What if FDR had lived?

[Inkstainedwretch]

The defining thing about FDR was not that he died when he did, but rather that, like many another immensely powerful and vain man, he thought he would never die. No matter how sick he was he wouldn't admit that he was mortal. He should have acknowledged that each breath might well be his last, yet he never briefed his VP, Harry Truman, on what the Manhattan Project was all about. With WWII still very much in progress, Truman only learned that he controlled the most powerful weapon in history after he became President. Imagine having that little fact dropped on you unexpectedly.

 

[Bigger Don]

Pecunia non olet

I had never seen that phrase before. 'Tis interesting the things one learns early on a Wednesday.

 

[Harp]

I had never seen that phrase before. 'Tis interesting the things one learns early on a Wednesday.

Bis won viaticus quod est dulce, sicut pecunia.

 

[AmateisGal]

What a fascinating discussion. I love reading about alternative history and "what might have been."

 

[LizzieMaine]

The defining thing about FDR was not that he died when he did, but rather that, like many another immensely powerful and vain man, he thought he would never die. No matter how sick he was he wouldn't admit that he was mortal. He should have acknowledged that each breath might well be his last, yet he never briefed his VP, Harry Truman, on what the Manhattan Project was all about. With WWII still very much in progress, Truman only learned that he controlled the most powerful weapon in history after he became President. Imagine having that little fact dropped on you unexpectedly.

FDR didn't think much of Truman. He preferred Wallace to continue as vice president, but the party was able to force him off the ticket because his militant position on civil rights was too much for the good-ole-boys from the pellagra belt. FDR then suggested William O. Douglas, but the right wing of the party didn't like him, either, and finally came up with Truman as, basically, a fill-in-the-blank candidate who they expected could be manipulated as needed. If FDR had had the energy to fight on this, Truman never would have gotten the job in the first place. Truman himself didn't want the job either -- his first response when the idea was put before him was "Go to hell."

FDR was very much in denial about the state of his health, but it was 1944, there was no telling how the second front was going to go, and other than Wallace, who would never have gotten the nomination, there was nobody available in the Democratic Party who was qualified for the job. So you can make a case he had no choice but to be in denial about his health.

You could also argue that with Wendell Willkie on his deathbed, there was no one in the Republican Party who was genuinely qualified for the job, either. Dewey was the guy to go to if you needed to prosecute somebody running a cathouse on 72nd Street, but at no point in his life was he ever White House material.

 

[Fastuni]

Wallace was a typical "naive" Soviet sympathizer who saw Stalinism through rose tinted glasses. At best it was gullibility and poor judgement. To his credit he himself admitted as much by the 1950's. Mercifully he never became President.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That wasn't the reason the G-O-B's wanted him off the ticket, though. Except for the fringe elements of the Gerald L. KKK. Smith type, Red baiting was low on the political radar in 1944 -- not when even Earl Browder was promising to shake hands with J. P. Morgan on the floor of the Stock Exchange if it would help the war effort. No, they wanted him off for one reason only: because he was what the hookworm brigade so quaintly considered a "race traitor," particularly since his bold public statements in the wake of the 1943 Detroit race riots.

Red-baiting during the war era was also in very bad odor because, in the prewar era, it had been intimately entwined with the filthiest type of gutter anti-Semitism. The sort of "Jew-Communist conspiracy" stuff being churned out by G. Lucifer Kodfish Smith, Father Coughlin, Gerald Winrod, Elizabeth Dilling and their cohorts could have come straight out of the pages of Der Sturmer, and in fact some of it actually did.

With some of the leaders of this movement, including Winrod and Dilling, having been indicted for sedition, and Coughlin escaping that same fate only by the starch of his collar, most of the rest of them were driven underground for the duration. They resurfaced immediately after the war, though, when the American climate became much more hospitable to their views, and they flourished in the fifties, sixties, and beyond with "Liberty Lobby" and the JBS.

 

[Bigger Don]

Bis won viaticus quod est dulce, sicut pecunia.

Your translator failed you. There is no "w" in Latin.
Here are a couple of more takes on what I think you were trying to say...
Quid est, lucratus est bis ut bonum sicut quod meruit.
Pecunia valent, bis parta est, quae est meritum.

 

[Harp]

Your translator failed you. There is no "w" in Latin.

I know. Brother Donovan was the dean of discipline and broke up a latrine poker game. His Latin admonishment.

 

[vitanola]

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

No, just with the clarity of hindsight.

 

[Fastuni]

My point is that the world dodged a bullet by being spared Wallace as president. Whatever the internal factors were.
"Red baiting" had plenty unsavory types... but this shouldn't excuse the wilfull blindness, apologetics and fullfledged support of Communism (including Stalin and Mao) by many of the American Left, despite better knowledge. I'm not buying into the whole "we were duped - there was no evidence of Communist mass murder" shtick that was put forward by a number of these characters.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Given a choice between a Wallace presidency and a healthy FDR serving out his fourth term, I'd certainly prefer FDR given the already-established network of working relationships between himself, Stalin, and Churchill, and I imagine he'd have gotten along fine with Atlee. An aggressive, bellicose presidency such as that of Truman, however, was exactly the thing to go for if you seriously *wanted* to push Stalin further into paranoia, as some in the State Department apparently wanted to do. There were still plenty "we fought the war on the wrong side" types around during the postwar era.

The result was a forty-year Cold War which swallowed untold billions of dollars and rubles which could have been better spent, found "freedom loving America" willfully collaborating with a throng of bloodstained "ex" Nazis whose records were mysteriously expunged, resulted in far too many deaths on all sides, and finally left a nuclear-armed Russia in the hands of a corrupt kleptocracy. (Not that such things aren't unknown in the West..) One could argue that this wasn't a particularly worthwhile outcome.

But I will suggest that a Wallace presidency would have inarguably hastened the progress of the Civil Rights movement in the US. FDR had kept that movement at arm's length to keep the Dixiecrat vote in line in Congress, but a Wallace presidency in 1944 would have driven the boll-weevil crowd out of the party much earlier than actually happened. Without having to kowtow any further to the pointy-hood vote, Wallace would have taken a very muscular approach to the Civil Rights situation and would have been helped by the fact that Civil Rights leaders of the time trusted him in a way that they didn't really trust Truman, who no matter what he did always had the slight smell of a Kansas City machine politician about him.

 

[MikeKardec]

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.

Mmm. Yes. Thank you. Mine just slipped out without thinking of it's content.

 

[Bigger Don]

Mmm. Yes. Thank you. Mine just slipped out without thinking of it's content.

I wasn't thinking of your post when I mentioned partisanship.

 

[Stearmen]

My point is that the world dodged a bullet by being spared Wallace as president. Whatever the internal factors were.
"Red baiting" had plenty unsavory types... but this shouldn't excuse the wilfull blindness, apologetics and fullfledged support of Communism (including Stalin and Mao) by many of the American Left, despite better knowledge. I'm not buying into the whole "we were duped - there was no evidence of Communist mass murder" shtick that was put forward by a number of these characters.

You do realize, we could not have invaded Normandy without Stalin? For every one German soldier the Allies faced on the beach, the Russians faced three. Could you imagine the carnage if we had to face all the Germans fighting in Russia on top of the Germans already there? As for Mao, Roosevelt went behind congresses back to send supplies and men, (The Flying Tigers, under Chennault,) to prop up General Ciang Kai Shek to fight the Japanese and Mao as did Truman!

 

[Fastuni]

Regarding support for Mao and Soviet aims... read up on the role of Frank Coe, Solomon Adler and Harry D. White.

The FDR Treasury Department was a veritable hotbed of Communist espionage and treason that enabled Maoism and aided Soviet aims well beyond any pragmatic wartime cooperation.

Lizzie, you seem to suggest that Stalin and ilk would have "behaved better", had the US not antagonized them after WW2. Is this that different from the argument of 1930's Appeasement-politicians? The long record of Soviet genocide, democide, armament and wars of aggression (some in collusion with Nazi Germany) sings a different tune - the true nature of the USSR was obvious in the 1930's to anyone who was not willfully turning a blind eye to it...

I see no reason why global Communism would have behaved more "benign". They steadily were after conquering one country after the other by various means. Without exception resulting in mass murder and enslavement.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Stalin had to be addressed one way or another. A confrontational saber-rattlling approach was exactly the wrong approach to take psychologically with a man like him -- it pushed every mental button he had. FDR -- who was a master of sizing up people and personalizing his method of dealing with them accordingly -- understood this in a way that Truman, who had only one approach to anyone who crossed him -- dig in and snarl -- did not.

(Even red-baiting imperialist tool Henry Luce was fond of Uncle Joe in 1943.)

I'm not arguing that Stalin was the lovable cuddly teddy bear of a fellow who smiled out at Americans from the cover of Life magazine -- but I don't see him either as the two-dimensional boogeyman of the right. He was an individual of psychological complexities, whose nation had just been decimated beyond reason by the war, and dealing with him effectively in the postwar era meant dealing with him in all his complexity, and not looking at him simply as A Comic Book Villian Out To Destroy Our Way Of Life. I do indeed believe that a more nuanced approach would have resulted in a better outcome for all involved. I think a great many of my country's problems over the last seven decades or so have stemmed from our tendency to look at the world like a fifteen-year-old boy wondering how Cap is going to defeat the Red Skull.

As far as what the USSR did or didn't do in the thirties, I'll simply say that I frankly don't buy a lot of what Robert Conquest, as a paid agent of the IRD with ties to the CIA, wrote, and by the end of his life even Conquest himself was forced to acknowledge that many of his conclusions -- especially the statistics he so cavalierly threw out, and which have been tossed around unquestioningly ever since by the "Stalin Was Worse Than Hitler" crowd, were based on faulty information or even pure conjecture. I think the conclusive history of that period has yet to be written, and probably won't be in our lifetime, not so long as Cold War era biases on both sides remain in place.

I will throw this out, though. As ruthless as Stalin's industrialization policies for the USSR were -- and make no mistake, they were ruthlessly implemented -- without them, there is no doubt in my mind that the Nazis would have won the Second World War. A world where Trotsky rose to power instead of Stalin, as appealing as some might be tempted to find it, or even a world where Kerensky had stayed in control in 1917, would have been a world none of us today would want to live in.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And just for the fun of it, here's my alternate-history World Without Stalin take, reposted from an old thread years ago...

-- WIth the death of Lenin in 1924, a fierce struggle erupts between rival Bolshevik factions, ending with the icepick murder of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin by agents of Leon Trotsky. The Trotskyite regime pushes for mass industrialization during the early 1930s, but dissension continues among the Politburo over the leader's arrogant, condescending personality. Factions form within the government and back-door Kremlin intrigue becomes the hallmark of the regime. Dissension among the various Soviet states leads to the use of military force under the direction of Moscow to keep them in line, even as the Trotsky regime continues to thunder about the need for global revolution, causing much concern among the Western powers.

In the Far East, Japan invades China in 1937, beginning a reign of terror that, with no opposition from the preoccupied West, will kill or enslave nearly half a billion Chinese. Retreating to the western mountains, deposed Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek and communist guerilla Mao Tse-Tung form an alliance to resist the invasion, but they are powerless against the onslaught. The guerilla movement is massacred, and Chiang and Mao are executed by the Japanese.

In 1939, the world is stunned by the announcement of the Anglo-German Alliance, intended as a bulwark against a possible Soviet push westward by the increasingly unstable Trotskyite regime. France subsequently joins the European Axis. An uneasy peace continues thru the year.

In the United States, hysteria over possible war leads to the assassination of President Roosevelt by radical isolationists under the leadership of Father Charles E. Coughlin. The 1940 election is chaotic, but a potentially-uniting figure is found in the person of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, who runs under the banner of the new America First party, and sweeps to victory over Republican Robert A. Taft and Democrat John Nance Garner. The first order of business is a non-aggression treaty between the United States and the European Axis.

On June 22, 1941, Germany shocks the world by launching Operation Sea Lion -- invading the South Coast of England from Axis bases on the Normandy coast. London is sacked within a week of the invasion, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and King George VI are publicly executed as "traitors to the British people." Edward VIII is restored to the throne as an Axis puppet. Oswald Mosely becomes Prime Minister, with Rudolf Hess as Berlin's official representative in London. Standing in Westminster Abbey, Adolf Hitler proclaims the next phase of his Thousand Year Reich -- the cleansing of the continent of "inferior elements." In America, President Lindbergh praises the triumph of the Aryan people and pledges American support for the New Order in Europe. Hitler looks across the Atlantic and smiles enigmatically.

Operating from Axis bases in India and Eastern Europe, a two-pronged assault on Trotskyite Russia begins in the spring of 1942. Weakened by internal dissension, the Soviets are no match for the Axis onslaught, and Moscow falls before winter. Trotsky is unceremoniously executed by troops sacking the Kremlin, and the entire Politburo is executed by a mass firing squad. Lenin's body is disentombed, dragged thru the streets, and hung from its ankles in front of a gas station, where it is abused by the invading forces. The Slavic peasantry is enslaved for food production, and within five years the native population of the former Soviet territory has decreased by fifty percent.

Disturbed by Axis hegemony, Imperial Japan forms an alliance with Berlin, becoming in effect a vassal state of the New Order. Tokyo is given authority over the entire Pacific rim, from Manchuria to Australia, but is, in turn, under the direct supervision of Viceroy Karl Doenitz. Emperor Hirohito is allowed to retain his position on a purely ceremonial basis, but efforts are made to suppress the traditional Shinto faith as an obstacle to full allegiance to the Reich.

As a testimony of his allegience to "America's great racial ally" President Lindbergh allows the installation of an Axis "governor-general", with whom he will share authority over the North American continent, ruling from the new continental capital of Minneapolis. Joachim Von Ribbentrop is appointed to this position.

As part of Axis racial purity laws, all persons of African ancestry in North America are deported to Axis work camps in Africa. All persons of Jewish ancestry are deported from the North American continent to relocation centers in Eastern Europe, where they are subjected to further "processing."

The United States is divided into Production Zones, with the remaining population assigned to specific functions. Industrial production is concentrated in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The Lower Midwest and South are designated Agricultural Zones. The population of the Mountain and Western states is forcibly relocated to either the Industrial or Agricultural zones depending on ancestry -- persons of Northern and Central European ancestry are assigned to Industrial tasks, while persons of Southern European ancestry are relocated to the Agricultural territory. Persons of Slavic ancestry are deported to the former Soviet territories.

The Mountain States become a fortified bulwark, separating the Far West from the East. California is reserved as a resort location for leaders of the Axis regime, and is reconstructed under the supervision of Reichminister Albert Speer. The regime's Propaganda Ministry takes control of the radio and motion picture centers of Hollywood, from which they beam high-powered broadcasts covering the entire globe.

An American resistance movement crops up in the early 1950s, under the leadership of former UAW president Walter Reuther, former ILU president Harry Bridges, former Communist Party USA leader Earl Browder, and a fiery young organizer from Michigan named Malcolm Little, who had escaped deportation for his African ancestry by convincing the authorities that he was "Asiatic." They attract a base of support in the Industrial Zone, and make a series of guerilla strikes against key Axis installations. The North American division of the Gestapo, under the leadership of Joseph R. McCarthy, spends much of the decade tracking down and exterminating these resistance cells. One cell leader, former attorney Joseph N. Welch of Boston, is hung from a meat hook on live television, but his final words resonate, sowing the seeds of future revolution -- "Have you no decency? At long last, have you no decency?"

 

[MikeKardec]

I wasn't thinking of your post when I mentioned partisanship.

I know but I did follow up when I should have been thinking a bit more ... ya know?

We're all good. This is a great space and everyone's very polite. I just want to live up to the general good conduct!

 

[Stanley Doble]

You may be right about Stalin but it is only fair to point out that if it had not been for the threat of the Communist party inside Germany, and the threat of the Soviet Union from the outside Hitler would never have invaded Poland and probably would never have come to power. In other words Stalin and Soviet industrialization were the threat that Hitler was reacting to.