A New-New Deal is a bad deal

Almost seven decades ago James Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an account of tenant farmers toiling in the cotton fields of Alabama--"beneficiaries" of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Her real name wasn't used in the book, but ten year-old Maggie Louise, whom Agee described as "magical, indefinable, and matchless," appears in it.

Fifty years later another author, Dale Maharidge, caught up with the families in Agee's book and his account, And Their Children after Them, won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Times of London thinks Maharidge's book issues a warning to those who want to bring back an FDR-style New Deal.

In the 19th century, "King Cotton" had been the South's gold-rush. It was woven into the fabric of that society. But America's leaders failed to make a leap of imagination, failed to see that when one product faltered, life could and should move on. At the beginning of the 1930s, the United States supplied nearly half the world's cotton, at a profit. Then, to help the small, depression-ridden farmer to survive, the Government started propping up the prices of cotton with public money. It raised cotton prices so high that the farmers were priced out of the world market.

At the same time, a technological leap introduced synthetic fibers. Cotton had to be produced more cheaply than ever before - but the subsidies retarded that change. By 1956, Maharidge wrote, the government subsidy of about $1,000 to each cotton farm cost American taxpayers $1 billion.

Maggie Louise and her family were none the better for it. In fact, Maharidge found that propping up the cotton industry had let its workers down. Kind, but cruel.

"If that $1bn had been used to educate and train them to enter more useful professions, it would have been money better spent. But that would have smacked of social engineering and been politically unacceptable," Maharidge wrote.

Throw in the fact the pre-mechanization harvesting of cotton consisted of families cutting and scarring their fingers on cotton bolls, which led to chronic bad backs after years of, well, back breaking work.

Maggie Louise's life ended tragically--suicide at 45 after drinking rat poison.

Cotton remains a major crop in the South. But the New Deal probably kept cotton cultivation in the dark ages for an unnecessary twenty additional years.

Let me be bring the story into the 21st century as the Times did: The way they are run now, the Big Three automakers are an anachronism.

Oh, bailouts are not just an American obsession. Barack Obama's DVD pal Gordon Brown just lent 2.3 billion pounds to Britain's auto manufacturers.

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