FDR's biggest mistake

[buritobr]

FDR was one of the US's greatest presidents. Almost everybody who make list of the best US presidents, include FDR in the top 10. But like any other human beings, he was not 100% free of making mistakes.
I don't think the 1 to 4 in this list were mistakes, but I included them in the list so that conservatives can vote. The 5 to 10 are criticism which progressives can do.

[TML]

In C-SPAN’s presidential rankings, his “worst” category has always been “pursued equal justice for all,” and we all know the main reason why that is the case.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think the Japanese internment has to be the biggest moral stain. In a strict consequentialist sense, 6, 7 or 9 might have been even worse, but those are somewhat more understandable in light of the awful political consensus of the time.

1, 3 and half of 4 were actively good things, of course.

[E-Dawg]

Not accepting Jewish refugees was likely worse than the Japanese internment camps in a consequential sense due to the number of lives that could have potentially been saved. But my vote here on a moral level still goes to the Japanese internment. It was actively persecuting and violating the rights of U.S. citizens whom the government had a responsibility to protect. As good as it would have been to accept more refugees, it was still simply not doing a good thing to people the U.S. government had no actual responsibility to protect, instead of actively doing a bad thing to U.S. citizens. In the same way, I would consider it morally worse to kill 5 family members in cold blood, than it would to not extend effort into saving 100 strangers who are dying due to the actions of others, even if the later action is worse consequentially.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think the Japanese internment has to be the biggest moral stain. In a strict consequentialist sense, 6, 7 or 9 might have been even worse, but those are somewhat more understandable in light of the awful political consensus of the time.

1, 3 and half of 4 were actively good things, of course.

In 1939, just after the war began, over 90% of the American public was against America joining the war outright. It is testament to FDR's skills he was able to turn this around and get us to commit wholeheartedly to the war effort.

[Mr. Smith]

Easily the refugees one.

[Aurelius2]

Giving Stalin a blank check to gobble up eastern Europe.

[Ferguson97]

The only sane answer is either not accepting Jewish refugees or the Japanese internment.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Giving Stalin a blank check to gobble up eastern Europe.

What were we supposed to do , threaten to start WW3 immediately after WW2 just ended . The only thing we could do at most was try to take Berlin first but that didn’t happen so there wasn’t much we could have done

[Progressive Pessimist]

Internment of Japanese Americans and the refusal of Jewish refugees.

[Sumner 1868]

Japanese internment.

In terms of worst blunder unrelated to the war, it was waiting until 1939 to propose single-payer health care, when he should have done it in 1937 with his mandate instead of the court-packing nonsense.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I think the Japanese internment has to be the biggest moral stain. In a strict consequentialist sense, 6, 7 or 9 might have been even worse, but those are somewhat more understandable in light of the awful political consensus of the time.

1, 3 and half of 4 were actively good things, of course.

In 1939, just after the war began, over 90% of the American public was against America joining the war outright. It is testament to FDR's skills he was able to turn this around and get us to commit wholeheartedly to the war effort.

Surely, that's stealing a lot of credit from the Japanese...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think the Japanese internment has to be the biggest moral stain. In a strict consequentialist sense, 6, 7 or 9 might have been even worse, but those are somewhat more understandable in light of the awful political consensus of the time.

1, 3 and half of 4 were actively good things, of course.

In 1939, just after the war began, over 90% of the American public was against America joining the war outright. It is testament to FDR's skills he was able to turn this around and get us to commit wholeheartedly to the war effort.

Surely, that's stealing a lot of credit from the Japanese...

The Japanese helped us get there, but FDR pushing the envelope and working diligently to get aid to our allies despite the strong isolationist movement had a large role to play in eventual US entry.
A majority of Americans probably would have been completely fine with war against Japan in 1940, but war against Germany was far dicier and required finesse.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

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

[Mr. Ukucasha]

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."🙄

The only sane answer is either not accepting Jewish refugees or the Japanese internment.

^^^

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

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.

[Aurelius2]

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.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

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.

That scenario ends with the Red Army in Paris and Rome, sorry.

[dead0man]

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.

in hindsight, sure.  But asking the men who were very eager to get home and make the Boomers to turn their guns on the Communists in the fall of '45 would have been rude.  Of course that point is lessened by the fact that we did just that a few short years later in Korea.  Some new men sure, but a lot of the same men too.


voted for The New Deal


<that's what you call "bury the lede/lead">

[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.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I hardly wish to be percived as defending Japanese internment, but I don't think it's pedantic to point out that American internment camps were not "concentration camps" in any sense of the word other than the most literal definition, which is completely meaningless these days.  Although they may technically have met that definition because they "concentrated" Japanese people in singular locations, the definition of "concentration camp" in a post-WW2 world has been fully replaced by camps meant as prisons for extreme abuse, forced labor and extermination.  It is trivial to argue that Japanese internment was a moral travesty without stooping to the dishonest emotional appeal of trying to draw a parallel between internment camps and Nazi concentration camps.

On a similar and perhaps even more controversial note, I wouldn't personally use the term "concentration camp" to describe the camps the British created during the second Boer war, since those camps were not intended for the intentional abuse, exploitation and extermination of their captives.  Although mass death, starvation, disease, and other appalling conditions were inflicted upon the imprisoned Boers, these were the results of abysmal management, neglect and underfunding, rather than an intentional campaign of genocide, such as that pursued by the Nazis.  In spite of this, though, the claim is often made that "concentration camps were first used by the British against the Boers" as though everything the Nazis did, the British did first.

Ultimately, Nazi concentration camps were unique in the respect that they were built explicitly for the purpose of exterminating the Jews and, other than temporarily detaining some Jews for the purposes of forced labor and rape, had no intent for their prisoners other than to kill them as fast as possible.  Since the term "concentration camp" now conveys the notion of such camps, it is not fair to other internment camps, no matter how deplorably evil they may have been, to cast the same aspersion upon them if they did not share that unique and emblematic characteristic. 

[LBJer]

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."

[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.

[I Will Not Be Wrong]

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.