LETTERS Roosevelt
Sir: Jeff Ferry's letter (8 March) about Franklin Roosevelt made very curious reading indeed.
Roosevelt, contrary to myth, was a fiscal conservative through and through. Only in one year, 1936, an election year, of the first two terms of his presidency (1932-40) was US Government fiscal policy more expan- sionary than it had been in the year of the Great Crash of 1929. How could it have been otherwise with such a powerful fiscal conservative as Henry Morgenthau as Secretary of the Treasury? Mr Ferry claimed in his letter that Roosevelt embarked on a Keynesian course in the 1930s. This is inaccurate. Indeed, Keynes wrote in the New Republic in 1940: `It seems politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organise ex- penditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove illy case, except in war conditions.' It is absurd for Neil Kinnock, who has already promised to bloat public expendi- ture by an extra £24 billion, to compare himself with the prudent Roosevelt. Only a demob-happy Brian Walden could have let Mr Kinnock off the hook when the ridicu- lous assertion was made on Weekend World.
Richard Ryder
House of Commons, London SW1
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