Free Republic

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

The most glaring fact about our president is that he is an empty suit. The people around him are also empty suits. They believe in nothing, really, but unearned luxury, unmerited adulation, and unaccountable power. Those whom we have come to call "leftists" are in fact nothing but nihilists, and we flatter them when we presume that they value anything beyond their vanities, their avarice, and their selfishness. When tragedy strikes, like in the Boston bombing, these empty suits can look and act appropriately somber and serious, but it is all for show, and the intended audience are Americans who...

Probably the most bracing aspect of Ira Katznelson's new history of the New Deal, Fear Itself, is his portrait of the marriage of progressive domestic policy and white supremacy. I knew the outlines of this stuff, but for a flaming commie like me, the extent of the embrace is hard to take: Far more enduring was the New Deal's intimate partnership with those in the South who preached white supremacy. For this whole period -- the last in American history when public racism was legitimate in speech and action -- southern representatives acted not on the fringes but as an...

The Rise of the Administrative State Written by William F. Jasper From the very start of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, there were unmistakable indications that his “New Deal” would be moving in the statist direction. Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor, recounted, decades later, a telling occurrence at the first FDR Cabinet meeting. She recalled: At the first meeting of the Cabinet after the President took office in 1933, the financier and adviser to Roosevelt, Bernard Baruch, and Baruch’s friend General Hugh Johnson, who was to become the head of the National Recovery Administration, came in with a copy...

The never-ending Obama campaign announced this week that it was raising funds from big donors — only a relative handful — to put together a $50 million fund for an army of grass-roots activists in swing states to go after Republican Congressmen and Senators who dare to vote against the president’s wishes. Over the next two years, they will be spreading their tentacles all over the nation, invading currently-Republican districts but might be turned to blue in 2014, in pursuit of a House majority and of a sixty-vote Democratic Senate. This “purge” of Republicans is reminiscent of 1938 when FDR...

For years, most Americans' vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt's death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents. They were gifted writers, and many of their books were bestsellers. And they have persuaded many Americans -- Barack Obama definitely included -- that progress means an ever bigger government In their view, the prosperous 1920s were a binge of mindless frivolity. The Depression of the 1930s was the inevitable hangover, for which FDR administered the cure. That's one way to see it. But there are others,...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Malcolm A. Kline, Share/Save Every now and then, professors let down their guard and reveal how left-wing they really are. In a lecture on 1030s propaganda that he delivered at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2013 meeting in Boston, UC Davis English professor Matthew Stratton noted that FDR’s head of the National Recovery Administration, Hugh Johnson, “was fond of handing out Italian fascist pamphlets to his colleagues.” “He didn’t last long,” Stratton averred. “One should certainly not compare the New Deal with Italian fascism unless one is trying to get on a conservative talk show and I’m not going to...

During my transcription process of the book Fabian Freeway, I would sometimes go through the footnotes and see what I could verify, when one thing in particular caught my eye. (Chapter 17) The fact that an old-line southern Democrat had been induced to sponsor the basic legislation so ardently desired by all spokesmen of gradual Socialism was an early and notable example of success for the Fabian technique known as permeation. This concept is actually used extensively throughout the book, but for whatever reason, it caught my eye in the current context. The Fabians turned "Permeation" into a policy because...

Unless you’re a member of the lucky sperm club or have just been unusually fortunate you’re entire life, you, like most of us, have experienced financial hardship and distress at some point. Some of this country’s greatest entrepreneurs have struggled mightily at different periods during their process to succeed. Walt Disney, one of the world’s most legendary icons, for example, was forced into bankruptcy and destitution before his perseverance and hard work finally paid off and he became “Walt Disney.” More times than not in this life failure and hardship dwell on the road to success, and at some point...

People, not least himself, have often compared Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt. You know the narrative. He came to office in a financial crisis and proceeded to take government action to revive the economy and expand government to help the little guy. That narrative was developed by great New Deal historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and has been an article of faith among liberal Democrats ever since. Expand government, and the people will love you. Except that it hasn't worked out exactly that way. Most Americans don't much love the stimulus package or Obamacare. That's why you didn't hear...

By Dr. Phil Taverna I ran across this book in my travels. And it peaked my interest. Who was the Forgotten Man? According to Amity Shlaes, her book, The Forgotten Man  is someone that will peak your interest for sure. When I first saw the expression, I expected to see a book written by a commie liberal and it was about the plight of the blacks and minorities who can't seem to get a fair share no matter how much money we throw at them.This book is mainly about FDR the biggest commie of the 40's but it also gives you...

On the possibility of a forthcoming political revolution.The United States has been shaped by three far-reaching political revolutions: Thomas Jefferson’s “revolution of 1800,” the Civil War, and the New Deal. Each of these upheavals concluded with lasting institutional and cultural adjustments that set the stage for new phases of political and economic development. Are we on the verge of a new upheaval, a “fourth revolution” that will reshape U.S. politics for decades to come? There are signs to suggest that we are. In fact, we may already be in the early stages of this twenty-first-century revolution.The great recession that began...

The United States has been shaped by three far-reaching political revolutions: Thomas Jefferson’s “revolution of 1800,” the Civil War, and the New Deal. Each of these upheavals concluded with lasting institutional and cultural adjustments that set the stage for new phases of political and economic development. Are we on the verge of a new upheaval, a “fourth revolution” that will reshape U.S. politics for decades to come? There are signs to suggest that we are. [....] The financial crisis and the long recession, with the strains they have placed upon national income and public budgets, are only the proximate causes...

In two books, the man who calls President Barack Obama a “food-stamp president” praised the man whose administration created the first food stamp program. Snubbing 16 other presidents including Ronald Reagan, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Franklin D. Roosevelt “probably the greatest president of the twentieth century” in his 1995 book To Renew America. In a passage of the book in which Gingrich laid out examples of historical figures asking for God’s help for the nation, he praised Roosevelt for “openly appeal[ing] to the nation’s sense of faith and religion in summing the national will to the task” of...

Congressman Joe Walsh (IL-8) recently introduced the ‘Dairy Deregulation Act’ to phase out the government's milk price setting regime, called the "Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMO)". This program was established in pre-refrigeration 1937 to guarantee that there were no shortages of milk across the country. Today 74 years later, milk is the only major agricultural product with government-mandated prices that differ according to product use. Walsh stated: “Most taxpayers are unaware that they are paying for their milk twice. Currently American families are taxed to pay for a federal program that directly increases the cost of their milk. This is...

The conventional wisdom is that FDR ended the Great Depression, but more recent research indicates his policies may have prolonged and even deepened the it. They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Here is a reminder of how some citizens at least saw the FDR administration…

It is an ideological milestone that the emerging Republican front-runner is as skeptical of the New Deal as anyone in his position since the New Deal. During the 1936 election, Republican nominee Alf Landon called Social Security "unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed." Now, according to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme" that tells young workers a "monstrous lie." It is a "failure" that "we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now." It is true that Barry Goldwater, during the 1964 campaign, said, "I think Social Security ought to be voluntary."...

The Great Depression dominated the 1930s, in large part because President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs failed to create jobs. In May 1939, shortly after learning that unemployment stood at 20.7%, Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury, exploded: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Morgenthau concluded, “I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!” Why did Roosevelt’s New Deal fail so miserably? The larger problem...

President Obama outlined what he called a framework for deficit reduction Wednesday. It was a tacit admission that his 2012 budget submission did not go far enough. That shows Republicans succeeded in seizing the initiative with their own comprehensive, pro-growth proposal to restore America’s solvency. Mr. Obama’s flimsy “me, too” smacks of desperation. The White House describes its latest plan as “comprehensive” and “pro-growth” but that’s deceptive. The GOP used the phrases to describe House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s package of discretionary spending cuts, entitlement reforms and tax relief. Mr. Obama hijacked the words to describe a combination of...