With programs like Lend-Lease, FDR was accused of being pro-British, even when we were formally neutral, and people said that he wanted to join the war on the allied side, when (the same people said), the war was none of our business.
I’m not sure how you are getting from A to B.
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Government spending certainly hasn’t gone down, either in absolute terms or as a percentage of GDP, since FDR’s Depression terms (let’s ignore the massive spending during WWII), but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. from prospering.
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Government “control of the economy” certainly hasn’t lessened since FDR’s time, and indeed has probably increased, but ditto.
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The period under FDR in which the Great Depression deepened and was indeed prolonged was 1937-38, when FDR drastically cut government spending.
You may have a point that FDR’s policies lengthened the Great Depression, but you haven’t made it yet.
Sua
Actually, you have Harry S Truman and Clement Atlee to blame for Russian domination of Eastern Europe. At Yalta the three big powers agreed to let all countries hold democratic elections. What Russia did was run diplomatic circles around Truman and Atlee at postwar conferences.
Regarding your saying that he went back on promises to reduce federal expenditures Presidential Campaigns by Paul Boller explains that while he said that, he also promised more aid to agriculture and federal public works. Essentially, he made contradictory statements in his campaign, and the voters knew that this was the case.
Of course, now we know (through recently relased telegrams, letters, etc.) that FDR didn’t give a damn about the Jews in Europe, didn’t much like Jews, refused to allow Jewish war orphans into the U.S. . . . He certainly didn’t enter the war “for the Jews,” just as Lincoln didn’t (initially) fight the Civil War “for the blacks.”
On a side note, everyone idolizes Eleanor Roosevelt now, but she was far and away the most-hated First Lady of her day—the brickbats thrown at Hillary Clinton are bushels of roses in comparison.
His agricultural policies are another reason to dislike Roosevelt. At a time when many thousands were going hungry his department of agriculture was destroying millions of pounds of food.
Another reason to dislike Roosevelt was his rounding up of Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Truly an ugly episode in American history.
fixed the economy! like hell!
there was one meeting between FDR and John Maynard Keynes. FDR said that Keynes was some kind of theoretical mathematician and Keynes said that FDR was an economic illiterate.
FDR possibly 1/3 heartedly did what Keynes said until WWII. WWII forced the government to do what Keynes had been saying all along. WWII ended the depression and is taken as proof that Keynes was right.
FDR was the first PR president with his fireside chats. he was a great psychological manipulator. when he died in office Truman didn’t know about the atom bomb or what was really going on in the war. what kind of leader doesn’t see that his second in command isn’t up to speed. FDR was a jerk. what do you expect from people that want to be president.
of course there is the conspiracy theory that he knew pearl harbor was coming and used it to motivate americans to get into the war.
considering that algerian terrorists tried to hijack an airliner to do a kamakaze attack on Paris in 1994, it is interesting that the FAA couldn’t reinforce doors to cockpits in 6.5 years. chalk up another conspiracy theory.
Dal Timgar
First, concerning the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpearlharbor.html
Now, as to why people hate FDR. FDR greatly expanded the size of the federal government. For some people, it’s simple dogma that any increases in federal power hurts the economy, so they believe that FDR hurt the economy.
Of course, that viewpoint is rarely backed up with empirical evidence from the Depression period. In the generations prior to the Depression, the American economy went through a fairly predictable cycle of growth followed by recession, where the recession period typically lasted four or five years and featured an unemployment rate of about ten percent, at least in industrial areas. Since the reforms of the New Deal period, the economic cycle has still existed, but the periods of downturn have been shorter and more mild. Like it or not, FDR’s reforms were simple, common sense measures that put the economy back on track. Consider one specific example, the area of banking. At the start of the Great Depression, many Americans had lost their life savings because the banks that they had trusted had placed too much of their money in foolish investments. FDR faced the daunting task of rebuilding the banking system and restoring people’s trust in it. His measures basically included forcing banks that weren’t solvent to shut down, regulating the ones that remained in business to ensure that the disaster wouldn’t repeat itself, and federal insurance of most accounts. Thanks to these reforms, most of the American people were willing to place their money in banks once again because they felt that the accounts were secure. I have yet to hear a good explanation of how this recovery would have occurred without federal intervention.
From the Mises Institute article:
In other words, the author asserts, with no evidence of any sort, that the banking crisis wasn’t real or at least that it wasn’t severe enough to merit any assistance from the government. Well, the truth is that 9000 banks had failed in the opening years of the Great Depression, with millions of people losing their entire savings. FDR did not heighten the public’s sense of crisis. The public already had a sense of crisis, and for a very good reason, too.
The folks who didn’t like FDR’s policies generally liked Coolidge’s and Hoover’s policies and are big proponents of isolationism. They didn’t like FDR because they feel that he got the country into the war, and as that great thinker Marge Schott argues, Hitler didn’t start out so bad.
Coolidge/Hoover economics was boom bust economics. Cycles of great prosperity and great poverty. The New Deal permanently ended the severe depressions that were rountine prior to the New Deal.
Isolationism is great if you are a nation without far flung interests. The United States is a major part of the world’s economy, using a greatly disproporationate amount of resources. Isolationism is not an option. We are now seeing what a year of ignoring the Middle East on an isolationist policy will bring us: a direct conflict between our moral obligations to help Israel and democracy against the injustice of millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps in their own native country and a threat to Western Europe’s energy supply from pissed off Arabs. Just a wee bit of engagement and the good sense not to simply assume one side was completely right and the other completly wrong could have avoided this. But no. Republicans not only have to sell the public on their Slogans for Dummies approach to the world, but they apparently believe it too.
I heard a University of Connecticut professor speak to this. Essentially, he said that FDR did empathize with the Jews but there were two roadblocks to helping them. 1) America wasn’t the most tolerant place in 1940. There was a Representative from Mississippi who totally eviscerated a Jewish colleague on a personal basis, and the Jewish colleague proceeded to collapse and die on the House floor. The Mississippi Rep was hoisted on the shoulders of some fellow congressmen and paraded around after this incident. FDR needed the support of these people for the war (the South, which always accrues a lot of seniority in Congress, doesn’t have a very internationalist tinge to it) and if he had made outright overtures to Jews he might’ve lost the backing of key congressmen. 2) A lot of the anti-Semitic decisions made during the time were not made by FDR, rather, by low-level bureaucrats at the State Department. FDR really didn’t have the time to micromanage, so he had to delegate. Unfortunately, men like Breckenridge Long, a nasty anti-Semitic Southerner made decisions that excluded Jews, and FDR couldn’t spend the political capital to reverse them.
Um… apart from a link to one of Unca Cece’s columns, I’ve seen claims and assertions made in this thread without a single cite to back them up.
C’mon, Hastur, I don’t think we’d want to see the sites that would be cited in support of some of the opinions expressed in this thread.
It intrigues me, however, that almost nobody has addressed what practical politics dictated at the time, or what solutions they would have instituted in FDR’s place.
It’s pretty easy to find clay feet on the giant. It’s much harder to stand as tall as he did.
I would like to see reputable cites which cover substatiated research on FDR which supports the wild assertions made by both the pro and con sides of the debate.
See Robert Dallek’s book on FDR. I think it is actually a series of books. He is sometimes on the more pointy headed news talks shows. He was also one of my professors in college lo these many years ago. This is the scholarly real thing.
Frankly, these are all very complex subjects. The simple accusations set forth in a sentence ignore a world of things going on at the time. Dallek does a tour d force defense of Roosevelt making do with what he had. The defense, however, is book length.
Well I sometimes argue that he used some communist ideas to get us out of the great depression, but that’s for another thread.
Thank you.
I am ordering the books, they look facinating.
You can argue them in this thread. The appropriate response is “So what?”
FDR was a pragmatic tinkerer, not a philosopher. If you argue that the “communist” ideas led to serious degradations of the U.S. economy or personality at that time or subsequently (a view shared by several posters to this thread) then that is a valid, if debatable, point. If you argue that any action that could be perceived as “communist” is in and of itself a blight on his record, we will laugh at you. FDR used tactics that included socialist, capitalist, fascist, communist, and even libertarian ideas. He was quite willing to try anything to keep the ball rolling.
Arguing that his efforts were primarily of one philosophy or another and that leaning too heavily on one or another philosophy was wrong because it produced some specific undesirable result is fine. Claiming that he was evil or earned hatred because some of his ideas came from any given philosophy suggests that only rigorously “pure” proponents of some other philosophy can be seen as virtuous–a notion that is too simplistic by far.
Well, if you insist, here’s a page that covers a lot of the economic changes in America during the 20th century, including a lengthy section on the Depression. It mentions that one quarter of all families had their life savings wiped out by the banking panic.
Don’t have much to offer, just wanted to thank everyone for wealth of thought-provoking ideas and info. It’s okay some of you don’t cite sources, I like to know what people have heard, I can sort it all out later. DPW just sold his former prof’s books to at least 2 of us!!! (By the way,not looking to dis, exactly, but understand how it would seem that way if you dig the guy) I would like to read more about the Japanese American camps (Puddlegum) I’m sure his books will address that, as well as clarify a lot of other issues and give the full picture.
About TOM’s comment that it is overly simplistic to judge someone based on pigeon-holing or labeling their decisions as one philosophy or another. I’m so glad someone finally said that! IMHO, its too bad some of today’s leaders are so locked-in with thinking in only one way, only one KIND of solution…but that’s another issue.
It seems like how involved one thinks the fed gov’t should be impacts greatly on the opinions. It WOULD be intereting to hear what some of his critics would have done in his shoes, as POLYCARP, ITR Champion suggests, but maybe that’s another Thread.
I lived through the great economic depression and all of FDR’s terms of office. I was practically born hating him and all his kinfolk, heirs and assigns. Since then I have learned and thought a lot more about the depression and the 1930’s mores of the USA. It is now my opinion that FDR converted what could easily have been a violent revolution in our system into a relatively peaceful one.
I think it was a revolution, but it was probably high time to finally get rid of the extreme laissez faire philosophy that we inherited from the 1890’s and retained through inertia.
I do think FDR did a few positive things, such as establishing a minimum wage, and other labor laws. Also, those works projects were a positive thing for the times.