Talk:Criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Picked racist for VP
Garner, a racist white congressman from Texas, was his VP for 8 years, needs to be included — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.38.155.134 (talk) 20:53, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Criticism Of New Deal Policies
This is a very political subject, and I think it's very important that the current consensus of the economic community and any responses to these criticisms also be established. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aewehr (talk • contribs) 03:53, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Yalta Conference and Eastern Europe
I'm surprised to find nothing here about this topic, not even a link to Yalta Conference. Surely FDR's relationship to Stalin must be among the most serious criticisms of his administration? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.206.87.116 (talk) 19:21, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Pearl Harbor Criticism
Going to the FDR criticism page I certainly expected to see a discussion of the accusations that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to be bombed as a pretext for the US entering WWII. Maybe there's another page dedicated specifically to this (don't know, don't really care) but I would think that there if there is then there should certainly be a link to it on the FDR criticism page. Seems to me this page is less about presenting vaild criticisms of FDR and more about fellating him. Just a thought.

I'd recommend adding criticism of his courting of isolationists to his later internationalism and critics of his record on civil rights (see FDR on Civil Rights page). There was also a lot of criticism of his haughty, aristocratic demeanor.

Of course, it couldn't win his critics an election. Or get their bills passed or policies enacted. Sam 01:12, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of Goebbels praising New Deal methods
Rjensen (del unsourced smear by father of Big Lie)
 * Ok, Goebbels praises FDR New Deal.ogg is the video from which this image was excerpted. That Goebbels said this remains a fact, evidenced from the video.  Although Joseph Goebbels held the position of "propaganda minister", this activity is comparable to "public relations" in other major governments at the time.  Not that everything Goebbels said was a lie, but rather, he sought to present Nazi government works in a sympathetic light.  The make-work programs of Reichsarbeitsdienst and the Works Progress Administration were extremely similar in practice, as authoritarian attempts to control unemployment, whether the projects themselves were the Autobahn or Mount Rushmore. 71.162.255.58 21:06, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Better read up a bit on Goebbels--favorable references to him will get an editor in real trouble. What exactly was he praising? the design of Mount Rushmore? Rjensen 21:14, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * From the video, "I am very interested in social developments in America. I believe that President Roosevelt has chosen the right path. We are dealing with the greatest social problems ever known. Millions of unemployed must get their jobs back, and this cannot be left to private initiative. It is the government that must tackle the problem." Specifically, he's excusing government control of the economy on the same grounds FDR used for the New Deal.  Yes, this is something of a red herring because it doesn't answer the diagnostic question of whether government control of the economy yields expected or desirable results, and instead frames the issue as "we're doing what you're doing".  However, the criticism remains that the governments of FDR and the Nazis sought to address their unemployment problems in a very similar way.  Goebbels' reputation doesn't refute this.  71.162.255.58 21:28, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * You read too much into political rhetoric. What was Goebbels trying to accomplish in 1936?  Is this a politican looking to cozy up, to associate himself with Roosevelt to keep America neutral and isolationist?  One trying to appeal to people who would naturally be opposed to him to avoid their full opposition? If you want to show that the two governments addressed social programs in similar ways, compare the two social programs.  This is a quote that is appropriate for a discussion of Goebbels more than Roosevelt. Or, if you want to address a more interesting question, you might think about the debate over the extent to which Roosevelt may have bought some of the isolationist position and some of the German overtures, a question on which you'll find some folks around here have strong opinions. But, for that debate, the picture is somewhat remote in relevance. Sam 22:00, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * The image/video seemed to me to compliment the observation that the FDR regime and the Nazi party shared a common prescription of government intervention in their respective economic regions for a common public demand to address the problem of unemployment. 71.162.255.58 23:12, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * The sectiuon is about FDR & Fascism. Goebbels mentions FDR but not fascism so there is no relevence to this article. Rjensen 22:07, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed here. Sam 22:33, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Goebbels does also imply fascism vis-a-vis government authoritarian control of the otherwise private (i.e. Free) marketplace. I would defer to further reading from the Austrian school for analysis of "FDR the Fascist". (A little of which has been flushed out in the article.  There was also an extensive debate in the Talk:Fascism in the past.) America's Great Depression 71.162.255.58 23:12, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

User:Rjensen (highly misleading and false history Goebbels does not call FDR a fascist)
 * Obviously Goebbels will not literally call FDR a fascist anymore than he would call Hitler a fascist. Rather, a diagnosis of fascism would be inferred from FDR and Nazis using the same means to address the same problems.  The Goebbels quote then becomes relevant for underscoring their agreement in methodology.  71.162.255.58 23:20, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
 * "would be inferred from" = original research and not allowed on Wiki. We are NOT allowed to make inferences from historical documents. Rjensen 01:55, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
 * That's an interesting way to interpret the "no original research" requirement. I took it more to mean that conclusions couldn't be written as such (i.e. conflating editing with authoring).  e.g. An encyclopedia requires "These people describe FDR as a fascist." not "FDR was a fascist."  However, at this time, I can imagine how the metadata of mere co-inclusion could be interpreted as a kind of "original research".  So, until a secondary source links together the primary source (i.e. Goebbels) to criticizing FDR (i.e. this article), I'll accept that the Goebbels media runs enough risk of possibly constituting "original research" to not include it at this time. 71.162.255.58 02:28, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
 * It is not true that the New Deal unemployment policies resembled those of Germany. They used very different techniques like suppression of labor unions and heavy military spending. When Hoover raised the fascism issue he meant that FDR was controlled by big business and the Chamber of Commerce. Rjensen 02:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
 * FDR also sought to limit the power of labor unions (he granted unions legal powers through the National Labor Relations Board, thus regulating/institutionalizing them) and vastly increased military spending because he "ran out" of civilian projects for make-work programs while unemployment (>14%) persisted. (And the military provides a bottomless government spending sinkhole, especially once government spending was untethered from the gold standard in 1933.)  However, FDR did also spur corporatism through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and National Recovery Administration (NRA). 71.162.255.58 03:44, 10 July 2006 (UTC)


 * in reality FDR vastly increased the power of labor unions. he did not start large military spending until 1940. The NRA lasted only 2 years and was gone long before Goebbels spoke. The AAA is an interesting case --we still have its subsidies to this day, but I doubt Goebbels knew much about it. Rjensen 04:00, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup/rewrite
I feel like this article has a lot of material that it could work with, and that it needs a serious re-writing/re-structuring. I'd like to see all of the criticisms broken down, as well as some references to possible support for FDR's decisions as a contrast, and to further inform the reader about the argument.
 * The article is about "criticism" of FDR, and is in no need of balance in that regard. While the criticism should be reasoned and not simply accusations without merit, there is no need to "counterbalance" the criticisms with defenses of the same.K. Scott Bailey 02:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Unconstitutionality
Why is there no mention at all in this article about Roosevelt's blatantly unconstitutional expansion of central executive power that has more or less kept its bloated bureaucratic form up through the present?
 * that's because the Constitution never said anything about the AAA, CCC, WPA, or SEC. Rjensen 02:40, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
 * is that why the supreme court ruled many of those programs unconstitutional? 96.242.168.61 (talk) 06:05, 22 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Rjensen, that is not the way the Constitution is drafted. Those programs were ruled unconstitutional because no authorization for such activities can be found in the Constitution. So your observation that nothing is said about the AAA, CCC, WPA, and SEC is exactly why they are unconstitutional. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.206.87.116 (talk) 19:32, 3 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd have nothing against a well-researched and cited paragraph or two discussing the constitutional view that did not prevail and that was expressed in the Butler decision, and earlier decisions going back to Lochner. Someone should draft it.  But, I think using the word "blatant" is pretty POV - you should tone down the rhetoric and do the research before drafting. A Musing (formerly Sam) 02:53, 27 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes. Aren't there supposed to be rules about this discussion? Is the discussion page on Wikipedia supposed to make political arguments about figures discussed in the content page? -- RDK.

Disagree. Facts are facts, opinion is opinion. That you do not like what the constitution says and favor continued violation of it does not make calling it a blatent violation of the constitution wrong. Montestruc (talk) 21:09, 29 July 2017 (UTC) Montestruc (talk) 21:09, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
 * "Facts are facts"??? -- not in Wikipedia. The only "facts" allowed here are noncontroversial statements that are very widely known (like "FDR was president 1933-45") Beyond that--and in this case--Wiki relies only on published RD-reliable sources. That means editors need to cite their RS to be credible in these discussions. Say, a law textbook. Rjensen (talk) 21:27, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Merge tag removed
This article has had a tag on it since early 2007, but there has been no discussion on it here. On the article that this was proposed to be merged with, Opposition to Roosevelt, the consensus was in favor of not merging. Accordingly, I have removed the merge tag. If you still feel that the articles should be merged, please put the tag on this article again and state your reasons. Bry9000 (talk) 22:24, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Criticism of post-war plans
Roosevelt has been criticized both for his doctrine of unconditional surrender, and for his plan for the "pastoralization" of post-war Germany, a plan that he used a $6 billion Lend Lease agreement to buy UK support for. Both these Rooseveltian policies have been accused of prolonging the war and causing unnecessary deaths,,, the latter also after the end of the war. In a report on the German situation after 2 years of occupation President Herbert Hoover would in 1947 remark:
 * "There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.".

Please, Wikipedia is not the place for hero-worship of Roosevelt or similar. I'm referring to this edit by you. Where you state "the criticism by Wikipedia editors does not count--only criticism of FDR at the time by actual people". Roosevelt drew heavy flack in the media for his plan, since it was feared it would encourage the Germans to fight on, as it also did, see the references in the other version you deleted. And to replace the text above with "Roosevelt was criticized by the Nazis for his plan for the "pastoralization" of post-war Germany. " is tantamount to a travesty. As to "the criticism by Wikipedia editors does not count". Please be civil, and please bother reading the text and sources I provided before lashing out. As to "only criticism of FDR at the time by actual people" Please also read the introduction to this article, you seem to have seriously misjudged what the article is about, later criticism of Roosevelt for his unconditional surrender policy is very much admissible.--Stor stark7 Talk 13:52, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * this is OR and is not allowed in Wikipedia. The article is about criticism of Roosevelt, and only the Nazi criticism is mentioned in the sources. POV criticism by Wikipedia editors is not what the article is about. Criticism of postwar US programs is hardly relevent (FDR was dead before the war ended of course.) Rjensen (talk) 18:55, 7 April 2008 (UTC)


 * From the JSTOR article on Unconditional surrender: "The doctrine of ' Unconditional Surrender ' has few friends nowadays. It tends to be represented as a predilection of Roosevelt, generated by the antipathy towards Germany which he [Roosevelt] acquired as a youthful visitor to that country; by his deep distrust of the State Department's conventional thinking on foreign relations; and by his consequential ready ear for less diplomatic advisers like the Chiefs of Staff and old friends such as Henry Morgenthau. At Casablanca he sprang the proposal on Churchill who, despite his better judgment and more generous impulses, felt in no position to disagree with the controller of Britain's transatlantic life-line,... Thereafter, although Stalin is supposed to have disapproved of it, and practically every senior American except Roosevelt (but including Eisenhower) to have doubted its wisdom, it remained a cornerstone of Allied policy until the actual terms of surrender for Germany were drawn up in 1945. Repeated attempts to interpret it away or produce some mitigation got nowhere. A free gift was thereby made to Goebbels of which he made full use, spurring on the German people to make their resistance outlast their hopes of victory by harping on the horrors which would follow defeat. On the other side of the medal, those Germans-and particularly those German generals-who might have been ready to throw Hitler over, and were in a position to do so, were discouraged from making the attempt by their inability to extract from the Allies any sort of assurance that such action would improve the treatment meted out to their country.
 * There was an even more serious consequence of the Allied insistence on fighting the war to a finish, instead of being prepared to contemplate surrender on conditions while German troops still stood outside German frontiers. Had a conditional surrender been possible at that stage the Russians would never have reached Central Europe, and a more or less intact Wehrmacht would have remained in existence to shield that area from them. As this was not permitted, the Allied armies had to fight their way right into Germany and divide it up into zones of occupation."


 * You are saying that that above is not a critisism of Roosevelts policy?


 * As to:"Criticism of postwar US programs is hardly relevent (FDR was dead before the war ended of course.)" How exactly do you motivate that? FDR was famous for keeping his associates in the dark about what he was up to, when Roosevelt died Truman had no choice but to keep carrying out the policies Roosevelt had set, as you well know. Also, you do not change policy on the spur of the moment, it requires long time of preparation to set occupation policy (create instructions, set organisation etc), even if Truman had wanted a different policy he couldn't have changed the basics of what Roosevelt had set in motion. Granted that Truman never even tried, as the JSTOR article I linked to on your talk page demonstrates it was the U.S. delegation who pushed for the Morgenthau policy at the Potsdam conference, but then they may have had no choise since that was the policy their wholle planning was set up for.


 * As to "only the Nazi criticism is mentioned in the sources" Where exactly do you see Nazi critisism? This policy was a godsend for the nazis, it ensured that the people had no choise but to fight even harder and stick with the nazis.
 * From the two Times articles: The Morgenthau plan... Far & away the most drastic yet proposed for the future of Germany, it was just barely above the level of "sterilize all Germans." It would reduce Germany from a prewar industrial giant to a fourth-rate nation of small farms...This was indeed a Carthaginian peace. But Henry Morgenthau believes that Germany must be destroyed, as Carthage was...Hull and Stimson strongly opposed the Morgenthau program to strip Germany. Both agreed that such a super-Versailles would only justify a future German generation in once more uniting to plan revenge...."Even the airing of this plan is going to cost a lot of American lives. It is going to stiffen resistance inside Germany. We have placed a powerful weapon in the hands of Goebbels." A few hours later, the Goebbels propaganda machine began grinding. Shouted the German radio: "The occupation of the Reich by Americans and British would be as horrible as by the Bolsheviks. Morgenthau is outdoing Clemenceau. Clemenceau said there were 23,000,000 Germans too many—Morgenthau wants to see 43,000,000 Germans exterminated." "But the highest sources in Washington insisted that the Morgenthau plan was not only still alive, but would yet turn out to be the final plan, though modified. According to these sources, his plan had been "bought" by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Quebec, despite heavy objections from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. After the hubbub has died down, Henry Morgenthau's proposals supposedly will then reappear as the official U.S. proposal."


 * Some Other sources:The Washington Post urged; stop helping Dr. Goebbels, if the Germans suspect that nothing but complete destruction lies ahead, then they will fight on. The Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey complained in his campaign that the Germans had been terrified by the plan into fanatical resistance, "Now they are fighting with the frenzy of despair."


 * General George Marshall complained to Morgenthau that German resistance had strengthened. Hoping to get Morgenthau to relent on his plan for Germany, President Roosevelt's son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger who worked in the War Department explained to Morgenthau how the American troops that had had to fight for five weeks against fierce German resistance to capture the city of Aachen had complained to him that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans." Morgenthau refused to relent.


 * On December 11, OSS operative William Donovan sent Roosevelt a telegraph message from Bern, warning him of the consequences that the knowledge of the Morgenthau plan had had on German resistance; by showing them that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany it had welded together ordinary Germans and the regime; the Germans continue to fight because they are convinced that defeat will bring nothing but oppression and exploitation. The message was a translation of a recent article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.


 * "So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose. To take a recent example, the Morgenthau plan gave Dr. Goebbels the best possible chance. He was able to prove to his countrymen, in black and white, that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany. The conviction that Germany had nothing to expect from defeat but oppression and exploitation still prevails, and that accounts for the fact that the Germans continue to fight.  It is not a question of a regime, but of the homeland itself, and to save that, every German is bound to obey the call, whether he be Nazi or member of the opposition."
 * --Stor stark7 Talk 10:59, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Tax-spend.JPG
The image Image:Tax-spend.JPG is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here. In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page. Please check


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 * That this article is linked to from the image description page.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Media copyright questions. --06:20, 1 November 2008 (UTC)


 * the rationale: The cartoon is a parody of the tax and spend policies of the Roosevelt administration. Parody is an allowed fair use and is not a violation of coyright.

Section Criticism of Roosevelt as a "Fascist"
I'm not sure all of these sources actually criticise him as a Fascist. Dougweller (talk) 10:53, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Amity Schlaes
Why is she characterized as an "historian", I thought she only had a bachelors in English? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.184.185.8 (talk) 02:24, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * she does research and writes serious history, and is called upon by the media as an expert on the 1930s. That makes her a genuine amateur historian. Rjensen (talk) 05:31, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * However when she moves beyond narration and stories and into historiography, she is out of her depth. She simply is unfamiliar with the advanced work that is being done. So I dropped this passage added by LesLein:  Shlaes wrote that Roosevelt's policies were often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.  She stated that a number of New Dealers such as Rexford Tugwell were heavily influenced by Mussolini's Italy and especially Soviet Russia.  She wrote that few New Dealers were spies or communists, but they were naive about the economic benefits of Soviet and European collectivism.  According to Shlaes, fear of being accused of McCarthyism has long prevented historians from looking into the Soviet's ideological influence on American domestic policy in the 1930s.  Shlaes acknowledges that Hoover and Roosevelt may not have had better alternatives; their policies may have spared America some facsimile of Mussolini's fascism or Stalin's communism.  Shales states that "The argument that democracy would have failed in the United States without the New Deal stood for seven decades, and has been made anew, by scholars of considerable quality, quite recently. ref Amity Shlaes.  The Forgotten Man:  A New History of the Great Depression.  New York:  HarperCollins (2007) ISBN 978-0-06-621170-1, pp. 6-7, 13-14. /ref '' Rjensen (talk) 23:55, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Sex life
I am not sure that it can be called criticism, but shouldn't there be a section on his and Eleanor's varied sex lives- since these were controversial if not grounds for criticism.Royalcourtier (talk) 07:47, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Meta - bias in terminology
Many people ignore the major shift in American political philosophy starting in the 1880s as a reaction to the civil war and it's outcome. The progressive movement was a virulent reaction against the traditional American classical liberal abolitionist sentiment. The article uses the term "liberal" when discussing pro-FDR historians that is simply not appropriate. Progressive is the accurate term.

FDR and Wilson whom FDR served as undersecretary of the Navy and T. Roosevelt were all closely associated with the progressive movement, and were opposed to, and antagonistic toward traditionally Liberal American political thought. Montestruc (talk) 21:06, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
 * "Liberal" is the term for FDR used in the great majority of RS (reliable secondary sources). Wiki defers to the RS according to WP:RS  As reported in An encore for reform: The old progressives and the New Deal by Otis Graham (1967), the majority of "Progressives" from the 1910s opposed FDR and the New Deal (like Al Smith, Frank Knox, WR Hearst), and a minority supported him (like George Norris, Harold Ickes).  Rjensen (talk) 21:18, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

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Completely unfocused bonfire of every borderline opinion available.
This article is mistitled. Instead of "Criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt," it should be called, "Every Joker Who Ever Had Anything Negative to Say About the New Deal Or Franklin Roosevelt for the Last 90 Years." If the article is supposed to cover criticism of Roosevelt at the time he was alive, then the article should be limited to materials that date from that time. If the article is supposed to cover anybody's opinion who ever argued with the New Deal, or Keynesian economics, or Roosevelt's leadership during WWII, then the article should simply be deleted. Criticism of the New Deal should be posted in an article about the New Deal; criticism about Keynesian economics should be posted under a subject-appropriate article; et cetera. I suspect that many of the sources cited in this article -- sources that are "relevant" because of the unbelievably broad, unfocused topic -- would never survive group editing in the particular subjects that the sources are actually talking about, e.g., the effect of Keynesian economics in the Great Depression. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MithraUnconquered (talk • contribs) 00:18, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
 * In my opinion it is a good article. It is well written without hyperbole; each section is narrowly focused; and the reliable sources are used effectively. Rjensen (talk) 00:50, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

I question the reliability of Rafael Medoff, and hope to find some criticism
Personally, he comes across to me as a Netanyahu coalition propagandist. However, I know it needs to be pointed out through reliable sources and a neutral point of view. I hope we can work together in finding articles about him.2601:449:4582:B3C0:7DDD:81C:9C6C:D06E (talk) 01:25, 27 April 2024 (UTC)