Neglect of FDR in wake of "conservative revolution" is an "injustice"; new bio recalls his greatness

[DeepModem Mom]

WP book review: A careful scholar explores the life of an aristocratic man of the people.
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, May 27, 2007; Page BW15

FDR
By Jean Edward Smith



....of Roosevelt's greatness there can be no question. Twentieth-century America was blessed with greatness in many quarters, but none stood taller than Roosevelt, though of course for the last two decades of his life he could stand only with the aid of braces and crutches. He was a giant, immense in his flaws as well as his gifts, but a giant all the same. He led the nation out of the Depression that could well have destroyed it, and then he led it to total victory in the most terrible war the world has known. He gave hope to millions who had lost it, and he changed forever the relationship between the citizens of the United States and their government.

For a quarter-century or more, that new relationship has come under challenge, primarily because of the conservative revolution engendered by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and in the process Roosevelt has retreated somewhat into the shadows. Though the fruits of his legacy certainly warrant reconsideration, the relative neglect into which he has fallen is an injustice....At the outset Smith establishes one of his central themes: "The riddle for a biographer is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man. The answer most frequently suggested is that the misfortune of polio changed Roosevelt," but though this is "undoubtedly true," it "does not go far enough." Roosevelt was deeply touched by the poverty he saw in Georgia while treating his polio at Warm Springs, and some who knew him believed that his aborted love affair with Lucy Mercer had an "equally profound effect" by deepening his emotional response to other people. Smith believes, though, that Roosevelt simply "was too talented to be confined by the circumstances of his birth," and that he was probably the most preternaturally gifted politician the nation has ever known....

***

....Roosevelt had the only political adviser he really needed: himself. He received invaluable assistance from many others, most notably Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins and James Farley, but he was the reigning master. His understanding of public opinion -- how to interpret it, how to shape it, how to lead it -- was unmatched, and it is telling that two of his most damaging mistakes came when he allowed it to be overcome by vindictiveness. The first and most famous occurred in 1937, when his anger over unfavorable Supreme Court decisions on New Deal programs led him to try to "pack" the court with additional judges who would be in his pocket; the defeat he suffered was humiliating, and he did not really recover from it until late in his second term. The other took place the following year, when he tried -- with a notable lack of success -- "to purge the Democratic party of dissident members of Congress."

There were other failures and disappointments, but mostly the record is astonishingly positive. Though his critics have generally contended that it was World War II, not the New Deal, that pulled the nation out of the Depression, the truth is that within six weeks of his taking office, "the banking crisis had been ameliorated, the government's budget pruned, and the heavy hand of mandatory temperance overturned." Subsequent programs -- Social Security, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Authority -- were powerful and lasting forces for renewal and betterment.

Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative who believed that "modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot," and who was willing to set aside (at least temporarily) his economic conservatism in order to serve this higher obligation. He established this as government policy and it has remained so ever since, at all levels of government; the conservative revolution of recent years has chipped a bit away from it, but not much, so deeply embedded has it become in Americans' sense of what they can expect from government....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052500004.html

[Bitwit1234]

1. Why do you thing the are canonizing Reagan

Look at all the social programs FDR instigated that they are trying to do away with.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. That's true. They would like to obliterate FDR's legacy in more ways than one. nt

[welshTerrier2]

3. today's "bandaid" Democrats

you either accept a model that sees economic oppression as an enemy of democracy or you accept a model that sees the inevitability of capitalist exploitation in which the best lower level workers can hope for is a kind of moderated disaster ... one view seeks to overturn the oppression and refuses to accept the "inevitability of inequity"; the other sees globalization and the harsh realities of the marketplace as something requiring the passing out of bandages for those crushed by its inhumanity ...

check out this post from my DU journal: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/welshTerrier2/94

[DeepModem Mom]

4. Excellent piece -- thank you! nt

[UTUSN]

5. K&R #1 for I -can't- believe- this -is- the- FIRST - one!!1 n/t

[DeepModem Mom]

6. Thank you, UTUSN!

[DeepModem Mom]

7. Kicking this for FDR.

[Hidden Stillness]

8. Nowadays, the Only Thing We Have to Fear is the Economic Royalists' Propaganda

It really bothers me--actually scares me--that people are increasingly, as time goes on, ignorant of Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the whole era of Government as the solution to the inequities of capitalism and corruption. It makes them so easy to trick, with "framing" and slogans, and fake "reasoning"--"get rid of the regulations that are holding entrepreneurs back, and keeping us from competing and developing new products," etc. If you can erase the memory of the real world, and history, you can set people up for anything, and this is happening now. You hardly know where to begin with the Roosevelt Administration, the greatest ever; they accomplished so much, solved so much, helped--even saved--so many, that you can't explain it all here. I recommend just buying a book, (this new one, if it is good), and memorizing the general program that was the New Deal, to understand how things really work.

The New Deal was so effective because it operated on abut three principles or areas, to combat the Depression, unemployment and actual starvation in the country. There were the programs that gave instant relief, by direct cash payments (Social Security, etc.), the legal remedies to corporate crime and greed, (banking laws, among them that personal savings would now be protected by the Federal Government, and could not be lost, invention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, stock trading laws, minimum wage, collective bargaining, unions, etc.), and jobs programs, (WPA, CCC which planted trees and did other conservation measures from Coast to Coast, etc.). There were new departments such as the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which bought mortgages from banks, (millions of people losing their homes during the Depression), rewrote them to lower the payments to manageable amounts, and saved millions of homes. Even the G.I. Bill, which enabled returning vets to afford homes, was not a Truman program originally, as most think, but a Roosevelt program. It goes on and on, and explains why there has not been a devastating depression ever since, no matter how many stupid, criminal Republicans have been in office since; they once were common. The only thing that will really solve this ignorance problem is to read at least one good book on the New Deal, and get a real citizens' perspective back.

Of course, the ngelect of the great Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt is not due only to Republican lies and censorship, but due to stupid, corrupt, "D"LC types, who quote Ronald Reagan, and not Roosevelt, who praise "conservative" economic policy, when really it was populist, anti-economic-royalist New Deal economics that saved us, and on and on. Even the excerpt title is phony: Since the "Conservative Revolution"? What "conservative 'revolution' "? When the liberal/Democratic opinion is the majority on almost everything, and tolerance, an understanding of the need for Government, support for help for the poor, Social Security still the most popular Government program ever, etc., the march of mainstream liberal thought keeps on, as always. Read a book called "The Illusion of a Conservative Reagan Revolution" by Larry Schwab, to be reminded of how phony the "conservative majority" crap is.

The excerpt doesn't mention the great influence of Eleanor on Franklin's thought--which everyone knows about. I hope the book is better than the excerpt here; of course, the Washington Post has declined as a newspaper since Bob Woodward became such a Repub stooge. However, after the ongoing disaster that is the Cheney-Bush Administration, it teaches us again what Roosevelt and the rest were fighting, and after the disaster of Katrina and Rita, where the Government's own accounting figures revealed later that if the Administration had bought everyone who lost their home a new one, and given them direct cash payments to help them, rather than all the contracting, subcontracting, no-bid contracting, missing money, FEMA trailers never delivered, and all the rest, it not only would have addressed the problems, which they still have not done, but it would have cost less! We keep getting the New Deal lesson over and over, and one of these days, there will be a new group, listening, because they will have learned the hard way, again. It takes another Republican Gilded Age.

[me b zola]

9. Excellent post

The excerpt also doesn't mention the political pressure from the left of Roosevelt represented by the communist party.

It is disheartening to hear some on this board and within the party berate and/or belittle those that are to the left of where they believe the Democratic Party should be. That tactic only ensures that the center line is pushed further to the right and consequenntly the party will (continue to) settle for policies and stances that are increasingly to the right of where you want to be.

The rePublican party understands the need to have some in their party advocate policies more to the right of where they are willing to settle for, that way they can claim to be more moderate or as if they have compromised. They have people constantly pushing to the right, and as a consequence their party, over the years, has moved to the right.

We need to push back that center line. To do that means we must embrace Democrats that some would call "radical".

[wicket]

10. K & R

:kick: