A howler of a claim accompanying Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal was that defeating greenhouse gases is a challenge akin to defeating fascism. We will need “a World War 2 scale mobilization of our society to create the renewable energy infrastructure and clean industries as fast as possible,” read her FAQ memo.
The congresswoman representing Throggs Neck tried to cut off naysayers by arguing that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been beset by exactly the same contemptuous chortling, but had saved the world by ignoring that negativity. When America built only 3,000 planes in a year, read the FAQ memo, “FDR called on America to build 185,000 planes to fight World War 2. … [E]very business leader, CEO, and general laughed at him.”
Really?
People weren’t much in a laughing mood a month after Pearl Harbor. On Jan. 6, 1942, Roosevelt went to Capitol Hill and called for “overwhelming superiority” in armaments and munitions to destroy the Japanese and the Nazis. When he declared that, in 1942, the U.S. would build 60,000 planes, he was met not with laughter but with raucous applause. When he declared, “Next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes,” the applause was even more raucous. The loudest applause came when the president proclaimed, “Let no man say it cannot be done. It must be done — and we have undertaken to do it!”
“The words he used, the figures he cited were enormous, staggering, beyond anything ever attempted by any nation on earth.” That’s how Life magazine reported the speech. “This was the blueprint of victory that Americans had been eagerly waiting for ever since Pearl Harbor.” According to Life, the president’s words “reached every American’s heart.”
Far from a laughingstock, “His figures were overwhelming, but they were not beyond the reach of a united, determined America,” Life wrote: “From government agencies, from scores of industrialists, from labor leaders, congressmen, editors and plain U.S. citizens came an immediate response: ‘We can do it; we will do it.’”
What about “every business leader” and CEO? The head of Douglas Aircraft, Donald Douglas, responded, “I am confident that with a united nation, hard work, clear thinking and unselfish devotion by all groups to the country’s welfare in the hour of national peril the job can be done.”
Maybe they were being over-optimistic. Babe Meigs, airplane adviser at the federal Office of Production Management, sputtered that 45,000 planes in 1942 represented “an all-out, almost impossible, figure to shoot at.” But he wasn’t laughing. According to historian Arthur Herman, “Those numbers were a way for the president to get the maximum effort out of American industry and the rest of the country, to show the rest of the world that America meant business.”
That could have been AOC’s line. Instead, she trotted out the trite “they all laughed” trope, with its assumption that critics are all know-nothing cranks. Which is just one of the many reasons everyone was laughing at AOC this last week.
