Many consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be  our third greatest president.  In books such as The New Dealers’s War,  Thomas Fleming, 2001, the forgotten man, Amity Shlaes, 2007, however, the case is being made that he is due for re-evaluation.

Not all went as well with FDR as we have been taught.  Unemployment was still 20% in 1939.  There was a severe recession in 1937.  Europe recovered from the depression much faster than did the United States.  Eight years into his presidency, we were not prepared for war, a war easily foreseeable.   In the 1940 campaign, he promised mothers he would not send their sons to war.   He placed Japanese American citizens in detention camps, he prevented Jews from emigrating from Europe.  He actually sent ships with fleeing Jews back into the clutches of Hitler.

FDR shelved Einstein’s famous warning about the possibility of an atom bomb.  The English had to urge on the Manhattan Project.  He did not move to support anti-lynching legislation.  His National Recovery Board supported monopoly price fixing and collusion in markets, placing small business at great disadvantage.  It was ruled unconstitutional, unanimously.  He tried to change the 150 year old make up of the Supreme Court.  He taxed the ‘little guy’ with excise taxes, and raised taxes overall,  and enormously increased government regulation.  The NRA in 2 years created more federal law that all the previous years of the nation since 1789.

The Great Depression turned out to be the one exception of the ‘boom and busts’ of the US economy  that didn’t quickly resolve, being the only one in which government didn’t act to increase the incentives of investing and the small business economy. It is as if he consciously hampered the recovery of the economy in order to justify increasing federal power.  He targeted political enemies with IRS investigations, and muscled the elections of congressional leaders.  Far from having a ‘first class temperment’, he manipulated,  frustrated, and infuriated his appointees, and staff.  Many abandoned him.

But he was a political success.  The New Deal was a political deal.  FDR personally directed New Deal funds for political gain, lavishing his supporters with government funds, denying it to those that disagreed with him.   He was a charming public speaker, he cultivated and pressured the press to support his line, and gloss over his contradictions.  He spoke a strong populist game, but he bought elections with New Deal funding programs.   In his great electoral victory of 1936, federal spending outpaced all local and state spending for the first time.  He didn’t hesitate to say opposing things to opposing audiences.

FDR died in office, galvanizing his image of victorious service to the nation, but he brought Tamany Hall to the Washington, D. C.