Is Trump the most undemocratic president in US history?

Post Reply New Topic

^Organizations such as the CCC did a lot of good, accomplished a lot, and helped thousands of unemployed guys find dignity and work which while often tough, was far better than slaving away in some factory or mine.

From Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Metropolitan Books, 2006.

The Nazi press enthusiastically hailed the early New Deal measures: America, like the Reich, had decisively broken with the "uninhibited frenzy of market speculation." The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, "stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,' praising the president's style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler's own dictatorial Führerprinzip" (p. 190).
Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He "told American ambassador William Dodd that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan "The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual"'" (pp. 19-20). A New Order in both countries had replaced an antiquated emphasis on rights.
Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace's New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture's program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).
Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32, quoting Tugwell).

From Justus D. Doenecke, emeritus professor of history at New College of Florida:


Words were matched by deeds as (FDR) mobilized the resources of the federal government against critics. His leading instrument was the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, a holdover from the Republican administration of Calvin Coolidge. To ingratiate himself with the Democrat FDR, Hoover used the bureau to discredit political opposition. He hoped that he would discover subversive activity among those Roosevelt’s foes who opposed conscription, massive aid to the Allies, and the convoying of lend-lease munitions....Yet in no case did the bureau produce evidence of subversion. The same holds true for surveillance of such outspoken anti-interventionist leaders as Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald P. Nye, and David Walsh; Congressman Hamilton Fish; and historian Harry Elmer Barnes, at the time best known for his revisionist history of the causes of World War II

Political use of enforcement mechanisms did not stop with the FBI but reached into the entire Department of Justice, which harassed groups and individuals on both the left and right.

^To be honest, the tactics of FBI and CIA are almost as bad as the organizations in dictatorships at times, and they don't always follow acceptable channels to achieve their ends.