Been There, Done That

Or, Repeating History for Lack of Remembering It

From the January 1933 issue Harper's Magazine

Inside the R.F.C.: An adventure in secrecy

By John T. (John Thomas) Flynn

The Congress which now presides over the dying months of President Hoover’s administration will, let us hope, bring to an end that fatuous adventure in secrecy which has stained the record of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In the very act of its birth the R.F.C. was stricken dumb by the President. Thereafter for five months it passed round hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to banks and railroads without affording either to the public, or even to Congress itself, a grain of information about the identity of the objects of its bounty.

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Before lifting a corner of the curtain let me insert a word about this dangerous notion that government can be safely conducted in secrecy. There is a school of politicians–in close communion with their business allies–who hold to what is sometimes called the idiot theory of government, because of certain expressions which the President himself has let fall. There is a belief that the citizens are stupid; that the less they know the better off they will be; that knowledge in their immature minds will frequently produce economic disorder, and that they will be better served if they will entrust their affairs to the strong and able men set over them by Providence and a well-oiled election machine. The theory ignores a very old truth: that if there are foolish citizens there are also selfish rulers; that the poor judgment of the masses is to be trusted hardly less than the bad ethics of their leaders, and that, in any case, those who supply the funds for governments and the blood for wars have a right to know what is being done with their money and their lives. [more...]