What if FDR had lived?

[scotrace]

Interesting, from CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...cnn/video/playlists/the-counterfactual-files/

 

[Bigger Don]

Interesting, from CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...cnn/video/playlists/the-counterfactual-files/

Question in the caption: Would McCarthyism have been allowed to thrive?

Re-asked: Would FDR have intervened in Congressional hearings?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Cold War would have unfolded differently, or possibly not at all, is the inference to be drawn from historian Frank Costigliola, in his recent book "Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start The Cold War." He contends that FDR had the force of will to resist the bellicosity that was building in the State Department during the war years, and had a level of respect, both personal and political, from Stalin that Truman could not hope to match.

Without the Cold War developing in the way in which it did, the Red Panic would not have developed in the years following the war. Parnell Thomas would have gone to prison for his corruption and financial chicaneries without ever having led any major campaigns on the HUAC. Without the Red Panic, Joe McCarthy would have been a failed one-and-done senator, would have been defeated in the 1950 election, and would have gone home to Wisconsin to drink himself to death in complete obscurity.

It's quite possible that Henry Wallace might have been elected president in 1948, defeating Harry Truman in a tough primary campaign. It's also quite possible that the Korean War would never have happened, and Dwight Eisenhower might have been satisified to live the rest of his life in a quiet office at Columbia University.

Richard M. Nixon would have been defeated by Helen Gahagan Douglas in his congressional campaign, and would have retired from politics to practice law in a small town in California. His ambitions, thwarted in politics, would turn to corporate law, and by the 1960s he would be a top attorney for the Pepsi-Cola Company.

"Aware, Inc., " "Counterattack," and "Red Channels" would never have existed, and Philip Loeb and Don Hollenbeck, among others, would not have taken their own lives.

Without fear of being tainted by the Red Panic brush, civil rights would have been a top priority for the administration in the years after the war, accelerating the pace of the Civil Rights Movement. The Supreme Court's decision dealing a fatal blow to the White Primary system in the South in 1944 would have been the first in a series of muscular rulings against Jimcrowism. There would still have been violence in the South -- perhaps even more of it than there was in our own timeline -- but with no Cold War panic to distract the country, national sentiment would have shifted against the Old Way Of Doing Things more quickly than it actually did.

Under the leadership of former fashion designer and radical UAW organizer Elizabeth Hawes -- who would not be Red Paniced out of the country in 1948 -- and channelling the support of legions of women emboldened by their wartime experiences, the second wave of American feminism sweeps the country in the late 1940s, with women making bold strides forward in the workplace and the halls of power. The "Revolution In The Kitchen" prophesied by Hawes in her 1943 book "Why Women Cry" comes to pass as millions of women refuse to be shoved back into what Hawes denounced in that book as "the Hitlerian routine of 'children-kitchen-church." Although a postwar "baby boom" does occur, it is substantially smaller and less influential than the one in our own time line, and is cut short before the mid-1950s by the accelerated development and popularity of the contraceptive pill.

A National Health Care system similar to that adopted in the UK would have been implemented in the US by the end of the 1940s, despite the best efforts of the AMA to derail it, as a key element in the Second New Deal. Actor Ronald Reagan, who in our time line began his political career as a paid spokesman for an AMA-funded anti-national-healthcare campaign, does not enter politics, and remains in Hollywood. He achieves new heights of stardom in the early 1960s with "The Ronald Reagan Show," featuring the actor as a lovable but bumbling single dad raising a precocious teenage daughter played by Tuesday Weld, with Reagan's real-life spouse Nancy Davis appearing as the down-to-earth school principal upon whom he has an unrequited crush, Allen Jenkins as fussy housekeeper Cousin Roderick, and Huntz Hall as Tuesday's goofy boyfriend Laszlo. Reruns of the show remain popular into the 1970s, and become popular all over again in cable reruns in the 1980s. Reagan's final acting role is as the voice of lovable, bumbling "Uncle Ronnie" in a 1990 episode of "The Simpsons."

A fiery Cuban righthander named Fidel Castro is signed to a contract in 1951 by scout Joe Cambria of the Washington Senators. By the end of the decade, Castro's blazing fastball and slicing inside curve have made him the top hurler in the American League, leading the Senators to pennants in 1959, 1960, and 1965. Among those honoring the legendary "Cuban Comet" on his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 are Commissioner Richard M. Nixon and Brooklyn Dodgers owner John F. Kennedy.

 

[Frunobulax]

Nice little bit of fantasy writing, Lizzie. Looking at life through red-tinted glasses?

 

[Bigger Don]

It's quite possible that Henry Wallace might have been elected president in 1948, defeating Harry Truman in a tough primary campaign. It's also quite possible that the Korean War would never have happened, and Dwight Eisenhower might have been satisfied to live the rest of his life in a quiet office at Columbia University.

Ah, but that assumes FDR wouldn't run again. The 22nd Amendment was not ratified until 1951.

 

[LizzieMaine]

He had wanted to retire in 1944, but only ran for a fourth term due to the war. With the war over, I think he'd most likely have been satisfied to retire at the end of that term.

 

[Fastuni]

With FDR serving a full fourth term, history would have witnessed a much bolder, stronger and uninhibited Communism worldwide.
While it would have appeared much less confrontational vis-a-vis the US, global Communist and fellow-travelling subversion would have proceeded much more smoothly. The communist agents, sympathizers and shills in the FDR Administration would have continued their work and seen to it that Communist expansion would have been left unopposed.

Germany and Japan might have witnessed a much harsher post-war scenario.
Iran, Turkey, Greece and Italy - perhaps also France - might have ended up (pro-)Communist.

 

[scotrace]

A key element is to qualify it by adding "healthy." A healthy FDR may have been tougher with Stalin and had greater strength to heed Churchill's warnings about the coming Iron Curtain. I certainly don't think he would have allowed worldwide communism to run amok once the war ended.
But as it was, FDR was a very, very sick man for a long time before his death. Had he lingered on through 1948 in poor health, it's really hard to say what he might have found the strength to support or oppose.

I am a very strong believer that to prevent the bloodbath that was the 20th century, you have to go back to 1912 and keep Wilson out of the White House by keeping Taft off the Republican ticket. A second TR presidency would have altered the landscape completely.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I agree that "healthy" goes without saying as a caveat. There is no circumstance under which an unhealthy FDR survives the war. Whether he should have run in 1944 at all, given the condition of his health, is a whole 'nother question for debate -- but the fact is that there was no other acceptable Democratic candidate. Henry Wallace was considered a pinko by the smoke-filled-room boys, and a "race traitor" by the good-ole-boy DixieKKKrats who tried, and failed, to get Harry Byrd to run, Jim Farley was too New York and too Catholic for the rural voters, labor didn't trust James Byrnes, and Harry Truman was an obscure little Pendergast ward heeler keeping a chair warm in the Senate.

The Democratic Party thruout Roosevelt's era was not a monolithic, disciplined entity. It was a sprawling mob of contradictory factions, many of whom hated each other's guts. FDR -- and only FDR -- had kept this coalition together, as witness the splitting off of the Wallaceites and the Thurmondites in 1948. So who runs in 1944 if *not* FDR? Maybe Eleanor should have given it a shot.

Another interesting possibility might have been Fiorello LaGuardia -- he was nominally a Republican, but in New York that simply meant "Not a Tammany Man." Politically he was to the left of Roosevelt on most issues, and even though he only had a few more years to live himself, if FDR chose not to run, I could see him jumping the ticket to run as a Democrat. He was nationally popular, he had a dynamic personality, and he and Stalin were even about the same size. A LaGuardia presidency -- assuming he can live past 1947 -- would have been, to say the least, not boring.

 

[MikeKardec]

Re-asked: Would FDR have intervened in Congressional hearings?

HUAC was formed during the FDR admin and had several predecessors.

The Dies Committee, somewhat ineffectively, chased communists that I knew as a child years later all over the mid west. Compared to how "out" many of these people were it seems kind of a Keystone Cops affair but possibly they agenda was different than I imagine. The Oklahoma cells I heard about, if memory serves ... and sometimes it does not, seemed pretty easy to investigate if anyone had really wanted to. They were often families or sort of "communist clans," related through birth or marriage, and their connections and therefore activities were pretty easy to follow.

 

[MikeKardec]

I agree that "healthy" goes without saying as a caveat. There is no circumstance under which an unhealthy FDR survives the war. Whether he should have run in 1944 at all, given the condition of his health, is a whole 'nother question for debate -- but the fact is that there was no other acceptable Democratic candidate. Henry Wallace was considered a pinko by the smoke-filled-room boys, and a "race traitor" by the good-ole-boy DixieKKKrats who tried, and failed, to get Harry Byrd to run, Jim Farley was too New York and too Catholic for the rural voters, labor didn't trust James Byrnes, and Harry Truman was an obscure little Pendergast ward heeler keeping a chair warm in the Senate.

The Democratic Party thruout Roosevelt's era was not a monolithic, disciplined entity. It was a sprawling mob of contradictory factions, many of whom hated each other's guts. FDR -- and only FDR -- had kept this coalition together, as witness the splitting off of the Wallaceites and the Thurmondites in 1948. So who runs in 1944 if *not* FDR? Maybe Eleanor should have given it a shot.

Another interesting possibility might have been Fiorello LaGuardia -- he was nominally a Republican, but in New York that simply meant "Not a Tammany Man." Politically he was to the left of Roosevelt on most issues, and even though he only had a few more years to live himself, if FDR chose not to run, I could see him jumping the ticket to run as a Democrat. He was nationally popular, he had a dynamic personality, and he and Stalin were even about the same size. A LaGuardia presidency -- assuming he can live past 1947 -- would have been, to say the least, not boring.

I totally agree. I never thought of it before but the LaGuardia alt history is pretty convincing.

And then there is always the pendulum effect or as I like to call it the doggie balloon effect. Squeeze one part of one of those long thin balloons that clowns like to sculpt into little dogs and unicorns and another part has to bulge. The harder you squeeze the bigger the bulge. When any one faction gets power it loses it's interest in accommodating the others, the more interest it loses the harder it squeezes and thus the harder the others will eventually push back.

We seem to always forget that the "others" (unless killed off) rarely go away they just bide their time and collect the people who have become pissed off. If you don't emphasize with their issues and make them happy they WILL be back. I think it's amazing that FDR/Truman lasted as long as they did through unbelievably trying times and even then had to be followed by the pretty moderate Eisenhower.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It helped Eisenhower that his opponents within the Republican party were so far to the right as to be completely out of what was then the mainstream -- Robert Taft was a prewar America First isolationist who preached the National Association of Manufacturers party line, and to his right there were the various ex-Coughlinites, Christian Crusade for Christ types, Gerald L. K. Smithites, and other conspiracy types who would coalesce around the John Birch Society in the late fifties. It would take Nixon's defeat in 1960 to give that element sufficient pull to yank the rest of the party in the direction of Goldwater in 1964.

 

[Bigger Don]

HUAC was formed during the FDR admin and had several predecessors.

The Dies Committee, somewhat ineffectively, chased communists that I knew as a child years later all over the mid west. Compared to how "out" many of these people were it seems kind of a Keystone Cops affair but possibly they agenda was different than I imagine. The Oklahoma cells I heard about, if memory serves ... and sometimes it does not, seemed pretty easy to investigate if anyone had really wanted to. They were often families or sort of "communist clans," related through birth or marriage, and their connections and therefore activities were pretty easy to follow.

In 1975-6 I went to Minneapolis to visit a friend and his girlfriend. Somehow they got involved with some Maoists. The whole thing seemed like theater of the absurd with the paranoia when I met some of their people at a food co-op. I remember learning three terms that weekend.

• "Trots". Short for "Trostkyites". Hate by them all.
• Material dialectic.
• Politically Correct. Thoughts and attitudes approved by higher ups and traceable to Mao and his gang. Discussions about what was politically correct were excruciatingly convoluted.

 

[LizzieMaine]

HUAC was formed during the FDR admin and had several predecessors.

The Dies Committee, somewhat ineffectively, chased communists that I knew as a child years later all over the mid west. Compared to how "out" many of these people were it seems kind of a Keystone Cops affair but possibly they agenda was different than I imagine. The Oklahoma cells I heard about, if memory serves ... and sometimes it does not, seemed pretty easy to investigate if anyone had really wanted to. They were often families or sort of "communist clans," related through birth or marriage, and their connections and therefore activities were pretty easy to follow.

The committee was specifically set up to investigate Fascist groups that were active across the US in the 1930s -- the Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, the Bund, the Coughlinites, and whatever was left of the KKK at that point, but Dies -- a Texan -- was ferociously anti-labor, and anti-anything-else-that-wasn't a-white Protestant Southerner, and decided instead, with perhaps a bit of encouragement from J. Edgar Hoover, to go after anyone to the left of John Nance Garner. He and his committee became very unpopular during the war era, with their reputation hitting rock bottom when Dies made an ill-advised personal attack against FDR-oriented columnist Walter Winchell. Winchell gave Dies a thorough "fisking" (as the blogosphere might say) on his radio program, refuting every single point Dies made, and pretty much ended his national influence. (This is the ultima thule of Irony when you consider that less than ten years later, Winchell himself -- left utterly bereft by the death of FDR, whom he idolized -- would drift firmly into the McCarthyite camp and in doing so would destroy his own national influence.)

Another member of the Dies Committe, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, who stands so far as the the most repellent single individual ever elected to offfice in the United States, responded to all this by attacking Winchell on the floor of the House as a "dirty little k*ke," a comment which further sealed the committee's reputation for Real 100 Per Cent Americanism. When the corrupt, grafting crook/future distinguished alumnus of FCI Danbury, Parnell Thomas became the HUAC's new chairman in 1947, it was actually a step up from the moral cesspool that it had been under Dies.

 

[Fastuni]

Ironically enough this same Walter Winchell became an outspoken supporter of McCarthyism...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Winchell was a lost soul when FDR died -- they were very close, and Winchell genuinely idolized the man. He was an outspoken liberal thruout the New Deal era -- and in fact may have been the very first American to denounce Hitler by name on the air, at a time when the American right wing was secure in its belief that it could "do business with Hitler."

Winchell needed a cause to attach himself to with FDR gone, and he thoroughly disliked and distrusted Harry Truman. He began drifting rightward thru the late forties, and his off-and-on friendship with J. Edgar Hoover influenced him further in that direction. McCarthy's stoolie Roy Cohn began cozying up to Winchell at the Stork Club, feeding him "inside dope" on what was going on with McCarthy's "investigations," and Winchell, looking for scoops, began pushing them in print and on the air. And down the spiral he went.

In 1945, Winchell had been the most listened to radio program on the air. Not just the most-listened to news broadcaster, the most listened-to program, period. Over the next decade, he lost his long-term sponsor, drifted from network to network, made a fool of himself with McCarthy and with the Josephine Baker incident, and was finally lampooned as the malevolent J. J. Hunsecker in a movie called "The Sweet Smell of Success." By 1957, his career was almost as dead as McCarthy himself. Boomers generally know him only as the barking narrator of "The Untouchables," but for those who understand his power and influence in the 1930s and early 1940s, it's impossible to put into words how much of a comedown that job was for him.

Winchell is a fascinating figure. He created "infotainment," for better or worse, he was one of the most brilliant newspaper writers of the 20th Century, he crusaded loudly and insistently for civil rights when it was not popular to do so, pretended to be married when he was not for more than forty years, had a long, long line of people eager to punch him in the face given the opportunity, was one of the first newspeople to attack the tobacco industry and raised millions of dollars for cancer research, and ended up losing everything he had because he lost everything he'd believed in. A more "American" figure I could not imagine.

 

[Stearmen]

The Democratic Party thruout Roosevelt's era was not a monolithic, disciplined entity. It was a sprawling mob of contradictory factions, many of whom hated each other's guts. FDR -- and only FDR -- had kept this coalition together, as witness the splitting off of the Wallaceites and the Thurmondites in 1948.

"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." - Will Rogers

 

[ChiTownScion]

The Cold War would have unfolded differently, or possibly not at all, is the inference to be drawn from historian Frank Costigliola, in his recent book "Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start The Cold War." He contends that FDR had the force of will to resist the bellicosity that was building in the State Department during the war years, and had a level of respect, both personal and political, from Stalin that Truman could not hope to match.

My own view is that history has less to do with individual personalities- no matter how forceful- than the reality of economic (and therefore, political) dialectic: action, and reaction, create the personalities rather than vice versa. FDR does indeed loom large over the 20th Century- but the drama of the times created that situation.

 

[MikeKardec]

Discussions about what was politically correct were excruciatingly convoluted.

Lord save us. No, wait, the Lord didn't save us. I'm glad I never faced that nightmare until the '90s. Well, it's the law of the land now.

 

[Bigger Don]

Well, it's the law of the land now.

And, out of respect for the host's wishes that we stay away from political discussion, I'll zip my lips after a brief relapse into non-partisan conservatism.

This forum is his property. He has rights regarding his property. I have 1st Amendment rights, but those only protect me from government intervention.