Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?

Why Reagan’s fans don’t like to talk about the Depression

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

12/7/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/dime.htm

Back around 1974, someone proposed that the penny, then made of copper, should be converted to aluminum. I was appalled, of course, since as a coin collector, I had seen my fill of aluminum coins. They usually came from European countries with few vowels and even less economy, and the local currency was the Thangamabob, and Thangamabobs were trading 48 to the dollar. The coin in question would be a Microthangamabob, and would be a large, ugly gray coin that weighed one tenth what it ought to and featured a non-aerodynamic eagle on one side, and on the other, the only politician to be assassinated in Europe in the nineteenth century whose death didn’t cause at least a border war.

They were ugly, ugly coins that proclaimed their lack of value in both their utter grim grayness and their ethereal lightness.

If America was to have such a coin, it seemed shameful to associate a great man like Abraham Lincoln with it. Much better to have a President widely regarded as worthless, of dubious moral value, and who would best serve the nation by dropping dead.

Fortunately, this was 1974, and we just happened to have one of those in stock. So in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, I proposed the Richard Milhous Nixon memorial cent. It would be the size of a silver dollar, flat grey, and on the other side, we could have a proud moment from the Nixon Presidency: the Christmas bombing, My Lai, the Watergate, or perhaps something more symbolic, like a stone wall in front of the White House like Garry Trudeau used to draw.

The LA Times elected not to run the letter, and of course, they have been in serious decline as a newspaper ever since.

It isn’t the first time I’ve wanted to dick around with the money. When the doomed Susan B. Anthony was proposed, I suggested that instead of kicking Charlie Brown off the silver dollar, they make a coin with a completely new denomination: a Seventy-One cent coin, that could be used to pay female workers. On a less facetious note, I’ve proposed a thousand dollar gold coin, and suggested that Martin Luther King would be a good candidate to be placed on what could be the loveliest coin American has produced since the $20 walking liberty.

Now the Republicans want to dick around with the money, and put Ronald Reagan, who isn’t quite dead yet, on the dime. It’s part of their drive to make a historical idol out of the Great Bumbler, much the same way that the Soviets used to lionize their leaders by naming everything in sight after them.

An article in Newsday states that the Republicans picked the dime over any other currency for a very specific reason: they want to get FDR off the dime and into obscurity. The Newsday article points out that they could just as easily have resurrected the $1000 bill and replaced Grover Cleveland, who nobody would miss. Even the $50 bill wouldn’t cause much of an uproar, since there aren’t that many U.S. Grant fans around. For that matter, dumping Jackson for Reagan on the twenty would just be swapping out one bad president for another, and nobody would much notice. Or they could come up with a new denomination coin; a five dollar coin would be useful, perhaps a half ounce size, made from silver. Twelve sided, so people wouldn’t mix it up with the half-dollar, not that you see many of those around.

But no. They want to take over the dime. The smallest coin of the realm in size, a minor denomination.

The Newsday article states that aside from wishing to lessen the presence of FDR in public consciousness, the Pubs made a mistake because they picked the one coin that is most associated with the person on it. FDR was associated with dimes thirteen years before he died, a link that no other personage in America can boast.

The Newsday article says that it was the "March of Dimes" fund raising program against infantile paralysis that Eddie Cantor proposed in 1937 and FDR implemented with huge success that formed that association, but that’s not entirely correct.

The real association between FDR and the little then-silver coin was the song, "Brother, can you spare a Dime?" Both Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby recorded it in October 1932, which meant it gained popularity in that dark, desperate winter when ten million men – nearly a third of the work force – were out of work, the currency was collapsing, and America’s future seemed at its bleakest. It crackled from twenty year old Victrolas at a time when men lived by pushing wheelbarrows around with all their earthly possessions ("Hoover chariots") and World War One vets, desperate for money, set up a tent city in Washington DC ("Hooverville") to demand their deferred bonus checks. Douglas MacArthur, another candidate for the aluminum penny, mowed the unarmed vets down with horses in response.

It was a grim and desperate time, the utter and catastrophic failure of laissez-faire economics, and FDR very literally saved the nation.

Before he took office, the song was a grim paean of despair. After he took office, things changed, and it became a clarion call to persevere, to slog on through to the other side, to become "Al" again.

FDR did that by repudiating all the shibboleths of the laissez faire crowd. His solutions weren’t elegant, they weren’t always successful, but unlike the remedies the Carnegies and Vandevers and Wall Street proposed, they worked. They saved the country.

FDR "spared a dime." As a result, even before 1937 and the March of Dimes, the coin was associated with him. Not only did it go from a coin representing despair to one of hope, but it showed, once and for all, what an utter, anti-social humbug laissez faire economics is.

A local Mt. Shasta attorney passes out Roosevelt dimes with little bits of red, white and blue bunting attached for Democrats to attach to their chests and wear with pride. He understands the symbolism. He’s been doing it for years.

The crowd that is trying to deify Reagan understands that symbolism, too. And they don’t like it.

Republicans hate that song, even more than they hate "Happy Days are Here Again." It reveals the dark cost of their glittering supply side schemes and anti-government rhetoric.

And that is why they targeted the dime.

If they want to deify Reagan in true Soviet style, they also want to implement another feature of Stalin’s diseased regime: they want to make history "unhappen."

The move to endime Reagan probably won’t get anywhere. But in the interests of historical accuracy, if the coin is to maintain its place as a symbol of economic policy perhaps an appropriate design for the back might be a panhandler, begging for dimes from indifferent wealthy sorts.

With the caption, "Lucky Ducky".

Brother. Can you spare the dime?

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

(Gorney, Harburg)

They used to tell me

I was building a dream.

And so I followed the mob

When there was earth to plow

Or guns to bear

I was always there

Right on the job.

They used to tell me

I was building a dream

With peace and glory ahead.

Why should I be standing in line

Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad

I made it run

Made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad

Now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun

Brick and rivet and lime.

Once I built a tower,

Now it's done.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits

Gee we looked swell

Full of that yankee doodle dee dum.

Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell

And I was the kid with the drum!

Say don't you remember?

They called me Al.

It was Al all the time.

Why don't you remember?

I'm your pal.

Say buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits,

Ah, gee we looked swell

Full of that yankee doodle dee dum!

Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell

And I was the kid with the drum!

Oh, say don't you remember?

They called me Al.

It was Al all the time.

Say, don't you remember?

I'm your pal.

Buddy, can you spare a dime?