FDR considered

Col. Bunny at The Reb, weighs in on the Red side of FDR, a man I consider to be one of the worst presidents in American history for the damage his social programs did, and continue to do. And YES, read the whole post!

I do not believe in Communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists.^[1]

~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Rep. Martin Dies (1940).

After quoting the above, William Grigg writes of the FDR Administration’s obstruction of Dies’ efforts “to expose Communist espionage, sabotage, and infiltration of government, academe, the defense industry, and unions,” the press attack on Dies, the IRS’s spurious audit of Dies, and an attempt to bribe Dies with an offer of the vice presidency. FDR also succeeded in getting author John T. Flynn blacklisted by the publishing industry and “relentlessly smeared” Charles Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer. His administration also made use of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee who acted as private spies against groups that were isolationist and patriotic but not anti-Jewish.^[2]

People today who obsess about what’s supposedly done in the name of the Patriot Act should read about Roosevelt’s attacks on his critics and those who displeased him. As with a lot of other things we are beginning to look at with fresh eyes, Roosevelt doesn’t come out smelling that pretty. Give me the relatively toothless Patriot Act any day.

A lot of this is news to me given how little I’ve read of the 1930s and wartime America on the home front. I had an uncle who turned beet red when he described FDR as a “traitor to his class.” He and his generation were a lot closer to these facts about him and, anyway, I soon was to become more fixated by the military aspects of WWII and Korea and my own later part in the Vietnam War. After that, the Cold War was something that kept me and a lot of other people looking hard at the Soviet and Chinese threats, my own perspective having been radically changed by reading The Gulag Archipelago, let it be said in passing.