Who exactly was FDR?

I do not believe in Communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists.^[1]

~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Rep. Martin Dies (1940).

After quoting the above, Willaim Grigg writes of the FDR Administration’s obstruction of Dies’ efforts “to expose Communist espionage, sabotage, and infiltration of government, academe, the defense industry, and unions,” the press attack on Dies, the IRS’s spurious audit of Dies, and an attempt to bribe Dies with an offer of the vice presidency. FDR also succeeded in getting author John T. Flynn blacklisted by the publishing industry and “relentlessly smeared” Charles Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer. His administration also made use of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee who acted as private spies against groups that were isolationist and patriotic but not anti-Jewish.^[2]

People today who obsess about what’s supposedly done in the name of the Patriot Act should read about Roosevelt’s attacks on his critics and those who displeased him. As with a lot of other things we are beginning to look at with fresh eyes, Roosevelt doesn’t come out smelling that pretty. Give me the relatively toothless Patriot Act any day.

A lot of this is news to me given how little I’ve read of the 1930s and wartime America on the home front. I had an uncle who turned beet red when he described FDR as a “traitor to his class.” He and his generation were a lot closer to these facts about him and, anyway, I soon was to become more fixated by the military aspects of WWII and Korea and my own later part in the Vietnam War. After that, the Cold War was something that kept me and a lot of other people looking hard at the Soviet and Chinese threats, my own perspective having been radically changed by reading The Gulag Archipelago, let it be said in passing.

But our collective, I think, ignoring of the activities of the subversive, hate-America-with-a-passion, Che-loving left at home during all this time has been a mistake, as the hiring of an admitted communist for President Obama’s staff by one of the president’s closest advisers, um, suggests. By what stretch of someone's deranged imagination does that come out as a cool thing to do? I'm just asking.

So, of late, it’s been extremely interesting to see what comes up when one decides that absolutely everything is back on the table for examination. Glen Beck, for example, has done great work in digging up and highlighting the origins and objectives of the Progressives.

From what I read in Grigg’s article, it’s obvious that the vilification heaped on Sen. Joe McCarthy was misplaced. Hands down, the man who actually deserved vilification was none other than St. Franklin, no stranger to the use of scurrilous tactics and the abuse of power and apparently disinclined to fret much about communist subversion.

Notes
^[1] “FDR's patriot purge.” By William Norman Grigg, The New American, 6/16/03, republished at The Free Library.
^[2] These two groups compiled voluminous lists of what they considered undesirables, which lists were freely shared with and used by the Roosevelt Administration to injure opponents. Leftist allies of FDR had no problem with keeping and using such surveillance records but succeeded in getting similar records compiled on domestic communists shipped to and effectively sealed in the Boyers, Pennsylvania, federal records storage area (as of the mid-1980s). Chilling of First Amendment rights of loyal Americans, don’t you see?