"Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage""

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Douglas Waller

Viewed from the bare bones of his life story, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan (1883--1959) resembles a type of hero out of the mists of some fiction writer's imagination--a handsome and roguish character who was fearless in the face of enemy bullets--German or Japanese--in war and prepared to buck or go around anyone who got in his way to achieve a national or personal mission in the corridors of power.

It's the rags-to-riches story of a tough "shanty" Irish-American kid from the wrong end of the tracks. Born in the poverty stricken First Ward of Buffalo, New York, "Wild Bill" managed to work his way to a top Ivy League college (Columbia) at a time when "shanty" Irish Americans were shown a good deal of disdain, along with those of Jewish backgrounds.

He married Ruth Rumsey, a member of a elite Protestant family. By the age of thirty Donovan had a successful career as a corporate lawyer and was a rising star in the Republican Party in New York. Gifted with perhaps an excessive amount of charm and magnetism with the ladies, he enjoyed numerous affairs. The details might make for spicy reading for some, but Waller mercifully steers clear of most of it, keeping the story focused his subject's professional life. It is noted that Donovan and his wife essentially led separate lives for the remainder of the life-long marriage.

He went off to war as an officer in 1917 in a low-key border affair with Mexican rebels and later the trenches of France on the Western Front. It was in the latter theater of carnage that his courage and leadership blossomed. Donovan and his "Fighting 69th" Brigade overcame bad generalship at the top and German aggression at the front to emerge as one of the most highly decorated units in the last year of the war. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the French Co-ix de Guerre. He refused the latter honor until a Jewish-American soldier was given his due,however, and latter dedicated his medal to the men he had served with who didn't come home.

In the 1920's Donovan became a State Attorney in New York and later ran--unsuccessfully--for the governorship of the "Empire State". By the time World War II broke out in Europe, this staunch Republican became an intimate of an old political opponent, the patrician Franklin Roosevelt.
Two men of more different backgrounds could scarcely be found in the corridors of power in those days. But they shared one thing--a certainty that German and Italian Fascism sooner or later had to be stopped and Americans had to play a key part. Roosevelt sent Donovan over to Britain in 1940 to see the situation first-hand, meet with the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and coordinate anti-Nazi activities with Canadian-born William Stephenson, another hero from the First World War and the man heading up Britain's main intelligence service. Big Bill (Stephenson) and Little Bill (Donovan) became close colleagues. Although friction developed between the fledgling American intelligence service Office of Strategic Services (the OSS) and the British Security Coordination Office (BSC), they shared common enemies. And not just Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese Empire, but also J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who was highly suspicious of British intelligence services operating in America at any level. Hoover also kept up an internecine war with the OSS, gathering intelligence against the flamboyant Donovan and his crew of eccentric and unorthodox but often highly effective and intelligent staff members and agents.

Many Americans, including the fascist-leaning Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy thought that England was finished in 1940 . But Donovan, who was given unprecedented access by Churchill to his government and their wartime inner-establishment, thought otherwise. He also knew that it would take great deal more American aid than Congress was willing to give to help forestall a possible defeat for democracy and a Nazi death grip on the continent for decades to come.

Roosevelt would refer to Donovan as "his legs" throughout the war. This was high praise from a leader who rarely if ever confided in anyone beyond his inner, inner circle of advisers. Donovan indeed had no compunction about gathering information from any source--be they American Communists or European royalists to ferret out Axis agents. He also approved "black bag" units to go into foreign embassies in and out of Washington to crack open safes and gleam information from "neutral" countries like Vichy France, Spain and Turkey.

From the Washington Post review of the same book:

" ...six months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan sent a memo to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging the creation of a central intelligence service. "Strategy, without information upon which it can rely, is helpless," the memo warned. Roosevelt, who badly wanted better information from abroad and regarded the military and State Department intelligence units as next to useless, embraced Donovan's idea. FDR gave him a bland interim title and in 1942 appointed him chief of the OSS.

"As the new player in town, Donovan was talented at making enemies, notably FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but also the chief of G-2 (Army intelligence) and others. What comes through clearly is that Donovan spent as much time battling rival agencies as he did running the wartime spy service. Only his direct access to FDR saved him. And the turf wars among the spy agencies continue to this day."

This book should be highly entertaining for those interested in espionage and building an intelligence service from the ground up. The United States had Army, Naval and State Department intelligence units before the war but Roosevelt found them inadequate for actually getting in the field and doing things. In contrast, it was hard to get Bill Donovan OUT of the field. He insisted, sometimes against direct orders from higher-ups, to be in on every major Allied landing in Europe (including Utah Beach on D-Day) and came close to being killed or captured more than once. (He personally shot his way out of trouble in Sicily when ambushed by Italian soldiers, reportedly "as happy as a clam" to his military escort. Even in his fifties, Donovan exulted in being shot at. He also carried an "L" pill to use to kill himself in case he was taken alive by the enemy.

When he wasn't drawing fire and being frankly reckless, he was literally flying all over the globe during the war, from North Africa to Burma, London, Australia , Washington, Moscow, etc, to try and establish spy networks and to relieve those of his head operatives who had lost their grip.

But at the same time Waller points out Donovan's weaknesses. He was a poor administrator and could be careless with secret files. Many who worked under him found him too cavalier. And he could make enemies by never taking "no" for an answer.

After World War II and the death of Roosevelt, Donovan hoped to head up a post-war version of the OSS. It was not to happen as he and Harry Truman could never establish a good working relationship. The Cold War National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA went on without him. Except for a brief post as Ambassador to Thailand under Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950's Donovan's career in military affairs and government ended before he wanted it to.

Huey Long: Man of the People or Dangerous Autocrat? Or Both?

Perhaps no one politician in the 20th Century held so much power in one state than governor, and later Senator from Louisiana, Huey P. Long (1893-1935) , held in the early 1930's.   

Long rose to power as the Railroad Commissioner of the Bayou State, when he was elected in 1918, only three years after he was admitted to the bar to practice law. He set about reforming and creating new regulations for public utilities and campaigned for taxes to bear on the mighty Standard Oil Company. He also set about to do battle with the "old regulars" in the do-little Democratic Party machine that was based in New Orleans. 

When elected Governor in 1928, he went to work raising taxes on the rich for  new public projects: 2,000 miles of new paved roads in Louisiana, free textbooks for school children, a major improvement to the Louisiana State University and major public works projects for charity hospitals and proper facilities for the mentally ill. 

 

Long also was a grafter and a leader  who once said to a legislator "I am the law now," in Louisiana.  He expected every pubic employee in his state to  contribute ten percent of their respective earnings to his "De-duct Box", a personal cache of money in the millions that  he planned to use to buy votes and slander his enemies through a newspaper he expected all good public workers to subscribe to. He  planned a national campaign for President in 1936, in an alliance with the future anti-semite and pro-fascist speaker, Catholic Father Charles  Coughlin, a demagogue figure from Michigan who was the Rush Limbaugh of his day.       

Long also proposed a major wealth redistribution that, at least to many , would cure the excesses of the Depression.  With so many out of work, his "Share the Wealth" ideas  broadened Long's appeal to millions all over the country that, like those in the backwoods of Louisiana, had felt oppressed  for far too long. 

 

Long was no shrinking violet when it came to backroom deals: (the following is an excerpt on Long's entry from Wikipedia:)

 

 

"On occasion, (while governor)  he even entered the legislative chambers, going so far as to sit on representatives' and senators' desks and sternly lecture them on his positions. He also retaliated against those who voted against him and used patronage and state funding (especially highways) to maneuver Louisiana toward what opponents called a Long "dictatorship". Having broken with the Old Regulars and T. Semmes Walmsley in the fall of 1933, Long inserted himself into the New Orleans mayoral election of 1934 and began a dramatic public feud with the city's government that lasted for two years.

"In 1934, Long and James A. Noe, an independent oilman and member of the Louisiana Senate, formed the controversial Win or Lose Oil Company. The firm was established to obtain leases on state-owned lands so that its directors might collect bonuses and sublease the mineral rights to the major oil companies. Although ruled legal, these activities were done in secret and the stockholders were unknown to the public. Long made a profit on the bonuses and the resale of those state leases, using the funds primarily for political purposes.^[37]

"By 1934, Long began a reorganization of the state government that reduced the authority of local governments in anti-Long strongholds New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria. It further gave the governor the power to appoint all state employees. Long passed what he called "a tax on lying" and a 2 percent tax on newspaper advertising revenue. He created the Bureau of Criminal Identification, a special force of plainclothes police answerable only to the governor. He also had the legislature enact the same tax on refined oil that in 1929 had nearly led to his impeachment, which he used as a bargaining chip to promote oil drilling in Louisiana. After Standard Oil agreed that 80 percent of the oil sent to its refineries would be drilled in Louisiana, Long's government refunded most of these tax revenues."

There is more than a whiff of fascism in all this.

 

On the far left, both the Socialist and Communist Parties opposed this income scheme as just a manipulation of a failed capitalist system that had brought about the Great Depression. His fellow Democratic politicos abandoned the somewhat loutish but brilliant "Kingfish" when he turned against Franklin Roosevelt's  "New Deal" and promoted his "Every Man A King" book.  Millions of regular people bought his ideas and its clear that his challenge to Roosevelt as a third-party candidate might have swung the election to the Republican candidate in 1936.   By 1940, given the GOP's lackluster track record on economic fixes in those days, Huey Long might have been the President of the United States.           

Upon his death at 42 from an assassin's bullet in September 1935--by a young surgeon named Carl Weiss, who was upset that his father-in-law was going to lose a judgeship thanks to Long's maneuvering--the point became moot. 

 

What would have become of the country had he lived?   Would be have helped the nation--some say he already had by pushing FDR toward Social Security and more public works projects--or would he have destroyed the Constitutional "separation of powers" in pursuit of a Caesar-ian dictatorship that would have unleashed revolutionary ferment in the country?    

I.F. Stone, the late prominent progressive journalist, thought Long was not a positive force but more of a Greco-Roman tyrant  (i.e., a manipulator of public policy for his own gain) ,  rather than a legitimate reformer who empowers the people.  On this I agree. But he certainly made enemies,  like political bosses and big oil companies, who were worthy opponents to any reformer in one of the poorest states in America..

 

Even today, while Long's legacy is controversial, its safe to say many of his ideas  have a modern resonance in  the times we live in  today.      

Captured: Great Depression Photos: America in Color 1939-1943 | Plog — World, National Photos, Photography and Reportage — The Denver Post

Some amazing color photographs of ordinary rural and urban life, both showing poverty  and the rebuilding and rearming of  the United States at a critical point in democratic history.  

 

 

Link

The Coming Democratic Party Landslide of 2012?

First off, let me state the obvious--US presidential campaigns are interminable. Only diehard political junkies like myself seem to keep up with these "who's in--who out" matters at this point.   But its clear that the Republicans are sweating a bit already at what looks like a weak field heading into the next Presidential race. 

The November 2012 general election, according to CNN and anybody else with a calender is 531 days off.  And its more and more clear to me that what matters most is not just who is governing but what kind of influence from lobbying groups and campaign money generate in the leaders and Representatives we do elect.   But at the same time the success the GOP enjoyed in 2010 has led to a cavalier  attitude toward restructuring Federal programs that is not borne out by popular feeling.  As one critic put it, "Americans voted for the Republicans in 2010 because they thought the house of state  needed to be redecorated. The GOP appears to think they are commissioned to tear the whole house down to start over."

 

Therein lies Obama and the Democrats' opportunity.  

But we may at least have seen the "Hezbollah Wing"/tea party wing of the Republican Party alienate the mainstream American independent voter with their threats to try and default  on the national debt in the name of further tax cuts for millionaires and draconian schemes like the abolition of the Medicare Program.  Medicare is one domestic  government program that  retains popularity because of the high prices of  the medical establishment. 

 

The Republican obsession to deregulate and privatize everything in sight  might work on some industries, and people can be fooled over issues like banking regulation because their is so much manipulation and smoke and mirrors there.  But things like Medicare, Social Security and unemployment  insurance for the laid off worker are matters that hit home, literally.

Let's look where the public stands on Medicare Reform, to take just one example, from a recent Associated Press Poll published last week:

   

"In the poll, 54 percent said it's possible to balance the budget without cutting spending for Medicare, and 59 percent said the same about Social Security.

"Taking both programs together, 48 percent said the government could balance the budget without cutting either one. Democrats and political independents were far more likely than Republicans to say that neither program will have to be cut.

"The recession cost millions their jobs and sent retirement savings accounts into a nosedive. It may also have underscored the value of government programs. Social Security kept sending monthly benefits to 55 million recipients, like clockwork; Medicare went on paying for everything from wheelchairs to heart operations.

"Overall, 70 percent in the poll said Social Security is "extremely" or "very" important to their financial security in retirement, and 72 percent said so for Medicare. Sixty-two percent said that both programs are extremely or very important."

Not good news for the newest class of Republicans, those who bliindly have followed House Budget Chairman  and Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan in a crazy plan to gut Medicare, with crazier plans for Social Security waiting in the wings to justify further tax cuts for the top one or two percent of income earners and/or receivers.    

Bernard Goldberg, a disgruntled former CBS on-camera news reader who turned into a Fox News contributor a few years back, gave some analysis recently about Obama's  chances. He recalled that the election might be shaping up the way the 1936 Presidential Election did in some ways. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected not because he had ended all economic ills in the country, but because the public recognized that with all the the ups and downs of New Deal experimentation, his leadership was moving the nation in the right direction.  Plus its hard to deny a sitting President a second term.    

  Goldberg writes: "After all, sitting presidents usually win re-election. Since 1936, 11 incumbent presidents have run for a second term and only three were defeated – Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

"And, like FDR, Barack Obama has something else going for him – an intangible that may compensate for bad economic news: likability -- an essential characteristic for anyone hoping to do well in politics.Except for his enemies – and that’s not too strong a word if you’ve ever listened to his most passionate detractors -- Americans generally like Barack Obama, even when they disagree with him on matters of policy.

"They like his smile, they like the way he talks, they like the way he dresses and carries himself, and yes, they like the fact that he is the first black man elected president of the United States of America. In some ways, it is a source of national pride."

 

Is some of this superficial? Yes, it is.  But politics is more visceral then rock-hard scientific theories. How else to explain the enormous success of Ronald Reagan, a man elected seemingly because of his style over his illogical "voodoo economics" which even leaders in his own party thought daft?  If Reagan could carry 49 states in 1984, what might prevent Obama from taking 35-40 and walking away with the election.  

 

Who are the Republicans  in the race now?  Who else is likely to get in? Sarah Palin?  Here's how a Public Policy Institute estimate shows what would happen in a Obama-Palin Race:

 

 

Well, what if some GOP types get cold feet about Palin.  So they nominate some governor with low national public identity?  Yes, dark horses have won the Presidency, but can a candidate for the Republicans win and appeal to the hard right tea baggers and the independent voters who just plain like Obama?  I doubt it. And another big Obama victory will certainly eat away at the GOP majority in the House. (Less likely in the Senate, though, where the Democrats have to defend 23 seats to the GOP's 10.

 

So maybe Barack Obama should take a page from FDR's 1936 playbook.  That's not an original idea of mine as this clip from the MSNBC cable network shows.

 

 

"Warm Springs" (2005) The Trial and Reinvention of Franklin Roosevelt

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

President's Day in the USA was observed yesterday. It's an odd holiday to me, considering many of our past Presidents did little as Chief Executives to bother about now, unless you're a history professor or a masochist. (Take James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, the two who served between Abraham Lincoln, for instance. Those birds did little if nothing to help the nation avert or recover from the Civil War int heir respective terms ). Warren Harding and George W. Bush also could be added to the list of un-worthies in my book.

And then there are a few Presidents worth remembering.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands out to me as the greatest force for the general good who served in the White House in the 20th Century. (To those cynical of elected officials, this may be considered damning the guy with faint praise.) Born into privilege, and processed with the magic name of his distant cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt was a quickly rising star in Democratic politics, a former New York state legislator and Assistant-Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson.

Before he was 38 he was nominated to serve as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Democrats in 1920. He and his running mate ,James Cox, lost that race but it was just a bump in the road at the time for a young politico who could look forward to the governorship of New York and likely a direct run himself for the Presidency.

But two years later his political career seemed finished. After contracting polio while visiting a Boy Scout summer camp in upstate New York (near his family home at Hyde Park) FDR soon was unable to walk and the diagnosis left him not only physically handicapped but depressed. The naturally cheerful if elitist and somewhat snooby nature the man had carried through his life at prep school and Harvard and the halls of power was gone, a shell of a man with little to do but hide from the public on his yacht remained.

The film "Warm Springs" documents FDR's emotional resurrection at a rundown spa in rural Georgia, later to be called Warm Springs. The naturally heated water made it possible for Franklin to gain some ability to propel himself with his arms and even stand in the therapeutic pool. The experience of living near people afflicted like he was and with the rural poor of all races also deepened his empathy for ordinary people.
Once considered a "supercilious prig" by Frances Perkins (later his Labor Secretary) who couldn't abide boring people and thought of rural folks in places like Georgia as "hillbillies", FDR spend a good deal of the mid-1920's in the resort, eventually buying the facility outright with two-thirds of the money his father had left him. He turned it into a first-class treatment center that was designed exclusively to treat those afflicted with the scourge of polio (or infantile paralysis). Even today, Warm Springs exists as a center for those with mobility diseases.

Incredibly, as I found out recently, these are still places like Nigeria where new polio cases are still being diagnosed.

Although Roosevelt was originally drawn to the spa to get himself walking again, he stayed on after all hope fro that was gone and continued to support Warm Springs after he became President. Indeed, he died there of a stroke in April of 1945 while enjoying a working vacation at "The Little White House". The bulk of his life insurance policy--about 450,000 dollars--was bequeathed to the center.


The movie itself boasts an outstanding cast: Kenneth Branagh as Roosevelt, Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor, David Paymar as Louis Howe, FDR's friend and closest political advisor and Kathy Bates as Helen Mahoney, the first certified doctor at the new facility.


The film dramatizes Roosevelt not as a great figure of power, but as a man who overcomes self-pity and a physical malady to get himself back in the ring of elected office and help lead a nation in its darkest hour since the Civil War. He would not have been the leader he was without this personal trial and I believe he is one leader worth remembering on Presidents Day.

Distributed by HBO
Directed by Joseph Sargent
Produced by Chrisann Verges
Written by Margaret Nagle
Starring Kenneth Branagh
Cynthia Nixon
Kathy Bates
Tim Blake Nelson
Jane Alexander
David Paymer
Music by Bruce Broughton
Cinematography Robbie Greenberg
Editing by Michael Brown
Country United States

"'Fear and Loathing' in California Politics, 1934: Upton Sinclair's Uphill Battle for Governor

(Upton Sinclair, author of the American literary classic, "The Jungle", and dozens of other books on political, media, and corporate corruption campaigns for governor of California on the radio as the Democratic Candidate.)

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was a rare bird in American politics--a literary writer by trade. He had risen to fame as the author of a damning indictment of the Chicago meat-packing industry.  "The Jungle" became a huge success and help push through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1907--the first time that the federal government began inspecting meat and poultry products to guard the public health. The Act created the United States Food and Drug Administration, much to the howls of protest by the meat-packing  industry, whose incredibly unsanitary conditions were previously brushed aside despite consumers being poisoned and workers in the  plants themselves testifying to all sorts of food contamination from using sick animals or mixing inedible substances into canned meat. 

President Theodore Roosevelt, whose "Rough Rider" troops had suffered from disease and even death from tainted meat shipped to them in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, met with Sinclair in the White House after reading his book.  He redoubled his efforts and sent Department of Agriculture officials to Chicago to check out the claims in the novel. Sinclair--who earlier gained access to the giant slaughter pens run by Armour Meats and other corporations, took careful and copious notes and interviewed workers and sympathetic managers--was vindicated.

Although Sinclair's main reason for writing the book was to call attention to the plight of over taxed and seemingly disposable workers in the meat-packing industry, his book troubled the average person in America more for its depiction of rotten beef and sausage in the stores. Nevertheless it was a victory for the progressive movement of that time.      

 

Our story now shifts to 1934.  Franklin Roosevelt (Teddy's fifth cousin) has been elected President two years earlier. The national mood was ready for  another round of reform and regulations, if anything more so. Sinclair has been a prolific writer for the past quarter-century, literally churning out dozens of articles for his own and other magazines, as well as novels and book-length pamphlets attacking all the major institutions of the United States, from the churches to the press to big business and even higher education.  (Sinclair himself had worked his way through City College of New York,  writing pulp novels of little political content.)     He was living as a celebrity with his wife in Pasadena and Beverly Hills, a Socialist Party member making friends with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein (the latter was a visiting professor at Cal Tech in Pasadena).   

Sensing that the high unemployment numbers (and the lack of concern among many business leaders satisfied to invest in the jobless)  was creating a void  the regular political candidates in the state capital,  Sacramento, weren't filling, Lewis entered the race.  

  

      He lost the race, after a very promising start where he received more votes in a primary than any candidate in state history, due in no small part to a concerted effort by big money interests in Southern California's agriculture, manufacturing and movie business.  Their efforts, which featured unlimited money and secretive organizations sending out often fabricated and out-of-context negative attacks on Sinclair, were highly effective. 

 Some historians see the 1934 race in California as the model for the modern "dirty" mass-media campaigning we see today, and will likely see more of now that corporations and billionaires can spend whatever they like against a candidate and the public will not likely know whom these purveyors of"free speech"--speech monopolized on radio and television and the main Internet ads--really are.       

Big business was not Sinclair's only enemy.  The Communist Party of California denounced the EPIC program as "social fascism", especially after the candidate began to modify and moderate it. The Socialist Party also aimed fire at  Sinclair's reputation for switching political parties. And FDR was wary of supporting a candidate who was further left than he was on economic issues. Even Lewis' son David thought he was wasting his time.  But the big blows came from business leaders, with MGM Studios boss Louis B. Mayer--the highest paid executive in the USA in 1934-- and the heads of major Otis Chandler and W.R. Hearst newspapers in California.        

For more on how the anti-Sinclair/EPIC campaign happened see the first comment in this blog.  And thanks for stopping by and forgive me this rather long blog.   

World War II: Japanese-American Internment Camps

Download at: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/internment/ for a larger version. A video about Japanese-Americans interned by the government during World War II. (Over 110,000 men, women and children were effected.)

We Need A Fair Deal on Roosevelt's New Deal

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." -- Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan 

Since the election of Barack Obama, there has been some increasing "thunder' from some select media outlets of a conservative brand in America concerning Franklin Roosevelt and his "failure" to cope with the staggering breath of the Great Depression.  One wag went  so far as to state that Roosevelt  CAUSED the Great Depression, which would have been a neat trick since it began three years before he took office as President. Another member of the Punditicracy, Sean Hannity of Fox News, claimed last night that Roosevelt was deliberately using policies to starve Americans by wasting agricultural crops (when it actually was major farm combines that were destroying the fruit and vegetables because they couldn't get the price they wanted from financially strapped consumers.)    

I find this irritating not because I think FDR was some kind of saint (he wasn't) but that this an attempt to distort history.  And the only reason anyone would want to do that I feel is more consumed by malice in their hearts for the Other Side of the political divide than for the economic health of the country.      

 Much of this is the kind of rhetoric one would expect from professional pundits and revisionists who were upset about the results of the last American elections. 

 Let it be noted that I, too, raised similar objections myself to friends and acquaintances in the past.  When I was a young man in 1980s and Ronald Reagan was elected President--twice--I would rail verbally against many of his domestic programs, especially those that raised the federal deficit by giving out large tax cuts to the higher-end income levels and cutting social programs. In the first two years of his Administration the economy plunged. Unemployment in many states reached double-digit unemployment levels (just as they have started to creep toward after George W. Bush's tenure as the Deregulator-in-Chief.

   Reagan's party lost two-dozen seats in the Congress during the 1982 elections. His policy of refusing to meet with Soviet Leaders over cutting the massive nuclear stockpiles of the bi-lateral arms race seemed, to me and millions of others, a reckless course.  He compounded by floating a "Star Wars" Missile Defense System, or, as he called it, a "Peace Shield".  That the technology was untested a the time, and might provoke the very thing Reagan was hired to avoid (World War Three), seemed not to bother him.  It was a nervous time for many  with "The Gipper " in the White House.    

Yet, by 1984, the economy had recovered and the economic morass that had been triggered by inflation and unemployment in the last years of Jimmy Carter's Presidency, had improved considerably. Unemployment went down again and the dollar was stronger.  And, although the national government started out a reckless course of over deregulation and the federal deficit began to grow as it never had before, things in the immediate were on the upswing.

    By the next Presidential election, Reagan carried 49 states and won a huge mandate.  Though I never supported him, I would be a fool to proclaim that the public at large didn't see Reagan as the leader best suited to the times.     

Which bring me back to FDR.   Fifty years earlier he was the President and, despite some bumps along the road, he was "that man in the White House" who made things better for the public at large.  The economic  disaster he inherited from his Republican predecessors was worse than what Reagan had to deal with: unemployment was officially at 24.9 percent when Roosevelt  took office in 1933.  By the end of 1936 that  was cut down forty-percent (to 14.3). Source: The US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 Roosevelt won a Reaganesque landslide at his next campaign and walloped his opponent, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, so badly that Landon lost the home state to FDR in the November elections!  Landon lost almost as many states as Walter Mondale (Reagan's opponent) lost in 1984.   

For those who haven't heard much about The New Deal Era in American History, I offer this brief  synopsis: 

"Roosevelt's efforts began on March 6, 1933, when he proclaimed a bank holiday and called Congress into special session. In the hundred days of that session, from March 9 through June 15, Congress passed Roosevelt's program: the Emergency Banking Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act, as well as the bills creating the Tennessee Valley Authority   (which built dams and power stations to provide power in a six-state region), the Home Owners Loan Corporation (which made mortgage loans to encourage home owning), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (which provided funds to the jobless). Roosevelt also took the United States off the gold standard to prevent a run on government gold reserves by people worried about the value of the currency.

"Later New Deal laws created public housing for workers, unemployment insurance, and Social Security benefits (pensions) for workers when they retired. Other laws made federal grants to states to provide welfare for needy families with children and established a legal framework for organizing labor unions and for collective bargaining with management (to discourage companies from breaking strikes by employing nonunion labor or intimidating workers from joining unions). New Deal legislation also created public service jobs for the unemployed, including the Civilian Conservation Corps for youths and the Works Progress Administration, which sponsored environmental and cultural public works projects. Other new government agencies included the Federal Communications Commission (which regulated radio broadcasting and telephone companies), the Securities and Exchange Commission (which regulated stock markets to ensure fair trading practices), the National Labor Relations Board (which ensured the rights of workers to unionize and bargain collectively with management), the Federal Housing Administration (which constructed public housing), and the Rural Electrification Program (which brought electric lines to rural areas that had never had power before)."

from "Answers.Com" (see under 'New Deal')

*********************************

Do those programs listed above sound like the work of an Administration that was trying to let millions of people go hungry and jobless?

It seems if Reagan gets credit from conservative pundits for the economic recovery of  the mid-1980's, then Roosevelt should at least get some of the credit from these same media jockeys for ameliorating the worst effects of the Depression and, indeed, like Reagan, giving people hope and putting millions of men and women to work.  Of course, FDR made mistakes, trying to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937 for one, but so has everyone who came before and did after he died in office in 1945.  

And, since it was ultimately World War II that ended the Depression not only in the USA but also in many non-dictatorial nations in Europe, perhaps President Obama's spending stimulus program will turn out at least as successful as The New Deal if he spends more, not less, to stimulate the markets.   And,as Senator Moynihan put it, critics are only allowed one set of facts, and the facts show that FDR did not make the Great Depression worse. To the contrary.  The votes of the public in 1936 and 1940 on his continuing mandate in the White House are just one measure of  that!