Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Source: Leon Perskie

One of the more peculiar ideological developments of the 21st century is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the conquering hero of the 20th-century center-left, has faded into vague disrepute among the very people who would have enthusiastically voted for him in his own day.

It used to be that FDR was controversial for his macroeconomic policies. But a more reasonable appraisal has emerged with time: Roosevelt mostly blundered about economically because he was clueless about macroeconomics, but then almost everybody was in the 1930s. Unlike Herbert Hoover, however, who froze up as the Depression worsened, giving markets the jitters, FDR at least kept energetically flailing away with one scheme after another, which was good for morale.

When Roosevelt’s name does come up now, it tends to be in connection with his transgressions of redlining, not abolishing Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, not letting in Jewish refugees, and failing to prevent the Holocaust.

In other words, the upper-class WASP FDR is deplored as a racist for not doing more for the kind of people who tended to vote for him in large numbers, such as blacks and Jews.

Thus, these days you hear constantly about Adolf Hitler but seldom about the man who beat him: FDR.

When FDR winning the Big One is brought up in his defense, it is widely assumed that America’s victory in a two-ocean war was inevitable. And yet, the U.S. has only triumphed in one sizable shooting war over the past eighty years, the 1991 liberation of Kuwait.

Sure, America would have won eventually with almost anybody as president, but…

(1) FDR was an extremely good politician, winner of four presidential elections. Having your most skillful politician ever be president during the biggest war ever is helpful.

Something I hadn’t realized until I saw Bill Murray play FDR in a minor movie, Hyde Park on Hudson, but which should have been obvious to me all along is: In his time and place, FDR was really funny. Like Ronald Reagan, his careful student, he always seemed to have a joke that wrong-footed his political opponents. And like the Gipper with Jimmy Carter, FDR benefited from having a dour, seemingly jinxed predecessor in Hoover.

(2) FDR was a good judge of military underlings. His appointees tended not to be afraid to appoint their own underlings who were better than them who would in turn appoint their own underlings who were even better. For instance, Roosevelt put Ernest J. King in charge of the U.S. Navy, who hired Chester Nimitz to command the fleet in the Pacific, who sent Raymond Spruance to fight the crucial battle of Midway.

(3) FDR wasn’t a genius, but his obsession was water. (Michael Barone’s book Our Country points out that at one high point in his political confidence, FDR considered a bizarre plan to junk the historic 48 states and carve up the country into seven administrative districts based on watersheds.) A former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he knew a lot about naval warfare, and the U.S. Navy benefited from having a big boss who understood their needs. Yet FDR didn’t let the exciting sea battles in the Pacific distract him from his strategic appraisal that Japan was the sideshow and Germany the real threat.

(4) Like Reagan, FDR tended to be lucky. For example, the seemingly devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor unified the country for him over going to war but, it turned out, did less damage in the long run to America’s war-fighting capability than anybody could foresee. The brunt of the damage was to our battleships, which, we discovered later, were rapidly becoming obsolete white elephants, while our three aircraft carriers in the Pacific went untouched.

But Pearl Harbor caused a political problem for the Roosevelt administration because the public’s priority was vengeance on the Japanese, whom FDR rightly saw as less central than the Nazis. Hitler solved this sticky situation for Roosevelt by declaring war on the United States on Dec. 11, 1941.

As luck would also have it, FDR’s death on April 12, 1945, turned out to be superbly timed, allowing Harry Truman to slowly begin clearing out the pro-Soviet parts of the Roosevelt administration.

Enoch Powell observed, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

FDR’s political life was one of those happy few.

(5) Under FDR’s good-humored leadership, the U.S. on the domestic front didn’t go as nuts as it had under the more intense Woodrow Wilson in 1917–1920, when, among much other tumult, Beethoven symphonies were often canceled. (Warren Harding seldom gets the credit he deserves for restoring “normalcy” in the early 1920s by statesmanlike acts such as pardoning the imprisoned antiwar socialist Eugene Debs and inviting him to dine at the White House.)

The end of the Second World War under the Roosevelt administration’s successors went surprisingly smoothly: The soldiers came home, attendance at movies and baseball games soared, people got married and had kids in historic numbers, a long prosperity set in, and modest social reforms like Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball successfully took place.

The main exception to sanity on the home front was the Roosevelt administration’s lamentable internment of West Coast Japanese-American U.S. citizens.

Still, it’s not surprising that Californians went nuts after the Japanese fleet’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Steven Spielberg’s worst movie, 1941, isn’t very entertaining, but it does get across the hysteria of the time. My grandfather, for example, became convinced that a Japanese farmer on a hillside above Pismo Beach had planted his crops in secretly coded patterns to convey crucial war information to the periscopes of the Nipponese submarines lurking offshore.

After all, who knew when the mighty Japanese fleet would bomb Burbank?

I sound facetious, but blowing up Lockheed would have made more sense than what the lunatic Japanese high command strategized when it decided to start its war with the United States and its vast resources. The American guess that the Japanese must have a trusted fifth column of spies and saboteurs inside the U.S. was more rational than the actual plan of the Japanese army to win the war through the bravery of its banzai charges.

FDR was prejudiced against the Japanese in part because he was a product of the WASP upper crust who sent many of their best people to China as Protestant missionaries. E.g., Time magazine founder Henry Luce was born in China.

FDR, like so many of his caste, was pro-Chinese and thus anti-Japanese. Like Luce, FDR saw support for a (purportedly) Christianizing China in resisting the aggression of the vicious Shinto regime as essential to American grand strategy in the later 20th century. After all, there are many more Chinese than Japanese, so in the 21st century, China would inevitably be more important than Japan.

Gifted with hindsight, I’ve finally figured out what the Roosevelt administration should have done with Japanese-American citizens in the desperate days after Pearl Harbor: ask each one to swear an oath of loyalty either to the American constitution or to the Japanese emperor. Lock up the imperial loyalists, but trust the former.

If we knew then what we know now about how well Japanese-American citizens, other than the 5,000 who swore loyalty to Hirohito and were imprisoned in a maximum security camp, would behave, the Roosevelt administration should have instantly administered loyalty oaths and then acted upon them: Lock up tight everybody who swore loyalty to the emperor, but leave alone American-citizen Japanese farmers in Los Angeles County who swore allegiance to the USA.

It turned out that the Japanese had the feudal virtue of taking oaths seriously, in sharp contrast to our Communist allies, who made a virtue out of tactical lying. But the Roosevelt administration and its allies like liberal Republican California governor Earl Warren (later chief justice of the progressive Warren Court) weren’t in the mood on Dec. 8, 1941, to see the good sides in a right-wing reactionary culture like that of the Japanese.

That’s why there was a vague pattern of the American right being more sympathetic to the nisei. For instance, Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH) opposed internment.

And J. Edgar Hoover offered a reasonable compromise: clear all the Japanese out from near the big naval bases in San Diego and Puget Sound, but leave the sizable Japanese farming community in place in Los Angeles County. The FBI could infiltrate them just fine to keep bad elements from arising, so there’s no need to lock up en masse fellow American citizens who were good farmers.

But the Roosevelt administration was familiar with the endless duplicity of their Communist friends, so they couldn’t imagine you could trust the word of Japanese-Americans.

But, as it turned out, you could.

As for the Holocaust, it’s not clear that the Allies could have done all that much other than what they did do: crush every square inch of the Nazi regime.

In retrospect, though, perhaps a few percent of the Jewish victims could have been saved by, say, spending a hundred million dollars to bribe local officials in peripheral countries of the Nazi empire to let their Jews escape. But that would be a hundred million dollars that would have to come out of some other part of the war effort to line the pockets of bureaucrats who were more or less on the side of the Germans, but who didn’t share the Nazi mania for murdering Jews. So you can see why the Roosevelt administration wasn’t as enthusiastic for these clever ideas as, in retrospect, they should have been.

FDR is now frequently criticized for not welcoming in millions of Jewish refugees before the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland. But there isn’t much evidence that many Jews had been clamoring to come to the United States, which suffered a massive second phase of the Depression in 1937–38.

For example, Roosevelt is often denounced for not allowing the MS St. Louis carrying 937 Jews from Nazi Germany to Cuba in May 1939 to take refuge in the U.S. after Cuba turned them down. But notice that Cuba was their first choice.

And the Roosevelt administration then helped persuade various anti-Nazi Western European countries to take them all in.

Tragically, many wound up being murdered in the Holocaust.

But should FDR in the spring of 1939 have foreseen that France, which had stood like a lion against the Kaiser’s army from 1914 through 1918, would crumble in 1940? And should he have foreseen that in 1942 the Nazis would start methodically exterminating all the Jews in Poland?

Nobody saw both coming.

Even most Warsaw Jews couldn’t believe for several months after they began being shipped off to murder camps like Treblinka that they would be slaughtered in cold blood rather than enslaved to work for the German war effort. So there was little resistance until the suicidal Warsaw Ghetto uprising by the remnants in early 1943.

In 1942, that had sounded crazy to imagine. Down through history, countless civilians on the losing side of wars had been slaughtered in hot blood after the taking of besieged cities or worked to death in cold blood as slaves. But to be murdered in cold blood on an industrial scale when your slave labor was most needed?

I’d say that FDR, for all his sins, can be forgiven for not anticipating that during peacetime.