Conrad Black’s FDR Idolatry

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins

My parents were New Deal Democrats, but I grew up at a time and in a place when Republicans were extraordinarily rare. I’ve often said I never actually met a Republican until I went to college and, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until my junior year. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that I became an ex-Democrat, and so I completely understand the quasi-religious reverence that Democrats have for FDR, Harry Truman and JFK. What puzzles me nowadays is that some conservatives seem to share that attitude.

National Review has published a column by Conrad Black which calls Diana West’s new book American Betrayal a “farrago of lies,” and I just don’t know what to say, except that (a) Black doesn’t seem to have read West’s book, and (b) is therefore attacking the straw man version of West’s argument, as presented by Ron Radosh.

As I said last week, the attacks by Radosh and David Horowitz have made it impossible “to view [American Betrayal] in an unprejudiced light,” and I fear that the resulting controversy will turn into one of those festering wounds akin to the attacks on Mel Bradford that prevented Bradford, a brilliant scholar, from becoming head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Reagan. The whole neocon/paleocon feud can be traced to that episode and, however real the substance of the ideological dispute, it’s the vicious tactics I lament.

What you find, if you examine the history of that quarrel, is that the neocons (and by this term, I especially mean those associated with the Claremont Institute) seem to crave the authority of Platonic archons, to promulgate and defend “noble lies” about American history, to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, so that in the place of actual history, we have instead a political myth.

Feuds over 19th-century history that attached the stigma of “controversial” to Bradford’s name are, it seems, now being replicated in regard to 20th-century history, with Roosevelt replacing Lincoln as the sanctified figure who cannot be examined critically. And just as criticizing Lincoln resulted in Bradford being stigmatized as “pro-slavery” (a ridiculous accusation to make in 1981), so now FDR’s critics are faced with the not-too-subtle insinuation that they are pro-Nazi.

Are the choices really so stark? Must we only praise FDR, or else be suspected of being Hitler sympathizers? Or was Lincoln’s statesmanship so unquestionably wise that no one may criticize “Honest Abe” without being accused of “white supremacy”?

Is it any accident, really, that both of these myths involve wartime leaders whose influence tended toward the centralization of power in Washington and development of the “Imperial Presidency”?

Yet both FDR and Lincoln were, in their own time, extraordinarily controversial figures. Once you clear away the gauzy myths that hagiographers have erected around them and examine the contemporary record — especially including the criticisms made by their political opponents — the men are perhaps not really less admirable, but their actions are seen as choices subject to second-guessing, and their philosophies of government lose much of their glow.

A preference for beautiful myth over ugly fact is a dangerous thing, and I wish people would stop to think that someday in the future, these mythmakers will be worshiping at the altar of Obama.

The controversies of our own era will eventually be reduced to a couple of pages in the high-school history textbook and, having lived through a half-century of history myself, I shudder at the thought. Already, one sees liberals trying to portray the shift of the Democrat “Solid South” toward the GOP as motivated entirely by racism when, in fact, it was controversies over Cold War foreign policy that did the most to undermine Democratic hegemony in the South, which has always been the most warlike region of America (and which was always the most fiercely anti-Communist).

The Radosh/Horowitz assault on Diana West’s American Betrayal took me by surprise because I’ve known Diana West for many years, and know she is no Buchananite paleoconservative. She is a regular Reaganite Republican, and certainly cannot be tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism that has been applied to Pat Buchanan.

It strikes me, however, that West’s critique of FDR’s foreign policy as too pro-Soviet, which would require conservatives to re-examine the standard history of World War II, might be viewed as “lending aid and comfort” to the paleoconservative enemy. That is to say, while West herself is a mainstream “movement conservative,” her undermining of the Rooseveltian mythos may pose the threat of redeeming the Robert Taft-style Old Right isolationism. So if you question FDR’s fundamental righteousness, you are a conspiracy theorist, and quite possibly (by implication) pro-Nazi.

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna offered a lengthy examination of the controversy Sunday, linking Dr. Andrew Bostom’s rebuttal to Conrad Black’s National Review article. I remain Diana West’s ally in this fight because whatever errors she may have made, from the standpoint of professional historians, she is asking important questions and calling attention to facts that have been too long ignored by those who prefer convenient myth to historical truth.

 

 

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58 comments

  1. Already, one sees liberals trying to portray the shift of the Democrat “Solid South” toward the GOP as motivated entirely by racism when, in fact, it was controversies over Cold War foreign policy that did the most to undermine Democratic hegemony in the South, which has always been the most warlike region of America (and which was always the most fiercely anti-Communist).

    This makes a good deal more sense to me than the race claim, especially since the Democrats’ softness on Communism (or as ISTR Jeane Kirkpatrick putting it, softness on democracy) puts a bad light on those who stayed with the Democrats through the end of the Cold War. Wasn’t “neocon” coined after 9/11…?

    Personally, I’m of the “better late than never” school when it comes to supporting national defense, and until thousands were murdered on our soil by a foreign attacker, the reality of the threat from across the oceans would have seemed abstract to a lot of people. Live and learn and don’t make the same mistake again, is all we can ever ask.

    But to the extent post-9/11 neocons are trying to preserve FDR’s legacy they are scarcely better than those who even now defend Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.

  2. FDR and the mythos surrounding his life and especially his political life, have been so injected into the crap taught in the public indoctrination centers (AKA publik skools) that it will take an almost revolution to unseat the saintly image of him from our national memory. Diana West begins by asking the questions that need to be asked if one is to undertake an honest examination of FDR and his actual politics.
    I firmly believe that FDR and his policies may have won the war but also caused the loss of our Liberty and is responsible for at least 50% of the trouble or nation and society are in.

  3. I think that your puzzlement re “conservatives” buying into this, and then referring to Radosh and Horowitz as such, may be the issue here.

    “Are the choices really so stark? Must we only praise FDR, or else be suspected of being Hitler sympathizers?” Who uses this tactic? Who says that if your don’t support abortion on demand, you are anti-woman? That if you don’t agree with XYZ, you’re a hater? The left. This is a tactic of cultural Marxists, a group to which both Radosh and Horowitz belonged. My point is that you are comparing yourself and your family, who were, like my family, traditional Democrats, to former Marxists. They are not the same. There is something fundamentally different in the wiring of a former democrat and a former revolutionary Communist, regardless whether the latter end up moving to the right. De-publishing favorable book reviews and publishing 7,900 word hit pieces, plus book reviews where the author did not read the book are evidence of that. Who does that? Thanks for keeping the heat on this.

  4. When a friend was pontificating that Bush The Younger should be impeached because of the military tribunal issue, I pointed out that the legal cover for his actions came from FDR, one of his idols. Specifically, he ignored Congress and the Supreme court, to execute German spies during WWII, at least two of which were American citizens, all contrary to Ex Parte Milligan, a Civil War SCOTUS decision which said citizens must be tried in civilian courts during war time if the courts are operating. Roosevelt ignored the Supremes and bulled ahead. Anyway, the friend’s head exploded. The best he could muster was a stammering, “But . . . .but . . . .FDR HAD to do that to save the country.” Until the present resident of the Oval Office, FDR was the closest thing to a dicator this country has seen and there is no doubt, he admired the authoritarian socialist regimes in Europe during the Thirties. For those reasons, I’m inclined to believe West’s assertions, which I’m sure are appropriately documented. (I’m waiting for the book from Amazon.)

  5. I used to be a Dem, too. That was when there were grown-ups who spoke the truth in the party and were solid on protecting America: people like Sam Nunn, Stu Symington, Scoop Jackson and others. Hell, even pre-chakra (sp?) Al Gore wasn’t half bad in 1988.

  6. Franklin Roosevelt was a great President, but that leads to the question of how one defines “great.” Mr Ollivander, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, noted that the wizarding world could expect great things from Harry Potter, because the wand which chose him — the wand chooses the wizard rather than vice versa — shared a magical core (a phoenix tail feather — with just one other, the wand used by Tom Riddle, who became Lord Voldemort. “He did great things, terrible, but great.”

    President Roosevelt deserves great credit for his management of the war, no doubt in my mind about that. He provided the policy and the means for the Army and Navy to win the war, without meddling in military operations. He chose the commanders in the field, then let them do their jobs.

    But when it comes to his economic policies, he falls into the Voldemort category: terrible, yes, but great, because he reordered American economic thinking, but his policies did nothing to end the Depression. If I were to give anyone credit for ending the Depression, it would be Hideki Tojo and Adolf Hitler, who created an artificial demand for large amounts of manufactured goods, goods which would be quickly expended and require prompt replacement. The fact that Messrs Tojo and Hitler also laid waste to the industrial plant of our prewar competitors further helped the American economy.

    The Democrats took the wrong lessons from President Roosevelt. He employed Keynesian economic thinking, true enough, but American borrowing was almost entirely from ourselves; at the end of FY1946, foreigners owned a whopping 1% of our national debt. That meant that the debt service repayments stayed in our country, further contributing to our economy. We were net exporters of oil and steel and manufactured goods, and had 45% of the world’s industrial capacity by the end of the war.

    The Democrats still push Keynesian economics, because such lets them justify more spending, but conditions are different today. Much of what we borrow today comes from overseas, and thus when we pay debt service, much of that leaves our shores and our economy; even if the deficit spending “:stimulated” our economy, it gets depressed on the other side by the removal from our economy of the fruits of our production via debt service.

    Of course, Keynesian economics holds that after you stimulate a bad economy during hard times, you pay back what you borrowed during better times. Instead, we have continued to borrow and borrow and borrow, to the extent that a stimulated economy isn’t really stimulated, but the norm to which we have all adjusted; we have, in effect, inoculated the economy from stimulus.

  7. I’m thinking somewhere along the way in her research into Hopkins and FDR Diana West must’ve overturned some long-buried rocks that certain people would prefer to leave buried. It has been a very long time, after all. Radosh and Horowitz push their own narratives about how the Soviets got the bomb (i.e., the Rosenbergs), but who’s to say who else might have been involved and how far back into time it went?

  8. I agree regarding domestic policies, but have reservations about FDR during the war. I concede he appointed good commanders, but his failure to recognize Soviet intentions, whether from naivete or affinity for centrally controled democratic socialism, caused as much human destruction among those misfortunate enough to be under the communist yoke and cost the free democracy more treasure than WWII.

  9. Sam and Scoop would be drummed out of today’s Democratic Party. And they’d be viewed with suspicion by the “leaders” of today’s Beltway Republicans.

  10. Horowitz earned my contempt by his defenestration of Lawrence Auster, and publishing the vile Dershowitz.
    Radosh has published junk in other places that shows he is still a red diaper baby, and he simply continues to show that with his attacks on West.
    Both are vile creatures not worth the time of day from a conservative movement of which they have never been a part.

  11. I’d guess that President Roosevelt knew fairly well what Soviet intentions were, but had a greater priority: winning the war with the fewest possible American casualties. The more Germans the Russians killed, the fewer that American troops would have to face.

    And there is a second part: the only way that President Roosevelt could have actually done anything about Soviet intentions would have been to stop sending the USSR Lend-Lease aid. The key to stopping the Soviet advance would have been to let the Germans beat them, and if the Germans had beat the Soviets, they’d probably have won the whole war.

  12. One of my solidly conservative friends greatly admired President Kennedy, because Mr Kennedy stood up to the Soviets and made the right moves in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He did foul up on the Bay of Pigs intervention, but that was something he inherited from President Eisenhower and was never invested in himself. He learned.

  13. I’m not sure that the only alternative was allowing Germany to beat the Sovs. Rather, a more forceful diplomacy immediately after the war, might have kept places like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary free. Of course, counterfactuals are interesting to ponder, but I note the Berlin Airlift told the Russians we would not fold our hand and leave the table. Finland’s example is another case, where displays of fortitude prevented a communist takeover. I think there’s more incriminating stuff waiting to be discovered about that era.

  14. I’m of the opinion, that while FDR wasn’t committed to any hard anti-Americanism, he was still sympathetic to things of that nature. Crimes of omission, rather than of commission.

    However, it can be good to disconnect FDR at home from FDR during the war.

  15. Black had the gall to name his article “Defaming FDR”, but as the Klingons say, you cannot tarnish a rusty blade.

  16. We cannot make progress against the progressive message when we refuse to regard its bearers with their due incivility.

    FDR was an economic dilettante, the ultimate parlor pink who nattered on from the White House and his Hyde Park mansion about fixing the maximum American wage at $25K a year (“No one,” he said, “needed to earn more than than that.”) and stuffing working-class Americans into managed ‘workers’ villages.’ He diddled around with draconian enforcement of wage and price controls on every aspect of commerce (one luckless drycleaner was sent to Federal prison for charging a nickel too much to clean a suit). He drove millions onto soup lines while cattle were slaughtered, crops plowed under and milk poured into the gutters because price controls made it impossible for farmers and ranchers to sell them for a living price.

    His pointless and inexpert meddling with the economy prolonged the Depression for years, and would have continued to but for the eruption of WWII. He was an unqualified disaster whose incompetence and abuse of the public trust were covered over by a willing or intimidated media and intelligentsia.

  21. A book on this topic is Burton Folsom’s “New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.”

  22. I think I know the reason for the vehemence that Ms. West’s book has brought: It dovetails with Suvurov’s Icebreaker thesis. In it Suvurov puts forward the case that the primary architect of World War II was Stalin and not Hitler. This, I think is a “bridge too far” (pun intended) for most historians of the period and why Ms. West’s book has been denounced.

    Suvurov’s thesis is that Stalin maneuvered the Allies into declaring war on Germany by offering what became the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact just before the German invasion of Poland and that this would guarantee that England and France would declare war on Germany. The idea was that Germany and the Allies would fight themselves to the point of exhaustion, like in WWI, allowing the Soviet army to move in later virtually unopposed. Germany was to be the “icebreaker” for the Soviet conquest of Europe. Needless to say, many historians in the west (but not in Russia, ironically) have dismissed Suvurov as crackpot revisionism.

    I haven’t read all of Ms. West’s of book but I have read the excerpts about the D-Day invasion being in Stalin’s benefit and Hopkin’s role in pushing it as opposed to the “soft underbelly” strategy. There are valid military arguments that can be made both ways. But to dismiss her arguments as ridiculous is unfair. Although I think she should have mentioned that DeGaulle had a vested interest in making the liberation of France a priority and may have had an influence over the ultimate decision to go ahead with D-Day, just to shut him up.

    One only has to look at her case and wonder cui bono? If D-Day succeeds, German forces have to be shifted west and Stalin benefits. If it fails, it would take the Allies a year or more to try again while the Soviet army keeps moving west and Stalin benefits. The only situation where Stalin does not benefit is if the Anglo-American can break out of Italy into the Balkans and Central Europe.

  24. One of these days I’ll understand why NRO continues to devote such attention to Conrad Black. I’ve never read a piece by him that wasn’t littered with provocative inanities.

    Anglophilia only goes so far.

  26. Been thinking about this for a while, not just in reference to ex-Red Diaper babies such as we’re discussing here but former Democrats of several varieties who can’t shake the notion that having Washington take care of [insert issue here] is the best way to deal with it.

  27. He gets some cred for launching the National Post, which was Canada’s version of the Washington Times, except more successful. Also, never underestimate the power of Anglophilia at WFB Jr.’s mag – though I’ll grant you, it didn’t save Derbyshire.

  29. Suvorov had a long lecture on the subject on you tube for awhile. I haven’t looked to see if it’s still there, but having been a part of the intelligence apparatus he probably has some inside knowledge of what went on behind teh scenes in Stalin’s Kremlin. Frankly, if teh argument were between Radosh and Suvarov, I know who would win that one, and Radosh would once more come out looking like the fool he is. Radosh has already expended any credibility he could have had.

  35. The USSR was sending IRBMs into Cuba, President Kennedy and his policies stopped them, and the IRBMs came back out of Cuba. I call that a win.

  37. One thing to note of the American Executive in Wartime: he, whomever and whenever, is the closest thing to a dictator America experiences.
    George Washington, “His Excellency” was ruthless to a degree that would shock modern generals; and, he was offered the crown of America. He is our hero because he declined the crown. and a third term.
    Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imposed an income tax, and a draft and fired generals in order to find Grant, who was not afraid to fight the last man.
    FDR was a dictator. Harry S Truman continued the dictatorship. Eisenhower stepped back from the edge.
    That FDR favored the Soviets was excellent strategy. Stalin was murdering millions, and had no problem murdering fascists. FDR needed the non-fascist Europeans and their armies and navies as close to intact as possible in order to prosecute invasions of Japan, China, and French Indochina. Everyone knows Stalin and Hitler were buds until 1941, and Stalin was always willing to bargain with whomever gave him the best deal – even Hitler again.
    That FDR’s assistants were East Coast monied liberals and favored solidarity with the myth of the noble blue collar union (not unlike today’s Prognazis) is not really shocking. America’s rich like to feel common just like European rich rented hermits. Rather like selecting a tie to go with a suit.
    Question is: are Horowitz and Radosh worth humoring enough to keep them supporting the Right?

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