Franklin Delano Roosevelt Quotes

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Presidents are selected, not elected.

Be sincere, Be brief, Be seated.

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

Another new and groundbreaking story in FDR Unmasked is about his highly consequential friendship with Vincent Astor, the closest with any man in his adult life. To truly understand the “real” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one behind his mask of deception, it is important to understand their almost brotherly relationship.

The Truth is found when men (and Women) are free to pursue it.

A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.

FDR Unmasked chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s life from a physician’s perspective. It tells a harrowing story of heroic achievement by a great leader determined to impart his vision of freedom and democracy to the world while under constant siege by serious medical problems.

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded us: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.... Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

Perhaps Germany will serve as a warning,” said Arvid. “May they learn from us to snuff out fascism in America when the first sparks arise and not delay until democracy goes up in flames all around them.” “This could never happen in America. A nation that elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt would never elect a madman populist.

I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them." [Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171]

Some read to remember the home they had left behind, others to forget the hell that surrounded them. Books uplifted their weary souls and energized their minds…books had the power to sooth an aching heart, renew hope for the future, and provide a respite when there was no other escape.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Whenever a soldier needed an escape, the antidote to anxiety, relief from boredom, a bit of laughter, inspiration, or hope, he cracked open a book and drank in the words that would transport him elsewhere.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Early survey researchers noted in 1936 that 83% of Republicans believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies were leading the country down the road to dictatorship, a view shared by only 9% Democrats.

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.

We Have Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

One of the aspects of the genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that, although a convinced Democrat, he was quite prepared to use talent wherever he found it.

FDR’s struggle with illness and subsequent metal-filled life are remarkably similar to the story of another great leader who was part robot: Iron Man. FDR, much like Tony Stark, was cocky and arrogant before his life-changing diagnosis, but the years of suffering changed all of that, and he emerged more humble, more fearless, and ready to defend America. Also, FDR wore iron braces and used a wheelchair, which, for the purposes of this comparison, is exactly like a well-armed robot suit.

The New Deal, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, saved capitalism. It was put in place because socialists were a strong and serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the breakdown of capitalism—something I expect we will again witness in our lifetimes—there was a possibility of a socialist revolution. They did not want to lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a friend in 1930, said there was “no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.”95 In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said, “Hand over some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution.” And they complied. That is how the government created fifteen million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and public works projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the masses moved them to pity. They did this because they were scared.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. --Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from a 1936 speech in New York City

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for his part, was less than enthralled with his wife’s alliance with the NAACP, and the White House attempted to maintain a distance between the president and Eleanor’s activism on behalf of blacks. Marshall himself had felt the president’s chill when Attorney General Francis Biddle phoned FDR to discuss the NAACP’s involvement in a race case in Virginia. At Biddle’s instruction, Marshall picked up an extension phone to listen in, only to hear FDR exclaim, “I warned you not to call me again about any of Eleanor’s niggers. Call me one more time and you are fired.” Marshall later recalled, “The President only said ‘nigger’ once, but once was enough for me.

A good story is sometimes preferable to an accurate one.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, který byl zvolen na začátku krize, je připomínán pro svůj soucit. Ale byla to Eleanor, která se postarala o to, aby věděl, jak se cítí trpící Američané.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted, “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” Don’t let your doubts cause your expector to expire.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “America’s greatest contribution to the world is the summer camp.” Anyone

Franklin Delano Roosevelt commends “the reading of the Bible” to my brother. The way they got these kids to die. Commends.

In that moment, too, he looked so exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt-some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain-that I drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement.

Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semi-beast,” as New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt exulted as a Harvard freshman in 1903.15 Though

We all know that books burn – yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. … In this war, we know, books are weapons. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)

if ever an argument can be made for the conclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Kingsley could ‘do’ the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning ‘somewhere in Germany,’ was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement—of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony—once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words 'fuck off' was note-perfect.

L'accent français de Franklin Delano Roosevelt donnait parfois à ses propos un tour singulier. Lorsqu'il prononça son appel à la radio, à l'aube du 7 novembre, il déclara : " ... J'aime vos fermes... vos villes...". Mais on compris " ... J'aime vos femmes, ... vos filles...", ce qui surprit un peu.

Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations...He was sensitive to nuances in a way that Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions.

Войната на идеите не може да се спечели без книги, както морската война без кораби.

Let not defeatists tell us that it is too late. It will never be earlier. Tomorrow will be later than today.

We believed we knew everything they were thinking. Those Magic intercepts made us feel invulnerable. No, a better word is cocky. Their diplomats are chatting back and forth with Tokyo about the weather or color of their new Cadillacs while their military put a plan together to kick us in the teeth. We thought we knew everything. We didn't. -President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the Third World Power Conference in Washington, D.C., on the importance of engineering in solving the nation’s social problems. At the conclusion of his speech, he pressed a button that stirred the turbines in the Boulder Dam to “creative activity.” “Boulder Dam,” said the president as his right index finger came down, “I call you to life!

A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a

The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. "Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world" were entitled to "Four Freedoms": freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the new president. He won in a landslide. Landslide makes me think of rocks and dirt falling down a mountain. Not sure what that has to do with an election. But maybe it does. My papa voted. He is a pebble. Lots of pebbles make a landslide, right? His vote counted. Roosevelt will move into the White House and will have a fine supper to celebrate, I guess. Papa had cornbread and buttermilk and beans with his friends at my house. I bet papa enjoyed his celebration more.

It’s all true. I needed to talk to Bernadette about her blackberry bushes, which are growing down her hill, under my fence, and invading my garden. I was forced to hire a specialist, who said Bernadette’s blackberries are going to destroy the foundation of my home. Naturally, I wanted to have a friendly chat with Bernadette. So I walked up to her car while she was in the pickup line. Mea culpa! But how else are you ever going to get a word with that woman? She’s like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You see her only from the waist up, driving past. I don’t think she has once gotten out of her car to walk Bee into school.

There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation, all reminiscent of the old Soviet style. In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law [230―31].

or creed.” These rights included: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education. Roosevelt

Angered by his quick recovery, commentators sought to recast the triumphant scene of his return to the White House. When Trump appeared on the White House balcony after his return from Walter Reed, NBC News’s presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted, “In America, our Presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes—that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems.”61 While the tweet was amplified by Beschloss’s fellow Resistance members, Americans with better knowledge of presidential history responded with pictures of every other president pictured at the balcony, be it President Barack Obama (many, many times—once with communist dictator Xi Jinping, no less), President George W. Bush, President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, on back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.62

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb..

Would you believe me or think of me as effrontery if I told you that 1.) the meticulously detailed wealth of notes, now being referred to as the Blue Planet Project, are actually the diary entries of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 2.) that they are records that go as far back as 1939, 3.) that when this diary first surfaced in the 1980's more than a decade after his passing, covert gatekeepers of Eisenhower's true legacy removed any pertinent Intel that would shine light on just who he was; beyond that which we've been systematically led to believe, and last but not least 4.) that he obtained this information during his time as the first and only human functionary ever to be accepted as a representative on the Council of Galaxies—an off-world body made up of countless alien species from innumerable extraterrestrial worlds that span the furthest recesses of our multifaceted macrocosm?

Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, honestly believed that he could reason with Adolf Hitler in good faith. Now, most history books find little else to say about Chamberlain and he is solely remembered for believing that he could pacify Herr Führer by signing the Munich Agreement of 1938. In doing this, he ceded to Germany the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, without having any real authority to do so. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier followed suit, thereby giving the “German Reich” a piece of Czechoslovakia, consisting of the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. In March of 1939, German troops rolled in and occupied the territory. Three other parts broke off from Czechoslovakia, with one becoming the Slovak Republic, another part being annexed by Hungary, and the third part, which was borderland, becoming a part of Poland. These all came together to become satellite states and allies of Nazi Germany. On May 10, 1940, in a radio address to the 8th Pan American Scientific Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “I am a pacifist. You, my fellow citizens of twenty-one American Republics, are pacifists too.” Roosevelt was referring to Canada and Latin America. The United States attempted to remain neutral and did not enter into the war until four days after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. Roosevelt opposed the concept of war and made every attempt to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities in Europe. On December 11, 1941, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

(Britain had 84 battleships and battlecruisers, including 35 modern battleships; compared, respectively, with Germany’s 48 and 20 and the United States’s 41 and 18. France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary trailed.)

American history is littered with overly saccharine quotes about the role of the press, but this quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt is worth repeating, because it explains why the republicans spend so much time waging war against the press: “Freedom of consciousness, of education, of speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom if the press ever be successfully challenged.

If you build a bomb and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But if you build an ideology and ignore the facts, the ideology may still prove explosive. While power depends on both truth and order, it is usually the people who know how to build ideologies and maintain order who give instructions to the people who merely know how to build bombs or hunt mammoths. Robert Oppenheimer obeyed Franklin Delano Roosevelt rather than the other way around. Similarly, Werner Heisenberg obeyed Adolf Hitler, Igor Kurchatov deferred to Joseph Stalin, and in contemporary Iran experts in nuclear physics follow the orders of experts in Shiite theology.

MENS REA”: On January 16, 1944, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and one of his deputies, Randolph Paul, personally visited the President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to coerce him to finally act and do something to help refugees escaping The Holocaust. More diplomatic efforts had failed, so Morgenthau's approach strengthened. The report brought to the President reveals a desperate and necessary act to coerce a response from an administration that was systematically and overtly preventing both private and official help for the victims escaping Hitler. The report documents a pattern of attempts by the State Department to obstruct rescue opportunities and block the flow of Holocaust information to the United States. Morgenthau warned that the refugee issue had become “a boiling pot on [Capitol] Hill,” and Congress was likely to pass the rescue resolution if faced with a White House unwilling to act. Roosevelt understood the deep implications and pre-empted Congress by establishing the War Refugee Board. The result was “Executive Order 9417” creating the War Refugee Board, issued on January 22, 1944.

FDR appointed a eugenic zealot named Isiah Bowman to his "M Project" that kept Jews from the safety of US shores.

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was comforted by a piece of poetry given to her by a friend: They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind: In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.2

Errors in Sampling Frames: The 1936 Presidential Election Our discussion of errors in sampling frames would not be complete without mentioning a classic example of sampling failure, the 1936 Reader’s Digest presidential poll. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, completing his first term of office as president of the United States, was running against Alf Landon of Kansas, the Republican candidate. Reader’s Digest magazine, in a poll consisting of about 2.4 million individuals, the largest in history, predicted a victory for Landon, forecasting that he would receive 57% of the vote to Roosevelt’s 43%. Contrary to the poll’s prediction, Roosevelt won the election by a landslide—62% to Landon’s 38%. 8 Despite the extremely large sample size, the error was enormous, the largest ever made by any polling organization. The major reason for the error was found in the sampling frame. The Digest had mailed questionnaires to 10 million people whose names and addresses were taken from sources such as telephone directories and club membership lists. In 1936, however, few poor people had telephones, nor were they likely to belong to clubs. Thus the sampling frame was incomplete, as it systematically excluded the poor. That is, the sampling frame did not reflect accurately the actual voter population. This omission was particularly significant because in that year, 1936, the poor voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt and the well-to-do voted mainly for Landon. 9

their installations. Once a wiretap was approved, Hoover considered it approved forever. Hoover had asserted that the FBI was free to install bugs at will, without informing a higher authority. He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by Franklin Delano Roosevelt a quarter of a century ago.

coltish-looking,

Liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT WAS A DISTANT COUSIN OF THEODORE’S. THEY BECAME CLOSER WHEN FRANKLIN MARRIED THEODORE’S NIECE, ELEANOR. FDR, AS HE WAS LATER CALLED, OFTEN FOLLOWED IN HIS FAMOUS COUSIN’S FOOTSTEPS. IN 1914, FDR HELD ROOSEVELT’S OLD JOB AS ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE NAVY. HE WENT ON TO SERVE AS NEW YORK’S GOVERNOR. AND IN 1932, FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. UNLIKE THEODORE, FDR WAS A DEMOCRAT. BUT LIKE HIS COUSIN, HE TRIED TO USE THE POWER OF THE GOVERNMENT TO HELP AVERAGE AMERICANS. FRANKLIN ONCE CALLED THEODORE “THE GREATEST MAN I EVER KNEW.” ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

All told, three huge economic engines—the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus bill—were in a state of play, placing more economic power in the hands of Obama and his party than any U.S. government since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future.

The Pen Made for the White House Presidents come and go, but one thing remains constant in the West Wing BY DAN LEWIS FROM NOW I KNOW PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM VOORHES The pens read “Skilcraft U.S. Government.” And if you have worked for an American government institution, chances are you’ve used one. About $5 million worth of these pens are sold every year (with 60 percent going to the military), and they have quite the story behind them. To start, they’re assembled by the blind. In 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression, the government stepped in to help blind workers, who were already at a competitive disadvantage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Wagner-O’Day Act, which required that the federal government purchase specific goods manufactured by blind Americans. The law soon included pens. The Skilcraft brand came to be a decade or so later, in 1952. Today, the company employs over 5,500 blind workers in 37 states, producing an arsenal of office supplies, with the pens made in factories in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The pens must be built to the specifications outlined in a 16-page document that was first promulgated more than 50 years ago. Among the requirements? The pens must be able to write continuously for no less than 5,000 feet and in temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero. You know, just in case. Copyright © 2011 by Dan Lewis.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

The trouble that public unions could potentially cause for citizens was one reason that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hero of Democrats and union organizers alike, opposed them for government workers. Republican Fiorello La Guardia, a great mayor of New York, opposed them, too. Unlike in the private sector, where unions were a needed counterweight to strong management, in the public sector unions had a big say in selecting management through the election process. As a result, they had a lot of power on both sides of the labor-management negotiating process. Roosevelt and La Guardia thus feared that, when government officials and unions battled over power, citizens could lose out.

I owe my life to my hobbies — especially stamp collecting.

WHILE HOOVER DAM was under construction, California began building the Colorado River Aqueduct and Parker Dam. Arizona’s governor, Benjamin B. Moeur, viewed the dam as an act of theft. Like many Arizonans, he worried that Southern California would suck the river dry before Arizona was in a position to divert almost any of its own share, whatever that turned out to be, so he sent a small National Guard detachment to the construction site to make sure that neither the workers nor the dam touched land on the Arizona side of the river—a challenge for a dam builder, you would think. The National Guardsmen borrowed a small ferryboat from Nellie Trent Bush, a state legislator who lived in the town of Parker, a few miles downstream. As the boat approached the site, it became entangled in a cable attached to a construction barge, and the National Guardsmen had to be rescued by their putative enemies, the people working on the dam. Moeur later sent a message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in which he said that he had “found it necessary to issue a proclamation establishing martial law on the Arizona side of the river at that point and directing the National Guard to use such means as may be necessary to prevent an invasion of the sovereignty and territory of the State of Arizona.” By that time, his National Guard detachment had grown to include many more soldiers, as well as a number of trucks with machine guns mounted on them. Moeur also made Nellie Bush “Admiral of the Arizona Navy.” Nellie

The presidency of America’s greatest leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, culminated in the idea of a second bill. It represented Roosevelt’s belief that the American Revolution was radically incomplete and that a new set of rights was necessary.”70

Betty made sure to write her parents about all the dramatic events of the spring of 1945. Four-term president Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away in April: “Wasn’t the president’s death a shock? I heard it 15 minutes after he died and just couldn’t believe it. I was thrilled that Truman declared yesterday a day of prayer and asked the newspaper men who knew how, to pray for him. A good start—maybe he won’t be so bad after all. [A professor] had just said last Monday that he could think of nothing worse that could possibly happen to the U.S. than if Truman were to have been elected. And now this! We never know how God will use it.”4

There was a squirrel Ben Franklin in bifocal glasses flying a little kite; a prairie dog Abraham Lincoln with a top hat, a beard, and a teensy Gettysburg Address; and a weasel Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a cigarette holder and a wheelchair.

In August, President Truman made the decision that death had spared Roosevelt from having to make. Truman ordered the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was “bully,” and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a “peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.” By contrast, President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.

When I was at business school, one of my professors told a story about a meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the economist John Maynard Keynes. FDR was enormously busy, but he spent well over an hour with this academic. If FDR had understood Keynsian economics some think the Great Depression might have ended sooner and enormous suffering could have been prevented. But at the end of the meeting, the president was not persuaded. My professor asked the question, "Whose fault was it? FDR's for not understanding, or Keynes's for not explaining it well?" This was one of those moments in my education that changed my life. I'd always shifted the burden of responsibility for understanding to the listener, not to the explainer. But now I saw that if Keynes's genius was locked inside his head, it may as well not have existed. It was his responsibility to make the ideas that seemed so obvious to him equally obvious to FDR. He failed. Far too often we assume that if somebody doesn't understand what we're telling them, it's because they are "stupid" or "closed minded". That is rarely the case. While we know our subject matter, we may fail to know the person to whom we are explaining the subject, and therefore may fail to get our ideas across. p92

When I was at business school, one of my professors told a story about a meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the economist John Maynard Keynes. FDR was enormously busy, but he spent well over an hour with this academic. If FDR had understood Keynsian economics some think the Great Depression might have ended sooner and enormous suffering could have been prevented. But at the end of the meeting, the president was not persuaded. My professor asked the question, "Whose fault was it? FDR's for not understanding, or Keynes's for not explaining it well?" This was one of those moments in my education that changed my life. I'd always shifted the burden of responsibility for understanding to the listener, not to the explainer. But now I saw that if Keynes's genius was locked inside his head, it may as well not have existed. It was his responsibility to make the ideas that seemed so obvious to him equally obvious to FDR. He failed. Far too often we assume that if somebody doesn't understand what we're telling them, it's because they are "stupid" or "closed minded". That is rarely the case. While we know our subject matter, we may fail to know the person to whom we are explaining the subject, and therefore may fail to get our ideas across. p92

In 1916 Congress passed an estate tax, eventually setting the rate at 25 percent for estates over $10 million (worth over $230 million in today’s dollars). The tax helped pay for the U.S. war effort in World War I, and it achieved Roosevelt’s goal to tame what he called “the really big fortune, the swollen fortune.” Politicians and the public understood the estate tax as a moral imperative. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt made clear, “The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people.” The president believed, as did most Americans, that each generation should stand on its own.

Strauss finished Metamorphosen on April 12, 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died the same day. Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, vaguely similar in tone to the music that Strauss had just composed, played on American radio. That afternoon in the ruins of Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic presented an impeccably Hitlerish program that included Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's Romantic Symphony, and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung. After the concert, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience, or so the rumor went. Hitler marked his fifty-sixth birthday on April 20. Ten days later, he shot himself in the mouth. In accordance with his final instructions, the body was incinerated alongside that of Eva Braun. Hitler possibly envisaged his immolation as a reprise of that final scene of the Ring, in which Brünnhilde builds a pyre for Siegfried and rides into the flames. Or he may have hoped to reenact the love-death of Tristan—whose music, he once told his secretary, he wished to hear as he died. Walther Funk thought that Hitler had modeled the scorched-earth policy of the regime's last phase on Wagner's grand finale: "Everything had to go down in ruins with Hitler him-self, as a sort of false Götterdämmerung" Such an extravagant gesture would have fulfilled the prophecy of Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would "experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure." But there is no evidence that the drug-addled Führer was thinking about Wagner or listening to music in the last days and hours of his life. Eyewitness reports suggest that the grim ceremony in the bombed-out Chancellery garden—two gasoline-soaked corpses burning fitfully, the one intact, the other with its skull caved in—was something other than a work of art.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?

Zangara fired five shots. One of them hit Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was shaking hands with Zangara’s intended target. Cermak died. The target, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was sworn in as president two weeks later. Within months of his inauguration Roosevelt transformed the U.S. economy through the New Deal. John Nance Garner—who would have become president had Zangara hit his target—opposed most of the New Deal’s deficit spending. He almost certainly wouldn’t have enacted many of the same policies, some of which still shape today’s economy.

of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, resided at No. 39. Other residents included other Astor family members, a future two-term governor, and Julia Gardiner, who would soon marry President John Tyler.

Much like GM and GE, Kodak had a fair employment policy in place by the 1960s and had laid out is own Plan for Progress, which included a commitment to “hold discussions with the employment interviewers in the various division to remind them: that “such things as race, creed, color, or national origin” are neither to “help nor hinder in getting a job at Kodak.” Yet for blacks trying to work and move up at the company, these assurances didn’t mesh with their own experiences. Some of this was a consequence of blacks being poorly educated, especially those who had relocated to Rochester from the rural South. In the company’s eyes, the simply weren’t qualified. “We don’t grow many peanuts in Eastman Kodak,” Monroe Dill, Kodak’s industrial relations director said in 1963, adding that the company would start to recruit more from all-black colleges so as to not keep “discriminating by omission.” But there was also plenty of discrimination by commission, as individual Kodak managers used their discretion to hire whomever they liked and cast off whomever they didn’t. “They would say it blatant, like, 'We don't have any colored jobs,"" recalled Clarence Ingram, who served as general manager of the Rochester Business Opportunities Corporation, an entity formed after the '64 riots to support minority businesses. "They would tell you that." Apparently, they told a lot of blacks that. In 1964, only about 600 African Americans worked for Kodak in Rochester. less than 2 percent of the 33,000 employees based there. Determined to remedy this was FIGHT, which was led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt Florence, the thirty-one-year-old pastor of the Reynolds Street Church of Christ, a stocky, hard-charging, charismatic man, who called Malcolm X a friend. On September 2, 1966, a delegation of sixteen from FIGHT walked into Kodak's executive suite. Florence, sporting a Black Power button in his lapel, said he wanted to see "the top man." Before he knew it, the minister and his retinue were sitting in front of three top men: Kodak chairman Albert Chapman, president William Vaughn, and executive vice president Louis Eilers. Florence told them about the harshness of life in Rochester's black ghetto and said he wanted Kodak to start a training program for people who normally wouldn't be recruited into the company. Florence braced himself, expecting Kodak to resist. But Vaughn listened carefully and then asked Florence to submit a more specific proposal. Two weeks later, he did. Calling FIGHT " the only mass based organization of poor people and near poor people in the Rochester area," Florence requested that Kodak train 500 to 600 men and women over eighteen months. FIGHT also wanted direct involvement in the process; the group would "recruit and counsel trainees and offer advice, consultation, and assistance.

War may be ‘declared’; peace cannot.

In elite White circles, Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semi-beast,” as New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt exulted as a Harvard freshman in 1903.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)

The people of China well over a century have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world—the same great ideals. China, in the last—less than half a century has become one of the great democracies of the world. —President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

We will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our Nation and our people to be ignored or violated.” He spoke of “the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking,” and accepted that Germany had, in fact, already gone to war against the United States.

there were ample opportunities to prevent what became World War II. The United States deserves a share of the responsibility. The Senate’s rejection of the new League of Nations presaged a retreat into isolationism, which gained traction in America during the two decades between the two world wars. Making matters worse was a simultaneous embrace of protectionism that weakened economies and democracies around the world along with a decline in U.S. military readiness. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. president from 1933 to nearly the end of World War II in 1945, encountered political resistance when he attempted to provide help to the Allies facing Germany, because a good many Americans feared doing so would get the United States dragged into European fighting. (The isolationist movement went by the name of America First. One of its principal representatives was Charles Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic had made him a public hero.) The opposition to Roosevelt signaled to German and Japanese leaders that they could invade others with a degree of impunity.

Wilson was encouraged by “the wonderful and heartening” events in Russia, which had “been always in fact democratic at heart . . . The great generous Russian people have been added in all their native majesty and might to the forces of freedom. We are now about to accept the gauge of battle with [Germany], this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the Nation . . . to fight for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberalism of its peoples, the German people included.

His last recorded words about Franklin were very optimistic and appreciative: “I know he is good and will be good,

ideological invasion of America.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt demanded many of the same compulsory liberties that the communists had in their constitutions – including entertainment, healthcare, education, jobs, housing, retirement, price controls, and food.  He called it the Second Bill of Rights, and presented it in his 1944 state of the union address.[136]  While presenting this plan to

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in a measured but determined voice: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” Roosevelt’s cabinet, led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, initially urged the president to present to Congress a comprehensive history of Japan’s international misconduct. Roosevelt decided instead on an accessible five-hundred-word speech so that his message would get through to as many people as possible: The Japanese attack was treacherous, and the United States had to defeat this cowardly enemy, no matter what it took.