George Rebane
From The Patriarch, David Nasaw’s mega-biography of the life and times of Joseph P. Kennedy, we read –
The Depression, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted in the first volume of his The Age of Roosevelt, offered “radicalism its long awaited chance.” The unemployed, underemployed, dispossessed, and hungry were not sitting idly by waiting for prosperity to return. Many were too numbed, too crushed, to protest, but a small and vocal minority were not. The Socialist and Communist parties more than doubled their tiny memberships and exploded in visibility. Communist Party organizers were actively operating in city neighborhoods from Harlem to Detroit, in the coal fields of Pennsylvania an Kentucky, and the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, among tenants and sharecroppers in the South and migrant workers in California, and outside and inside closed and closing mills and factories in the Northeast. Their argument was simple: capitalism had failed and needed to be replaced.
In the 1930s FDR’s big government nostrums kept the country in a depression so deep and enduring that it took the greatest war in history to bring us out of it (aided through Truman’s fortuitous rejection of the post-war return to FDR’s alphabet soup agencies) and reject communism. What is it going to take this time in today’s Democrat-promoted recession as their socialists/communists again marshal their forces in the streets and in the ballot boxes?
[17jul20 update]
rebanesruminations.com 
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