The Reactionary Utopian

Honoring Evil

December 18, 2007

[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate, April 23, 1997]

The enormous monument to Franklin Roosevelt will be dedicated on May 2, [1997,] and it’s probably too late to do anything about it now except to hang our heads in shame.

The monument is enormous in two senses. For one thing, it’s big: It consumes 7.5 acres of Washington’s choicest real estate, along the Tidal Basin. It cost $48 million to build. But it’s also enormous in the old sense of being aberrational.

So far, the only debate about the monument has been whether it should depict Roosevelt in his wheelchair, in accordance with the latest victimhood guidelines. Roosevelt’s liberalism hadn’t gotten to that phase yet; exquisite sensitivity to human suffering (mandating ever greater concentrations of power to relieve it) was still in its early stages as a political posture.

Roosevelt, as they say, “led us through Depression and war.” He used the Depression to claim for the federal government powers it had never had — powers that were nowhere suggested, let alone mentioned, in the Constitution. Roosevelt blithely observed that the Constitution had been written for “horse-and-buggy days” and decided the solution was to dilute the obstinate Supreme Court with more pliant personnel. His Court-packing plan shocked even his allies, but it did send the message, and the Court quickly learned to see things his way.

Roosevelt didn’t end the Depression, but he did pretty much abolish constitutional government. Before his presidency the federal government bore a heavy burden of proving its claim to novel or ambiguous powers. Today it takes what it wants. The clearest proof that the original system is gone is that today’s congressmen, when contemplating a proposal as vast as national health care, don’t even worry about whether they are exceeding their delegated powers. The basic practical question of limited government — whether power is being usurped — is simply never asked.

Roosevelt used his power, including the IRS and FBI, to silence his critics. The biographer Ted Morgan describes how his machinations damaged the career of John Flynn, a brave and honorable journalist. This was only a symptom of Roosevelt’s contempt for personal liberty, which became more evident when he put thousands of innocent people into concentration camps. (He called them “Japs.”)

[Breaker quote for Honoring Evil: Excusing enormous enormity]

[Breaker quote for Honoring Evil: Excusing enormous enormity]

Since nobody can plausibly call Roosevelt honest, his admirers take the aggressive tack of praising him for lying his way into World War II. In 1940 he assured the nation that its sons would not be sent to fight in “foreign wars” when he had every intention that they should. It was a cold-blooded lie.

During the war Roosevelt formed an alliance with a worse tyrant than Hitler, Mussolini, or Hirohito: the incomparable Joseph Stalin. The excuse his admirers make is that in war he had no alternative. But Roosevelt’s benefactions to the Soviet Union began long before the war. Ignoring the evidence of a huge, forced famine in Ukraine, he had given the USSR diplomatic recognition and international respectability in 1933.

Later, when war came, Roosevelt didn’t just compromise with Stalin; he glorified him as a partner in the quest for a better, more democratic world. Roosevelt’s admirers have been far more understanding about this than they would have been about similar treatment of Hitler. In fact, in virtually ceding Poland to Stalin at the end of the war, he somehow forgot that the war had begun with a joint German-Soviet rape of Poland.

Roosevelt’s other great legacy was the atomic bomb, whose creation he secretly presided over. His excusers say he had to get it before Hitler did, then that its use against Japan (when Hitler and Roosevelt were both dead) “shortened the war.” But he had conducted a war against civilians even without the atomic bomb, ordering the massive bombing of great cities, and he was willing to lengthen the war by insisting on unconditional surrender. There is no evidence that the suffering his policies entailed disturbed his conscience in the slightest.

The exercise of excusing and even celebrating Roosevelt is deleterious to the moral sense. He was not only callous in himself, but the cause of callousness in other men. As we erect a monument to him, we should no longer marvel that many Russians yearn for the good old days of Stalin.

Joseph Sobran

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