President Franklin D. Roosevelt Was NOT A Socialist

The top photo shows President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the bill that created Social Security on August 14, 1935. The bottom graphic shows the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by President Roosevelt on January 11, 1944.

There are some of my brothers and sisters on the left that claim these two things show that Roosevelt was a socialist. They would have you believe that anyone who believes in those things must be a socialist, and say it proves Roosevelt was socialist. He was NOT. This is nothing more than an effort to make socialism palatable to the general public. That's a worthy goal in my opinion, but claiming something that is not true is not the way to do that.

Did Roosevelt (who I consider to have been a very good president) have some socialist elements in some things he proposed? Yes. He also had capitalist elements. The fact is that a person can believe in economic fairness with being a socialist -- and many Americans today like the idea of our economy being fair, without embracing all the tenets of socialism. They don't see economic policy as an either/or thing (capitalism or socialism). They view some elements of each as being good -- and so did President Roosevelt (who rejected both unregulated capitalism and socialism as being unworkable). He believed a vibrant and fair economy lay somewhere in the middle.

The following is part of an excellent op-ed in The New York Times by Jonathan Alter on Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, American politics took place largely on Roosevelt’s liberal terrain. Since then, even Democratic presidents have often been forced to play on Ronald Reagan’s conservative side of the field.

Suddenly, though, Roosevelt is alive again in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign: His ideas for using government to improve lives echo through stump speeches across Iowa and New Hampshire. . . .

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to revive Roosevelt. Before we allow anyone to assume his mantle, let’s separate candidates merely seeking inspiration for big ideas from those misappropriating his legacy.

Bernie Sanders, the most explicit of the Roosevelt wannabes, is in the latter category. He has repurposed the “Second Bill of Rights” address on his website to report that Roosevelt was constantly attacked as a socialist, so he must have actually been one — just like the independent senator from Vermont. He’s betting that a younger post-Cold War generation won’t conflate his brand of democratic socialism with communism, as many of their elders wrongly do.

But Roosevelt was an improvisational pragmatist — a “juggler,” he called himself — not a socialist. While his idea for Social Security contained socialistic elements (as did George W. Bush’s 2008 bank bailout), he understood that in a nation of strivers, the concept is a political loser. When asked his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.”. . .

Even after Roosevelt took office at the depths of the Depression, he had no unified plan, just a vague commitment to “action and action now.” But he quickly made good on that pledge with a dizzying series of inventive programs and structural changes that have inspired “100 Days plans” from Ms. Klobuchar and others.

Not all were embraced on the left. Like President Barack Obama in 2009, Roosevelt in 1933 rejected calls to nationalize failing banks after they reopened. His larger aim was to reform capitalism so it worked better for ordinary people, which sounds a lot like Elizabeth Warren’s agenda.

Senator Warren’s challenge is that today’s economic anxieties might not be powerful enough to drive real change. Roosevelt capitalized on the Great Depression: It helped him offer government jobs, regulate Wall Street, raise taxes sharply on the wealthy, launch huge infrastructure projects and secure a minimum wage — all ideas reprised by today’s Democrats, but in a much stronger economy.

Running for re-election in 1936, Roosevelt said of his big-money critics: “They are unanimous in their hate of me and I welcome their hatred.”

But when Mr. Sanders quotes that line in his stump speech, he doesn’t mention that Roosevelt soon tacked to the center. He rebuffed calls for national health insurance as impractical, backed a balanced budget, insisted that most welfare be connected to work and supported free trade. As World War II approached, he abandoned the New Deal entirely and invited the corporate titans who loathed him to help him win it. With the end of the war in sight, he renewed his liberal domestic agenda with the landmark G.I. Bill, which inspired today’s Democratic focus on affordable education. . . .

Roosevelt was far from perfect, and various candidates have noted his slowness on civil rights, the folly of his “court-packing” scheme and the horrible wartime detention camps for Japanese-Americans that Mr. Trump is now using for migrant children.

But his larger message remains powerful: Despite our divisions, the country can confront big problems like global warming. We don’t know yet if “Happy Days Are Here Again” — Roosevelt’s campaign theme song — but the cycles of history may finally be turning in a progressive direction. With any luck, the next election will bring a new epoch of problem-solving — a fresh commitment to what Roosevelt called “bold, persistent experimentation.” It’s about time.