Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Police handcuffed dozens of protesters in cities around the country on Thursday as they blocked traffic in the latest attempt to escalate their efforts to get McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food companies to pay their employees at least $15 an hour. The protests, which were planned by labor organizers for about 150 cities nationwide throughout Thursday, are part of a campaign called "Fight for $15."

On this day in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act. Press photographers snapped pictures as FDR, flanked by ranking members of Congress, signed into law the historic act, which guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees. FDR commended Congress for what he considered to be a "patriotic" act. Roosevelt had taken the helm of the country in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, the nation's worst economic crisis. The Social Security Act (SSA) was in keeping with his other "New Deal" programs, including the establishment of the Works Progress Administration and...

Would Franklin Roosevelt approve of Social Security? The question seems absurd. After all, Social Security is considered the New Deal’s signature achievement. It distributes nearly $800 billion a year to 56 million retirees, survivors and disabled beneficiaries. On average, retired workers and spouses receive $1,839 a month — money vital to the well-being of millions. Roosevelt would surely be proud of this, and yet he might also have reservations. Social Security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed. It has become what was then called “the dole” and is now known as “welfare.” This forgotten history clarifies...

This week Major Theodore Van Kirk, the last surviving Veteran of the Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, joined the rest of his comrades. His passing is a reminder of why using the atomic bomb was the right thing. In August 1945 the Allied Powers, led by the United States, were at war with Imperial Japan in the latter days of World War II. Japan would not give up. For every ten thousand Japanese soldiers that were killed by the Allies only a minuscule amount gave up; usually in the single digits. We were at...

Virtue: A habitual and firm disposition to do the good. Cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Traditional male virtues are strength, courage, independence, heroism in combat, and sexual initiative. For many years, Jesus has been portrayed as a Galilean flower child, walking around the countryside being nice, preaching love and peace, and having a thing for Mary Magdalene. Somehow, this easygoing hippie runs afoul of the corrupt power structure, and ends up dying with career criminals, under horrible circumstances. Of course, even a casual reading of the Gospels reveals something far different. If anything, Jesus is a confrontational,...

Amity Shlaes does not believe in playing it safe. In 2007 she issued the original edition of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which dared to badly dent the established shibboleths regarding America’s Great Depression and how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal did—or did not—dealt with it. In 2013, she departed the beaten path still more provocatively, resuscitating the reputation of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge defied all odds and joined The Forgotten Man in achieving best-seller status. Having placed such high-stakes bets and won, she doubled back—and doubled-down—to collaborate on a “graphic” version of The...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Divers from the U.S. Navy will visit the World War II graveyard of the "Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast” — the sunken USS Houston — later this month in a bid to determine what remains of the ship, which went down with more than 700 sailors off the coast of Indonesia. The wreck of the Northampton-class heavy cruiser, which was sunk by the Japanese during the World War II battle of Sunda Strait on Feb. 28, 1942, will be surveyed by Navy divers working with their counterparts from Indonesia. The ship lies about 125 feet deep, near Java, Indonesia,...

Last month, 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon told the remarkable story of Sir Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker in London who saved 669 Czech children-- most of them Jewish--from the Nazis during WWII. England took in almost all of the 669 children. Winton, now 104 years old, told 60 Minutes he had made a desperate plea for help to the United States back in 1939. He said he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, describing the plight of the Czech children and asking that America grant refuge to a number of them. "But the Americans wouldn´t take any,

The recent unpleasantness in eastern Ukraine recalls a nagging truth: Wars always bring unintended consequences, and Americans have seen plenty of them, firsthand. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson won reelection on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out Of War!” But Wilson wanted war, and, five months later, he got it. In October 1940, late in the presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt promised “again and again and again” that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” But Roosevelt wanted war, and fourteen months later, he got it. The results were as grim as they were unintended. Over a...

Here’s your history lesson of the day, and it’s a duzy. Do you all remember the department store chain Montgomery Ward? It was in the same class as JC Penney and Sears, and like Penney’s and Sears had a robust catalog business in the 20th century. The catalog ended in 1985 and the stores closed in 2000. The incident we are going to talk about happened during World War 2, in 1944. When I read this it initially put my jaw on the floor, but when I thought about it for a moment, I realized that it put all...

This isn’t really new, but some of the most interesting material comes from Rafael Medoff’s demonstration of how the material was buried and misreported by historians sympathetic to liberal presidents. When FDR endorsed quotas for Jews in the US and even North Africa, liberal historians claimed that he was being “practical” or actually trying to help Jews. And then there’s the story of the efforts to bury and lie about FDR’s exchange with Stalin about the Jews.

In a recent speech in Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some interesting predictions about two of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions: Kelo v. City of New London, which ruled that government can condemn private property and give it to other private owners to promote “economic development,” and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. On Kelo, Scalia reiterated his 2011 prediction that the decision will eventually be overruled, stating that it “will not survive.” Kelo was a closely divided 5-4 decision (Scalia voted with the...

In the summer of 1965 Marine Corps Boot camp training included the boast “If it weren’t for the Marine Corps you’d be speaking Japanese.” It was true then and it is still true today. Sixty nine years ago waves and waves of eighteen and nineteen year old Marines, waded ashore on Iwo Jima to defeat the Japanese and help win the war in the Pacific on American terms. They fought to keep us from being the slaves of the Japanese and being forced to end up “speaking Japanese.” By mid- February 1945 Franklin Roosevelt knew Americans were running out of...

Webster’s defines a dupe as “one who is easily deceived.” But a misperception prevails among most people. They think of dupes as ignorant people only. On the contrary, there are large amounts of intelligent dupes in all societies. Brains are no protection against dupery. In fact, I would classify dupery as one of the deadly sins that curse all men and women no matter what level of class and smarts they possess. Dictatorships depend upon dupery to perpetuate themselves – especially dupery among the intelligentsia. There are, in this writer’s opinion, three forms of dupery afflicting the human race, or...

Those of us who track academic bias have long been plagued by a nagging question: when did it start? From the recently published memoirs of one-term president Herbert Hoover, we learn that it’s at least as old as Clint Eastwood. “One day at Stanford, after I left the White House, I asked Professor Roninson, Dean of the History Department, to send me a list of books of required reading by all students in a course on ‘Citizenship,’” Hoover wrote. “I found about one hundred books listed, of which some thirty were objective descriptives of the machinery of our civil government...

The FDR bible used by Mayor Bill de Blasio for his swearing in vanished after the New Year’s Day ceremony, sparking a panicked, hours-long search for the historic tome. “They had the whole detail looking through blankets,’’ a police source said of the scramble by at least 50 NYPD detectives and city officials to find the Bible, which was given to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a gift at his first inauguration in March 1933. Former President Bill Clinton performed the ceremony Wednesday as de Blasio laid his hand on the bible.

The First Lady, who was born on October 11, 1884, became a subject of controversy when people suspected she was romantically involved with journalist Lorena “Hick” Hickok. While the two never publicly addressed their relationship, their letters did nothing to dispel rumors. 1. March 5, 1933: Eleanor to Hick, on the first evening after FDR’s inauguration Hick my dearest— I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without...

On Sunday, a stunned audience sat in silence as Doris Kearns Goodwin turned the keynote address at the opening ceremony for the 150th anniverary of the Battle of Gettysburg into a political lecture focusing on women's and gay rights. Missing from much of her keynote: Gettysburg. Self-centered, insular, and oblivious to the occasion, the historian who was infamously caught plagiarizing merely recycled much of what she has said before about herself in previous speeches. And her rambling, self-promoting, and borderline inappropriate lecture touched upon nearly everything except for the heroic sacrifices made on that battlefield. In so doing, she desecrated...

It’s difficult to imagine that he was surprised by the outcome. But the White House response that ensued after Author and Journalist Bob Woodward dared to question and criticize the President should be an eye-opener to the world. And the fact that America’s beltway media culture has essentially “sided” with the President and seems quite comfortable with the White House hostility is a very telling sign. Consider the relationship between the presidency and the press over the course of American history. Believe it or not, the White House has been home to lots of outlandish and at times illegal...