Posted on 12/23/2021 3:49:30 AM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
Like many people my age (62), I was taught both at home and in school that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president. FDR, I was taught, saved American democracy in the 1930s with the New Deal and led the nation to victory against Hitlerism in the 1940s. That view of FDR was reinforced by many television documentaries and history books. And virtually every poll of historians — including the most recent C-Span poll — places FDR in the top five of all U.S. presidents (usually in third place behind Lincoln and Washington). This is so despite persuasive revisionist historical works that paint a very different picture of FDR’s presidency.
Let’s start with the New Deal. In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes shows that the New Deal — so lionized by liberal historians and Democrats — did not restore the U.S. economy as promised by FDR and his “brain trust,” but instead extended the sufferings of the Great Depression for seven more years. Unemployment remained well beyond 10 percent throughout the 1930s, only subsiding with the coming of World War II. “The cause of the duration of the Depression,” she writes, “was Washington’s persistent intervention” in the economy. The end result of the New Deal’s “bold persistent experimentation” was “inflexible statism” that has evolved into a gargantuan federal government exercising nearly unlimited powers to a degree that would have shocked the Founders of our country.
But an even greater failure of FDR’s administration in the 1930s was the nation’s lack of preparedness for the Second World War.
........read it all at the link
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
I have nothing good to say about FDR.
He was Stalin without the skill and opportunity.
A+ on the war
F on the economy
FDR’s 90% tax rates on businesses really spurred the economy though! /s
On the plus side, he DID know how to get Lucy Mercer, Missy LeHand, and Crown Princess Märtha to wax his weasel like a wheelchair Jeffrey Epstein...
BFL
Lincoln was a great president is another government propaganda success. Then again, winners get to write the history.
One thinks about how divided we are today.....we have always been a deeply divided country.
Of course, now the takers outnumber the makers. We will have to take the country back by ballots or bullets if need be.
Or be lost and scattered to the wind like ancient Judah.
"The functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions, because [they are] as old as government and inherent in its very nature. The bulk and complex minuteness of our positive law, which covers almost every case that can arise in Administration, obscures for us the fact that Administration cannot wait upon legislation, but must be given leave, or take it, to proceed without specific warrant in giving effect to the characteristic life of the State." ["Notes for Lectures at the Johns Hopkins," January 26, 1891, Papers of Woodrow Wilson Vol. 7, p. 121]
While FDR is indeed responsible for his own actions like 'Court Packing', he does come from the infamous heritage of the 1880s-1920s Progressivism/Populism. While they were not 'specifically' Socialist or Communist, it is instructive how influenced they were from German & European intellectuals and proposals.
For a LENGTHY treatment on the ancestry of the SWAMP, I recommend this 2007 monograph from Heritage Foundation / Hillsdale College; "The Birth of the Administrative State: Where It Came From and What It Means for Limited Government". The above Wilson quote comes from this paper.
See "The Cardinal Spellman Story" by Robert I. Gannon, S.J., Doubleday & Company, New York, 1962.
Chapter 14, "President Roosevelt", pages 222-248.
Years before Yalta and Ike's "Operation Keelhaul" ...
Bkmrk
Thought experiment: Imagine if Donald Trump had the skill to wield the powers of the office that FDR possessed.
oh; you mean the politician
["Come along. We're going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt" Peter Arno]
You might like this 1930's New Yorker Magazine cartoon, bearing in mind that from the start, this magazine was firmly on the left. At the start it was a genteel and rather avant-garde leftism as opposed to the contemporary raging LEFTism.
FDR was the worst. He started, with social security, the idea that government would take care of us, birth to death. People were no longer responsible for their lives and look where we are today.
Give us more, we are victims. It is not up us, it is up to you, government.
“the desirability of a powerful bureaucracy over squabbling ELECTED politicians”
We have that today in spades, much larger than in the 30s. After all, they have had 80+ years to grow and perfect it.
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