Good afternoon. And welcome, everyone fireworks the audience and everyone watching live online. Im dylan croup and im an intern at the Young Americans foundation. [applause] Young Americas Foundation trains conservative youth from across the country to promote conservative values. Through campus activism initiatives and conferences and campus lectures. The conservative force and called a key pillar of the conservative movement by politico. The annual in educate americas youth is undeniable. And today i also have the honor of announcing my favorite speaker, dirt dr. Burt folsom. I first heard him peek at the conference and one of the many reason its started a chapter on my campus and i became a history professor myself. As a native of lincoln, next, dr. Folsom received hip his ph. D from the university of pittsburgh. Over the four deck takes he had taught u. S. History at murray state university, northwood universe, hillsdale congress and Kennesaw State university. The Charles Cline professor of history at Hillsdale College from 2003 to 2017. He was recently appointed a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College as well two favorite courses were history of the american presidency and history of the American Economy. He is also regular speaker and friend of Young America foundation, a special our snore for entrepreneurship and free enter might, join me in giving a warm welcome to dr. Burt folsom. [cheers and applause] thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And i have a question for you. Are you glad to be here . Yes i am delighted to be here. Im delighted to be here, and since i have this one talk here remaining, i wanted to give you some of the best wisdom i have for dealing with the historical record and the myths that you will encounter on your college campuses. Ones i encountered when i was a student, and if i can help in any way prepare you to deal with this, when you leave the conference today, i hope that will be success on my part. I wanted to do three myths. Three myths of history that most College Professors teach, and the teaching of these myths perpetuates the idea that government solves problems, capitalism creates them. Itself is really the reverse. Let me look at the historical record and talk today about some of those myths. Myth number one. The Great Depression was caused by capitalism. We know the Great Depression of the 1930s how many of you rafe heard that argument maybe in classrooms already . Wow. A lot. Right. The Great Depression, the greatest economic catastrophe in u. S. History was caused by capitalism. And you see sometimes the connections. The stock market crashes. Banks are closing. The Unemployment Rate skyrockets over 20 . And it looks like, hey, business collapsed, capitalism collapsed, it failed. Some of you see the movie its wonderful life at christmastime where you see Jimmy Stewart running a bank and is collapses under the strain of the Great Depression. Or almost collapses, and he is there to try to rescue it. What i want to do is go through this a little bit. And talk about what is the problem with that argue. Its truly the stock market did collapse, absolutely true. Its true that maybe, many banks, hundreds of them failed and its true unemployment skyrocketed. Absolutely try. I the issue is what caused that. For example, i have three causes that have really nothing to do with capitalism. Number one, the Federal Reserve, which had been manipulating Interest Rates through the 1920s, the Federal Reserve raised Interest Rates in 1929. The raising of those Interest Rates made money harder to borrow and, therefore, made it harder for Business People to get the capital they needed to invest and expand. Milton freedman won the nobel prize for a book that he coauthored on the Federal Reserve, and the American Economy, that part of that become included the 1930s, and his argue. Is this Federal Reserve manipulating the the Interest Rates is a chief cause of the Great Depression. Thats point number one. Opinion number two, the protective tariff, taafes were raise tariffs were raise held in the 1930s. Raised to record highs. The smoot hawley tariff was the highest tariff in u. S. History. I was enacted during president hoof hoovers presidency when the Great Depression began. Now, youre think, gee, tariff . Thats a tax on imports. A tariff . Is helping to cause a Great Depression . That sounds like it may not quite make sense, but it does if you think of it this way. Tariffs have to do with trade. When you tax imports and you tax them highly, you restrict trade. When you restrict trade, you slow down an economy. In particular, the restrictions we had in the smooted hawley tariff where we had high taafe on 3,000 items and raid tariffs sharply on several of them, we had situation for example, we had switzerland, major watches, watches were the best watches in the world, and they sold if we would translate this to dollars today think sold for about 30 apiece. The swiss watches were the best in the world, kept perfect time and sold for 30 apiece. American made watches from New England States like rhode island, were not as good and they cost 45. In other words, they cast more than the swiss watch, the american watches this back in the days when we had to wind our watches. Every morning we would wind our watch, and then it would keep time for that day, and then we would wind it again the next day. The americanmade watches had problem. Youd wiped it and one would run for an hour in 58 minutes, which is to say it was off sometimes a couple of minutes an hour. But thats okay because remember you wind it the next day and just reset it and get it back. Now, would you rather do that with a 45 american watch or would you rather have the a swiss watch for 30 you didnt have to do that with . Well, most americans said, i want the swiss watch. Which is find because switzerland would buy our watches would sell us their watches and they would buy our products, typewriters, say, or automobiles, the United States had the cheapest cars in the world and the best cars so we while switzerland our cars and they would sell us watches. When we put a huge tariff on swiss watches because the watch, making congressional districts wanted to price swiss watches out of the market so theirs would sell instead. To do this they had to pass a tariff that virtually doubled the price of swiss watches, so its rough lay 30 tariff on 3. You had to pay 30 for the swiss watch and 30 to the Customs Service for the tariff so its a now become a 60 watch and a lot of american watchmakers thought, good, if ours are 45 and the swiss watch is 60, maybe more people with buy our watches. Even though they dont tell time very well. Well, you might say, well, yeah, maybe, and i mean at least we gain few watch sales but look at is this way weapon lose car sales. Because switzerland absolutely cut us off in our exports. Now, thing about this. Multiplied by country after country put a high tariff on british blank kits, on french wine, a tariff on spanish olives. So we have tariffs on all of these items, and then all of those countries, european and iowa, refuse to buy our products. So, now american cars, which sold over 5 million in 1929, are down to a million and a half by 1932, and michigan, detroit, is in a Great Depression. We lost those sales and that became part of the problem in the auto industry. So what im saying is, that tariff, the smoot haley everybody was a tariff was a key cause in the great decision, and the third and final is that president hoover responded he was you say hoover was a republican. He absolutely was. He was a member of guess youd say the liberal wing of the Republican Party and his presidency was indeed disaster. But he wanted to use government whenever he could and thought it would be good, and he raised taxes because he thought this would be good to gather more money for the government abuse were losing money because the depression is creating lower revenues, lower income, and, therefore, lower revenue coming to the United States so he thought, a tax rate would be good. The tax rate in 19 well, in 29 when hoover became president was 25 maximum. I haven essay the book the myth of the robber barons on andrew melon, which you have, which talks about the tax rate, which actually was lowering the tax rate in the 1920s to get it down 25 . And when we did that we had tremendous inventions like talking movies, radio, heres one that guess for us summer day in d. C. Air conditioning. Im enjoying it right now. Air conditioning. Those inventions in some cases that care conditioning was invented be before the 20s but was not adopted until the 20s when we got the tax rate down and then the entrepreneurs like Willis Carrier had the insend tonight invest and was very prosperous. Now the tax rate goes from 25 which is a maximum rate, on top of incomes up to 63 . That means thats wealthy people at some point are paying more than half of their income to the government. If youre going to pay more than half your income to the government, youre going to be very careful but what you invest in and maybe you shouldnt be investing in much aft all. In other words, it attached down heavily on entrepreneurship, on investment, right when we need investment to create jobs to replace the ones being lost by the Federal Reserve raising its Interest Rates and by the smoot hawley tariff. What im saying here is we have three things. The Federal Reserve raising Interest Rates, the high tariff, and raising taxes. Think about that. Is that capitalism or is that government . You have government creating the Great Depression. Those changes are changes that made it hard, almost impossible, for capitalists to operate. Free enterprise thinkers were at a standstill because of the high taxes, because the tariffs affected imports so much, and because of the Federal Reserve raising Interest Rates. So what we have here, i would suggest, is the Great Depression was caused not by capitalism, the Great Depression was caused by government. Capitalism is going to be ultimately part of the solution, not part of the problem. So thats myth number one. Myth number two is connected. Myth number two is this. Franklin roosevelt because hoover lost the election of 1932 to Franklin Roosevelt. And so the republican is out, the democrat is in, roosevelt, and his program was called the new deal. Going to have a set of programs which he is going to use to try to come boot the Great Depression. So myth number two, fdr, or Franklin Roosevelt, with his new deal, used government effectively to help get the United States out of the Great Depression. Franklin roosevelt with his new deal used government effectively to help get the United States out of the Great Depression. How many of you have had that taught to you in school . Thats exactly what i had taught to me. That is the prominent teaching. Now, theres sometimes some variations. Some professors will say, well, the new deal may not have completely gotten us out but help. A movement in the right direction and then other things came later to help more. Now, the new deal is always praised. A step in the right direction, and some will say it was really the whole way out of the Great Depression. Or some part of the Great Depression. Capitalism failed. Government, through new deal programs, is ready to come to the rescue. Franklin roosevelts new deal. When i was writing my book an important subject i wrote the book new deal or raw deal and in writing that book, i spent a lot of time, about ten years writing it. The longest time id ever spent writing a book, and the reason i did so is bass i wanted to get this right. Went and asked my fellow history professors, and students, too, what do you think was Franklin Roosevelts best policy maneuver . His best program. I would then sometimes say, Franklin Roosevelt failed and i would cite program after program that was a failure or had horrible unintended consequences. And i would say, what do you think of that . And they frequently would say, well, yeah, maybe, but, he tide this, which was good. And it often came back to one particular program, the program under the name of the emergency relief and construction act. It was the program that gave food or money immediately to cities and states to feed starving people because we had almost 25 unemployment. I think that theres some logic in that argue. If you take it just that far. If you have a situation where you have 25 percent of the people unemployed, and naturally theyre going to run out of money at some point, unless their savings is huge, and most people didnt have that. Then theyre going to be hungry, cant feed their families, and so even if other parts of roosevelts program are not so good, the fact that he was willing to feed people and use that money is a good thing and it shows the important of a Good Government program. What i want you to do though, is look at this. I explored this emergency relief act in the First Program to give its really the First FederalWelfare Program in u. S. History. Called it relief back in the 1930s. We often call it welfare today but the first one. Heres an interesting point. Itself was 300 million, which is a lot if you put it in todays terms of many, many billions of dollars. It was a large program. And the way it was distributed you might find interesting. The state of illinois, which was now, we have some illinois students. Were not booing them. These are the politicians in the state of illinois. Those politicians in the state of illinois were very clever and very crafty. They maneuvered the situation so their state received almost 20 of all the money. Out of that 300 million, illinois got close to over 55 million. Theyve got more money in illinois than new york, california, and texas put together. They did it by pleading need but they did it more by pleading, we are good with franklin roof getting votes roost for getting offends for mitchell. Roosevelt could count on illinois delivering votes to him in emergency situations so they were politically important. Illinois was a swing state that roosevelt wanted to carry and thus illinois ended up the number one state receiving this relief money. Pennsylvania is number two. Now, i know those are large states but not the largest states and youll fine it interesting to know that states that tended to be republican any 1930s didnt do so well. Massachusetts, its hard to believe that massachusetts was a republican state at one time but it was. In the 1930s, massachusetts and connecticut were both republican states. Massachusetts and connecticut received a grandtotal of zero money. So understood, 300 million is being spent for relief, and massachusetts, boston, all that, and connecticut get zero. And they werent the only states to get zero. The bottom five states all got zero, and they tended to vote republican. And the top five states got over half the money. So you have 300 million. The top five states get over half the money. The bottom five states get zero. Now, what this is in effect is not a Welfare Program or relief practice its at redistribution program. We are redistributing wealth from republican states or states that are not in some way serviceable to Franklin Roosevelt, who states that are very influential and key in Franklin Roosevelts economic or political career. Hearry hop hari hopkins was a leader on the relief act, one the the fdrs people distribute the money and were careful to distribute the money to the people they thought were the politically most worthy of receiving i it. Boston is caught in a bind. As part of my research in the book i was trying to deal with how massachusetts was dealing with this. Massachusetts constantly worked to raise money because now massachusetts has to feed its own unemployed, plus it has to send taxes to washington to feed illinois. Listen to this. In massachusetts, a statewide unemployment drive raid over 3 million. That in todays money would be more like 50 million. The boston civic symphony gave concerts to benefit the jobless. Boston college and holy cross played an ann exhibition Football Game for charity. Benefit wrestling match at boston guard s supplies 5,000 for local need. Closer to 100,000 today. City officials helped the mayor raise a remarkable 2. 5 million as