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Thursday, June 20, 2013
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1% controls your welfare? Historian says ‘isn't true’
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · August 03, 2012
For those who believe the “99 percent” argument — that the 1 percent wealthiest Americans determine the welfare of the rest of America — at least one historian strongly disagrees.
And according to American history scholar Thomas Fleming, neither Republican Herbert Hoover nor Democrat Harry Truman would ever consider using such an argument to political ends.
Fleming, one of three scholars featured Saturday in “Pivot Point: America’s Changing Foreign Policy,” wrote a 1972 best-selling biography on Harry Truman, which also discusses Truman’s friendship with Herbert Hoover.
“It simply isn’t true,” Fleming said of the presumed power of the 1 percent. “There is more to politics than that.”
Yes, he said, the wealthiest Americans have sheer social power and money. But that was true in 1776, too, when America had a “thriving middle class.” It was the middle class, however, using what they did have — and that was “an awful lot,” Fleming said — that started and led the Revolution.
“They were the real power and drive for independence,” he said. “They are the real strength of America.”
The reason Truman and Hoover worked so well together — Truman had asked Hoover to tackle famine in Europe and waste in the federal government — was that they found areas where they agree, even though they publicly criticized each other where they did not, he said.
“They wanted to do what was best for the country,” Fleming said. “That was deep in their souls. That was why they collaborated so successfully.”
Fleming spent two weeks with Truman and his family when researching Truman’s biography.
The symposium was hosted by the Hoover Presidential Library-Museum and Hoover Association and covered C-SPAN. Other speakers were Prof. Justus Doenecke of New College in Florida and Prof. Patrick Hearden of Purdue University, brought in to discuss America’s changing role in world affairs after World War II, switching from Herbert Hoover’s anti-interventionism to a more active role in the Cold War.
Doenecke talked about how Hoover believed Russia was a greater threat than Germany because Germany could not cross the ocean nor threaten the U.S. economy. He also argued that Hoover opposed the U.S. making military or economic commitments to either of those countries, believing that, in an emergency, the United States could be “97 percent contained.”
Hearden noted that American leaders must have been confident that they would join — and then win — World War II because they began making plans for a new world order six months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He said that while Franklin Roosevelt despised Hoover, he nonetheless accepted arguments from his advisors that he should begin acting on, or continue to use, many of Hoover’s ideas or projects to help lift the country out of the Great Depression. |
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