So
chances are if you are reading this your enough of a nerd to who Emperor Palpatine
is. If you’re not, you probably still know about “Star Wars”, and Plapatine is
the big bad guy in those movies. He is Darth Vader’s boss, the creepy dude in
black robes who looked like he was a million years old and shot lightning out
of his fingers. If you never saw Star Wars, and have no idea what I’m talking
about, then go watch it instead of reading this article. Either that or watch “Indiana
Jones”, because chances are you need to watch that too if you haven’t seen Star
Wars. On to the point, and that is that Emperor Plapatine was based on Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. Am I saying that F.D.R. was a power hungry dictator? No. I
think George Lucas was saying that.
Where
to start? Well since this is a blog entry about Star Wars I’ll start in the
middle. That being said, I’ll be
primarily just discussing his actions in the prequel trilogy since he didn’t
even show up until the end of “Return of the Jedi” in the originals. In those
movies he was a looming threat in the background, and not a character with a
lot of depth (not that a whole lot of characters in the prequels had depth.)
Back when “Revenge of the Sith” came out a lot of people thought that Palpatine
was a critique of George W. Bush because he was involved in a war and expanded
executive powers. However this is pretty vague and could be applied to most of
the presidents dating back to Lincoln. There was however, a President who was
involved in a war that engulfed the entire world in a scale that no one had
ever seen before, which employed new and terrifying technologies. In Star Wars
Palpatine ruled during the first “full scale galactic war since the formation
of republic”.
Of
course this too is pretty vague, and just because both wars enveloped all of
civilization, it doesn’t mean that the two are identical situations. These similarities are just beginning
however. In the original trilogy the Death Star was a plot device, but in the
prequels it’s nothing more than a very secretive project to develop a weapon of
mass destruction, the first of its kind. Much like something known as the
Manhattan project. And just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, so was
Princess Leia’s home planet Aalderna. “Hey!” You might say, “F.D.R. didn’t bomb
Hiroshima or Nagasaki, that was Truman.” Right, and Palpatine didn’t blow up
Aldernaan, that was Vader.
Palpatine’s
plans stretch back far back to before he was ever the Chancellor. Do you remember
the plot for Episode I? No? That’s alright a lot of people have tried to forget
it. Well, the movie revolved around an economic crisis. The crisis itself
didn’t really make any sense, but it served two important purposes. First of
all it gave the chacters something to worry about, but more importantly it’s
what got Palpatine elected as the Chancellor. Palpatine’s predecessor,
Chancellor Valurum did too little to solve this economic crisis, so Palpatine
was elected, he was seen as someone who would be able to handle these tough
economic times. Ever hear of the Great Depression? Some guy, Herbert Hoover was
president back then you see, and his plan to fix the economy was basically do
nothing. Everyone thought he was weak so they decided to elect a “Strong
candidate.”
Once
elected F.D.R.’s new deals and other projects began to vastly expand executive
powers. Now expanding executive powers was nothing new, even in F.D.R.’s time. However
there was one thing that no president had ever done, and that is stay in power
for more than two terms. When George Washington stepped down after his second
term a precedent was set, which was that no one should campaign for the
presidency more than twice, and in all of those years the only other President
to campaign for the presidency more than twice was Ulysses S. Grant, and his
third campaign was both nonconsecutive and unsuccessful. F.D.R. campaigned and
won four terms, he kept running even in severely declineing health, and served
as president until he died. The reason that Washington stepped down after two
terms was he did not want America to have a king or emperor figure, who would rule
all their life. Washington was reluctant to serve even a second term and
refused to serve a third. After Roosevelt died the unwritten law on not
exceeding two terms was made into written law so that no one could ever do what
he did again. So what does any of this have to do with Palpatine? Well in the
Star Wars Padme (Natalie Portman) mentions that Palpatine has also stayed in
power for more than the customary two terms, by way of amending the
constitution.
Plapatine’s
increasing power did not stop there. During the course of the war, which began in
his third term, Palpatine continually gained more and more “Emergency powers”
which allowed him to become more and more in control of the government. The
powers of the senate were being vastly depleted and he often went over their
head with his new executive powers. Replace Palpatine with F.D.R. in every
sentence in this paragraph and it still works. F.D.R.’s massively expanding
powers completely overshadowed the other two branches of government during the Second
World War.
Just as
F.D.R. is often celebrated as being one of our greatest presidents as he gave
himself more and more power, Palpatine was in the prequels a well-liked leader.
Padme even says “This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” while the
rest of the members of the senate cheer for him declaring himself emperor. In
the same speech that Palpatine announced that he would become emperor, he also
revealed a physical deformity that in his own words left him crippled. F.D.R’s
polio was one of his most memorable aspects, and he would also have been
considered crippled, using a wheelchair in his later years. In the original
movies Palpatine had the same wrinkles and hunched, but that seemed at the time
to be just a way to show he was old and evil. No mention was ever made of him
being crippled. Why then would Lucas make him crippled instead of just having
the wrinkles be the product of old age, as everyone already assumed? Palpatine
would have been in his eighties in the original trilogy, those wrinkles would
make sense on an eighty-something man. The reason for this seemingly insignificant
change was most likely to draw yet another parallel between Palpatine and
F.D.R.
Not
long after Palpatine was crippled he declared that the Jedi were enemies of the
republic and they were to be hunted down. These Jedi which had been born in the
Republic and had been citizens their entire lives were, as a group, declared a
threat to the republic, just because they were from the same group as someone
who attacked the republic. In the case of Star Wars, a group of Jedi attacked
Palpatine. Likewise once Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese President Roosevelt
signed an executive order which placed Americans with Japanese descent into
concentration camps. This order was both highly unethical, and eventually ruled
unconstitutional. Perhaps the most striking similarity between these two
executive orders is what they were called. The order that destroyed the lives
of so many Japanese by stripping them of their possessions and having the army
place them into concentration camps was “Executive Order 9066”. In Star Wars
when Palpatine tells his army to literally end the lives of the Jedi he says, “Execute
Order 66.” This is too much to just be a coincidence.
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