Talk:Criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt has been criticized both for his doctrine of unconditional surrender, and for his plan for the "pastoralization" of post-war Germany, a plan that he used a $6 billion Lend Lease agreement to buy UK support for.^[1] Both these Rooseveltian policies have been accused of prolonging the war and causing unnecessary deaths,,, the latter also after the end of the war. In a report on the German situation after 2 years of occupation President Herbert Hoover would in 1947 remark:

"There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.".

Please Rjensen (talk · contribs), Wikipedia is not the place for hero-worship of Roosevelt or similar. I'm referring to this edit by you. Where you state "the criticism by Wikipedia editors does not count--only criticism of FDR at the time by actual people". Roosevelt drew heavy flack in the media for his plan, since it was feared it would encourage the Germans to fight on, as it also did, see the references in the other version you deleted. And to replace the text above with "Roosevelt was criticized by the Nazis for his plan for the "pastoralization" of post-war Germany. ^[1]" is tantamount to a travesty. As to "the criticism by Wikipedia editors does not count". Please be civil, and please bother reading the text and sources I provided before lashing out. As to "only criticism of FDR at the time by actual people" Please also read the introduction to this article, you seem to have seriously misjudged what the article is about, later criticism of Roosevelt for his unconditional surrender policy is very much admissible.--Stor stark7 ^Talk 13:52, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

this is OR and is not allowed in Wikipedia. The article is about criticism of Roosevelt, and only the Nazi criticism is mentioned in the sources. POV criticism by Wikipedia editors is not what the article is about. Criticism of postwar US programs is hardly relevent (FDR was dead before the war ended of course.) Rjensen (talk) 18:55, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

From the JSTOR article on Unconditional surrender: "The doctrine of ' Unconditional Surrender ' has few friends nowadays. It tends to be represented as a predilection of Roosevelt, generated by the antipathy towards Germany which he [Roosevelt] acquired as a youthful visitor to that country; by his deep distrust of the State Department's conventional thinking on foreign relations; and by his consequential ready ear for less diplomatic advisers like the Chiefs of Staff and old friends such as Henry Morgenthau. At Casablanca he sprang the proposal on Churchill who, despite his better judgment and more generous impulses, felt in no position to disagree with the controller of Britain's transatlantic life-line,... Thereafter, although Stalin is supposed to have disapproved of it, and practically every senior American except Roosevelt (but including Eisenhower) to have doubted its wisdom, it remained a cornerstone of Allied policy until the actual terms of surrender for Germany were drawn up in 1945. Repeated attempts to interpret it away or produce some mitigation got nowhere. A free gift was thereby made to Goebbels of which he made full use, spurring on the German people to make their resistance outlast their hopes of victory by harping on the horrors which would follow defeat. On the other side of the medal, those Germans-and particularly those German generals-who might have been ready to throw Hitler over, and were in a position to do so, were discouraged from making the attempt by their inability to extract from the Allies any sort of assurance that such action would improve the treatment meted out to their country.

There was an even more serious consequence of the Allied insistence on fighting the war to a finish, instead of being prepared to contemplate surrender on conditions while German troops still stood outside German frontiers. Had a conditional surrender been possible at that stage the Russians would never have reached Central Europe, and a more or less intact Wehrmacht would have remained in existence to shield that area from them. As this was not permitted, the Allied armies had to fight their way right into Germany and divide it up into zones of occupation."

You are saying that that above is not a critisism of Roosevelts policy?

As to:"Criticism of postwar US programs is hardly relevent (FDR was dead before the war ended of course.)" How exactly do you motivate that? FDR was famous for keeping his associates in the dark about what he was up to, when Roosevelt died Truman had no choice but to keep carrying out the policies Roosevelt had set, as you well know. Also, you do not change policy on the spur of the moment, it requires long time of preparation to set occupation policy (create instructions, set organisation etc), even if Truman had wanted a different policy he couldn't have changed the basics of what Roosevelt had set in motion. Granted that Truman never even tried, as the JSTOR article I linked to on your talk page demonstrates it was the U.S. delegation who pushed for the Morgenthau policy at the Potsdam conference, but then they may have had no choise since that was the policy their wholle planning was set up for.

As to "only the Nazi criticism is mentioned in the sources" Where exactly do you see Nazi critisism? This policy was a godsend for the nazis, it ensured that the people had no choise but to fight even harder and stick with the nazis.

From the two Times articles: The Morgenthau plan... Far & away the most drastic yet proposed for the future of Germany, it was just barely above the level of "sterilize all Germans." It would reduce Germany from a prewar industrial giant to a fourth-rate nation of small farms...This was indeed a Carthaginian peace. But Henry Morgenthau believes that Germany must be destroyed, as Carthage was...Hull and Stimson strongly opposed the Morgenthau program to strip Germany. Both agreed that such a super-Versailles would only justify a future German generation in once more uniting to plan revenge...."Even the airing of this plan is going to cost a lot of American lives. It is going to stiffen resistance inside Germany. We have placed a powerful weapon in the hands of Goebbels." A few hours later, the Goebbels propaganda machine began grinding. Shouted the German radio: "The occupation of the Reich by Americans and British would be as horrible as by the Bolsheviks. Morgenthau is outdoing Clemenceau. Clemenceau said there were 23,000,000 Germans too many—Morgenthau wants to see 43,000,000 Germans exterminated." "But the highest sources in Washington insisted that the Morgenthau plan was not only still alive, but would yet turn out to be the final plan, though modified. According to these sources, his plan had been "bought" by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Quebec, despite heavy objections from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. After the hubbub has died down, Henry Morgenthau's proposals supposedly will then reappear as the official U.S. proposal."

Some Other sources:The Washington Post urged; stop helping Dr. Goebbels, if the Germans suspect that nothing but complete destruction lies ahead, then they will fight on.^[2] The Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey complained in his campaign that the Germans had been terrified by the plan into fanatical resistance, "Now they are fighting with the frenzy of despair."^[3]

General George Marshall complained to Morgenthau that German resistance had strengthened.^[4] Hoping to get Morgenthau to relent on his plan for Germany, President Roosevelt's son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger who worked in the War Department explained to Morgenthau how the American troops that had had to fight for five weeks against fierce German resistance to capture the city of Aachen had complained to him that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans." Morgenthau refused to relent.^[5]

On December 11, OSS operative William Donovan sent Roosevelt a telegraph message from Bern, warning him of the consequences that the knowledge of the Morgenthau plan had had on German resistance; by showing them that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany it had welded together ordinary Germans and the regime; the Germans continue to fight because they are convinced that defeat will bring nothing but oppression and exploitation.^[6] The message was a translation of a recent article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose. To take a recent example, the Morgenthau plan gave Dr. Goebbels the best possible chance. He was able to prove to his countrymen, in black and white, that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany. The conviction that Germany had nothing to expect from defeat but oppression and exploitation still prevails, and that accounts for the fact that the Germans continue to fight. It is not a question of a regime, but of the homeland itself, and to save that, every German is bound to obey the call, whether he be Nazi or member of the opposition.

--Stor stark7 ^Talk 10:59, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

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the rationale: The cartoon is a parody of the tax and spend policies of the Roosevelt administration. Parody is an allowed fair use and is not a violation of coyright.

I'm not sure all of these sources actually criticise him as a Fascist. Dougweller (talk) 10:53, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Why is she characterized as an "historian", I thought she only had a bachelors in English? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.184.185.8 (talk) 02:24, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

she does research and writes serious history, and is called upon by the media as an expert on the 1930s. That makes her a genuine amateur historian. Rjensen (talk) 05:31, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

However when she moves beyond narration and stories and into historiography, she is out of her depth. She simply is unfamiliar with the advanced work that is being done. So I dropped this passage added by LesLein: Shlaes wrote that Roosevelt's policies were often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad. She stated that a number of New Dealers such as Rexford Tugwell were heavily influenced by Mussolini's Italy and especially Soviet Russia. She wrote that few New Dealers were spies or communists, but they were naive about the economic benefits of Soviet and European collectivism. According to Shlaes, fear of being accused of McCarthyism has long prevented historians from looking into the Soviet's ideological influence on American domestic policy in the 1930s. Shlaes acknowledges that Hoover and Roosevelt may not have had better alternatives; their policies may have spared America some facsimile of Mussolini's fascism or Stalin's communism. Shales states that "The argument that democracy would have failed in the United States without the New Deal stood for seven decades, and has been made anew, by scholars of considerable quality, quite recently. ref Amity Shlaes. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins (2007) ISBN 978-0-06-621170-1, pp. 6-7, 13-14. /ref Rjensen (talk) 23:55, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

I am not sure that it can be called criticism, but shouldn't there be a section on his and Eleanor's varied sex lives- since these were controversial if not grounds for criticism.Royalcourtier (talk) 07:47, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Many people ignore the major shift in American political philosophy starting in the 1880s as a reaction to the civil war and it's outcome. The progressive movement was a virulent reaction against the traditional American classical liberal abolitionist sentiment. The article uses the term "liberal" when discussing pro-FDR historians that is simply not appropriate. Progressive is the accurate term.

FDR and Wilson whom FDR served as undersecretary of the Navy and T. Roosevelt were all closely associated with the progressive movement, and were opposed to, and antagonistic toward traditionally Liberal American political thought. Montestruc (talk) 21:06, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

"Liberal" is the term for FDR used in the great majority of RS (reliable secondary sources). Wiki defers to the RS according to WP:RS As reported in An encore for reform: The old progressives and the New Deal by Otis Graham (1967), the majority of "Progressives" from the 1910s opposed FDR and the New Deal (like Al Smith, Frank Knox, WR Hearst), and a minority supported him (like George Norris, Harold Ickes). Rjensen (talk) 21:18, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

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This article is mistitled. Instead of "Criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt," it should be called, "Every Joker Who Ever Had Anything Negative to Say About the New Deal Or Franklin Roosevelt for the Last 90 Years."
If the article is supposed to cover criticism of Roosevelt at the time he was alive, then the article should be limited to materials that date from that time.
If the article is supposed to cover anybody's opinion who ever argued with the New Deal, or Keynesian economics, or Roosevelt's leadership during WWII, then the article should simply be deleted. Criticism of the New Deal should be posted in an article about the New Deal; criticism about Keynesian economics should be posted under a subject-appropriate article; et cetera. I suspect that many of the sources cited in this article -- sources that are "relevant" because of the unbelievably broad, unfocused topic -- would never survive group editing in the particular subjects that the sources are actually talking about, e.g., the effect of Keynesian economics in the Great Depression. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MithraUnconquered (talk • contribs) 00:18, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

In my opinion it is a good article. It is well written without hyperbole; each section is narrowly focused; and the reliable sources are used effectively. Rjensen (talk) 00:50, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Personally, he comes across to me as a Netanyahu coalition propagandist. However, I know it needs to be pointed out through reliable sources and a neutral point of view. I hope we can work together in finding articles about him.2601:449:4582:B3C0:7DDD:81C:9C6C:D06E (talk) 01:25, 27 April 2024 (UTC)