Posted by R Feurer on March 4, 2006, 10:10 pm, in reply to "Re: FDR" Again, the point is not to slam FDR, but to think about how change is made. The high school history textbooks give us the 'great man' theory of history. I don't want you to come away with a 'bad man' theory of history from this class, but rather to think seriously about how and why change occurs.
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Actually, many historians do credit Roosevelt for helping to change the Democratic Party. But he only went so far. And the point is not to slam Roosevelt, but to show the limits of a history that concentrates only on those at the top and forgets how change comes about. The sharecroppers film was meant to show that power was challenged from below. Roosevelt did little to change that power structure. In fact, in some ways, he helped reinforce it. For instance, the south got boatloads of money that they didn't have before, but it reinforced power structures rather than weakened them. The money, as the letters show, didn't go to the bottom without major amounts of protest. So, FDR didn't do it for people, people won those rights to equal treatment with years of struggle. Still, without access to land, the problem inherited from Reconstruction, the issue of how to live was still the same for those at the bottom
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