FDR's biggest mistake

[Alben Barkley]

1. Good thing

2. Not even really true

3. Good thing

4. Good thing

5. Not entirely true, he did do Executive Order 8802. Arguably not enough but he worked with the hand he was dealt.

6. This is in the running for biggest mistake. Though politically unpopular, it would have been the right thing to do.

7. Politically unfeasible at the time and honestly probably would have made little difference. The "giant" that was the US military-industrial complex had not "awoken" yet, so to speak, and we didn't have a large or well-trained standing army yet. The draft wouldn't begin until the next year. Probably we just end up having to evacuate France with the British, if we even make it over there. I mean even as it was it took 3 years to prepare D-Day so.

8. This is what I and the majority voted for. There is no excuse for rounding people up and interning them just based on their race/ethnicity, even if we are at war with people predominantly of the same race/ethnicity. There were explanations -- the Nihau incident, the fact that such a policy was overwhelmingly popular in the country (which is why I think it's more of a national shame than FDR's specifically), general wartime hysteria and paranoia in reaction to Pearl Harbor. But not excuses. That kind of thing is not who we are as a country. Still, we didn't go around executing them and kept them in relative comfort, which made us better than our enemies and even our allies (looking at you, Soviets). So, looking at the context of the time, could have been a lot worse.

9. Good thing. Or well, maybe not "good" as war is hell, but a justified and necessary thing.

10. The feasibility and practicality and effectiveness of this is debatable. (Not like the Nazis couldn't just go back to rounding up and shooting people and throwing them in ditches, even if they couldn't get them to the camps to gas them.) This is the kind of thing that's probably less on FDR than the military commanders anyway. I doubt he was micromanaging to the extent of telling them every railway we should bomb or not.

[Alben Barkley]

Letting the segregationists swap Wallace for Truman on the 1944 ticket.

Yes, because this was worse than interning hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans because of their ethnic background and allowing hundreds of thousands of Jews to die because "muh arbitrary lines on a map."🙄

In the long term, yes--basically the entire Cold War could have been avoided and the United Nations could have continued to cooperate towards everlasting peace and prosperity. Jewish refugees second, Japanese internment third.

The Cold War was good - the only shame is that we didn't make it unnecessary by taking out the Soviet Union as soon as we finished off the Nazis and the Japanese.

This would have been a horrendous disaster on every level. Fun scenario in HOI4, ridiculous in reality. The Soviets had 600 f--king battle-hardened divisions in Europe by the end of WW2. It would have been no cakewalk to defeat them to put it mildly, and they would have fought to the bitter end to every last man, woman, and child. You might say "Couldn't we just use nukes?" But that means either nuking the parts of Europe we are trying to "liberate" in order to drive them out in the first place, or nuking millions of Soviet citizens in their own cities (if we could even get there to drop them and produce enough nukes), thereby committing horrendous war crimes and losing the moral high ground over f--king STALIN. Even that I'm not sure would have ended the war; they could move to the Urals as they were prepared to do against the Nazis and hold out indefinitely. It would have resulted in tremendous loss of life that probably would have doubled or more the losses that had already been incurred, including MILLIONS of American lives (we "only" lost 400,000 as it was). There's a reason it was called "Operation Unthinkable" and did NOT happen.

I see people talk about this all the time but there are so many reasons it wouldn't and couldn't and shouldn't have happened it's not even funny. Frankly, the Cold War WAS a good thing in that it prevented this kind of carnage and bloodshed from breaking out on a massive scale again. So far at least, nukes have undoubtedly saved lives; the fear of them has prevented major powers from going directly to war against each other in 80 years. Without them, a hot WW3 between the West and Soviets was probably inevitable, but would have been a tremendous disaster for all involved.

[Alben Barkley]

9. Good thing. Or well, maybe not "good" as war is hell, but a justified and necessary thing.

To suggest that the burning alive of perhaps 100,000 civilians--men, women, and children--was in any way a "good" thing is an obscenity of the first order.  If the shoe had been on the other foot and Japan (or Germany) did the same thing to the U.S., we would likely view it as a war crime even if, in that alternative scenario, it had been us who started the war.

It's not even clear that it was "justified and necessary."

I personally met WW2 pacific theater veterans who saw their comrades' corpses mutilated, blown up with grenades as they tended to the wounded enemy, and were indeed burned alive and worse. Most of George HW Bush's comrades were literally eaten. Try telling these vets it wasn't "justified and necessary" to take out Tokyo. Breaking the enemy's will and ability to continue to fight, especially such an evil and brutal and aggressive enemy, is absolutely necessary.

And I clarified already it wasn't really "good." But war is hell, especially total war. The Japanese were the aggressors who started the war by invading China and forcing parents to rape their own daughters at gunpoint and impaling babies on bayonets. I sympathize with the civilians who did NOT support this barbarism, but I do not sympathize with the Imperial Japanese state at all. And its seat of government was Tokyo, which made it a legitimate military target even if it was unfortunately densely populated with civilians.

[Alben Barkley]

Are you kidding me? Obviously rejecting Jewish refugees was the worst mistake he made. Japanese internment would be second. The Supreme Court is a minor issue compared to those two.

He didn't reject all Jewish refugees, but far too many. The justification was, ironically, fear that some could be Nazi spies. Similar to the justification of the internment camps, really. There was a big -- and in some ways understandable (given how heated the world was at the time) -- fear of "the other." Again, I maintain that the US was better than most other countries in the world at the time in how we dealt with that, but we were far from perfect to put it mildly.

There was also bureaucratic obstruction in the State Department that made it more difficult for many refugees to get into the US. I watched a documentary about this a couple years ago but can't remember the name of it or find it now. In any case, as with many things listed here, FDR is not solely to blame by any means. Indeed in many of these instances he was simply responding to the overwhelming sentiment of the public and playing the political hand he was dealt during an extraordinarily difficult time for the entire world. It's easy to say with hindsight that this and that should have been done better, but as FDR's distant cousin once said, "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena."

[Alben Barkley]

9. Good thing. Or well, maybe not "good" as war is hell, but a justified and necessary thing.

To suggest that the burning alive of perhaps 100,000 civilians--men, women, and children--was in any way a "good" thing is an obscenity of the first order.  If the shoe had been on the other foot and Japan (or Germany) did the same thing to the U.S., we would likely view it as a war crime even if, in that alternative scenario, it had been us who started the war.

It's not even clear that it was "justified and necessary."

I personally met WW2 pacific theater veterans who saw their comrades' corpses mutilated, blown up with grenades as they tended to the wounded enemy, and were indeed burned alive and worse. Most of George HW Bush's comrades were literally eaten. Try telling these vets it wasn't "justified and necessary" to take out Tokyo. Breaking the enemy's will and ability to continue to fight, especially such an evil and brutal and aggressive enemy, is absolutely necessary.

And I clarified already it wasn't really "good." But war is hell, especially total war. The Japanese were the aggressors who started the war by invading China and forcing parents to rape their own daughters at gunpoint and impaling babies on bayonets. I sympathize with the civilians who did NOT support this barbarism, but I do not sympathize with the Imperial Japanese state at all. And its seat of government was Tokyo, which made it a legitimate military target even if it was unfortunately densely populated with civilians.

Sorry, it's not enough to point to Japanese atrocities to justify U.S. or other Allied actions.  Even if they CAN be justified, you have to make your case on other grounds (e.g., that it was truly necessary to end the war and at least likely prevent more deaths and suffering than it caused).  And you can use "breaking the enemy's will" to justify practically anything.  Would Iraqis have been justified in exploding a nuclear device in D.C. or New York to break Americans' will to continue fighting there?  After all, the U.S. started that war.

I thought I explained this? Tokyo was the seat of the Imperial Japanese government and much of its industry. It was a legitimate military target. Bombing it probably did hasten the end of the war by cutting Tokyo's industrial output in half, and pressuring Hirohito himself to begin seriously thinking about making peace. The fact that it STILL took two atomic bombs to actually get there after that just tells you how utterly fanatical and indifferent to the loss of life of their own citizens the Japanese were. The blood was on their hands more than ours.