While FDR and his New Deal that moved the country out of the Hoover Depression remain as popular as ever, Republicans have always opposed Social Security and other FDR/New Deal programs.
Back in the 1930s, the Chicago Tribune was a vociferous FDR opponent, reflecting the ultra-conservative views of its owner, Robert McCormick.
There were surely hundreds of Tribune editorials, slanted new stories, and editorial cartoons that McCormick commissioned to smear and weaken FDR and other Democrats.
One of them, a cartoon from 1934 that slurs the FDR team as commies, has been making the rounds of the wingnut blogosphere.
The tea partiers around Albany, NY, were naturally excited about a 76-year-old red-baiting cartoon that smeared FDR, and posted it on their message boards as "A Stunning cartoon from 1934...WOW!"
Debunking details, below.
The local tea partiers usually do not originate wingnut e-mails, they are more copy-paste-and-forward types.
This one about the cartoon was posted back in April 2009 on Free Republic (where all the details are much more readable).
And what details they are.
The central part of the cartoon is a runaway, donkey-drawn wagon, out of which various New Dealers (Ickes, Wallace, et al.) are shoveling moneybags out, to fall on a dirt road.
The real Red-baiting happens at the margins.
The scribe at lower right, who clearly is drawn to resemble the still-alive Trotsky, is writing a Plan of Action for U.S.:
SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!
Under the guise of recovery -- bust the government -- blame the capitalists for the failure -- junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship.
Just to the left of Trotsky's "plan" are the words "It worked in Russia."
In case that red-baiting was not enough to convince the tea partiers of the 1930s about the EVIL Democrats, over on the right a mini-Stalin remarks sinisterly "How red the sunrise is getting."
Some tea partiers and freepers believe this cartoon is relevant today.
It's another ahistorical tea party delusion among so many.
Thankfully, the tea partiers who believe such BS are a micro-minority of voters, who have had some influence on GOP primaries in Confederate/Mormon states this year, but will have little effect on general elections in most other states.