“Partly through his own doing, partly through the dice roll of circumstances, Franklin Roosevelt radically altered the landscape of American expectations. The small-government world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was banished forever. Americans demanded more of their government: more services, more safeguards, more security. They got them – along with more taxes, more red tape, more intrusiveness. At times some Americans would wonder whether the cost was worth the benefit. But the skeptics were never convinced enough or numerous enough to turn back the clock and unravel Roosevelt’s handiwork. He gave Americans what most of them agreed the country required during the emergency of the depression, and they sufficiently liked what they got that they retained it after prosperity returned. ” H.W. Brands, Traitor To His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, p.821
or
“Despite the existence of a financial panic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected into office by Americans who retained a remarkable independence of spirit and willingness to make their own way in life that had been the great legacy of the Founders and of all those freedom-seeking immigrants who had abandoned all they had to seek opportunity in the New World. By his actions while in extended office, FDR transformed a minor Panic into a Great Depression, and sowed the seeds of a progressive socialism that slowly would throttle all enterprise out of the capitalist system. By his pandering to the fears of the weakest remnants, and by his specious use of words of insincere comfort to those who had no desire to flourish as free individuals, FDR weakened the constitution of the People, made the People excessively dependent upon governmment, and sowed the seeds for a redistributive, rather than an entrepreneurial society. FDR was not only a traitor to his class. He was a singularly ill-informed and vacuous traitor to his nation.” Charles K. Rowley, June 25, 2011
