How corrupt, racist, and elitist our 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was, seems to have seriously evaded the notice of most American voters who describe themselves as liberals, progressives, and Democrats.
Most of F.D.R.'s most popular achievements - like the "end" of child labor, the 40-hour work-week, and Social Security old-age and retirement benefits - should be credited to F.D.R.'s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, rather than to Roosevelt himself.
But that aside, F.D.R. - and his advisor Henry Stimson - made some horrendous wartime decisions, most of which, liberals and modern Democrats seem to have completely forgotten.
Let's review. We're talking about a man:
1. Who imprisoned over 110,000 Japanese-Americans who did nothing wrong, nor criminal, of their own volition. Their only "crime" was the accident of being related to their former countrymen back home in Japan.
Think about what it means, from the perspective of the Japanese, for the United States (under F.D.R.) to intern 110,000 innocent American citizens in good standing with the law. Imagine that you attack a country. Imagine that that country responds by placing all of your emigrants as prisoners of war. Imagine that the enemy country allows children (for example, Star Trek actor George Takei) to grow up as if they were prisoners and common criminals.
This would give you all the reason to keep the war going, and - at that - longer than it needs to go on! You would have every reason to not only fight that country in the air and at sea, but additionally to mount a full-scale land invasion on that country, for the purposes of setting those 110,000 people free!
Franklin D. Roosevelt thus arguably kept World War II going, for much longer than it "had to" go on, by imprisoning those innocent people.
The fact that this was done in the interest of national security - and Bill Clinton's formal apology to Fred Korematsu - do not matter. The United States is a country of laws, and the Fourth Amendment should have prevented F.D.R.'s orders to exclude Japanese-Americans from the West Coast Military Area from ever becoming law in the first place. In fact, because the Fourth Amendment is still in place, those orders were never valid laws in the first place. Which is why they were struck down in Korematsu v. U.S..
2. Who authorized the internment of thousands of German-Americans and Italian-Americans.
Eleven thousand German-Americans and nearly two thousand Italian-Americans were unlawfully detained during World War II. The fact that they were white, and that Japanese-Americans were detained too, does not make this "equal misery" (to paraphrase a quote by Winston Churchill) acceptable, nor sufferable. It was wrong then, and it would be wrong now.
Eleven thousand German-Americans and nearly two thousand Italian-Americans were unlawfully detained during World War II. The fact that they were white, and that Japanese-Americans were detained too, does not make this "equal misery" (to paraphrase a quote by Winston Churchill) acceptable, nor sufferable. It was wrong then, and it would be wrong now.
3. Who listened to the advice of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, when Stimson advised him not to bomb the train tracks which led to the Auschwitz cluster of several dozen forced labor, concentration, and extermination camps.
The fact that it would have been dangerous to fly U.S. Air Force bomber planes over the area, is no excuse for shelving the plan to bomb the tracks leading to Auschwitz. The fact that Air Force planes risked being shelled by the Nazis' surface-to-air missiles, is no excuse.
If the U.S. Military used "it's too dangerous" as an excuse all the time, then it never would have fought World War II to begin with. If the plan was made, then it should have been attempted. If it had been attempted and then it had failed, then it should have been attempted a second time (and, if necessary, a third time).
The U.S. Military does not award anybody a medal for lack of bravery or lack of courage.
Henry Stimson advised F.D.R. against attempting this plan, not because it probably wouldn't have worked, but because Henry Stimson was an anti-Semite. How do I know this?
4. Listened to Henry Stimson another time - prior to the shelving of the Auschwitz plan - when Stimson advised against allowing a ship full of Jewish refugees into the United States.
The M.S. St. Louis held about 900 passengers, the vast majority of them Jewish refugees from Europe who were trying to escape from the Nazis. When the so-called "Ship of the Damned" arrived in Cuba, passengers discovered that they had been sold fraudulent tickets, and were not allowed to disembark.
The ship was unable to unload passengers, who turned to the United States out of desperation. After Stimson advised F.D.R. against allowing the passengers to disembark in the United States, the ship sailed to Canada, and unloaded about 600 passengers.
The ship was eventually forced to return to Nazi-occupied Europe with 300 passengers in tow. The majority of them were murdered at the hands of the Nazis.
5. Who was not some poor boy, nor a dirt farmer, nor a union organizer, but a nepotist, being a cousin of former President Theodore Roosevelt.
Teddy Roosevelt had previously served as President of the United States for nearly eight years. Teddy Roosevelt was no saint himself, having served as a general out west, massacring Indians, and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
Another relative of theirs - Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (born in 1916) - helped found the Office of Strategic Services (which eventually morphed into what is now the C.I.A.), and led America's coup against the democratically elected leader of Iran, Muhammad Mosaddegh, in 1953.
Franklin D. Roosevelt also married his own cousin, Eleanor.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is treated by Democrats today, as George W. Bush was treated by Republicans in the early 2000s; as a self-made man who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and made a name for himself out of nothing. Nothing could be further from the truth.
F.D.R. was nothing more than a spoiled, power-hungry elitist, who rode on the back of his cousin Teddy's accomplishments. Aside from being a nepotistic cousin-fucker whose parents were sixth-cousins.
6. Who was the governor of the State of New York, prior to becoming president.
F.D.R. served as governor of New York from 1929 to 1932. Before that, he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy (like his relative Teddy), and prior to that, he served in the New York State Legislature. Before that, he was a lawyer.
Moreover, F.D.R.'s father James was a businessman and a horse breeder. James once took Franklin to meet Grover Cleveland while Cleveland was president. In fact, Cleveland told Franklin that he hoped Franklin would never become president.
F.D.R. grew up playing polo and tennis, and received a free sailboat from his father at the age of sixteen. It would probably be fair to conclude that F.D.R. never performed a day of honest hard work in his whole life.
7. Whose legacy was based on the myth that wartime spending can get a country out of a recession without many negative consequences.
Sure, the United States emerged from World War II as the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth. But that was arguably due only to the facts that the other developed countries of the world were thoroughly bombed to rubble during the conflict, and because the U.S. was so far geographically removed from the other Allied nations that it never suffered significant military attacks.
The U.S. may have recovered from the losses it suffered during World War II. But the number of people paying federal income taxes skyrocketed (from 7% to 64%) from 1940 to 1944. To the extent to which high income taxes discourage people from working and earning more, the economy has never recovered (in that regard). That number now sits at 44%.
Additionally, the country has never recovered from the increased militarism which was brought about by its second major involvement in an international military conflagration. Prior to that, the U.S. had been relatively uninvolved in wars (that is, if you don't count its colonialism in the Philippines, Hawaii, and elsewhere). The people who settled America sailed across an entire ocean for a reason; to get away from Europe, its kings, and its endless conflicts (including religious wars).
8. Was not an honest public servant, but rather, someone who knew how to do the bare minimum of what was required, in order to keep his power and his job. Richard Nixon could be described the same way.
F.D.R. is credited for having lifted people out of poverty. But this came at the expense of the freedom of the interned Japanese, German, and Italian Americans. It came at the expense of forgetting the contributions of people like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and the legislators who wrote the laws that F.D.R. merely enforced.
F.D.R.'s successes came at the expense of a legacy wherein modern-day Democrats "vote blue no matter who", despite all the indications that the Democratic Party is no longer interested in helping anybody other than wealthy professionals who live in wealthy suburbs which are growing so quickly that they resemble cancerous tumors on the face of the Earth more than they resemble livable human settlements.
Don't even get me started on F.D.R.'s mischaracterization of the Philippines and Hawaii as if they were "American" in late 1941, in order to excuse American military involvement in the Pacific theater of World War II.
For more information on this, please watch Daniel Immerwahr's presentation "How to Hide an Empire", available at the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA
Or read this article on the same topic:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa
Or his confiscation of gold from American citizens, after which he turned around and sold the gold to big banks at a 28% profit.
For more information on this, please watch Daniel Immerwahr's presentation "How to Hide an Empire", available at the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA
Or read this article on the same topic:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa
Or his confiscation of gold from American citizens, after which he turned around and sold the gold to big banks at a 28% profit.
Or his refusal to meet (or "snubbing") of African-American Olympic champion runner Jesse Owens, which genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler didn't even have the gall to do.
Based on a post titled
"Franklin D. Roosevelt Was an Elitist,
and He and His Adviser Henry Stimson
Were Anti-Semitic War Criminals",
originally posted to Facebook on August 8th, 2021
Edited and Expanded on September 9th, 2021
Originally published to this blog on September 9th, 2021
