Jen Senko - The brainwashing of my dad : how the rise of the right-wing media changed a father and divided our nation, and how we can fight back

* CHAPTER 1 *

The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Nazi Propaganda That Paved the Way for Extreme Right-Wing Media

When any of us kids wanted to stay home from school because we had the sniffles, my father would boast that he had never once missed a day of school. Even at a young age, Frank Senko valued educationand a warm, quiet, one-room schoolhouse. For him, school represented a safe haven away from his turbulent and poverty-stricken homelife. My dads family certainly didnt experience the roar of the Roaring Twenties, struggling to get along even during a time of relative prosperity for many Americans.

During the 1920s, the country transformed from a mixed market economy to a free market economy. A mixed market economy allows for a significant government role. Profit-seeking is not the sole motivation. The motivation is the overall health of the economy. Free marketeers advocate for a strictly reduced government role and believe the market should solely by driven by competition and profits.

The Republican Party dominated the White House during this era, with three consecutive presidents: Warren Harding from 1921 to 1923, Calvin Coolidge from 1923 to 1929, and Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. The rich were growing richer, and the poor had to struggle along with no safety net.

During this time, the stock market was booming. Opportunistic investors were taking bigger and bigger risks, often buying stocks on credit with very low interest rates. But behind the scenes lay a troubled agricultural sector, low wages for working-class people, bank loans unable to be liquidated, and lots of debt.

The Great Depression

The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, just months after Herbert Hoover became president. Billions of dollars evaporated from the economy as stock prices spiraled, and by 1932, the stock market would be worth only about 20 percent of what it had been before the crash.

The nation was devastated. People were starving. They couldnt pay their rent or mortgages. Breadlines wrapped around entire blocks, and soup kitchens set up by charitable organizations and churches were overflowing with hungry people. This was the world in which my father spent his childhood.

President Hoover believed in virtually no role for the government and wanted to promote capitalism and individualism. Many people felt that the government urgently needed to step in to save the millions of people who were struggling, but Hoovers administration was reluctant to engage in any wide-scale economic programs.

The New Deal

By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the country was ready for change. Lifting the economy out of the Depression that the free market economic climate had created was a priority for millions of Americans, and FDR had a solution for them: the New Deal, a series of government-managed economic and social programs designed to create economic recovery and a social safety net for its citizens. My mother clearly remembers she and her friends feeling hopeful as he took office.

FDRs first move was to restore confidence in and stabilize the banking system with the Emergency Banking Act, opening the Federal Reserve to supply unlimited amounts of money to banks and creating 100 percent deposit insurance. Although this governmental control over banking was controversial at the time, it went a long way in reinstating the publics trust in banks and slowing the economys downward spiral.

Within his first one hundred days in office, FDR established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which spent $500 million on soup kitchens, blankets, employment initiatives, and nursery schools. Some of the other projects created construction jobs, supported professionals in the arts, educated workers, and gave jobs to nearly five hundred thousand women. Some of the many programs FDRs administration enacted in this time period include the Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave unemployed men jobs working on conservation projects in national parks and other natural areas; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which supported farmers; and the Public Works Administration, which spearheaded the construction and maintenance of roadways and bridges across the country. Little by little, FDRs New Deal started America on a new path toward equality and growth.

Many of the laws and institutions we take for granted today, including things like Social Security, can be traced to the New Deal era. FDRs expansive vision of a supportive government that extended opportunities to its citizens allowed for more federal intervention to help banking, agriculture, and public welfare. It provided social safety nets, gave GIs the opportunity to get an education or housing, and much more. The people loved these programs, while the free marketeers called it socialism.

Very significantly for the discussions well explore in this book, FDR signed the Communications Act into law in 1934. To avoid a monopoly on media and undue influence by any one company or person, this law regulated radio, telephone, and telegraph communications by limiting ownership and cross-ownership licensing. FDR had the foresight to be concerned about how much influence media could have on people, largely because he could see the alarming creep of right-wing propaganda going on in Germany. He believed consolidated media ownership could be dangerous for democracy. (Boy, did he prove to be right!)

The Communications Act also determined that technology was an interstate good, like railways and highways, and should be monitored and regulated as such. To implement the Communications Act, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was created. The FCCs duty was to issue licenses and frequencies to radio operators and to bring order to the burgeoning new industry. They determined ownership by what best served the public interest, requiring diversity in ownership, political discourse, hiring, and programming. Companies broadcasting content considered obscene or profane could be penalized. As such, the FCC had the responsibility of educating the public on the dissemination of news and centralized all the authority pertaining to news and media in the United States.

Not everyone agreed with FDRs regulatory approach, but the success of the New Deal was impossible to deny. Day by day, month by month, the United States clawed its way closer and closer to economic recovery, bolstered by FDRs liberal programs (again, deemed socialistic by his critics) and focus on benefits for everyday people. He easily won a second term in office.

In FDRs acceptance speech for his 1936 nomination, he introduced the term economic royalists to describe the super rich who wielded enough wealth and power to directly influence American policies. Economic royalists fought against social safety net programs, partly because these social programs were partially funded by levying higher taxes on the rich. This resistance to tax-supported social initiatives would continue for the next several decades and remains a hallmark of todays Republican Party.

FDR went on to serve over three terms as presidentthe only president to be elected four timesuntil his death in 1945. His unmatched popularity was due in large part to his refusal to allow the ultrarich to dictate the shape of American government and his belief in and support for the everyday Americanand that government should be a force for good.

Propaganda in Nazi Germany

Meanwhile, back when America was just entering the Roaring Twenties, in Germany a young man named Adolf Hitler joined the Nazi political partya far-right, fanatically anticommunist, racist, and nationalist party with a paramilitary culture. Many Germans were desperate for a strong leader after their defeat in WWI, and postwar Germany was fertile ground for someone like Hitler to rise to power. And rise he did.