Time and again lately, I run into a bit of history, real history, of real heroes in the United State’s past, I have NEVER heard about them, in a substantial way, in United States academia’s “official” history!
I think I am getting a bit ticked that the “great”, “free” and “exceptional” United States of American would have to twist its own history apparently to paint our government itself as exceptional, all day everyday, apparently.
A few months ago I ran across this article, promptly bookmarked, from ‘New American’ by John J. Dywer that outlines what has happened all along in this country (and other countries as well):
But the actual histories of the men suggest that “history” is often little more than propaganda that has been oft repeated. An accounting of the quality of the men’s judgments, their standards of behavior in interpersonal conflicts, and their personal accomplishments makes it logical that American history should, instead, laud Lindbergh while recoiling from Roosevelt.
There you have it. History as told by the intellectual class in academic books and in academia in a democracy ends up being a distorted version of what really happened. History is written by the victors, not just of wars, but of political struggles as well.
Enter two heroes of the early 20th century in the United States, one you will remember, the other, you may know a few passing facts.
FDR is well known as a four-term president, stories of his “fireside” chats, as well as the myth that he guided the United States out of the Great Depression with his New Deal, and that FDR, having promised peace, reluctantly guided the United States to fight Japan across the Pacific and Germany/Italy across the Atlantic to win WWII.
Lindbergh, flew solo across the Atlantic and had his son kidnapped and murdered, and later, as myth would have it, was an isolationist.
Does this fit what your high school history book or teacher taught you? My guess is that you may agree with me.
So let us tackle in “Part 1 of 2”, the hero that everyone is familiar with, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in the beginning of his political career …:
… capitalized on the fact that his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most admired U.S. presidents and managed to become governor of New York. After winning two gubernatorial terms, “FDR” parlayed his own handsome visage, galvanizing charisma, and message of hope for Great Depression-ravaged America into the presidency in 1933
So far so good right? Well, it about to come off the rails if you are a fan of FDR:
Roosevelt, riding a historic wave of success and popularity, issued an executive order in early 1934 that outlawed an entire industry, private airline mail carrying. Instead, Roosevelt determined, the U.S. military would provide the air transportation for delivering air mail.
It is one thing to transition the USPS from horses to delivery vehicles, even though they STILL can’t run the monopoly with a profit, but to take on mail delivery with army pilots? Only government can come up with a decision like this, no free-market business would have been that stupid. John shares more along this line:
Brave army pilots, ill trained for their new mail-carrying mission and flying planes far inferior to the airlines’ (one commercial liner, for instance, could carry the load of six army planes) and inadequate for either the pitch black of night or the freezing, snow-blown winter, began immediately to perish.
As the body count rose to 12 and accidents to 66, masses of air mail were delayed or never delivered, and public fury mounted at the administration.
90 days later, FDR reversed his stupid decision, and one of his own shared the quick lesson learned:
Roosevelt ally Henry “Hap” Arnold, later five-star commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces during WWII, summarized the fiasco: “Within two weeks we were forced to realize that although the ‘will to do’ might get the job done, the price of our doing it was equal to the sacrifice of a wartime combat operation. Courage alone could not substitute for years of cross-country experience; for properly equipped airplanes; and for suitable blind flying instruments, such as the regular air-line mail pilots were using.”
A business leader making decisions like that would be sidelined to some area of the company where they might do the least damage, but not in government. Stupid is promoted and made exponential:
His famed “first hundred days,” contrary to many of his campaign promises about avoiding the centralization of government power, unleashed an unparalleled blizzard of legislation in which the federal government sought to correct the supposed failures of the capitalistic system — through the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and many other new laws. “It is common sense to take a method and try it,” he explained. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
Letting economic lightweights take charge of the whole American economy, what can go wrong? The myth that capitalism got the country in a position where unemployment was almost 25% was enough for the masses to think that FDR could do this, just with his charisma!
So we not only have stupid government, but we have stupid people.
About government, Albert J. Nock, an avid writer in FDR’s days, wrote:
“I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.”
―
About stupid people, Albert J. Nock offered a counter-balance:
The Remnant has always existed, since the beginning of man and it survives today. It is not possessed with extraordinary intelligence, wealth or power. Those that comprise it are just ordinary human beings, average by—and—large and you will never recognize them for what they are when you meet them, see them or hear them. They are the builders, re—builders and redeemers of humanity. They are the ones who sustain and regenerate society — and above all else — they persevere. You can guess who they are or might have been but you will never know with any certainty. They are friends of liberty though, that much I know.
It was in Nock’s writings that actually gave me hope a few years ago. Discouraged by both personal and social media attempts to help people see the truth, to research for themselves the truth, I wondered if this was just a recent phenomenon. Then I found that in Albert J. Nock’s writings that in the 1930s the masses actually believe that government could not only help, but be the savior for the USA. The wisdom he offered can be found in the following:
it is Nock’s contention that when one has something of value to say, a strong and workable principle if you will, speaking to the masses and expecting wholesale results is the incorrect approach, rather, speaking through mass—man to the ‘reachable’ few is the accurate and rewarding path to take. In that way your message is not prostituted or diluted in any way and remains true and whole. It reaches those ‘with ears to hear,’ who are able to understand and make use of its intelligence.
This gives me hope in the few ears that can hear in 2019! I don’t need to hear rave reviews of the articles I share, I just can rest knowing that the seeds are planted, for later comes the harvest.
To quickly summarize the balance of FDR’s “wisdom”, (as we in the US Navy would call a CF, Cluster F**k, Mr. Dwyer shares:
Though the realization gradually dawned on Roosevelt and his minions that no amount of constitutionally questionable New Deal programs and Machiavellian presidential scheming could end the Depression, Roosevelt kept his programs going full steam ahead. Near the end of Roosevelt’s second term, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, a key New Deal architect, penned this startling confession regarding the administration’s failure: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot.”
As nations on nearly every continent emerged from the economic cataclysm, U.S. unemployment skyrocketed back up to nine million workers in 1939 — 12 million if counting Americans employed at taxpayer-funded “make-work” jobs — a total nearly that of when Roosevelt first won the presidency, and after oceans of New Deal spending.
All that debt for nothing, nada, zero benefit. About this time the government started the habit of “cooking the books” to make it look like things were on the up and up. There are economists that have gone back to the “books” and found blatant lying on the economic stats produced in that day, that I believe persists to the present!
So what does the state do when it feels itself back in the corner economically with no good place to go inside an election cycle? It seeks war!
In September 1939 when Germany and Russia invaded Poland, precipitating WWII, Roosevelt saw his chance to eliminate U.S. unemployment. Amity Schlaes opined in her Depression chronicle The Forgotten Man: “A war … would hand to Roosevelt the thing he had always lacked — a chance, quite literally, to provide jobs to the remaining unemployed .. Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now (1940) he did: he could make them soldiers.” Never mind that the private-sector unemployment problem was exacerbated by the economic drag caused by his costly Big Government programs — or that going to war would make government even more expensive.
So if the New Deal fiasco was not enough, why not create more debt and involve the US in a war it didn’t need to participate in? Beside trying to entice Germany to do something, anything as an excuse to mobilize for war (like what the US did with the Lusitania to get the US in WWI), Hitler refused to take the bait. So FDR turned to Japan:
The president [FDR] implemented all eight planks of the infamous McCollum memorandum. Authored by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence, these planks advocated actions about which McCollum stated, “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war [against the United States], so much the better.” They included a new and dramatic U.S. military presence in the Far East; the gradual choking off of all crucial manufacturing elements to Japan by America and its allies; and placement of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii, an isolated outpost thousands of miles toward Japan from the American mainland.
Admiral James O. Richardson, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, immediately recognized the jeopardy in which this move placed the fleet and protested so strongly to Roosevelt that the president fired him.
After meeting with the president on October 16, 1941, Republican Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a staunch internationalist and member of the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in his diary: “We face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure Japan is put into the wrong and makes the first bad move — overt move.” A diary entry six weeks later following a meeting of the War Cabinet — less than two weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — clarifies what Stimson meant by “overt move”: “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief … that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.” After the war, he added that, “We needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act.”
So FDR got his war, costing thousands of sailors at Pearl Harbor their lives as well as a large chunk of the Pacific Fleet. But the propaganda worked once more, the “surprise” attack was bought by 99% of Americans and suddenly, everyone was for war. Truth is indeed the first causality of war!
So enough of FDR, who I consider to be one of the five WORST presidents of the United States of American, and on to Charles Lindbergh, a true hero as you will soon see in “Part 2 of 2” to be posted soon!
Stay tuned
-SF1