Free Republic

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was perhaps the most important president, if not world leader during the 20th century due to the U.S. involvement WW II, but his legacy started long before that conflict, and his decisions helped shape the post war world. Hosted by Colin D. Heaton. Forgotten History is a 10th Legion Pictures Production.

One of those men was Henry Marshall, whose death—he was shot five separate times in the chest with a rifle—was ruled “a suicide.”.. June 3, 1961, Henry Marshall was found dead on his farm near Bryan in Robertson County, Texas. He had been shot five times with his own rifle. Marshall, 51, had worked as a clerk with the Robertson County office of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA), holding a senior post in the agency. In 1960, he was asked to investigate the activities of Billie Sol Estes, a wealthy benefactor of Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he found to have...

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself these questions — or this one: How can history be written as a newspaper headline? Call this a biography by indirection. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defined by competing individuals and movements: Huey Long, Father Coughlan, Al Smith, the Liberty League, Earl Browder and the Communist Party, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend Plan, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. They threatened FDR’s majority in...

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...

Despite a population that is now more prosperous and more educated by several orders of magnitude, we clearly have become more lazy.To celebrate another $1,400 in stimulus checks, a quickly withdrawn video from Wisconsin Democrats showed people dancing to a catchy rap song with captions of “$$$ IN THE POCKET” and “THANK YOU POTU$.” As Joy Pullmann noted, its release on the same day abysmal job numbers came out was a testament to Democrats’ blindness to economic reality. It also attested to our culture’s devolving expectation of something for nothing.America has definitely changed. Juxtapose that video with images from the...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been mocked for claiming that climate change is a product of racial injustice, as she relaunched her controversial Green New Deal. The New York congresswoman on Tuesday spoke in front of the Capitol to promote her plan, which set a series of ambitious targets such as eliminating U.S. greenhouse gas emissions within a decade and transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels. Ocasio-Cortez said that climate change must be viewed through the lens of race.

CNN host Fareed Zakaria hijacked former President Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” and slapped it on President Joe Biden’s gargantuan federal spending. Zakaria fawned in a new op-ed headlined, “How Biden’s New Deal can really make America great again.” He went on to pretend that “Trump claimed he wanted to ‘Make America Great Again,’ President Biden is attempting to actually do it.” Zakaria must have missed economist and The Lindsey Group CEO Lawrence Lindsey’s October 2020 op-ed headlined, “The Trump Boom Is Real.” But according to Zakaria, “Biden’s infrastructure plan is the first major fiscal program in five...

Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) said Thursday that he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will soon unveil a coronavirus relief package that he described as “Rooseveltian” in its scope and size. “We need big, bold action," Schumer said in an MSNBC interview with Stephanie Ruhle, adding that he and Pelosi "are working very closely together on putting together a very strong plan, which you will hear shortly.” “We need Franklin Rooseveltian-type action and we hope to take that in the House and Senate in a very big and bold way,” he added. Schumer's remarks came in response to Senate...

Source: AP Photo/Craig Ruttle The great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard elucidated, “Before the massive government interventions of the 1930s, all recessions were short-lived.”[1] The deceptive narrative of collectivists about the “Roaring Twenties” and the New Deal goes like this: Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation. Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words...

A Depression-era mural depicting white children playing outside in the winter was removed from Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park because school officials said it failed to represent the school’s diversity. While some said the mural was upsetting to students of color who felt it excluded them from the school, a local historian likened the removal to a “modern-day book burning.” Cynthia Brito Millan, a coordinator for the middle school’s Social Justice Club, said the push to remove the mural began in February at a district school board meeting. Students expressed frustration about an atmosphere of exclusion for students...

The 1930s fresco mural by Ann Rice O’Hanlon was painted as part of the federal Public Works of Art Project. It shows Lexington’s history from its settlement in a series of scenes. In one, black men and women are planting tobacco, and in another, a Native American man holds a tomahawk. Various efforts to remove the mural have been made since at least 2006. In 2015, in response to a meeting with a group of black students, Capilouto ordered the mural to be shrouded. Then after meeting for a year, a UK task force said the mural should be uncovered,...

I laughed out loud when I came across this one. Stuart Chase, the man who coined the term "New Deal" and was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, bemoaned the "destruction of goods" in his book titled "The Challenge of Waste". Here is the full paragraph: (page 22-23) DESTRUCTION OF GOODSEven when the industrial plant is running, we find that enormous quantities of the output never reach the consumer at all by reason of defects in the distribution and market mechanism. In a period of so-called "over-production," we see night riders burning tobacco and cotton, corn used as fuel, milk dumped...

Both fans and foes of the so-called Green New Deal (GND) agree that it is a wildly ambitious set of proposals, which—by design—will involve the federal government spending boatloads of money. In fact, the GND is so expensive that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has cited the inflationary doctrine of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to deflect the issue; we don’t need to worry about the cost of the Green New Deal, so the argument goes, because the Federal Reserve can create an unlimited number of dollars. Even so, more sober-minded policymakers, as well as the general public, should be aware of just how ludicrously expensive the GND really is. A...

Nearly 200 nations have agreed rules on implementing the 2015 Paris agreement. After marathon talks in Katowice, Poland, the rulebook was approved unanimously on Saturday evening. The agreement aims to deliver the Paris goals of limiting global temperature rises to well below 2C. The final session was delayed by more than 30 hours amid an ongoing stand-off over carbon markets to reduce emissions. Some accused the hosts of not shepherding the agreement through.

FULL TITLE: Unfixable? Several nations have tried to restore democracy after populist strongmen. It was never the same. In April, aided by massive gerrymandering, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling coalition crushed opposition in Hungary’s national elections, claiming a supermajority in the parliament. The prime minister — who had used two prior terms in office to dominate media outlets, alter electoral rules so that urban areas were massively underrepresented and seize control of the top courts — moved to further consolidate his power. He is pushing Central European University, a leading academic institution backed by George Soros, whom Orban has demonized,...

Faced with a 5-4 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, some liberal Democrats want to pack the court to reverse the balance. Once the Democrats regain control of the White House and the Senate, so the argument goes, the new Democratic president could create enough new seats on the Supreme Court to ensure a liberal majority. The last time the Democrats tried that was in 1937. President Franklin Roosevelt had just been re-elected by the largest majority in American history. He carried all but two states, Maine and Vermont, and racked up unprecedented Democratic majorities in the Senate and...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this weekend that he will introduce a resolution to rename the Senate's Russell Office Building for Sen. John McCain, who died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. McCain died 13 months after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. Schumer, D-New York, praised his colleague as an American patriot and said he would introduce the resolution “so that generations remember him." "As you go through life, you meet few truly great people," Schumer said in a statement. "John McCain was one of them. His dedication to his country and the...

An interesting phenomenon in politics is the flip flop. What would cause a politician who takes a stand on an issue to reverse himself and take precisely the opposite stand on the same issue? Even more interesting is the about face or volte face. The volte face goes beyond the flip flop because it represents a total and usually lasting shift of course, as when Reagan abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican. More interesting even than the volte face is when a whole group or party makes this shift. Perhaps the most dramatic example in our lifetime is...

The New Deal led to the rise of the administrative state, to which Congress frequently delegates its regulatory power. Its programs were so vast, they required a massive team of people to carry out. Instead of being divided up into three entities — legislative, judicial, and executive, as prescribed by the Constitution — the government is now functionally divided into the political and administrative states. ... Under this re-imagined structure, decisions are no longer made by the people. They are made by special interests: the bureaucrats regulating the issue, interest groups, and corporations. The massive bureaucratic state makes it so...

In the first century or so of our national existence, one of the Constitution’s provisions that was most often at issue was the Contract Clause. But following New Deal era decisions that eviscerated it, hardly any cases have since centered on it. The clause has been so forgotten that few Americans even know it’s there, in Article I, Section 10, reading, “No state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.” The Constitution’s drafters had good reason to include that language, meant to assure people that contracts would be inviolate. During the years under the Articles of Confederation, the...