Posted on 04/25/2008 7:28:51 AM PDT by bs9021
Presidential Personality Cult Deconstructed
by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 25, 2008
So many generations have been taught that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the Depression that it has become an article of faith for historians in and out of academia and, naturally, their media acolytes. “The life of Franklin Roosevelt has been well-analyzed through the lens of politics and policy,” the editors of U. S. News & World Report write in the April 28/May 5 issue of the magazine. “As the president who lifted the country out of economic despair and stood up to foreign military aggression, FDR offers historians the richest of public material.”
Actually, Cato Institute scholar Jim Powell in FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003) brought together evidence from the findings of several dozen economists at Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Brown, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley, hardly a bunch of right-wing think tanks. “Throughout the bulk of the Depression, unemployment rates averaged about 17 percent,” we reported of his findings....
(snip)
“Your plans, if I recall 1932 correctly, called for economy in government and a reduction in taxes,” a Phoenix businessman wrote in a guest editorial in the local paper back in 1937 that was done in the style of one of FDR’s famous fireside chats. “In five years you have spent more than this government of ours spent in its entire history before 1932,” the Arizona merchant observed.
“In five years my taxes have increased over 250 percent and I fear greatly that ‘I ain’t seen half of it yet.” The young executive was future presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
When his father died, Goldwater left school to take over the family business....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
When i was in high school, my father gave me these facts about Goldwater doing this and I got sent out of class for being a distraction by Mr. Watson. All and all I thought that if Barry could get me out of class, he was a good guy!
The Great Depression never ended. This is still the Great Depression.
The Press of our time broke the news to the terrorists that America could track them by their cell phones, ultimately giving up what was a great tactical advantage over people who want us dead or enslaved, and spends more time worrying about the "rights" of those terroirsts than it does their defeat.
See the difference?
FDR was President for 7+ years before we even got into the war.
To paraphrase Gov. Daniels, the liberals are just going to have to get over FDR.
Depends who is POTUS.
Remember how ‘great’ things were during the Clinton Administration??
MSM media self, conservative and America hating little pseudo elitists whose lives depend only on who can get the scoop first no matter who it hurts. There's going to be a reckoning someday
That was not about being first.
It was the same as all the other news stories.
It is about Bush Hating Syndrom, and a purposful damaging of Bush and the American Government.
FDR is the most overrated president in history. He took a cyclical recession and parlayed it into a decade long depression in order to grow big government.
Even his management of World War II wasn't the success often claimed. Despite top-notch military leadership, he ceded far more to the Communists than was necessary to ensure their temporary cooperation in the war against facist national socialism.
Well, he had enough of them in his administration to run Russia. Matter of fact, they are still there today.
The question Senator Macarthy asked was why are they still there. Remember what happened to him and learn.
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