A painful post to make...

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, but it is so difficult to find the manner in which I want to present it.  I am simply convinced that one of our own (cough...Ryan... cough) is going to take this the completely wrong way.

I have been watching a fascinating documentary series by the BBC called Wartime Farm and it has really made me spend some time and effort re-thinking my position on the Great Depression and New Deal eras of the 30's and 40's.

I heartily recommend the show, if for no other reason than it gives a remarkable look at a facet of the war in Britain that we (or I, at least) never really considered... the rural farmer of an island nation at war.  It's premise is simple:  in 1937, 2/3 of all food consumed in Great Britain was imported from abroad.  By 1939, those imports were all but cut off by the U-boat blockade of the north Atlantic routes.  By 1940, Great Britain had DOUBLED its domestic food production, and by 1942 was producing enough to feed itself AND fuel an overseas empire at war.  How, in God's Name, was this accomplished in so little time?

The amount of government control and planning that happened in Britain between '37 and '39 dwarfs even FDR's New Deal efforts.  These controls went so far as the allow the government to not only dictate how a farm was to operate, but (should the farm fail to meet goals and quotas) who would operate and ultimately OWN the farm.  This was central planning on a scale never seen before in the UK... in fact, never seen before in Europe outside of Stalin's communist "utopia" of the USSR.

The long and short of it?  It worked.  Food production doubled, people were fed and housed (no small accomplishment, when 400,000 were homeless due to the Blitz), and the war effort was marching forward from Sept of '39 to its ultimate conclusion in '45.  As demands increased, the farmers and countryside delivered, each and every year of the war.  In fact, Britain (and all the Western powers) did so well while Germany (and the USSR) did not... because the focus on domestic success was never there.  Both of those failing examples followed failing paradigms from the 30's that allowed no innovation and focused mainly on the military side of winning the war.  Even the USSR, which did produce vast amounts of food, used that food to ONLY feed the military machine, and watched passively as millions of people starved in the very fields they were tending.  Inefficiency was rampant... even expected and accepted... rather than eliminated.

My troubling point in all of this is that there is a LINE at which this sort of planning and control FAILED to work, and that line was crossed very soon after the war officially ended.  Great Britain suffered more than 11 years of "depression" after the war ended in '45... because the government tried to maintain the level of control it had during the war.

Ryan has always maintained that NO aspect of the New Deal did any good during the depression years, but the very same control, planning and austerity measures (to use a modern term) he hated in the 30's worked wonders to propel the country to victory in the 40's.  Had there been no TVA or REA (Rural Electrification Administration), there would have been no Manhattan Project.  Without the WPA, war-time industrial centers like Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Wichita, New London, San Diego, and Seattle would never have been able to meet their required quotas of wartime productions nearly as fast... possibly adding years to the overall war effort.

Is it possible that the "Greatest Generation" was as great as it was because it accepted the (almost) tyrannical level of control and worked through it to reach the goal of total victory over the Axis powers... or were those almost tyrannical levels of control necessary to success, and then doomed to fail in a peacetime setting?