I never heard about a few of the remarks made in this article. I always thought Joseph Lash was just a good friend of Eleanor's and still do. As for Lorena Hickok, I still don't believe the rumors. I thinks Eleanor was naïve about a lot, and befriended many people. She had a good heart, and meant well.
Franklin was in over his head, and was swayed by the wrong people with the wrong policies. He had a wave of supporters similar to those that Obama had early on when they believed that these men were the answer to all of their problems. My opinion.
Ken Burns has a way of softening the reality, but I am enjoying the program anyway.
I think FDR was a Democrat because his father was a staunch Democrat.
You may be onto something, there, though not the way you put it. We must drop forever this notion of FDR as traitor to his class, or the New Deal being revenge against “the malefactors of greet wealth” and “economic royalists.” FDR’s people were political capitalists. There’s no war between the rich and the socialists. Rich kids are socialists more often than not, probably, at least in “late capitalism,” as they call it.
There were a few gangs controlling things since the parties disallowed any truly anti-Washington policies, except in rogue members, along them Morgan boys and Rockefeller boys. FDR represented gangs outside this mainstream, but not wide-eyed hippies, or anything, just alternative Big Business. Republicans ruled from the Civil War to Wilson, and the decade after Wilson, and appeared to have run things into the ground. But there hadn’t been an anti-Washington party since the 1890s, and the Democrats of ‘32 certainly didn’t fit that bill, despite talk of balancing the budget, repealing prohibition, etc. They were merely another capitalist gang, come to run things their way.
The New Deal amounted to, for lack of a less abused term, fascism. And as communists never tire of reminding us, fascism and Big Business are friends. Wall Street funded the Bolsheviks as well as Hitler, of course, and the only real difference is that the Reds bit back faster on account of their greater insanity. Anyway, the point is the New Deal being an attack on free enterprise and the Republican party in no way makes it an attack on “the rich.” It was the rich, abetted by their egghead airforce and flotillas of the unwashed, attacking the rich. New Dealism was as Big Businessy as the Progressive Movement.