Free Republic

During World War I, the thousands to American soldiers heading to France and Belgium were given pocket Bibles with the forward written by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917: “The Bible is the Word of Life. I beg that you will read it and find this out for yourselves, -read, not little snatches here and there, but long passages that will really be the road to the heart of it. You will find it full of real men and women not only, but also of the things you have wondered about and been troubled about all your life, as men have...

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907. 'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else...

Outreach to the Shinto CommunityHow did President Bush’s response to 9-11 in 2001 compare with the words and actions of President Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier? As it happens, the reactions of the two presidents were surprisingly similar within their contemporaneous context. Vlad Tepes has ferreted out some rare footage from old newsreel archives that shows the longer version of FDR’s address to Congress on the day after the surprise attack by Japan. The first part of the president’s speech will be familiar to most readers, but the rest of his address is not as well known:...

JERUSALEM — Muslim militants, evoking a jihadist pretext and backed by rogue states, are attacking vital Western interests. The president of the United States fails to convince Europe to join a coalition to confront the aggressors. No, this is not President Bush versus Saddam Hussein, but Thomas Jefferson versus the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who were plundering Western ships and enslaving their crews. When Jefferson proposed creating a multilateral force to stop the pirates, Europe went on bribing them. "This is money thrown away," Jefferson concluded, before ordering the Navy into action. On Aug. 1, 1801, the first American...

Theodore Roosevelt's Long Island mansion is set to reopen to the public following a $10million restoration. Sagamore Hill, known as the 26th president's 'Summer White House,' underwent a four-year restoration by the National Park Service. The Lincoln, Jefferson and Grant portraits have been cleaned and the massive elk, moose and buffalo heads are back on the wall following the extensive works.

The Pentagon says the American warship USS Theodore Roosevelt is "repositioning" as part of a security operation at sea, and not to intercept Iranian vessels off the coast of Yemen. Citing unnamed officials, the Associated Press reported earlier in the day that the aircraft carrier would join other U.S. ships in the area to confront Iranian vessels, which are said to be carrying weapons to resupply Houthi rebels that have overrun parts of the country. But Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren dismissed the report, saying the Roosevelt is ”repositioning to conduct maritime security operations."

Radio links follow.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. The life of toil and effort, of labor gold strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little...

FDR, the man who studied Mussolini, who birthed the current intrusive state, who started the drug war in earnest, who put Japanese Americans into concentration camps, who extended the Depression years longer than it needed to be and thereby contributed to the genesis of the Second World War, who tried to pack the Supreme Court, who gave away half of Europe to the Soviets at Yalta, and who confiscated the gold – the real wealth – of the American people. What a guy. And he still has his face on the dime. There is a reason why my grandmother, a...

The major thrust of the books on West’s list — namely that Roosevelt’s cabinet and much of the federal bureaucracy was filled with Communists, fellow travelers, dupes and “useful idiots,” and that at the very least this influenced an FDR agenda that proved heavily favorable towards “Uncle Joe” Stalin and the Soviet Union, enabling its expansion and increasing its sphere of influence well beyond its borders — leads to a total paradigm shift when thinking about the World War II era. It bears noting that in “American Betrayal,” West herself seeks to draw a parallel between the modern-day whitewashing of...

My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him. That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’? Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts — for those who weren’t bored to tears — repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t...

Ken Burns is at it again. The Left’s favorite propagandist has put together a 7 part series on the two Roosevelt presidents. Leaving aside what he is likely to show about Teddy Roosevelt, without seeing a minute of this presentation I’ll go out on a short strong limb and guess what will not be shown about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even a very superficial study of FDR shows he was a consummate phony. He preached “There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” but everything he did was presented as a fearful crisis that could only be handled by giving him...

The film-maker's 14-hour marathon has a psychological subtlety and depth unprecedented on television. ... It's Ken Burns's documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, a masterpiece even by his standards. The Civil War (1990) was hailed as the best series of its kind since The World at War. In a way, it was even more impressive since the absence of moving images meant that Burns had to rely entirely on photographs – an inventive necessity that has become one of his trademarks.

Ron French has a great article in Bridge Magazine looking at "the crazy economics of Michigan's favorite pitted fruit." The piece describes some of the federal cherry regulations that are mostly left over from the New Deal of the 1930s: [T]he tart cherry industry is told by the U.S. government how much of their product they can put on the market. The Cherry Industry Administrative Board (CIAB), operating under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), sets restrictions on the percentage of the tart cherry crop that can be sold. Some years the share of the market restricted from...

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Most of us are familiar with the bromide “Real life is more like high school than college.” This proverb is widely accepted, for the simple reason that it is—as the Brits would say—bang on. Supposedly childish high school elements such as cliques, gossip, outward displays of wealth and status, risky behavior, base envy, pettiness, and romanticization of criminal elements are all found to play dominant roles in real life. Consider the unlikely career of one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who after a shockingly inept tenure as Secretary of State considers herself worthy to be president. Objectively, Hillary has accomplished these few...

Stalin's Secret Agents — The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government was written by two experienced authors and recognized authorities on the Cold War, M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein. Evans is a veteran journalist and former broadcaster, as well as the author of Blacklisted by History (2009), a biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and other momentous books

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.

You may have seen the news by now that John Kerry said the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over. Problem is, if you read what he said he isn't substantively talking about the Monroe Doctrine. He's talking about the Roosevelt Corollary. John Kerry(a progressive) is rejecting his own history! Theodore Roosevelt is one of John Kerry's own founding fathers, being the first President of the Progressive era. So what exactly did John Kerry say? Among other things: The relationship that we seek and that we have worked hard to foster is not about a United States declaration about how...

Watch this short report on the brutal way American Army troops were successfully ordered to turn on fellow veterans of World War I, by MacArthur Eisenhower and Patton. Do we have any military leaders who even approach these guys? If THEY did this can the current crop of military heroes resist an Obama order to turn their guns on fellow Americans?