Franklin D. Roosevelt: Difference between revisions

He was also something of a [[Magnificent Bastard]]. Recognizing the danger and evil Hitler represented, he bent, folded and spindled assorted laws and roadblocks preventing overt US assistance to the Allies in order to provide as much support as he could against significant political and popular opposition, in spite of making campaign promises to keep America out of the war. Then the attack on Pearl Harbor removed any significant opposition to joining the war, while [[Adolf Hitler]] was obliging enough to declare war on the USA shortly there after and remove any real objections to fighting the Nazis taking top priority. His supermajority in Congress and his emergency powers enabled him to run the USA almost like a monarch. The length of his presidency also ensured control over the courts and by the end of his life only one member of the Supreme Court, Owen Roberts, was not nominated by him (Roberts would resign within a few months of Truman taking office). The rulings of his judges on his policies include several extremely controversial cases, such as ''Wickard v. Filburn'', ''United States v. Miller'' and most infamously ''Korematsu v. United States''. These are made even more controversial by one appointee, Hugo Black, holding a solid gold passport that was proof of his life membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

The Republican-controlled Congress changed the Constitution after he left, so no one else can serve for more than eight years (or up to ten if they take over for less than two years of another president's term). This turned out, ironically, to primarily affect Republicans: only one Democratic president ([[Bill Clinton]]) and three Republicans ([[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[Ronald Reagan]], and [[George W. Bush]]) so far have actually served long enough to be affected by the term limit. (Sitting President [[Harry S. Truman]] was grandfathered in by the amendment; [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] served less than two years of [[John F. Kennedy]]'s term and could have run for one more term. Both of them chose not to run again for political and personal reasons.)

He's consistently ranked by scholars and the public as one of the greatest Presidents in American history, next to [[George Washington]] and [[Abraham Lincoln]] while among libertarians and some conservatives he's actually considered '''the''' ''worst'' for his dramatic expansion of government and human rights abuse.

* [[Batman Gambit]]: How he got [[Harry S. Truman]] to be his running mate. In 1944, the Democratic Party leadership decided that Henry Wallace was too liberal to be Vice President for Roosevelt's fourth term; the leadership knew that FDR's health was not what it once was, and that his Vice President would be very likely to become President. They eventually settled on Truman as an acceptable next President, but there was just one problem: Truman didn't want to be VP. As a result, the leaders brought Truman to a hotel room, where Roosevelt was waiting to speak to him over the phone from Washington. Roosevelt excoriated Truman for threatening Democratic party unity during wartime, and (seemingly) hung up in a huff. Little did Truman know that this whole thing had been carefully rehearsed in ''exactly'' the way required to get at one of Truman's weak points: he was nothing if not a Democratic loyalist, and accusing him of breaking party unity was tantamount to calling him a traitor. Truman accepted, and the rest is history.

* [[Politically-Correct History]]: The main heading details his attempts to conceal his lack of use of his legs from the public (the picture at the top is one of the only two showing him using a wheelchair. The other can be seen [https://web.archive.org/web/20120308191524/http://frc.sbcc.edu/4sbccfaculty/lecture/2000s/images/shapiro_images/42-back_of_fdr_in_chair_72.jpg here]); the FDR memorial features a statue of him seated in a wheelchair which was added well after the initial design phase because disability rights groups complained that this aspect of his life was being ignored.