Like many people my age (62), I was taught both at home and in school that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president. FDR, I was taught, saved American democracy in the 1930s with the New Deal and led the nation to victory against Hitlerism in the 1940s. That view of FDR was reinforced by many television documentaries and history books. And virtually every poll of historians — including the most recent C-Span poll — places FDR in the top five of all U.S. presidents (usually in third place behind Lincoln and Washington). This is so despite persuasive revisionist historical works that paint a very different picture of FDR’s presidency.
Let’s start with the New Deal. In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes shows that the New Deal — so lionized by liberal historians and Democrats — did not restore the U.S. economy as promised by FDR and his “brain trust,” but instead extended the sufferings of the Great Depression for seven more years. Unemployment remained well beyond 10 percent throughout the 1930s, only subsiding with the coming of World War II. “The cause of the duration of the Depression,” she writes, “was Washington’s persistent intervention” in the economy. The end result of the New Deal’s “bold persistent experimentation” was “inflexible statism” that has evolved into a gargantuan federal government exercising nearly unlimited powers to a degree that would have shocked the Founders of our country.
But an even greater failure of FDR’s administration in the 1930s was the nation’s lack of preparedness for the Second World War. This is detailed most recently in Arthur Herman’s biography of General Douglas MacArthur (Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior). MacArthur was kept on as the Army’s chief of staff by FDR, and the two repeatedly clashed over the size of the military budget. MacArthur sensed as early as 1934 that another war was on the horizon, but FDR’s budget director proposed to cut the Army’s budget by half and to reduce War Department expenditures by $80 million. MacArthur called the proposed budget “a stunning blow to national defense,” and later told the graduating class at West Point that the “necessity of national defense” was being “sacrificed in the name of economy.”
At one White House meeting between the secretary of war, MacArthur, and FDR, the president repeatedly resisted with harsh and bitter words the war secretary’s pleadings to provide more money for the armed forces. MacArthur interjected by telling FDR: “When we lose the next war and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spits out his last curse, I want the name to be Roosevelt, not MacArthur.”
By 1939, the U.S. Army ranked 19th in the world with 174,000 personnel, less than Portugal’s army. The Army Air Corps had 26,000 airmen and about 1,200 planes, many of them obsolete. The U.S. Navy was in a little better shape, with 15 battleships, five carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, and 19 light cruisers, but was still unprepared for global war. As late as the summer of 1941, some American troops were training for combat with wooden broomsticks instead of rifles.
FDR’s defenders usually note that while FDR sensed the gathering storm of war abroad, the American people and Congress were wholeheartedly opposed to war preparation, and FDR would not move forward in this area without public and political support. That may be so, but really great leaders — like Lincoln and Washington and Britain’s Winston Churchill — took political risks when their nation’s security was at stake. FDR was unwilling to take such risks. He was above all a political animal — and a deceptive, devious one. General MacArthur once described FDR as “a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.” Even as FDR covertly began involving the United States as a belligerent in the wars in Asia and Europe, he promised the American people in the 1940 campaign that their sons would not be sent overseas to fight in foreign wars. Even as he tightened sanctions against Japan in the late 1930s, he left our forces unprepared in the Philippines and elsewhere when Japan attacked.
