Harold L. Ickes Quotes

This is one of the FDR quotations, which his opponents then, and many conservatives later, characterized as “class warfare.” This type of accusation has in part protected business leaders and those who control wealth from public accountability. Similar business leader resentment was levied against President Obama when he criticized the Bankers and Wall Street leaders whose behavior, in great part, was the cause of the economic meltdown and recession of 2008.

Paul wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve Board. This is a political viewpoint that goes back to the Founding Fathers debates about a national bank. Andrew Jackson terminated the national bank and later the concept of the Federal Reserve Bank took its place.

Most people think that in a democracy, the government has more control over the economy than it really does as Hoover observed almost a century ago. However, the major issue between liberals and conservatives is whether or not the government should use the tools that it does have that might influence the economy and to what extent the government should ameliorate the damage that the poor and middle class suffers from the recession or depression. Unemployment insurance and food stamp distribution are basic examples of amelioration. When the Great Depression hit, Hoover was president and he chose not to use the powers of government and became America’s worst President at managing the economy.

Ruth did have a great year. Hoover was floundering after presiding over the stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed.

The great scholars were as wrong as everyone else about the Great Depression

Major bankers were not only clueless in the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, but they were equally hapless in the Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression thereafter.

The Institute was just getting started then. The stock market had crashed the year before, and we were one year into the Great Depression. Several of the trustees that that they should devote the first department of the institute to the study of economics to focus on the challenge of the depression. Flexner, the first Director, thought that a bad idea giving this quotation as his reason. He then persuaded the trustees to start with mathematics where the Institute has since done its finest work.

This quotation illustrates a little known fact about America’s infectious disease history. It also reveals one of the great skills of Eleanor Roosevelt: Her ability to see a program or project in its breadth of influence and potential benefits throughout the panoply of problems facing the nation. The health fact is that malaria was a major health hazard in parts of America in the middle of the 20th century. Actually, before that time, malaria was one of the top causes of death in America. As a result of technology and programs such as this one, malaria has been virtually eliminated as a mortality risk in America.

This quotation about George Washington is one of the best complements ever paid to any political leader.

The Rio Grande River flows through New Mexico on its way to Texas. However, for many reasons the river flow is diminishing and only a little water makes it to Texas. Some Texas politicians wanted the New Mexican farmers, who were miles from the river and have paid to drill wells which they use to pump water for their irrigation, to limit their water pumping. They argued that the pumping was diminishing the water in the underground aquifer, and this was causing some of the water flowing down the river to flow into the New Mexico aquifer thereby diminishing the river flow. The New Mexican farmers argue that they paid a great deal for that land because it came with water rights under the ground and the water is theirs. This was one of the many intractable problems of agricultural water allocation in the West where farmers plant many crops that would not normally survive in that part of the country without artificial irrigation.

Agriculture, in most of the country, uses much more water than the human population does for personal drinking and hygiene, but in a number of places there is just not enough water to support all the uses in our growing nation. Agriculture has been organized and has been willing to spend large amounts of money to bribe and/or lobby legislators to block many efforts to develop water supplies for cities large and small under the theory that the more water that went to cities, the less there would be for agriculture.

Ford was outraged about the President’s administration making rules and regulations to cope with the worst economic crash in American History. Former President Hoover had been voted out of office because philosophically he believed like Ford that the Federal Government should not be actively involved with private business and the economy. Some view regulation as meddling and interference while others see it as fulfilling its responsibility for the majority of citizens. See {642381} for Ford’s view of the Great Depression.

This quotation may be apocryphal and not real. We have not been able to find an eyewitness or even a quotation the citation of which gave a date or suggested how the quote was ever made public given that it passed between these two men. However it is so frequently quoted that we have decided to include it. A further argument in its favor is that it fits the circumstances of the time. FDR had given Hopkins a huge budget and told Hopkins to get the American people working again. Hopkins did not believe in payments to the able bodied unless worked and his programs created an astounding array of jobs for the unemployed to do ranging from fixing benches in parks to writing poetry about poverty. He spend more money than any human being in history and started and implemented a nationwide program at a pace that has never been matched, Incredibly, no one was ever able to find any dishonesty in the administration, but it took years for the information of exactly what had going on at the local level to filter back to Washington. So the quote is plausible factually. Style-wise Hopkins was brutally honest with Roosevelt and others so well might have admitted that he did not know all that was going on in his programs. See {642829}.