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Steve Austria Tells the Columbus Dispatch Editors:

 FDR Started the 1929 Great Depression When He Took Office in 1933

Note: Martin Gottlieb's Dayton Daily News editorial is copied here.  You can go to the original by clicking on the title below.

The Wikipedia account of this and alleged plagiarism by Austria is interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Austria

Editorial: Professor Austria’s history lesson goes awry

By Martin Gottlieb | Wednesday, February 11, 2009, 05:36 PM

(NOTE: Here’s a link to the Columbus Dispatch editorial.) 

Some people complain that politicians don’t know as much about history as they should. But that’s only part of the problem. The larger problem is that so much of what they do know is wrong.

They often get their information from partisan sources, with results that are catastrophic to truth. Exhibit A for the week is Congressman Steve Austria, the freshman who represents Greene and Clark counties and points east.

The other day he was speaking with journalists at the Columbus Dispatch. He was going down a list of conservative talking points about President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan. He ventured into Japanese history, giving the sound-bite conservative take on that country’s efforts to get itself out of economic doldrums a while back. He talked up the allegedly positive effects of tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy.

And he spoke of the Great Depression of the 1930s. If you’ve been following this debate, you know that conservatives like to say that President Franklin Roosevelt’s big-goverment approach did not succeed in ending the Depression. That has some truth.

But Rep. Austria took the point a step further, saying FDR actually caused the Depression.

“The last time this was done,” he said, speaking of borrowing and spending so much, “was under Franklin Roosevelt, and when Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a great depression, to be honest with you.”

Rep. Austria was given a chance to make clear whether he was really blaming FDR. He repeated his point, saying, “That’s just history.”

Actually, it’s just nonsense. President Roosevelt inherited an unemployment rate of 25 percent in 1933. By 1937, it had dropped to 14.3 percent, an extraordinarily fast drop in percentage terms. Then there was what some economists call a “mini-depression,” and the rate went back as high as 19 percent. But overall, from 1933 to 1940, it dropped from 25.2 percent to 14.6 percent.

Meanwhile, the national economy grew by a third in his first term — a growth rate that would look pretty good right about now — and by half over two terms.

Apparently, Rep. Austria, after listening to some conservative thinkers talk with unrelenting disparagement of FDR, assumed that the case against that president must be overwhelming, rather than that the partisans simply left out the parts they don’t like.

The day after Rep. Austria distorted history so seriously (twice), he withdrew his statements, saying he never intended to blame President Roosevelt for the Depression.

So he learned by talking and getting feedback. But there’s a certain flaw in that sequence. People who learn that way don’t change their mind, just their pitch. He’s already committed to the position he took.

That a member of Congress doesn’t know basic, relevant history is sad. (For more sadness, check out the audio excerpts of the interview for the congressman’s difficulty with the name of the most important liberal economist of the 20th century.) But sadder still are the pretense of knowledge and the assumption that one can talk knowledgeably about history after hearing about it from partisan sources.

If Rep. Austria got from all this a history lesson about FDR, good. Hopefully, though, he got another lesson, too, about whom to listen to, and how carefully to listen.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Austria