The Real Deal (Reconsidering our reverence for FDR)

Wall Street Journal ^ | July 1, 2007 | Amity Shales

[RWR8189]

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so."

Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era--or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take a skeptical look at the New Deal as a whole has been considered downright immoral.

The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal. Rather, the question is why it has taken us all so long. Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: "to put people to work." Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. International factors and monetary errors cannot entirely account for these abysmal showings.

When I went back to study those years for a book, I realized two things. The first was that the picture we received growing up was distorted in a number of important regards. The second was that the old argument about the immorality of scrutinizing the New Deal was counterproductive.

The premier

[Cicero]

I was a little boy when Roosevelt was president, but I heard plenty of muttering about him at the time. People were just a bit careful not to raise their voices, or somebody would respond with the standard put-down: “Shut up. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

But I knew a lot of grown ups who hated Roosevelt, and I grew up thinking that way myself. And later, though not very often, I would come across the suggestion that the world would have emerged from the Depression in 1936 if Roosevelt hadn’t plunged us all back in again.

No, he wasn’t just a leftist, he was surrounded by Communists, and was probably covertly a Communist himself, although probably he never carried a card.

Even the war, considered to be his greatest accomplishment, succeeded in defeating Hitler and Tojo, but also succeeded in setting Stalin up as the conqueror of much of Europe—indeed, for a while it looked like he might get all of it, with the help of Communists in France and Italy.

Roosevelt handed over Eastern Europe to Communism, and he began the process of handing over China to Communism.

And he left the heritage of the Welfare State, that has undermined our freedoms and increased the size of the Underclass ever since.

[Enchante]

"No, he wasn’t just a leftist, he was surrounded by Communists, and was probably covertly a Communist himself, although probably he never carried a card."

Certainly he was incorrigibly soft on communists, and invincibly naive about the real nature of "Uncle Joe" Stalin who Roosevelt persisted in viewing through rose-clouded spectacles to the very end. I don't think Roosevelt ever consciously wanted rule by any communist party, but I do think he was hopelessly ignorant and naive about the implications of Yalta, etc. Roosevelt was the classic liberal machine politician who thought that he could beguile and coopt and manipulate Stalin, never grasping that Stalin had been through an immensely tougher, more ruthless school of "hard knocks" than any NY pol.

[Verginius Rufus]

Didn't Eleanor say that the Communists were just liberals in a hurry?

One thing we should be grateful to FDR for is not dying during his third term--or we would have had his disastrous choice for VP as President (Henry Wallace). All of Western Europe might have wound up in the Soviet orbit.

FDR's percentage of the popular vote in 1944 was only 53%. Two percent higher than Bush got in 2004.

[ex-snook]

"The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism "

My recall says the country was in far more danger from communism than fascism. The veteran march on Washington was for jobs and the promised bonus. They squatted in tents until MacArthur and troops forced them away. 'Hooverville' was hardly an assembly of fascists. Fascism, for it's short reign in the world, gathers a lot more fear than the still present communism.

[jpl]

Personally, I've always felt that the lefties have given FDR more credit for defeating Hitler than he probably deserves. The British and the Russians did a lot more fighting and dying on that front than we Americans did.

Granted we did provide most of the material and equipment to enable the Allies to keep going, but I've never felt that that alone was enough to make him deserving of getting more credit than Churchill and Stalin.

[Verginius Rufus]

There are some indications that in the interval between Yalta and his death, FDR was becoming upset with Stalin over his violation of his promises...but whether he would have taken the course Truman took is debatable. In the early years of the Cold War there was a school of thought that it was all Truman's fault, that if FDR had lived our relationship with Stalin would have been fine. That element supported Henry Wallace in 1948.

That's the measure of the difference between the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and the Democrats of today--in 1948 Wallace got 1 million votes to Truman's 24 million, but the Wallaceites are the overwhelming majority of today's Democrats. Joe Lieberman is a relic of the old Truman type...and he was defeated in his party's primary in 2006.

[FreeKeys]

there has been curiously little argument.

Oh, really?

THE  BEST  of  all  the  SCANDALOUS  BIRTHDAY  PARTY REVELATIONS "... regarding the Great Depression: You're right, we did it."-- what Federal Reserve Board Governor (now Chairman) Ben Bernanke finally said to Nobel Laureate Dr. Milton Friedman, at Milton's 90th birthday celebration, meaning that indeed, the Great Depression WAS caused by, AND prolonged by, THE GOVERNMENT, as Friedman had always said.. [Financial Review, 12-9-2002]  Also see Rethinking the Great Depression HERE, America's Great Depression HERE,The Roosevelt Myth  HERE, Forgotten Lessons HERE, Essays on the Great Depression HERE, and FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell HERE.  Also check out the Burton Folsom speech on the Great Depression HERE and  the audio lecture, The Cause and Consequence of the Great Depression (CD) HERE."Scratch the surface of an endemic problem -- famine, illness, poverty -- and you invariably find a politician at the source."--  Simon Carr, in his review of The Mystery of Capital  by Hernando de Soto

HERE

"There is no need here to attempt to explain FDR's economic reasoning, if such an explanation is even possible. Speaking of the President's acquaintance with economics, biographer John T. Flynn noted that 'it is entirely possible that no one knew less about that subject than Roosevelt.' [from The Roosevelt Myth]  What is important is that these economic fallacies would have terrible consequences. The President's faulty grasp of what had caused the Depression led him to introduce a system whose operation was quite similar to the old guild structure, with the explicit intention of reducing competition." -- Thomas E. Woods, Jr., HERE

[newguy357]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: FDR did more damage to the republic than any other single individual. Read Milton Friedman's Free to Choose to learn a little about that if interested.

[farmer18th]

Who ever HAD reverence for FDR? If he were around at the founding of the republic, he would have been run out of town with a stick.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I don’t think Roosevelt was a communist. He was no atheist and he had too much respect for US traditions and history for a commie. But he was extremely ignorant of the way his path was leading to. I suspect he did not really understand communism and the ultimate development of a system of intrusive government. But that does not mean he was not extremely harmful over the long haul. If no Roosevelt, then no LBJ and the Great Society.

[jamaksin]

Some additions:

Beard, Charles Austin, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941 - A Study in Appearances and Realities, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1948

Barnes, Harry E. (editor), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its Aftemath, Caxton Printers, Caldwell, ID, 1953

George, Crocker N., Roosevelt's Road to Russia, Regnery Books, Chicago, IL, 1959.

[Morgan in Denver]

Thanks for the reminder. I dusted off my copy of Fee to Choose and I will reread it myself. I read it in the 80's but I did not have as much understanding then as I do today.  It should be an enjoyable to read it again with newer perspectives.

 

 

[TopQuark]

I am surprised that the author has missed the most obvious reason for the absence of a critical reevaluation of Roosevelt, namely, that the “thinkers” of the second part of the century actually share Roosevelt’s leftist views and see no contradictions in them.

[MplsSteve]

The final sentence is your post is most telling. It reminds me of a sentence from the book “Backlash”.

It goes like this: “Roosevelt cloaked his guile with a personal charm reputed to be so overpowering that some political foes were said to shrink from private encounters with him lest they succumb to his wiles”.

In that, Stalin was one of the few who was not swayed by Roosevelt’s persona.

[Cicero]

You can make the argument either way. Many of his closest advisers WERE card carrying Communists.

People will never agree about all the details, but here’s one comment I just found on the web, which pretty much sums up what I have read elsewhere:

“When his Chief of Security Berle brought him information from the Communist courier Whittaker Chambers that there were 2 Soviet spy rings at the highest levels of his administration, naming names like Hiss, White and Silvermaster, FDR told him to “go jump in a lake.” The report was suppressed for years. The KGB archives list 221 agents in the most sensitive sections of the Roosevelt administration in April 1941. There were probably a like number of Soviet military GRU agents.”

[Enchante]

Yes, that was a big part of the problem with Yalta, etc. Roosevelt was so accustomed to charming or overpowering almost anyone in his orbit with his personality that he could not grasp that Stalin was quite immune to such personal appeals and would go on acting purely from a combination of self-interest and national interest of the USSR as determined by Stalin. Of course, it is debatable whether the US really had any good cards to play w.r.t. the future of Eastern Europe, since with Soviet troops occupying THEY were going to call all the shots whether we liked it or not. We might have gotten them to make a few more promises, which would probably have been broken just as easily as Stalin snapping his fingers and jailing or executing anyone who got in his way. Nothing short of General George Patton’s WWIII was likely to force the Soviets out of Eastern Europe, but we might have been much better prepared and somewhat more effective in trying to influence some specific events if Roosevent and then Truman (in the latter’s first months in office, he did start to wise up later) had not been so gullible and naive.

[mulligan]

Right on! FDR was a disaster then and since then we have paid for his liberal leanings. And it just gets worse and worse. The man was a socialist and maybe even a communist. Why people hold him is such high esteem is beyond any rational reasoning.

[snowsislander]

Yes, I think President Franklin Roosevelt was our greatest disaster on the domestic side.

In reading some of his executive orders, it's clear to me that he had no respect for our constitution. His bullying of the judiciary also was indicative of his contempt for our system, with his threats to pack the Supreme Court unless it did his bidding.

[TopQuark]

Why people hold him is such high esteem is beyond any rational reasoning.

Why so? Most people in this country are pro-big government. Witness the numerous posters on this forum that rave against free markets at every turn and urge Bush to do something about high gas prices and jobs outsourcing, for instance. That's on a conservative forum, mind you. Also, how many republicans spoke up in the six years preceding their defeat in Congress against the ballooning size of government. Not one, to the best of my knowledge. Conservatives want the preservation of cultural norms and religion, perhaps, but not free markets. The anti-corporate feeling is as high as it's ever been. Why would people who actually celebrate Roosevelt's views hold him in less than high esteem?