General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A Short Note On The Democratic Party And The Progressive Left.... [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)My grandmother told me once that her family was Republican until the Republicans left them. There was an ideological shift in the early 20th century. The party that had heretofore been liberal -- the Republicans -- became ultra-conservative.
It's chic and fashionable to downplay Roosevelt's achievements. Doesn't seem possible that any American president could have been the hero that FDR was. But he really did change the US in amazing ways. In my view, more than any other president in our history.
People commonly underestimate what he achieved because he did so much it sounds like an exaggeration when you list his accomplishments.
FDR's fights were, very often, in the courts. Here is what the Smithsonian website says about him;
The outpouring of millions of ballots for the Democratic ticket reflected the enormous admiration for what FDR had achieved in less than four years. He had been inaugurated in March 1933 during perilous timesone-third of the workforce jobless, industry all but paralyzed, farmers desperate, most of the banks shut downand in his first 100 days he had put through a series of measures that lifted the nations spirits. In 1933 workers and businessmen marched in spectacular parades to demonstrate their support for the National Recovery Administration (NRA), Roosevelts agency for industrial mobilization, symbolized by its emblem, the blue eagle. Farmers were grateful for government subsidies dispensed by the newly created Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).
Over the ensuing three years, the cavalcade of alphabet agencies had continued: SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission); REA (the Rural Electrification Administration) and a good many more. The NYA (National Youth Administration) had permitted college students, such as the future playwright Arthur Miller, to work their way through college. The WPA(Works Progress Administration) had sustained millions of Americans, including artists such as Jackson Pollock and writers such as John Cheever. In a second burst of legislation in 1935, Roosevelt had introduced the welfare state to the nation with the Social Security Act, legislating old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. During the 1936 campaign, the presidents motorcade, mobbed by well-wishers wherever he traveled, had to inch along the streets in towns and cities across the nation. His landslide victory that year signified the peoples verdict on the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote Arthur Krock, the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, had gotten the most overwhelming testimonial of approval ever received by a national candidate in the history of the nation.
During the next year, these five judges, occasionally in concert with others, especially Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, struck down more significant acts of Congressincluding the two foundation stones, the NRA and the AAA, of Roosevelts programthan at any other time in the nations history, before or since. In May 1935, the court destroyed FDRs plan for industrial recovery when, in a unanimous decision involving a kosher poultry business in Brooklyn, it shot down the blue eagle. Little more than seven months later, in a 6 to 3 ruling, it annihilated his farm program by determining that the Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional. Most of the federal governments authority over the economy derived from a clause in the Constitution empowering Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but the court construed the clause so narrowly that in another case that next spring, it ruled that not even so vast an industry as coal mining fell within the commerce power.
These decisions drew biting criticism, from inside and outside the court. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, a Republican who had been Calvin Coolidges attorney general, denounced Roberts opinion striking down the farm law as a tortured construction of the Constitution. Many farmers were incensed. On the night following Roberts opinion, a passerby in Ames, Iowa, discovered life-size effigies of the six majority opinion justices hanged by the side of a road.
Lots more at:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/showdown.html
FDR was wrong about some things. Japanese Americans were very badly treated during his president, for example. Some cases of suspicion may have been justified, but a lot of them were not. Racial equality was put on a back burner even though Eleanor Roosevelt struggled for it.
https://www.google.com/webhp#q=eleanor+roosevelt+naacp
barred Marion Anderson from performing her Howard University-sponsored spring concert at the DARs Constitution Hall, the largest concert venue in Washington, D.C. The NAACP established the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee to rally public support for the singer and secure a venue. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in the DAR to protest the exclusion. She worked with Walter White and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange an outdoor concert for Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial in April coinciding with Easter and the anniversary of Abraham Lincolns assassination. Mrs. Roosevelt also agreed to present the Spingarn Medal to Marian Anderson at the NAACPs annual convention in July.
http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/naacp/greatdepression/ExhibitObjects/WalterWhitetoEleanorRoosevelt.aspx
FDR really was the best president ever. The programs that he started transformed our country for the better. Obama has not even tried to approach FDR's achievements.
Check out the National Labor Relations Board, for example.
http://www.nlrb.gov/who-we-are/our-history/1935-passage-wagner-act