Posted on 10/21/2001 11:12:41 AM PDT by LiberalBuster
FDR was the first in line of three presidents who helped to move our nation towards socialism. The second was LBJ who was FDR's point man and protege. LBJ capitalized on what FDR had begun. The Great Society put a deadlocking economic strain our nation that we are STILL trying to fend off. It was Clinton who tried to polish all of the work of FDR and LBJ. If it weren't for our Republican Congress in 1994, we'd be in a whole lot of hurt today.
I find it amazing how many of the children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren of the states below are still what I call FDR demonicrats. They still believe that FDR was the second coming and in some cases the first coming! Their love of socialism and blind loyalty to FDR is truly a sect religion! They would die before voting for a republican!
ROOSVELT (D) % OF THE POPULAR VOTE-- SOUTHERN STATES Alabama 85.22% Arkansas 78.44% Florida 73.99% Georgia 84.81% Kentucky 57.45% Louisiana 85.88% Maryland 58.26% Mississippi 95.70% Missouri 52.27% North Carolina 74.03% South Carolina 95.63% Tennessee 67.25% Virginia 68.08% West Virginia 57.10%
The South has struck me as socially conservative, but economically liberal. That is starting to change more now.
In the late 1800's, there was a split with the Republicans. There were a new branch that were gaining more influence. They were I believe considered "Liberal Republicans". Liberal then meant Lockean Liberal, or is today known Classical Liberal. Largly libertarian. The other branches were the Thaddeus Stevens Radicals, Free-Soilers(out west) and then were the Old Whigs, Temperence, "Know-Nothings", and such from the Northeast Protestants.
The democrats were dominated by the Old South and Catholics(in response to Know Nothings), especially the Irish.
I think that Wilson was the dem that really started to tilt left. Cleveland if I remember right, was very conservative. Coolege was a rarity, a Mass Conservative.
Very true. Either way, it is NOT part of eitherof today's Republican or Democratic parties, is it?
Of course FDR could not have been elected 4 times if not for the Ny Slimes, Washington Compost and the other left wing newspapers who spiked the truth about FDR, destroyed his enemies like Al Smith and republicans! They were very eager for FDR to destroy our constitution on daily basis, and they backed FDR whenever he shredded our constitution!
Then these left wing extremist newspapers spawned the various tv networks. The left wing editors of the Slimes and Compost determined the Sunday morning topics for the screaming heads. There was a token conservative who was paid well to be the schill, and he was attacked by 3-5 left wing screaming heads. By doing this they killed the 10 commandments, made God a bad word as well as organized religion, made the inner cities into crime centers as they unarmed the good people with the scare of the Saturday Night Special, made those who opposed abortion the evil people, made the strident gay life style the icon while hammering the heterosexuals who preferred marriage. Each Sunday, the country was showed to be ugly and vile, and only the diverse perverts where the way to go! The nightly tv left wingers who presided over phoney tv news were hand picked to seduce, calm and to lie to us every night under the guise of news. Again the topics/editorials were determined by those who owned the left wing fish wraps throughout the county. The Slimes and Compost were the big controllers of the left propaganda posing as nightly news!
This went on basically unchallenged except for 8 years of Reagan and the 1994 election of a Republican majority in congress. Without Reagan those conservative Republicans, we might not be here as a country. We would have been a socialist and politically correct second or third world disgrace!
This country ceased to be a constitutional republic many years ago. We remain in a steady state of decline, even under the current administration. Bush's new Homeland Security Agency is merely another nail in the coffin of this once-great Republic.
We remain in a steady state of decline
We were being bled to death until Ronald Reagan became President. He did so much good for this country that Clinton could not finish us off.
Truly. He did great and lasting damage to this country and its founding principles. But the damage was so insidious, that today even Republicans argue not about whether wealth-redistribution programs are unconstitutional, but only that they need to be about 10 percent smaller.
Given current circumstances, we could have done much worse than George W. Bush, but that's the main reason I didn't vote for him, either.
To be nominated as a presidential candidate , Al Smith fits that category...How many others who pride themselves with 'gravitas' or feel so highly qualified as to ascribe or deny that judgement of another....
As for Wilson, you won't hear a lot from him on this forum from southerners because Wilson grew up in Virgina at the end of the civil war. One of his earliest memories was seeing Jefferson Davis being taken away by the union army. Wilson was a proud confederate and really loathed Lincoln most of his life, so the Lincoln-haters on FreeRepublic don't want to admit that one of their own actually passed most of the federal laws they're trying to blame Lincoln for (example: the "income tax" that Lincoln passed was temporary and always designed that way, whereas the income tax Wilson gave us was permanate and specifically designed to stay in place today, which happened)
I would also point out that the socialists in the Democratic Party had control of many local organizations before Wilson brought it to the national level. The Illinois Democrats were undoubtedly socialist-leaning in the 19th century. Our governor in the 1890s was a fellow named John Peter Altgeld . Historians actually rank his as one of the two most liberal governors we've even had, perhaps even worse than Otto Kerner (a Daley-machine canddiate and FDR clone in the 1960s who went to prison for massive corruption). Altgeld was the notorius Chicago judge who controlled a giant labor union movement and sided with the infamous haymarket strikers. He passed so much state "regulations" over business that he was overwhemingly defeated in the next election by a conservative Republican. As you mentioned, President Clevland controlled the national wing of the Democratic party, and despised Altgeld. However, Altgeld had a lot of influence over the party leaders and definitely got the party to nominate more liberal candidates. Clevland wouldn't endorce his own party's nominee (William J. Bryan) to suceed him because the guy was far-left on economic issues. Cleveland endorced the Republican party nominee (McKinley), because he considered him a "sound money man".
Finally, I should point out that the GOP in the 19th century took a while to find it's ideological focus. It really started out as a single-issue party in 1854 who's sole plank was opposition to the spread of the slavery. Thus, every anti-slavery person, REGUARDLESS of the ideology, joined the GOP. Conservatives, Liberals, Libertarians, centrists, and Pat Buchanan style right-wing "populists" (the Know-Nothing who joined the GOP) were all aboard early on. The party ran a very liberal candidate in it's first presidential election (John Fremont), and he worried people because he was consided a "radical". The responce in the next election was to try and find a middle-of-the-road Republican, and the result was Abraham Lincoln (far from the "marxist" paint that the hate-Lincoln crowd tries to paint him as). With the "radical" (liberal) Republcians kicked out of the party during recostruction, I believe conservatives had marginal control over the GOP by 1876 and have held on to it (with a few exceptions) even since then. When the GOP strayed from it's norm in the late 1880s and once again nominated a libearl Republican ('progressive' James G. Blaine), the conservative Republicans abandoned their party and used enough influence to talk the Democrats into selected a conservative that they would vote for (Cleveland). Conservative Republcians were certainly a reconizable force in the 19th century, they were known as "Mugwumps".
So, IMO, this is why we should ignore freepers who scream that the Republicans were the "liberal" party and the Democrats were the "conservative" party only a generation ago. Most of these so-called "historians" are just citing something their yellow-dog Democrat granddaddy told them. The south may have broke with the Democrats in the 60s and 70s because they were socialists, but alot of the nation figured that out long ago. ;-)
P.S. Franklin Roosevelt was the Dem party nominee for VICE President in 1920, so Al Smith's nomination in 1928 was certianly the exception rather than the rule.
Oh yeah, I remember the health-care fiasco.
(side note: I remember how it was going to be "paid for": "Employers" maybe 80 percent, don't remember exactly, and maybe 20 percent by "employees". just like social security is paid for 50 percent each. Of course, anyone with a brain should be able to quicky realize that in each case the "employee" pays for 100%, and the "employer" just mails the IRS a check which is part of the employee's earned compensation.)
You're right in that the Republican congress saved us (certainly with respect to the budget, anyway), but the health-care thing was killed before that, by the Democrats. The reason was that the Clintons were so incompetent that even the Dems coudn't support their plans.
My opinion is that the Clintons tried to expand the FDR-LBJ stuff purely as a means to getting and weilding power, but they found that it wasn't working and switched to the Dick Morris/triangulation srategey, which allowed them to remain in office (and if Clinton had just ignored that one intern, we'd have President Gore now, and I don't like to think about what that would mean.)
Alfred E. Smith, Democratic governor of New York during four terms, became the Democratic candidate for President in 1928 but lost to Herbert Hoover. In 1932 he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for President, but by 1936 he was so shocked and alarmed by what he saw happening that he decided to warn his Party. Because of the popularity of President Roosevelt this step was considered by some to be virtual treason. Nevertheless, on January 25, 1936, Alfred F. Smith gave the following speech in Washington, D.C., to warn the American people that the Democratic Party was being betrayed.Al Smith was rejected because he a "wet"; FDR was swept into office due to the failures of the Hoover administration. Smith couldn't have been in favor of a third and then fourth term (Smith died October 4, 1944) for FDR -- oldtimers who are old enough remember the "No 3rd Term" and "No 4th Term" buttons from 1940 and 1944 know that it was a fairly important issue. Of course, there was "FDR for Life" attitude evident across the country as well. They got their wish.
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