BUSINESS AND LABOR….Here is Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Oxford History of the American People, writing about why businessmen hated FDR and the New Deal:
Worst of all, he had done his best to peg wages at trade-union levels. Almost every man of wealth had enough resources to tide him over any conceivable depression, but he wanted the downward spiral to hit rock bottom, smash the labor unions, and re-establish the free labor market of the previous century. Roosevelt’s successful effort to prevent that was his unpardonable crime; but in the eyes of the country at large, his greatest achievement.
A lot of things have changed since the Depression, a lesson that many Democrats need to learn. However, the core concern of the business-friendly right hasn’t changed a whit. That’s a lesson that a lot of Democrats need to learn too.
