F.D.R. Was a good president.

Cons CaseOne important quote to keep in mind as this debate goes on is "No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience." - Theodore RooseveltI. ImmoralityA) Japanese Internment President Roosevelt authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, dated February 19, 1942, gave the military broad powers to ban any citizen from a fifty- to sixty-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to assembly centers hastily set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington state, and Oregon. Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents—including some naturalized citizens—were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. Yet while these individuals (and others from those groups) suffered grievous violations of their civil liberties, the war-time measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse and more sweeping, uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens. According to the International Criminal Court imprisoning humans, in this case Germans, Japanese, and Italians, is a crime against humanity. The mass transporting and imprisonment of these people based on race is wrong and caused them to live lesser lives with many negative health effects. Not only that, but the cost of these camps to the federal government alone in 1942-43 was $9,503,905 and when this abomination was finished $20,000 was paid to each Japanese internment camp survivor. This is just one reason as to why FDR cannot be considered a "good" president. B) AffairA good president is someone that the youth of America can look up to and have as a role model. Not someone who isn't mature enough to be faithful and honorable to his own wife. For this reason and many others FDR was not a good president.The words "Sex scandal" are enough to plague the minds of young children. A passage about Eleanor, FDR's wife."Only lately had [her] confidence returned with her recognized contributions to the war effort. Now, in an instant, a packet of letters had swept [it] away (letters sent from Lucy, FDR's "second" wife). Because of her lack of interest in sex, she had not grasped what an overpowering force it was. Now, faced with incontrovertible evidence that her husband had found satisfaction elsewhere, sexual failure was added to her inadequacies."So not only did FDR authorize the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people based on their race, but also had no respect for his wife.C) Racist PoliciesA good president is one that looks at all the aspects of their nation and instantiates policies that have an overall beneficial effect for all groups of people. In many cases FDR "accidently" created policies that had a negative effect for all the black people in the United States. The flagship of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June 1933. It authorized the president to issue executive orders establishing some 700 industrial cartels, which restricted output and forced wages and prices above market levels. The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs. Marginal workers, like unskilled blacks, desperately needed an expanding economy to create more jobs. Yet New Deal policies made it harder for employers to hire people. FDR tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940. Social Security excise taxes on payrolls discouraged employers from hiring. New Deal securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. New Deal antitrust lawsuits harassed some 150 employers and whole industries. Whatever the merits of such policies might have been, it was bizarre to disrupt private sector employment when the median unemployment rate was 17 percent. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) aimed to help farmers by cutting farm production and forcing up food prices. Less production meant less work for thousands of poor black sharecroppers. In addition, blacks were among the 100 million consumers forced to pay higher food prices because of the AAA. The Wagner Act (1935) harmed blacks by making labor union monopolies legal. Economists Thomas E. Hall and J. David Ferguson explained: “By encouraging unionization, the Wagner Act raised the number of insiders (those with jobs) who had the incentive and ability to exclude outsiders (those without jobs). Once high wages have been negotiated, employers are less likely to hire outsiders, and thus the insiders could protect their own interest.” By giving labor unions the monopoly power to exclusively represent employees in a workplace, the Wagner Act had the effect of excluding blacks, since the dominant unions discriminated against blacks. The Wagner Act had originally been drafted with a provision prohibiting racial discrimination. But the American Federation of Labor successfully lobbied against it, and it was dropped. AFL unions used their new power, granted by the Wagner Act, to exclude blacks on a large scale. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey were all critical of compulsory unionism. The Tennessee Valley Authority — FDR’s government-power-generating monopoly funded by the 98 percent of American taxpayers who didn’t live in the Tennessee Valley — was touted as a bold social experiment. But, among other things, the TVA flooded an estimated 730,000 acres of land behind its dams, and 15,654 people were forced out of their homes. Farm owners received cash settlements for their condemned property. But tenant farmers — a substantial number of whom were black — got nothing. After chronicling victims of the TVA “population removal program,” historians Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny reported: “TVA’s social experiment was a failure.” II. Economic PolicyA) Negative Effects The New Deal was a failure as it has protected the trusts more than the American people. Today, the poor are poorer, and the trusts are richer. Another reason: this is a county that is controlled by the trusts. When one stands on the street, and closes his eyes for a moment, and then opens them and looks; everything, absolutely all that one sees is made by the trusts. The automobile that passes by, the street car, the trucks, everything that one wears: shoes, clothes, ets. When one enters a restaurant, he sees the plates, the tables, the spoons, all is made by the trusts. 95% of what one eats is controlled by the trusts. The trusts for more than 200 years have been controlling all the industries, and killing the small business men. We have reached a state in which the trusts dominate all, as they are the owners of the money, or nearly all the money that there is in the United States. The war can already be seen between one trust and others; the strongest will dominate the weaker trusts, and the capital will be reduced to a few men who will control everything.It's inarguably true that in the very short-term, the New Deal did not fix the economy. Roosevelt's programs were first passed in 1933 but economists generally agree that the Great Depression did not end until 1939, when the country began preparing for World War II. Unemployment rates, which reached as high as 25%, took several years to recover and did not get below 9% until 1940. It was obvious to people even then that the NRA was seriously flawed; in 1935, the Supreme Court ruled the program unconstitutional. "Anytime you put in price and wage controls, you are more likely than not to make the economy worse off," says Valerie Ramey, professor of economics at University of California, San Diego. "That's the lesson of all economic history." Economists differ, though, in their estimates of how badly the NRA's bad policies damaged the economy. On the more dire end of the scale, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian, economics professors at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA respectively, estimate the New Deal's labor and industrial policies caused the Depression to last seven years longer than otherwise. III. Foreign PolicyA) He refused to propose entering the war even after hearing that millions of jews were being imprisoned. Although, it isn't that surprising considering he allowed the Japanese to be imprisoned in his own country.IV. ConclusionAs one can see FDR was not the best president nor a good president, he is not the nice man in the wheel chair that single handly beat Hitler as everyone thinks that he was. Instead he is a president that was a sheep. He followed others even if they were morally wrong and worsened America's economy to this day. Sources1. http://historymatters.gmu.edu...2. http://encyclopedia.densho.org...3. http://www.usnews.com...?4. http://www.cato.org...5. http://www.loc.gov...6. http://money.cnn.com...+(Top+Stories)7. http://newsroom.ucla.edu...8. http://www.icc-cpi.int...