Franklin D. Roosevelt is considered the most-sainted president of the 20th century. You have to look far and wide to discover the truth about his character and policies. But as John T. Flynn notes in this landmark 1948 volume, FDR actually prolonged the Great Depression and deliberately dragged the country into a war that seriously compromised American liberties.
What's more, he did this despite campaign promises to slash bureaucracy and cut spending. He ran as a small-government liberal, a fact (among a million) that has been completely forgotten today.
Flynn writes a devastating indictment. If the contents of the book were widely known, the monuments erected in FDR's honor would be torn down forthwith.
To this day, the period of the New Deal remains a puzzle just on the face of it. People were suffering. The Great Depression was long and hard. We are told that Roosevelt did wonderful things for people to rescue them from this suffering, yet even a casual look shows that he didn't actually end the Depression. It continued from his first to his last day in office. How is it possible that he is given credit for something that he so obviously did not do?
The reputation of this president has to be one of the greatest propaganda victories of the 20th century. There is no better book on FDR. Just to focus on one example, Flynn's account of the early banking crisis and the confiscation of gold is more detailed and beautifully written than any other. Most historians totally ignore this monumental event or pass it off as some sort of brave act of responsible public policy. Not Flynn. As a serious student of economics, he understood monetary depreciation and its implications.
Flynn provides a seamless documentation on how the New Deal so nicely segued into the Second World War. The war was clearly seen by the Roosevelt administration as an another round of New Deal policymaking: more debt, more control, more spending, more inflation, more of everything that had not worked for eight years but was now taken to another level entirely.
If you want to know why this book never became a national bestseller, this is the reason: Flynn saw the welfare state and the warfare state as two expressions of the same policy impulse. That vision makes him anathema to historians of the Left and the Right. Even worse, from their point of view, he fully succeeds in making his case.
The Roosevelt Myth remains the best-ever account of this presidency and its catastrophic influence on American life. Its appearance also sealed the fate of the author. He was a giant in the 1930s as a journalist and public figure. By the 1950s, he was forgotten and ignored. He paid a big price for telling the truth. We are all so fortunate that he dared to do so.
In addition to Flynn's own foreword, this digital edition from Laissez Faire Books includes an introduction by historian Ralph Raico and an editorial preface by Jeffrey A. Tucker.
