Martin Meenagh blog

  Harry Truman became president in unusual, but not unprecedented, circumstances. Truman succeeded upon the death of a popular president who had recently been re-elected, in the midst of a global war in which the United States was approaching victory. At a basic level, he did not undermine the legacy his predecessor had worked towards, as Andrew Johnson had done, and nor did he preside over a dangerous post-war economy recklessly, as Calvin Coolidge had. He did not fire or remove the cabinet and advisors assembled by his predecessor—as Tyler did—and, unlike Lyndon Johnson, he did not deceptively escalate a major Asian war. He also won re-election in his own right, unlike Presidents Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, and Arthur, who had risen from the vice-presidency to the presidency after presidential death. In this basic analysis, Truman was a somewhat successful president. Political historians and analysts may employ such a feral metric to assess Truman, but there are other outstandi...

  American economic growth is widely viewed as having been marked, across the history of the republic, by a remarkable period of growth between 1870 and 1970 which has been characterised as a ‘special century.’ Robert J. Gordon, writing in the remarkable and deeply important The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2015) for instance, has noted how a revolution in continental affairs was made possible across the hundred years by a set of ‘special inventions.’ The principals of these inventions, which Gordon identified as the railway, and the contingent industrial processes such as steelmaking it inspired and sustained, the telegraph, and electricity, made possible a national market, dense urban areas, and the exploitation of American agricultural and mineral resources on a vast scale. Gordon, of course, proceeds in his argument by redefining and adding to GDP, arguing (alongside many others) that it is a flawed metric. Instead, he employs an enhanced figure of GDP adjusted for pu...

  What can be called the domestic presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, between 1933 and 1940, was highly controversial. Taking office in the midst of the crisis caused by the Great Depression, Roosevelt had no set plan bar to ‘try what worked.’ This led to swathes of dynamic policymaking at odds with the more conservative impression that Roosevelt had conveyed on the campaign trail, when those who were supporters of gold-backed stability might have sought reassurance from his words. It is also clearly the case that multiple members of Roosevelt’s ‘own class’ of monied and socially well- connected Americans based largely in New England cities might also have assumed that he would, as a person known to them, not fundamentally threaten their interests. In fact, Roosevelt embarked upon a policy of economic stimulation, demand management, and industrial regulation, which quickly created reactive criticism, both in the Supreme Court and outside. Thus, criticism ‘on the right’ can be dis...

Historians of the 1920s and economists have been apt to disagree on the development of 1920s prosperity. This has been because economists have focussed on the monetary policies and implications of the period whereas historians have looked to the supply-side, or to Keynesian analyses based around employment and demand. The two professions have therefore, until recently, formed radically different perspectives on the period. To an historian, the 1920s were a period when Gross National Product rose by some $25 billion; the number of ‘radio-owning households’ rose over sixteen times, from 60000 to ten million; income tax millionaires rose eightfold, and the number of people who used airlines rose twentyfold. This speaks to a massive increase in demand, which can be associated with the growth of jobs in motor manufacturing, and in the associated industries such as tyre-making and steelworks. The automobile industry alone was by 1929 responsible for 7 % of all United States industrial...

Many historians, particularly those on the political left, tend to become confused over Al Smith. The ‘Lincoln of the tenements’, four times Governor of New York and a reformer who was personally transformed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, the consensus more or less goes, was simply bitter when he reacted against FDR’s New Deal in 1934. His rich friends in the Liberty League somehow corrupted him. Al Sold out. These underlying explanations of motive are not in fact explanations at all, but rather attempts to ‘retro-fit’ Smith’s class, background and views to the assumption that the New Deal was universally supported within the progressive centre and on the left. Though complex, Smith was in fact more consistent in his political perspective than many writers have allowed for. Smith had been a leader of the Progressive movement, and had roots in the lower East Side. He was working class, and was not a university man. He arose in the early twentieth century. His career ha...

Historical arguments about the causes of an economic crash are often dependent upon cognitive biases about the economy. So, for instance, if one was a traditional, non-Keynesian but neoclassical economist, the 1920s boom would be the place to look for the causes of the later depression. This would be because such economists look to oversupply, caused by a glut of malinvestment based around interest rates that are too low, as the cause of recession. Neoclassical economists would then further suggest that the attempts of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations to restore demand or to encourage large government protection of businesses ‘turned away from the skid’ and made an inevitable inventory correction into a Depression, which was compounded by poor policy choices in 1935 and 1937.. This is certainly the view propounded by Amity Shlaes in her recent works. On the other hand, Keynesians such as John Kenneth Galbraith have long pointed to the period between 1926/7 and 1933 as on...