There is more than one historian who will back me on this..
There is no doubt that he ruled with an iron fist. Many things about his presidency are now coming to light.
The Press protected him like they did Kennedy..and tried to do for Clinton and Gore.
With TV [FOX news in particular,] really good Republican investigative reporting, and even the internet..it is getting more difficult to hide Washington dirt.
Did you realize most people didn't know FDR used a wheel chair?
nscds.pvt.k12.il.us
A Clear-eyed Look at the Aftermath of Roosevelt's New Deal
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Although Franklin D. Roosevelt remains the most revered and influential president of the 20th century, 50 years after his death, an avalanche of new books continues to refocus and refine our image of the man and his times.
Contemporary political realities encourage this process. We've seen the great Democratic coalition FDR assembled, once a smooth-running electoral juggernaut, suddenly wheeze, rattle and fall apart like a clown car at the circus. The New Deal approach to government - big programs, big rhetoric, strong Washington control - is over, too. It is increasingly seen in important intellectual circles today as a root cause for many of our current problems rather than a way to resolve them.
This latter perception is at odds with much of the hagiographic Roosevelt scholarship that still prevails. Until very recently, historians who declined to accept Roosevelt and the New Deal as emblematic of all that is best in American public life ran the risk of ridicule. They were seen as crass and slightly comic, like the suburban businessmen in New Yorker cartoons.
But here and there, even on the most prestigious and conventional campuses, revisionist Roosevelt scholars have toiled on. One of the best of them, William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been producing interesting and offbeat analyses of Roosevelt for more than 30 years.
In "The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy," Mr. Leuchtenburg brings together nine splendid essays, ranging from broad-brush assessments of what was clearly the first modern presidency to microscopic - and fascinating - examinations of lesser-known events and the policy responses that were made to them.
This is neither a work of ideology nor an assault on Roosevelt's reputation. Mr. Leuchtenburg's tone is one of informed admiration and respect. But he never loses sight of the fact that actions do have consequences and, rather like a determined beagle following a cold trail, traces the connections between events in our time and policy decisions in Franklin Roosevelt's.
Sometimes he does this in amusing ways. For example, in developing the point made by some of Richard Nixon's aides that the roots of the Watergate scandal extended back to the Roosevelt administration, he cites a speech by liberal former Sen. Alan Cranston, California Democrat.
"Those who tried to warn us back at the beginnings of the New Deal of the dangers of one-man rule that lay ahead on the path we were taking toward strong, centralized government may not have been so wrong," Mr. Cranston said in 1973. This old Republican refrain, not surprisingly, wasn't echoed by many members of Mr. Cranston's party, nor did it receive much attention in the press at the time.
Nixon was not the first president to cut corners. Even before Pearl Harbor, Mr. Leuchtenburg notes, Roosevelt, with no statutory authority, had used troops to end a strike, sent U.S. forces to occupy Iceland and Greenland, provided convoys of vessels to carry arms to Britain and ordered destroyers to attack German U-boats on sight.
When war came, of course, it invited a further expansion of presidential authority. When opportunity knocked, FDR was ready and didn't wait to see if it would knock twice. He, and even more so many of the intellectuals he had brought to Washington, remembered only too well the lessons of World War I.
It is conventional historical wisdom that the New Deal was the product of political movements, primarily progressivism and populism. But in one of his essays - "The New Deal and the Analogue of War," itself worth the price of the book - Mr. Leuchtenburg finds another connection, this one to Woodrow Wilson's great mobilization of 1917 and 1918.
For what the intellectuals regarded as all too brief a moment, World War I had "occasioned the abandonment of laissez-faire precepts and raised the federal government to director, even dictator, of the economy. " Powerful government agencies - to be replicated 15 years later - were set up to deal with the emergency.
Progressive John Dewey saw "the social possibilities of war" and rejoiced, perceptively, that "the old conception of the absoluteness of private property has received the world over a blow from which it will never wholly recover."
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Murchison, William, A clear-eyed look at the aftermath of Roosevelt's New Deal., The Washington Times, 11-27-1995, pp 23. |
