Folsom’s Book Portrays FDR As Devious Opportunist

• Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom, FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America, New York: Threshold Editions, 2011, 384 pages, $27.00.

Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom and his wife Anita have given a much-needed counterweight to the standard view that Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest American presidents. After reading FDR Goes to War (and I also recommend Folsom’s earlier book New Deal or Raw Deal?), anyone who isn’t an utter zealot for our welfare-warfare state will have to conclude that FDR’s years of control over the nation were nothing short of cataclysmic.

This new book examines Roosevelt and his administration from 1939 on as war engulfed Europe, an event that gave FDR an opportunity to reinvent himself as a wartime leader. The war was truly a godsend for him since many Americans had grown tired of the Depression (which FDR’s statist policies had greatly prolonged) and the election of 1940 looked to be very difficult for the president.

As war raged, FDR had to walk a tightrope. Most American citizens did not want the country to be drawn into conflicts that did not threaten our shores. Therefore, FDR had to pretend that he desired to maintain our neutrality, while at the same time doing all he could to aid Britain and desperately seeking an excuse to enter the war.

In his speeches and avuncular “Fireside Chats,” Roosevelt reassured Americans that he was not going to get the country involved in the war. “But behind the scenes,” the authors write, “Roosevelt wanted the United States involved in the war,” and they quote his speechwriter, Robert Sherwood as admitting that his statements “may be denounced as deliberately misleading or at best wishful thinking.” Roosevelt’s policy was one of quietly preparing for war and putting American naval forces in danger, hoping that Germany would be provoked into creating a casus belli.

A key, recurring theme in the book is the way FDR would ignore the law — even the Constitution — when doing so helped him accomplish his goals. One example is the deal he struck with the British in September 1940, wherein the United States would trade 50 Navy destroyers for British military bases from the Caribbean to Newfoundland.

There were, however, two legal problems with this deal: the Constitution gives the president no authority to make such deals unilaterally and doing this one violated a federal statute, the Neutrality Act. Roosevelt was fully aware of the illegality involved, but went ahead anyway through an “executive agreement.” He admitted to his close confidant Bernard Baruch, “I might get impeached for it.” The destructive idea that the president must be allowed to do whatever he thinks best no matter what the law says is one of the most lasting and harmful legacies of FDR.

The presidential campaign of 1940 was a model of what Richard Nixon would later call “maximizing the incumbency.” Throughout the campaign, FDR’s allies in the bureaucracy steered government contracts into swing states with great fanfare and the implication that if the president were defeated, the federal goodies would stop. He perfected the nasty tactic of using taxpayer dollars to buy votes from interest groups. Our massive federal budget and looming debt avalanche today are a result of that.

Apologists for Roosevelt say that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took him completely by surprise, but the Folsoms present a much more complicated picture. First, Pearl Harbor had not been the base for the American Pacific Fleet until FDR had ordered it there late in 1940. The fleet commander, Adm. James O. Richardson, protested that the fleet would be vulnerable there, so FDR relieved him of command shortly after the November election had been won.

Second, FDR refused to heed the counsel of military men who said that the nation’s armed forces were ill-prepared for war and that we should not underestimate the capabilities of the Japanese. Nevertheless, Roosevelt kept on with his bellicose policies while doing little to make the armed forces ready for the war he desired. The president also continued to believe that a war with Japan would be over in a mere six months.

The authors don’t go so far as to say that Roosevelt knew ahead of time, from the Japanese diplomatic transmissions we had intercepted and decoded, that an attack on the base would occur December 7. They do say, however, that from those intercepts, he must have known that an attack was imminent on December 6 and that Pearl Harbor was a possible target.

Another of FDR’s executive orders led to the most egregious attack on Americans’ liberty and property during the war years: the internment of Japanese-American citizens under another of FDR’s many executive orders. Tens of thousands were forced into detention camps without the slightest pretense of due process of law. There was no evidence that any of those people would or could aid the Japanese military. But with anti-Japanese hysteria raging after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt did not hesitate to order that a great number of these innocent men, women, and children be imprisoned under his “emergency powers.”

Why was there no internment of German-Americans or Italian-Americans? “In Roosevelt’s political calculation, he wanted votes from German-Americans and Italian-Americans,” the authors say. “He also wanted to carry California and the western states. By relocating only the Japanese-Americans, he could please native Californians and not offend the many ethnic Germans and Italians he would need to win re-election in 1944.”

Despite Roosevelt’s failing health, he resolved to run in 1944. During the campaign he gave a speech in which he proposed an “economic bill of rights” that would put the federal government in the business of ensuring every American’s “right to medical care,” “right to decent housing,” “right to a good education,” and so on. That speech indicated Roosevelt’s intention to revive his “New Deal” domestic agenda with a great expansion of entitlement programs after the end of the war.

He did not live to push that agenda through, however. Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945. Far from the brilliant and almost saintly leader that most historians and politicians see, FDR was a devious man who was really good at only one thing — winning elections.