Recently, Samizdata’s own Paul Marks had a post about F.D. Roosevelt and considered his reputation, his actions and the New Deal. The blogger under the name Hedge Fund Guy has this scathing assessment of the man regarded by many Britons to this day as a good guy:
I think FDR was a horrible president. My son takes better care of his ant farm than this guy took care of the economy. If ever there was someone in power who looked only at partial derivatives, it was FDR. If there was ever someone who focused on producers and ignored consumers, it was FDR. If there was anyone who thought self-interest was only present among businessmen, not government or union workers, it was FDR. His economic views are indistinguishable from a typical campus left-winger after 10 bong hits.
Ouch. He then goes on to attack much of FDR’s record, and I don’t have a quarrel with a single word of it. Even so, it interests me that a man who, objectively speaking, was a total failure in cutting the massive unemployment of 1930s America managed to hold the reputation as a saviour of capitalism for so long. I recall my O-Level history classes and how Roosevelt was presented as essentially one of the Good Men of History, while Herbert Hoover, FDR’s immediate predecessor in the White House, was presented as a Republican who did what he could but not nearly enough (in fact, Hoover was a persistent meddler and regulator, and carries considerable responsibility for the scale of the Great Depression, as do the protectionists in Congress at the time).
Roosevelt was a great showman. His “fireside chats”, his folksy manner, his ability to surround himself with a loyal and capable grouping of what we would call today “spin-doctors” ensured that the FDR myth lasted a long time. His friendship with Winston Churchill – albeit subject to strains and disagreements such as how to deal with Stalin – also ensured that the man is viewed by some Britons in a positive light. Being entirely selfish, I am glad that the United States entered the Second World War on Britain’s side, and one of the reasons why I am a visceral pro-American is that I believe that Europe today would be in a far worse shape than it is now were it not for the courage shown by America’s airmen, soldiers and sailors (some U.S. folk joined up on the British side even before America joined). I have absolutely no truck with the absurd isolationist view that the United States should have sat back, let Stalin/Hitler do their worst and if need be, come to some sort of accomodation with an entire European/Asian landmass under totalitarian, race-based thugs. So it is easy to see why Roosevelt’s image burned bright for many people.
I think the lesson of how FDR managed to hold a high reputation for so long is that a political leader, particularly if he or she is adept in the arts of propoganda and can come across as “doing something” to fix a problem, however counter-productive, can get a fair pass. I do wonder, however, whether FDR would have been as successful in narrow political terms now.
This book, written very much from the “Austrian” perspective, has a particularly devastating chapter on the New Deal, the record on unemployment.
The SEC remains a popular candidate for the most effective federal agency. Securities regulation is somewhat expensive, but I don’t think there are many economists who would argue that we’re better off without any and I get the impression, as a fairly red blooded capitalist, that the 33 and 34 acts are about right.
The Wagner act, tempered by the Taft-Hartley, avoided a lot of the violent problems with unions that plagued Europe after the war and that had hurt America before.
He had 4 terms and there’s an awful lot that he got wrong in his double presidency (one term is really a half-presidency). His economic instincts were poor. His con law was worse. His love of freedom didn’t always add up to much. Still, there was good stuff in there with the bad. It’s rarely helpful to see these things in black and white and the positive aspects of partisanship mostly fall away with distance.
Well its fairly clear that FDR was a socialist.
Although, famously, the communists and the fascists both left the party when Truman took over, I’ve always seen him more as a fascist than a socialist. He wanted to have the state direct the private sector’s efforts to the state’s ends. He didn’t expropriate all that much. He had moments of nutty redistributionism, but for the most part he rubbed along OK with an America that had some pretty amazingly wealthy people in it.
I should note that I don’t mean the term fascist in a pejorative sense. As I note above, the corporatist NLRA was a model of good sense. One of my chief fears for the new Congress is that they’ll screw it up.
Thinking about it, I should clarify that clarification. I do think that his corporatist enthusiasms generally did a lot of harm. The NIRA and TVA stand out in particular. I don’t mean to suggest that I agree with corporatism in general, just that I didn’t mean “fascist” in the sense of “villain”.
Nah, just one of those lovable fascists…
As I’ve said before , the Roosevelt Administration was just another form of National Socialism.
I’d rather have an ideologically bankrupt system administered by humane people than a flawless system administered by thugs. See for example the Stalin Constitution, an excellent document in theory.
The New Deal showed that National Socialism did not have to involve Death Camps. I’m not sure though that there’s ever been a Marxist Administration that didn’t at least have Gulags.
I am not a great admirer of FDR.
There is no question that many people who praise him lavishly have an insufficient grasp of the history of the depression years. Either that or they are simply prosletyzing for big government in all its forms.
On the other hand, people who are so quick to condemn him have no concept of the despair and hopelessness prevailing when FDR took office. I assume that conditions were similar in Great Britain. While FDR did not end the depression, WW2 did that; he did take immediate and highly visible steps to bring a sense of hope and energy to the people of the United States. This was no small accomplishment.
I was a depression baby. I have heard the stories first hand from my parents and others who lived through the teeth of it; and I have seen the pictures and news film from those days. It was terrible. FDR’s bold actions, as trumpeted by his effective “spin machine” were important steps at the time.
Many of his actions and programs were necessary and would have been excellent as temporary emergency stop-gaps. The problem is that they endured; and they grew; and they continue to grow. There is a lesson there, but it has been poorly learned.
I should think that Brits would cheer his actions in the dark early days of WW2. He was far ahead of the rest of the United States in recognizing the nature of the threat you faced and advocating for action in your defense. I have to suspect that his failing health was a big factor in some of the late war time decisions.
In 1980 Reagan got into a bit of trouble with the media when he said something to the effect that “fascism was the basis of the New Deal.” At the time I was shocked, but I voted for Reagan anyway.
On reflection, I realized that he had lived through the depression and had earned a degree in economics at about that time. He might actually have first hand knowledge.
It turns out that the National Recovery Act (NRA) was indeed an American version of Mussolini’s corporate state. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1937 leading to the ‘court packing’ proposal that pretty much killed off the second half of FDR’s second term.
Without World War Two he would have gone down in history as a mid ranking President, not too good but not too bad either.
His Secretary of State Cordell Hull was one of the great crusaders for Free Trade, against both the US Congress and the British ‘Imperial Preference”. In fact it was this obsession which made him an irrelevent wartime diplomat.
“fascism was the basis of the New Deal.”
Much truth in that, I think, although mostly in the economic sphere. I might also posit fascism as the basis of the corporatist states in Europe today. The two most influencial socialists of the last century were undoubtedly Stalin and Mussolini.
But I sure wish we had a president who could speak like Roosevelt.
I think the lesson of how FDR managed to hold a high reputation for so long is that a political leader, particularly if he or she is adept in the arts of prop[a]ganda and can come across as “doing something” to fix a problem, however counter-productive, can get a fair pass.
Which is the heart of it. Cf Blair, who has been accepted even among the middlebrow right as preserving the status quo, ‘stealing Tory policies’, etc, even while he has conducted a revolution and turned Britain into a European social democracy.
FDR is held to have “saved capitalism” partly because whether you have capitalism is seen as a question of political naming, and partly because of the virtual communist revolution that he can be imagined to have staved-off by feeding the leftist crocodile. (The US is not the only country where the Communist Party was never important in mainstream politics.)
Spend federal money to support lots and lots of writers and artists and you’ll be sure of deification.
Can this be the same James of England who dropped his trousers and made a rude face when I mentioned buying a BBC DVD of a comedy show? Admittedly, it is early, I have not drunk a coffee yet, but I distinctly remember it. And yet here we have this fella supporting quite a lot of things like the SEC, which is one of the most ferocious regulatory agencies in the world, and not exactly a libertarian one.
Bizarre.
Hoover was out of his depth as President and FDR was the husband of a controlling inter-generational illuminati. No wonder he got four terms when the Finance had set up the war with their help.
I may be wrong. Perhaps the SEC is the devil. Still, it looks to me as if US listings have done pretty well compared to, well, compared to any other stock market on the planet. My sense is that this is partly because the SEC has been good at maintaining investor confidence.
I’m not sure if you’re disagreeing with my sense that the proposed amendments to the NLRA are terrifying. Are you?
Oh, I forgot to mention the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. Is there anyone on this thread who believes that this Act was not a positive step?
The SEC is like the Curate’s Egg: good in parts, but ultimately, not necessary because all a market needs is for laws against force and fraud, and for those laws to be diligently and fairly enforced. The US economy grew at a hectic pace for much of the 19th Century without the SEC and yes, there were scandals, but there have been plenty since it was set up. It is an overwieldy organisation, in some ways more so than Britain’s own Financial Services Authority. This, by the way, helps explain why some U.S. firms have chosen to set up shop in Britain.
I have absolutely no truck with the absurd isolationist view that the United States should have sat back, let Stalin/Hitler do their worst and if need be, come to some sort of accomodation with an entire European/Asian landmass under totalitarian, race-based thugs.
The ‘isolationist view’ to which you refer is only ‘absurd’ when considered in terms other than America’s national interests and the preservation of its republican form of government.
Germany’s campaign to close the Atlantic via unrestricted submarine warfare ran counter to those interests and was appropriately thwarted by the US Navy. Likewise, Japan’s attack on the Pacific Fleet’s HQ at Pearl Harbor – provoked though it was – was appropriately dealt with via the destruction of Japan’s ability to project military power in the Pacific in a little over two years. That is as far as we should have gone. Both steps could have been undertaken with a limited mobilization of the US Navy/Marine Corps without putting the entire nation on a war footing. There was absolutely nothing to be gained from reconstituting the US Army and inserting it into the conflict on the side of the ‘allies’ (‘allies’, BTW, meant ‘British/UK’ then the same way ‘coalition’ means ‘American’ now).
I do think, BTW, that letting Hitler and Stalin bleed each other white on the Russian steppes would have been a splendid way to guarantee the end of both Russian communism and German facsism – probably prior to the spring of 1945 – from sheer exhaustion. Germany would likely have been forced to withdraw from western Europe and eastern Europe may well have been spared its 50 years of privation under Russian domination. As for the Japanese, they had done their worst at Pearl Harbor. The essentially single-handed destruction of the Japanese Imperial Navy and merchant fleet by the US Navy’s submarine force during 1942-43 ended the Japanese ’empire’ in all but name. For all the hype and bother, the Japanese were never more than bit players in the first place. Wars are essentially economic enterprises – the side with the biggest wins.
As Bill Lind wrote(Link):
‘Old Werther gets at the central fact when he writes that “the modern age that dawned in the Renaissance is no longer alive – World War II was the last gasp of modernity, industrialism and linearity.” The death of the Modern Age actually comes with World War I; in 1914, the West, which created modernity, put a gun to its head and blew its brains out. The ninety years since have merely been the thrashing of a corpse.’
Say what you like about America’s entry into WWI – part II, but a triumph of ‘democracy’ over ‘totalitarianism’ it wasn’t. By his manipulation of America into that conflict, FDR killed the Constitutional American republic and replaced it with what is essentially a watered-down fascist state.
Trav.
Absolutely correct. People often tend to ignore the U.S. naval interests.
I happen to think that Roosevelt, and others at the time, reckoned that entry into WW2 on the British side was far from being some altruistic gesture. Hard-nosed calculation was part of it. There was a strong anti-British element in US public opinion that wanted to see the British Empire dismantled and replaced by U.S.-led trading links. Arguably, this actually is what happened in some parts of the Empire, with the major exception of Africa.
If the continent of Europe and much of Russia, possibly down into the MEast and beyond, had fallen into the hands of some sort of Nazi super-empire or Soviet version, then this would have posed a long-term but inevitable threat to the USA, in my opinion. Hitler’s own goals were global. The US had large and influential immigrant population drawn from groups that the Nazis had targeted, most obviously the Jews; the U.S.’s liberal, cosmopolitan tendencies were ones he hated and probably feared. He would have found reasons over time to conflict with the US eventually and had already demonstrated by 1939 that he was not to be trusted and was capable of taking huge gambles.
This is pure conjecture, of course, although I do not dismiss it out of hand. Even after a murderous war, the victor(s) could have lasted for years, and Europe and much of Asia would have been under a totalitarian blanket for decades. Tyrannies can take a long time to die.
There was a strong anti-British element in US public opinion that wanted to see the British Empire dismantled and replaced by U.S.-led trading links. Arguably, this actually is what happened in some parts of the Empire, with the major exception of Africa.
Undoubtedly, there was such a body of opinion at the time. However, one can’t replace something that does not exist and, at the time of America’s entry into the conflict, the British empire was largely an historical artifact and had been since November 11, 1918. I view the difference of opinion as being between those who believed that it was America’s ‘manifest destiny’ (so to speak) to act as a sort of benevolent overseer to the rest of the world (pragmatists, realists, what have you) and those who believed that the country should vigorously enforce its right to trade with whomever and otherwise mind it’s own affairs (‘isolationists’).
If the continent of Europe and much of Russia, possibly down into the MEast and beyond, had fallen into the hands of some sort of Nazi super-empire or Soviet version, then this would have posed a long-term but inevitable threat to the USA, in my opinion. Hitler’s own goals were global.
The defect to this line of reasoning is the very real disconnect between ends and means. Even if Hitler had had delusions of global domination (and I have been able to find no evidence to support that thesis), he would still have had to overcome the obstacles presented by the relatively small size of the German population and the relative paucity within Germany of the resources necessary to wage war on that scale. Hell, Germany failed to successfully execute an expeditionary operation in north Africa under the command of a commanding officer of no small ability (Rommel) against a commanding officer of no great ability (Montgomery). Consider also the Germans’ inability to plan – let alone, successfully execute – a seaborne invasion of an island chain 25 miles offshore of territory that they controlled absolutely. Whatever the Germans’ faults politically, culturally or whatever, a competent bent toward empire-building is not among them. The Soviets, on the other hand, were somewhat more successful in this regard.
What the West subsequently wound up with was a classic case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. I fail to see how dealing with a severely weakened facsist dictatorship in western Europe would have been demonstrably less pleasant than dealing with a rampant Soviet/Maoist communist dictatorship in eastern Europe and most of Asia. Hitler received a great deal of negative press for the atrocities that he ordered (the fact that he spectacularly lost a war contributed to that in no small measure, as well), but, compared to those committed by Stalin and Mao, Hitler was a piker. In effect, we killed a rattlesnake in order to free (or create, if one wishes to be perfectly accurate) a tyrannosaur. Some bargain, that . . .
This is pure conjecture, of course, although I do not dismiss it out of hand. Even after a murderous war, the victor(s) could have lasted for years, and Europe and much of Asia would have been under a totalitarian blanket for decades.
Yes, but what fun . . .
And I don’t buy it. Germany’s economy was shattered. So was the USSR’s. The only difference was that Germany lost and had to pay reparations and endure 45 years of occupation and the USSR was the beneficiary of a great deal of largesse from the West (not to mention wealth and talent looted from Germany) – primarily from America. Absent those, both countries would have been 50 years in rebuilding – if at all – and very likely would have emerged from that rebuilding as vastly different countries than they were going in.
Tyrannies can take a long time to die.
And did . . .
Trav.
While I have no major disagreements with Paul Marks original post, a very knowledgeable overview, and can understand much of the distaste voiced by other commenters for FDR’s statist leanings, although some of the critique has gone off the rails imho, there are a few points that should be mentioned or clarified.
There is a strain of “demonization” in some of the critiques, as though FDR was the font of all evil, who sprung full grown from Teddy’s forehead, and maliciously connived to destroy constitutional government.
FDR was the fruition of the aristocratic Northeastern class who had governed the US for several decades.
In pre-revolutionary America, the society was unapologetically aristocratic, stemming from an imperial, feudal system, based on an hereditary monarchy and a strictly stratified social order. This system was under attack from the “presbyterian” movement, which had posited an order without the need for an intermediary structure in religious matters, i.e., the clergy, and was also calling for a simplified structure in civil society, without the need for hereditary nobles.
Those who wonder at the ferocity of the “heretic” wars and repressions during and following the Reformation don’t understand what the ruling classes of the time quickly saw—men who only needed the Bible and their faith to confront God had no need of a nobility to confront a mere earthly king.
At any rate, pre- and post-revolutionary America was an aristocratic feudalism based on a landed gentry, mainly southern. The primary loyalty of the founders was to their states, and one of the major aims of the system they constructed was the avoidance of factionalism, ill fated as that desire was to be.
These men were classicists, steeped in Greek and Latin, who knew the damage done by the feuding city states, or the endless conflicts among the patrician Roman families, the blues vs greens of Byzantium, the wars of English succession, and many other examples in history.
The little understood and quixotic Electoral college was a futile attempt to prevent such factionalism in America. They hoped the electorate would select wise men from their states, who would in turn select the best leaders from the available pool—a pool populated by the landed nobility which had devised the system to begin with.
The Civil War destroyed that class, and replaced it with a commercial aristocracy which completed the conquest of the continent. It was the wealthy children of those pioneers who populated the aristocratic intelligentsia and cultural elites, ” the Boston 400″ et al, that adopted the mantle of progressivism and scientific government, and supplanted the commercial elites by the use of political power to rein in and control their activities.
FDR is the flower of this latter movement, the “Augustus” who firmly established the rule of corporate feudalism, which continues to the present day. (I use the term “corporate” in its generic sense, as meaning any cohesive social entity, not just a business structure)
While the statist tides were surging around the globe, and various forms of authoritarian and totalitarian systems were taking power in Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, Argentina, China, and many more, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the great empires destroyed by WW1, the US, in the midst of a startling economic crisis, thoroughly explored, I think, in Paul Marks’ analysis, searched for someone who could lead the country out of the desert.
Who was FDR? He was a scion of the wealthy, Northeastern aristocracy, schooled at all the right schools, known by all the right people, connected by all the right connections. He had taken up the burden of government service, noblesse oblige’, and served in several positions, most recently as Governor of New York. He was a consummate political animal, media savvy in the use of newspapers and, especially, the radio, which had destroyed the candidacy of the 1928 Democratic nominee, Al Smith.
One can argue endlessly, and I have in other venues, as to his successes, failures, mistakes, or achievements. Some things are clear.
He put together a coalition, internally and externally, which provided the means to defeat one of the most heinous threats to moral human society ever to rise to power in human history. Hitler, and the system he grafted onto the Prussian military state, would have ushered in a dark age on earth beyond any depths previously known.
The Nazi’s junior partners in Japan were every bit as ruthless and racist, but if he got one thing right, it was the realization that Germany was the true threat, both militarily and scientifically, and the major effort was there.
He failed in his understanding of, and dealings with, the Soviets and Stalin, but that was understandable given the intellectual climate of the times, and his own conceits. He was repeately told the communist regime was not as bad as it was, and not doing what it was, in fact, doing on a regular basis—murdering thousands, eventually millions, of its own citizens every bit as ruthlessly, if not as efficiently, as the Nazis.
As to Stalin, FDR thought himself able to overcome anyone with charm and persuasion. It is doubtful he had ever met anyone who operated on the level of amorality plumbed by the likes of Stalin, and so, weak and sick, he was fooled by his own wishful thinking.
FDR was a casualty of the war every bit as surely as if he had been assassinated like Lincoln, or shot down on some beach, as so many were. While it does not excuse his excesses, it is worth remembering.
The US is approaching a period in which major political alignments will be restructured. Partly this is generational, partly it is due to major changes in our cultural, economic, and social life. Most of these latter changes are driven by the machine sitting in front of you, the power and repercussions of which will take generations to play out.
Enough. My apologies once again for abusing the courtesy of this site and its readers with verbosity.
Well, the relatively “small size” of the German population did not stop Hitler from very nearly succeeding in bringing all of continental Europe to its knees and under his control. The more I read about WW2, the more amazing it is that Germany did not succeed in its aims.
Rommel ran out of petrol for his tanks, in part because the RAF managed to cut off his supplies, in part because the British were able to destroy a lot of his tanks and in part because of those handy Grant and Sherman tanks supplied by the US, which presumably would not have been provided by an isolationist US.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make, but given that nearly all of Continental Europe fell under the Nazi rule and much of eastern Europe ditto, I find that statement to be questionable.
Fun for whom?
Germany’s economy was indeed shattered. One of the reasons it was so badly damaged was on account of the destruction wielded by the US forces, both land and air. So if the isolationists had their way, one wonders whether the German economy would have suffered such a fate. Take one example, that of the daylight bombing raids on Germany by the USAAF from 1942 onwards. These raids forced the Luftwaffe to divert aircraft from other theatres, forced the defence forces to devote guns and other weapons, destroyed all manner of targets, etc.
You sound to me like someone who is making the conjecture that had the war run on without US involvement, would have led, inevitably, to an exhausted Germany and Russia, and all would have turned out fine after a few bleak decades. I am afraid that all you offer is conjecture, helped with a large dollop of hindsight.
Jonathan: I agree that the SEC has good and bad within it. I agree that it has persuaded some companies to leave for the UK. I get the impression that the NYSE has grown a lot faster than the LSE since the SEC was set up, which suggests to me that the UK’s regulatory regime is not a decisive advantage (although it may still be an advantage). FDR’s support of international trade probably also supported this.
Would you agree with me that the NLRA was one of the better attempts at preserving the good aspects of unionisation (freedom of association, reduced transaction costs for labor relations) while reducing the negative aspects (remember that the US had seen air strikes used against striking workers not that long before FDR, and that just about every western country had significantly worse union violence than the US in the decades following FDR)? Would you further agree that the secret balloting finally adopted by Thatcher was one of the better elements? And, lastly, that the possibility that this will be replaced by voting that is not secret is one of the more worrying possibilities for this congressional term?
James of England,
I work in the financial planning industry, and have cause to ponder the consequences of some of FDR’s legislation. While the SEC has done some good work over the years, to stop there in your study of the financial markets would be a mistake.
Google the laws having to do with the Accredited Investor caste, erected in some of FDR’s early legislation. In summary, they ensured that only the wealthy could participate in several lucrative classes of investments— “private placements” being the most egregious example, as they are the lifeblood of true capitalism. Small companies who wanted venture capital had to beg on bended knees before the robber barons, rather than opening subscription to the mass of small investors. This had, and continues to have, a stifling effect on the operation of creative destruction, and on economic innovation generally.
The Accredited Investor laws are plutocracy in a particularly vile form. We have only inflation to thank for the diminishing effect of this system, as a million dollars is much easier to get these days than it used to be.
Rommel ran out of petrol for his tanks, in part because the RAF managed to cut off his supplies,…
And also because supply lines that long are hugely difficult to maintain. It was not just petrol, it was water and food he needed. They had to be motorised in the desert, and couldn’t be picked up along the way. At one point the Afrika Korps had fully one half of the Wehrmacht’s motorised transport. (van Creveld, Supplying War, 1979)
I am not sure that the SEC was all that important in helping the New York stock market. As for the exodus of U.S. firms in recent years, this is largely down to cheaper costs of doing things elsewhere, and the impact of Eliot Spitzer’s antics while NY Attorney General and the Sarbanes-Oxley laws, or at least how SO is enforced.
I don’t know if I can answer your long list of questions with a yes. I guess there have been lots of truly awful union laws down the years, so maybe the questions you pose are easy to answer in the affirmative. There is no doubt that compared to UK union laws up until 1979, anything else had to be better. The 1906 Trades Disputes Act and subsequent UK legislation gave unions a degree of coercive power almost without parallel, although unions in France and Italy are arguably worse these days.
I personally do not think it is the business of the state to tell autonous institutions like unions as to how they organise their own affairs, such as whether ballots should be secret or in public. But if unions are going to have their internal procedures set by the state, then I guess secret ballots are better than ones in which people can be intimidated.
Mastiff makes a number of good points about the SEC.
I have already written all I want to, at this time, about the domestic record of President F.D. Roosevelt.
As for World War II – I think that F.D.R. may well have been correct (as a matter of morality and American national interest) to support Britain against Germany. However, it does irritate (to say the least) to examine the endless speeches F.D.R. made about how he hated war and was doing everything he could to maintain peace – when, in reality he was doing everything he could to produce war.
F.D.R. broke the 1939 Neutrality Act repeatedly (and other Acts), his aid to Britain could only provoke Germany (and was meant to), the lies about German U. Boats fireing first on the American navy (when it was the American navy that was ordered, long before war, to destroy the U. boats) thent there was such things as the occupation of Iceland.
As I said the stuggle against National Socialist Germany was a moral one (although F.D.R. had imitated some aspects of Nazi economic policy – although not the anti independent union aspect).
However, the lack of effort to save Jews either before or during the W.W.II is impossible to justify (the much attacked Pope Pius XII hid thousands of Jews on Church property in Italy including in the Vatican itself – F.D.R. would not raise a finger to help the Jews of Europe).
Nor should one forget that F.D.R. allied the United States with Stalin’s Russia and Stalin murdered TENS OF MILLIONS of people indeed he was the second greatest murderer of the 20th century (the greatest murderer of all was Mao in China). Nor can it be claimed that F.D.R. did not know about Stalin’s activities – the Russian section of the State Department was eventually destroyed by the New Dealers, but the staff kept files which prove that the government knew what was going on in Russia.
The struggle against Imperialist Japan was also a moral struggle (a look at the way the Japanese treated other Asians, not just Western folk, shows that) but again F.D.R. pretended (in speech after speech) that he wanted peace, whilst (in fact) doing everything he could to provoke war – by cutting off Japanese oil supplies, freezing Japanese assets (and so on).
Of course the regime in Japan was stupid (as well as wicked) to launch the attack upon the United States. And the National Socialist regime in Germany was stupid to declare war on the United States (Japan had not declared war on Russia when Germany had attacked it – and this lack of Japanese help had allowed the Soviets to move the vast Siberian army to the defence of Moscow).
But both Japan and Germany reacted in the way that F.D.R. had calculated they would. They reacted to his policy of provocations with war – and war (given the small size of these powers compared to the United States and its allies – remember the British Empire alone was more than a quarter of the world in both natural resources and population, with such things as the Canadian navy AT THAT TIME being of great size), could only end with their defeat.
Whatever else he was, F.D. Roosevelt was a politician of genius.