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The last American President (indeed, I believe, the last American politician) to really remember what the United States was like before the Hoover-Roosevelt Depression and the New Deal died on December 26th..

From now on every one talks or writes of the time when, for example, American farmers got their income from their customers, rather than the government, will be drawing on second hand information from books and so on rather than their own memories.

The same is true for when people talk of the time when men either did not expect to ‘retire’ (i.e. stop working because they had reached a certain age) or looked to their families and to private investments and fraternities (in the 1920’s ‘fraternity’ did not mean ‘student society’ for most people – it meant a group of adult people in a social and mutual aid society) to finance their retirement.

Was it a better time? Well technology was much more primitive and the capital base much less developed – so living standards were a lot lower. At least the statistics tell me so, although whenever I see film of the time (even socialist propaganda films) the people of the 1920’s look better dressed and more clean cut (or just more clean) than people today. And I do not think that the fact that most people were a lot slimmer was due to them not having enough money to eat themselves fat.

However, I am thinking of what is sometimes (after the actor) called the ‘Harold Lloyd’ America of scientific, economic and social progress (the America that Ford’s Grand Rapids Michigan was very much a part of in the 1920’s). Not the ‘Jim Crow’ (compulsory discrimination against blacks) South where corruption and poverty were much bigger factors.

On race: It was legal to discriminate against blacks in Michigan in the 1920’s (although, as stated above, it was not compulsory), but one of things about being a libertarian that shocks people is that we do not hold that someone should be prevented from discriminating by law. Who one chooses to trade with should be just that – a choice. If a bigot chooses not to take the money from black people (for example by not allowing them to rent rooms in his hotel), or chooses to employ a white idiot over an intelligent black person – that is their loss.

As for the general question of “race relations”. Did people of different races really tend to hate each other more in 1920’s Michigan (and the North generally) than they do now? Or did they just lie less? Judging things Henry Ford’s anti-semitic Dearborn Independent will not do. Henry Ford really did believe that ‘the Jews’ had sabotaged his efforts to make peace in Europe during World War I, but Henry Ford did not speak for all of Michigan, let alone all of the North. Michigan was and is also the State of Hillsdale University , the first college in the nation to let in blacks in on equals terms way back in the 1850’s and a strong supporter of equal treatment of people from all ethnic groups and of women. They were also a stern opponent of government statutes to force people act in ways favourable to blacks or to women or to anyone). With the death of Gerald Ford there is virtually no one left who knows what ordinary people really felt in their hearts in the 1920’s.

As for Prohibition: now there is the ‘War on Drugs’ which produces even more crime and corruption. At least there was a Constitutional basis for Prohibition (the 18th Amendment).

On politics: I confess I do not even know how Gerald Ford voted in 1936 (even if voted at all). I know he worked in the Republican campaign in 1940, but that might have been a protest against FDR going for a third term (which even George Washington had rejected) rather than out of a desire to fight the New Deal.

Certainly Gerald Ford (then an ‘America First’ type person as most Republicans from the midwest were) was against the underhand way that President Roosevelt was trying to get the United States into World War II (and contrary to the myth being against war in 1940 did not mean being ‘pro Nazi’ most, although not all, people who were against war in the United States despised Hitler and the National Socialists), and FDR was certainly violating the law – for example by sending aid to Britain, occupying Iceland, and ordering American forces to destroy German naval forces and dishonestly claiming that the Germans fired first.

On Japan, President Roosevelt’s policy of seizing Japanese assets and cutting off supplies of raw materials to Japan successfully led to war. But the Japanese did not have to be so stupid as to lauch the suicidal war on the United States in 1941 (they should either have just accepted their losses – or helped the Germans against the Soviet Union) and nor did they have to wage the war in the way they did (for example the vile treatment of allied prisoners of war did not benefit Japan in any great way).

Nor did the Germans have to declare war on the United States after the 1941 attack by Japan any more than the Japanese had declared war on the Soviet Union after the German attack on it in June – indeed the failure of Japan to help allowed the Soviets to move vast forces from Siberia to the defence of Moscow.

Whatever the details the actions of both Japan and Germany and the threat of international communism led Gerald Ford to reject the view that America could stay out of the wars of the world – and he became an ‘internationalist’, running against the ‘isolationist’ Republican Congressman in Grand Rapids and supporting Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower faction of the Republican party who wished to keep American power actively involved overseas.

How does this fit with wanting to keep government limited at home?

Certainly it is possible to support an ‘active’ foreign policy and limited government at the same time as a lot of people have – going right back to Pitt the Elder in Britain, but there is a tension in allowing government to spend a lot and do a lot in terms of defence and foreign policy and trying to keep it otherwise limited – however much writers such William Buckley Jr tried to paper over the cracks.

Oddly enough, I think that Gerald Ford went full circle (or something close to it) in foreign policy. As President he still tried to prevent the betrayal of Laos, Cambodia and the Republic of Vietnam, when Congress cut off support and allowed the Communists to take over in contempt for the peace agreements they had signed, murdering millions of people and enslaving tens of millions more.

However, President Ford’s heart never seemed to be it. He said clearly that Congress was breaking the promises that America had made – but he never made a great campaign of it. It was not that Ford was a pacifist as when the Cambodian Communists captured an American ship, his response was swift and hard, it was that in his heart he did not really believe in great President Wilson style wars for the alleged benefit of foreigners. If the foreigners were too unwilling or too corrupt to defend themselves after almost 60,000 Americans had died for them, perhaps it was time to say “enough is enough” and leave them to their fate (although President Ford did make sure that hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Indochina were allowed into the United States – and they have proved to be good citizens). → Continue reading: President Gerald Ford…and the end of an era