askchapo

Lots of credit being given to Teddy here without mention that many of the New Deal reforms were actually given as concessions to a well organized and highly active labor force. Unions won these reforms through their sweat and blood. A tale as old as time.

Is every good thing Teddy did the results of this? No, but a hell of a lot of it was the spoils of class war won by labor struggles. This was literally the golden age of the US labor movement, workers were striking constantly and in new and creative ways. They were usurping the power of capitalists and the bourgeoise US government to an extent never seen before or since (with the exception of the Black Panthers perhaps). Much of the organizing was led by socialists, which is why they leaned hard on the unions to get rid of socialists with McCarthyism and the red scare 1.0. WWII weakened the US labor movement a bit in terms of manpower and coercion via nationalism, but by no means did this slow their roll. If I remember correctly, there were even more strikes during the war than the years between WWI and WWII. If you think the fight for universal healthcare is relatively recent, it's because you haven't learned about US labor history. Workers were fighting for this from at least the early 1900s. I mention this because it was an eye-opening moment for me the first time I heard it mentioned casually when talking about strikes in the 1920s and 1930s.

USians idolize this war criminal due to successful historical revisionism, making it look like he was just a "great man", a good ol' boy with stereotypically hypermasculine behaviors that made some good reforms out of the kindness of his heart and the strength of his moral character. Every story you read about this man is dripping with this mythos. He was no exceptional, he was practical in the sense that he saw that concessions were needed to appear the labor movement, but would he have come to these reforms and made the changes without all of this pressure? I doubt it.

Idealism and massive propaganda efforts poisoning the US education system are largely to blame. Those in the US aren't taught this shit in school and the books that cover this topic in detail aren't known by most. Sorry, I'd like to drop the names of them, but I don't own these books and would need to do some digging to find them again. Our local workers alliance covers this in their labor history presentations each year and has copies they lend out, which was my first exposure to them.