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Roosevelt and His Critics
 I
see that HBO is doing a movie honoring Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
who “brought us out of the Depression and through World War
II.”  It
stars Kenneth Branagh as
Roosevelt, and anything that keeps Branagh too busy to make another of his
wretched Shakespeare films is, to that extent, laudable.
But why this endless celebration
of FDR? The Germans are expected to repent the Hitler era everlastingly; the
Japanese are supposed to apologize for their role in the same war, while they
are also being hounded by the Chinese for their impenitence about invading
the mainland. The Russians are repudiating the Soviet era. Everyone is
issuing apologies for history these days.
I’m always a little leery of
people who repent other people’s sins, because one suspects
hypocrisy — or what C.S. Lewis called the sin of detraction
masquerading as the virtue of contrition. I can’t honestly repent the
massacres of the American Indian, because I didn’t take part in them;
they were largely crimes of the U.S. Government, which I can only helplessly
deplore, as I deplore its current crimes at home and abroad.
Still, we can recognize crimes as
crimes, which brings me back to Roosevelt. Why are Americans still treating
this monster as a hero?
I hardly know where to start. His
contempt for the U.S. Constitution he was sworn to defend, in everything
from creating a national welfare state to putting U.S. citizens in
concentration camps, is almost a minor item on his ledger. So are his deceits
in getting the United States into World War II, while assuring the American
public that he was doing everything he could to keep us at peace.
![[Breaker quote for Roosevelt and His Critics: Time for an apology?]](2005breakers/050428.gif) Long
before that war began, he befriended Joseph Stalin
by granting diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, shortly after it had
deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians. During the war, he made an
alliance with Stalin, not as a regrettable necessity, but with effusive praise
for “Uncle Joe.” He even urged Hollywood to make pro-Soviet
films to dispel “prejudice” against Soviet Communism and lent a
hand in the production of the egregious propaganda movie Mission to
Moscow. (Jack Warner later called the film the worst mistake of his
long career.)
As the war progressed, Roosevelt
ordered the massive bombing of Japanese and German cities for the express
purpose of killing as many civilians as possible. His victims, from Tokyo to
Berlin, numbered in the millions. He was uninhibited by the ancient principle of
Christian civilization that warfare should spare noncombatants.
But that wasn’t enough.
Meanwhile Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic
bomb, which could obliterate whole cities in a flash. He thereby took the
world into a dreadful new era in history, which concerned him not at all.
Long after Pearl Harbor is
forgotten, the name of Franklin Roosevelt should “live in
infamy.” Yet the United States still officially honors him when an
official apology to the entire human race would be more fitting.
Despite his great popularity, many
critics saw through Roosevelt in his own time. He tarred them as fascist
sympathizers, though their chief criticism of him, developed by John T.
Flynn’s book As We Go Marching, was that he himself
was bringing a form of fascism to this country. His most eloquent critic was
perhaps Garet Garrett of The Saturday Evening Post, whose
trenchant anti-Roosevelt editorials cost him his job. FDR, always vindictive,
also worked behind the scenes to ruin Flynn. The caustic H.L. Mencken, seeing
the futility of opposing Roosevelt during the war, decided to keep a prudent
silence.
When Roosevelt died of a stroke in
1945 (in the company of his mistress), the war was pretty much won, even
without atomic weapons. Yet those weapons, used by his successor Harry
Truman, would be his chief legacy to the world. When Stalin acquired them
too, the long Cold War became a global terror.
It’s an interesting footnote
to all this that Flynn, though a principled anti-Communist, saw that American
militarism had become a threat to American liberty. But Cold Warriors
didn’t want to hear this, and Flynn became persona non grata in the
conservative circles which had loved his anti-Roosevelt polemics.
Flynn died forgotten. It’s as
if Roosevelt had managed to take his critics with him.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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