Talk:Rexford Tugwell

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What is the point of the Rexford Tugwell in Fiction section? These popular culture references throughout the Wikipedia articles are almost juvenile.Lestrade 17:17, 4 April 2006 (UTC)Lestrade

I'm going to trim it as I agree with you to some extent.--T. Anthony 14:42, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

I always hesitate to make edits, and just mention them in the talk section in case I'm wrong. I think the first paragraph is implying that members of the Brain Trust all attended Columbia. I don't think that's true. Aptitude 22:04, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Editorial comment in article

---I removed the comment about "socialistic" ideals inspiring "many" New Dealers and the reference that "Historians" are reassessing this influence. I also removed the reference to Amity Shales and her book, which is really a reiteration of the same point.

Amity Shales, the author of the the Wall Street Journal reference, is the only person brought forth to justify the assertion that many New Dealers were influenced by "socialist" and "leftist" ideals. She is not a historian. She is a journalist with a BA in English. Her work has been criticized by dozens of economists and actual historians for its sloppiness (her claim that unemployment did not significantly drop during the New Deal is predicated on the assumption that goverment funded jobs should not be counted as employment) and ideological bias. Also, literally hundreds of books have focused on Tugwell's influence, and to reference her book as the only work of relevance concerning his actions in the New Deal is truly perversion of any true attempt to assess his legacy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slabadoo (talk • contribs) 20:08, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

I removed this text from the article:

In the summer of 1927, a group of future New Dealers including Tugwell, were received by Stalin for a full six hours when they traveled on a junket to the Soviet Union. Romantic leftist ideas strongly influenced Tugwell. After leaving office, Tugwell, even created his very own version of Animal Farm in Casa Grande, Arizona. As in the Orwell book, the farmers revolted.

I don't understand what this bit about "his very own version of Animal Farm" refers to. Any actual details about what this project was (a collective farm? a utopian commune?) and how and why it failed would be welcome. -Steve207.6.224.49 01:01, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't know, either, but Tugwell & colleagues meeting with Stalin is well-documented and notable. I deleted the Animal Farm bit, and reinstated the rest. Cheers, Pete Tillman 01:19, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Looks better but could use more detail. Was Tugwell visiting the Soviet Union on behalf of the government, or was the trip for private or academic research? Also, I have one issue with the current text where it says "Romantic leftist ideals influenced Tugwell". I'd be inclined to drop the "romantic" part because in context the term is possibly misleading. The WSJ article suggests that Tugwell and his colleagues romanticized economies of scale to the point where they dismissed the role of small producers. But the Romantic movement which influenced many on the left was about the opposite: it romanticized small producers and dismissed the potential of large-scale industry. Tugwell may have been a romantic, but he was no Romantic, if you see what I mean. So I think the choice of words here is, while strictly correct, too ambiguous - it could easily be read to mean the exact opposite of what's intended. I'd suggest either a different word than "Romantic" or dropping it altogether and just saying "Leftist ideas influenced Tugwell..." and maybe following it up with a bit about his enthusiasm for large-scale centralized industry. -Steve 207.6.224.49 16:32, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

--- This article reads like a 6th grade book report of something the author really likes. I think this article fails to note a single controversial thing about the man and his methods, in spite of this man having such a direct hand on the tiller. I think few understand just how arbitrary the entire notion of price setting was. From FDR setting the price of gold each morning from his bed (often based on what he felt were lucky numbers) to the slaughtering of 6M pigs (in an effort to riase prices) while people in teh country were suffering from lack of food has not been given the the consideration it deserves.

Secondly, the number of times Tugwell and the New Dealers (Douglass, Morgenthau et al) met with Stalin and Mussolini and were left with a positive impressive in the 20's and early 30's, and how the New Dealers utterly failed to recognize what bad people these men were until the late 30's (in the case of Douglas and Morgenthau) and a bit later in the case of Tugwell.

In the end, the fundamental inability of Tugwell et al to grasp the shortcomings of collectivism in the soviet union is worthy of its own section.BrushlessInSeattle (talk) 18:02, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

References