money plowed into them. here it is, a federal program to build roads that's supposedly nonpartisan. listen to some of these comments. the democratic county chairperson, what i think will help is put men in there who are in favor of using these democratic projects to make votes for the democratic party. you know, i disagree with him, but in a way i appreciate his bluntness. he helps me to understand what federal spending is about. it's helpful. james doherty, a new hampshire democrat, agreed. quote, it is my personal belief to that -- that to the victor

belong the spoils so that we might strengthen our fences for the 1940 election. in other words, we hold these positions, and then we strengthen ourselves to win in 1940. i like this in new jersey, one wpa directer in new jersey, i have this, a corrupt but candid man -- [laughter] answered his office telephone, quote, democratic headquarters. so he was head of the wpa, but he answered democratic headquarters. and many times you had to sign up, and you had to prove that you were a democrat in order to be eligible to get a job. listen to this congressman, frank talley, also in new jersey. at aal -- rally he said this. in this county in new jersey, hudson county n this county there are 18,000 people on the wpa. with an average of three people in a family, you have 54,000

potential democratic votes. can anyone beat that if it's properly mobilized? well, what eventually happened because the parallels when i've talked about this before people say does this remind you of acorn? yeah, it kind of does. and just as we're having federal investigations of acorn right now because whenever you get massive spending, massive corruption is right behind. and so what we had here with the wpa is thatten in investigation by a man named thomas stokes, and he won a pulitzer prize for his work exposing the wpa as essentially a political activist arm of the democratic party. and he said, gosh, i was a democrat going into this. but now i can't get anybody in roosevelt's administration to speak to me after i wrote these

articles. so he was treated very, very negatively. but i think it's interesting if we look at the media at least in the 1930s, he was at least willing to investigate this with a certain amount of openness, and he concluded it's corrupt, he reported it, he won the prettier prize -- pulitzer prize, and that exposure helped to diminish the negative impact of the wpa, and we had a law passed afterwards that limited the amount of campaigning that wpa workers could do for the democratic party. that limit gave the other party, the republicans, an opening to have the potential to win elections. so nonetheless, i'm saying the investigations perhaps, we don't know, of acorn today perhaps could yield some restrictions there. the wpa ultimately was restricted. if you look at roosevelt and what he's doing, try to think of it this way. the spending today, there's a parallel. let's say, of course, general motors used to be a private

company completely. let's say in the 1930s general motors -- they have more than this, let's just say they have 20,000 people working at major plant in michigan. let's say they have a layoff of 5,000. now, of course, some of this layoff, right, it's high taxes and all of these things that are being done to them. probably if we would look at those 5,000 people, half roughly would be republicans and roughly half would be democrats. there's no reason to believe it would be any ditch. it -- different. it might be a little bit different, but the laws of probability are since we have about half and half that if you had people at general motors, half of them would be republicans. look at this from roosevelt's perspective. now they're laid off. now they're candidates to go work for the wpa or another agency, there were others. the ccc, the civilian

conservation corps, and others. now we put them on these federal work programs, and we poll them, and we did have poll pollsters to poll them, and they were as much as 10-1 democrat. in other words, they're laid off because they don't see any connection between a low-tax policy and working for general motors. they just say republican, democrat, whatever. you lay them off, and roosevelt steps in and gives them a job. wow, i am grateful. now i'm going to vote for roosevelt. i say this because it explains how roosevelt was able to win election after election. one of the complications of writing on the new deal, the difficult task is you have to explain, number one, the new deal was failure, it didn't work. again, historians ranked roosevelt as either the greatest or one of the greatest presidents in american history. it's a blow to say the new deal didn't work. the fallback position is, well, if he didn't work, how come the

voters voted for him so overwhelming hi? -- overwhelmingly? how many states did the republican carry? yeah? oh, good, i heard a lot of people. the math has improved here. [laughter] two. maine and vermont. what i'm telling you -- no, this has to register. in 1936 when roosevelt was running for reelection with double digit unemployment, roosevelt received 523 electoral votes and the republican received 8. now, that is a beating. that is one big beating. 523-8. and it just blew the republican party away, it put them in a quandary, in a dilemma that they have had ever since. some of them said, well, maybe we need to back this federal giving stuff. someone said maybe we could outgive the democrats, someone

else said, no, you can never do that, but someone else said, well, maybe we ought to try. landon criticized the aaa, hey s this stupid or what, we're paying people not to produce. and crowds would cheer in boston, and then he'd go to farm country and they'd say, are you taking away our program? and he'd say, no, i'm going to administer it better. i'm going to do better at administering it. well, now, the voters have a choice if you're a farmer. do you vote for the guy who gave you this nice subsidy or a guy who says i'll do it even better? well, the proof is in the vote. landon was governor of the state of kansas. roosevelt carried kansas. and 45 other states to give him 46. landon carried two. this was a transforming election in u.s. history because it set

the tone. if you can get in there and promise lots of stuff, throw it out there even if it doesn't do any good, you'll pump and hit key congressional districts. the modern-day earmarks. you'll hit key congressional district ares. they'll be grateful, you'll receive votes even though the program is not working in the sense of reducing unemployment. so that's why i say you can't even really argue the new deal was well intentioned because the intentions of this kind of program is simply to perpetuate one party in political power. now, if we're persisting with a 15-20 percent unemployment, that is not exactly solving the big problem that the nation is facing during the great depression. and so i don't really think we can most of the time give the new dealers and franklin roosevelt really particularly good credit for well-intentioned behavior. also i point to those high tax

rates. that's very unfortunate. we also had excise taxes, cigarette tax, whiskey tax, taxes on telephone calls, we had taxes on stock sales, and then we had, and then somebody said, well, gosh, people are escaping. they've going to movies like gone with the wind and all of that, my gosh, and then we immediately had a movie tax, see? so we're putting taxes in, raising money to help pay for this. a lot of this are just taxing we're trying to institute on the rich and then these excise taxes that hit poor people, and that is how we're going to try to pay for this. we indulge in what we call today generational theft, and so my generation inherited a double debt just like there are those who want to double the current national debt in the next eight years and, unfortunately, i'm sad to say you people would then be saddled with that as i was in my generation with the new deal debt. but just because our generation was hit with a double national

debt during the new deal doesn't mean we ought to say, well, yeah, we got hit, too, you take that! i like what george washington said in his farewell address. he said, we fought the revolutionary war, and we won it. we wrote the constitution, we signed it, and we gave this nation an excellent government. now what i'd like to do before i die and before my generation dies is pay off the entire national debt. i don't think our posterity ought to have to pay that either, and he did it within -- not in his lifetime, but within the lifetime of some to have founders -- some of the founders and by the 1830s, the national debt was completely paid off. now, that is leadership. that is quality leadership. [applause] i wrote the book because i thought if my colleagues in the historical profession are going to rank franklin roosevelt ahead

of george washington, someone needs to add a dissenting voice. i think the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that roosevelt was not a good president, but the larger point, get it off personalities, these ideas didn't work. we have a case historical study of a ten-year unemployment period or more that where we sustained double digit unemployment. that whole generation, all that creativity with the high taxes was lost. all of those losses we saw. life expectancy leveling off, people who could have lived longer, accomplished more never got to do it. i think that what we need in this generation is we need free markets that will work. we had a depression after the world war i. we had 12 percent unemployment. we did two things, and i would recommend them for today because, you know, it's legitimate for someone to say,

well, if you're not going to do all that spending, what are you going to do? i like what we did under president coolidge in the 1920s. we cut the income tax rate from about 70 percent at the top level to 25 percent, i mentioned that, and second, we cut federal spending so that we had balanced budgets every year. the 1920s was the last decade in our history we had budget surpluses every single year of the decade. we chopped a third of the national debt off thereby reducing our interest payments, putting america on a course of incredible prosperity, and once we showed the world we're going to discipline ourselves, we're going to cut our debt, we're going to cut our tax rates, we're going to turn our entrepreneurs loose, we attracted capital from all over the world to invest. i talked about it, whether they're chevrolets with the new steering where you don't have the crank start as ford did it,

refrigerators, sliced bread, zippers, scotch tape, all of these inventions that were part of the 1920s. i think we can turn it around, it is in our nation's control. if we implement policies, limited government, lower taxes, reduced role for the federal government, we will not impose on your generation the generational theft. we will turn you loose to be creative when you graduate and come out into a society that says you get to keep most of what you produce, we will honor the contracts you make, you are in the unite, and that's the way -- united states, and that's the way we've always done it. thank you. [applause] good. i think that's great. let's have some questions. be sure to give your name clearly and state your question. what was your first name again? >> bill.

>> bill, okay. >> my question for you is i was just wondering if you could provide for us two examples of some criticisms that dissenting liberals have provided against your book and how you would respond to those. >> well, i have had some criticism, as a matter of fact. but a lot of criticism simply is that i guess i indirectly responded to it, they've said, well, the new deal may not have worked in its totality, but it was a step in the right direction. part of what i said was it wasn't, and even though the new deal may not have worked in every instant, the people who did it were well intentioned, and i questioned that. so my response to the critics is to say not only did the new deal not work, it was not a step in the right direction, and it was not well intentioned either. thank you, go ahead. >> hi. my name's melissa harrison, i'm from the university of louisiana at lafayette.

>> yes. >> the first time i heard you speak about the harding and coolidge administrations it kind of gave me hope for the situation we're in now. could you compare and contrast the depression of the 1920s to the economic hard times we're having now and how possible is it for someone else to come in and implement the same types of policies to turn it around? >> well, i think that's a good question to ask me to elaborate on that because in 1920 and '21 we had soldiers coming home, millions from world war sr.. and we -- world world war i. we had the high tax rates. we didn't have a culture at that point where we were going to tell investors you can keep most of what you invest. so we didn't have people investing. therefore, we had a pileup of unemployment. now, we had one argument that herbert hoover made who was the spending arm o. coolidge

administration, and he and some others said what we need is a kind of stimulus package. it includes road building especially, and we'll have these veterans come out and build roads. well, coolidge looked at that, and he said the same thing we've talked about here, if you have them out there building roads maybe that's well and good, but who's going to pay for it? entrepreneurs aren't investing. we need to get the veterans back to work working on jobs created by entrepreneurs. now, it's interesting, what do you mean new jobs? you can't answer that because you don't know what they're going to invent. why, air-conditioning, or scotch tape, gosh, it's hard to stick things here, somebody's going to invent scotch tape. you don't know what they're going to invent, that's the fascinating thing. you turn people loose.

we had igor si corps sky, and he said america is a land of opportunity, they won't let me experiment in russia the way i want to, i'm coming over here to invent my helicopter, and he did. you don't know what people are going to be able to come up with. historically in the 1980s when we turned them loose tax rates at a top level were 70 percent, ray began got it down, and -- reagan got it down, and all of a sudden we get fax machines, the further development of microwave ovens, internet work, walkman radio, all of the development. i know this, i was living -- boy, sure would be nice to have a fax machine. i could communicate with my students better through e-mail. that's what's going to happen if we cut taxes. we didn't know. we just knew if we gave people the opportunity to produce something, a lot of good things were produced, and they were. go ahead. >> good afternoon.

i'm from florida international university, and my friend and i were talking about this during lunch, and i couldn't answer it correctly, so i figured i'd turn it over to you. >> i'll try, no promises. >> you elaborated how the government runs an industrying runs it poorly rather than the private industry, and we were wondering if you could parallel that to the united states postal office as paired to ups and all of that. >> right. some of you may have found this. i remember it hit me when i was a teenager, you know, when i went to the post office, there were long lines, and you'd see people, and they were talking with one another, and they wouldn't wait on you. and when i'd go into mcdonald's, they were all eager to serve me. it happened mcdonald's and the post office were near each other. so if you want to see how private enterprise works, you go in to a business and if you want

to see how the government works, go into the post office. fedex and ups have found niches where they've been able to prevail. the post office no longer does a majority of the package business because private companies seem to be able to better handle it than government companies. sometimes bureaucrats are friendly, but they have no incentive to be. it's only because they decide i want to be that they are. it's nice with a private business because they have incentives to be friendly. sure. >> hi. my name is zaire fee that, i will be attending northern virginia community college this fall. >> okay. >> it seems as if obama's following in roosevelt's footsteps, and it looks like we're headed towards another great depression, that's what it looks like to me. how do you suggest we prepare for these hard times to come? >> well, you may be right.

you can't ever project the future because even in the '30s a lot of people thought if roosevelt would just switch gears, maybe that would help end the regulation. and it might have, but it never did. what i'm saying is it could be that a different congress could be elected in 2010. i always hold out hope because i believe the historical examples so strongly favor be us that people will change. in other words, if be every stimulus package ever undertaken has failed, maybe some will figure out we shouldn't do stimulus package, right? i mean, you don't want cash for clunkers to be a comment on pay raises to your congressmen. so maybe some of them will figure it out, so i'm ever-hopeful that getting evidence out -- that's why i wrote new deal or raw deal -- to get the evidence out and that that might have an impact. i don't want to look at this as, oh, here we go through another great depression. i hope we don't have to. if we do end up doing so, at

least we can look at the historical evidence, how it was bad, how to get us out, and that's my legacy and those of my generation who are riding on this to try to say here's some help when we're gone, maybe you can use this to help get out of it and do better than my generation did. don't let it happen again. sure. [applause] thank you. >> how about another round of applause for dr. folsom, huh? [applause] thank you, dr. folsom. you know, every time i hear him speak, he always gives me some new tidbit of information that

conveniently my liberal professor didn't give me in school, and there's plenty more of that in his book, which i've read. it's amazing, he's going to be signing copieses out in front in the lobby. i would highly recommend the book. i'm a college student, all of you are cling students, i enjoyed it, i'm assuming that you will also. we're going to be taking a short break -- oh, also dr. folsom is available to speak on your campus through young america's foundation. if you're interested in bringing him to your campus so that your colleagues and fellow students can learn some of the historical truths that simply aren't taught on many liberal cam passes, contact us at young america's foundation, 1-800-usa-1776, or visit us online at www.yaf.org. we'll help make that happen. we're going to take a quick 5-minute break for our television and online audience. we'll be back shortly with the panel.

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