F.d.r. Quotes

The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I’m trying to undo the “Great Society.” It was L.B.J.’s war on poverty that led to our present mess.

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and see, I have seen blood running from the wounded, I have seen children starving, I have seen the agony in mothers and wives. I hate war

None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategical mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers—a backhand tribute to the Leader's virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil, fully familiar to those who have heard partisans of F. D. R. or Ike explain how things went wrong.

His ability came from being raised in Blackford County, Indiana, where cussing among men was as necessary as church on Sunday. Except, in Wade's case, it was church on Saturday, because Wade's daddy was a religious bigot who hated Jews, Negroes, Catholics, Coca Cola (which represented frivolity and broken dietary laws), F.D.R., city people, country people, and members of his own 7th Day Adventist church.

Nor could I see any reason for allowing our more chastened view of political possibility (not too long before I began this novel A. Phillip Randolph had to threaten our beloved F.D.R. with a march on Washington before our war industries were opened to Negroes) to impose undue restrictions upon my novelist’s freedom to manipulate imaginatively those possibilities that existed both in Afro-American personality and in the restricted structure of American society. My task was to transcend those restrictions.

. As George Seldes told me, “If you are saying anything in general about the fight against fascism in America, it seems to me that a point to emphasize is that the entire Redbaiting wave which culminated in the McCarthy era was successful in inundating the anti-Fascists by making every anti-Fascist, whether liberal, socialist, or Communist, a Red.

The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.

Throughout the black night, with every step taken, I left my youth further behind; there would be no turning back.

the product of a freed people that have not the spirit to be free.… We

For eight years he had been a satellite of F.D.R., revolving about him; now suddenly there was no F.D.R., and Lanny was an asteroid or something, wandering alone through space.

The Army didn’t know who its true friends were; it considered Socialists to be crackpots, just as they were called in America, and the people who knew how to get things done were the powerful ones at the top—the same who had hired the Nazi-Fascist gangsters to put down labor and keep political control in the hands of the well-born and well-to-do. F.D.R. himself understood this quite clearly; but how many in his administration understood it, and how many in Congress

The most important of all tasks, in the view of F.D.R., was the forming of an international organization to settle future disputes and keep the peace of the world. There must never be another war like this, if civilization was to endure. The President had called an international conference at a mansion in Washington called Dumbarton Oaks, and it had worked out the details of such an undertaking; now he wanted to persuade Stalin to agree to a time and place for a formal assemblage of delegates to organize and launch the project.

Lanny thought it was just as well that F.D.R. didn’t have to undergo the ordeal of another interview with that hysterical Frenchman, who called himself a successor to Joan of Arc and whose mind had come straight out of that period of history.

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pomyślał Otto. Jedynymi kobietami, jakie widywał w Górach F.D.R.,

On the third day, Sunday, we were guests of Mrs. Roosevelt, in Hyde Park. She gave us a conducted tour through the house, the Museum, which houses all the presents that the president had received, while in office, and to the garden and we stopped at the grave of F.D.R. That remained a very special week-end, a memorable highlight during my two years as a student. I still possess a snapshot, which a Greek student took of me in front of the Roosevelt Estate in Hyde Park, New York.

Progressivism, in short, was to a very considerable extent led by men who suffered from the events of their time not through a shrinkage in their means but through the changed pattern in the distribution of deference and power.

Will there be a run on the banks in the U.S. similar to what we saw in Cyprus several years ago? Will the government demand for all citizens to turn over our gold and silver, like they did when F. D. R. was president in WWII? Is this what the largest military exercise on American soil since the Civil War, Jade Helm, is really about? The government knows the collapse is coming, and when it does will they be prepared?

F.D.R.’s executive orders, putting the U.S. into a perpetual state of martial law, invalidating the Constitution, making it a theoretical document, which

Constitution and the United States Government, transforming it into a Global Corporation; U.S.A INC. AMERICA officially declared Bankruptcy as F.D.R instituted the Emergency Powers Act, forcing the United States Constitution into permanent suspension with the annual declaration of National Emergencies (declared yearly by either by U.S.

This is the true story of a remarkable American who, during the early New Deal years, was sought by wealthy plotters in the United States to lead a putsch to overthrow the government and establish an American Fascist dictatorship. According to retired Representative John W. McCormack, former Speaker of the House, if the late Major General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps had not been a stubborn devotee of democracy, Americans today could conceivably be living under an American Mussolini, Hitler, or Franco.

The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920’s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency. When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were Communists trying to create national chaos so that the Reds could take over. Legionnaires were given baseball bats to break up strikes and civil rights demonstrations. The American Civil Liberties Union later reported, “Of the forces most active in attacking civil rights, the American Legion led the field.

If we remember Major General Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States—and for making damned sure no one else did either.

But school texts that deal with the New Deal are uniquely silent about the powerful Americans who plotted to seize the White House with a private army, hold President Franklin D. Roosevelt prisoner, and get rid of him if he refused to serve as their puppet in a dictatorship they planned to impose and control.

he issued a blast at the Hoover Administration as heartless for its treatment of the veterans and its failure to help them, their wives, and their children return home without further humiliation. That November lifelong Republican Smedley Butler took the stump for Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped turn Herbert Hoover out of the White House.

I am a Quaker and am preaching tolerance and am not connected nor will I have anything to do with any movement or organization advocating intolerance or the entrance of this country into any foreign war.

War was “largely a matter of money,” he told the veterans who had gathered to hear him. “Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay the President sends Marines to get it. I know—I’ve been in eleven of these expeditions.” The world was not yet through with war, he warned, but “we can help get rid of it when we conscript capital along with men.

The American Liberty League banquet marked the opening of their hate campaign of propaganda to defeat the reelection of Roosevelt in 1936.

Directors of the League were identified as also being directors of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, Goodyear Tire, and Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Soldiers never leave the country except to protect the moneyed interests.

The Du Ponts supplied more grist for Butler’s antiwar mill in September, when the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee revealed that the munitions industry, led by the Du Ponts, had sabotaged a League of Nations disarmament conference held at Geneva.

Butler’s raging hatred of war led him into the same errors of judgment that ensnared the isolationists of America. Like them, he approved of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to buy “peace in our time” at Munich.

The conspiracy unquestionably inspired the novel Seven Days in May, made into a successful film, which portrayed a Fascist plot by high-placed American conspirators to capture the White House and establish a military dictatorship under the pretext of saving the nation from communism. Few of the millions of Americans who read the novel or saw the film suspected that it had a solid basis in fact.

. Before he [Butler] left for Atlanta, he was approached by a representative of the bankers gold group system, and offered the sum of seven hundred and fifty dollars for each speech if he would insert some short reference in favor of continuing the bankers gold standard. This would have meant an additional ten thousand dollars to General Butler, but he told the representative of the gold group that even if he were offered a hundred thousand dollars to do this, his answer would be “no.

We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second.

FRENCH: During the course of the conversation he continually discussed the need of a man on a white horse, as he called it, a dictator who would come galloping in on his white horse. He said that was the only way; either through the threat of armed force or the delegation of power, and the use of a group of organized veterans, to save the capitalistic system.

It fits in with what he told the general, that we would have a Secretary of General Affairs, and if Roosevelt played ball, swell; and if he did not, they would push him out. He expressed the belief that at least half of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars would follow the general if he would announce such a plan.

† BUTLER: . . . and in about two weeks the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be.

Butler’s next observation, possibly the most significant in all his testimony, was missing from the published version of his testimony. It was the link between the conspiracy and the powerful interests Butler had good reason to believe were the “big fellows” in the background.

Its contributors included representatives of the Morgan, Du Pont, Rockefeller, Pew, and Mellon interests. Directors of the League included Al Smith and John J. Raskob. The League later formed affiliations with pro-Fascist, antilabor, and anti-Semitic organizations. It astonished Butler that former New York Governor Al Smith, who had lost the 1928 presidential race to Hoover as the Democratic candidate, could be involved in a Fascist plot backed by wealthy men.

He emphasized throughout his conversation with me that the whole thing was tremendously patriotic, that it was saving the Nation from Communists,

He had seen it in Europe. It was a plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight, and he said that when they got into power, that is what they would do; that that was the ideal plan.

Extensive space was given to their attempts to brand Butler a liar or lunatic. Only at the tail of the story, buried inside the paper, did the Times wind up its account with a few brief paragraphs mentioning some of his allegations.

Most papers suppressed the whole story or threw it down by ridiculing it. Nor did the press later publish the McCormack-Dickstein report which stated that every charge Butler made and French corroborated had been proven true.

This total vindication of Butler did not burst like a bombshell across the front pages of America. Instead, as Seldes noted, “Most newspapers again suppressed or buried or belittled the official verdict.

It is conceivable that some of those named by MacGuire as under consideration for the role of dictator or subordinate positions of leadership had no knowledge of this fact, although Van Zandt reported that he, for one, had been approached. It is unlikely that Douglas MacArthur, as Chief of Staff and a stiff-necked hero with patriotic credentials as unchallengeable as Butler’s, would have had any unsavory dealings with the plotters, however patrician his outlook.

He might have been boasting falsely about having had his headquarters while in Paris at the offices of Morgan and Hodges and about the involvement of the Morgan interests in the plot.

During the feverish atmosphere of the early New Deal days, big business was horrified by Roosevelt’s drastic surgery on the broken-down machinery of the capitalist system. The savage hatred of “that cripple in the White House” represented the most bitter animosity big business had ever manifested toward any President in American history.

In that emotional climate it was not at all surprising that some elements of big business should have sought to emulate their counterparts in Germany and Italy, supporting a Fascist putsch to take over the government and run it under a dictator on behalf of America’s bankers and industrialists. That it did not happen here could be credited largely to the patriotism and determination of one courageous American—Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.

Once Hitler announces his decision, they all fall into line, like so many humble rookies. The reason for that is, not so much that they trust Hitler—many of them privately think he’s a bit cracked—but they know he’s managed to get the German people behind him. That is the basis of his power—that, and his luck; he’s managed to get away with one thing after another, and of course every concession by the rest of the world increases that prestige, makes him bolder and his people more adoring.” Said F.D.R.: “I have the feeling that we are drifting into a frightful calamity.

Even the Catholics, the most devout among them who wore scapulars and said their prayers, were strongly tinged with Pink. They would cite the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII dealing with the rights of labor and the evils of inequality of wealth—those same authoritative documents which F.D.R. kept on his desk to read to archbishops who came to protest against this or that New Deal extremism.

The plotters definitely hated the New Deal because it was for the people, not for the moneyed interests, and they were willing to spend a lot of their money to dump Mr. Roosevelt out of the White House.

Butler spilled over with anger at the hypocrisy that had marked American interference in the internal affairs of other governments, behind a smoke screen of pious expressions of high-sounding purpose. “We supervised elections in Haiti,” he said wryly, “and wherever we supervised them our candidate always won.

Industrialists and financiers were shocked by Butler’s “radical” notion. But if they had checked the Oxford Dictionary, they would have found as one definition of conscription: “taxation or confiscation of property for war purposes to impose equality of sacrifice on non-conscripts.

Butler’s uncompromising stand against war was sometimes confused with the right-wing propaganda of pro-Fascists who wanted no American help given to the victims of Mussolini and Hitler.

The Olympia, Washington, post of the United Spanish War Veterans immediately passed a resolution protesting this libel. Demanding a retraction, they pointed out, “Less than three years ago he stifled an incipient fascist rebellion in the eastern United States, an accomplishment due solely to his own prompt initiative, thereby demonstrating once more his stalwart Americanism.