FDR's biggest mistake

[GeneralMacArthur]

If we'd rolled through Eastern Europe after WW2 and defeated the Soviet Union before they had the chance to develop nuclear weapons, we would have just ended up in a Cold War with China anyway.

It's ultimately for the best for humanity that the first two nations to find themselves in a nuclear showdown were both fairly pragmatic states led by level-headed and rational men, and quickly led to the precedent, still respected today, of nuclear weapons being only a deterrent to be used as a last-resort defensive measure.  Imagine if America had held nuclear hegemony for seventy years or so, only to be finally tested in its first nuclear showdown against an eschatological Iranian theocracy led by an ignorant and irrational ayatollah.  Perhaps with President Trump on our end of the telephone line.

[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."

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.

[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.

[E-Dawg]

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. 

You made really good points here and I think you have shifted me off my idea that calling them internment camps is euphemistic. It probably was at the time, but after how the public imagination of "concentration camps" became defined as post-Holocaust, it probably is appropriate to be more specific than its technical definition when using that term. I removed what I said about this from my original response on this thread, as I don't think I stand by it anymore.

[buritobr]

The US, the UK and the USSR were allies against the Axis and that was necessary. It doesn't mean that FDR was close to Uncle Joe. He was not. This is a right-wing revisionism.
But I included this option so that those ones who believe can vote. I would never vote for 1, 2, 3, 4. The others I can discuss.

[Mr. Ukucasha]

HOT TAKE: Despite Japanese internment winning, I believe rejecting Jewish refugees was worse. Even though internment was disgusting, no one was directly killed by it, however FDR succumbing to public opinion by turning away virtually all Jewish refugees led directly to hundreds of thousands of deaths and demonstrated the dangers of populism.

[Vice President Christian Man]

The Supreme Court issue is why I would’ve opposed his re-election campaigns in ‘40 and ‘44 although with hindsight his refusal to accept Jewish refugees is the most obvious mistake. The Japanese Internment Camps are a runner up.

[Vice President Christian Man]

Giving Stalin a blank check to gobble up eastern Europe.

I’m no fan of Stalin but temporarily allying with him was clearly the lesser of two evils given what would’ve happened if the Axis won.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Giving Stalin a blank check to gobble up eastern Europe.

I’m no fan of Stalin but temporarily allying with him was clearly the lesser of two evils given what would’ve happened if the Axis won.

The division in Eastern Europe guaranteed that either the Soviets or the Germans would dominate the region. It is safe to say the Red Army did the world a service by stopping Generalplan Ost from having any chance of being fulfilled.

[Aurelius2]

Giving Stalin a blank check to gobble up eastern Europe.

I’m no fan of Stalin but temporarily allying with him was clearly the lesser of two evils given what would’ve happened if the Axis won.

I'm all for allying with them. I'm talking about the Yalta Conference and subsequent events.

[Devout Centrist]

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.

The term “concentration camp” predates the Nazi camp system by nearly 50 years (likely first used to describe guerrilla internment facilities during the Spanish-Cuban war). Many historians now use the terms “death camp” or “extermination camp/facility” to refer to camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobbibor, and Majdanek. Based on its original etymology, concentration camp is a perfectly acceptable term to refer to the internment camps/relocation centers that were used to detain Japanese Americans in the US.

[KaiserDave]

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.

I think destroying Europe is bad

[MarkD]

For this poll, I vote for the internment camps issue but I want to add this observation: FDR's mistake was that he unquestioningly believed the intelligence report he received in which it was claimed that the Japanese military was planning a sneak invasion into the west coast of the US. That was in a report written by intelligence-gathering agents, but it was a lie -- a falsehood concocted by some bigoted member of the intelligence agency. The fact that he automatically trusted his agents without verifying whether anyone else had also discovered the same information was the president's mistake.

In terms of the Court-packing plan, I think it is important to recognize that a major factor that entered into play why the public and Congress declined to support his proposal was because FDR was originally not honest about why he was proposing. When he first told the public about what he was going to propose to Congress, he dishonestly said that the "nine old men" were overburdened in their workload and needed some additional assistance. Everybody knew that explanation was very misleading, and he eventually got around to giving a more honest explanation for the plan -- that he wanted to change the ideological direction of the Court so it would stop striking down New Deal legislation. But the fact that he was initially dishonest might have been an important reason why the public and Congress chose to oppose the idea.