Free Republic

The same presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue behind the interventionism of Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the domestic economy also led them to be interventionists in other countries. Theodore Roosevelt was so determined that the United States should intervene against Spain's suppression of an uprising in Cuba that he quit his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to organize his own private military force — called "Rough Riders" — to fight in what became the Spanish-American war. The spark that set off this war was an explosion that destroyed an American battleship anchored in...

"Often wrong but never in doubt" is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two giants of the Progressive era, a century ago. Their legacy is very much alive today, both in their mindset — including government picking winners and losers in the economy and interventionism in foreign countries — as well as specific institutions created during the Progressive era, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve System. Like so many Progressives today, Theodore Roosevelt felt no need to study economics before intervening in the economy. He...

Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago. Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration. The two giants...

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within...

There is a great World War Two documentary, that was made in 2005, that shows the diplomatic disputes between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, as they planned their military campaigns against Hitler. The 4 part documentary is titled: Warlords. The DVD version was released in 2007, and it shows Winston Churchill as the true defender of freedom, democracy, Christianity, and Western Civilization - against three socialist dictators - Stalin, Hitler, and Roosevelt. Here is a an Amazon link to the documentary: http://www.amazon.com/Warlords-Churchill/dp/B000NVKZUG Churchill noticed the obvious - that Stalinist Russia was more oppressive than Nazism. While Nazism was brutal in its...

Want to be looked at by government like a farm animal? If your stock isn't good enough, perhaps we could just sit people in front of the politburo and force them to justify their existences. Doesn't sound good to you? Would it be too far to go out on a limb and say that Theodore Roosevelt would've agreed with the notion? In his letter to Charles Davenport, people's stock being 'farmed', is exactly the notion he advances. You can read the letter here, but I would much prefer you listen to it. Youtube link. (Also, Popmodal. But the audio doesn't...

'Factor' producer surveying the folks about presidential politics and leadership. Most of them have a hard time even identifying past U.S. presidents, let alone remembering their policies and accomplishments.

Theodore Roosevelt seems to be in vogue among certain Republican contenders -- but his Republicanism might not be the most conservative brand available. In fact, a big ideological contender against Roosevelt is Calvin Coolidge, another Republican stalwart of the 20th century. Though these two men occupied the same political party, each embodies one side of a struggle between philosophical factions that continues today. In summarizing his view of the proper role of the presidency, Roosevelt in his autobiography writes, "I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the Nation could not be done by the President...

Newt Gingrich took pains to wrap himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan during last week’s Fox debate in Iowa. He reminded viewers that Reagan was once called “not electable,” just as he sometimes is. He went on to point out he had “accomplished conservative goals” as speaker in the 1990s, including welfare reform and a balanced budget. “I am someone who campaigned with Reagan,” he concluded. But at the same time Newt tries to wrap himself in the Reagan mantle, he also exhibits another nostalgic tic that should give conservatives agita. Newt is an unabashed admirer of the Roosevelts...

when you're talking about Glenn Beck now he actually, the other day, called you a progressive on FOX Business channel. What do you say to that sort of claim?" Gingrich: "I don't know. It depends on what standard you're using, you know? The fact is I balanced the budget for four consecutive years. And we did so by cutting taxes and increasing employment so people went back to work, they left welfare, they left food stamps, they left unemployment, they left Medicaid. Who else has that record of achievement? I worked with Reagan in '79, '80. I worked with Reagan...

In this episode of the Conscience of Kansas radio program I interview Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp about Obama's visit to Kansas. Next, I speak to Paul Soutar of Kansas Watch Dog about the historical and symbolic reasons behind the President's seldom seen visit to Kansas. We invite you to listen and comment.

by John HillStand With Arizona Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Congress, 12/08/1941 The Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor and those who lost their lives that day are being remembered today on the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack that brought the U.S. into World War II. About 120 survivors will join the Navy Secretary, military leaders and civilians to observe a moment of silence...

Jeff sent this along, "the following passages were written in 1916 in Teddy Roosevelt's book, "Fear God and Take Your Own Part", reproduced in "What Every American Needs to Know About the Qur'an" by William Federer. These words are relevant today because the historical conflict between Islam and Christianity, which started nearly 1400 years ago, is still going on. The final outcome of this struggle is not clear." Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were...

Obama's Income Inequality SpeechAdam Clark Estes - 2:18 PM ET **SNIP** Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even...

President Obama will give an economic speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Tuesday at a location the White House says it was very specific in picking and was meant to stir echoes of President Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt spoke in the very same town more than 100 years ago on Aug. 31, 1910, where he presented his vision for America and the coming 1912 election. The White House says it spent a month planning and choosing this location and that there are parallels between how working class families felt then and now. Roosevelt gave what was called a "New Nationalism" agenda, talking about...

"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing variations of a flat income tax, President Obama’s tax-the-rich campaign strategy is looking backward—to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign. FDR won his reelection, but the American people lost: Roosevelt’s new taxes on business and the “economic royalists” gave us the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937-38. By August of 1935, Roosevelt had achieved some of his signature pieces of legislation: a new entitlement program known as Social Security, banking reform, pro-union reform, infrastructure expansion and massive transfers of wealth to the poor and middle classes. Sound familiar? FDR also ran up federal spending...

In his book God Knows, Joseph Heller perfectly described the manipulative, power hungry bored first lady. Bathsheba, in his telling, is a constant meddler, jockeying for power and, desperate to have her son, Solomon, made David's successor to the throne. She spends her free time in creative activities like inventing pantaloons because she is way too narcissistic to play second fiddle even to the king. We should be so lucky. The last two Democrat First Ladies cost us a bundle in their effort to be co-Presidents. Hillary ("two for the price of one"), with hair styles changing weekly, mucked about...

Just learned an interesting (I think) factoid. Roosevelt got the phrase New Deal from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". Been reading Twain recently. Maybe the 99%ers have too? "I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal."

* Historian cites positive examples of Roosevelt, Reagan * Persistent unemployment threatens Obama's re-election (Reuters) - Aides to President Barack Obama held a secret strategy retreat where they listened to a history lesson from a presidential scholar about past presidents who could serve as models for Obama's re-election effort, Time magazine reported. Historian Michael Beschloss reportedly gave the team hope with his June presentation about Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Ronald Reagan, who both won re-election in tough economic times. According to Time, Beschloss said the strategies the two presidents used were similar: they both made the case that the...

National excess, like individual overindulgence, leads to uncomfortable aftereffects and even deeply painful ones. The "hope and change hangover" the country is experiencing is 100 percent the consequence of the policies adopted in 2007 and 2008 by President Obama in concert with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Even the recession bequeathed to this trio of massive spenders combined with the dire consequences of the Panic of 2008 did not oblige the country to struggle through the dreariest recovery in modern times. This is an Obama-made becalming of the economic waters, an inevitability when Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, an...

Government Bailouts, Pump Priming, Interference, Whatever you want to call it, it Doesn't Work, & the numbers have already been crunched, & documented. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx By Meg Sullivan August 10, 2004 Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years. "Why...

...On behalf of what she calls the Republican Party, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan bids adieu to the past decade and to the Bush Doctrine, to what she calls "un-Republican" conduct, aka "bullying dreaminess." But who defines what is "Republican conduct?" Calvin Coolidge? Dwight Eisenhower? Robert Taft? Or Theodore Roosevelt, the "bullying dreamer" himself?... ...Rubio's maiden speech talked of a world that needs an "American century" and an America that needs to defend humane aspiration. Sounds like a proper idea of "Republican conduct." Sounds like a bullying dreamer to me... Read more at the Washington...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) is to liberals as Ronald Reagan is to conservatives, a greatly revered hero of their cause. Barack Obama is following in FDR's shoes. Roosevelt was more destructive to the economy in his own time than Obama has been in his... thus far. Roosevelt responded to the recession he inherited with a combination of massive spending on new government programs and sweeping controls over private industry, (sound familiar?). His thinking was that government spending would get people back to work, and controls over private industry would end deflation. Rules and regulations over private industry were put in...

112 - Letter on the Resolution of Federation of Federal Employees Against Strikes in Federal Service August 16, 1937 Franklin D. Roosevelt 1937 Font Size: Report Typo Share The American Presidency Project Promote Your Page Too My dear Mr. Steward: As I am unable to accept your kind invitation to be present on the occasion of the Twentieth Jubilee Convention of the National Federation of Federal Employees, I am taking this method of sending greetings and a message. Reading your letter of July 14, 1937, I was especially interested in the timeliness of your remark that the manner in which...

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.

The Truth about "Palestinian" Arabs A.K.A. Arab immigrants' children, grand children & the vastly vacant desolate land prior to the rise of Jewish returnINTRODUCTIONOrigins and immigration Foreign Arab and foreign Muslim immigration:Over 100,000 or at least 150,000 (to some estimates, such as the testimony given in the U.S. Congress in 1939) have immigrated during the British Mandate alone, or during a 17 Years old period.At least 50,000 or more have immigrated from Hauran, Syria alone.Immigrants include: Arab - Egyptians (mainly in the early 1800s), Syrian, Algerian, Sudanese, S. Arabians. Other Muslims from: Bosnia during the 1800s and fascist Nazi Slavic-Muslims...

As usual, the President did a superb job delivering his annual Christmas Eve speech; his love of country and his pride in our military shines through his every word. Clearly he believes in what we are fighting for, and it is evident that he holds our troops in the very highest regard. In case you missed it, here is a small clip of his speech; I think you will agree that it is inspirational, reverent, and entirely appropriate...

It's hard to disagree. Robust economic growth solves a lot of fiscal and other problems. But Obama's fellow Democrats, to whom he explicitly directed these comments, can be forgiven for being puzzled. The whole thrust of his first two years -- the stimulus package, the health care legislation, the vast increases in government spending -- has been to put programs in place that have done little or nothing to stimulate economic growth. That's not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats' policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place...

By disclosing a plan to conjure $600 billion to support the sagging economy, the Federal Reserve affirmed the interesting fact that dollars can be conjured. In the digital age, you don’t even need a printing press. This was on Nov. 3. A general uproar ensued, with the dollar exchange rate weakening and the price of gold surging. And when, last Monday, the president of the World Bank suggested, almost diffidently, that there might be a place for gold in today’s international monetary arrangements, you could hear a pin drop. Let the economists gasp: The classical gold standard, the one that...

Two leading communist front activists have called on President Barack Obama to use his executive authority to initiate a massive public job creation program. In an op-ed posted on the far left Truthout website, Jeanne Mirer, president of the former Soviet front International Association of Democratic Lawyers and Marjorie Cohn, president of the I.A.D.L.' s U.S. affiliate the National Lawyers Guild, urged President Obama to create by executive order a $300 billion federal jobs program funded by money from TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Fund). The TARP funds have been approved by Congress already and are not subject to "Republican obstruction",...

Barack Obama’s controversial comments to the Latino community on Univision radio urging them towards a policy of “we’re gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us” certainly ranked among the less savvy political remarks in the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections. But they were hardly without precedent. In 1918’s mid-term elections, President Woodrow Wilson similarly stirred a hornets’ nest when he unleashed his own considerable wrath upon congressional Republicans. And with similar disastrous consequences.

Roosevelt: 'Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching and losing heart.'Obama: We don't 'always think clearly when we're scared.'. Whatever the outcome of today's election, this much is clear: It will be a long time before Americans ever again decide that the leadership of the nation should go to a legislator of negligible experience—with a voting record, as state and U.S. senator, consisting largely of "present," and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence. A platform vowing, unforgettably, to restore us—a country lost to arrogance and crimes against humanity—to a place...

'Worst president since Hoover." Democrats have said this at one point or another about every Republican president since, well, Herbert Hoover. That's because Democrats have been waiting for the resurrection of FDR like a cargo cult waiting for one last plane that never comes. Such wishful thinking is rarely repaid. History just doesn't work like that. Fate, providence -- whatever you want to call it -- has a better sense of humor than that. Which is why I'm beginning to think Barack Obama isn't the next FDR -- as so many promised -- but the next Hoover. The creation myth...

Who decided we wanted 'a new FDR', anyway... Newsweek? Give-em-Hell Harry's pragmatic and patriotic Democratic leadership was actually of the type that could have banished today's GOP to the political boonies for a decade or more. Alas, somehow it seemed more stylish and romantic to repeat the expensive Keynesian failures of the Roosevelt Administration instead... this coupled to a weird defeatist foreign policy of Team Obama's own creation. Harry S Truman (the "S" doesn't stand for anything... just "S") was a brave, humble, and grateful-to-be-free American who ran to serve his country... and in a most competent and principled manner....

If President Obama's visitors ever grow bored, they can always read the mottoes woven into the border of the Oval Office's new rug. There are five of them, "of meaning to the president," around the perimeter of the rug, according to a White House spokesman, and they definitely are not from Disney. No "whistle while you work," in other words.

On this day in 1937, sixteen Republican Senators voted against confirming a former Ku Klux Klan member to the U.S. Supreme Court. Senator Hugo Black (D-AL) was known to have been in the KKK, but President Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party and the media kept the documentary proof hidden until after his confirmation.

In the 1930s, the Schechter brothers ran a chicken business in Brooklyn. The name Schechter is derived from the Yiddish word for "butcher," and this is what the brothers did: they slaughtered chickens and sold them to shops. The brothers seemed to be typical immigrants, at once struggling and succeeding. But in 1934, they became famous thanks to Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. Only months after Franklin Roosevelt had signed a code regulating the chicken business, the brothers were accused of violating it. Prosecutors said they had sold an unfit chicken, one with an egg lodged inside it, and...

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 3,500 acres in southern Arizona have now been closed to U.S. citizens because of the dangers posed in that area from Mexican drug smugglers. The area includes part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. Refuge manager Mitch Ellis told Fox News: “The situation in this zone has reached a point where continued public use of the area is not prudent.” Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said: “It’s literally out of control. We need support from the federal government. It’s their job to secure the border and they haven’t done it. In...

It is remarkable that Theodore Roosevelt (TR to his friends), who has been beloved as an iconic patriot and president, would become a controversial figure today. This unusual development is largely due to the rise of Glenn Beck. Glenn has been right on many issues and his views are resonating with Main Street. But he is wrong on one big issue: Theodore Roosevelt is not, as he claims, the root cause of President Obama’s intrusive, “big government” policies. It is no accident that TR’s face is chiseled into Mount Rushmore along with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham...

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate...

First the liberals destroyed the value of our money - principally through the policies of Roosevelt, Johnson and Carter, which led to hyper-inflation. This is happening again under Obama. Then the liberals destroyed our culture, glorifying the use of abortion as a birth-control method, and glorifying the use of drugs and casual sex. The result of this glorification of abortion, drugs and hook-up sex can be seen all around us as our civilization crumbles. Our movies and television programs reflect this crumbling. Then the liberals destroyed our schools and our colleges, dumbing down the curricula and substituting the study of...

Today, the facts about Katyn are not in doubt. In the spring of 1940, 22,000 Polish prisoners of war—most of them army officers, but also thousands of leading members of the Polish intelligentsia—were systematically murdered by the Soviet secret police on direct orders from Joseph Stalin. ...In one of history's richer ironies, the massacre was first discovered and publicized by the Nazis in 1943. That made it that much easier for the Soviets to dismiss the revelation as German propaganda to cover up a German crime, a line the U.S. and Britain were only too happy to adopt to propitiate...

Two critical things happened in American history today: the first is that today marks the 149th anniversary of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, SC, which began the Civil War in 1861. Seven states had already seceded and four others were about to go as well, leading to the largest trauma in our nation’s history. The other is the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. Long regarded as one of the best presidents in our history, a sober look at his record shows that Roosevelt caused much harm to this country. At best he was an able and...

Like many of you, I'm more than casually interested in American history, and more than a casual viewer of the Hitler channels documentation of our past. That the History Channel's "Beltway Unbuckled" would yield new information about FDR, then, is illustrative of how media selectively protects the image of patron Liberals, while targeting what were once called mainstream Americans. FDR mistress Daisy Suckley's diary, which was discovered under her bed in 1991, isn't a secret, as I discovered by searching the term. But, it sure as hell has not been been publicly aired. I'm talking about FDR telling Ms. Suckley...

Something else in President Obama's speech on Friday... This isn't the first time this point of drivel has come up in the current debate on healthcare, but here's another item President Obama has used in the past and repeated again at George Mason University to buttress his case: THE PRESIDENT: A few miles from here, Congress is in the final stages of a fateful debate about the future of health insurance in America. (Applause.) It's a debate that's raged not just for the past year but for the past century. One thing when you're in the White House, you've got...

If one goes by the Pentagon’s recent report on the Ft. Hood terrorist attack, the Pentagon’s PC putzes wouldn’t recognize a Muslim terrorist if one jumped up and bit them on the butt. So in the interest of national security, I have collected some statements made by folks over the years, which might point the Pentagon in the right direction. One lives in hope—the poor dears are awfully slow on the uptake though. “Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all...

Some 65 years ago, as World War II raged in Europe and the Pacific, the American people faced an unprecedented constitutional crisis of which they were completely unaware — and which has remained a secret ever since. It has long been known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the last year of his life, was gravely ill with serious cardiac problems: He'd been diagnosed with acute heart failure in March 1944 and suffered from astronomically high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis. But what the public did not know was that four years earlier, while still in the second of his four...

WASHINGTON -- The spirit of Christmas seems to have escaped Congress, maybe even the country. Have you ever encountered such mean spiritedness and political conniving as are now on display on Capitol Hill? In the past, we have had great philosophical divisions in the struggle for civil rights, especially when southern legislators ran the show. In praise of democracy, fortunately they lost. And of course there also was the "red scare" fomented by Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., in the 1950s when he led the commie-hunting movement that ended up victimizing government officials, academia and Hollywood. We recovered from that, too....

In 1941, the Roosevelt administration commissioned a radio special, “We Hold these Truths,” to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Listen to it here. The producer and writer was Norman Corwin (an ardent New Dealer who is still going strong at age 99). It featured an all-star cast including Orson Welles, James Stewart, Walter Brennan, and Edward G. Robinson, and closed with a speech by Roosevelt. Broadcast only a week after Pearl Harbor, it still holds the ratings record for any dramatic show. About half the American population tuned in. The actors, especially Stewart and Welles, give...