RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/franklin-d-roosevelts-terrible-legacy/

In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the architect of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declared that fear was all that Americans should fear. He also attempted to lower expectations for an economic recovery by trying to convince the nation that material prosperity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Happiness,” he declared sonorously, “lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” He continued, “The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits….” He called on Americans to recognize “the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success.”

During his 1936 reelection campaign, Roosevelt reiterated his determination to redistribute wealth, adapting the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” in saying: “Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.”

As was so often the case with Roosevelt, this sounded better than it was. A graduated income tax has been in place in America for many years, but that doesn’t negate the fact that penalizing wealthier Americans by forcing them to pay higher taxes only decreases their ability and reduces their incentive to maintain businesses that provide jobs for ordinary citizens. A genuine “American principle” would be to tax everyone equally, which would naturally result in the wealthy paying more anyway.

As the Great Depression dragged on, perhaps there were some Americans who comforted themselves with the realization that they were not corrupted by “the falsity of material wealth.” They had scant other comfort. In May 1939, halfway through Roosevelt’s lengthy presidency, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau went before the House Ways and Means Committee and frankly admitted that the New Deal had been an abject failure.

https://dianawest.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

Did you know that we celebrate V-E Day on May 8 due strictly to Stalin’s wishes and Truman and Churchill’s fear of “offending the Russians”? This fear was the frequent driver, sometimes fueled by bona fide agents of Stalin’s influence, of much US and British policy and strategy.

The war in Europe ended on May 7, 1945.

Here is the real story, from Chapter 12 of American Betrayal:

An even cruder, emptier example of this manipulation was the embargo placed at the behest of the Allied leaders, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill (dragging his heels), on the news of the surrender of Nazi Germany in France on May 7, 1945, until the Russians could rig up their own surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8, 1945. This stupendous act of appeasement, blanked out of national memory, was thankfully circumvented by a wise and bold AP reporter named Edward Kennedy, who believed the news of Germany’s surrender “belonged to the Allied peoples,” as he later wrote, and not to the Soviet propaganda department.

Kennedy created a giant controversy for refusing to go along with this blatant political censorship. On learning that Allied military headquarters (SHAEF) had already authorized German radio to broadcast the news of the May 7 surrender, Kennedy filed his story regardless of the embargo, regardless of the Soviet plan. As Kennedy explained his decision (which cost him his job with the AP) in an Atlantic Monthly essay in 1948, “Truman and Churchill—the latter reluctantly and only on pressure from Washington—agreed to hold up the news, which belonged to the Allied peoples, until the time of the Berlin meeting . . . The Russian action was quite in line with the Soviet conception of the press for propaganda, and nothing to get excited about; the fault was ours for falling for it” (emphasis added).

Of course, according to this new way of looking at our history, we fell for it because we were pushed, both from the outside and, more important, from the inside. As a result, Americans at large were left to try to make half-sense of the partial truths doled out by our leaders. Later, as Kent Cooper notes in his book The Right to Know, a smaller, book-reading audience would sort through the many war memoirs written by military and political figures, Churchill’s most famous among them, containing “laments” over their authors’ having been “pushed around by the insatiable Russians.” Cooper—the newspaper executive who coined the phrase “the right to know”— comments acerbically:

“Not one of them, however, has expressed any realization of how different it all might have been had they disclosed what they later so dolefully put in their memoirs to excuse their actions. The fact that they so needlessly conducted all political matters in secret and kept them so under protection of war censorship should be the basis of remonstrance from a democratic people.”

https://spectator.org/who-is-james-k-polk-an-old-question-asked-again/

Who is James K. Polk?” his opponents in the 1844 presidential election mockingly asked. Two centuries later, the question is asked again more quizzically. For one thing, James K. Polk proved a president can be both a big-picture visionary and an effective manager.

Elected as a Democrat from Tennessee, Polk has long been characterized as a dark horse. In fact, he was anything but. Before becoming president, Polk served 14 years in Congress — four as Speaker of the House. He had been governor of Tennessee, a hopeful for vice president in 1840, and the apparent choice to balance presumptive Democratic nominee Martin Van Buren of New York in 1844. When Van Buren failed to be nominated in a convention divided over the annexation of Texas, Polk rode a white horse out of the chaos.

Scholarly Polk was a stickler for detail all his life. As a young attorney in Nashville, he criticized an older Sam Houston for attempting to execute a judgment from a North Carolina court that was not properly authenticated. For his part, the much looser Houston is said to have observed that Polk was “a victim of the use of water as a beverage.”

Sober and somber, Polk carried his attention to detail throughout his political career, earning respect from friends and foes alike whether he was presiding over the House of Representatives or navigating the constituencies and issues of the cutthroat politics of 19th-century Tennessee.

“I intend to be myself, President of the United States,” Polk told a Tennessee confidante after his election, discounting rumors he would be Andrew Jackson’s or anyone else’s pawn. Then, Polk took the unprecedented step of insisting his cabinet appointees pledge not only to support the Democratic platform but also refrain from seeking the presidency themselves. If you run, Polk told them, you must resign.

James K. Polk never let executive details, political infighting, or public opinion distract him from the specific goals — his “four great measures” he called them — that he enumerated for his administration: the resolution of the decades-old joint occupation of the Oregon country with Great Britain; the acquisition of California and an expanse of the Southwest from Mexico; the reduction of the tariff that stifled the southern economy; and the creation of an independent treasury system immune from national bank wars.

With the 80th anniversary marking the end of World War II fast approaching, the number of combatants still alive is shrinking. The Bureau of Veteran Affairs estimated last year that, out of over 16 million Americans who served in the War, approximately 66,000 men and women are still with us, with an estimated 55 dying each day. As well, we are rapidly losing even those with memories of the War.

So it is fitting to mark battles in which members of our families participated. By early January 1945, the ultimate outcome of the War was obvious, yet an estimated 49,000 American GIs were yet to die in combat. Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the Battle of Berlin were yet to be fought. Among the lesser well-known battles was one that took place in Italy, where an estimated 100,000 German troops under General Albert Kesselring were embedded along what was called the Gothic Line, a roughly 200-mile defensive line running along the Apennines from Spezia on the Ligurian Sea to Pesaro and Ravenna on the Adriatic. Following the fall of Rome in early June 1944, Germans retreated north to this mountainous defensive position that protected the farm-rich Po Valley and the cities of Bologna and Verona. The key was Mount Belvedere, the highest peak, which overlooked Highway 65, the main road between Florence and Bologna.  

In March 1944 my father, then thirty-three, married and father of three (with a fourth on the way), was drafted. After basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he transferred to the 10th Mountain Division – the “Ski Troops,” who had trained in Colorado, but were then stationed at Camp Swift, about 40 miles east of Austin. In December, the 10th was sent to Fort Patrick Henry in Virginia, prior to being shipped to Italy later that month. A full complement of 14,000 men, under Major General George P. Hays, were sent to rout Kesselring’s troops from their mountainous redoubts. In Mountain Troopers, Curtis Casewit quoted General Hayes: “Mt. Belvedere must be captured before we can advance.”

In November 1944, elements of the British 8th Army and the U.S. 5th Army had attacked Germans entrenched on Belvedere. German counter-attacks caused them to retreat. Three months later, on February 19th, the 10th Mountain Division (now part of the 5th Army) made its ascent, beginning at 0030 hours. The night before the 1st Battalion of the 86th Regiment captured Riva Ridge, which overlooked slopes on Belvedere. Along with others, C Company (my father’s unit) of the 87th Regiment were ordered to move silently forward, with Division artillery supporting the attack. They walked single-file, ten feet apart. “The way up,” Peter Shelton wrote in Climb to Conquer, “was long and folded, riddled with streams and ditches, with sharp ravines and bombed-out wagon roads.” They had to avoid mined fields and went past “ghostly remains of U.S. tanks,” abandoned on that earlier attempt. Because of walking past German sentries, the GIs, with fixed bayonets, carried grenades but no live ammunition – at least until daylight. Unfortunately, several soldiers were killed by mines. By 0430 Company C had attained its objective atop Belvedere, but with three of its men killed. Hays was again quoted by Curtis Casewit: “Mt. Belvedere and the occupied ground will be held at all costs.”