Not familiar with it. Clue us in!

 

I'll have to give you more details later, but in short, in 1939 he had the insight to listen to Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard and developed the Uranium Committee. This would lead to, in less than six years, the US detonating the first nuclear weapon, and subsequently, well...I don't have to tell you that history that led us to being a nuclear power, I'm sure.

 

More details tomorrow, if you are interested.

Thank god for Albert Einstein.

 

:thumb:

I'm going to say William Henry Harrison. Anyone who isn't smart enough to wear a coat and hat on a rainy day, give a two hour inauguration speech, and then catch a cold and die doesn't win points with me.

 

:laugh:

I didn't give reasons because you know the reasons...sometimes its best to be slow to speak to make a bigger point. I do believe the internet age has hurt him compared to past presidents. He lost to Al Gore.

Andrew Jackson, for the things he did to the Native Americans. One of his platforms for his campaigns both in 1824 and 1828 was the support of the Indian Removal Act, which for all intensive purposes, was to purchase Native American lands because Gold had been found on a lot of these plots. They moved the Native Americans westward outside the borders of the US. I read in one place that Jackson referred to this as "Racial Cleansing." Also, they purchased over 100 million acres of land for around 68 million dollars. Which, if my math adds up is about: 68 cents an acre.

 

Another one is Ulysses S. Grant. He was the most corrupt president we have ever had, the Black Friday gold scandal and the Whiskey ring in 1875, in which over $3 million in whiskey taxes were stolen from the government and given to Grant's aids. Another was the Sanborn incident, an embezzelment scam that implicated his Vice President at the time, Schyluer Colfax, who eventually dropped out of the next presidential race.

 

Far worse presidents that did far worse things than creating Social Security or the misuse of executive orders IMO.

Andrew Jackson, for the things he did to the Native Americans. One of his platforms for his campaigns both in 1824 and 1828 was the support of the Indian Removal Act, which for all intensive purposes, was to purchase Native American lands because Gold had been found on a lot of these plots. They moved the Native Americans westward outside the borders of the US. I read in one place that Jackson referred to this as "Racial Cleansing." Also, they purchased over 100 million acres of land for around 68 million dollars. Which, if my math adds up is about: 68 cents an acre.

 

Another one is Ulysses S. Grant. He was the most corrupt president we have ever had, the Black Friday gold scandal and the Whiskey ring in 1875, in which over $3 million in whiskey taxes were stolen from the government and given to Grant's aids. Another was the Sanborn incident, an embezzelment scam that implicated his Vice President at the time, Schyluer Colfax, who eventually dropped out of the next presidential race.

 

Far worse presidents that did far worse things than creating Social Security or the misuse of executive orders IMO.

 

Precisely.

Can I answer this question in 2012 ?

 

While I'm an unabashed liberal (a rare commodity here on BGP), I will give kudos to a good zinger regardless of the political stripe of the recipient.:clap:

Creating and encouraging monopolies is not liberal. Burning crops and killing pigs with hungry Americans on the streets is not liberal. Sending Japanese to interment camps is not liberal. And the worst of them- the court-packing scheme was not liberal. It was an insidious attempt by FDR to circumvent the rules set forth by the Constitution for his agenda.

 

If you are from the liberal perspective, there may be some things that FDR did that you agree with, that's fine. But the groundwork that he layed in DC- one of disrespect for the constitution, one of pushing one's own agenda at any costs- is what has caused real problems in our country.

They are liberal in the sense that they used government forces to attempt to fix the economy. The conservative plan of Hoovers was do nothing and let the market fix itself, at the time things only got worse. There is a current notion that had nothing been done the economy would have recovered quicker, but I find this assumption highly politically motivated.

 

The point of NIRA was to stop wages from falling out of the sky. I don't disagree with the argument that this might have been counterproductive, but we can not foresee the effect of how the serious drop in wages would have furthered the problems.

 

The point was to control prices and keep farmers profitable. While your framing it as FDR dancing around a campfire of produce while people are starving the intent was to ensure the farmer didn't leave the industry. If all of that food was given away you would be seriously jeopardizing the free market by flooding it with free goods. You have to remember that there was a major depression going on at the time and they were going to try anything to fix it. Food prices are still controlled and fixed today not by the same extremes but they still are.

 

The Japanese internment camps are a serious blight on our human rights record. While I don't forgive these actions we can't ignore that racial attitudes and fears of the day took the lead role in this. You are right in that this was not liberal, and was in so many ways wrong but this was a war issue, not a political one.

 

Yes packing the supreme court was wrong. But it was accepted by the masses under the situation that they were in i.e. desperate. Our system of government works to "muck up" quick changes. We were at the time in need of quick and drastic changes.

 

FDR was not the first president to go outside the lines of the Constitution. How does the Louisiana Purchase or the Emancipation Proclamation fit in the guidelines of the Constitution? The Constitution as it exists may be to simple and to undefined to adequately meet the needs of the modern day state if held strictly to its words. It is very arguable that it is because of its lack of clarity and simpleness that government has been able to evolve under it and make changes to meet our needs as history has moved on.

 

But I again have to return to my original argument that the US, under the framework developed in FDR changes, soared higher in prominence than it ever had before. We today are the greatest nation in the world and much of our government works under principals and programs from that era. If his presidency was such a dramatic failure how could this possibly be the case?

 

FDR guided the country through some of the most difficult times the nation faced, and we came out of it stronger, more productive, and more powerful.

FDR was a liberal, many concepts and programs he pushed (and I do agree that much of this was done so on a less than constitutional standards) have formed much of the basis for modern liberal thinking. For this reason his legacy is a target. It is not to say that any specifics given by cch5432 are wrong, but one can not ignore A.The shape he left the country in. B. His guidance through WWII C. His popularity.

 

The US rose to become the most powerful country in the world under the parameters that FDR left the government, which were quite revolutionary compared to the prior government. If he did the country so wrong how were they able to blossom under this new significantly more socialist, government?

 

Simply because he is a hero of the left doesn't negate his great legacy. A reverse argument of the legacy of Reagan can be made for some of our current problems but it to would be a false representation of the total value and importance of his presidency.

 

None of his work programs worked to get us of th e Depression, a historical note that the current adminstration should pay heed to. His programs were designed to help one group or another at the expense of another. An example is the AAA, where farmers were paid not to grow crops, but forced food prices up. The first one was ruled unconstitutional. Another example was the National Recovery Act which was to encourage higher wages and lower consumer prices. This lead to fewer workers being hired, because of lower profits. This too was ruled unconstitutional. Taxes were raised taking the money out of the hands of the consumer and used by the government to create temporary jobs, leaving the consumers with less money to buy goods with, which lead to fewer full time jobs being created.

 

While many of his programs looked good on the surface, made some feel good at the time, in the long run these programs were failures at creating lasting jobs.

 

His efforts at leading us in WWII, for the most part, were sucessful. There are points that can be argued that were not so great. His effort at Yalta would be one point. FDR and Churchill led the Allies to victory.

 

I believe we overcame his socialist programs, that never really worked. The one true socialist effort, Social Security, is dragging us toward economic failure. For a long time it looked OK, it just has taken a long time for its failure to show up. Even at that if the politicians had left the program alone, it may not be in the its current situation.

I'd like to preface my post by mentioning the unfortunate misuse of the word "liberal"- what liberal is described as today is so different than what the "classic liberalism" of von Mises, Hayek, and others was about.

They are liberal in the sense that they used government forces to attempt to fix the economy. The conservative plan of Hoovers was do nothing and let the market fix itself, at the time things only got worse. There is a current notion that had nothing been done the economy would have recovered quicker, but I find this assumption highly politically motivated.

Herbert Hoover was NOT a do-nothing. His highly interventionist policies (coupled with the Fed's tinkering with interest rates) caused the Depression- FDR's highly interventionist policies lenghtened it. The myth that Hoover was laissez-faire is nothing more than propoganda. See Chapter 7 from Murray Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" for details on how Hoover was not....

The point of NIRA was to stop wages from falling out of the sky. I don't disagree with the argument that this might have been counterproductive, but we can not foresee the effect of how the serious drop in wages would have furthered the problems.

You are right that we can not foresee the effects had nothing been done. All we can see is the effect of what was done- in 1940, 11 years after the stock market crash, unemployment still averaged 14.6%. If President Obama's or President Bush's policies led to an unemployment rate of 14.6% in 2020, something tells me we wouldn't say "well we can't see what would have happened had we done nothing." .

 

The point was to control prices and keep farmers profitable. While your framing it as FDR dancing around a campfire of produce while people are starving the intent was to ensure the farmer didn't leave the industry. If all of that food was given away you would be seriously jeopardizing the free market by flooding it with free goods. You have to remember that there was a major depression going on at the time and they were going to try anything to fix it. Food prices are still controlled and fixed today not by the same extremes but they still are.

The irony that you are arguing that enormous food subsidies were to protect the free market is outlandish. I really don't have much to say beyond that, except that I know the food prices are highly subsidized today as well and it costs the taxpayers billions of dollars.

 

The Japanese internment camps are a serious blight on our human rights record. While I don't forgive these actions we can't ignore that racial attitudes and fears of the day took the lead role in this. You are right in that this was not liberal, and was in so many ways wrong but this was a war issue, not a political one.

I'll use the "this was a war issue" next time I hear Bush getting criticized for the Iraq war. Not an excuse.

 

Yes packing the supreme court was wrong. But it was accepted by the masses under the situation that they were in i.e. desperate. Our system of government works to "muck up" quick changes. We were at the time in need of quick and drastic changes.

 

FDR was not the first president to go outside the lines of the Constitution. How does the Louisiana Purchase or the Emancipation Proclamation fit in the guidelines of the Constitution? The Constitution as it exists may be to simple and to undefined to adequately meet the needs of the modern day state if held strictly to its words. It is very arguable that it is because of its lack of clarity and simpleness that government has been able to evolve under it and make changes to meet our needs as history has moved on. .

First of all, I've already expressed that we didn't need quick and drastic changes. IMO it was FDR seizing the opportunity that the crisis presented (NOTE: does anyone ever notice that government loves to label anything "a crisis" as a way to incite the masses and assume more power?) to push his agenda. Any President who tries to circumvent the rules set forth by the Constitution is a bad President to me. As a sworn in member of the executive branch, you take an oath of office to "defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic." I know of no President who has gone as far to try to ignore it.

But I again have to return to my original argument that the US, under the framework developed in FDR changes, soared higher in prominence than it ever had before. We today are the greatest nation in the world and much of our government works under principals and programs from that era. If his presidency was such a dramatic failure how could this possibly be the case?

 

FDR guided the country through some of the most difficult times the nation faced, and we came out of it stronger, more productive, and more powerful.

First of all, the ends don't justify the means. We could nuke the Middle East and become even more prominent with a control of the world's oil supply, but that doesn't make it right.

 

The great strides that our country has made was in spite of FDR. The economy never fully recovered until 1946, yet many today hail him and big government as the reason why our country is great.

 

It is clear to anyone that our government is messed up today, and the single most important contribution to our country that FDR made was a mindset that the Constitution is something to elude, not to admire. And it is that mindset that resides in DC today- push your own interests despite what the Constitution says. And that's why I think FDR was the worst thing that could have happened to us.

Someone's grumpy. :lol:

What's new. I'm the grumpiest 20-year old on BGP, especially in P&R. You know that as well as anyone :lol:

Andrew Jackson, for the things he did to the Native Americans. One of his platforms for his campaigns both in 1824 and 1828 was the support of the Indian Removal Act, which for all intensive purposes, was to purchase Native American lands because Gold had been found on a lot of these plots. They moved the Native Americans westward outside the borders of the US. I read in one place that Jackson referred to this as "Racial Cleansing." Also, they purchased over 100 million acres of land for around 68 million dollars. Which, if my math adds up is about: 68 cents an acre.

 

Another one is Ulysses S. Grant. He was the most corrupt president we have ever had, the Black Friday gold scandal and the Whiskey ring in 1875, in which over $3 million in whiskey taxes were stolen from the government and given to Grant's aids. Another was the Sanborn incident, an embezzelment scam that implicated his Vice President at the time, Schyluer Colfax, who eventually dropped out of the next presidential race.

 

Far worse presidents that did far worse things than creating Social Security or the misuse of executive orders IMO.

Thanks for the post. While I don't think that either of the things you listed compare to the grave disrespect that FDR had for the Constitution, which he swore to protect, I appreciate that you took the time to formulate a legitimate post.

Doesn't social security come from money we as citizens put in? Therefore if we put it in, shouldn't we be able to get it back? How is that a hand out?

I wouldn't call it a handout, but it is forced redistribution. I'd have less problems with it if it was optional, and if it wasn't running at a tremendous deficit right now.

My vote is yes. I have a few reasons why. For anyone who votes no, I want actual contributions to the thread- I want you to tell me which President was worse, and why.

 

I will agree here.

 

If you have to ask why, then obviously you haven't been paying attention for the last decade.

 

Yeah, I think in the following years his presidency will be looked at even worse.

 

Do you mean besides the obvious?

 

Cats,

 

I've seen you post in other forums. Only LN can rival you in terms of post lengths. Now, as I clearly stated in the first post, I want reasons why. I want other posters to compare the worst marks of Bush against the worst marks of FDR (although, technically, I haven't even got into FDR's tax policies, so I haven't done them all). We want an extrememly long post with substance!

Cats,

 

I've seen you post in other forums. Only LN can rival you in terms of post lengths. Now, as I clearly stated in the first post, I want reasons why. I want other posters to compare the worst marks of Bush against the worst marks of FDR (although, technically, I haven't even got into FDR's tax policies, so I haven't done them all). We want an extrememly long post with substance!

 

I was writing everything down that I could think of. It takes time!

 

The bolded part is hilarious! I don't think I have a rival there.