“There’s a myth,” said Pitney, “that politics was adjourned for the duration of the Second World War.”
As this article points out, even in the midst of WWII — and especially as the war wound down — critics of the FDR administration and its domestic and war policies were not too restrained by the struggle going on.
Indeed, our local Lancaster New Era noted in an editorial on the eve of the election, Nov. 6, 1944, that “The surprising thing about this war-time presidential campaign is that it was no different from all the others.” Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s opponent that year, spent much of the campaign deriding FDR as a “tired old man.” The Roosevelt administration, Dewey said the week before the election, was “the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent administration in the history of the nation.” Dewey, in fact, spent that fall all but calling Roosevelt a communist, insisting that FDR was intent on selling the nation down the river to the reds.
But at least Dewey didn’t criticize FDR on the war effort, right? To have done that in the wake of the failed Market Garden operation, just before the Battle of the Bulge, would have been grossly unpatriotic, right? Judge for yourself:
“American fighting men were paying in blood through a prolongation of the battle of Germany for the ‘improvised meddling’ of the Democratic administration and the ‘confused incompetence’ of President Roosevelt.”
That’s from an Associated Press article that ran in this very newspaper on Sunday, Nov. 5, 1944, the morning after a major Dewey address at Madison Square Garden in New York City. In it, Dewey derided the “Morgenthau plan,” whereby then-Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. suggested that after the war, Germany should be reduced to an agrarian economy and the Germans treated “in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”
Morgenthau’s suggestion, Dewey said, “put fight back into the German army” and was “as good as 10 fresh German divisions.” This he called the “tragic consequences of blunder,” which was “costing the lives of American men and delaying the day of final victory.”
It’s difficult to tell today, sixty years later, whether the level of vitriol was comparable to today — and some folks will deride the comparison between the War on Terror and the War on the Axis. But it’s an interesting perspective, at least, on the idea that WWII was a period of political rallying behind the flag, where never a criticism could be heard — and that we ought to be likewise today.
(via GoaF)
No kidding. I hate it whenever I hear some hack like DeLay question attacks on the administration.
Good to see it’s happened all along. Hell, look at the Civil War, and the 1864 campaign for another brutal assault on the presidency.
I think, overall, it’s a matter of balance. To draw from another thread here, the impact upon the community and nation of actions, particularly during wartime, should be kept in mind (by all parties). Acting for personal or partisan gain in the face of national crisis is despicable regardless of who’s doing it. And even rhetoric that has a divisive effect should at least be weighed (again, by all sides) cautiously.
That caveated, a blanket condemnation of criticism and questioning, whether it’s decrying such as either being unamerican or as being attacks on personal patriotism, is certainly neither patriotic nor American.