Charles Hammer: Right wing forgets our big heart

In 1942, when I was 8 years old, my father took me to a summer night war bond rally in Tulsa’s Skelly stadium. Bleachers were jammed with 15,000 citizens eager to help our nation fight a war it seemed we just might win, given our June victory in the Battle of Midway.

After military demonstrations, the moderator walked onto the field.

“Please take out a match,” he said. “If you don’t have one, borrow one from your neighbor.” Mystified, people began fumbling in their pockets. After a moment the stadium lights blinked out, leaving us in darkness. Then a tiny spark flared.

“I struck my match,” the man said. “Isn’t this a pitiful little light? Now, strike your own matches.”

At first feebly, then in a slowly growing conflagration, the stadium came alight. I looked up at my dad’s smiling face. People glanced around, grinning at each other amid that radiance, like lava in the caldera of a volcano. In one long breath, the crowd sighed:

“Ooooooo...”

The message, of course, was that what one person alone cannot do many working together can. That night our nation was emerging from the Great Depression, the worst fiscal disaster of the 20th century. With his many New Deal efforts to stimulate a dead economy, President Franklin Roosevelt had helped revive it. He took his cue from John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who argued that when business fires many workers and stops investing, governments must step in to help.

Roosevelt’s WPA built the still-beautiful Wyandotte County High School, the City Hall and Courthouse in Kansas City, Gardner lake and other Johnson County projects, plus countless schools and bridges and roads and dams across the nation. His Civil Conservation Corps put three million young men to work planting nearly three billion trees and constructing 800 parks. The New Deal lifted the economy from its 1933 depression nadir. It was our economic response to World War II that finally conquered the Depression.

We financed that war 40 percent with increased taxes, 60 percent through borrowing, much of it from war bonds like the one my dad bought that night for $18.75. Ten years later he cashed it for $25. Everybody who wanted a job, including women and many black people previously excluded, had one. Our gross national product more than doubled from $101.4 billion in 1940 to nearly $212 billion in 1945. This was the Keynes doctrine operating on a giant scale.

At war’s end, the nation was more than $250 billion in debt, equal to $3.3 trillion in today’s dollars — surely a disaster? I can imagine certain of today’s politicians moaning:

“We’re broke!” and therefore paralyzed to accomplish anything further. Imagine how right-wing Grover Norquist would have raved, given his famous quote about government: “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can … drown it in the bathtub.”

That’s where we are today in Kansas and Missouri. Our small-government state legislatures along with those from 20 other states denied poor citizens care through Medicaid, even when the federal government paid the whole price. This was a factor in closure of Mercy Hospital in Independence, Kan.

Gov. Sam Brownback and his legislature cut the state’s income tax for the wealthiest by 25 percent and entirely wiped it out for 200,000 business owners. This gift and more to high incomes drained away funds for schools, road repair and mental health, such that the state hospital in Osawatomie no longer meets Medicare standards. Kansas pays many bachelor’s degree caseworkers less than $13 an hour. Our Highway Patrol troopers and prison guards are leaving for states with better pay.

One thing Brownback can say in support of being stingy with the poor and middle class: It’s the major anti-Keynesian weapon he and the Kansas Legislature have wielded to stop recovery from the 2008 collapse. Ben Bernanke, then the Federal Reserve chairman, called that bank crisis the worst in American history. But why, after all, should our legislature and this Republican Congress do anything to help the economy when Democrats are in power?

Thankfully, President Barack Obama is no Brownback, no Herbert Hoover, willing to stand aside while the nation sinks. He had only two years with a friendly Congress to pass the Keynesian stimulus that rescued America’s economy. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said in 2008 the stimulus was too small. Indeed, recovery has been slow, but our heads (particularly rich folks’ heads) once more are above water.

Those right-wingers forget that Americans are a big-hearted people. We won the most terrible war in human history and were left holding that gigantic debt. But we were far from broke. Your government is never broke when it can borrow money, as from my father at that bond rally, for 2.9 percent and for far less today.

While we paid down the debt, our generous nation rebuilt Europe under the Marshall plan, educated returning veterans under the GI Bill, sheltered millions of young families with FHA and GI housing loans, built our great interstate highway system under Dwight Eisenhower, passed Medicare and Civil Rights under Lyndon Johnson, formed the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon, and enjoyed the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history under Bill Clinton — recently matched by the one under Obama.

Is this our government of the people, by the people and for the people that Grover Norquist wants to drown in the bathtub?

When I close my eyes now, I can still see the smiling American faces in the radiance of those flaming matches: What one person cannot do alone many of us working together can. I love that great old poster of a World War II defense plant worker, Rosie the Riveter, flexing her bared bicep.

“We can do it!” she says.

This story was originally published March 22, 2016 at 4:08 PM with the headline "Charles Hammer: Right wing forgets our big heart."