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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
(8,045 posts)But FDR was a politician working in a racist system, in the context of centuries of racist oppression. I can't and won't defend everything he did or didn't do. He obviously felt he had to choose his battles. But to say the bad things he did outweigh all the good he did is absurd.
On the whole, I think his contributions toward saving the world from Nazism (which is about as racist an ideology as ever existed) outweigh his slighting of a single black athlete, sad and reprehensible as that incident was. You don't agree? You'd be happier, and you think the world would be a better place, if FDR had welcomed Jesse Owens to the White House, but allowed Hitler to defeat Britain and thus win the war?
BTW, Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that African American singer Marian Anderson be allowed to sing at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939the first Black artist ever to do soand over the strenuous, even violent objections of white racists. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution because of their objection to Anderson singing at an event they sponsored. FDR obviously supported her in this. Does that sound like a racist to you?
So like I say, he decided for political reasons, for good or ill, to fight some battles and not others.
Frederick Douglas, writing about Lincoln after his assassination, said that judging Lincoln "on the pure abolitionist ground" you'd find him slow, compromising, tepid. But judging him in the context of his times, and in light of how he had to function as a politician, he was fast, daring, and a true leader (I'm paraphrasing). I'd say the same about FDR.
Not consistently great. But a great man, nonetheless.