Charles Peters is president of an organization called Understanding Government, ?a nonprofit seeking better government through better journalism,? according to Newsweek.
It?s too bad Peters considers better journalism to include this unsupported assertion: ?The greatest president of the last century, Franklin Roosevelt. ??
It?s possible one could assign that accolade to FDR based on his war-time record, but Peters implies that the honorific is due because of Roosevelt?s executive style.
If Peters wants to promote better journalism, he ought to read what Amity Shlaes has to say about the problems created by Roosevelt?s erratic leadership:
Kokai: We know Roosevelt today as the resolute war leader, the person who early on said, ?The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.? But you say that during the Depression, ?Roosevelt believed in a future of scarcity,? and later you add that the New Deal was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery. That sounds like a much more pessimistic attitude than what we have all learned about FDR and his role in bringing us back.
Shlaes: I think these days we suffer in history from what might be called ?presidentism.? It?s all about the presidents, right? We move from president to president, and that is the history. Yes, of course, we need to know our leaders well. But no president is perfect. Roosevelt was a great war leader. He was the right man for the war. That should not allow the reality of what he did in the 1930s to be so obscured, and what he did in the 1930s was truly problematic. He was egregiously arrogant. He said, ?We seek in government an instrument of unimagined power.? Can you imagine a presidential candidate today, not John Edwards, not Hillary Clinton, not Ron Paul, not Romney. No one would say, ?We seek an instrument of unimagined power to create a higher order of things.? I am paraphrasing.
He was very, very arrogant. He attacked principles of property, and he had no understanding for the market and even for the American temperament of the small businessman. So that was a lot different from what I had studied as a child, reading books about FDR. My book seeks to give a reality revision, not an ideological revision, of the ambiguous character that he was in the ?30s.
Kokai: You don?t paint him as a villain, but you do point to some of the things that he did that just built upon other mistakes. You get the sense in reading this book that if he had just stopped at some point and let his various ?reforms? stand, we would have been better off.
Shlaes: Politicians have their reasons, that they like reform for the sake of reform. But as we know here in the marketplace or when we are citizens that reform for the sake of reform is very costly in terms of uncertainty. If your child?s school is reformed six times from first grade to sixth grade, you know he doesn?t have a pleasant experience in that school and a lot of us know that, right? So we know No Child Left behind. We know stuff that changes sounds good, but change itself can be trouble.
And that was the New Deal. Roosevelt would do a reform. One day he loved big business. The next day he is suing them. Then he loves them again, breathing spell, then he is back at them. And even Keynes, the famous U.K. economist who was so important in that period, didn?t like it. He said to Roosevelt about utilities: either nationalize them or leave them alone. What?s the use of chasing them around the lot every other week? That?s the politician, and that?s what Roosevelt did. It?s the dark side of his famous phrase ?bold, persistent experimentation.? People don?t like bold, persistent experimentation too much because they can?t get their bearings, and that?s a little bit of what happened in the ?30s ? especially the latter half.
