let my contextualize this. my family is half republican, half democrat, all northern. the northern democrats in the last century were solid union liberals and roosevelt supporters. contrary to the perception of the republicans as a southern & conservative party, however, in the north the history is very progressive & liberal. so it is a different tradition than the current republicans.
so here is the thing.
i have been watching speeches today by roosevelt. now, during my public school days, i was taught by the teacher union history program (not a bad one, i scored perfect on the tests) i was taught roosevelt with lincoln were the high points of US history, but especially roosevelt. if you have also been to US public school, no doubt you have been taught roosevelt = new deal = victory in WW2.
however, i have as i mentioned, been watching these FDR videos. dude's a fucking fascist. no way around it. very, very scary. i am actually questioning the whole thing now - how much of that honorable tradition is a lie? you know?
yes, i'll give you the whole country in depression, the whole world in peril, the ultimately liberal views of the US prevailing = good for globe. but FDR? he was basically a dictator - this makes me very uncomfortable with this period in history, and this is a period which is emphasized in public school as the key to modern america. its a very disturbing thing, if you can imagine.
i am really wondering what is the truth behind my republican relatives and their philosophy of opposing the new deal and isolationism at the time of WW2. granted, you probably have to fight those nazi bastards. but under a dicator? chilling - anyone know what i mean?
The trend among conservatives and republicans, in the 1930s as well as now, was to demonize Roosevelt's actions as dictatorial. He did make a few errors in judgement, the foremost being the forced internment of American japanese on the west coast.
However, most cases of his alleged over-reaching were simply instances of him trying to get his economic recovery plan past the kind of mindset that had led to the great depression, principally the republican notion that the government should operate in favor of business (and let big businesses take care of 'the people'--it was Reaganomics wasn't a new idea), and the democratic notion that everything should be left up to the states.
Pro-business governance created the conditions for the Depression in the first place, and insistence on allowing states to handle things themselves only prolonged the problem. National economic recovery became an issue for the United States as a whole, and the response had to be from the country as a whole.
It's worth noting that some of his efforts to make sure the New Deal got through were not, strictly speaking, illegal. There is nothing in the constitution preventing mandatory retirement ages for the Supreme Court (in fact, there's nothing to say the legislature can't push off judges by fiat), nor is there a provision that it always remain at 9 members. So while efforts like these may have been a bit of a petty way to get the job done, they weren't illegal and they were intended to serve the country's interests.
It's worth noting that Roosevelt's reputation as anti-business and anti-free enterprise is probably overstated, since a great number of people suspected him of being secretly in league with the great bankers and industrialists of the day (the original "fascism" or "corporatism").
Lastly, compare the activities of Roosevelt during the Second World War with those of any other wartime president since Lincoln (including the current one), and he comes out practically spotless.
In the first place, Darwyn, you assume that the attack would not have happened had it not been for the memo. That Japanese had already started building the Yamato, which was designed specifically to engage and outclass US naval forces in the Pacific.
As for the memo itself, I remain unconvinced that the government acted in the wrong. The facts remain that Japan was, at the time, fighting a war against friendly nations (the British Commonwealth, the Netherlands government in exile), forcibly annexing parts of China (the freedom of which the US had been a staunch supporter of since the 19th century), had the capability to isolate militarily U.S. overseas possessions in the Philippines and Guam, and had openly been reviewing plans for war in the Pacific with the US since the 1930s. The Federal government had the power to shut down the Japanese war machine almost altogether through the means of an oil embargo, and had the Japanese themselves not been totally committed to waging war against the United States one would have expected them to at least offer a diplomatic compromise. Instead, the decision to attack the US was made by the Japanese Naval High Command almost immediately, and in response to activities that could hardly be considered belligerent. Certainly it took a great deal more baiting to get Germany to force war on the US in 1917.
It's also disingenuous to compare the Roosevelt administration with PNAC's plan for Iraq, which was basically to have the US invade suddenly and under dubious pretenses. The Iraqis never attacked Pearl Harbor.
Well, it's still not necessarily the case that the McCollum memo was the reason he did those things. As I said, it was perfectly in line with previous American foreign policy to do those things, some which never happened (Singapore remained a British possession until it fell, for example). Further, given the state of Japanese expansionism, if you had a major naval base and a civilian population within striking distance of their navy, wouldn't you make sure to defend it? Does Italy leave Tunis empty when there's a French fleet in the Western Mediterranean?
And even if provoking a war with Japan was the goal, it wasn't wrong. Congressional and popular opinion were wrong. They were wrong about potential threats to the United States territorial possessions, they were wrong about the severity of the threat of fascism, and they were wrong about the US's position responsibilities as potentially the world's strongest military power. What sets Roosevelt apart from Johnson, Nixon, and GW Bush is that didn't lie, he didn't fabricate evidence, at worst he advanced the Japanese plan of attack by a few months.
Supporting support move
)
)
)
)