Free Republic

As the only president elected to four terms and who saw the country through two of its greatest cataclysms — the Great Depression and World War II — biographies of Franklin Roosevelt were certain to treat him as a magnificent figure of enduring accomplishment. In many respects he deserves this exalted regard: He transformed American government in fundamental ways, led the nation in the Second World War, created the building blocks for the postwar world order and left behind the durable New Deal Democratic Party coalition that dominated American politics for most of the next half-century, ending more than 70...

There was a kerfuffle a couple weeks ago involving criticism of Winston Churchill as a leader. I find it strange the way that conservative Americans treat Churchill as if he were one of the greatest American leaders, as the third in the sequence after Washington and Lincoln. I’m not the only person who’s noticed this. The academic Tanner Greer said, “The boomercon historical pantheon of heroes is something like this: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln. Your pick among Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.” Without taking anything away from Churchill, this is...

For those who lived through the Great Depression, the strangeness of it was hard to convey. The nation had suffered no great natural disaster. The farmers were still farming, and the factories were still standing. Yet there lay rotting food that people couldn’t afford to buy and empty factories next to shanty towns filled with the unemployed. In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise to restore prosperity. But he and his advisers had no clear explanation for the collapse and his subsequent New Deal would amount to a series of experiments. FDR admitted to the nation...

Reshaping the economy in Imperial China.For 4,000 years, from 2070 BC to 1911 AD, one imperial family after another ruled China. The longest period in which a single family exercised power was 790 years, while the average tenure was 228 years. Most Westerners are familiar with the Tudors, Stuarts, and Windsors of England, or the Romanovs of Russia, but few are aware of the names of Chinese dynasties such as the Zhou, Han, or Ming, let alone the notable figures associated with them.In this essay, I acquaint the reader with a man named Wang Anshi 王安石. He lived from 1021...

On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 — and landed Mr. Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.” But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Mr. Carter, the one-term Democratic president who died Sunday at 100, would be forced to listen rather helplessly as Republicans mostly called the...

Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has...

It is often forgotten, but Hoover was a political philosopher. He first outlined his political philosophy in 1922 in "American Individualism." In 1934, in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hoover wrote "The Challenge to Liberty."Both "American Individualism" and "The Challenge to Liberty" were a defense of what Hoover called the “American System,” or constitutionalism. In "American Individualism," Hoover hailed the principle of equality of opportunity or the “fair chance of Abraham Lincoln,” which reflected his own life story. Hoover argued that it was the American system of liberty that allowed an individual to advance. Orphaned at an...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was perhaps the most important president, if not world leader during the 20th century due to the U.S. involvement WW II, but his legacy started long before that conflict, and his decisions helped shape the post war world. Hosted by Colin D. Heaton. Forgotten History is a 10th Legion Pictures Production.

One of those men was Henry Marshall, whose death—he was shot five separate times in the chest with a rifle—was ruled “a suicide.”.. June 3, 1961, Henry Marshall was found dead on his farm near Bryan in Robertson County, Texas. He had been shot five times with his own rifle. Marshall, 51, had worked as a clerk with the Robertson County office of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA), holding a senior post in the agency. In 1960, he was asked to investigate the activities of Billie Sol Estes, a wealthy benefactor of Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he found to have...

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself these questions — or this one: How can history be written as a newspaper headline? Call this a biography by indirection. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defined by competing individuals and movements: Huey Long, Father Coughlan, Al Smith, the Liberty League, Earl Browder and the Communist Party, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend Plan, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. They threatened FDR’s majority in...

Like many people my age (62), I was taught both at home and in school that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president. FDR, I was taught, saved American democracy in the 1930s with the New Deal and led the nation to victory against Hitlerism in the 1940s. That view of FDR was reinforced by many television documentaries and history books. And virtually every poll of historians — including the most recent C-Span poll — places FDR in the top five of all U.S. presidents (usually in third place behind Lincoln and Washington). This is so despite persuasive revisionist historical...

Despite a population that is now more prosperous and more educated by several orders of magnitude, we clearly have become more lazy.To celebrate another $1,400 in stimulus checks, a quickly withdrawn video from Wisconsin Democrats showed people dancing to a catchy rap song with captions of “$$$ IN THE POCKET” and “THANK YOU POTU$.” As Joy Pullmann noted, its release on the same day abysmal job numbers came out was a testament to Democrats’ blindness to economic reality. It also attested to our culture’s devolving expectation of something for nothing.America has definitely changed. Juxtapose that video with images from the...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been mocked for claiming that climate change is a product of racial injustice, as she relaunched her controversial Green New Deal. The New York congresswoman on Tuesday spoke in front of the Capitol to promote her plan, which set a series of ambitious targets such as eliminating U.S. greenhouse gas emissions within a decade and transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels. Ocasio-Cortez said that climate change must be viewed through the lens of race.

CNN host Fareed Zakaria hijacked former President Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” and slapped it on President Joe Biden’s gargantuan federal spending. Zakaria fawned in a new op-ed headlined, “How Biden’s New Deal can really make America great again.” He went on to pretend that “Trump claimed he wanted to ‘Make America Great Again,’ President Biden is attempting to actually do it.” Zakaria must have missed economist and The Lindsey Group CEO Lawrence Lindsey’s October 2020 op-ed headlined, “The Trump Boom Is Real.” But according to Zakaria, “Biden’s infrastructure plan is the first major fiscal program in five...

Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) said Thursday that he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will soon unveil a coronavirus relief package that he described as “Rooseveltian” in its scope and size. “We need big, bold action," Schumer said in an MSNBC interview with Stephanie Ruhle, adding that he and Pelosi "are working very closely together on putting together a very strong plan, which you will hear shortly.” “We need Franklin Rooseveltian-type action and we hope to take that in the House and Senate in a very big and bold way,” he added. Schumer's remarks came in response to Senate...

Source: AP Photo/Craig Ruttle The great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard elucidated, “Before the massive government interventions of the 1930s, all recessions were short-lived.”[1] The deceptive narrative of collectivists about the “Roaring Twenties” and the New Deal goes like this: Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation. Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words...

A Depression-era mural depicting white children playing outside in the winter was removed from Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park because school officials said it failed to represent the school’s diversity. While some said the mural was upsetting to students of color who felt it excluded them from the school, a local historian likened the removal to a “modern-day book burning.” Cynthia Brito Millan, a coordinator for the middle school’s Social Justice Club, said the push to remove the mural began in February at a district school board meeting. Students expressed frustration about an atmosphere of exclusion for students...

The 1930s fresco mural by Ann Rice O’Hanlon was painted as part of the federal Public Works of Art Project. It shows Lexington’s history from its settlement in a series of scenes. In one, black men and women are planting tobacco, and in another, a Native American man holds a tomahawk. Various efforts to remove the mural have been made since at least 2006. In 2015, in response to a meeting with a group of black students, Capilouto ordered the mural to be shrouded. Then after meeting for a year, a UK task force said the mural should be uncovered,...

I laughed out loud when I came across this one. Stuart Chase, the man who coined the term "New Deal" and was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, bemoaned the "destruction of goods" in his book titled "The Challenge of Waste". Here is the full paragraph: (page 22-23) DESTRUCTION OF GOODSEven when the industrial plant is running, we find that enormous quantities of the output never reach the consumer at all by reason of defects in the distribution and market mechanism. In a period of so-called "over-production," we see night riders burning tobacco and cotton, corn used as fuel, milk dumped...

Both fans and foes of the so-called Green New Deal (GND) agree that it is a wildly ambitious set of proposals, which—by design—will involve the federal government spending boatloads of money. In fact, the GND is so expensive that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has cited the inflationary doctrine of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to deflect the issue; we don’t need to worry about the cost of the Green New Deal, so the argument goes, because the Federal Reserve can create an unlimited number of dollars. Even so, more sober-minded policymakers, as well as the general public, should be aware of just how ludicrously expensive the GND really is. A...