What percentage of Republicans in 1936 believed FDR was a secret Jew?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I wonder if FDR's fake birth certificate and secret non-Christian faith were more or less widespread as articles of faith for his enemies than Obama's Kenyan-birth and secret Muslim-hood are for RW nuts today?

We didn't have so much polling back then and I doubt anyone ever polled on FDR's faith or ethnic heritage so we don't have the numbers but I would not be at all surprised if the "Rosenfeld" hoax was as widespread in RW circles as the Muslim thing.

The 1936 presidential election was unusually crazy. Fake news stories discrediting FDR and the WPA were passed from hand to hand like spam-email today and the fake stories were boot-strapped into real news just like they are today. For instance, identical and completely fake Letters to the Editor from a "local" farmer who was paid $1,000 by a New Deal agency for $300 worth of hogs appeared in local papers across the nation. Republicans actually hired actors and built fake (ridiculous) WPA projects, then called in the press. Talk radio was dominated by RW religious loons (like Father Coughlin) who lied about everything while demanding that white Christian people take their country back. And media conglomerates staged the news. (The Chandler media conglomerate in California is a famous case, but they were all in on it, like the national Hearst media empire.)

And the centerpiece of the vast smear-a-thon of 1936 was that FDR's name was actually Rosenfeld, that he was a secret Jew and that most people in his administration were also secret Jews. This was even more bonkers than the Obama secret-Muslim thing since FDR's lineage was unusually well known... was his relative President Teddy Roosevelt also a secret Jew?

Modern media has nationalized and intensified these tactics, but the playbook is as it ever was.

Business leaders actually plotted a coup against FDR... like a real coup, not an electoral or impeachment coup. Were they prosecuted? I don't think so. We have to look forward! (See... nothing changes.)

[Ozymanithrax]

1. I do not that almost all progressives hated FDR...

and complained that Social Security was just a givew away to the bankers. Huey Long and other progressives considered him just a tool of the bankers.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

5. True

[fascisthunter]

2. sounds like business leaders succeeded in their coup this time

unfortunately, Obama is not FDR.

[ET Awful]

3. The same percentage that thought JFK was going to lead a Vatican takeover of the country n/t

[AnArmyVeteran]

9. Southern Baptists even said a tunnel was going to be built between the Vatican and White House!

And southern Baptists and other fundies believed that nonsense!

[Major Hogwash]

4. Excellent post. My grandparents told me many stories about that decade.

My grandfather said that Father Coughlin should have been taken off of the radio.
He said he thought he was a traitor.

He told me that he lost a lot of good friends during that period of time.
A lot of people that he didn't know were even Catholics until after they started spouting the rhetoric that Coughlin was spewing on the radio.
He spent most of his time farming, not sitting around listening to the radio.
But, when he went in to town to get goods, some of his friends would tell him the wild stories they were listening to on the radio about FDR.
He couldn't believe how gullible they were.

Back in those days, the news of the capture of Bonnie and Clyde was being denied as well.
So, they took the "death car" around to county fairs and charged a dime to see the car that they had been killed in.
My dad begged my grandfather for the 10 cents so he could see it.
He was only about 10 years old when he went.
Back then they didn't restrict little kids from seeing things like that, so it had quite an impression on him.

As Democrats, we have to fight against the machine with the truth about what is going on.

[Enrique]

6. his opponents were bona fide fascists

as in, they supported fascist governments in Europe and opposed U.S. entry in to WWII.

[newspeak]

7. I'm with you!!!!

how many repugs at the time supported fascism? And, did any of those repugs take bribes from Hitler to stall US from joining the war? And how many so-called US companies aided and abetted Mussolini and Hitler?

[old mark]

11. You mean like the Bush family?... Several large corporations continued to

sell to Nazi Germany through out the war years shipping goods via "neutral" countries. Several of the large pharmaceutical companies had branches in Germany and in the US.


add: Link to article on Ford and GM's ties to Nazi Germany...(GM owned OPEL outright, still did last I heard)...http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm

Also, interesting to note that the radial aircraft engines powering the Japanese Zero fighters and several other bombing and torpedo planes that attacked Pearl Harbor were built under license from a US company...they were used throughout the war. They were made by Mitsubishi.

mark

[connecticut yankee]

8. And wasn't there also a rumor

that he was born on Campobello Island (in Canada)?

[enid602]

10. plot

GWB's grandfather Prescott, Henry Ford and a few other industrialists organized a plot to assassinate FDR.

[joeybee12]

12. You don't have to go that far back...go to Kennedy and his hotline to the Pope...nt

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

13. True, though at least Kennedy was actually Catholic

FDR and Obama are/were not the victims of outrageous theories about how their religion would affect their governance, but victims of outrageous theories about how their religion would affect their governance if they were of religions they obviously were not.

[joeybee12]

14. True...teh stupid was focused a little differently...nt