Child labor laws were condemned by the Conservatives because they said such laws would destroy the nations ability to compete in foreign markets. Maybe you remember seeing photos of little boys in coal-mines and little girls working in cotton mills.
Women's suffrage was condemned because women were considered to be unable to make any serious decisions. Workplace safety laws and the Pure Food and Drug Act were opposed by Conservatives, again because they said it would destroy our ability to compete in the market-place, and that they were interfering with "free enterprise".
The Conservatives called the Social Security and Wagner-Payser Acts "socialist"
They were violently opposed to the Civil Rights Act.
One piece of "Liberal" legislation opposed by the right has had a tremendous positive effect on the nation. If you don't already know, it is the "Veteran's Readjustment Act of 1944" or as it is more commonly called "The GI Bill". If I remember rightly, a couple of million young American veterans were paid by our government to further their educations. The benefits of that piece of this bill to the nation are incalculable. The bill passed Congress by one vote. The Conservatives opposed it. I would bet that you know people who benefited from this bill. Those that did are now in their seventies or eighties, but I'm sure they, also, remember.
The nation has been repaid a million times over for that investment in our veterans. Including by the extra taxes those veterans paid over the years due to the higher income jobs their GI Bill funded educations allowed them to obtain. So, the next time you hear someone sneer at Liberals, you might consider the source and suggest that they take the time to read some history.
Bio: John Ford is a Korean War veteran who finds the unprecedented (in America) evil and duplicity of members of the Bush administration intolerable. The silent complicity of the mainstream press in that evil has driven him to write what they should be writing but aren't. Contact him at
jandb@plateautel.net
Women's suffrage was condemned because women were considered to be unable to make any serious decisions. Workplace safety laws and the Pure Food and Drug Act were opposed by Conservatives, again because they said it would destroy our ability to compete in the market-place, and that they were interfering with "free enterprise".
The Conservatives called the Social Security and Wagner-Payser Acts "socialist"
They were violently opposed to the Civil Rights Act.
The nation has been repaid a million times over for that investment in our veterans. Including by the extra taxes those veterans paid over the years due to the higher income jobs their GI Bill funded educations allowed them to obtain. So, the next time you hear someone sneer at Liberals, you might consider the source and suggest that they take the time to read some history.
Bio: John Ford is a Korean War veteran who finds the unprecedented (in America) evil and duplicity of members of the Bush administration intolerable. The silent complicity of the mainstream press in that evil has driven him to write what they should be writing but aren't. Contact him at
jandb@plateautel.net
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