In July of 1929, Republicans had occupied the White House for eight years running with the current Republican president not due to end his term for another three-and-a-half years. Twelve years minimum of one party controlling the executive branch.
Herbert Hoover, the present occupant, had served as the secretary of commerce and had begun to widely expand government involvement in the private sector–for better or for worse. Now that he was president it became clear that he intended to continue on this path.
The economy was faltering and it would only be two short months before the stock market plunged the United States firmly into the Great Depression.
Democrats knew they had to do something to show the country they could gain the trust of the American People. Their previous president, Woodrow Wilson, betrayed his voters–campaigning as a non-interventionist, and then doubling down on that sentiment in his re-election bid, proudly proclaiming he kept the United States out of the Great War in Europe–by engaging United States citizens in a foreign war on foreign soil under a specious pretext. His solution to the post-war world, the League of Nations, was soundly rejected by the American people, who had recently gained the privilege of directly electing their senators.
Republican policy favored business, and this attitude was palatable to a roaring population in the 1920s. They looked the other way as the federal government began inserting itself more and more into the daily operation of state economic affairs, because the intervention seemed to work in their benefit. It was tough for a Democrat with presidential aspirations to take a stand against this while the economy boomed; but as investment began to recede and value began to decline, they sensed an opportunity to decry Republican policy.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was serving as the newly elected governor of New York. But everyone knew his goal was the presidency. He had been the Democratic nominee for Vice President in the 1920 election with James Cox at the helm of the ticket. It was only a matter of time.
With a backdrop of federal economic interventionism, an economy that was beginning to feel the descent of a market cycle, and a Republican president who insisted on solving problems at the highest possible level, FDR had an opening.
He excoriated the liberties the federal government had begun to take beginning in the Progressive Era and continuing through Herbert Hoover. He spoke a message of Reform–of true reform as the word’s etymology suggests, not one that advocates change but exhorts the nation to return to founding principles. It was precisely the actions of government–viz., Republicans–that was getting America into a mess. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff, a protectionist bill for American jobs that raised tariffs to an unprecedented level for that era, was the big debate and Democrats saw it as just one more reason why the federal government needed new leadership.
It was under these circumstances that Roosevelt addressed a conference of governors in July of 1929 about the dangers of federal power, and it was here that he said,
“there is a tendency, and to my mind a dangerous tendency, on the part of our national government, to encroach, on one excuse or another, more and more upon state supremacy. The elastic theory of interstate commerce, for instance, has been stretched almost to the breaking point to cover certain regulatory powers desired by Washington.”
No, that was not John Calhoun, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, or Ron Paul. It was Franklin Roosevelt, who advocated during the beginning stages of the Great Depression the wisdom of state sovereignty, and warned of the dangers of using the interstate commerce clause to justify federal intervention.
Of course, we know the more popular story of the New Deal, the vast expansion of federal regulations and federal spending, and the “seventy years of precedent” FDR himself fought so hard to gain when it suited his agenda during his presidency. The same precedent and the same president that Barack Obama and supporters of his Obamacare have looked to for wisdom and guidance in their quest to force Americans to engage in commerce upon penalty of fine or a forfeiture of liberty and property.
Perhaps FDR was right about the elasticity of the commerce clause nearing its breaking point. And perhaps under his ministration he did cause it to break, and the federal government has been operating on a shredded version of a threadbare authority with every subsequent intervention into private business. In any case, it would be unwise to accept FDR’s vision of interstate commerce–and how his packed courts interpreted it–without questioning the sincerity of his vision.
If Roosevelt’s public statements on political philosophy four years prior to his presidency are so fundamentally contrary to what he displayed as chief executive of the nation, he must have been an opportunist with an agenda–and opportunists never engage to devolve power, but to consolidate it; never to protect liberty, but to control it.
