I was amazed by what I learned about FDR last night

[PlanetBev]

I watched Part I of the FDR special on the History Channel last night. In his second or third presidential campaign, it looked like he didn't have a chance in hell of being re-elected. He responded with vitriol, attacking the Republicans savagely and relentlessly, never letting up. The voters responded by rewarding him with another term.

How long will the Democrats continue to play nice? Negative campaigning works and the Dems have a million hand grenades to throw at the Pubs, if only they had the courage to pull the pin.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. We have to come out hard next time.

Comity and manners will only get you so far, especially with these guys.

[RaleighNCDUer]

9. Comity. Isn't that the guy on TV with Hannity? nt

[Amy6627]

2. That really surprised me too. I thought he was always loved. I'm curious

about one of the critics they had in the special saying that he (FDR)didn't really help things that much. I'm going to talk to my parents about what they lived through back then.

[Bridget Burke]

6. Many loved him.

But the rich considered him a traitor to their class.

[NVMojo]

18. And the rich want to go back to Pre-1937, Pre-New Deal!!!

[DemBones DemBones]

21. And the wanna-be-rich considered him

a threat to the class they wanted to be in. Then, as now, a lot of people think they're better off (and thus pay too much in taxes) than is actually the case.

[jwirr]

14. That was the Repug line. And it is live and doing well today!

[sandnsea]

35. FDR was a communist

That's what Republicans said about him. They've been after his programs since the day he implemented them. Kennedy had plenty of people who hated him too. Read up on Truman some time, he went after the Republicans too. We had them down for a little while, but they reared their ugly head again.

[Boo Boo]

36. One of the things that FDR

did was levy a monster tax rate on the wealthy---don't have exact figures for you, but it was outrageously high. The 'pubes have been living off of that ever since. Of course, as I explained to someone just the other day, he didn't have anybody else to tax. Ya gotta remember what the country was like back then.

If he was going to put the country back on its feet, he was going to do it on the backs of the wealthy. And that's what happened. All those work-relief programs were payed for by GW's grandpa!

They hated him for it.

[elperromagico]

3. Attack early, attack often, never relent.

Hit them with the truth. Truth is like holy water to the GOP... it burns them up.

They're wrong. We're right. Simple as that.

[BOSSHOG]

5. The best way to piss off a republican

is to tell the truth.

One of my favorite political quotes - Adlai Stevenson I think:

I'll stop telling the truth about republicans when they stop lying about us.

[PlanetBev]

8. Very true, Bosshog

Ever notice how hysterical the Republicans get when you just happen to plainly state the facts? They react like you called their mother a whore.

[bunkerbuster1]

16. "I never give them hell. I just tell the truth

and they think it's hell."

We should remember Truman's words more often, methinks.

[whistle]

4. I'm watching it again. I also enjoyed the earlier broadcast....

...summary on the presidents, but I stopped watching it at Herbert Hoover. God they had 2 to 3 minutes of commercials ever 6 to 7 minutes and were barely getting in six former presidents an hour.

[PlanetBev]

7. I was listening to Pacifica yesterday

On the Ian Masters show, one of his guests was saying that because the Democrats were in power for so long, the had literaly forgotten how to fight; they had to get their asses kicked to learn again. In it's present form, it's hard to believe that this was the party of Truman, LBJ and Tip O'Neill.

[whistle]

11. I know, FDR did not pull too many punches either, but the move...

...to back segregationists in order to win the Southern vote in the 1940 re-election bid was total news to me. Had I been alive then I might have had a difficult time as a democrat with that endorsement. I always thought that Eleanor Roosevelt's stand on desegregation and invitation to have Natalie Miller sing "My Country Tis of Thee" before the Lincoln memorial that election year was pure to her values but also a supportive balance move to her husband's re-election bid, but I guess not. It seems that FDR had too much American aristocratic blood running through his arteries.

[AP]

19. If FRD had lost...

...and there hadn't been the built up wealth (through jobs and fair labor laws), it probably would have set civil rights back 70 years.

He may not have been great on race at the time, but the stuff that he did for working people planted the seeds of economic power than allowed black Americans to eventually assert more political power (which then turned into more economic and cultural power).

Without FDR, there would have been a polarization of wealth which would have strangled everyone who wasn't in the top 1% from asserting political power, regardless of whether their identiy was based on class, race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or whatever.

[whistle]

26. I just watched the parts of FDR that I missed last evening....

...and I was incorrect about the name of the African American who Eleanor Roosevelt had sing "My Country Tis of Thee" before the Lincoln memorial. It was Marian Anderson.

<snip>
When the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Marian as a black woman to sing in Constitution Hall in Washington D.C., Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization in protest. Later, at the invitation of the Secretary of the Interior, Marian sang at the Lincoln Memorial for Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, for an audience of 75,000. Marian herself, though disturbed and saddened by racial inequalities in her country, did not see a role for herself as an active, aggressive opponent of racism. Rather, she preferred to educate and enlighten her listeners through the example of her own life and actions. She became a great advocate and role model for African-American musicians. She never seemed to give up hope for the future of both her people and her country.

<link> http://www.fembio.org/women/marian-anderson.shtml

[DemBeans]

10. he attacked not only Republicans -

But savaged big business - the organized money that is always attempting (and has now apparently succeeded) to run the country.

And to think people advised Kerry to drop the "Benedict Arnold CEO" line. That was tame compared to FDR in 1936 (and oh, how we need him back).

[roguevalley]

12. he was and is a god in our family. its hard to tell you how beloved

this man is to millions and millions of people. he's a god.

[EVDebs]

13. Google up "The Plot to Overthrow FDR (Smedley D. Butler)"

2x CMOH winner USMC Gen Smedley D Butler blew the whistle on a coup attempt in 1933 to oust FDR. Plotters included Bush's relatives...

Wonder why they didn't mention that in the documentary last night, huh ?

[liam_laddie]

31. another familiar plot

Read "The Plot To Seize the White House" by Jules Archer, 1971.
Expensive as a used book, but good libraries should have it or get it through inter-library loan. It was a very direct but behind-the-curtain attempt to marginalize FDR in '34, due to "health issues," and replace him with a manager-type Secretariat.
We may have had a fascist administration had not General
Butler's gut feeling about the schemers caused him to be a
heroic whistleblower. Saved the US and the New Deal.
Hearings were held under John McCormick, but they withered
out due to, probably, Wall Street and Old Wealth opposition.

[EVDebs]

20. Well said, DemBeans ! The most prescient point ... I think Kerry

could have won over more in Ohio especially had he continued with investigating the outsourcing and 'exporting of America' line.

The 'globalizationist' forces within the Democratic Party helped sandbag this from happening, as his dropping that line about CEOs. He could even have mentioned more from the book Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston and picked up crossover moderate Republicans (guys like Paul Craig Roberts types who know Bush-o-nomics is Voodoo economics).

[ReadTomPaine]

15. I'm surprised they used Doris Kearns Goodwin.

She was academically discredited only a few years ago for plagiarism. Ashame, as I liked her.

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2061056

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/793ihurw.asp

RTP

[DemBones DemBones]

24. Then again, MLK was also discredited for plagiarism,

in the eyes of some. I think most people who appreciated the rest of his life's achievements shrugged it off as a stupid mistake he made while fairly young, though I never paid that much attention to that particular tempest in a teapot.

For the record, I do oppose plagiarism and various other acts of stupidity and/or cupidity. But a lot of people do things they shouldn't do. And it is possible that some acts of seeming plagiarism could be a result of a person being widely read and not realizing s/he was using wording read in someone else's work. No easy answers on this, I'm afraid.

[ReadTomPaine]

25. Points well taken!

However Ms. Goodwin's transgressions are both too recent and professionally oriented for her to have 'come in out of the cold' already, in my view. Then again, in the current climate, perhaps I should be thinking of far greater crimes and criminals.

Thanks for your thoughts.

RTP

[cestpaspossible]

32. I wrote the exact same comment

in a thread awhile back. I think I even used the same references.

[Chef]

17. FDR

I didn't watch. I generally find the History Channel a little short on the facts. Like unemployment being 14% in 1940 instead of 22% like they said. Wilkie was the most liberal Republican he faced and beat him with 55% of the popular vote. The Republicans were split between the Taft ultra rightists and the moderates. FDR got 449 electoral votes to Wilkie's 82. The interesting thing about the 1944 election is that the people in service over seas could not vote. The southern Democrats didn't want the Blacks to vote and they joined with the Republicans to deny them franchise because the feared the troops would have voted for the C&C.

[CatWoman]

22. the replay is on right now

I'm watching.

I can't get enough :D

[WI_DEM]

23. must have been his third campaign because he was always

the front runner to defeat Alf Landon in 1936--except for the Literary Digets poll which polled only people with phones--most people in 1936 didn't have phones unless they were wealthy.

[elperromagico]

28. Yes, 1940 was probably the closest call,

though 1944 ended in the closest margin of victory for Roosevelt.

[La Coliniere]

27. FDR was the man......

who made it possible for me. I'm only 2 generations away from Polish farm peasantry. The opportunities ushered in by the New Deal changed the course of my family's existence. Unions, Social Security, 40 Hour work week, unemployment insurance. College grants, you name it. True opportunity.
I sent thank you notes to folks who attended my surprise birthday party this summer that consisted of a picture of Franklin and Eleanore waving from the back seat of an open air limo. Underneath I printed the words, in bold type:
I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE. THANK YOU!
Some family members who share the same history as me now vote repug. I can't get it into their thick noggins that their good fortune in life wouldn't be possible without FDR and the Dems. Fools!
I can't believe all of the things FDR helped usher in are systematically being destroyed. Bastards I say. We can't let it happen!

[sendero]

29. I keep wondering that myself..

... Americans bitch about negative campaigning - but they vote for the attack dog. Why? Because they want tough strong leaders, not pink-tutued, hand-wringing, nuanced issue milktoasts.

The Dems have about one more election cycle to figure this out, or they will be forever irrelevant.

[leesa]

30. Exactly! All this nicepoo shit is the wrong tact as is the desire to

become Republicans to beat them....stupid!

[cestpaspossible]

33. It seems he was a very lonely man.

Well, as they say, if you want a friend, get a dog.

[rman]

34. did FDR lie like the GOP does?

it's true that Dems shouldn't roll over and play dead, but that doens't mean we should play dirty like GOP does. Just telling the truth - and repeating it over and over - instead of being quiet, would do the job. Saying the truth occasionally, as some reps do now, isn't nearly enough.