COP:New Deal or Raw Deal? The Myth that is FDR

Ben-Peter Terpstra

It may seem hard to believe that a man like Franklin D. Roosevelt could (a) torture a major world economy and (b) receive uncritical praise from antiwar historians. Or that such a racist President is still stimulating Democrats. Compelling and convincing, Burton Folsom Junior’s provocative book New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America sets out to measure the famous President’s actions against his promises. Under former President Herbert Hoover we see high unemployment, but under FDR it explodes. The grand leader, who wanted to break with tradition, ends up breaking American families, blacks, women, and all the other “minority groups” Democrats insist they care for. In many ways, the New Deal stimulated court packing, reprehensible price fixing and regressive taxes, or, in a word: socialism.

Thankfully, Folsom, an economic historian, doesn’t aim to appease romanticists. He knows that “FDR, liberal rhetoric notwithstanding, did little to advance civil rights. Why, for example, did he refuse to endorse the antilynching bills that were filibustered by southern Democrats in the Senate in 1937 and 1939? That would have been politically possible and politically desirable for someone determined to promote liberal ideas.”

I accept that FDR’s entry into World War II was nothing to sing about either – and I’m no pacifist. For starters, he was a day late and a dollar short. One of the Democrat Party’s most revered men also interned American citizens of Japanese descent, including Christian girls with pigtails and little boys with baseball bats – a horror chapter addressed by Republican Reagan in the 1980s.

Innocent Japanese-Americans were not alone. “Now [December 1934] there are a lot of us [who] will choose suicide in preference to being herded into the poor house,” one 80-year-old woman wrote, and many shared her despair. Turning to the records too, we see that suicides remained consistently high throughout the progressive 1930s.

Across the board, the Stalin-praising Democrat lived in a fantasy world. Turning to the records again, we see plummeting car sales under FDR, more business failures, low investments in patent applications for inventions and skyrocketing real estate foreclosures. But in some ways that doesn’t matter when you have subservient scribblers. To campaigning journalists, Roosevelt was a god-man.

While Democrats rightly remind us about the day an African-American Olympian humiliated Nazi Germany, few provide us with context. “The two most prominent blacks in the 1930s were track star Jesse Owens and heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis. Owens won four gold medals in Berlin at the 1936 Olympics, defying Hitler and the overtly racist Germans. Yet Roosevelt refused to invite Owens to the White House, or even send him a congratulatory telegram.” Owens was an anti-lynching Republican.

More disturbingly, Folsom refers to America’s so-called accidental deaths, from suspiciously convenient falls to train-track-related accidents. In the golden days of the New Deal too, white life expectancies were hit hard, and African-Americans harder still. “In 1933, black Americans could expect to live only 54.7 years, but in 1940 that had dropped to 53.1 years. Both before and after the Great Depression, the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites had narrowed, but from 1933 to 1940 it actually widened.”

Unlike the Democrat Party’s President Woodrow Wilson – who, according to Sigmund Freud, was a complete fruitcake – FDR was better able to manage public opinion and break with the Constitution. Even his son Elliott, a bonny prince, openly confessed that daddy-dear “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.” It was the best of times for Washington’s white chardonnay socialists, indeed.

“From time to time,” writes Folsom “Roosevelt admitted that he lied” but only for the right reasons (or when it suited sir). “I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell lies if it will help win the war,” confessed the President, and this was probably his finest hour. But what disturbs me is that most of FDR’s lies helped FDR’s career, as opposed to the lives of America’s New Deal beggars. “Sometimes Roosevelt invented not just a fact or two, but whole stories, complete with detailed dialogue.”

Folsom’s book relies heavily on primary sources, and his grasp of economics and statistics shines throughout, but what really stands out are the little-known life stories that give numbers meaning, from Jesse Owens’s experience, to the thoughts of an elderly lady and her openness to suicide under the New Deal. And there it is. The truth: Obama’s hero – the media-created saint – is a myth.

And, Folsom reveals that America’s reliably partisan journalists were busy with other pressing issues – like covering up the President’s extramarital affairs and – my guess – his wife Eleanor’s lesboerotic adventures. I’m only sorry that FDR didn’t stimulate the conservative Republican Party’s anti-lynching platform.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ben-Peter Terpstra, an Australian-European satirist, is a contributor to a number of websites, from On Line Opinion (Australia's e-journal of social and political debate) to American Thinker. His pieces are also posted on his blog, Pizza Trays and Beer Bottles.