President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the New Deal

By  Ron Unz

 The Unz Review

July 11, 2025

FDR as Our Greatest Twentieth Century President

A few weeks ago I'd published an article on Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious radio priest of the 1930s, and my extensive reading revealed that he had been a far more formidable figure than I'd ever realized.

Although he was relegated to just a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, Coughlin had pioneered political commentary in the new medium of radio broadcasting, and partly as a result he had amassed an astonishing audience of perhaps 35 million regular listeners by the early 1930s, a total that may have amounted to one-quarter or more of all American adults. This enormous following probably made him the world's most influential media figure, someone who dominated large segments of American society. Although the occasional fireside chats of President Franklin Roosevelt were hugely popular and FDR received thousands of letters each day, Coughlin's own audience was much larger and his daily volume of mail far greater.

As a populist social reformer widely regarded as being on the left, Coughlin had been a strong and important early supporter of FDR and his New Deal economic policies, but he eventually came to regard these as a failure and turned against Roosevelt, also later becoming a leading figure in the effort to keep America out of World War II. That latter political turn led FDR to successfully deploy the full power of his federal government to drive Coughlin from the airwaves and permanently end his political activities.

•  American Pravda
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 19, 2025 • 8,000 Words

Coughlin was hardly alone in his strong opposition to our involvement in World War II, with polls showing that some 80% of the American people held similar views, nor was he even the most prominent public opponent.

Earlier this year, I published a long article on the career of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his America First campaign, a political movement that had similarly sought to block our involvement in the war. In that work, I'd drawn very heavily upon  an excellent 2024 book of that title by historian H.W. Brands, whose coverage focused entirely upon that Roosevelt-Lindbergh political duel of the early 1940s.

•  American Pravda
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 10, 2025 • 15,600 Words

Although Coughlin and Lindbergh were the primary figures in those articles, in each case President Roosevelt had been their main opponent, so he also had a central role both in my political narrative and in the extensive reading that I had undertaken to produce it.

Prior to Roosevelt, no American president had ever dared to exceed the two term limit informally established by George Washington, but FDR shattered that tradition by winning a third and eventually a fourth term, becoming the longest-serving president in our national history. My school textbooks told the story of how FDR's New Deal rescued our country from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and then how that same president went on to win the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the greatest military conflict in human history.

During his many years in office, FDR had hugely expanded the size and scope of the American federal government, establishing Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and numerous other basic elements of our society that I had always taken for granted. Along the way, he had become an enormously popular hero to a huge fraction of the American public, notably including a young Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an ardent New Deal Democrat, and despite his later decades as a conservative Republican still always lionized FDR and many of his policies.

Given such political achievements, it's hardly surprising that Roosevelt's Wikipedia page runs 21,000 words, with another 32,000 words devoted to his New Deal policies, with the former declaring:

Historians and political scientists consistently rank Roosevelt, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln as the three greatest presidents.

These articles and my reading led me to realize the very scanty and meager extent of my knowledge of FDR and his New Deal policies. For nearly my entire life, my understanding had been limited to what I had gleaned from my textbooks and absorbed over the years from my newspapers and magazines. However, about eight or nine years ago, I'd read a highly critical late 1940s book about Roosevelt and his presidency, and found it sufficiently persuasive that I'd later summarized some of its surprising information in  a 2018 article. But in the back of my mind, I'd always wondered whether that account was merely a severely distorted and one-sided critique, a biased version of events that I had accepted because of my general ignorance of the subject.

Therefore, I recently decided to broaden my historical understanding of that era with an extensive study of FDR and his presidency, focusing my reading upon fully mainstream historiography, and that major project consumed much of the month of June.

The Privileged Life and Early Career of FDR

I'd been very favorably impressed with the Brands book, and noticed that the same author had previously published a lengthy 2008 biography of FDR that had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, so  Traitor to His Class, a doorstop-sized work running around 900 pages seemed like a good starting point for my investigation.

From the beginning, Brands emphasized Roosevelt's very wealthy and elite family background. The future president was a descendent of the early Dutch settlers who had founded New York, and he followed that family tradition by being educated at Groton and Harvard College. FDR seems to have been a mediocre student with few if any intellectual interests, and years later he always described his failure to be admitted to Harvard's elite Porcellian social club as the greatest disappointment of his entire life. By all accounts, Roosevelt almost never read any books, with the sole exception being dime detective stories. I'd sometimes come across these sorts of striking anecdotes about FDR in my casual readings, but having them explicitly stated in such a weighty and widely-praised biography fully confirmed their credibility.

After college, FDR enrolled at Columbia Law School, though he found legal studies rather uninteresting, received mediocre grades, and dropped out before graduating. By contrast, he was a very active and enthusiastic member of the New York City Yacht Club, so despite his lack of a law degree, a yachting friend of his soon offered him an unpaid apprenticeship at one of America's most prestigious law firms. Roosevelt found practical legal work just as dull as he had his law school classes, but the couple of years or so he spent in that position, half of that time working without salary, seems to have been the only real job he ever held in his entire life.

During that period, Roosevelt was already telling his friends that he intended to make politics his career and hoped to reach the presidency, something that struck me as an astonishingly bold goal for someone then in his late 20s with such unimpressive personal achievements. But his very successful subsequent political career owed much to a crucial factor that I had entirely failed to grasp.

When I first began reading candid accounts of FDR's background and his personal characteristics, the historical analogy that immediately came to my mind was that of President George W. Bush, but I'd failed to fully appreciate just how closely the two cases matched. As most people know, Bush's very successful career in Republican Party politics was almost entirely due to the famous name of his father, President George H.W. Bush, with many ignorant voters notoriously getting the two men confused. I think it's widely acknowledged that if Bush's last name or even his first name had been something different, it's unlikely that he would have ever been elected to anything at all.

Similarly, I'd always found it an odd coincidence that America had had two presidents with the rather unusual name Roosevelt just a couple of decades apart, but until reading the Brands book I'd failed to understand that much more than mere coincidence was involved.

As the author emphasized, the two terms in office of President Theodore Roosevelt, followed by his extremely active and high-profile post-presidential career had made TR the foremost public figure of his era, also establishing "Roosevelt" as the most famous political name in America, perhaps even in the entire world. FDR came from an entirely different branch of that family, being only a fifth cousin of his important relative, although his wife Eleanor was actually TR's niece. But FDR's very famous last name was still regularly regarded as a major political asset, with Democratic Party leaders always glad to put up a Roosevelt of their own and capitalize on the huge fame of the progressive Republican of the same surname.

So when the Democrats of Dutchess County in Upstate New York heard that FDR might be interested in running for office, they eagerly recruited him even though he'd spent the last few years living in New York City. His district was a heavily Republican one and Roosevelt was wealthy enough to fund his own race, so he seemed like the ideal candidate. FDR was handsome and charming and he campaigned in an expensive and gaudy red automobile at a time when horse-and-buggies were still the main means of transportation, so as he drove around his rural district, his unusual vehicle often attracted as much attention as the candidate who rode inside it. The year 1910 happened to be a very good one for Democrats, so Roosevelt won an upset victory by 1,440 votes, entering the New York State Legislature, while his fellow Democrats gained control of both houses.

The election of a Democratic Roosevelt was considered a major political novelty, especially since most people incorrectly assumed that he was actually a close relative of the recent Republican president. The New York Times soon published a lengthy profile on the freshman lawmaker, with the feature writer even declaring that "His patronymic had gone before him."

Back then, the notorious Tammany Hall Democratic political machine ran New York City, with the state's Democrats being sharply divided into pro- and anti-Tammany factions. FDR became a leading figure in the latter camp, probably inspired by a mixture of TR's progressive views and his own shrewd political instincts on how to make a quick name for himself.

Once again, the Roosevelt surname worked wonders, and the freshman lawmaker received a great deal of national media attention as he and his allies successfully blocked the preferred Tammany candidate for New York Senator, an office that was still selected by a vote of the State Legislature. Numerous newspapers all across the country hailed FDR's efforts and ran his photograph, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer identifying the young officeholder with TR's battles against corruption, while lauding his bright political future:

Franklin D. Roosevelt is beginning his public career fully as auspiciously...If none of the colonel's sons turn out to be fit objects for popular admiration, may it not be possible that this rising star may continue the Roosevelt dynasty?

Over the years that followed, this same exact pattern would often repeat itself. Political opportunities of an important nature would regularly be showered upon a relatively young man whose own rather undistinguished personal achievements while in office would otherwise have passed almost unnoticed. Being a political celebrity with a famous last name was just as beneficial a century or more ago as it has been in recent decades.

A bitter political battle between progressive and non-progressive New York Republicans had allowed FDR to initially slip into office, and in 1912 this same Republican battle was repeated on the national level. Theodore Roosevelt came out of retirement to mount a vigorous third-party challenge to his own hand-picked successor President William Howard Taft, with the result of the bitter three-way presidential race being the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Meanwhile, FDR won a difficult reelection campaign by the same relatively narrow margin as before.

Franklin Roosevelt in the Wilson Administration

Roosevelt seemed generally bored by state politics and he was also enough of a realist to recognize that once internal Republican battles subsided, any hopes of reelection in his district would probably fade away. He had enthusiastically endorsed Wilson for the presidency, so he eagerly sought a position in the new administration. Wilson had appointed a North Carolinian newspaperman named Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, and FDR successfully lobbied Daniels for the position of Assistant Secretary, a perfect fit given Roosevelt's love of yachting as well as his desire to follow in the footsteps of TR, who had himself served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy decades earlier.

Daniels had no interest or experience in either naval affairs or administration, and had been advised by his predecessor that the Secretary of the Navy did nothing but approve the requests of the various admirals. But being a Bryan progressive, he was extremely suspicious of all the corporate military contractors, and according to a contemporaneous observer quoted by Brands, rightfully so, with the navy brass mostly consisting of deadwood, often corruptly linked to their corporate suppliers.

Daniels had a good working relationship with his young subordinate, and given his lack of interest in naval matters, he delegated a great deal of authority to FDR. According to Brands, even though Roosevelt had barely turned thirty, he already had his eye set on the White House, and therefore made every effort to ingratiate himself with the leadership of the navy. This included pressing very hard for an aggressive new building program of battleships, destroyers, and submarines, a project aimed at making our navy second to none, which was an extremely radical American idea for that era.

FDR was hugely ambitious, continually seeking every possible path for political advancement. Despite being only in his very early 30s and lacking any significant accomplishments, he decided to run for New York's U.S. Senate seat in 1914, the first time that position was determined by popular election. Roosevelt had only served less than eighteen months in the Wilson Administration and Wilson anyway discouraged his appointees from involvement in state politics, so when he faced the longtime politician backed by the Tammany machine, he was crushed in the worst election defeat of his career. FDR got barely a quarter of the vote in the Democratic primary, while his opponent went on to lose heavily in November to the Republican candidate.

The outbreak of the First World War later that same year proved a major political opportunity for FDR, with our sleepy peacetime navy suddenly facing the potential challenge of a world military conflict as the threat of German U-boat attacks gradually drew America into the war. Daniels was firmly aligned with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in the anti-militarist, anti-war camp, while Roosevelt took a very different position than his superior in public hearings, emphasizing the need to greatly expand our naval forces. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania almost led Wilson to declare war, prompting Bryan's resignation with Daniels nearly following him out the door. Roosevelt railed against his superior in private, while emphasizing his very contrary views to Wilson and the rest of the government.

While the leadership of the Republican Party was strongly pro-war, the Democrats were sharply divided, with their urban Irish and German voters and their Western progressives strongly opposed, so Wilson's very difficult 1916 reelection campaign had to carefully balance those conflicting elements. Wilson therefore campaigned on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," but then brought America into the conflict just months after his extremely narrow victory. Roosevelt took full advantage of this new opportunity, doing his best to promote naval shipbuilding, proposing some innovative wartime measures, and even hiring his own publicist to promote his activities.

On a much more embarrassing personal note, his wife Eleanor received some important media attention, being featured in a 1917 Sunday Times article on the importance of following federal guidelines to conserve food during wartime. The very affluent but rather insouciant Mrs. Roosevelt emphasized that both she and her numerous family servants were doing everything they could to economize:

Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable. Since I have started following the home-card instructions, prices have risen but my bills are no larger.

In 1918 FDR arranged to travel to Britain on an inspection tour, including a brief trip to the Western Front in France, a visit that allowed him to always afterward claim that he had "seen combat." Although he was just a junior figure in the Wilson Administration, his famous last name once again opened many important doors, getting him lengthy personal meetings with King George V, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and many other top officials.

Upon his return home FDR planned to resign his government position and join a naval unit, thinking that he might see combat. As Brands explained, "With luck he might be decorated, even lightly wounded," something that would prove very useful for a "president-in-the-making." But the war ended too soon for his plans to come to fruition.

Many millions of those who reelected Wilson in 1916 did so believing that he had promised to keep America out of the European war, and they were outraged when he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany just weeks after his second inauguration. Wilson also soon enacted a military draft, the first and only such measure in our national history except for the Civil War fought more than two generations earlier.

Potentially forcing millions of Americans to fight and die thousands of miles from home in a foreign war proved extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, and harsh sedition laws were soon passed, threatening long prison sentences for anyone who challenged those controversial government policies. In 1912 socialist Eugene Debs had won 6% of the presidential vote, among the best results for any minor party candidate in history, but when he made  a few disparaging public remarks in 1918 about government policies and the draft, he was quickly sentenced to ten years in federal prison for sedition.

All these factors together with Wilson's other political blunders resulted in a sweeping Republican victory in the 1918 elections, followed by Wilson's severe stroke and the final Congressional defeat of his effort to enroll the U.S. in the League of Nations, an international project that he regarded as his main public legacy.

As a result, the Democrats realized that they faced almost certain defeat in 1920, so they nominated a bland Midwestern governor to lead the hopeless effort. The Democratic convention then balanced that ticket by picking as vice president the young and attractive 38-year-old FDR, a Wilsonian progressive with a famous name. Just as expected, Republican Warren Harding won by a huge landslide with over 60% of the vote, while his party picked up enough additional Congressional seats to establish majorities larger than any they had enjoyed since the Reconstruction Era two generations earlier. This election represented the greatest political defeat that the Democrats had suffered since the Civil War and marked the beginning of the near-total Republican national political dominance of the 1920s.

But Roosevelt himself had meanwhile gained his first national platform, giving most American voters an opportunity to size him up and recognize that he compared favorably with the winning candidate. As Brands puts it, "If voters could envision Warren Harding as president, they could certainly envision Franklin Roosevelt." So FDR was hardly damaged by being on the losing ticket, and he had now become one of the leading figures in the national Democratic Party, much closer to his longstanding goal of reaching the White House than might have seemed possible just a year or two earlier.

While he contemplated his next political move, Roosevelt's new political stature and his Washington connections soon landed him a very lucrative position as a front-man and rainmaker at a New York financial house run by a sailing friend of his. That position paid him the pre-tax current equivalent of millions of dollars each year for part-time work with only vague duties.

This discussion of FDR's early career has run far longer than I had originally intended, and was drawn from less than the first 150 pages of Brands' 900 page volume, while it lacks any of the important events of Roosevelt's dozen years in the White House. But although I had been somewhat familiar with his years in the presidency, I was very surprised by what these earlier years revealed about the future president's personality and character.

Brands is a biographer sympathetic to his subject, but many of the basic facts he set forth in a friendly manner seemed quite remarkable to me. Politics obviously attracts the politically-ambitious, but I'm not sure I'd ever read a biography of someone who had been so firmly determined to reach the presidency from such a young age despite his complete lack of any personal achievements, notable or otherwise. Roosevelt was a handsome, charming fellow, but his only major assets seemed to have been his personal wealth and his famous political name, while he appeared to have no clear goals or interests in public policy, let alone any ideology, being almost a blank slate in that regard.

I recalled the stinging remarks that Texas Democrat Jim Hightower made decades later regarding a future President Bush:  "He was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple."

Years later, the eminent progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes  famously declared that Roosevelt had a "second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament." But this sounded exactly like the sort of thing Neocon pundits might have said about President George W. Bush in the years after 9/11.

I think all these aspects of Roosevelt's personality are highly relevant as we begin to consider his later political career and his time in office.

Given the enormous hagiography that eventually enveloped FDR's wartime presidency and continued during the decades that followed, I think this examination of his early career helpfully cuts him down to normal size, allowing the contrary evidence to become much more believable. Once we begin to think of Franklin Roosevelt as being more of a George W. Bush or a Warren Harding, subsequent matters begin to make much more sense.

 FDR's Family Wealth, Illness, and His Return to Politics

As I read the reviews of the Brands book, I discovered that historian Jean Edward Smith had published an equally long and well-regarded biography of Roosevelt just one year earlier in 2007, so I decided to read it as well.  FDR also weighed in at close to 900 pages, and covered much the same ground as the other biography, having a similar tone of generally friendly and respectful coverage, but with considerable candor. In many respects, the two comprehensive volumes painted fairly similar pictures, but each naturally included some elements that the other left out.

For example, Smith began his discussion of FDR's family roots several generations earlier, and he did the same for Eleanor Roosevelt as well. Among other things, the author explained that the basis of FDR's very considerable family fortune—which actually came from his mother's Delano side of the family—had been his maternal grandfather's great success in the notorious opium trade with China, which although "not strictly legal" was immensely profitable. The author also went through a considerable number of the stories that FDR often told and retold about his early years and his family background, delicately noting that in many of them "fact and fiction mingle freely."

Both Smith and Brands provided some intriguing figures on the wealth of the Roosevelts, but it is important that these be properly understood in current terms, with the dollar amounts adjusted for the dramatic changes in median household income over the last century or so. According to ChatGPT, estimates put the former figure at perhaps $500-600 around 1904, rising to around $1,200-1,600 during the 1930s, while today's total is over $80,000. So applying the respective deflators, dollars during the early 1900s should be multiplied by at least a factor of 130 compared with a factor of 50 or more during the 1930s.

When FDR was attending Columbia Law School and the young newlyweds were living in NYC, Smith explained that their personal trust funds gave them a combined annual income of $12,000 or over $1.5 million in current terms, while the lack of any personal income taxes back then would probably boost that figure to the pre-tax equivalent of several million dollars today. This was obviously quite a substantial income for a young couple, both of whom were still in their early 20s, but according to Smith the Roosevelts found it difficult to live within their means:

Yet their combined incomes were insufficient to support their lifestyle...They lived in three different houses at various seasons of the year, always employed at least five servants, maintained a large yacht and numerous smaller boats, automobiles, and carriages, dressed in fashion, belonged to expensive clubs, traveled extensively, and gave generously to political and charitable causes.

Therefore, FDR's very wealthy mother Sara generously subsidized the shortfall, with this merely being the latest of her many financial contributions to her only child.

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When FDR attended Harvard, she had paid for and furnished his opulent suite of rooms, luxurious even by the standards of that elite college, and after the death of her husband James in 1900, she had relocated to Cambridge to be close to her son during most of his undergraduate years.

Soon after FDR's marriage, Sara informed the young couple that she was building a pair of adjoining townhouses on an expensive Upper East Side plot, one for herself and one for them, with the rooms connecting. Eleanor sometimes deeply resented the extreme control that her mother-in-law exercised over their lives.

Smith went on to say:

In the summer of 1909 Sara gave Eleanor and Franklin a second home—a thirty-four room, three story, seaside "cottage" nestled on ten acres of prime Campobello shoreline. The expansive house...stood next to the Roosevelt house, separated by a tall hemlock hedge. This time Sara transferred full title to Franklin: "a belated wedding gift," as she expressed it.

Smith also later briefly recounted a notable incident from FDR's early years in the Wilson Administration whose enormous potential importance the author apparently failed to appreciate.

Smith explained that in 1913  California enacted legislation forbidding its small Japanese minority from owning land, leading Japan to lodge a vigorous protest with Washington, a protest that President Wilson flatly rejected. As a result, tensions between the two countries flared and top American military commanders believed that war was inevitable. This led the Joint Board of the Army and the Navy to unanimously recommend that a powerful naval flotilla be concentrated in the region to intimidate Japan, while two leading New York City newspapers carried sensational stories that the American military was preparing for war.

Such a war might have easily broken out if not for the strong intervention of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a committed anti-militarist who declared that the board had exceeded its authority and prohibited the extremely provocative naval movements that would have precluded any negotiated settlement. Although Daniels won Wilson over to his side, the admirals persisted in their plans and appealed the decision until the president firmly rebuked them, declaring that military commanders must obey their orders rather than challenge them. Wilson even prohibited any future meetings of the military board, and the war scare soon died down.

But suppose that Daniels had not acted so forcefully and war against Japan had indeed broken out in 1913. Given the longstanding Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Britain would probably have been drawn into the conflict, and a 1913 naval war between Britain and America would obviously have had enormous implications for the First World War that began the following year.

FDR's life took a completely unexpected and tragic turn in 1921. He had reached his late 30s entirely cosseted by his great wealth and privilege, but in August of that year, he was suddenly stricken by an illness that left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. At the time, this was diagnosed as polio, but more recent research indicates it was probably Guillain-Barré syndrome. Regardless of the particular cause, this crippling injury completely transformed his life and future plans.

As both Brands and Smith explain, FDR soon relocated to his large family estate in Hyde Park, desperately trying to partially recover from his terrible affliction. His very domineering mother was convinced that as a cripple he should abandon all his political and business activities and permanently retire from the world, but he was determined to do otherwise. During the years that followed he did his best to keep his hand in New York State politics while also concealing as much as possible the true extent of his disability, both from the public and even from his colleagues.

Brands makes a shrewd observation regarding FDR's situation during that period:

Not even Roosevelt's worst rivals would have said that his contracting polio was anything but a misfortune. Yet some could have complained that if a Democrat with presidential ambitions had to come down with the disease, he couldn't have chosen a better time than the early 1920s. The decade after the World War was a wilderness period for the Democrats. The Republicans remained the nation's majority party, chiefly by virtue of their success in delivering on the promises of the economic revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Republican coalition combined nearly all the business interests of the country and added sufficient numbers of urban workers and midwestern farmers to lock up the White House and Congress. Against this coalition the Democrats arrayed nothing nearly so unified but rather the tired dualism of city bosses and southern gentry, with western mavericks shouting from the sideline. Pulled three ways at once, the Democrats went nowhere.

The traditional narrative that I'd always read in my textbooks had briefly mentioned FDR's extremely privileged background before claiming that his crippling 1921 illness had completely transformed his personality from that of a wealthy and rather selfish political dilettante into a deeply committed humanitarian. But although I'm sure that his many difficult years in a wheelchair must have certainly toughened him, the exhaustive biographies I read gave little indication of any such change in his attitudes or behavior.

By 1925, FDR had begun spending much of his time in Warm Springs, Georgia, swimming in the waters of a resort in hopes that this would somehow improve his physical condition. The next year he invested two-thirds of his personal fortune to purchase the property and convert it into a rehabilitation center that he hoped would soon turn a profit by attracting a national clientele, doing so despite the severe misgivings of both his wife and his mother. Their doubts proved correct since the project never succeeded as a business enterprise and instead its annual losses continued to steadily drain his financial resources.

During these years, FDR regularly begged off from any candidacy due to his illness, but he still did his best to keep his hand in both New York and national Democratic politics, sending out a steady stream of personal notes and very occasionally giving political speeches. His return to active politics began as early as 1922 when he strongly encouraged Al Smith, another leading state politician from New York City, to attempt to regain the governorship that he had lost in the Republican landslide year of 1920. Smith did so, serving three more two-year terms and becoming one of the most successful governors in his state's history.

Smith was almost a decade older than FDR and had entered politics years earlier, already serving as Speaker of the New York State Assembly during Roosevelt's first term in office. Smith's personal background was polar-opposite from that of the very wealthy and privileged younger man, growing up in a struggling family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a Catholic of mixed Irish, German, and Italian immigrant ancestry. FDR was educated at Groton and Harvard, while Smith was forced to drop out of school at the age of 14 to help support his family, and he lacked any high school or college education.

As governor of New York, Smith was one of the most powerful Democrats in the country, and in 1924 he unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential candidacy, with FDR delivering his nomination speech at the national convention, famously describing Smith as "the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield."

Then in 1928, Smith tried again, and as a very successful four-term governor of New York got the Democratic nod, then faced Republican Herbert Hoover on the November ballot. But there was also an important but totally unexpected consequence of Smith's campaign for the presidency.

New York's popular Republican attorney general was running for governor to succeed Smith, and the national Democratic Party leadership was desperate to find a reasonably strong candidate to face him and boost their voters' turnout enough to help Smith carry the Empire State. FDR hadn't run for any office since 1914, so he had few enemies and was the obvious choice, but their entreaties fell on his deaf ears since he thought he had no chance of winning and was instead waiting for a much better opportunity to reenter politics. Finally, however, the ultra-wealthy former DuPont executive who ran the Democratic Party offered Roosevelt a secret payment of about $15 million to bail him out of his failing resort property if he ran, and he agreed to do so.

Smith lost in a huge national landslide largely because of his Catholic faith, while FDR unexpectedly won the governorship by a 1% margin. That victory suddenly catapulted Roosevelt into becoming one of America's top non-Southern Democratic officeholders in an otherwise Republican sea, thus setting him on the likely path to the Democratic nomination and the presidency in 1932.

 Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, and FDR's Election

Both the Brands and the Smith biographies drew heavily upon a widely-praised historical volume by David M. Kennedy that covered the years 1929 to 1945, stretching from the onset of the Great Depression to the end of the Second World War, with this work published as part of the Oxford History of the United States and running over 950 pages. I discovered that several years ago I'd purchased  Freedom from Fear for a dollar at a Palo Alto used book sale and decided to include it in my reading project given that its coverage extended well beyond FDR's personal activities, though he was obviously the central character during those years.

Kennedy's first chapter described the country on the eve of the Great Depression, focusing on the infamous stock market crash of October 1929 that later came to be so widely regarded as its opening bell. But the author noted that there was no real connection between the two events since most observers already believed that stock prices had been inflated into an unrealistic bubble and that the crash merely brought them back down to earth.

Leading contemporaneous figures ranging from President Hoover to economist John Maynard Keynes therefore regarded the speculative collapse as a healthy economic development. According to brokerage firms, only about 1.5 million Americans owned any stocks in 1929—a little more than 1% of the total population—so nearly 99% of Americans would have been unaffected by the sudden loss of paper wealth. And indeed, well into 1930 there was still no sign of any general economic decline in the national statistics, no indication of any depression, great or otherwise.

Kennedy opened his second chapter with a brief sketch of President Herbert Hoover, the individual whom popular mythology has long identified as the villain of the Great Depression, condemned as the incompetent or uncaring leader whose inaction allowed the total impoverishment of our society.

Almost a decade older than FDR, Hoover had been born into a Quaker family of modest circumstances and then orphaned as a child, afterwards being shunted among various relatives and friends. He subsequently graduated from Stanford University with a degree in geology and became a mining engineer, achieving such tremendous success that by 1914 he had amassed a personal fortune amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in present-day terms, and was able to retire at the age of forty. So Hoover's personal wealth was many times greater than that of Roosevelt, but he was a self-made man who had actually earned it.

Following his retirement, Hoover devoted the rest of his life to public service and good works, so that when the Great War broke out that same year, he became known as an outstanding humanitarian by organizing a successful food relief effort for the starving Belgians. After the end of the war, he did the same for many other countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

Contrary to his much demonized later public image, Hoover was anything but a hidebound reactionary, and he had instead been very widely praised as a great reformer, someone often lionized by progressives. Indeed, during the Wilson Administration FDR had ironically proclaimed Hoover as "certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one." As Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge Administrations, Hoover's great reputation for honesty and competence won him the Republican presidential nomination and the White House in 1928.

Kennedy largely acquitted Hoover of most of the charges against him, emphasizing that he worked very hard to shore up the American economy in the wake of the market crash by trying to restore business confidence and also pressing industrialists to avoid cutting jobs or wages. The author noted that the small size of the federal government and the independence of the Federal Reserve made any more sweeping actions difficult, with state spending on construction projects being ten times Washington's total. As a useful comparison, in 1929 federal expenditures were only 3% of American GDP, while by the end of the century the figure had risen to 20%. Everyone still remembered the sharp but short recession of 1921, and the limited course of that recent past downturn hardly suggested the need for any extraordinary economic measures in 1930, so Congress would have never authorized any dramatic new legislation.

Indeed, Kennedy explained that by May 1930 there was a widespread perception that the national economy had already bottomed out. He noted that "the powerful Democratic financier and economic sage Bernard Baruch" predicted that by Hoover's 1932 reelection campaign he would be riding a rising economic tide, regarded as "the great master mind who led the country out of its economic misery."

Kennedy was much more critical of Hoover's refusal to veto the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised import taxes to the highest rates in American history and started a dangerous international protectionist spiral that may have greatly contributed to the worldwide economic crisis that began soon afterward.

Against the entreaty of some one thousand economists and top financiers such as Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan and Company, Hoover signed the measure into law in June 1930. This led the very prominent political analyst Walter Lippmann to denounce the president for giving up his leadership of the Republican Party, whose Congressional wing was rabidly protectionist. The decision also outraged the significant block of progressive Republicans in Congress, costing Hoover some important political support.

Unfortunately for Hoover, the 1930 Congressional elections eliminated Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, with many of the races having been decided by Prohibition and non-economic issues. And according to Kennedy, the Democrats who now dominated Congress began deliberately obstructing Hoover's subsequent economic efforts in 1931 and 1932, correctly believing that the 1932 elections would allow their party to reap the rewards of the president's failures.

America had long had a rather ramshackle and poorly-regulated banking system, and in late 1930 a sudden panic led to a wave of bank failures across the country. These included New York City's Bank of the United States, which closed its doors in the largest such financial collapse in our national history, with its highly-misleading name greatly adding to the sense of public panic. The owners of that latter institution had speculated in stocks and two executives were later jailed for fraud, so Kennedy suggested that its failure might have been a delayed consequence of the 1929 market crash, but all these developments deepened the existing economic decline.

By 1931 the financial crisis became international with the collapse of Austria's largest bank and waves of economic problems across Europe. The aftermath of the First World War had created a complex and fragile system of international financial flows in which American loans to Germany were used to provide the reparations payments to Britain and France demanded by the harsh Treaty of Versailles, and these funds were then in turn sent back to America as repayments of our wartime loans to the Allies. The collapse of this bizarre, almost circular system led to widespread European impoverishment, and the decline of our major trading partners then deepened our own economic problems. By the end of that year, huge waves of industrial layoffs in America had raised unemployment rates to new heights.

The first three chapters of the Kennedy book provided this detailed narrative of the origins and early years of the Great Depression, closing with FDR's landslide 1932 presidential victory over Hoover. As part of this discussion, Kennedy devoted a few pages to sketching out Roosevelt's background and how he had cemented his position as the Democratic front-runner by spending his previous four years as governor of New York implementing the sort of government relief measures in his own state that Hoover had been unwilling or unable to pursue on the federal level. Ironically enough, the top leadership of the national Democratic Party was then firmly reactionary on such economic matters but their efforts to block FDR's nomination at the convention failed.

However, although Kennedy seemed to believe that FDR's economic policies were generally correct, his account hardly suggested that he had any high regard for the candidate's intellect, knowledge, or logical consistency. The historian noted that shortly before the November vote, FDR had actually denounced Hoover for his fiscal deficits and urged a sharp reduction in government spending, the exact opposite of the policies he would actively pursue once he came into office.

As part of his successful presidential campaign, FDR had established a "Brain Trust" of academics who helped formulate his planned policies, with Columbia professor Raymond Moley being the leader of the group. But Kennedy explained that most of them developed a very skeptical view of the candidate whom they were advising:

Roosevelt's mind, said another Brain Truster, Raymond Moley, "was neither exact nor orderly." On one occasion, speechwriter Moley was left "speechless" when Roosevelt, presented with two absolutely incompatible drafts of addresses on tariff policy—one calling for blanket reductions, the other for bilateral agreements—blandly instructed Moley to "weave the two together."

Similarly, after many long talks with Roosevelt, the influential political columnist Walter Lippmann admitted that he was still at a total loss regarding the man's core beliefs:

The art of carrying water on both shoulders is highly developed in American politics, and Roosevelt had learned it...It is not easy to say with certainty whether his left-wing or his right-wing supporters are the more deceived. The reason is that Mr. Roosevelt is a highly impressionable person, without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions...Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.

 President Franklin Roosevelt and the First New Deal

This reported sense of FDR's total ignorance of policy issues and his very casual approach to logical consistency was strengthened in my own mind when I considered the legislation that he quickly enacted once he came into office in March 1933. This package of bills was passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress during the famous "First 100 Days" of his presidency, constituting what later became known as "the First New Deal." Some of these proposals appeared good and sensible to me and others seriously mistaken, but taken as a whole there seemed little rhyme or reason to them.

As part of the strongly pro-New Deal skew of my history textbooks, nearly all of these policies were presented favorably, and I'd always just nodded my head at the time. But now seeing them described in much greater detail in three separate 900 page books, I've become much more skeptical and can easily understand why most of them were later abandoned or ruled unconstitutional by court decisions.

Early in my efforts to gain a good understanding of FDR's New Deal, a knowledgeable academic had recommended to me a classic 1963 book on the subject by William E. Leuchtenberg. I soon discovered that  Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal had been a major source for both the Kennedy book and the two thick FDR biographies, and the work certainly provided me a great deal of useful information when I read it.

Although generally quite favorable towards Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg grudgingly admitted the haphazard and rather disorganized nature of the economic policies that FDR's administration initially implemented. Towards the beginning of the book, the author quoted top "Brain-Truster" Prof. Moley and explained:

Both before and after Roosevelt took office, many deplored the absence of a coherent New Deal ideology. Moley later commented: "But to look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator."

Consider, for example, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). This domestic allotment measure was championed by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and vaguely described in my textbooks as a means of rescuing American farmers. By the time it was enacted in May 1933, the Great Depression was already three years old, and a substantial fraction of the entire American population had become totally impoverished, with many millions regularly going hungry.

Yet the policy proposed by the AAA was to pay and pressure farmers into destroying their livestock and crops, including slaughtering millions of little piglets and the sows who gave birth to them, with almost none of the meat being available for human consumption. For decades, farmers had always trained their mules to avoid trampling down crops, but they now forced the same mules to do exactly that, deliberately destroying food that could have fed a hungry nation. Delicious oranges were soaked with kerosene in order to prevent their possible consumption.

Offhand, I'm not sure I've ever heard of another country that forced its farmers to destroy food supplies at a time of widespread national hunger, and if Maoist China or Stalinist Russia had ever done such a strange thing, it surely would have been endlessly cited as proof of the total insanity of Communism. Unsurprisingly, many of these early elements of the AAA were very unpopular with the American public. So wouldn't it have made much more sense to instead buy all this food from farmers and then distribute it free of charge to those who were currently going hungry, or even just sell the surplus supplies overseas? Would the cost to the government have been so much greater?

The Social Security Act of 1935 was certainly an important and very positive measure, but according to Leuchtenberg and others, it was only finally enacted under the pressure of the Townsend Plan movement. This wildly popular grassroots campaign had been launched by a retired California physician and would have required the government to provide large monthly payments to every American over sixty, with up to twenty-five million people signing the Townsend petitions. In any event, Social Security had originally been pioneered by Bismarck's Germany a half-century earlier, and by the 1930s the U.S. was the only modern industrialized nation completely lacking any such system of old age pensions or disability benefits, so FDR's new legislation was hardly blazing any trails.

But the centerpiece of the legislative package that constituted the First New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which established the National Recovery Administration (NRA). This was intended to provide centralized government guidance and control over many private business practices, including determining their prices, wages, and production levels. The basic idea seems to have been for the federal government to exercise the same degree of control over ordinary businesses as it had done over much of the industrial production of military equipment during the First World War. Indeed, the director of the NRA was retired Gen. Hugh S. Johnson, who had similarly supervised the wartime industrial economy during 1917-1918.

So instead of enforcing our existing anti-monopoly laws in different economic sectors, the government now completely reversed that policy, applying government pressure and regulations to effectively create a series of national cartels. For decades, such monopolistic combinations had been illegal, but they were now essentially made mandatory.

Unfortunately, there is obviously a great difference between implementing such centralized controls during wartime and doing so during peacetime. Furthermore, a national program aimed at ensuring that industry absolutely maximized the production of weapons and munitions is entirely different from one intended to similarly control most aspects of a very modern and extremely complex national consumer economy. The later total failure of Soviet central planning eventually demonstrated this.

As described on the Wikipedia page, some of the enforcement aspects of the law seemed outrageous:

Individuals were arrested for not complying with these codes. For example, one small businessman was fined for violating the "Tailor's Code" by pressing a suit for 35 rather than NRA required 40 cents.

Wikipedia went on to quote a strong Roosevelt critic:

The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman's garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man's factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it.

The entry then explained:

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The NRA was famous for its bureaucracy. Journalist Raymond Clapper reported that between 4,000 and 5,000 business practices were prohibited by NRA orders that carried the force of law, which were contained in some 3,000 administrative orders running to over 10 million pages, and supplemented by what Clapper said were "innumerable opinions and directions from national, regional and code boards interpreting and enforcing provisions of the act."

Given such absolutely outrageous aspects of the law, it's hardly surprising that the system soon proved wildly unpopular. So after the NRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935 by a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court, the Roosevelt Administration made no effort to revive it. According to Brands:

The court's verdict against the NRA, and especially the unanimity of the decision, dealt a mortal blow to the New Deal, at least as originally configured...That same day the Supreme Court, by equally unanimous votes, demolished two other pillars of the New Deal.

 The First New Deal as American Fascism?

This actually relates to an important aspect of the NRA and several other major elements of the First New Deal enacted during FDR's "Hundred Days," considerations that were never mentioned in my introductory textbooks.

For most of my life, I'd never paid much attention to FDR or his New Deal policies, so I'd 0nly had a vague and quite orthodox understanding of those issues.

I remember that decades ago, a friend of mine in graduate school had once told me that the New Deal was based upon fascism, and over the years I'd sometimes seen that same accusation made in various libertarian venues, but I'd always regarded it as nonsense of an utterly ridiculous type. After all, throughout all of Roosevelt's terms in office, we continued to have free elections while none of FDR's harshest critics were ever seized in raids by masked members of a secret police force and tortured at hidden prisons. So calling the Roosevelt Administration and its New Deal "fascistic" seemed like total lunacy.

But what I'd failed to appreciate was that the term "fascism" had undergone considerable evolution over time.

As one of our main enemies in World War II, Benito Mussolini and his fascist system had naturally been massively demonized as might be expected during a major war. But he had originally come to power through semi-legal means in 1922, and for most of the years after that, the Italian leader and his political system had often been viewed quite favorably by many or most Americans. During those years, "fascism" lacked any of its extremely pejorative later connotations, and instead was merely the name that Mussolini gave to the political and economic system that he had created. Fascism represented a new synthesis of capitalism and socialism, under which private businesses still existed but were required to operate under certain government guidelines and often as members of particular national cartels.

Mussolini himself had been one of the leaders of Italian socialism prior to the outbreak of the First World War, at which point he and so many other European socialists abandoned internationalism for fierce support of their own native countries. Indeed, Mussolini's own family roots were strongly on the Left, and he had actually been named for the famous nineteenth century Mexican liberal leader Benito Juarez.

Communists naturally detested fascism, while many socialists also rejected Mussolini as a despised turncoat. But anti-Communist conservatives usually had a strongly positive view of his regime, and surprisingly enough the same was often also true of moderates, liberals, and progressives.

As a striking example of this, the liberal New York Times generally provided highly favorable coverage of Mussolini's fascist regime and its notable achievements, and this treatment was echoed throughout most of the rest of our mainstream media. Gov. Philip La Follette of Wisconsin, one of America's top progressive leaders, had a photograph of Mussolini on his setting-room wall near one of famed liberal Justice Louis Brandeis, representing two of the figures whom he most greatly admired. These were among the many surprising facts I discovered a half-dozen years ago when I read the fascinating 1972 work  Mussolini and Fascism, bearing the subtitle "The View from America" and published by Princeton University Press, with the author being the highly-regarded mainstream scholar John Patrick Diggins.

Most Americans favoring Italian fascism didn't endorse Mussolini's anti-democratic dictatorial practices for their own country, but they usually regarded his seizure of power as having been necessary to forestall a Communist revolution, which would have been a vastly worse outcome.

Mussolini's fascist economic system—based upon government planning, coordination, and the formation of cartels—was generally assumed to be separatable from his authoritarian political regime. So I think that fascism almost certainly did inspire many aspects of the NRA and various other planning- and cartel-based elements of the First New Deal.

Obviously by the time of World War II and during the years that followed, it became a vicious calumny to characterize any elements of FDR's New Deal as being "fascist" however much such statements might theoretically be justified.

Given these severe ideological constraints, a short but interesting book by a German academic scholar that I read about a dozen years ago followed an entirely contrary rhetorical approach.  Three New Deals was published in 2006 by noted cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and the other two "New Deals" of his title were Mussolini's fascism and Adolf Hitler's National Socialism.

All three of these national economic systems constituted various mixtures of capitalism and socialism, and by treating them together and comparing them side-by-side the author successfully demonstrated that they shared many important characteristics.

In his last chapter, Schivelbusch noted that each of these national economic systems put an important emphasis on public works, with a particular very high-profile project being promoted to demonstrate its great success.

For Italy, this was the draining and reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, a huge area of abandoned, malarial swampland in Central Italy. For Germany, the project was the construction of the Autobahns, with that system of highways laying the foundation for plans to provide most Germans with automobiles. And under FDR's New Deal, the project was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a system of publicly-built dams and other hydroelectric facilities aimed at bringing electricity to many millions of rural Southerners who had always lacked it.

The author explained that by the 1930s nearly all Germans were connected to the electrical grid, but relatively few owned automobiles, while in America, the situation was exactly reversed. Henry Ford had long since made cars ubiquitous in our country, but surprisingly enough, as late as 1930 only 10% of rural American households had access to electricity. The private utility companies that dominated the sector saw no business profit to be made in rural power, and this was one of the many reasons that hatred of the utility industry and support for public power had long been a central element of the progressive ideological camp. Thus, Roosevelt's TVA was one of the projects they most enthusiastically supported.

Schivelbusch's short epilogue focused upon  As We Go Marching, a book published more than sixty years earlier by a leading progressive journalist named John T. Flynn, who had taken a very similar position. According to the author, "Flynn has fallen into almost total obscurity" because his strong opposition to FDR's policies rendered him one of "history's losers," but he had actually been "one of the most insightful analysts of the New Deal."

The reprinted 1973 edition of Flynn's book included a strongly favorable preface by Ronald Radosh, a highly-regarded scholar then affiliated with Marxism and the radical New Left. Copies sold on Amazon are outrageously priced, but free PDF and ePub versions are available on  the Mises Institute website, as is an inexpensive paperback edition, and I recently purchased and read it for the first time.

Flynn's book was originally published in 1944 at the height of the wartime glorification of FDR and the concurrent demonization of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, so the contents were really quite remarkably courageous.

Flynn described the economic systems of all three countries as being "fascist," and the three sections of his book bore the following titles: "The Soil of Fascism: Italy," "The Bad Fascism: Germany," and "The Good Fascism: America." As someone quite critical of the fascist economic planning system, he noted the considerable overlap between the government policies of all three countries.

One major argument he made was that the policy of very detailed government planning strongly advocated by many New Dealers was inherently incompatible with a democratic, non-authoritarian political system, and this soon became obvious in the early New Deal period in the case of the NRA. Therefore, Flynn argued that either democracy or such detailed economic planning would probably eventually be abandoned, and writing in the middle of the war, he mistakenly predicted that the former was much more likely to happen.

 John T. Flynn and The Roosevelt Myth

Although this particular Flynn book was new to me, I'd already read a couple of others and one of them had greatly influenced my evolving views on both FDR and his New Deal policies.

Just as Schivelbusch stated, over the decades Flynn had "fallen into almost total obscurity," but as I began investigating the 1930s and the circumstances under which America had entered World War II, I discovered that Flynn had spent that decade as a progressive journalist of great influence and importance. As I  explained in a 2018 article:

Take the case of  John T. Flynn, probably unknown today to all but one American in a hundred, if even that...So imagine my surprise at discovering that throughout the 1930s he had been one of the single most influential liberal voices in American society, a writer on economics and politics whose status may have roughly approximated that of Paul Krugman, though with a strong muck-raking tinge. His weekly column in The New Republic allowed him to serve as a lodestar for America's progressive elites, while his regular appearances in Colliers, an illustrated mass circulation weekly reaching many millions of Americans, provided him a platform comparable to that of a major television personality in the later heyday of network TV.

To some extent, Flynn's prominence may be objectively quantified. A few years ago, I happened to mention his name to a well-read and committed liberal born in the 1930s, and she unsurprisingly drew a complete blank, but wondered if he might have been a little like  Walter Lippmann, the very famous columnist of that era. When I checked, I saw that across the hundreds of periodicals in my archiving system, there were just 23 articles by Lippmann from the 1930s but fully 489 by Flynn.

Much of Flynn's early prominence came from his important role in the 1932  Senate Pecora Commission, which had pilloried the grandees of Wall Street for the 1929 stock market collapse, and whose recommendations ultimately led to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other important financial reforms. Following an impressive career in newspaper journalism, he had moved over to The New Republic as a weekly columnist in 1930. Although initially sympathetic to Franklin Roosevelt's goals, he soon became skeptical about the effectiveness of his methods, noting the sluggish expansion of public works projects and wondering whether the vaunted NRA was actually more beneficial to big business owners than to ordinary workers.

As the years went by, his criticism of the Roosevelt Administration turned harsher on economic and eventually foreign policy grounds, and he incurred its enormous hostility as a consequence. Roosevelt began sending personal letters to leading editors demanding that Flynn be barred from any prominent American print outlet, and perhaps as a consequence he lost his longstanding New Republic column immediately following FDR's 1940 reelection, and his name disappeared from mainstream periodicals. However, he still authored a number of best-selling books over the years sharply attacking Roosevelt, and after the war his byline occasionally surfaced in much less mainstream and influential publications. A decade ago the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute republished a couple of Flynn's books, and  a lengthy introduction by Prof. Ralph Raico sketched in some of this background.

Prof. Raico's introduction  described some of these facts:

Roosevelt, who always viewed any criticism of himself as a perversion of true democracy, was outraged. The president of the United States wrote a personal letter to a magazine editor declaring that Flynn "should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly." Whether or not as a consequence of FDR's spite, the New Republic dropped the column by Flynn it had been publishing since 1933, a sign things were changing in the circles of left-liberalism. In the years to come, FDR would use the FBI, the IRS, and other agencies to spy on, harass, and intimidate his critics. This—and his lying, his constant lying—more than any putative mental affliction, explains the hatred that so many cherished for Franklin Roosevelt.

Consider what our history books would say if there existed hard evidence that in the years after 9/11, President George W. Bush had personally demanded that CBS fire Dan Rather and that no other media outlet provide him with any platform.

Raico had written his introduction for Flynn's postwar bestseller on FDR and the discussion of its shocking contents became an important part of  my 2018 article:

Supporters of my local Palo Alto library hold a monthly book sale at which donated items are sold for a pittance, and I usually drop by to browse the shelves out of curiosity for what I might find. A few years ago, I happened to notice one of Flynn's FDR books, published in 1948, and bought it for a quarter. The material presented on the yellowing pages of  The Roosevelt Myth were eye-opening to me.

Anyone can write a book saying anything, and if some obscure right-winger leveled astonishing charges against a liberal president, I might not pay much attention. But if Paul Krugman had spent years expressing growing doubts about Barack Obama's policies and effectiveness, then finally turned against him and published a national best-seller denouncing his administration, surely those opinions would carry much more weight. And so it was with Flynn's accusations against Roosevelt.

I am no expert on the New Deal Era, but Flynn's work seemed soberly and persuasively written, although in a journalistic muck-raking style, and he makes all sorts of claims I had never previously encountered. My software system provides cross-referenced book reviews and I read  a dozen of these. A few from around the time of the book's publication were extremely critical, denouncing the contents as total nonsense written by a notoriously crazed "Roosevelt-hater." But no specific rebuttals were provided and the general tone was much like that of the numerous Wall Street Journal op-eds from the mid-2000s which issued blanket denunciations of books written by "crazed Bush-haters." Indeed, the sum-total of one 1949 review consisted of the single sentence "Unadulterated venom from a professional F.D.R.-hater." However, other, more recent reviews, admittedly drawn from the libertarian camp, were overwhelmingly favorable. Having no great expertise, I cannot effectively judge.

But Flynn's claims were extremely precise, detailed, and specific, including numerous names, dates, and references. Most surprisingly, he accused the Roosevelts of exhibiting  an extraordinary degree of familial financial corruption, which he claimed may have been unprecedented in American history. Apparently, despite his wealthy and elite background FDR's eldest son Elliott never attended college and had essentially no professional qualifications in anything. But soon after FDR became president, he began soliciting large personal payments and "investments" from wealthy businessmen who needed favors from the massively growing federal government, and seemingly did so with FDR's full knowledge and approval. The situation sounded a little like Billy Carter's notorious activities during the late 1970s, but the money involved totaled as much as $50 million in present-day dollars relative to the household income of that era. I had never heard a word about this.

Even more shocking was the case of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who also had never attended college and apparently had little formal education of any sort. Soon after FDR was inaugurated, she began a major round of very well-paid personal advertising for corporate consumer products such as soap and took all sorts of other large payments over the next few years from various businesses, especially those crucially dependent upon government regulatory decisions. Imagine if recent First Ladies such as Michelle Obama or Laura Bush were constantly seen in TV ads hawking cars and diapers and fast food. The payments Eleanor personally received over the course of the FDR's dozen years in office allegedly came to an astonishing $150 million, again relative to current family incomes. This, too, was something that I had never suspected. And all this was occurring during the very depths of the Great Depression, when a huge fraction of the country was desperately poor. Perhaps Juan and Eva Peron just didn't hire the right PR people or simply aimed too low.

Obviously, the unprecedented growth in the spending and regulatory power of the federal government during the New Deal years increased opportunities for this sort of personal graft by an enormous amount. But Flynn notes how odd the situation seemed since FDR's inherited fortune meant that he had already come into office as one of the wealthiest presidents of modern times. And as far as I've heard, his successor Harry S. Truman left the White House about as poor as he had entered it.

Some of Flynn's other shocking claims were easier to verify. He argues that the New Deal was largely a failure and in support of that contention notes that when FDR entered office in 1933 there were 11 million unemployed and in 1938 after six years of enormous government spending and deficits and the creation of an alphabet soup of New Deal programs there were...11 million unemployed. That claim appears to be factually correct...

Leaving aside the extraordinary level of family financial corruption alleged by Flynn, his portrayal of FDR reminds me more of "W" than any other recent president. We must remember that "W" had run for office promising a "humble" foreign policy and the removal of various kinds of anti-Muslim government profiling, but quickly reversed himself when the 9/11 attacks gave him the opportunity to enter the history books as a "war president."

The background of the book's appearance provides an indication of the publication obstacles faced by critics of government policy. Notwithstanding Flynn's outsize reputation and his previous string of best-sellers, his manuscript was rejected by virtually every major publisher, and in desperation, he finally turned to an obscure Irish-American house. Yet despite such an inauspicious launch and his near-complete exclusion from mainstream media outlets, his book quickly rose to the #2 spot on The New York Times list. Merely a decade earlier, he had been at the pinnacle of American influence, and the ongoing blacklisting by the mainstream media had apparently not yet fully managed to smother his memory.

•  American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 11, 2018 • 5,500 Words

Having now carefully read more than 3,000 pages of very mainstream books and biographies on FDR and the policies of his presidential administration, I decided to slightly balance that material by rereading Flynn's 1948 bestseller, whose contents probably amounted to much less than one-tenth of that total. And despite the enormous research and detail that obviously went into those very thick texts by Brants, Smith, and Kennedy, as well as various other books, I actually concluded that Flynn's treatment may have provided the more accurate, candid, and realistic assessment of the personal characteristics and public policies of the most important American president of the twentieth century.

Aside from the print copies sold on Amazon, PDF and ePub versions of the book may be freely downloaded from  the Mises Institute, which sells the 1974 paperback edition, and a convenient HTML copy may also be read on this website:

•  The Roosevelt Myth
• John T. Flynn • 1948 • 159,000 Words

The bibliography of the Smith book is exceptionally long, running 35 pages and containing perhaps 1,000 entries, but Flynn's book is omitted, and his name never appears anywhere in the index. Flynn's name is equally absent from the Kennedy, Brands, and Leuchtenburg books, raising serious doubts as to whether any of those authors were even aware of him despite their many years of research on the topic.

Once again, I found Flynn's description of the unprecedented graft obtained by close Roosevelt family members just as shocking and apparently well-documented as I had remembered from years ago. Yet these striking facts seem to have almost entirely vanished from the historical record, with no hint found anywhere in FDR's lengthy main Wikipedia page or various other related ones that I examined.

However, I did discover some brief mentions in the two exhaustive FDR biographies and these seemed to fully confirm Flynn's accusations.

The Smith book devoted several paragraphs to the unseemly financial dealings of Elliott Roosevelt, explaining that the wealthy publisher William Randolph Hearst almost immediately put him on the payroll at a "princely salary" of a million or two million dollars a year in present-day terms, going on to say that "Elliott was always on the lookout for easy money, invariably trading on the family name." Smith told the story of how FDR's son attempted to broker a 1934 deal to sell Dutch airplanes to the Soviet Union for which he would be paid a $25 million commission, and after the deal fell through and he only received $250,000, he failed to report that sum on his income taxes.

Just as Flynn claimed, Elliott also solicited large payments from a major corporation facing an antitrust suit by the FTC and he called his father to enlist the president's support, with FDR telling the CEO that "I will appreciate anything you do for him."

None of this material appears anywhere in the Brands book, but that biographer does provide a couple of paragraphs on the enormous payments made to Eleanor Roosevelt for some of her broadcasts and writings, just as Flynn had claimed. The biographer defended the First Lady by saying she arranged to donate some of those funds to the American Friends Service Committee, but according to Flynn "the defense that she pours it out to charity has been pretty well exploded." Flynn's chapter on these very sordid dealings had the title  "The White House Goes into Business" and I suggest that those so interested read it and decide for themselves.

 The Many Historical Revelations of John T. Flynn

Flynn's 1948 bestseller provided a cornucopia of other important factual material that was either entirely omitted from the thousands of pages I had recently read on FDR, or else so extremely minimized as to be almost invisible. Although I cannot easily verify most of those claims, it seems unconscionable that so many of them have completely vanished from the historical record.

During the early 1930s, four months separated the November election of a new president and his inauguration in March, and in early 1933 this interregnum led to a huge financial crisis as waves of banks suddenly began failing across America. Fearful depositors tried to withdraw their savings, and with their local banks unable to meet those unexpected demands, the latter failed, further raising depositor fears and producing runs on additional banks. All our standard histories describe how this financial chain-reaction so severely deepened the existing Great Depression. For example, Smith wrote:

Roosevelt was elected on November 8. Inauguration was not until March 4. That four-month hiatus, coinciding with the fourth winter of the Depression, proved the most harrowing in American memory. Three years of hard times had cut national income in half. Five thousand bank failures had wiped out 9 million savings accounts.

Hoover apparently believed that at least some of these bank failures were due to public fears of Roosevelt's possible policies, and he sent an urgent 14-page personal note to the new president-elect, urging that FDR make some public statement, whether alone or in conjunction with Hoover, in order to help restore public confidence and avert this ongoing calamity. But FDR completely ignored this plea and did nothing. All of this is solidly accepted history.

However,  according to Flynn, Roosevelt's inaction was actually a deeply cynical move, apparently based on his calculation that a further economic collapse in the last days of the Hoover Administration would redound to his own benefit by allowing him to enter office at the absolute nadir of America's economic disaster. As he put it:

There must be some explanation of this. And the explanation is simple, as we shall see. Hoover was struggling to save as many banks as possible. Every day the crisis was allowed to run meant the closing of more banks, the flight of more gold, the loss of more tens of millions and hundreds of millions in savings, in values, in business losses. But Hoover was powerless to do anything effective without the concurrence of the new President because he lacked powers to act alone and he would have to get the powers from Congress, or at least an assurance that Congress would validate his assumption of powers. Roosevelt had no wish to stem the panic. The onrushing tide of disaster was sweeping the slate clean for him—at the cost of billions to investors and depositors. The greater the catastrophe in which Hoover went out of power the greater would be the acclaim when Roosevelt assumed power.

Neither of the major FDR biographies raised this disturbing possibility, with Smith even ridiculing conservative suspicions that Roosevelt was taking such deliberate action in order to pave the way towards socialism. But Kennedy's Oxford history volume quoted Raymond Moley, a top FDR advisor and the head of his celebrated "Brain Trust" as apparently substantiating Flynn's shocking accusation:

On his side, as Moley later commented, Roosevelt "either did not realize how serious the situation was or...preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation. In any event," Moley somewhat cynically concluded, "his actions during the period from February 18th to March 3d would conform to any such motive on his part.

The first-hand information provided in Flynn's book may also correct the historical record regarding some of the events leading up to our involvement in World War II, thus providing important information that nearly all later historians may have missed.

The Neutrality Acts of the mid-1930s were intended to prevent any repetition of America's slippery slide into direct involvement in the First World War, a historical situation that by the 1930s had been almost universally condemned by our voters and elected officials. So after World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, these laws severely restricted FDR's efforts to provide military support to the Allies, and he needed to fight bitter political battles to modify or repeal the legislation, while meanwhile taking actions that seemed to violate both their letter and their spirit. My introductory textbooks had always indicated that these laws had been passed over FDR's strong objections.

This history is explicitly stated in the Wikipedia page on the Neutrality Acts, and the three very comprehensive books I read took the same position, with Smith declaring that FDR objected to"being shackled"in that way, and the other authors providing roughly similar indications. According to this account, the powerful bloc of Isolationists in Congress had passed those enormously popular measures, and we are told that FDR was compelled to sign rather than veto the bills, although he had certainly never supported such restrictions on his foreign policy activities.

However, according to Flynn the true facts were entirely different, and  his own account of what had actually happened is sufficiently important that it is worth quoting at considerable length:

These war moves were of profound interest to the American people. There was a general feeling that our well-intentioned entry into the First World War had been ill-advised, that none of the grandiose moral objectives had been achieved, that all the tall talk about ending war forever and bringing a reign of peace through the League had been a ghastly failure, that our allies had taunted us with our selfishness for making money out of the war, asked for cancellation of the war debts and called us Uncle Shylock. There was a feeling that we had been drawn into the war through the ill-considered day-to-day decisions made by the administration then in power and that we had been lured in by permitting ourselves to tap the resources of war as an opportunity for business prosperity.

Americans were generally decided that we would not make that mistake again and out of this grew the now famous Neutrality legislation. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in his memoirs, has denounced the Special Senate Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry, which was headed by Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, for having put upon our statute books this Neutrality Act. It is possible that Secretary Hull to this day does not know how the Neutrality Act came to be passed, since the President was in the habit—as Mr. Hull himself has demonstrated—of carrying out important projects in international affairs without consulting his Secretary of State.

The origin of the Neutrality Act has never, I believe, been made public before. The writer was in a position to know the facts and now states them for the first time. I was acting as one of the advisers of the Nye Committee. On March 20, 1935, Senator Nye brought the Committee into executive session. There he informed the members and myself that he had just received a message from the President requesting him to bring the Committee or as many members as possible, with him to the White House at once. I do not recall how many members went with Senator Nye, but they went at once and there the President proceeded to expatiate at some length upon the causes of war, based upon his own personal experiences in war.

He then declared that he thought the wise thing for the Committee to do would be to prepare an act which would guarantee, in the event of a European war, the absolute neutrality of the American people. This was the first proposal for a Neutrality Act and it came from the President of the United States, Mr. Hull's superior at the time. Several senators expressed prompt agreement. The President then said he thought William Jennings Bryan was right in 1916 on this subject. Senator Bennett Clark, whose father had been defeated for the presidential nomination by Bryan's leadership, laughed a little sardonically and said"Well, so far as I am concerned, I have no use for William Jennings Bryan or any of the things he stood for, but I do agree with him on that."This referred to the position taken by Bryan that American citizens should be prohibited from traveling on foreign ships in time of war or on American ships into the war zones.

The Committee was greatly pleased with the President's suggestion and left the White House in complete agreement with him. Senator Nye later prepared, after consultation with his colleagues, the first draft of the famous Neutrality Act, which generally was along the lines suggested by the President. It was introduced in the Senate and House and passed by very large majorities. It had a time limit of two years and at the expiration of the time limit it was passed again by enormous majorities in both houses.

The President promptly applied the law with a good deal of gusto when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, and when the Spanish Civil War broke out and the President found the Act did not apply to civil wars but only to wars between countries, he sent for Senator Nye, requested him to have the law amended immediately to apply to civil war, all of which was done and the President promptly declared the Neutrality Act in force as to Spain.

In the 1936 campaign, in the famous address at Chautauqua already referred to, the President described the conditions which bring countries into war. He had said:"Industrial and agricultural production having a war market may give immense fortunes to a few men. For a nation as a whole it produces disaster."He described how war profits had sterilized our farms, extended monopoly, produced unjustified expansion of industry and a price level that dislocated relations between debtor and creditor. And then he said with complete approval:"The Congress of the United States has given me certain authority to provide safeguards of American neutrality in case of war"and he warned the nation that this was not enough unless the President himself was one who was willing to use the authority.

Yet for years writers dealing with this subject have referred to the Neutrality Acts as if they were something that had been imposed on the President against his better judgment and for the purpose of hamstringing him in the conduct of foreign affairs. The whole policy of the Neutrality Acts has been referred to as the"neutrality blunder"as if it were the blunder of the President's critics instead of one in which he had not only shared but which he had actually initiated. This is just one more thing the President did in the field of foreign affairs without consulting Mr. Hull and he probably never confided to him that he had originated the idea.

Roosevelt had said in his 1936 campaign that"the effective maintenance of American neutrality depends today as in the past on the wisdom and determination of whoever at the moment occupies the office of President of the United States and Secretary of State."And he had warned that in the event of war abroad we would have to be on guard against those seeking"fool's gold,"those who would find it hard to look beyond,"to realize the inevitable penalties, the inevitable day of reckoning that comes from a false prosperity."We can keep out of war, he promised, "if those who watch and desire have a sufficiently detailed understanding of international affairs to make certain that the small decisions of today do not lead toward war and if at the same time they possess the courage to say no to those who selfishly or unwisely would lead us into war." This is what was called isolationism.

Flynn had been one of the most influential progressive journalists in America, and unless he was flat-out lying in his huge 1948 bestseller about those important political events that he had personally experienced, virtually all our modern historians have gotten their facts entirely wrong, merely repeated those errors back and forth to each other during the last ninety years.

 President Roosevelt and the Origins of World War II

Flynn's long-forgotten work provides even more explosive information regarding the outbreak of World War II and America's involvement in that global conflict. As I wrote  earlier this year:

Flynn noted that by the mid-1930s FDR's various governmental schemes had failed to revive the American economy, while in 1937 a new economic collapse spiked unemployment back to the same levels as when the president had first entered office, confirming that harsh verdict of failure. Therefore, Flynn alleged that by late 1937, FDR had turned towards an aggressive foreign policy aimed at involving the country in a major foreign war, primarily because he believed that this was the only route out of his desperate economic and political box, a stratagem not unknown among national leaders throughout history. Indeed, in  his January 5, 1938 New Republic column, Flynn had already alerted his disbelieving readers to the looming prospect of a large naval military build-up and warfare on the horizon after a top Roosevelt adviser had privately boasted to him that a large bout of"military Keynesianism"and a major foreign war would cure the country's seemingly insurmountable economic problems. At that time, war with Japan, possibly over Latin American interests, seemed the intended goal, but developing events in Europe soon persuaded FDR that orchestrating a general war against Germany was the best course of action. Flynn fleshed out many of the additional details in his later 1948 book.

Flynn's remarkable January 1938 prediction that Roosevelt planned to foment a major war for domestic political reasons seems fully confirmed by diplomatic disclosures, with memoirs and other historical documents obtained by later researchers revealing that FDR ordered his diplomats to exert enormous pressure upon both the British and Polish governments to avoid any negotiated settlement with Germany, thereby leading to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

The last point is an important one since the confidential opinions of those closest to important historical events should be accorded considerable evidentiary weight. In  a 2019 article John Wear mustered the numerous contemporaneous assessments that implicated FDR as a pivotal figure in orchestrating the world war by his constant pressure upon the British political leadership, a policy that he even privately admitted could mean his impeachment if revealed. Among other testimony, we have the statements of the Polish and British ambassadors to Washington and the American ambassador to London, who also passed along the concurring opinion of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain himself. Indeed, the German capture and publication of secret Polish diplomatic documents in 1939 had already revealed much of this information, and journalist William Henry Chamberlin confirmed their authenticity in his 1950 book. But since the mainstream media never reported any of these facts, they remain little known even today.

Thus, Flynn levied the monumental accusation that FDR had deliberately orchestrated the outbreak of World War II as a means of rescuing his presidency from the increasingly obvious economic failure produced by his haphazard collection of unsuccessful New Deal programs.

No suggestion of this explosive scenario has ever appeared anywhere in our modern historiography nor was it found in the very thick books on Roosevelt and his presidency that I recently read.

But a careful reading of those latter works certainly seems to strengthen the credibility of Flynn's remarkable claims. All of these absolutely mainstream and authoritative books of history and biography emphasize that despite FDR's New Deal programs and contrary to the popular mythology, America remained mired in the Great Depression until the outbreak of World War II. Moreover, FDR's political standing had reached a low ebb by 1938 until his presidency was rescued by that same terrible war, which also allowed him to successfully seek an unprecedented third and fourth term in office.

Consider, for example, these sentences from the Editor's Introduction to Kennedy's 950 page volume in the Oxford History series, describing what finally ended the Great Depression:

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What [the New Deal] did not do was to end the Great Depression and restore prosperity. That proved in the end to be the incidental and ironic work of a terrible war.

It was a war—really two wars—that the will of the people as expressed repeatedly by congressional majorities wanted no part in.

A chapter with the title"The Ordeal of Franklin Roosevelt"appears several hundred pages later. There, Kennedy described the major political defeats that FDR suffered in 1937, including the widespread repudiation of his "Court-Packing"plan for the U.S. Supreme Court. But the author explained that these were soon followed by even more serious economic problems:

By the end of 1938 liberal reformers were everywhere in retreat. As the next electoral season of 1940 loomed, noted an observer, the New Deal "has been reduced to a movement with no program, with no effective political organization, with no vast popular party strength behind it, and with no candidate.

Political checkmate went hand in hand with policy stalemate, as a renewed economic crisis calamitously revealed. In May 1937 the economic recovery building since 1933 had crested, well short of 1929 levels of employment. By August the economy was once again sliding measurably downward; in September, rapidly downward. In October the stock market cracked. The dread specter of 1929 once again haunted the country. "We are headed right into another Depression," Morgenthau warned the president, and he was right. Conditions deteriorated with astonishing speed, swiftly eclipsing the rate of economic decay that had destroyed Herbert Hoover. Within weeks, stocks gave up more than a third of their value. Corporate profits plunged nearly 80 percent. Steel production in the year's last quarter sank to one-fourth of its mid-1937 size...By the end of the winter of 1937-38, more than two million workers had received layoff notices. They expanded the already crowded ranks of the unemployed to more than ten million souls, or 19 percent of the work force, numbers that evoked grim comparison with the Hoover years.

Kennedy then opened the next chapter by explaining how the sudden outbreak of World War II completely redeemed the manifest economic failure of FDR's New Deal:

Not with a bang, but with a whimper, the New Deal petered out in 1938...As it happened, recovery awaited not the release of more New Deal energies but the unleashing of the dogs of war...the war brought recovery at last, a recovery that inaugurated the most prosperous quarter century America had ever known.

In very similar fashion, the Smith biography contained a chapter entitled "Low Tide," opening with the explanation that his 1937 political defeats meant that "FDR had lost control of the party." This was soon followed by an economic collapse that the author characterized as a "depression within the depression," presenting much the same disastrous economic statistics that Kennedy did.

Smith closed that chapter with a summary of Roosevelt's seemingly hopeless political prospects:

Roosevelt was a lame duck...If the downward momentum continued, the Republicans had their best shot at the White House since 1928. "Clearly," wrote Washington newsman Raymond Clapper, "President Roosevelt could not run for a third term even if he so desired."

But Smith then opened the next chapter with the foreign policy developments involving Japan and Germany that were about to rescue FDR from his political and economic predicament. The author explained that up until that point Roosevelt's "involvement in foreign affairs had been sporadic," and exactly the same had been the case for his biographer. But suddenly that situation now changed, and the remaining one-third of Smith's volume would be overwhelmingly focused on the topic of the war.

Brands was even more explicit in his separation of the domestic and foreign policy segments of FDR's long presidency, dividing his coverage of those years into two multi-hundred-page sections that are split by the year 1937. He ended the first section with Roosevelt's political defeat, which included his abandonment by many of his most faithful progressive allies in Congress, then opened the next long section with the following sentences, explaining how the war in Europe was about to change everything:

And then events rode to his rescue. Not at once, and not in the way Roosevelt or anyone else would have wished, but in such fashion as to allow a subtle and canny leader to make the most of them.

If Roosevelt's first term was all about domestic policy, his second term centered increasingly on foreign affairs.

In the first few pages of that new section, Brands like Kennedy and Smith evocatively described the terrible 1937 domestic economic collapse that soon led FDR to turn to foreign policy as his political lifeline:

The stock market collapsed, with the Dow Jones average plunging from 190 in August to 115 in October. Wealth vanished more rapidly than at the worst of the 1929 crash. Corporate profits plummeted by four-fifths. Steel production fell by three-quarters. Unsold autos jammed factory and dealer lots. As the furnaces were banked and the assembly lines shut down, two million people lost their jobs, crowding back onto the relief rolls Roosevelt had hoped to render obsolete.

Brands, Kennedy, and Smith are very mainstream academics, and the many hundreds of pages they devoted to the origins and course of World War II closely conformed to the orthodox historical narrative of the last several generations, never raising any doubts or suspicions that matters might have sometimes been a little different from what our standard history textbooks have always described.

The Second World War was to become such a central element of FDR's presidency that Brands had opened his book with a prologue of a dozen pages describing the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that finally took America into the conflict, and his account provided not the slightest hint of anything doubtful regarding the circumstances of that military disaster. The books by Kennedy and Smith were nearly as oblivious, casually dismissing any contrary notions in a sentence or two.

All of these authors seemed entirely unaware of Flynn's existence, and scarcely more aware of the many other once highly-regarded writers and scholars of that same era who very much shared many of Flynn's conclusions. In an article last month, I briefly sketched out some of the intriguing elements of the Pearl Harbor attack that took place under President Roosevelt. None of these facts were mentioned anywhere in the three 900 page volumes of mainstream history and biography on FDR that I had recently read:

Over the years, diplomatic historians have demonstrated that faced with such stubborn domestic opposition to direct military intervention in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration undertook a wide range of deeply hostile actions against Japan, directly intended to provoke an attack and thereby achieve  a "back door to war" as Prof. Charles C. Tansill later entitled his important 1952 book on that history. These measures included a complete freeze on Japanese assets, an embargo on the oil absolutely vital to the Japanese military, and the summary rejection of the Japanese Prime Minister's personal plea to hold top-level governmental negotiations aimed at maintaining peace. As early as May 1940, FDR had ordered the Pacific Fleet relocated from its San Diego home port to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, a decision strongly opposed as unnecessarily provocative and dangerous by its commanding admiral James Richardson, who was fired as a result.

Thus, the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 actually marked the successful conclusion of Roosevelt's diplomatic strategy by putting America into the war. Indeed, some scholars have even pointed to considerable evidence that the highest levels of the U.S. government were fully aware of the impending attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor and allowed it to proceed. This was intended to ensure that sufficiently heavy American casualties would produce a vengeful nation united for war, thus sweeping aside all popular obstacles to our full-scale involvement in the global military conflict.

By 1941 the U.S. had broken all the Japanese diplomatic codes and was freely reading their secret communications, raising obvious questions about why our local commanders in Hawaii were not warned of the planned attack on their forces. Tansill and a former chief researcher for the Congressional investigating committee made this case in the 1953 Barnes volume, and the following year a former US admiral published  The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, providing similar arguments at much greater length. This book also included an introduction by one of America's highest-ranking World War II naval commanders, who fully endorsed the controversial theory.

In 2000, journalist Robert M. Stinnett published  a wealth of additional supporting evidence, based upon his eight years of archival research. A telling point made by Stinnett was that if Washington had warned the Pearl Harbor commanders, their resulting defensive preparations would have been noticed by the local Japanese spies and relayed to the approaching task force; and with the element of surprise lost, the attack probably would have been aborted, thus frustrating all of FDR's long-standing plans for war.

There was also a very strange domestic incident that immediately followed the Pearl Harbor attack, one that has attracted far too little attention. In that era, films were the most powerful popular media, and although Gentiles constituted 97% of the population, they controlled only one of the major studios; perhaps coincidentally, Walt Disney was also the only high-ranking Hollywood figure perched squarely within the anti-war camp. And the day after the surprise Japanese attack,  hundreds of U.S. troops seized control of Disney Studios, allegedly in order to help defend California from Japanese forces located thousands of miles away, with the military occupation continuing for the next eight months. Consider what suspicious minds might have thought if on September 12, 2001, President Bush had immediately ordered his military to seize the CBS network offices, claiming that such a step was necessary to help protect New York City against further Islamicist attacks.

Pearl Harbor was bombed on a Sunday and unless FDR and his top aides were fully aware of the pending Japanese assault, they surely would have been totally preoccupied with the aftermath of the disaster. It seems highly unlikely that the U.S. military would have been ready to seize control of Disney studios early Monday morning following an actual "surprise" attack.

•  The True History of World War II
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 2, 2025 • 14,300 Words

Perhaps the single most famous public speech that President Franklin Roosevelt gave during his twelve years in office came in the wake of the sudden Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor, an attack that killed some 2,400 American servicemen. And his most famous line in that speech declared that December 7, 1941 would be the "date that will live in infamy."

If more Americans were to read the books by John T. Flynn and some of his other contemporaries, they would certainly still endorse that ringing phrase made famous by our American president, but perhaps give it a new meaning much less favorable to Franklin Roosevelt's memory.

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