Tag: Franklin D. Roosevelt

Together We Cannot Fail: FDR’s Ten Days

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Photograph by Vincenzo Laviosa, circa 1932.

March 3, 1933. Herbert Hoover spent his final hours in the White House in anger and despair. Angry that he’d been decisively rejected by an electorate wrongheaded enough to not realize the wisdom of his policies—even when the evidence of their efficacy had been there for all to see. Despairing that his successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a dilettante, an unworthy lightweight at a time when all serious men understood the necessity for prudence, for careful adherence to sound principles and practices.

He was also profoundly worried. “The Great Engineer” could see that the cracks in the foundation that he had so carefully begun to mend were giving way. Unemployment remained stubbornly high. Europe was deeply unstable and calling home from the U.S. its reserves of gold. Currency was increasingly scarce, and there was an acute loss of confidence in the domestic banking system—many banks could not meet the demand for cash. Without sufficient cash, the economy would completely seize up, and any scrip that might be issued in lieu of it would cause rampant inflation. 

Hoover thought he knew the reason: His leadership was coming to an end. The clear policy statements he had made over the course of the previous year—indeed his efforts ever since the Crash itself—had painfully, but certainly, eased the economy back from the brink. Now, he believed all that good was being undone by the public’s anxiety that FDR would abandon his proven approach.  

It’s not as if Hoover hadn’t warned the electorate: In his October 31, 1932 campaign speech in Madison Square Garden, he laid out the stakes: elect FDR and “[t]he grass will grow in streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms if that protection be taken away. Their churches, their hospitals, and their schoolhouses will decay.”   Read more »

Monday, January 4, 2021

A Tale Of Three Transitions: Part II, Hoover To FDR

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Adlai Stevenson, in the concession speech he gave after being thoroughly routed by Ike in the 1952 Election, referenced a possibly apocryphal quote by Abraham Lincoln: “He felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

Stevenson got over it sufficiently to try again in 1956 (he stubbed a different toe, even harder), but the point remains the same. Losing stinks. Having to be gracious about it also stinks. So, it’s not unreasonable to assume that having to be gracious about it when you are the incumbent stinks even more, but that’s the job. The country has made a choice, and (let us keep our eyes firmly planted in the past for now), it is incumbent on the incumbent to cooperate, even if it is not required that he suddenly adopt the policies of his soon-to-be successor.

Last month, I wrote about the fraught transition from Buchanan to Lincoln, which ended with secession and, shortly after Lincoln’s Inauguration, led to the Civil War. Lincoln, and all that he represented, was clearly anathema to Buchanan, who, when he got up the nerve, acted accordingly. This month, I’m turning to the potent clashes of ideology and ego that went into the transition between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Hoover was once one of the most admired men in the world. He had earned that through his service in World War I, first by aiding thousands of American tourists stranded in Europe, then, as Chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, by helping to feed millions of people. He returned home in 1917 to take a role as Food Administrator for the United States, and, without much statutory authority, accomplished logistical feats on food supply and conservation. Woodrow Wilson sent him back to Europe to head the American Relief Administration, where he led economic restoration efforts after the war’s end, distributed 20 million tons of food to tens of millions across the continent, rebuilt communications, and organized shipping on sea and by rail. His efforts were so extraordinary that streets were named after him in several European cities. Read more »

Monday, August 17, 2020

A Joyous Bit of Politics: FDR’s Fala Speech

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

August 8, 1940. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library website.

It is March of 1944, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dying. His physicians, Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruen and Vice-Admiral Ross McIntire, know it, as do a handful of others McIntire brought in. FDR probably knows it as well, no matter how much his doctors may have sugar-coated their findings. He has cardiac insufficiency, arteriosclerosis, congestive heart failure, an enlarged and failing left ventricle, and mitral valve issues. Modern medicine would likely have offered more productive years of life, but, in the era before sophisticated heart surgery, before the development of a heart-lung machine, and with a very limited formulary of drugs, it is just a matter of time, maybe a year at most. 

His decline was obvious. You could see it on his face, in the amount of time he needed to recover from exertion, in the loss of weight. He had undertaken a long sea trip on the USS Baltimore to visit American forces in the Pacific, but spent much of it in his stateroom, resting. An ordinary man of that time would have scaled back, gradually becoming a convalescent. But FDR was no ordinary man, and 1944 no ordinary time. Obviously, the Democratic Party would re-nominate him for an unprecedented fourth term, if he wanted it, but there was deep concern in the family that he would never survive. Eleanor Roosevelt was later quoted as saying, “If Franklin loses, I’ll be personally glad, but worried for the world.” Read more »

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Birth, Decline, and Re-Emergence of the Solid South: A Short History

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Slave saleSince the Civil War, the American South has mostly been a one-party region. However, by the turn of the 21st century, its political affiliation had actually swung from the Democrats to the Republicans. Here’s how it happened.

It is not an oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War. For not only was slavery the most important on its own merits, but none of the other relevant issues, such as expansion into the western territories or states’ rights, would have mattered much at all if not for their indelible connection to slavery.

Initially, Northerners rallied around the issue of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds. Small farmers and new industrial workers did not want to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor. This was the philosophy that bound together the new Republican Party.

No friends of African Americans, most Free Soilers were openly racist, as were the vast majority of white Americans at the time. Abolitionists, who were fired by religion and opposed human bondage on moral grounds, were actually a small minority of the population However, as the bloody war raged on, Northerners began to seek moral assurance in their cause. For more and more people, the mere political goal of saving the union did not seem to justify the unholy slaughter of men by the tens of thousand. Though preserving the union was always Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal, he astutely played to this concern by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and establishing abolition as the war’s moral compass. It worked. The North persisted, won the war, abolished slavery, and forced the South to return.

Read more »