A Final Note on "Don't Know Much About History"
In an earlier post, I observed that my audio CD of the bestselling book "Don't Know Much About History" struck me as extremely odd, focusing on only the lowest points in American history. I can report after finishing the CD that it stayed on this path to the end. After the Cuban Missile Crisis we had conspiracy theories of JFKs death, then the Mai Lai massacre, then Watergate, then Iran Contra, then Monica Lewinsky. Yes, the last 40 years were summed up in total as Mai Lai - Watergate - Iran Contra - Lewinsky and essentially nothing else. Wow, what a view of history! As a libertarian, I am happy to showcase the foibles of government, but this seems like a crazy loss of perspective even to me.
In addition, bits of the history were just terrible. For example, he said that the Puritans who came to America were much like a cult today and treated as such. That is a lame simplification of history. Sure, one can argue that today's religions were yesterday's cults, but it is silly to say that the Puritans were treated poorly in England for the same reasons a cult might be today. This completely ignores the whole reality of having a state religion in England at the time of the Puritans. A state religion trying to purge itself of dissent is a really different dynamic than a modern cult getting shunned by mainstream society (except perhaps when Janet Reno controls some tanks). This distinction is also important because avoiding state religions is an important foundation block of our government, and its prohibition is buried in that arcane and little discussed thing called, uh, the First Amendment.
It's clear the author is not a big fan of capitalism, and I would generally not even comment on such a thing because it is so common in academia. I managed to mostly ignore numerous off-the-cuff quips he makes about evil corporations and greed and the assumption that any action by a rich person had to be out of a desire to repress the masses rather than from principle. However, his bias creates some really bad history in at least one instance. In discussing Hoover and the depression, he really lays into Hoover for how block-headed and absurd Hoover was for not initiating massive government welfare programs earlier in his administration. I mean, he absolutely hammers Hoover for being a total cretin, and the author laughs at various Laissez-Faire speeches by HH.
But this is a stunning loss of context for a historian. While government handouts to people who are out of work may seem a no-brainer today, it was absolutely unprecedented at the time. It had never been done. And, nowhere in the Constitution, whose 10th Amendment specifically says that Congress only has the specific powers enumerated in the Constitution, does it say Congress has the power to tax one person and give the proceeds as a handout to another to relieve economic distress. In fact, it was enough of a Constitutional question mark that the Supreme Court would later rule unconstitutional most of FDR's new deal, at least until FDR could repack the Court with his guys. HH had good reason, beyond just his principles, to believe that he would be breaking the law and violating the Constitution to do as the author suggests. But nothing of this context is mentioned. The author only portrays Hoover as an idiot for not being interventionist enough.
In fact, the author leaves out a point I would tend to make first -- that the Depression would have been much better off if Hoover had in fact been truly Laissez Faire. Unfortunately, his tightening of money supply in the face of a depression and liquidity crisis via the relatively new Federal Reserve, his acquiescence to the Hawley Smoot tariffs, and his tax increases to close the budget deficit all contributed far more to sending the train off the rails than any intervention could have ameliorated.
