In the course of his sort-of-State-of-the-Union address, President Obama explained why it’s a great idea to add hundreds of billions of dollars of clearly non-“stimulative” spending to the federal budget during a recession:
In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world.
Let’s put aside policy for a minute and just think about history. Does any of these examples support the President’s thesis?
The Transcontinental Railroad. Contrary to what some decriers claim, construction did begin during the Civil War. Congress authorized the project in 1862 and agreed to lend the railroads – the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific – a total of $43 million, secured by first mortgages on their properties, and to grant them large acreage of public lands (the latter not seen as much of an expense, since the government didn’t expect to be able to turn the land into cash in the foreseeable future). In January 1863, the Central Pacific, operating in war-free California, began grading its right of way. The Union Pacific started work about a year later. By the end of the war, the two lines together had laid – 58 miles of track. Not exactly “from one coast to another”. Also perhaps pertinent to the present day is that the directors of both railroads devised ways to cheat the government and their shareholders out of huge sums of money. The Central Pacific subcontracted construction to an insider-owned outfit whose overcharges ran to $40 million (half the total cost), while the Union Pacific financed its operations through the famously corrupt Credit Mobilier. [Source: Christopher Chant, The History of North American Rail, pp. 36ff. (2002)]
Public High Schools and the Industrial Revolution. This one is so strange that I wonder whether the President’s teleprompter hiccuped. While “Industrial Revolution” doubtless can mean different things to different people, the conventional idea is that it began in Britain and was largely completed by the early 19th Century, while public high schools didn’t become widespread in the U.S. until a century later.
The GI Bill. Okay, it did indeed come “in the wake of war and depression” (though not in that order), that is, after they were over. President Roosevelt did not commit billions of dollars to educating ex-soldiers in the midst of an economic crisis.
The Twilight Struggle, etc. The Cold War was psychologically a “twilight struggle”. Economically, it was a time of unprecedented prosperity. The government could afford the interstate highway system and the space program without strain. The explosion of technology was mostly the work of private enterprise.
I can see why Barack Obama went into politics. As an historian, he’d be an embarrassment to a diploma mill.
Comments