Contents
- FDR as Our Greatest Twentieth Century President
- The Privileged Life and Early Career of FDR
- Franklin Roosevelt in the Wilson Administration
- FDR’s Family Wealth, Illness, and His Return to Politics
- Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, and FDR’s Election
- President Franklin Roosevelt and the First New Deal
- The First New Deal as American Fascism?
- John T. Flynn and The Roosevelt Myth
- The Many Historical Revelations of John T.
Earlier this year, I published a long article on the career of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his America First campaign, a political movement that had similarly sought to block our involvement in the war. In that work, I’d drawn very heavily upon an excellent 2024 book of that title by historian H.W. Brands, whose coverage focused entirely upon that Roosevelt-Lindbergh political duel of the early 1940s.
- American Pravda: Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Movement
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 10, 2025 • 15,600 Words
Although Coughlin and Lindbergh were the primary figures in those articles, in each case President Roosevelt had been their main opponent, so he also had a central role both in my political narrative and in the extensive reading that I had undertaken to produce it.
Prior to Roosevelt, no American president had ever dared to exceed the two term limit informally established by George Washington, but FDR shattered that tradition by winning a third and eventually a fourth term, becoming the longest-serving president in our national history. My history textbooks told the story of how FDR’s New Deal rescued our country from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and then how the same president went on to win the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the greatest military conflict in human history.
During his many years in office, FDR had hugely expanded the size and scope of the American federal government, establishing Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance, and numerous other basic elements of our society that I had always taken for granted. Along the way, he had become an enormously popular hero to a huge fraction of the American public, notably including a young Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an ardent New Deal Democrat, and despite his later decades as a conservative Republican still always lionized FDR and many of his policies....
If more Americans were to read the books by John T. Flynn and some of his other contemporaries, they would certainly still endorse that ringing phrase made famous by our American president, but perhaps give it a new meaning much less favorable to Franklin Roosevelt’s memory.
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