No deal
As the administration's recovery plan for the Gulf Coast testifies, George W. Bush is no Franklin Roosevelt. He's not even a Herbert Hoover.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, an article on the Bush administration's recovery plan for the Gulf Coast in the Oct. 2 Ideas section incorrectly stated that KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, received no-bid contracts from the federal government following Hurricane Katrina. According to Halliburton, KBR is providing Katrina-related work under two preexisting, competitively-awarded contracts with the US Navy and the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
IT LOOKED AT FIRST as if Hurricane Katrina would be a turning point. The government's failure at all levels to respond to the plight of New Orleans—to say nothing of the racial and class stratification that the storm laid bare—seemed to have issued a wake-up call.
Believers in activist government took heart. As George W. Bush's approval ratings hit new lows, he spoke of spending generously to repair the Gulf Coast. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist shelved plans to abolish the estate tax, which suddenly appeared like an indulgence. Amid Democratic calls for a ''Marshall Plan for the cities"—an idea floating around since at least 1967—some conservatives showed willingness to commit to greater spending on our urban problems.
The era of small government seemed to be over.
But expectations of a return to the big-government philosophy that held sway for much of the last century turned out to be misty-eyed hope, not clear-eyed prophecy. The plans President Bush has outlined for rebuilding the region amount to a windfall for corporate interests, with government getting out of the way. A ''Gulf Opportunity Zone" would consist largely of tax breaks to businesses, including casino chains. Private schools stand to pocket taxpayer funds through education vouchers doled out to displaced students. No-bid contracts have enriched favored corporations, such as the
As it's shaping up, the package looks less like a Marshall Plan—the heroic general's 1948 blueprint for spending billions to restore postwar Europe—than its opposite. Call it a MacArthur Plan, after Marshall's old rival Douglas MacArthur, whose many aphorisms included the declaration, ''We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction."
Actually, when it comes to Katrina, for this administration, the relevant history lies in earlier efforts, in the 1920s and '30s, to use federal resources to address hardship, dislocations, and natural disasters. When Franklin Roosevelt sought to assuage the deprivation of the Tennessee Valley and the Dust Bowl in the Depression, or when Commerce Secretary Herbert
Hoover responded to the 1927 Mississippi Flood, the private sector stood discredited, having failed to deal with severe social ills, allowing advocates of social planning to take advantage of these crises to implement much-needed federal programs. Today, however, with government widely suspect, Bush is using Katrina to test-drive longstanding conservative proposals that would shift resources from public entities toward private ones.
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The flooding of the Mississippi River that began in April 1927 was perhaps the worst natural disaster in American history before Katrina. Caused by massive rains the preceding year, the deluge affected not just Louisiana but states along the river as far north as Kentucky and Illinois. It displaced some 700,000 people for months and claimed hundreds of lives.
Although the public in the Progressive Era had demanded a more activist government—to break up monopolies, set labor standards, and inspect the nation's meat, to name three examples—the 1920s had taken on a conservative tenor. But the Mississippi flood spurred a reluctant Washington to devote more resources to assisting afflicted cities and regions, which had previously been left largely alone to deal with crises. Though at first President Calvin Coolidge, a conservative, hands-off president, rebuffed pleas for action, under pressure he delegated Herbert Hoover, his commerce secretary, to handle the emergency.
Though by no means a liberal, Hoover was an engineer who after World War I had successfully overseen the distribution of food to Europe. He favored a role for Washington in managing, if not directly running, social projects. In the flood relief effort, Hoover employed federal resources to rescue victims, care for the displaced, and rebuild the region. He also proposed a new initiative to aid the region's poor and black residents, who then as now had suffered the most—a stand that helped win him the black vote when he ran for president the next year.
Still, the Coolidge administration spent money reluctantly. The War Department even asked the Red Cross to compensate it for the use of its tents and blankets. And it resisted calls for new steps to assist the distressed region. The standoff between the laissez-faire administration and state and local politicians, who pushed for a stronger federal role in disaster prevention and management, finally produced a compromise in the Flood Control Act of 1928. To improve the physical engineering around the river, the law created a federal board and allocated federal dollars. And it decreed the region's flooding to be of national, not merely local, concern.
With the New Deal, the public came to expect a vigorous role for Washington in disaster relief, as in so many other areas. In his first hundred days, FDR passed the
Roosevelt reacted similarly to the Dust Bowl. Years of drought followed by wind storms in the early 1930s had parched the Great Plains, destroying farms, saddling residents with crushing debt, driving hundreds of thousands to migrate—and exacerbating the bitter strains of the Great Depression. Besides lending additional justification to New Deal jobs and relief programs, the Dust Bowl brought about the Soil Conservation Service, an agency charged with using the best technical expertise to protect farmland. And Roosevelt himself, after studying the details of forestry, championed a controversial plan (ultimately successful) to plant bands of drought-resistant trees to shelter the plains from ravaging winds.
The raft of policies and agencies created by the New Deal, sometimes called ''Alphabet Soup," legitimized federal power as a means to alleviate mass suffering and, more important, to ward it off in the first place. This vision of activist government reached a high-water mark in the 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations passed a slew of programs designed to salve and to prevent social ills.
As faith in government crested, however, a conservative backlash against activist, technocratic Washington policies set in. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 signaled that a conservative anti-government ideology had overthrown, or at least come to challenge seriously, what were now hoary New Deal orthodoxies.
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This newfound aversion to ambitious social programs may explain why many recent traumas that promised to bring bold federal action ultimately failed to do so. Such false heralds date back at least to the Kerner Commission of 1967 and '68, convened after the urban riots of the preceding summers, which warned that American society was drifting ''toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." Despite high hopes, it yielded no lasting federal programs. Neither did the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Nor have such national ordeals as the energy shocks of the 1970s or the health-care crisis of recent times.
Although observers have contrasted the Bush administration's swift reaction to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 with its foot-dragging after Katrina, in fact 9/11 also represented a missed opportunity for action. Just after the attacks, Americans found succor in the presence of such agencies as FEMA, the FAA, and the EPA, which provided a kind of Alphabet Soup for the soul, a comforting reassurance that the government would come to the rescue.
Yet no far-sighted domestic vision ever emerged. Apart from waging war, Bush's main focus was to claim that 9/11 further justified his tax cuts. And as many have noted, forming the Department of Homeland Security may have done more harm than good. The leviathan bureaucracy swallowed up FEMA, and the headline-making gesture of creating a Cabinet department allowed the drafting of organizational flow charts to substitute for an actual mobilization to defend vulnerable domestic targets. After a brief spike, trust in Washington has fallen again.
Katrina, it now seems clear, will not revitalize government any more than Sept. 11 did. Although Republican leaders agreed that our government failed us terribly after the hurricane, rhetorically they adopted the coy formulation of blaming ''government" in general—as if an even less robust FEMA would somehow have delivered relief faster and more effectively—and thus in no way modified their longstanding anti-state ideology.
Meanwhile, uncritical expressions of faith in private enterprise have pervaded our discourse. Newscasts celebrated heroic individual missions to round up supplies for the victims or retrieve stranded New Orleanians, while press reports highlighted
Of course, recent reports have noted that many private firms performed miserably as well. Tenet Health Care owns the hospital where 45 patients died.
More fundamentally, the stories suggesting that the market works better than the government take for granted everything that the government alone can do. Private efforts by themselves did not, and cannot, respond adequately to a catastrophe as huge and complex as Katrina. Nor should we assume that business, in rebuilding the Gulf Coast with a relatively free hand, will do it fairly. Nor will the private sector address the structural poverty that was the precondition to much of the hardship that Katrina wrought.
As Roosevelt and Hoover understood, only the state has the financial, organizational, and human resources—not to mention the accountability to the public—to combat disasters, undertake regional development, and address issues like class and racial stratification.
And yet, ironically, even amid our reverence for the market, a return to the pre-New Deal status quo is not about to occur. Just as the underappreciated popularity of Social Security produced a groundswell of opposition last spring to Bush's privatization plan, so the public's general expectations of an activist government created the near-universal outrage over the administration's failure to help Katrina's victims promptly.
Americans may talk a good game about the magic of the private sector, but we still depend crucially on Washington—a fact that tends to be realized only in times of crisis.
David Greenberg teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University and is the author of ''Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image." He is writing a biography of Calvin Coolidge. 