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Humbert and Lo in '32. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)
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Last week in high school across the country, the biggest Advanced Placement test of the year took place. More students take United States history than any other AP test. It is justly a mark of national pride that so many of our striving young sit for this test that gets them into the meaningful details of our great past.
I have come to praise the “APUSH” test, not to bury it, and I call attention to the central question last week:
“Evaluate the extent to which the role of the federal government in the United States economy changed from 1932 to 1980.”
Good question. The only issue I raise is, what if we shifted the dates just a bit, say from 1920 to 1964? What if the question were:
“Evaluate the extent to which the role of the federal government in the United States economy changed from 1920 to 1964.”
All this would do is shift the first date back twelve years and the last sixteen. The period in either case would be forty-plus mid-century years. I submit that the answers to the questions, on account of the shift, could be radically different.
When we see a beginning date of 1932, we think automatically of a flailing President Herbert Hoover doing nothing effective to arrest the ever-worsening spiral of the Great Depression. Although I do wonder if we ever contemplate Hoover’s demand that the top rate of the income tax be raised by 150 percent as of January 1st of that year. He got his wish, and given that all jobs come from the investment decisions of the top earners, why exactly is this essentially unknown in our ample memory of the Great Depression?
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