Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy

[steve2470]

259. agreed

For some perspective, let me share this, that I ran into last night:

At neither end of the ideological spectrum did respect for civility of discourse restrain the Roosevelt-haters. The Communist leader Earl Browder said that FDR was "carrying out more thoroughly and brutally than even Hoover the capitalist attack against the masses," and the domestic fascist William Dudley Pelley called the President the "lowest form of human worm - according to Gentile standards." One critic accused him of "blathering platitudes like a parson on vacation." and another wrote to him savagely, "If you were a good honest man, Jesus Christ would not have crippled you." It was in a formal address to the Chicago Bar Association, not in a harangue to an extremist rally, that a United States Senator from Minnesota did not hesitate to liken Roosevelt to the beast of the Apocalypse," "who set his slimy mark on everything."[4]

Roosevelt, his critics maintained, had shown himself to be a man without principles. Herbert Hoover called him a "chameleon on plaid," while H. L. Mencken said, "If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday." The Sage of Baltimore declared, "I am advocating making him king in order that we may behead him in case he goes too far beyond the limits of the endurable."[5]

A good number of historians as well have found fault with FDR. New Left writers have chided him for offering a "profoundly conservative" response to a situation that had the potential for revolutionary change, while commentators of no particular persuasion have criticized him for failing to bring the country out of the Depression short of war, for maneuvering America into World War II (or for not taking the nation to war soon enough, for refusing to advocate civil rights legislation, for permitting Jews to perish in Hitler's death camps, and for sanctioning the internment of Japanese-Americans. Even a historian who thought well of him, Allan Nevins, wrote that "his mind, compared with that of Woodrow Wilson, sometimes appears superficial, and...he possessed no such intellectual versatility as Thomas Jefferson - to say nothing of Winston Churchill." Nevins added: "In respect to character, similarly, he had traits of an admirable kind; but...even in combination they fell short of a truly Roman weight of virtue."[6]

Roosevelt has been castigated especially for his inability to develop any grand design. Most great leaders have had an idea they wanted to impose, noted a contemporary critic, "whereas Roosevelt, if he has one, has successfully concealed it." Similarly, the political scientist C. Herman Pritchett later concluded that the New Deal never produced "any consistent social and economic philosophy to give meaning and purpose to its various action programs." He added,

more at this link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fdryears.htm