That makes me un-American in the eyes of old-fashioned patriotic types, who seem to believe that our failings in Iraq should be blamed not on administration blunders, but rather on the news media and other critics.

It’s a sort of modern-day “stab in the back” theory. And it was on full display in a recent letter to the editor of a local newspaper, in which the writer, a World War II vet, decried the “negative bashing” by the media and “misguided political figures” seeking to capitalize on the blood of Americans.

What made this letter different from the others, however, was that it contained a small gem near the end, an assertion that is completely untrue. Yet this untruth is a core belief of those who shout the loudest about a stab in the back.

“Believe it or not,” the writer states, “the administration of FDR made many blunders during that war but everybody was too busy supporting the total effort to bash the president or his cabinet!”

Don’t believe it.

Because the fact is that President Roosevelt was pretty much roundly bashed by Republicans during the entirety of the war. And during the presidential campaign of 1944, things got as nasty as ever.

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.”


Historians might indeed conclude that the Morgenthau plan stiffened German resistance. But ultimately, how was Dewey’s denunciation of it any different than, say, criticism of Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence that we didn’t need more troops?

Claremont McKenna College professor Jack Pitney, a former Republican National Committee official who once worked for Dick Cheney, told Salon.com last year that Dewey even came close to blaming FDR for Pearl Harbor.

“There’s a myth,” said Pitney, “that politics was adjourned for the duration of the Second World War.”

So let’s put the myth to rest, shall we? There was criticism then as there is now, and if there is a difference, it is in the fact that the two wars are vastly different, and in the ubiquity of the media today; there simply are more outlets for criticism than there might once have been.

But let’s not let the media of the past off the hook, either. Newspapers in this very town endorsed Dewey over Roosevelt, arguing strenuously that in the midst of that great war, it was imperative to change horses in midstream.

And indeed, Lancaster County voted to do exactly that. The county went to Dewey by a wide margin.

This despite the fact that Roosevelt “trotted out the bugaboo of his indispensability in the days ahead: the argument that he alone can handle foreign affairs because he is a close personal friend of Churchill and Stalin,” said the Lancaster New Era in its editorial endorsing Dewey the weekend before the election.

In a later editorial, the New Era called FDR’s attitude “un-American.”

It very well might have been un-American then.

Just as surely it’s un-American now.

Gil Smart is assistant news editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817. blog comments powered by Disqus