How did we get from the rise of union membership and the decline of inequality in the 1930s, to the decline of union power and the rise of inequality in some 40 years? We well know that the public reacted with desperate anger at the onset of the Great Depression and had the good fortune to elect a president who was "a traitor to his class." So his Harvard classmates called him, a man who was willing to take unprecedented measures on behalf of the desperate public. Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act regulating banks, and the Wagner Act authorizing industrial workers to organize unions into a countervailing force against big business. FDR had a certain acerbic gift: "government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob ..."
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