Liberty Pen: Thomas DiLorenzo: 'The FDR Myth'

Source:Liberty Pen- Author Thomas DiLorenzo, talking about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 2005.

"Economics professor Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo explains the parts played by Hebert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt in the "Great Depression. Liberty Pen."

I was actually talking about this with a very good friend of mine on the phone last week. And I was arguing that President Franklin Roosevelt was overrated as a President and was not the Liberal that he tends to get credit for because on things like civil liberties and civil rights. Things he didn't see to either care about or not willing to do anything about to protect those things for all Americans, period. Including for African-Americans but all Americans in general.

African-Americans were getting lynched by the Ku Klux Klan and perhaps other Anglo racist groups. Even though Liberals in Congress were calling for laws to outlaw lynching, President Roosevelt didn't support that. And then you get to civil liberties and constitutional-rights where German, Italian and Japanese Americans were being locked up during World War II simply because of their ethnicity because the Roosevelt Administration feared that German, Italian and Japanese Americans were sympathetic to the Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II. Clearly Unconstitutional and bigoted but thats what the policy of the Roosevelt Administration was.

Then you get to the economy where pre World War II the American economy was still in very bad shape. Whether it was growing or not with roughly 1-5 Americans still out-of-work. It's really World War II that moved the economy past the Great Depression and back to good economic health. What the New Deal did was prevent the economy from getting worst. It in a lot of ways saved American-capitalism and prevented us from starting to nationalize industries and so-forth.

FDR never wanted to nationalize the American economy, but what he wanted to do was to build a modern infrastructure system for America and to create what is the modern safety net in America which as big as it was at the time and even today is still pretty small compared with Europe. So if you are a big believer in individualism and economic freedom, America is still a great place to be and somewhere where you should want to live.

Most of the credit I give FDR as President has to do with foreign policy by successfully leading us through World War II where we saved all of those European-Jews from an ethnic genocide and to help create what is the National Security State to deal with communism and other authoritarian ideologies and states. And moving the United States from an isolationist country on foreign policy to a liberal-internationalist country. Where we've been for the most part ever since. But other then that, FDR's liberal credentials are pretty weak. 

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