Hightower Lowdown

When Franklin Roosevelt was accused of being a traitor to his own privileged class, he jauntily replied, "I welcome their hatred."

Those FDR-haters are on the prowl again, now led by right-wing think tanks and talk-show yakkers who are busy rewriting history to trash Roosevelt's New Deal. Their real target is Barack Obama's economic-recovery plan, which is largely modeled on the New Deal approach of government spending for roads, schools, parks, conservation, and other public works, putting millions of people to work on jobs that need doing.

Naysaying popinjays like the far-right-wing Heritage Foundation now claim that the New Deal was a failure. Fox News pundit Monica Crowley has said that the failure is proven by "all kinds of studies," and her Fox colleague Gregg Jarrett added, "I think historians pretty much agree on that."

Uh...no, they don't. Indeed, they pretty much agree that millions of families were saved back then by the New Deal's public-works programs, and we still benefit today from the work that those people did.

The chief shortcoming of FDR's public spending was that he didn't do enough of it. After winning a smashing re-election victory in 1936, largely based on the popularity of his New Deal, Roosevelt gave in to Wall Street interests who were demanding a cutback in federal spending. The result was a relapse into recession in 1937, a return to double-digit unemployment, and a rejection of Democrats in the 1938 congressional elections.

In 2009 we need to stand firm against the ideological naysayers and to be even bolder than FDR.