Description:

Roosevelt Franklin

Bi-fold TLS on light green stationery stock with letterhead of The White House, Washington, 7" x 9". Dated "September 29th, 1939" and boldly signed by President Franklin Roosevelt as " Franklin D. Roosevelt' with a large 3.75" signature . Typed on rectos with verso blank.   Near fine with small paper clip indent and a few pale handling marks.

 

War profiteering in World War I was mammoth. It is the oldest, most profitable racket, he declared – one in which billions of dollars are made for millions of lives destroyed.  Of the estimated $52 billion cost of World War I, industry war profiteers pocketed nearly one-third.  More than 21,000 new American millionaires and billionaires emerged from the human ashes of the war, while the federal government was mired in post-war debt – a debt paid for by working people’s taxes. In a short book written in 1935, War Is A Racket, based on the military experience of Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler (a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient) he frankly discusses how business interests commercially benefit (including war profiteering), from warfare. He described his Marine Corps-officer role in the early 20th century as a "bully boy for American corporations," leading invasions into China, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti on behalf of American banking, oil and sugar interests.  

 

As Butler saw it, war is first and foremost about making the world safe for war profits.  It is the oldest, most profitable racket, he declared – one in which billions of dollars are made for millions of lives destroyed.  Of the estimated $52 billion cost of World War I, industry war profiteers pocketed nearly one-third.  More than 21,000 new American millionaires and billionaires emerged from the human ashes of the war, while the federal government was mired in post-war debt – a debt paid for by working people’s taxes.


Franklin Roosevelt's letter, written as storm clouds rolled in for WWII, discusses the "the dangerous dislocations to American economic life which may occur, as a result of profiteering when there is a war in Europe… none of us wants to see the cost of living unjustfiiably increased or prices become so unreasonably high as to interfere with our national defense."

 

"I seems to me, therefore that during this period, the TNEC (the Temporary National Economic Committee) might well keep a constant eye on increases in prices of our basic materials and, in the light of past and present circumstances, study the facts to determine whether there is profiteering …"

 

A fantastic piece of WWII history, understanding some of the bigger implications of the underlying currents of greed during a period of a great world crisis, and FDR's fight against "ugly and inhuman greed."

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