Talk show host Glenn Beck is on a tear again, telling his audiences that it is progressives who were the biggest racists and violators of civil liberties in American History, particularly Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt!
Interesting how Beck distorts history and reality! 🙁 He is wrong in his facts and in his interpretation!
Let me make it clear that racism and civil liberties violations are a problem throughout American history without a doubt! But the facts are that while it is clear that Wilson worsened race relations during his administration, and has been roundly condemned for that, he cannot really be blamed for the violations of civil liberties known as the Red Scare which occurred during the last 18 months of his administration, when he lay paralyzed by a stroke and the government was really leaderless, giving Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer the freedom to abuse civil liberties!
While it is true that Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, he did not do it without widespread support from most Americans, including many Republicans and conservatives, with California Republican Attorney General Earl Warren, the future Chief Justice, really actively promoting the idea in the two months after Pearl Harbor before FDR issued the executive order. To call what happened specifically racist seems unjustified, as it was more a reaction against the hysteria and panic felt throughout America after the surprise attack on our naval base in Hawaii!
Meanwhile, it was conservatives and Republicans who willingly abandoned Southern blacks at the end of Reconstruction, leaving their futures to conservative Southern Democrats who promoted “Jim Crow” racial segregation under the Republican Presidents, who no longer cared about the lives of African Americans in the South!
It was also a conservative and Republican dominated Supreme Court that authorized segregation as constitutional in 1896 in Plessy V. Ferguson!
It was also conservative Republican President Calvin Coolidge who appointed J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, a new government agency created in 1924 that proceeded to violate civil liberties much of the time during the 48 year career of Hoover!
It was conservatives and Republicans, headlined by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who promoted the Second Red Scare after World War II!
It was Republican President Richard Nixon who authorized illegal bugging and wiretapping that led to widespread violations of civil liberties of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War!
So although “Progressives” such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt certainly can be blamed in some respects for violations of civil rights and civil liberties during their administrations, the heavier burden of responsibility for violations of civil rights and civil liberties must be laid at the door of conservatives of any political persuasion, as well as members and leaders of the Republican party!
For Glenn Beck to conjure up that it was “Progressives” who were the major perpetrators of violations of civil rights and civil liberties is, as MSNBC talk show host Ed Schultz terms it,
“Psycho Talk!” 🙂
“Roosevelt’s performance, then was deeply flawed, but blacks rendered their own verdict when in 1936 they abandoned their historic allegiance to the Republicans, the party of Abe Lincoln, and moved in large numbers over to the Democrats, the party of FDR, where they have been ever since. One of Roosevelt’s severest critics, Ralph Bunch, said the FDR era “represented a radical break with the past,” and W.E.B. Du Bois concluded that Roosevelt “gave the American Negro a kind of recognition in political life which the Negro had never before received.”
“The Japanese, whose skull pattern being less developed than that of the Caucasians,
might be responsible for their aggressive behavior?”
“You either have to castrate the German people or you have to treat them in a manner that they
can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”
– FDR
Glen Beck mentioned that racism occurred on both sides spectrum but the points he made were valid and well researched. And of course Ed Schultz and the liberal MSNBC is going to down play Glen Beck. HELLOOOOOO!!
Explain the origins of the KKK then… please… I would love to hear your distortion on THAT one. And Bird was the last living Klan member until his recent death. Yup – you cannot explain that EVERY DEMOCRAT was a racist with that organization… they started it, cultivated it and kept it alive as long as possible.. only difference today is they don’t wear the sheets and if said often enough are believed to be on the side of minorities… what a freaking joke you “progressives” are.
You must be kidding. You find that FDR’s racist concentration camps for Japanese (while omitting the ones for Germans and Italians) were just fine because they were popular? All sorts of racism was and is popular now, but it is not excusable to engage in it for any reason.
David Horowitz writes extensively about how he and his friends supported the Soviets (a hostile foreign power, if you did not know) during the Cold War and the Nixon wiretaps were part of combating that. Nixon did not use any concentration camps, but he is some sort of a bad guy and FDR is a good guy to you.