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In reply to the discussion: The good that came out of FDR does not out weigh the bad [View all]thucythucy
(8,048 posts)set by Congress, in legislation passed in the 1920s during the height of the eugenics anti-immigrant craze? FDR didn't have unilateral authority to change the immigration laws, sad to say.
As far as being a womanizer, he had one affair, with one woman, during the course of his marriage. Maybe not commendable, but certainly not in the same league as Donald "grab them by the pussy" "I like to watch women piss" "pay off that porn star" Trump.
Also, the Nazi scientists who came to the US came AFTER the war, after FDR's death. The ones who came before and during the war were either Jewish--like Albert Einstein, or anti-Nazi and antifascist, like Fermi. That's why they agreed to help build the atomic bomb--because they WEREN'T Nazis.
Not that I condone the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, just because of their ancestry. But you know, don't you, that George Takei, who was interned as a child, a few days ago wrote an editorial saying what Trump is doing is worse? In it he said that at least in the internment camps children weren't separated from their parents.
I'm not sure how you "weigh" the good against the bad. On the bad side, the unjust imprisonment for several years of tens of thousands of innocent people. Very bad indeed. On the good side--saving our democracy from fascism, both domestic and foreign, bringing the country out of the Depression, defeating the Nazis and preventing the probable extermination of every Jew on the planet, and the actual enslavement of anybody who wasn't either "pure Aryan" or--as Hitler called the Japanese -"honorary Aryans." Also Social Security, which has saved and prolonged the lives of millions of people. Also the founding of the United Nations, the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights (written largely by Eleanor), the Atlantic Charter...
On the whole, I'm pretty confident his presidency was better, and will long be remembered as being better, than any of the possible alternatives.