In the closing days of the IA campaign, perhaps Bernie ought to cite an IA native as an example of his political approach. Harry Hopkins, who headed the FERA, the CWA, and the WPA at various times in the 1930’s, was a native of Grinnell, IA, and a graduate of Grinnell College. His political philosophy was summed up in this quote:
Communities now find themselves in possession of improvements [resulting from the WPA] which even in 1929 they would have thought themselves presumptuous to dream of... [but] everywhere there had been an overhauling of the word presumptuous. We are beginning to wonder if it is not presumptuous to take for granted that some people should have much, and some should have nothing; that some people are less important than others and should die earlier; that the children of the comfortable should be taller and fatter, as a matter of right, than the other children of the poor.
This piece further sums up his approach:
Hopkins never gave up his commitment to a permanent program of countercyclical government projects to absorb unemployed industrial workers. For him unemployment was no longer just a temporary effect of the Great Depression. It would always be a pressing social problem, the result of technological advances, of normal business cycles, or of the market economy. The Social Security Act, Hopkins declared, is only the beginning; employment assurance must be added to public assistance and social insurance in order to complete the package. At the end of 1936, he wrote an article for the New Republic in which he stated: “If it becomes evident that private enterprise cannot make the most efficient use of all available manpower and all available resources, people will look to public services as a means of supplementing private employment.” The federal government, he wrote, should augment unemployment insurance with public works not only to employ idle workers but “also to release the productive energies of persons who would otherwise be unemployed.” He insisted that if industry was unable to employ enough workers, then it must be prepared to pay its share of the cost of employing workers on public projects as well as the cost of unemployment insurance. For years he had vigorously defended his program of government jobs for the able-bodied unemployed as the American way to welfare. Government work projects would stimulate the economy through public money, which would be spent for materials to support these projects and then respent by newly confident, wage-earning workers. Government jobs would prime the economic pump. And this, Hopkins declared, “is as American as corn on the cob.”
During World War II, Hopkins would reside in the WH and essentially serve as FDR’s legs as an emissary to Churchill, Stalin, and others. He arguably had a greater historic impact in that role. His approach to economic matters, however, clearly was closer to 1 of the 2 leading 2016 Dem candidates.
One might also cite a second Iowa New Dealer, Henry Wallace, as a second exemplar of this tradition:
The concept of freedom," Wallace explained, was rooted in the Bible, with its "extraordinary emphasis on the dignity of the individual,” but only recently had it become a reality for large numbers of people. “Democracy is the only true political expression of Christianity,” he declared, adding that with freedom must come abundance. “Men and women can never be really free until they have plenty to eat, and time and ability to read and think and talk things over.”
I freely admit that my focus on Hopkins stems, in part, upon the fact that my daughter is a recent Grinnell grad. Sanders spoke there on Monday. I don’t know if he cited Hopkins as an exemplar in that speech. I do know that Bernie can draw on proud IA traditions.