If you ask any American libertarian who the worst presidents of all time were, you are likely to receive the same answers, though in different order. Abraham Lincoln invaded the South and led the greatest slaughter of Americans in history, including targeted attacks against civilians. Woodrow Wilson created the Fed and got us into World War I. Franklin Roosevelt established the New Deal, bankrolled the Soviet Union, caused the Cold War, and staffed his administration with communists. Lyndon B. Johnson escalated Vietnam, amplified the welfare state, and greatly magnified the civil rights regime.

I do not seek to answer who committed the worst crime in this article. Rather, I would like to look at Franklin Roosevelt, who shaped the modern US the most out of these four, and his motivations for total war. It is not secret that Roosevelt viewed Germany as the greatest threat to his ideals and sought its permanent crippling under the Morgenthau Plan (relenting only with public backlash). However, most people do not know that Roosevelt’s teutonophobia has its origins in the teachings of Silas Marcus MacVane.

MacVane and Roosevelt at Harvard

According to Dr. Michael S. Bell—whose exquisitely-detailed dissertation is the main source of this article—FDR was a C student at Harvard (this is before grade inflation, when C’s actually denoted that a student was average rather than poor at the subject). The exception was in MacVane’s history classes, in which FDR demonstrated his enthusiasm by consistently scoring B’s.

For context, Silas Marcus MacVane was born to Scottish Highland immigrants on Prince Edward Island in Canada. After receiving his bachelors, he studied in Berlin and later became an instructor of economics at Harvard. MacVane would switch to teaching history after a few years, being a full professor by the time that FDR would study under him. Historians of economic thought and Austrian economists will recognize that this is the same MacVane who criticized Böhm-Bawerk’s capital theory. MacVane also had rather radical political beliefs through which he viewed history. Dr. Bell writes:

The “truth” that Macvane imparted to his students portrayed the history of Europe as the constant struggle between the friends of progress and the forces of reaction. Clearly an adherent of the Whig school of historical interpretation, Macvane portrayed history as the emergence of Anglo-Saxon civilization and liberty as a result of the alliance between Protestants and Whigs and despite the obstructionism of Catholics and Tories…. In keeping with his whiggish perspective, Macvane noted that “it is best to devote attention mainly to the course of affairs in England—the history of the continental states being on the whole rather arid.”

MacVane’s Anglo-progressivism found fertile soil, as the young FDR was already rather progressive himself. Indeed, he was primarily interested in the discipline of history as a means of constructing his own family’s hagiography, and he was convinced that the Roosevelt family—long established in New York—succeeded because of their progressiveness and “democratic spirit.” In fact, one can easily make the connection between MacVane’s radically progressive reading of history and FDR’s own rhetoric and policies. …

This explains FDR’s support of the Morgenthau Plan—a scheme to dismember Germany after the war, abolish Prussia, ethnically cleanse non-German lands of Germans, and deindustrialize all German rump states. The Wikipedia article on the Morgenthau Plan runs cover for FDR, claiming that he approved of it and later distanced himself, but the writings of Morgenthau tell a different story:

I met at 12:00 today with Roosevelt, Churchill, Eden and the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs… Then Churchill, turning to Lord Cherwell and myself, said, “Where are the minutes on this matter of the Ruhr?” and according to our agreement we said that we didn’t have them. The reason we didn’t have them was because I felt, when I read the minutes which Lord Cherwell had written, that it presented much too weak a case, and I thought that we could get Churchill to go much further… When Churchill read our very short memorandum, he said, “No, this isn’t what I want.” Then he started to talk and dictate to us, and I said, “I don’t know what the rules of the game are, but is there any reason why we can’t have a stenographer present?...

…Roosevelt’s important contribution, while Churchill was dictating, was that when he got talking about the metallurgical, chemical and electric industries, Roosevelt had him insert the very important words “in Germany”. What Roosevelt meant was—because it came up later—that he didn’t have in mind just the Ruhr and the Saar, but he had in mind entire Germany, and that the matter we were talking about, namely, the ease with which metallurgical, chemical and electrical industries in Germany can be converted from peace to war, does not only apply to the Ruhr and the Saar, but the whole of Germany, which of course is terribly important.

FDR did publicly distance himself from the plan at a later date, particularly after the estimated death toll of implementing the plan became known. Since he died before the end of the war, though, we will never know if he was genuine or not. His personal philosophy definitely leads one to believe the latter.

The Consequences of Wrong Education

I have heard many analyses of FDR, the New Deal, and progressivism from many Austro-libertarians, but I don’t recall having seen an article that traces FDR’s progressivism to his education, much less to a prominent critic of the Austrian School.

While this article is heavy in historical detail, I believe the main takeaway for our present time is the importance of education and the dangers of teaching the wrong ideology. The history of the world was irreparably changed for the worse due to progressive ideologies being imparted to students at Harvard, and most of it can be traced to one economics and history professor. Should anyone think that progressivism in the schools is a minor issue, may this historic episode dissuade him.