The New Deal in Old Rome

Did you know that many New Deal experiments were tried out in Rome?...These as well as their analogies in our current history are discovered and correlated in this unique and original volume. Using his familiarity with Roman remains in Europe—not to mention his careful study of ancient history—and drawing on his long experience as a political observer, the author, H. J. Haskell, who was editor of the Kansas City Star, has described with consummate accuracy a picture of a period in the past so startlingly akin to our own that it can be written of in the modern idiom and considered from the modern point of view. Many of the alphabetical agencies of the New Deal were set up long ago in Rome—the P.W.A., the F.E.R.A., the R.A., the H.O.L.C., the A.A.A., the F.C.A. The much discussed two-price system for wheat was adopted in the second century B.C. in connection with the Ever-Normal Granary. There were boom years with an easy-money policy and wild speculation, precisely as in the United States in the 1920’s, followed by the inevitable panic, in which the government spending led to ruinous taxation, monetary devaluation, and inflation with soaring prices. Attention is called, however, to significant economic differences between the ancient and the modern world, and enough of the political and social background is supplied to make these events intelligible. The result is an extraordinarily interesting book.