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Posted on 12/07/2025 11:41:27 PM PST by CharlesOConnell
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From the perspective of John T. Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth, the 32nd presidential administration under Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not the enlightened, benevolent era of national salvation portrayed by official hagiographers and establishment historians. Instead, it was marked by political opportunism, economic failure, and ultimately, a deliberate march toward war as a means of salvaging Roosevelt’s collapsing domestic credibility.
(Prior to his time in the leadup to the 1933 Presidential campaign as an FDR supporter, Flynn had been a major contributor of hundreds of magazine articles in mainstream, liberal magazined, The New Republic, Harper's, Collier's Weekly and The Nation. Flynn soured on FDR as the 1937 campaign approached. Then after revealing to his wide leadership in 1938 that an FDR insider has let slip, the "The New Deal" was going to solve its political problems by fomenting war against Japan and Germany, Flynn was "canceled".
Flynn’s thesis is unambiguous: the New Deal, despite its monumental expenditures and unprecedented expansion of federal power, failed in its primary goal—ending the Great Depression. By 1937, the unemployment rate was virtually identical to that of 1933, when Roosevelt first took office—hovering near 11 million unemployed. After four years of alphabet-soup agencies, industrial controls, massive public works, and financial interventions, Roosevelt’s economic policy had reached a dead end. The economy teetered into a recession within the Depression itself—the so-called “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937–1938—revealing the hollow nature of the recovery and the fragility of the economic façade the administration had constructed.
Faced with the failure of his domestic policies, and fearing political disaster, Roosevelt turned to an entirely different strategy: war. This pivot, as The Roosevelt Myth suggests, was not accidental, nor reactive. It was premeditated, strategic, and fundamentally deceptive. Roosevelt’s path to war was crafted not in response to national necessity but to serve personal and political interests. He sought to shift the nation’s attention from economic failure to global conflict. And in this, Roosevelt was no rogue actor. His policies aligned seamlessly with the interests of Wall Street and The City of London, whose financial elites had every incentive to dismantle the global power of Germany and Japan and reassert Anglo-American dominance over the world financial and colonial order.
The Roosevelt administration, through embargoes, economic sanctions, covert provocations, and duplicitous diplomacy, deliberately entrapped both Japan and Germany. The goading of Japan through the oil embargo, freezing of assets, and diplomatic stonewalling made war inevitable. The Atlantic provocations against Germany—U.S. destroyers convoying British ships and engaging in undeclared naval warfare months before Pearl Harbor—were calculated to elicit a response that could be used to justify full entry into the war.
Roosevelt, behind the curtain of neutrality, was orchestrating a geopolitical catastrophe to cover a domestic policy failure. He was not leading a nation reluctantly to war, but rather dragging it toward war against its will, under false pretenses.
And what was the cost of this policy? Tens of millions of human lives.
These deaths were not the incidental consequences of an unavoidable conflict. They were the direct outcome of deliberate policies, chosen not for national defense but for political survival. Roosevelt's war policy, therefore, was not a response to aggression, but a conspiracy to manufacture war, sold under the guise of “freedom” and “democracy.”
When we consider these figures in light of the University of Hawaii’s “Democide” research by R.J. Rummel, which documents the death tolls inflicted by governments upon their own and others' populations, the comparison becomes unavoidable:
While Roosevelt may not have pulled the trigger directly, he created the circumstances under which global slaughter occurred. Under any morally serious definition of democide, Roosevelt’s legacy must be evaluated alongside the greatest mass-killers of history. The fact that his actions were cloaked in legality and propaganda does not absolve him. It makes the crime more insidious.
Source for comparative death tolls: University of Hawaii – Murder By Government (Democide)
From Flynn’s view, Roosevelt was not a savior of American democracy but its great manipulator. His domestic policies failed catastrophically. His foreign policies, crafted in secrecy and deception, plunged the world into a war that killed tens of millions. He was a master of mythmaking, not a man of peace or progress. The cult of FDR is not a reflection of historical reality, but the product of elite-driven propaganda designed to whitewash one of the most cynical political calculations in American history.
In sum, Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency should not be remembered as enlightened or noble, but rather as a case study in the use of war as a political weapon, with a death toll that places him among the worst perpetrators of state-sponsored mass killing in modern history.
Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a massive national radio following, was not a Nazi supporter—he was a fierce critic of both communism and international finance capitalism, which he correctly identified as two heads of the same serpent strangling the American Republic. His outspoken opposition to war, his denunciation of the Federal Reserve, and his attacks on the concentration of financial power made him a target of FDR’s administration, which leaned on the Church and the FCC to silence him.
His critique of Roosevelt was rooted in the betrayal of the working class and the abandonment of Christian values. Coughlin saw the drift toward war as a banker’s war, designed to bail out Britain and further the interests of international finance at the expense of American blood.
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Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero who crossed the Atlantic, was vilified by Roosevelt’s backers for his role in leading the America First Committee (AFC). But Lindbergh never praised Hitler or supported Nazi ideology. What he did do was articulate a clear, reasoned opposition to U.S. involvement in another European war—a war he saw, accurately, as being manipulated by British propaganda and pushed by Jewish-owned media and financial institutions.
Lindbergh’s controversial Des Moines speech in September 1941 openly called out the three primary forces he believed were agitating for war: the Roosevelt administration, the British government, and American Jews. While this statement drew fury from the usual suspects, it was not “pro-Nazi”—it was anti-war and anti-deception.
The America First Committee, founded in 1940, was the largest anti-war organization in U.S. history. Its roots were not in Columbia University—as some revisionist narratives suggest—but in Yale University, where a group of students, including future President Gerald Ford and future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, were involved in its founding.
America First grew rapidly, tapping into the deep anti-interventionist sentiment of the American people. At its height, the AFC had over 800,000 dues-paying members, thousands of chapters across the country, and support from prominent figures like Senator Burton K. Wheeler, journalist John T. Flynn, and industrialist Henry Ford. Its rallies drew tens of thousands—800,000 members in 450 chapters is a conservative estimate.
In the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the overwhelming majority of Americans opposed entering the war:
Neither Father Coughlin nor Charles Lindbergh were Nazi sympathizers. They were American nationalists who saw through the Roosevelt administration’s duplicity and sought to protect the republic from another foreign war. The America First movement was massive, organic, and deeply representative of the public will.
The label of “Nazi sympathizer” was nothing more than a weaponized smear—used by an increasingly authoritarian regime and its media allies to silence dissent and manufacture consent for a war that served Wall Street, London financiers, and the Roosevelt agenda, not the American people.
I have a 3rd printing edition of that book right here in my collection
“A Gallup Poll from September 1941—less than three months before Pearl Harbor—showed 80% of Americans opposed declaring war on Germany even if Britain were on the verge of defeat.”
My father was 13 at that time, and that poll is consistent with what he later recounted. He remembered basically everyone he knew believing that FDR was just itching to enter the wor to bail out Britain, and virtually all of the adults with whom he had contact opposing such a move. This was barely 20 years after WW1, and as the Gallup poll indicates, 8 out of 10 Americans really had no interest in another war.
To some extent, this is why the “FDR let Pearl Harbor happen” conspiracy hypothesis resonates with some folks. FDR was indeed dragging a reluctant nation into a war that it didn’t want, and Dec 7 was a total game-changer for shifting public opinion.
Pure 100% USDA Prime Bullshit. Roosevelt did not create a war against innocent Germany and Japan.
He screwed up in huge ways with his progressive ideas and deepened the depression. That is easily explained by incompetence and the quiet communist fellow travelers and theorists in his administration.
He probably saved America from some very bad outcomes despite the other damage he did to our future economically. Duranty was lying in the NYT about abundance in Stalin’s Russia and Hollywood was churning out lots of left wing movies, “Meet John Doe”, “our Daily Bread”, “Grapes of Wrath”, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington”...etc. Woody Guthrie was singing “This land was made for you and me”. It had a verse....
“I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
All around me a voice was a-sounding
This land was made for you and me
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said, “Private Property”
But on the back side, it didn’t say nothing
This land was made for you and me”.
Communism was solidly on the march here and we were at grave risk of following the “example” of the USSR.
On the other hand, the Wall Street Putsch of 1933 was broken up by USMC General Smedley Butler. But it was real. There were admirers of Mussolini all through the wealthy circles and admirers of Hitler as well. Henry Ford was, Lindberg was another. Prescott Bush was another. Father Charles Coughlin was one of those fools.
So there sits Roosevelt, communists on the rise.. and restive fascist advocates on the other hand. He did the best he knew how to bring relief to people in the great depression but his efforts were wrong headed and made the depression deepen.
He introduced some socialism but it was pretty clearly in the idea of keeping the lid on. He wasn’t leading a communist overthrow.
And he sure as hell didn’t gin up WWII against the innocent Germans and Japs. Was was coming no matter who was in the White House. He saw it and we started our build up. That also created a LOT of jobs fast. CCC and WPA disbanded and everyone headed to defense jobs.
He was out of his league economically and surrounded by willful communists. BUT he kept us from going communist OR fascist. And he also saved us from a world where the Nazis crushed Europe and England completely... and Japan won their sphere in the Pacific and we would face the world alone.
Nobody but an ignorant ass lays the total global dead in WWII at FDRs feet.
Lay his incompetence and mistakes bare and do whatever we can to roll back the damage our system his programs caused. But this is fiction.
BTW, the Wall Street Putsch of 33 failed. But they finally started us into their version of centrally planned fascism with a national security state 30 years later when they blew JFKs head off. Many of the same people from ‘33 or close associates were at the periphery of JFK. The Bush family, the Dulles banking and intel contacts.
Falsehoods like this get in the way of honest looks at the damage FDR did, and at the programs he created. With crap like this out there it’s easier for democrats to defend what he did by adding his real crimes in with these imagined ones and then calling the whole thing rubbish.
But it never dies.
Harry Truman was a much better President than Roosevelt.
Yes,
Hitler got to power in 1932, before Roosevelt was even President, and immediately started war buildup.
Japanese invaded China in 1937.
Again, before “sinister Roosevelt trickery”
WWII happened mostly, because there was, after the horrors of WWI, widespread reluctance getting into war.
Nobody wanted to get into the war, so they let German military buildup, and violation of all kind previous peace agreements.
And in December 1941, Germany had already controlled almost all Europe, from British cannel to gates of Moscow.
Millions were already dead, before US fired first shot.
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