Rollback In Regulations Turns New Deal Into A Dirty Deal Letter Of The Week: From July 18

We must ask hard questions about Republicans’ vision for America’s future. Since they attack Roosevelt’s New Deal, we assume they want to return America to economic and social conditions that prevailed before the 1940’s.

We doubt they want a return to the Depression-era 1930s, so it must be the 1920s or earlier. Now we have a clearer picture.

The 1920s were the heyday of the wealthy robber barons - the Vanderbilts, Astors, Carnegies - enormous wealth for a few and grinding poverty for the many. Eighty-five percent of the nation’s wealth was in the hands of a wealthy 15 percent. It was a time of U.S. congressmen accepting payment from the wealthy few, of Tea Pot Dome scandals and Pullman car massacres of working people.

It was a time of low wages, the six-day, 60-hour work week and no paid holidays, 10-minute breaks, sick leave or sick pay. Pollution of air and water was the norm. Working conditions in mines and forests killed and maimed workers as if they were expendable mules. Conditions in Chicago slaughterhouses were bad enough to gag maggots.

It was a free-enterprise era that let the wealthy control our economic lives and keep the rest of us down. Those were the good old days of small government and no regulation, without the inconvenience of a just distribution of wealth.

The one saving grace for most of us was that most of us lived in rural communities or on farms. No matter how money poor we were, we had a garden, chickens, maybe a cow and a hog. So we could survive.

Most Americans no longer have that luxury. George Thomas Spokane

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