Dissertation Information for Kenneth Franklin Kurz NAME: - Kenneth Franklin Kurz
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1995)
ADVISORS: - Robert Dallek
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Eric H. Monkkonen - Blair Campbell
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Franklin Roosevelt and the gospel of fear: The responses of the Roosevelt administration to charges of subversion
Abstract: President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies came under intense attack during his first two terms, as many of his critics believed the New Deal to pose a threat to the American system. Many saw a threat to the Constitutional system of checks and balances, and others saw Roosevelt's activism as too great a centralization of power in the presidency, at the expense of Congress, and to the detriment of state and local government.
Consequently, many of these critics openly accused the Roosevelt Administration of subversion; some called Roosevelt a potential fascistic dictator, and others saw the threat as being socialistic or even communistic. During his first two terms, and during his re-election campaigns, therefore, President Roosevelt had to answer his accusors.
In the election campaigns, Roosevelt very effectively muted and defeated his Republican opponents, but his responses to accusations leveled by Congressman Martin Dies were not nearly so effective, nor even very direct. Dies, a conservative Democrat, caused the Administration to become defensive, and Roosevelt and his underlings sought to divert and undermine Dies subtly, and, in so doing, unwittingly appeased and empowered him.
The Roosevelt Administration's main response was to form two executive branch committees to investigate charges of subversive activities on the part of Federal employees. Roosevelt's men hoped to neutralize Martin Dies in this way, but the committees failed to do so, and instead provided the stated precedent for President Harry Truman's loyalty boards later in the 1940s. The various collections housed at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, contain a good deal of correspondence that shows the political nature of the Administration's actions; those involved in planning the committees wrote directly of their intentions to stop Dies and the Dies Committee.
The ongoing loyalty investigations in the Truman Administration, and perhaps, McCarthyism itself, became part of Roosevelt's legacy to the nation, along with his expansion of presidential power and the role of the Federal government in matters of social welfare. The Roosevelt legacy, therefore, was mixed. His New Deal reforms and dynamic leadership did a great deal of good, but his weakness and vacillation in the face of Martin Dies' attacks imprinted upon American liberalism a defensive response to charges of subversion. Roosevelt's failure to defeat Dies compromised American liberalism, and burdened it, thenceforward, with a crippling onus that was successfully exploited by Republicans in the coming decades.
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calculated 2009-01-25 11:06:56
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