Free Republic

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...

The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.... [....] The constitutional separation of powers is a means to safeguard the liberty of the people. In Madison’s famous words, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The destruction of this principle of separation of powers is perhaps the crowning jewel of the modern administrative revolution. Administrative agencies routinely...

All three can be good or bad depending on how much, how and for what used. That a little bit might be good does not mean that a lot more will be better.RadiationMany years ago, in the mid to late 1940's and early 1950's when I was a young boy, shoe stores had X-ray machines permitting one to view images of the bones in one's feet. Health hazards were recognized but generally ignored. Although most of the dose was directed at the feet, a substantial amount would scatter or leak in all directions. Shielding materials were sometimes displaced to improve image quality, to make the machine...

Here's my response to Commander Zer0's verbal assault on reason that took place last night. I realize that our Dear Leader's plans to provide al-Qaeda air cover may not materialize, but keep this in mind: We have a failing dictator who's willing to start world War III to distract the country from his varied scandals and Zimbabwe-like economy. Anything is still possible with this pile of human debris in the White House. Without further ado: *** For the last couple of days, we've been exposed to an endless stream of war propaganda in support of Chairman Obama's Syrian adventure. Without...

By the end of the 1930s the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt had lost a great deal of its luster. While the New Deal undeniably brought tangible benefits to millions of Americans, it had not delivered on its promise of economic recovery. Ten years after the Great Crash of 1929, nearly one worker in five was unemployed, despite the administration having racked up a series of budget deficits that were unprecedented in peacetime. Moreover, the president himself was caught in a dilemma — there was no up-and-coming Democrat whom he believed to be a worthy successor to the Oval Office....

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...