Quote Originally Posted by DuncanONeil View Post
First of all the "excerpts" are fictional, as is the text from which derived. Hence the assumption in your question that this is a planned text makes little sense.
That being said; "The first of these New Deal laws, the Emergency Banking Act, was approved in two days by a docile Democratic Congress (the vote in the Senate was 73-7) without reading the actual wording of the legislation. The Banking Act gave FDR and the Democrats unprecedented and potentially dangerous control over the national supply of credit " sounds a lot like now, does it not?
I never said this was a planned text, I'm asking people how they would feel about a text like this.

As for the particular statement in question I think a textbook really ought to examine things like:

(1) The contents of the Emergency Banking Act
(2) The economic arguments for and against it at the time.
(3) Consequences of the Act.

Furthermore I'd suggest that they review the statements in a slightly more neutral fashion:

The bill gave the government control of the banking supply, it happened to be FDR & The Dems at the time, but it certainly passed on to future Republican or Democrat leaderships.

So if you want a point for discussion to be:

(1) The bill gave the government further control of the money supply? In what ways was this a good thing? In what ways was this a bad thing? On the whole do you think the Act was a positive or negative influence on America and the problems it faced in the 1930's?

This would be the difference between a textbook saying:

Bush and the Republicans committed the Americans to an unpopular, expensive and futile war in Iraq, without any international support to the great detriment of the country.

Or giving a bunch of data and information and then asking:

The government elected to go to war in Iraq without UN support. In what ways does this complicate things for the US? What is a situation in which you would support such an action? What is a situation in which you would oppose such an action? On the whole do you think this action was justified? What do you feel the consequences were on the US?

Or even:

(1) Compare and Contrast the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.