'Raw Deal': Historian makes waves with scathing look at Franklin D. Roosevelt

[WestVirginiaRebel]

L.A. Times:

Reporting from Dunwoody, Ga. For more than half a century, biographers have treated Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Rushmore-like reverence, celebrating the nation's 32nd president as a colossus who eased the agony of the Great Depression and saved democracy from Nazi Germany.

Which never sat right with historian Burton Folsom Jr.

Growing up in Nebraska, Folsom remembers, his dad, a savings and loan executive, griped about high taxes and Roosevelt's voracious ambition. FDR was dead, but his legacy deficit spending, an activist federal government, an expansive social safety net lived on.

About 15 years ago, Folsom read another of those historical surveys, this one placing Roosevelt on par with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. "As a matter of my professional integrity," Folsom said, "I had to respond."

The result was "New Deal or Raw Deal?," a scathing 300-page counter-narrative that has made Folsom a conservative hero and placed him squarely in the midst of a roiling debate over America's past, the nature of history and, some say, its manipulation for political ends.

It is an ancient debate spurred anew by the rise of the "tea party" movement, which treats the Constitution as both cudgel and sacred text; by TV commentators such as Glenn Beck, who wrap their ideology in selective scholarship; and by a current vogue among conservatives eager not just to revisit the past but to rewrite it.

Many tea partyers, for instance, speak as though the Founders favored a small, circumscribed federal government, when in fact some wanted a more powerful Washington than we have today. (James Madison proposed a national veto over state laws.) In a recent speech, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) extolled the Founding Fathers' efforts to end slavery, when they actually made inequality the law, passing legislation counting blacks as three-fifths of a person.

Misleading or not, the revisionism represents a scramble for the high ground; in a country that reveres its history even as we endlessly fight over its meaning there are few more powerful arguments than precedent.

"We're not discussing how many economic-stimulus plans we can balance on the head of a pin," said the University of New Mexico's Jason Scott Smith. "There can be real-world consequences to the lessons we attempt to take from history."

Some scholars, however, worry the debate has been poisoned by the same attitude afflicting political discourse: the notion that truth and virtue reside on one side, and those who disagree are not just wrong but un-American. In a new book, Harvard's Jill Lepore condemns what she calls "historical fundamentalism," a belief that "a particular and quite narrowly defined past" should be worshiped, unquestioned, above all others.

"There's an opportunity for an interesting national conversation about what the past means to us," Lepore said. "But it needs to be a respectful conversation."
________

It would be nice if the liberal historians who worship FDR felt that way...

[Sabre86]

FR deserves credit for leadership during WWII. He didn't micromanage the war (no more than any previous President had other wars), and left the battlefield decisions up to the commanders. He also provided inspiration and morale at home.

 

However, that is as far as the praise for him should go. Everything relating to the New Deal was a long term disaster, although some of the projects did help us win the war by providing electricity, especially for the Manhattan Project. Regardless, the New Deal actually made the Great Depression last longer.