FDR demonstrated a clear lack of concern with Stalin and the threat of Communism.
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“Whitewashing of history” is a term that many throw around these days. It seems like everyone not only wants the most beloved people of the past on their side, but would also like it much more if those people existed in the form of quotes.
For instance, when Nancy Pelosi officially became Speaker Of The House back in 2019, the man she chose to quote was former President Ronald Reagan. In fact, one study found that was the former president she most often quoted. Yet, Pelosi was in Congress for the final year and a half of Reagan’s term. She almost never voted with him.
Now, it’s one thing for the average politician to do this. It’s another for a historical source. Yet, Conrad Black (who some of you may know as the man Donald Trump pardoned for obstruction of justice) recently decided to do this with the legacy of former president Franklin Roosevelt.
According to Black, the claim by commentator Mark Levin and professor Burton Folsom that Roosevelt was a friend of Stalin is nonsense. “Roosevelt-era Republicans,” Black informs us, were “the stupid party.” Only purposed, he said, by people with a “know-nothing view of modern American history.”
Specifically, Black was angry the duo on Fox talked about “the infamous theory that Roosevelt gave Eastern Europe to Stalin.” You see, “this horrifying monster of historical fabrication is the only subject that could be agreed upon by such disparate groups as angry partisan Republicans, outraged that Roosevelt and Harry Truman defeated them in five consecutive elections.”
After shaming Levin for noticing that Roosevelt and Truman gave an odd amount of land Stalin, Black gives us the true way Roosevelt wanted to deal with the Soviet Union:
“Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, in fact, agreed in the liberation of all occupied countries at Yalta, with free elections (except for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which reverted to Russia which had occupied them for over 200 years prior to World War I). The elections were held in the countries liberated by the Western powers, but not in the East. Roosevelt’s plan was to deal with Stalin when he knew that atomic weapons would work and Russia wasn’t needed to defeat Japan. With that stick and the carrot of massive economic recovery assistance, Roosevelt proposed to encourage Stalin to honor his commitments.”
The “carrot-and-stick economic recovery assistance” mentioned I believe would be the Marshall Plan. However, that was Truman’s policy and Secretary Of State George Marshall’s brain-child, two years after Roosevelt died. Marshall also only served that role under Truman, in case anyone wanted to make the argument Marshall was also part of Roosevelt’s cabinet.
Do you want to know how the Truman administration dealt with the Soviets when it was mostly Roosevelt’s men? They engaged in Operation Keelhaul. After the Yelta agreement liberated POW’s from Allied nations, forces from both the US and UK found many Russian POW’s did not want to return to life under Stalin. What did the government do? Drugged them and forced up to a million anti-communist Russians to live in their home country. Afterwards, Stalin sent many of them to the gulags for seeing western culture. A large percent of them spent the remainder of their lives in these gulags.
Mind you, by themselves these claims mean very little, despite the atrocities connected to them. After all, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill also engaged in a similar operation and he was so anti-communist he tried to full on invade Soviet Russia. However, insiders from the FDR administration found he was constantly making excuses for the Soviet regime, even when it was not needed.
Here is a brief chronological history (brought to you by historian Tom Woods and his book The Politically Incorrect Guide To American History) of various apologetics the President engaged in for the Russians:
-In November 1941, Roosevelt made the claim that freedom of religion was a fundamental right in Stalin’s Russia. The truth was that the Soviets had been running a massive anti-religion campaign since 1921. That was followed with a full on ban on all forms of religion being placed into law in 1929.
-In 1943, FDR made a claim to then-New York Archbishop Francis Spellman that the population of eastern Poland “wants to become Russian.”
-At the Tehran conference in 1943, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union William Bullitt informed FDR about the true nature of Soviet Communism. He responded by saying the following: “Bill, I don’t dispute your facts. They are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he’s not, and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country. And I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblease oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
-In May 1944, Forrest Davis, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, wrote the following about FDR’s negations with Stalin: “The core of his policy has been reassurance of Stalin. That was so, as we have seen, at Tehran. It has been so throughout the difficult diplomacy since Stalingrad . . . Suppose that Stalin, in spite of all concessions, should prove unappeasible . . . Roosevelt, gambling for stakes as enormous as any statesman ever played for, has been betting that the Soviet Union needs peace and is willing to pay for it by collaborating with the West.”
-That same month, the then-US ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harrian said FDR “told me that he didn’t care whether the countries bordering Russia become communized.”
And are we supposed to ignore the communists within FDR’s administration? Roosevelt’s 2nd Vice President (a man who Roosevelt so wanted to replace the moderate John Nance Garner that he threatened to leave the Democratic Party if they refused to allow him) was an Agricultural Scientist named Henry Wallace. Wallace ran for President in 1948. One of his main platform planks was ending the Cold War and creating “peace” with the Soviet Union. Is it any surprise he won the support of the Communist Party?
It should be no surprise that the underhanded tactics of Wallace earn him nothing but scorn from Harry’s daughter Margaret in her biography on her father. Including saying he lacked “what the Mussiorians call common sense.”
Overall, one can easily come to the conclusion, without even looking at a single economic policy of Roosevelt, that he had at least some support for the communists. Yes, he tried to stop the career of Huey Long. But that was only because Long was a threat to his power, not because Long was just too far left.
Overall, it is impossible to deny that the 32nd President of the United States was, at best, just a little too nice to the red menace.
Do you have a response to this article? Would you like to offer your own take on this topic? Feel free to submit your own article or offer a comment below.
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I think it’s worth noting that Winston Churchill was FDR’s guest at the White House on a number of occasions. Roosevelt was committed to doing what was necessary to stem the tide of fascism. Modern Republicans could take a lesson from that.
True, FDR was focused on stemming the tide of fascism. But that does not excuse what seems to be an acute inability to see the rising tide of Communism. The iron curtain fell in large measure because Roosevelt seemed to have a willingly blind approach to Stalin and the authoritarian designs of Soviet Russia.