Liberals, conservatives revisited

By Russ Kullberg

Occasionally a writer on the Opinion page will make disparaging remarks about liberals without any apparent knowledge of the dictionary's definitions of both liberals and conservatives.

A liberal is broad-minded and unbiased (in politics) and is open to new ideas.

On the other hand, a conservative is one who is disposed to maintaining the existing institutions, is opposed to innovations and wants to maintain the status quo.

With these definitions in mind, we can understand why George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and a host of others can be called liberals. They wanted a change from British rule.

The conservatives, called Tories at the time, wanted to remain under British rule. As we know, war developed, and it was the liberals who fought and died for our freedom. The conservative Tories stayed home and often spied for the British.

In the late 1800s and into the 1900s, the going wage for a day's work was $1, with 12-hours workdays and six workdays a week. The conservatives wanted to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, liberals thought 72 hours a week was too much and the pay too low. Luckily for the American worker, the liberals gradually got the standard hours a week lowered to 40 and the pay increased, and vacations and medical coverage became standard. People had more money to spend, and everyone benefited.

The Great Depression of the 1930s began with the stock-market crash in the fall of 1929. Within a short time, the economy was in shambles, but President Hoover saw no need to do anything to alleviate the problem. Being a conservative, he believed in maintaining the status quo even though people were losing their homes, couldn't buy food and clothes and couldn't heat their homes. These people were desperate.

The people had enough of Hoover's do-nothing attitude, so in 1932 they voted in a liberal, Franklin Roosevelt. Soon after his inauguration in 1933, Roosevelt proposed many programs to put people to work. Examples are the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration. These were work programs, not free-money programs.

The WPA built roads, bridges, dams, water-purification plants, sewage plants and irrigation projects. The CCC worked on soil-conservation projects, reforestation and building and road construction in state and national parks, national monuments and in other related state and federal lands. Most of the WPA and CCC projects are still in use, and the forests are still growing.

The NYA program also put people to work. By using federal money, college students were hired at colleges and universities to work for professors or at other jobs at the schools. This enabled the students to go to school, the professors' jobs were saved and the institutions were able to stay open.

The jobs created by the WPA, CCC and NYA put money into circulation again, enabling people to buy all manner of consumer goods. This resulted in people at all levels in many occupations to benefit: manufacturing, shipping, retail sales, banking and teaching. The actions of a liberal president and a liberal Congress got America moving again.

President Roosevelt also proposed and Congress enacted the Social Security program in the 1930s. Related to this is Medicare, enacted during President Johnson's administration (another liberal president). People of the European Union have similar social programs, as do the people of some other developed countries of the world.

The environmental laws were also enacted by liberals. The conservatives in industry preferred the status quo: to keep polluting, because to clean up their mess might cost some money. Never mind the health of the people. It's the bottom line (profit) that is of utmost importance. However, the political lap dogs on the payroll of industry are always on call to weaken these laws. Our health is better and our longevity will be greater due to the efforts of environmental liberals in Congress.

Anyone called a liberal should be proud of the title, because he or she is a continuation of a long line of liberals beginning with those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and those who fought in the Revolutionary War. Then too the liberals in this country are in step with liberals of the world who have been instrumental in liberating the people from oppressive, conservative monarchies, oppressive labor conditions and unfair social conditions.

People who write for the Opinion page and others who unload on the liberals are obscenely ignorant of American history. It's embarrassing that they know so little of what the liberals have done for America. It's possible these people don't know how little they know. On the other hand, in their little world of recycled fallacies, they may think like Adolf Hitler did when he wrote in "Mein Kampf":

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it."

Russ Kullberg of Cape Girardeau is a retired professor of biology at Southeast Missouri State University.