Posted on 02/13/2011 8:06:53 AM PST by wizkid
Reporting from Dunwoody, Ga. — For more than half a century, biographers have treated Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Rushmore-like reverence, celebrating the nation's 32nd president as a colossus who eased the agony of the Great Depression and saved democracy from Nazi Germany.
Which never sat right with historian Burton Folsom Jr.
Growing up in Nebraska, Folsom remembers, his dad, a savings and loan executive, griped about high taxes and Roosevelt's voracious ambition. FDR was dead, but his legacy — deficit spending, an activist federal government, an expansive social safety net — lived on.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
That’s why it’s important to point this stuff out. That’s why I point out how well FDR did electorally. We need to understand what we’re up against. We’re only a couple of generations removed from a time when FDR won the biggest landslides ever. A conservative country? lol.
I have always thought FDR was the Bill Clinton of his era. Alot of blow, not alot of go.
Wow....your grandfather was so ahead of his time!
I hope you don’t mind if I copy/paste this letter to others.
Let me know if this is ok.
That is an AWESOME letter! Your grandfather was a very smart and discerning man. Good for him. It was risky to speak out like that in the 30s as you easily got onto FDRs enemies list and could subject you to all sorts of investigations and trumped-up charges.
Burt’s a good friend, has written a great book, and he and his wife Anita have another one coming out on FDR in the war years. Should be good.
A Patriot's History of the United States. Check.
Burt’s wife, Anita, just emailed me this and she and Burt thought it was a pretty fair review.
What, no WTF button??
You are absolutely right. Not only did the passage of Smoot-Hawley in 1930 cause the crash (because it passed a key Senate vote in October 1929, which made it a done deal), but FDR was a Keynesian (because he had read or been told about Keynes’s ideas) long before 1936, when Keynes published “General Theory.”
When my mom was house hunting years ago she refused to look at a listing on Roosevelt St!
The book slammed in the article gives a good account of how FDR subverted government to introduce “machine” politics into the Federal Elections. He “bought” and extorted his majorities once in office.
I never understood why people liked FDR; them man was a socialist.
They are very generous, but likely focused on what he had to say about the book and ignored the preamble.
True to LA Times form, the piece drips with snarky arrogance and concludes that we ignorant rubes should never look behind the clever media spin curtain regarding FDR. The squishy Left gets indignant when you challenge their finely crafted history hoaxes. We all know the drill: FDR was a saint, Kennedy was magical, Vietnam was all Nixon’s fault, LBJ was NOT a racist cracker, the Woodstock nation was without flaw.... blah blah blah.
Lectures from the Left grew old long ago, and God help anyone who giggles during their solemn recitations.
Interesting timing...the very month of the crash.
I wonder how much of a factor having Roosevelt as Gov of NYC (aka Wall Street) played in Hoover's soft economic decisions.
Another thing I think about is the pressure coming from the left of Roosevelt (as hard as it is to imagine that people were even further left). For example, I saw a special on Huey Long which claimed that his popularity (a political threat to Roosevelt) is what spurred Roosevelt to push for the WPA.
So much to learn...so little time.
My great aunts and uncles and other extended family on my Father's side were beneficiaries of this system. As Southerners, they were by definition Democrats, but they came from a politically active and connected family, so got more than their share. In return for their loyalty and contributions, jobs were showered on them: music, art, and journalism grants via the WPA, patronage jobs in D.C. Those few still living revere Roosevelt and the others praised him until their dying day. My mother's family were just poor dirt farmers with no connections. They got nothing.
We are talking apples and oranges. There is no argument that FDR won with massive victories, but going into each election he did not have the level of confidence that such victories would occur.
The point the book makes is that he used various illegal methods to assure himself of such victories.
I dunno. I read the article and thought it was typical of a journalist, and, given that, was pretty fair. I’d be happy with such a review of “Patriot’s History of the United States.”
The result was "New Deal or Raw Deal?," a scathing 300-page counter-narrative that has made Folsom a conservative hero and placed him squarely in the midst of a roiling debate over America's past, the nature of history and, some say, its manipulation for political ends.
It is an ancient debate spurred anew by the rise of the "tea party" movement, which treats the Constitution as both cudgel and sacred text; by TV commentators such as Glenn Beck, who wrap their ideology in selective scholarship; and by a current vogue among conservatives eager not just to revisit the past but to rewrite it.
Many tea partyers, for instance, speak as though the Founders favored a small, circumscribed federal government, when in fact some wanted a more powerful Washington than we have today. (James Madison proposed a national veto over state laws.) In a recent speech, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) extolled the Founding Fathers' efforts to end slavery, when they actually made inequality the law, passing legislation counting blacks as three-fifths of a person.
Misleading or not, the revisionism represents a scramble for the high ground; in a country that reveres its history — even as we endlessly fight over its meaning — there are few more powerful arguments than precedent.
"We're not discussing how many economic-stimulus plans we can balance on the head of a pin," said the University of New Mexico's Jason Scott Smith. "There can be real-world consequences to the lessons we attempt to take from history."
Some scholars, however, worry the debate has been poisoned by the same attitude afflicting political discourse: the notion that truth and virtue reside on one side, and those who disagree are not just wrong but un-American. In a new book, Harvard's Jill Lepore condemns what she calls "historical fundamentalism," a belief that "a particular and quite narrowly defined past" should be worshiped, unquestioned, above all others.
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