Criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt

As president from 1933 to 1945, Roosevelt was the target of sharp criticism from both left and right.

Both during and after his presidential terms, and continuing today, there has been much criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Critics have questioned not only his policies and positions but also charged him with centralizing power in his own hands by controlling both the government and the Democratic party. Many denounced his breaking the no-third-term tradition in 1940. His wife Eleanor Roosevelt and their children came under attack—and so too did his dog Fala.[1]

By the middle of his second term, much criticism of Roosevelt centered on fears that he was heading toward a dictatorship, by attempting to seize control of the Supreme Court in the Court-packing incident of 1937, attempting to eliminate dissent within the Democratic Party in the South during the 1938 mid-term elections, and by breaking the tradition established by George Washington of not seeking a third term when he again ran for re-election in 1940. As two historians explain, "In 1940, with the two-term issue as a weapon, anti-New Dealers... argued that the time had come to disarm the 'dictator' and to dismantle the machinery."[2]

Long after his death new lines of attack opened to attack his policies regarding helping the Jews of Europe,[3] incarcerating Japanese Americans on the West Coast,[4] and opposing anti-lynching legislation.[5]

Rejection by allies

Numerous allies and appointees turned against FDR, such as Vice President John Nance Garner, Brain truster Raymond Moley, Postmaster General James A. Farley[6] and Ambassador Joseph Kennedy.[7] Outside the administration prominent supporters who turned against FDR included journalists Walter Lippmann[8] and Frank Kent,.[9] Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst was a major Roosevelt supporter in 1932, but turned his nationwide media chain against FDR starting in 1934. Historian Charles A. Beard had supported FDR in 1932 but became the leader of isolationist intellectuals who opposed his foreign policy after 1937.[10] Roosevelt in the 1920s had been closely associated with Al Smith, the governor of New York. Roosevelt defeated Smith for the 1932 nomination, and Smith became the leader of the Liberty League of prominent businessmen opposing the New Deal.[11] After Pearl Harbor FDR rejected the possibility of major war jobs for any of these men except Lewis Douglas[12] and Dean Acheson.[13] Some appointees privately turned against the New Deal but kept quiet and stayed in the jobs, such as ambassador Claude Bowers.[14]

Criticism of the New Deal and of tax policy

Further information: Critics of the New Deal

Roosevelt was criticized for his economic policies, especially the shift in tone from individualism to collectivism with the dramatic expansion of the welfare state and regulation of the economy. Those criticisms continued decades after his death. One factor in the revisiting of these issues in later decades was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.[15] When, in 1981, Reagan was quoted in The New York Times saying that fascism was admired by many New Dealers (not including Roosevelt), he came under heavy criticism, for Reagan had greatly admired Roosevelt and was a leading New Dealer in Hollywood.[16]

Today, Roosevelt is criticized by right-wing conservatives and libertarians for his extensive economic interventionism. These critics often accuse his policies of prolonging what they believe would otherwise have been a much shorter recession. Their argument is that government planning of the economy was both unnecessary and counterproductive, and that laissez-faire policies would have ended the suffering much sooner. Austrian School of economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo says Roosevelt did not 'get us out of the Depression', or 'save capitalism from itself,' as generations of Americans have been taught.[17]

More recently, right libertarian Jim Powell, in his 2003 book FDR's Folly, stated that the median joblessness rate throughout the New Deal was 17.2 percent and never went below 14 percent. However Powell does not count government workers on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as employed; they of course worked at full-time paid jobs. Powell states the Depression was worsened and prolonged "by doubling taxes, making it more expensive for employers to hire people, making it harder for entrepreneurs to raise capital, demonizing employers, destroying food... breaking up the strongest banks, forcing up the cost of living, channeling welfare away from the poorest people and enacting labor laws that hit poor African Americans especially hard."[18] Liberal historians reject Powell's charges and note that it was Hoover who raised taxes, not FDR, and that the New Deal did more for blacks than any administration before or since.[19]

A 2004 econometric study by Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian concluded that the "New Deal labor and industrial policies did not lift the economy out of the Depression as President Roosevelt and his economic planners had hoped," but that the "New Deal policies are an important contributing factor to the persistence of the Great Depression." They believe that the "abandonment of these policies coincided with the strong economic recovery of the 1940s."[20] They do not credit FDR for the remarkable prosperity of the 1940s.

New Deal defenders argue that the failure of industry to create new jobs in the 1930s was caused primarily by the lack of new technologies and new industries; apart from radio, there were few growth industries that emerged in the 1930s than compared to the 1920s, when automobiles and electricity created the demand for new products that in turn created many new jobs. By contrast in the 1930s companies did not hire more workers because they could not sell the increased output that would result.[21]

Criticism of Roosevelt as a "Warmonger"

As World War II began, Roosevelt was among those concerned at the growing strength of the Axis Powers, and he found ways to help Great Britain, the Chinese Nationalists, and later the Soviet Union in their struggle against them. His program of Lend-Lease supplied military equipment to those powers despite the U.S. government's official neutrality. This prompted several isolationist leaders, including air hero Charles Lindbergh, to criticize him as a warmonger who was trying to push America into war with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. This criticism was largely silenced in the public arena after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but some persisted in the belief that Roosevelt knew of the attack beforehand.

Criticism of Roosevelt as a "Fascist"

After 1945 the term "Fascist" conjured up images of Nazi death camps, but in the 1930s it had a very different connotation, meaning the centralization of political power as in Benito Mussolini's Italy and of a "third way" between communism and capitalism. While most American businessmen thought Roosevelt was hostile to them, critics on the left said he was too friendly. Similarities of American domestic programs to fascist economics are not necessarily pejorative; one of the motives behind the Interstate Highway System was that President Eisenhower was impressed by Hitler's autobahn system.[22] Early in Roosevelt's first term supporters and critics alike found similarities between the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and Italian corporatism. In 1935 and 1936, after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Supreme Court struck down the NRA, contemporaries stopped comparing the NRA to Italian corporatism. Interest in the subject returned in 1973 when two prominent historians wrote articles on resemblances between the New Deal and fascist economics. According to James Q. Whitman, by the late 1980s it was "almost routine" for New Deal historians to identify similarities between the New Deal and fascist economic programs.[23] Similarities are in anti-depression policies; in totality the New Deal and fascism were very different.[24]

Critics on the left

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) first charged Roosevelt with being fascist less than two months after he took office. On May Day, 1933 the CPUSA ran a series of newspaper advertisements denouncing "the whole Roosevelt program of preparation for fascism and war" and calling Roosevelt a "fascist dictator." The ads' examples of alleged fascist activities included "forced labor for the unemployed" and harsh tactics against striking farm workers in California. Scholar Paul Kengor wrote that the charges were ridiculous.[25] Richard Hofstadter noted that critics from the left believed, "that the NRA was a clear imitation of Mussolini's corporate state."[26]

Left-Liberal publications such as The Nation and The New Republic worried that the Civilian Conservation Corps' (CCC) integration with the military could start a transformation to a fascistic society. While the CCC was operated by the military and had some militaristic aspects, the Roosevelt administration allayed these fears by emphasizing the CCC's civilian character. Unlike its German counterpart, the CCC was never a compulsory service.[27]

Critics on the right

Conservatives have made the most significant criticisms of Roosevelt, and have been keeping up with these criticisms for decades. They warned of "regimentation." They made cautionary comparisons of Roosevelt's economic programs to communism and fascism, to which Roosevelt responded in a June 1934 Fireside Chat. He said that the critics were motivated by self-interest. Roosevelt stated that everything he did was within America's political tradition.[28] Without providing details, Roosevelt privately told his Secretary of Interior, Harold Ickes on October 4, 1933 that the New Deal was doing some things that were being done in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Roosevelt was a pragmatist who had studied under William James at Harvard College. As a pragmatist, Roosevelt was willing to consider various sources of ideas for social experiments.[29]

The most prominent of Roosevelt's critics in regards to fascism was Herbert Hoover. He saw a connection between the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the "Swope Plan," named after Gerard Swope. Hoover was an ardent supporter of trade associations, but saw the Swope Plan as fascistic because of its compulsory nature.[24]

Historian George H. Nash argues:

Unlike the "moderate," internationalist, largely eastern bloc of Republicans who accepted (or at least acquiesced in) some of the "Roosevelt Revolution" and the essential premises of President Truman's foreign policy, the Republican Right at heart was counterrevolutionary. Anti-collectivist, anti-Communist, anti-New Deal, passionately committed to limited government, free market economics, and congressional (as opposed to executive) prerogatives, the G.O.P. conservatives were obliged from the start to wage a constant two-front war: against liberal Democrats from without and "me-too" Republicans from within.[30]

The Old Right emerged in opposition to the New Deal of President Roosevelt. Hoff says, "moderate Republicans and leftover Republican Progressives like Hoover composed the bulk of the Old Right by 1940, with a sprinkling of former members of the Farmer-Labor party, Non-Partisan League, and even a few midwestern prairie Socialists."[31]

Historians compare New Deal with Europe

The Swope Plan was the starting point for drafting the NIRA and it was in no way copied from Europe. Many prominent businessmen had participated in writing it. Hoover, however, denounced the Swope plan as monopolistic and refused to support any proposal made by the Chamber of Commerce. However, it was widely praised by American businessmen and academics.[32][33] The Swope Plan was corporatist, but far less extensive than fascist corporatism. Historian John A. Garraty said that the NIRA was "similar to experiments being carried out by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy and by the Nazis in Hitler's Germany. It did not, of course, turn America into a fascist state, but it did herald an increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of interest groups, both industrialists' organizations and labor unions." Garraty said that another influence was the concept of the corporate state, where capitalists and workers, supervised by the government, worked out problems to avoid wasteful competition and dangerous social clashes.[34] Historian Ellis Hawley reviewed the legislative history of the NIRA. A key member of the Brains Trust, Raymond Moley, led efforts to review industrial recovery plans. Another significant influence was Hugh S. Johnson, who drew on his experience with the war industries board.[35] Popular historian Amity Shlaes stated:

The NRA was the consummation of a thousand articles and a thousand trends. It was the ideas of Moley, the trade unions, Stuart Chase, Tugwell, Stalin, Insull, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Mussolini's Italian model all rolled into one.[36]

According to comparative law scholar James Q. Whitman, it was not the NIRA statute that fueled suspicions of fascism but the leaders of the National Recovery Administration. The head of the NRA, Hugh Johnson, openly admired Mussolini. Both Johnson and his assistant, Donald Richberg, made disturbing statements indicating that they were hostile to parliamentary government. Richberg denied being a fascist but described Roosevelt several times as a "Man of Action." Whitman said that there were "striking" differences between the ideology of Johnson and Richberg and fascist propaganda.[23]

Garraty suggested that there were some "striking" similarities between Roosevelt's programs and German anti-depression policies but concluded that the New Deal did not have much in common with fascism in total because of the vast political differences between the two systems. Roosevelt expanded political participation for the less fortunate. Garraty stated that the main reason for the similarities was that both nations were dealing with problems that were unique in the industrial world.[37] Garraty stated that the New Deal lacked any consistent ideological base. While the Brains Trust got a lot of attention, theorists never had much impact on Roosevelt. Roosevelt drew on populism, with its hostility to bankers and its willingness to inflate the currency; Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism in its dislike of competition and deemphasis on antitrust laws; and the ideas of social workers from the Progressive Era. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis influenced Roosevelt on financial reforms. The War Labor Board from World War I influenced Roosevelt's labor policy.[38]

Other scholars had varying views on the relationship between the New Deal and fascist economics:

Hayek

In 1944 Friedrich A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Hayek focused mostly on Britain but also mentioned the New Deal. He argued that Britain and America had started to abandon their basic commitment to personal liberty through increasingly statist economic programs. Historian Alan Brinkley said that Hayek's work was influential because it expressed concerns that already existed. The biggest challenge to the New Deal was the fear that the expanding federal bureaucracy limited personal economic freedom and autonomy. According to Brinkley liberals accused Hayek of attacking a straw man, but their criticism had a strongly defensive tone. Alvin Hansen wrote a scathing review, but said that The Road to Serfdon is "'good medicine but a bad diet.'" Stuart Chase acknowledged that Hayek provided "a useful warning ... which every planner should paste under the glass top of his desk." Reinhold Niebuhr noted that totalitarianism's rise prompted the democracies to be apprehensive about collectivist solutions, stating that "a wise community will walk warily and test the effect of each new adventure before further adventures."[46]

Accusations of racism

Internment

Further information: Japanese American internment

Executive Order 9066, which sent 120,000 Japanese expatriates and American citizens of Japanese ancestry to be confined at internment camps, has been charged by critics as being racist. The Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality.

Treatment of Jesse Owens

After the 1936 Berlin Olympics, only the white athletes were invited to see and meet Roosevelt. No such invitation was made to the African American athletes such as Jesse Owens, who had won four gold medals. A widely believed myth about the 1936 games was that Hitler had snubbed Owens, something that never happened. Owens said, "Hitler didn't snub me--it was [Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."[47] However, Hitler had left after Owens's first gold medal win and did not meet him. Subsequently, he did not meet with any of the gold medalists. Owens lamented his treatment by Roosevelt, saying that he "wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President."[48]

Hugo Black

When Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court he apparently did not know that Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.[49]

Anti-lynching legislation

Roosevelt condemned lynching as murder but did not support Republican proposals to make it a federal crime, although his wife Eleanor did so. FDR told an advocate, "If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they [Southern Democratic senators] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk."[50]

Failure to do enough for the Jews of Europe

Beginning in the 1960s FDR was charged[51] with not acting decisively enough to prevent or stop the Holocaust. Critics cite instances such as the 1939 episode in which 936 Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis were denied asylum and not allowed into the United States because of strict laws passed by Congress.[52]

Historian David Wyman and others argue that the Roosevelt Administration knew that the Nazis were systematically killing Jews but nevertheless followed a policy of not rescuing them.[53] According to professor Wyman, Roosevelt's record on Jewish refugees and their rescue is very poor and one of the worst failures of his presidency.[53] He has been criticized for failing to issue public statements or address the issue of European Jews in any of his 998 press conferences.[54]

Defenders of Roosevelt, such as Robert N. Rosen, argue that Roosevelt made numerous attempts to allow Jewish refugees to enter the United States and that, at weaker periods of his presidency, he simply did not have the political capital to wage these battles.[55] Rosen argues that the mood in the country favored the strong desire to remain neutral regarding European affairs and distrust of anything that smacked of internationalism.[55] Rosen argues there were divisions in the American Jewish community, which had not reached a consensus as to the best policy for freeing their European counterparts from Nazi persecution.[55]

References

  1. George Wolfskill and John Allen Hudson. All But the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39 (Macmillan, 1969)
  2. Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht. Never Again: A President Runs for a Third Term (1968) page x.
  3. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (2013),
  4. Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (2009)
  5. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2014)
  6. Thomas Spencer, "Loyal Democrats: John Cudahy, Jim Farley, and the Politics and Diplomacy of the New Deal Era, 1933-1941," Wisconsin Magazine of History (Spring 2011) 94#3 pp 2-15
  7. Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1981)
  8. F. Krome, "From Liberal Philosophy to Conservative Ideology? Walter Lippmann's Opposition to the New Deal," Journal of American Culture (Spring 1987) 10#1 pp 57-64,
  9. Eugene W. Goll, "Frank R. Kent's Opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal," Maryland Historical Magazine, (Summer 1968) 63#2 pp 158-171
  10. Robert A. Divine, "Franklin D. Roosevelt and Collective Security, 1933." Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1961): 42-59. in JSTOR
  11. Jordan A. Schwarz, "Al Smith in the Thirties." New York History (1964): 316-330. in JSTOR
  12. Kelly McMichael Stott, "FDR, Lewis Douglas, and the Raw Deal," Historian (Fall 2000) 63#1 pp 105-19
  13. Robert Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (2006) ch 1
  14. Thomas T. Spencer, "'Old' Democrats and New Deal Politics: Claude G. Bowers, James A. Farley, and the Changing Democratic Party, 1933-1940" Indiana Magazine of History (1996) 92#1 pp: 26-45. in JSTOR
  15. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffery O. Nelson, eds. American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (2006) 619-21, 645-6.
  16. "Reagan says many New Dealers wanted fascism." New York Times. December 22, 1981.
  17. DiLorenzo, Thomas. The New Deal Debunked, The Free Market, Volume 24, Number 11, November 2004
  18. Powell, Jim. FDR's Folly: How Franklin Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, Random House, 2004.
  19. Harvard Sitkoff, ed. Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated (1985) defends the New Deal
  20. Cole, Harold L and Ohanian, Lee E. New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis, 2004.
  21. Rick Szostak, Technological Innovation and the Great Depression (1995)
  22. Steven Ambrose. Eisenhower the President, Volume Two. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. (1984). ISBN 0-671-60565-8, p. 250.
  23. 1 2 James Q. Whitman, "Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal," The American Journal of Comparative Law, (1991) 39#4 pp. 747-778.
  24. 1 2 John A. Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," The American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 4 (October 1973), pp. 907-944.
  25. Paul Kengor. Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books (2010). ISBN 978-1-935191-75-9, pp. 23, 113-118.
  26. Richard Hofstadter (1955). The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. Vintage Books. p. 327.
  27. Kiran Klaus Patel. Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933--1945. New York: Cambridge University Press (2005) ISBN 978-0-521-16866-3, p. 152-154.
  28. Franklin Delano Roosevelt; edited by Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy (1992). FDR's Fireside Chats. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 46. ISBN 0806123702.
  29. In his diary entry for October 5, 1933, Ickes wrote that "He said that what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way." Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union 1917-32: A Component of New Deal Ideology", American Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2, Part I (Summer 1962), pp. 119-149.
  30. George H. Nash, " The Republican Right from Taft to Reagan," Reviews in American History (1984) 12#2 pp 261-265 in JSTOR quote on p 261; Nash references David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right since 1945, (University Press of Kentucky, 1983)
  31. Joan Hoff (1975). Herbert Hoover, forgotten progressive. Little, Brown. p. 222.
  32. Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (1966) pp 41-42
  33. Jerry Hess, "Oral History Interview with Leon H. Keyserling," Harry S Truman Library, May 3, 1971. (Available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/keyserl1.htm; retrieved January 29, 2013)
  34. John A. Garraty. The American Nation: A History of the United States Since 1865 (Volume Two). New York: Harper & Row (1979). p. 656.
  35. Hawley. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly p. 23.
  36. Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) p. 151.
  37. John A. Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," The American Historical Review, (1973) 78#4 pp pp. 907-944. in JSTOR
  38. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States Since 1865 (Volume Two). (1979) p. 660.
  39. William Leuchtenburg, "The New Deal" in Woodward, ed, C. Vann (1968). The Comparative Approach to American History. Basic Books. p. 306.
  40. Early in 1933 Roosevelt told a White House correspondent that "I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman." In June 1933, Roosevelt wrote to Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Italy about Mussolini: "There seems no question that he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply imipressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and to prevent general European trouble." John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. (Princeton University Press, 1972). , pp. 279-281.
  41. Kiran Klaus Patel. Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933--1945. New York: Cambridge University Press (2005) ISBN 978-0-521-16866-3, p. 4-5.
  42. Ludwig von Mises. Liberalism: In the Classic Tradition. San Francisco: Cobden Press (2002). ISBN 0-930439-23-6, Kindle Location 282.
  43. Milton and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose. New York: Avon Books (1980). ISBN 0-380-52548-8, pages 83-84, 88-89.
  44. James Q. Whitman, "Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal," The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Autumn 1991), pp. 747-778.
  45. Amity Shlaes. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins (2007) ISBN 978-0-06-621170-1, pp. 6-7, 13-14.
  46. Alan Brinkley. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Kindle locations 3387 -- 3460.
  47. Triumph, a book about the 1936 Olympics by Jeremy Schaap
  48. "Owens pierced a myth" (2005), by Larry Schwartz, ESPN SportsCentury.
  49. Roger K. Newman (1997). Hugo Black: A Biography. Fordham Univ Press. p. 244.
  50. Maurine Hoffman Beasley et al. eds. (2001). The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia. Greenwood. p. 29.
  51. In works such as Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York, 1968), David S. Wyman's Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (1968), and Henry L. Feingold's The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (1970)
  52. Feingold, (1970) pp 66, 103
  53. 1 2 FDR defenders enlist TV critics to refute Holocaust film Current.org. May 9, 1994. Retrieved August 21, 2012.
  54. New Documents Shed More Light On FDR's Holocaust Failure Laurel Leff and Rafael Medoff. David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. April, 2004. Retrieved August 22, 2012.
  55. 1 2 3 Saving The Jews Robert N. Rosen. Retrieved August 22, 2012.

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