A year and a half into FDR’s first term, journalist William E. Berchtold seized upon one of the softer under-bellies of the New Deal and pointed it out for all to see:
“The lot of the intellectual in politics has never been a particularly happy one, and the current experiment was certain to have its complications.Most of the men taken from universities and colleges to staff the New Deal were minor dignitaries on their own campii. Such men suffer severely from the low public esteem which are held during times of prosperity. The New Deal and it’s Brain Trust raised them to a level occupied ordinarily by men considered their superiors by the general public. It set free long oppressed egos and the most obscure lost no time in seizing the most gaudy places in the limelight. Their extravagant actions were a natural result. They sought to crack down on the Old Order with a sadistic ardor reminiscent of the New England witch-hunters in an earlier reform movement in our history. Such men are not the administrators needed to consider the interests of producer, financier, consumer and worker alike in acting as an imperial referee. It is this realization of the unfitness of many of the professors for such administrative posts which is troubling those who would like to see the notions of government control as provided in the New Deal legislation given a fair test.”
More on FDR’s “Brain Trust” can be read here.
The group that advised FDR on all matters involving the African-American community was popularly known as “the Black Brain Trust”…
