Another unsettling factor which was certainly not needed at the time was President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, in 1931, was elected on the promise to guarantee full employment in peace time but he didn’t come close to delivering. The sheer number of his social reforms hurt the economy far more than helping it at the time. Some of his reforms were thrown out by the Supreme Court. Some are treasured today as bulwarks of our social system. Many people decry his reforms as the beginning of the end of political freedom in the country. My father was in this category. In 1938, a record number of 10 million people were still unemployed. In the next four years, the number plummeted, but it was a war time economy that did it. Vivid in my memory, but seldom mentioned in history, is how Roosevelt had precipitated the United States’ involvement in World War II by his historic ultimatum to Japan. Joining with Holland and England—countries that controlled the strategic raw materials of Indonesia, Sumatra, Malaysia and Singapore—he demanded that Japan quit China and threatened a blockade of oil, tin and rubber. This struck at the lifeline of the Japanese economy. Japan struck back at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt chose that moment to also declare war against Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, and thus ensured the U.S. total involvement in World War II. That ended Roosevelt’s unemployment problem.

Ironically, Roosevelt had been re-elected to a third term in 1940 with the promise to keep the United States out of war. His famous statement was “I hate war; my wife Eleanor hates war.” I don’t think he ever intended to keep out of the war at all. He was motivated by historic ties to the United Kingdom, which felt threatened by the war on the mainland. A number of Roosevelt key advisers were Jewish and felt equally threatened by Hitler. Of course, at that time the enormity of the Holocaust to follow wasn’t known at all.