The Roosevelt Myth (Paperback)

~ John T. Flynn (Author), Ralph Raico (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from the Foreword by John T. Flynn

This book is in no sense a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is rather a critical account of that episode in American politics known as the New Deal. As to the President, it is an account of an image projected upon the popular mind which came to be known as Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is the author's conviction that this image did not at all correspond to the man himself and that it is now time to correct the lineaments of this synthetic figure created by highly intelligent propaganda, aided by mass illusion and finally enlarged and elaborated out of all reason by the fierce moral and mental disturbances of the war. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to present the Franklin D. Roosevelt of the years 1932 to 1945 in his normal dimensions, reduced in size to agree with reality.

The war played havoc with history-writing after 1940. Not only did a great curtain of secrecy come down upon performers in the drama of the war, but their portraits and their actions were presented to us through the movies, the radio and the press upon a heroic scale as part of the business of selling the warriors and the statesmen and the war to the people. Their blunders and their quarrels were blotted out of the picture. Only the bright features were left. The casual citizen saw them as exalted beings moving in glory across the vast stage of war, uttering eloquent appeals to the nation, challenging the enemy in flaming words, striding like heroes and talking like gods.

The moment has come when the costumes, the grease paint, the falsely colored scenery, the technicolored spotlights and all the other artifices of make-up should be put aside and, in the interest of truth, the solid facts about the play and the players revealed to the people.

A whole 20-foot shelf of books has appeared glorifying the character and career of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In addition a large number of men and women who were associated with his administrations have published their own versions of their several parts in those administrations. And while these contain some incidental criticisms, the chief effect of all these books is to feed the legend of the world conqueror and remodeler. Curiously, only two or three critical works have appeared and these touch only special sectors of the whole story. It seemed to me there was room for at least one critical book covering the whole period of Roosevelt's terms as President. There is much to this story with which I have not attempted to deal either because it is not provable or, if provable, is not yet believable or because it belongs to a domain of writing for which I have neither taste nor experience. I have omitted any account of the bitter struggle which attended our entry into the war or any attempt to determine whether or not we should have gone into the war. That is another story which is reserved for a later day. Similarly no account of the military conduct of the war is included. The facts about that are even more obscure than the political facts and must await the release of a mass of documents still under official lock and key. I have, however, sought to clear up from the recently offered testimony of the chief actors, the diplomatic performances in that shocking and pathetic failure during and after the war. And I have included some account of the incredible mismanagement of our economic scene at home during the war.

I have limited myself severely to facts. A critic may disagree with my interpretation of those facts, but he will not be able successfully to contradict them. I have introduced into the text numbered references to my authorities and these appear at the end of the book. The facts are drawn from official records and reports, the testimony given in congressional investigations, the reports of responsible journalists and a large number of books by men who were actors in these scenes.

Product Details

• Paperback: 437 pages
• Publisher: Fox & Wilkes; 50th anniversary edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930073274
• ISBN-13: 978-0930073275
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #403,963 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important, Necessary Book, November 26, 1999

By A Customer

This book is must reading for those who favor Constitutional government and who know instinctively that FDR began the systematic destruction of the American free enterprise system. The book fills in the details of what exactly FDR did that subverted the Constitution. Examples: His administration told the public that the free enterprise system couldn't produce enough to feed America at even a bare subsistence level-then proceeded to spend $700 million over a two year period to destroy crops and livestock to raise agricultural prices. He oversaw the creation of the National Industrial Recovery Association, which organized various industries into collectives free to fix prices and arrest those who didn't go along (in one instance, a tailor was arrested for charging 35 cents to hem a pair of pants instead of the guild mandated minimum of 40 cents). FDR got around the legislative process of lawmaking by creating agencies which then received appropriations without Congressional approval; these agencies then created their own regulations and enforcement branches. FDR created dozens of "social welfare" programs which he himself admitted were "narcotic." And despite the popular perception that FDR "ended the depression" there were just as many people unemployed and just as many people on the dole in 1939 as there were in 1932 when FDR was first elected. In short, FDR was skilled at getting elected, but not at leading (anyone could get elected 4 times if they stood on the street giving away $100 bills; the catch is that FDR didn't tell the public that their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc. would be the ones paying for it). And of course there was FDR's biggest debacle: the Social Security program, the biggest pyramid scheme of all time. It's important to note that this book was written by a contemporary of FDR and not by some publicity hound. John T. Flynn had been a respected writer for years before he wrote this book and has also written other important books. WARNING: Because of the decades long propaganda by the mass media, there are many who place FDR in equal esteem with Jesus Christ. Be prepared for temper tantrums, emotional outbursts, and insults directed at you if you discuss this book.

96 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars FDR ""reduced in size to agree with reality", February 10, 2001

By	Jean-Francois Virey (59500 DOUAI France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The American politician, without troubling his pragmatic mind with the meaning of words, has discovered socialism- and embraced it- not as a great system of social organization, but as a wondrous machine for the purpose of buying votes." - John T. Flynn

In 1997, in that excellent newsletter of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, *The Free Market*, one of my favorite historians, Robert Higgs, published a brilliant article entitled *No More "Great Presidents"*, in which he reviewed the results of a poll of thirty historians asked to rank America's presidents on a scale of "failure" to "great". Among the select three who were thought to deserve the accolade "great" was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And this is not merely the consensus of the liberal historians in academia, who, as Higgs remarked, "worship political power, and idolize those who wield it most lavishly in the service of left-liberal causes". As John T. Flynn explains, Americans generally tend to see FDR as a "noble, gentle, selfless, hard-headed, wise and farseeing combination of philosopher, philanthropist and warrior" who "performed some amazing feat of regeneration for this country". They perceive him as the providential knight in shining armour who saved America from that evil spawn of unbridled capitalism, the Great Depression, and the world itself from that dark and alien evil from Europe, nazism.

I for one never fell for the Roosevelt myth. By the time I knew what he did, I had enough moral, political and economic common sense not to feel the slightest admiration for him. To be frank, I have always considered him the worst American president ever. So when I started Flynn's *The Roosevelt Myth*, I did not expect to have any illusions of mine destroyed.

The book did change my perception of Roosevelt though. I had always assumed he had been some evil genius who destroyed the Constitutional basis of freedom in America in a conscious, calculating and utterly insidious way. I saw him as some malignant mastermind who had thoroughly bluffed a gullible American citizenry and robbed them of liberties which they were too unintellectual (or, alternatively, too intellectually corrupt) really to understand and cherish. In other words, I perceived Roosevelt as an Ellsworth Toohey, when he was closer to a James Taggart.

True, Roosevelt was a power luster. As Flynn explains, he was a pure politician, if you define politics as the art of winning votes. But this is all he was. In this lay all his intelligence. In all other matters, except perhaps maritime history, he was just a snobbish dilettante, completely unread and devoid of curiosity. His knowlege of economics and political science was "a total blank". He was nothing but a small, shallow man whose naïveté, ignorance, overconfidence in his own charm and complete lack of principles made him a mere puppet in the hands of the reds and pinks who swarmed in his office or interacted with him on the international scene.

That he was corrupt to the bone, there is no doubt: he was corrupt to a degree I thought had only characterized the White House since the Kennedy administration. But he was politically evil only by default, because of his ineffectiveness, his blindness, his vanity, his fatuousness, his lust for power and public adulation. All the evil I saw in him while studying his speeches did not originate in him, for they were all ghostwritten: he was only lending his "golden voice" to the string pullers in his administration, the actual "thinkers" of the New Deal, the genuine Tooheys.

*The Roosevelt Myth* is not a well-structured book. It is not chronological, it does tend to repeat itself, and it may be a bit confusing for someone who is not familiar with the broad outlines of the New Deal to begin with, as it is very detailed and swarms with minor figures. But it is an important book, the work of a first-rate journalist who examined tons of material on the President and his accomplices, some of whom he personally interviewed, and reached his conclusion based on a thorough, uncompromising examination of the record.

Prefaced by Ralph Raico, published by that generally excellent editor, Fox & Wilkes, *The Roosevelt Myth* has been corroborated by independent scholars (Raico mentions Robert Nisbet's *Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship* as further reading) and is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding this watershed era and the man who best symbolizes it.

72 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Absolute Sham Has Been Perpetrated Upon Americans!, December 23, 1999

By A Customer

Like most Americans, I considered Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to have been a decent and intelligent leader. If nothing else, I believed him to be a force for shaping American attitudes in a positive way when an attitude of optimism was needed most - during the Great Depression.

I will admit that I never much cared for his fathering of Big Government and the Nanny State, but I wasn't particularly offended by the accolades bestowed upon him by history. But this book has completely changed the basis for that viewpoint. History has indeed treated FDR well - too well in fact. FDR may have started out with good intentions but he quickly became corrupt and drunk with power.

He did nothing of substance to pull America out of the Great Depression (the economics of war did that). Instead, FDR allowed himself to be shaped by the experiments of the social engineers and consequently tried to re-create America's economic and political infrastructure (without any constitutional justification).

FDR attacked the very system he was supposed to be reviving (not replacing) - the free-market economy. With the direction of Keynesian "intellectuals," he tried to replace capitalism with a planned socialist economy. Fortunately, war and his death did what the electorate would not - halt the onslaught against American institutions that had served to promote this country's success and prosperity for 140 years. What should have been a repair job turned into an attempt to uproot and replace the entire system!

Then there were the foreign policy debacles, not the least of which was FDR's responsibility in allowing the Pearl Harbor attack to proceed despite full knowledge of its eminence. Then there is the war that America won but had nothing to show for it. FDR gave away the proverbial farm at a cost of many American lives. This man, in the throes of death (a fact hidden from most Americans), conceded demand after demand to Stalin in hopes of softening Uncle Joe into accepting democracy.

The post-WWII situation quickly revealed the lies of the war propaganda machinery. Yes, Hitler was defeated. But thanks to FDR's obsession with appeasing Stalin, Communist Russia emerged the victor as it captured sixteen nations, increasing the population under its control from 193,000,000 to 725,584,000! (NOTE: It took forty years and a real American president to stand up to the Communist menace and to finally give back what FDR gave away)

It is amazing that so much of the information in this book is not better known. While the New Deal advocates (liberals, socialists, and communists) deride the 20th century's real American hero, Ronald Reagan, they forget that their 20th century hero created the Big Government that thrives on public debt. And FDR did the exact opposite of Reagan - he appeased Communism and delivered people to the control of Soviet oppression. Reagan and his policies may have continued in the tradition of Roosevelt's massive debt-spending but at least Reagan had something to show for it, namely a re-strengthening of the free-market economy and liberating people from under Soviet oppression ... and restoring the European nations that existed before WWII (i.e. before FDR gave them away at Yalta and elsewhere).

Perhaps it could be said that Reagan finally did what FDR should have done. In any case, FDR should not be held up as a hero by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I think the case can be made that he committed treason in his efforts to undermine, replace, and sabotage American institutions and American interests.

Every American that loves Truth and limited government (as prescribed by the Founding Fathers in the U.S. Constitution) ought to not only read this book but spread its message far and wide. It is time to dispense with the lies and myths surrounding Roosevelt so that the real verdict of history can be rendered.