The Failed Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt

He set the nation on a course of virtually unlimited federal power.

Like many people my age (62), I was taught both at home and in school that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president. FDR, I was taught, saved American democracy in the 1930s with the New Deal and led the nation to victory against Hitlerism in the 1940s. That view of FDR was reinforced by many television documentaries and history books. And virtually every poll of historians — including the most recent C-Span poll — places FDR in the top five of all U.S. presidents (usually in third place behind Lincoln and Washington). This is so despite persuasive revisionist historical works that paint a very different picture of FDR’s presidency.
Let’s start with the New Deal. In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes shows that the New Deal — so lionized by liberal historians and Democrats — did not restore the U.S. economy as promised by FDR and his “brain trust,” but instead extended the sufferings of the Great Depression for seven more years. Unemployment remained well beyond 10 percent throughout the 1930s, only subsiding with the coming of World War II. “The cause of the duration of the Depression,” she writes, “was Washington’s persistent intervention” in the economy. The end result of the New Deal’s “bold persistent experimentation” was “inflexible statism” that has evolved into a gargantuan federal government exercising nearly unlimited powers to a degree that would have shocked the Founders of our country.
But an even greater failure of FDR’s administration in the 1930s was the nation’s lack of preparedness for the Second World War. This is detailed most recently in Arthur Herman’s biography of General Douglas MacArthur (Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior). MacArthur was kept on as the Army’s chief of staff by FDR, and the two repeatedly clashed over the size of the military budget. MacArthur sensed as early as 1934 that another war was on the horizon, but FDR’s budget director proposed to cut the Army’s budget by half and to reduce War Department expenditures...