Print the Legend

In his New York Times column Jonathan Alter says that Democrats are “reviving Roosevelt”:

From the 1930s through the 1970s, American politics took place largely on Roosevelt’s liberal terrain. Since then, even Democratic presidents have often been forced to play on Ronald Reagan’s conservative side of the field.

Suddenly, though, Roosevelt is alive again in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign: His ideas for using government to improve lives echo through stump speeches across Iowa and New Hampshire.

If so it will need to be a carefully edited version of Roosevelt. There are a number of actions by Roosevelt, not the least being the Japanese internment, that would suggest that he is a model that modern Democrats might want to shy away from. These include:

• Mexican repatriation. Roosevelt continued the policy, begun under Hoover, of forcibly transporting people of Mexican ancestry from the United States to Mexico. Estimates of how many people were involved vary from 400,000 to several million. It is believed that a majority of those transported were American citizens—if you looked Mexican you were a candidate for repatriation.
• Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative. Throughout his first two terms he steadfastly maintained his belief in a balanced budget.
• His policies may have prolonged the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a double-dip recession. The first dip occurred in 1929-1930. The second was in 1937 and was probably due to a combination of bad monetary and fiscal policies. Certainly increased taxes on businesses resulted in the “capital strike” of 1937.

Maybe the question is which Roosevelt? Not the Roosevelt of his first two terms, the pragmatic Christian Democrat who would be mostly unrecognizable to today’s Democrats.