Yes halting the banking collapse was due to his PR skills, why doesn't he deserve due credit for something that was 100% on him such as his PR skills? PR skills are vital to a good presidency in time of crisis and if his were such that he stopped one of the worst threats to our banking system than I'd say he's put them to a very good use.
First off, I'd already acknowledged that when it came to PR that was the one are FDR excelled at. Still, it wasn't the only way the crisis could have stopped, merely the quickest.
There were other examples of strikes and labor-management conflict you declined to cite. San Fransisco in 1934, for example, ...
For obvious reasons, I'm more familiar with labor issues that affected the South than San Francisco. I figured one example would suffice to illustrate my point.
The problem with using something that happened in 1934 to say he had a poor record on that, was that it ignores the Wagner Act (1935) which radically altered the balance of power from management to labor, and at least temporarily brought a form of mediation to the constant bickering. It wasn't a perfect system (strikes were rampant and a bit too much power was given to big labor), but it ended the even more unbalanced status quo that had previously existed for 50 years, yes.
Actually, I'd argue that the Wagner Act set up an equally unbalanced status. We didn't really get a good balance on this issue until Taft-Hartley.
Robert Moses isn't the sum of all New Deal beautification and construction projects.
No, but he's a handy example, especially since his work is often criticized.
It well known he was merely a very strong advocate of a national level conservation corps (based on the success of the examples you mentioned) rather than its originator. I think I'm missing your point in this here somewhere?
My point is that if some other person had won the Democratic nomination in 1932, there was a fair chance he would have established similar programs. If one is going to claim that FDR was a spectacular success in all areas, as was done in the post I was replying to, then that implies that there was something uniquely special about the man.
This postulates that US involvement in WWII was inevitable and a complete accident. That's not a view I can reconcile with. Certainly the buildup and mobilization could have been ordered much later than it was IRL.
Lend-Lease could have happened later or even not at all with a different President, but not the American buildup. That had begun well before the start of WWII in response to the buildups begun in Europe and Japan.
