The predominantly ludicrous lawmaker from Georgia did Biden a solid this weekend, telling Republicans the Democratic president is fiendishly attempting to make people’s lives better.
The predominantly ludicrous lawmaker from Georgia did Biden a solid this weekend, telling Republicans the Democratic president is fiendishly attempting to make people’s lives better.
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One thing I also wonder is, does it matter? Things have definitely improved for marginalized groups over time, but I can probably find texts from 2000 years ago that talk about discrimination over immutable traits being wrong. Discriminating as a head of state with presumably good access to information is equally wrong at any point in time.
It’s always tricky isn’t it? There’s some beliefs that even as a product of the times you’d reject. The founding fathers who wanted to maintain slavery can be abhorred for it even today. At the same time you have someone like Lincoln, who said at one point that freed slaves should be sent to Liberia. We would certainly call that racist today.
I don’t think there’s a perfect, universal way to look at this, but it’s helpful to look at other contemporary beliefs. You had anti slavery advocates at the founding of the country, so it wasn’t impossible. This is difficult to do though when you have something like the New Deal that disproportionately helped white people, and no alternative to compare against.
What we can say with certainty is that interning Japanese Americans was wrong, and FDR had strong worker policies in spite of not being racially equitable.
The thing about discrimination is it isn’t a passive act. You don’t write a law that only applies to white people without explicitly excluding others. Hitler shook Owen’s hand… HITLER for fucks sake. That guy that utterly hated jews and deplored non-aryans. FDR could have at least invited him in for a coffee.
Everything will be with the benefit of hindsight but the idea that turning away hundreds of thousands of Jews while you KNEW (had multiple intelligence reports and American news reporting the fact that jews were being put into concentration camps and murdered being reported for over 2 years by 1941.). He blocked jewish refugees from immigrating actively.
Segregation in the military was so insidious black servicemembers were pushed aside for NAZI POWs …
This sort of thing was not the output of a great man by todays standards, nor of someone who honors those who served and put their lives on the line. His discriminating behavior was continuous and not representative of what I would call a great man. If he had had a deathbed lament of his behavior maybe I’d reconsider, but he died knowing he was a great man, and that includes that behavior.
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Churchill, FDR, Stalin and Hitler were contemporaries, we’re talking about history and ideology. It is perfectly reasonable to speak to an example scenario where his contemporary whom he tried to draw stark contrast in public media did the opposite of him.
I would say that the writers of FDRs biographies have definitely biased his historiography to the point where he’s a “Great Man.”
I would say they underappreciate the capitulation he was forced into with regards to the New Deal, and how he essentially appointed socialists to his cabinet to stop what he perceived was a potential Bolshevik style revolution. The same thing is essentially what happened with the FEPC where he made an agency specifically to “eliminate discrimination in the defense industry” he perceived a very real threat of black men marching on the capital in protest if they weren’t provided equal protections and it would affect the war effort.
When asked about the “jewish problem” his plan to “spreading the jews thinly” across the world was arguably advocating for cultural genocide.
You could really look at most of what he did and see it does increase the non-segregated races average income, and thinks like infant mortality… these were all great, and things he wouldn’t have even considered if he didn’t think they would starve out the oncoming violence.
You can look right at one of the first things he did during his administration for this pattern of capitulating to what he perceived as dangerous political movements:
The first people to hear about the announced CCC jobs and available positions were the Bonus Army camp in Washington, D.C. It worked so well it basically ended the entire movement. Congress later (3 years) did it anyways, despite him vetoing it, but it’s pretty clear he didn’t consider their request. It’s basically the very essence of the current Conservative “work for food” mentality with welfare programs.
So While I see that some of the historiography likes to paint him as a Great Man for some of the things he did, I would say he was a Great Politician, and a very average upper-class rich man for his time.
People in 1930 understood that racism and antisemitism was wrong. This “judge them by the standards of the day” is just an excuse.