Unfortunately generations thought FDR was just short of God Himself. I don’t know how often I tried to make the point that everything he did deepened the depression. They wouldn’t listen.
I remember back in Junior High being astounded that my dad (WW II vet) hated FDR. And Kennedy too (But dad! The one ended the war and the other one was assassinated!!)
I don’t really recall him educating me on them. Perhaps he did, but just a little. (Not like my wife and I that got probably too into history and politics with our kids at a young age).
It wasn’t until after college that I realized how terrible FDR was.
The following is a link to an old FR article. It has a very long read of an old booklet written in 1939 called “The Revolution Was” and goes into detail about FDR and his failed policies. Well, failed America, but furthered FDR’s revolution.
The similarities with FDR and Obama is striking, and so to with Biden. Some of the Obama speeches are pulled right from the old FDR speeches.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929392/posts
An excerpt from that link “The Revolution Was” about the New Deal in my earlier post. Amazing how it still pertains today with Obama and Biden:
“Each one of these problems would have two sides, one the obverse and one the reverse, like a coin. One side only would represent the revolutionary intention. The other side in each case would represent Recovery and that was the side the New Deal constantly held up to view.
Nearly everything it did was in the name of Recovery. But in no case was it true that for the ends of economic recovery alone one solution or one course and one only was feasible. In each case there was an alternative and therefore a choice to make.
What we shall see is that in every case the choice was one that could not fail:
(a) To ramify the authority and power of executive government its power, that is, to rule by decrees and rules and regulations of its own making;
(b) To strengthen its hold upon the economic life of the nation;
(c) To extend its power aver the individual;
(d) To degrade the parliamentary principle;
(e) To impair the great American tradition of an independent, Constitutional judicial power;
(f) To weaken all other powers the power of private enterprise, the power of private finance, the power of state and local government;
(g) To exalt the leader principle.
There was endless controversy as to whether the acts of the New Deal did actually move recovery or retard it, and nothing final could ever come of that bitter debate because it is forever impossible to prove what might have happened in place of what did. But a positive result is obtained if you ask:
Where was the New Deal going?
The answer to that question is too obvious to be debated. Every choice it made, whether it was one that moved recovery or not, was a choice unerringly true to the essential design of totalitarian government, never of course called by that name either here or anywhere else.”