Free Republic

"If history were to repeat itself," warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address, "and we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home." The "normalcy" of the 1920s that Roosevelt referred to was a time of peace and prosperity. The decade began with Republican President Warren Harding commuting the sentences of political prisoners jailed by the Wilson administration, including the socialist leader Eugene...

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...

Don’t put it past our politicians to try it in a financial emergency. The breaking of contracts by the U.S. government, unfortunately, has happened before, and what’s under way in Cyprus shows that feckless politicos will continue to try such things. In 1933–34, amid the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. government seized the American people’s gold holdings. From that point, until 1975, it was illegal for Americans to own gold, other than in some forms of jewelry or collectors’ coins. In the panic of the Depression years the courts upheld this unconstitutional confiscation. Yes, people received dollars in...

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question." Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman)...

Many of the Nazi camps in Europe are falling apart, an expert has warned in advance of Holocaust Memorial Day. Florence Eizenberg, who is finishing a doctorate on the topic of Holocaust denial, said that the camps, which provide valuable testimony to Nazi war crimes, are in poor condition. Eizenberg visited camps across Europe as part of her research. …

Today it is more clear than ever why Niles doubted FDR genuinely supported Zionism. President Barack Obama has spoken of his deep admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his desire to emulate FDR’s leadership style. But in the wake of the discovery of new documents detailing FDR’s behind-the-scenes coldness regarding the creation of a Jewish state, many Israelis will be hoping that sentiment does not extend to Roosevelt’s views on Zionism.

Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine... Starting in the 1960s, a flood of books appeared with self-evident titles like “No Haven for the Oppressed” and “While Six Million Died.” But the most influential account by far was David S. Wyman’s “Abandonment of the Jews,” published in 1984. Wyman considered numerous parties responsible for America’s tepid response to the Holocaust, including a badly divided Jewish community, a nest of virulent...

Historian Rafael Medoff says Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to take relatively simple measures that would have saved significant numbers of Jews during the Holocaust, because his vision for America only encompassed having a small number of Jews. “In his private, unguarded moments, FDR repeatedly made unfriendly remarks about Jews, especially his belief that Jews were overrepresented in many professions and exercised too much influence and control on society,” Medoff told The Daily Caller in an email about his new book, “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.” “This prejudice helped shape his overall vision of what America should look...

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...

Last week, I gave 12 examples of how religious liberty has been assaulted in just the past two years in the U.S. Here are about two dozen more instances just for good measure, as reported by the Family Research Council, the office of Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., and various media outlets. --The following public institutions recently have joined the growing ranks of those that have banned the use of the word "Easter" in order to diminish or eliminate references to religion: East Meadow School District in New York, Prospect Heights Public Library in Illinois, Heritage Elementary School in Alabama,...

On April 12, 1945, my grandfather approached me as I played outside and asked where my mother was. He looked stricken, and so I quickly followed him inside and heard him say words that made my mother burst into tears: President Roosevelt had died. My mother’s grief and panic were so palpable — her brother was fighting in the Pacific, her brother-in-law was fighting in Europe — that it scared me. In our house, FDR was not merely the President. He was a god. He is a god no more. His New Deal is no longer solely credited with ending...

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...

From his very first state-of-the-union utterance last night, associating himself with President Kennedy, President Obama got it wrong, and it was mostly downhill from there: “51 years ago,” he began, “John F. Kennedy declared to this chamber that ‘the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress.’” Great alliteration; bad constitutionalism. Yes, in a very narrow sense the Constitution makes the political branches partners for progress. But it also, most definitely, makes the branches, and those with authority within them, rivals for power. Indeed, throughout the Federalist Papers we learn how the Constitution pits power against power...

A pair of professors objected to our coverage of them at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Boston this year. Near as we can figure out, what they objected to was the fact that we covered them. “Glad you could make it to my paper on 1930s propaganda and popular culture,” Matthew Stratton, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California-Davis wrote in an effort at cordiality that belied what was to come. “I must admit, however, that I’m a bit confused by your account of the panel.” “What exactly in my paper did you find objectionable...

Former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has published an op-ed: that the president wants a "second Bill of Rights" alongside the existing one. Sunstein located the source of Obama's inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, rather than the South African constitution--though the American academics whose writings inspired South Africa's ambitious Bill of Rights could well have taken Roosevelt's proposals as their foundation. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights--not a list of constitutional amendments, but policy goals--was as follows: In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak,...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

Washington -- The year 2012 is about to expire. It was a blank in my judgment -- poof and it is gone. We have the same sorry vacuity in the White House, bereft of knowing how to run the government. Just now he is off to Hawaii to loll in the sun, having left behind questions as to how to avoid our "fiscal cliff." Yes, he wants to raise taxes on the top two percent, but how do we reduce the deficit and finish off the tax bill? He has headed for the beach -- and practically no one remarks...

Guest: Author John Koster discusses his book, "Operation Snow - Who instigated the attack on Pearl Harbor?" Interview begins at 11 mins into the broadcast. Link to streaming audioLink to download MP3 audio file

CLICK HERE:YOUTUBE:FDR:A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMYCLICK HERE: History Channel:WWII in HD:Attack on Pearl HarborCLICK HERE:December 7, 2012 AP Today in HistoryCLICK HERE:YouTube:Harry Truman Announces Atom bombCLICK HERE:YouTube:Truman Warns Japs To Give Up Interview With Crew of the Enola Gay CLICK HERE:Interview With Crew of the Enola Gay HiroshimaCLICK HERE:YouTube: Hiroshima DetonationCLICK HERE:YouTube:Hiroshima Detonation NagasakiCLICK HERE:BBC:Nagasaki DetonationClick Here:Hundreds of Fantastic Pictures of Japanese on Board USS Missouri During Surrender Ceremonies

Andrew Napolitano: Why are GOP leaders helping Obama spend us into oblivion? Do you know anyone who voted Republican this past election in order to further President Obama’s big-government agenda? Or is it more likely that Republican voters sought to advance a smaller version of the federal government? And if they did, why are Republican congressional leaders offering to help the president spend us into oblivion? I suspected that those questions might have been asked when Mitt Romney was nominated to oppose Obama. My view of his campaign then and now has been that he presented a choice to the...