Roosevelt Island Quotes

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation Delivered on December 8, 1941 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7th, 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. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

That was my first lesson in real politics. . . . If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.

If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.

ON FRIDAY, 25 August, Roosevelt shocked most of his countrymen by dropping to the floor of Long Island Sound in one of the Navy’s six new submarines, appropriately named the Plunger. He remained beneath the surface (lashed with heavy rain) long enough to watch fish swim past his window. Then, taking the controls, he essayed a few movements himself, including one which brought the ship to the surface rear end up.

Eleanor Roosevelt had just conducted a two-month, twenty-five-thousand-mile tour of American fighting units in the South Pacific. This included Guadalcanal and other of the Solomon Islands, during which she is said to have told an audience of marines: “The marines that I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marines!

In 1903, when it became clear that the Snowy Egrets of the Everglades had been hunted to the brink of extinction, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order to create the first federal bird refuge at Pelican Island in Florida—one of fifty-five reserves set aside during his presidency.

Miltiades was a Greek general who, flush with victory against the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC, led a punitive mission against an ally of Persia, a small island nation that was supposed to be a pushover. The mission was a fiasco and Miltiades was defeated and disgraced; he died of his wounds in prison.

Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. “I’m just a president,” Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “and he has seen lots of presidents.

In the spring of 1931, West African natives in the Cameroons sent New York $3.77 for relief for the "starving"; that fall Amtorgs's new York office received 100,000 applications for job in Soviet Russia. On a single weekend in April, 1932, the 'Ile de france' and other transatlantic liner carried nearly 4,000 workingmen back to Europe; in June, 500 Rhode Island aliens departed for Mediterranean ports.

We have now managed to acquire bases all over the world—islands distant as the Australian Archipelago which President Roosevelt seized in 1938 without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress. There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort of which, if we wish to use the pretension, we cannot claim our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the most powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies, They will become and economic necessity for us.

The day’s most vivid exchanges were about a delicate but serious matter: the extreme foreignness of native Hawaiians. Both sides used racial arguments. Annexationists said the islanders’ evident savagery made it urgent for a civilizing force to take their country and uplift them. Opponents countered that it would be madness to bring such savages into union with the United States, where they could corrupt white people.

It so happened that no job, short of the Presidency itself, so appealed to Roosevelt. Convinced as he might be that Cuba deserved its freedom from Spanish rule, he was equally convinced that the Philippines needed the benison of an American colonial administration. “I … feel sure that we can ultimately help our brethren so far forward on the path of self-government and orderly liberty that that beautiful archipelago shall become a center of civilization for all eastern Asia and the islands round about.…

There was no response. Soon afterward, a skiff flying the Spanish flag approached the Charleston. Two Spanish officers came aboard and apologized for not having returned the American “salute” because they had no gunpowder left in their arsenal. It turned out that they had not been resupplied for months and did not know the United States and Spain were at war. The next morning an American lieutenant went ashore. At 10:15 he handed the Spanish commandant a message demanding surrender of the island within thirty minutes. The commandant retired to his quarters. Twenty-nine minutes later he emerged with a reply. “Being without defenses of any kind and without any means for meeting the present situation,” he had written, “I am under the sad necessity of being unable to resist such superior forces and regretfully accede to your demands.

Novelist Saul Bellow remembers the exhilarating experience of listening to Roosevelt speak. “I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. The light held after nine o’clock, and the ground was covered with clover, more than a mile of green between Cottage Grove and Stony Island. The blight hadn’t yet carried off the elms, and under them drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it.

Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.

The BBC announcer’s voice changed. “The news,” he said, “has just been received that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii. The announcement of the attack was made in a brief statement by President Roosevelt. Naval and military targets on the principal Hawaiian island of Oahu have also been attacked. No further details are yet available.” At first, there was confusion. “I was thoroughly startled,” Harriman said, “and I repeated the words, ‘The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.’ ” “No, no,” countered Churchill aide Tommy Thompson. “He said Pearl River.” U.S. ambassador John Winant, also present, glanced toward Churchill. “We looked at one another incredulously,” Winant wrote. Churchill, his depression suddenly lifted, slammed the top of the radio down and leapt to his feet. His on-duty private secretary, John Martin, entered the room, announcing that the Admiralty was on the phone. As Churchill headed for the door, he said, “We shall declare war on Japan.” Winant followed, perturbed. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” (Later Winant wrote, “There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill—certainly not when he is on the move.”) Churchill stopped. His voice quiet, he said, “What shall I do?” Winant set off to call Roosevelt to learn more. “And I shall talk with him too,” Churchill said. Once Roosevelt was on the line, Winant told him that he had a friend with him who also wanted to speak. “You will know who it is, as soon as you hear his voice.

Roosevelt reasoned, “if the Vice-Presidency led to the Governor Generalship of the Philippines, then the question would be entirely altered.” That post was the one he desired above all others, even a second gubernatorial term. From the moment the United States acquired the islands as a provision of the treaty in 1899 ending the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had coveted the job of creating a new government in a Philippines free of Spanish tyranny.

President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched sixteen new Atlantic Fleet Battleships to sail around the world showing our colors and strength. In keeping with his motto to, “Speak Softly but Carry a Big Stick” the ships were all painted white with only the scroll work on the bow of each ship gilded. The Battleships of the “Great White Fleet,” first named the “Atlantic Fleet,” under the command of Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans, on the flagship the USS Connecticut, were accompanied by what was termed a “Torpedo Flotilla” and additional support ships. Leaving Hampton Roads on December 16, 1907, they sailed around South America to San Francisco, where two of the ships, the USS Maine and the USS Alabama were replaced by the USS Nebraska, and the USS Wisconsin. Because of poor health Rear Admiral Charles S. Sperry relieved Admiral Evans and on July 7, 1908 took the fleet to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan Celon and arrived in Egypt on January 3, 1909. At the time the USS Connecticut, Illinois, Culgoa and the steel hulled schooner the USS Yankton, sailed to the island of Sicily to show America’s compassion by assisting in with the rescue operations after a severe earthquake. Crew members of the Illinois also recovered the bodies of the American consul and his wife who had been trapped in the ruins. On January 9, 1909, the fleet left Messina, Sicily and continued on to Naples and Gibraltar before returning to Hampton Roads, Virginia on February 22, 1909, where President Roosevelt reviewed the returning fleet one last time.

in my campaign launch speech on Roosevelt Island, I took the opportunity to talk about my mother. When I thought about the sweep of history, I thought about her. Her birthday had just passed a few days earlier. She was born on June 4, 1919—the exact same day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, finally granting women the right to vote. “I really wish my mother could be here tonight,” I told the crowd in Brooklyn. I had practiced this part several times, and each time, I teared up. “I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become, and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte.” I swallowed hard. “And, of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.

The old Waldo-Hancock Bridge crossed the Penobscot River from Verona Island in Hancock County to Waldo County in Maine. Built in 1931, it has since been replaced by a 2,040-foot modern suspension bridge that was opened on December 30, 2006…. It was on Verona Island where the wooden ship Roosevelt was built in 1905. This ship carried Robert Peary from New York to the Arctic in 1908 for his last expedition to the North Pole….

At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Franklin Roosevelt had made it clear that he had little interest in further close collaboration or partnership with the United States' Western Allies, whose empires and global influence were fast disintegrating. Serenely confident of his own country's power, he envisioned the Soviet Union and its main ally in dealing with postwar international problems.

Once again, Hitler paused briefly. Then he straightened his shoulders and declared, louder than before: “I cannot believe that the civilized nations of the world are so blind that they will lacerate each other to smooth the way for Bolshevism. The contrary is essential: coalition, by groups, into confederacies of states, into families of nations, perhaps even here and there into federal states… “It is all the more important that we work at coalition. And on that point I will tell you over and over again: without England it is not possible! England has the necessary power. We bring along only the idea and the will. I cannot imagine that England will not decide to climb down from its pedestal of arrogance and imperialism, which has been made outmoded by history, and to extend its hand to a community of nations. England cannot ignore present-day events to such an extent! It cannot discard the world mission of the Aryan race in the world to such an extent! It must surely recognize the danger of international Communism, even if its island realm might be the last to fall into its hands. “And it must notice that for the world… a new great adversary has arisen across the Atlantic — America. As a result of excessive industrialization, which received its latest impetus precisely during the Great War, America has no choice but to wage an imperial policy all over the world. For the moment, Roosevelt hopes only to achieve ‘prosperity.’ But if he cannot make it come into being by peaceful means — and in this he will fail — then it can be coerced only by a war — a war intended to permanently eliminate economic competition from Europe and possibly also from Japan, securing for America the international markets of the future: South America and China, perhaps Russia as well. “Now England is simply part of Europe, even if it was unwilling to admit it before this. Its front is against Russia and against America. The struggle has already begun in the oil fields of Persia, it will continue in India and the Far East. And in the end it will encompass the whole Empire! “…England and Germany are equally threatened. But they are also the backbone of the West, the old world, the cultural source of mankind. And a Europe that stretches from Gibraltar to the Caucasus includes all the spheres of interest of the countries that belong to it in other parts of the world, especially all of Africa, India, the Malayan archipelago, Australia, and New Zealand. Canada will also remain loyal to such a concentration of power, which would otherwise fall to America; and the Arabic family of nations will complete the circle of these United States of the old world. “This is the prize we offer England! World peace would be assured for all eternity. No earthly power could sow discord into such a community, and no army or navy in the world could shake such power. “It cannot be that England does not recognize and understand this. In any case, I am prepared, even at the risk of failing to persuade England, to take this road, and I will never betray Europe to Bolshevism and Jewry. Hitler raised his voice for the final words…

We did not agree in all things,… but we did in some, and those we pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics… if you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.

The surroundings I saw echoed Winston Churchill’s most stirring words, given in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. “. . . We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, ... we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. ...

This was my first real lesson in politics… If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men.

We have no managed to acquire bases all over the world—islands distant as the Australian Archipelago which President Roosevelt seized in 1938 without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress. There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort of which, if we wish to use the pretension, we cannot claim our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the most powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies, They will become and economic necessity for us.

If Washington was the father of the country and Lincoln the savior of the union, then Theodore Roosevelt was the philosopher of the modern nation. He believed that immigration was central to the question of American identity.

Ah,” replied Shorenstein, “you’re worried? Listen. Did you ever go down to the wharf to see the Staten Island Ferry come in? You ever watch it, and look down in the water at all those chewing-gum wrappers, and the banana peels and the garbage? When the ferryboat comes into the wharf, automatically it pulls all the garbage in too. The name of your ferryboat is Franklin D. Roosevelt—stop worrying!” The Shorenstein rule no longer has quite the strength it had a generation ago, for Americans, with increasing education and sophistication, split their tickets; more and more they are reluctant to follow the leader. Politicians, of course, still look for a strong leader of the ticket; yet when they cannot find such a man, when it is they who must carry the President in an election rather than vice versa, they want someone who will be a good effective President, a strong executive, one who will keep the country running smoothly and prosperously while they milk it from underneath. In talking to some of the hard-rock, old-style politicians in New York about war and peace, I have found them intensely interested in war and peace for two reasons. The first is that the draft is a bother to them in their districts (“Always making trouble with mothers and families”); and the second is that it has sunk in on them that if an H-bomb lands on New York City (which they know to be Target A), it will be bad for business, bad for politics, bad for the machine. The machine cannot operate in atomic rubble. In the most primitive way they do not want H-bombs to fall on New York City—it would wipe out their crowd along with all the rest. They want a strong President, who will keep a strong government, a strong defense, and deal with them as barons in their own baronies. They believe in letting the President handle war and peace, inflation and deflation, France, China, India and foreign affairs (but not Israel, Ireland, Italy or, nowadays, Africa), so long as the President lets them handle their own wards and the local patronage.

The fourth member of the Colorado-class was never completed because the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 brought new battleship construction worldwide to a halt. The World War I victors agreed to limit capital ship construction and scrap certain existing vessels to result in a 5:5:3 ratio among the three major naval powers of the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. Signatories pledged to honor a ten-year moratorium on capital ship construction and guarantee ships would not exceed thirty-five thousand tons or carry armaments larger than sixteen-inch guns. The treaty also contained a non-fortification clause aimed at American and Japanese intentions across the broad reaches of the Pacific. Beyond what the United States might undertake in Hawaii or what Japan might do in its home islands, the signatories agreed not to fortify bases on their island possessions, including Japan’s Caroline and Marshall Islands, recently won from Germany, and such American outposts as Wake, Guam, and most important, the Philippines. Whether Japan would honor this commitment was a matter of considerable debate. Franklin Roosevelt, out of the public eye while recovering from polio, asked in an article, “Shall We Trust Japan?” Citing Japan’s participation in the Washington Naval Treaty and noting there was “enough commercial room” in the Pacific “for both Japan and us well into the indefinite future,” Roosevelt answered with an optimistic yes.7 The end result was that America honored its treaty commitment and built no new battleships between commissioning the West Virginia in 1923 and the North Carolina (BB-55) in 1941. This left the Arizona and its sisters the undisputed, though aging, queens of the seas on the American side during the latter 1920s and throughout the 1930s. But even queens require an occasional facelift, and from May 1929 to March 1931, Arizona underwent a twenty-two-month modernization at the Norfolk Navy Yard.

The thickness of the armor decking was increased by 1.75 inches, and giant torpedo bulges, or blisters, were added below the waterline on the exterior of each side of the hull. In theory, these bulges provided some measure of protection from torpedoes or near-miss bombs. They were filled with air in the outer half and water in the half next to the hull, and were designed to absorb the shock of an explosion and dissipate potential damage to the ship. Bulkheads bisecting the bulge limited flooding and damage to a particular section. All this meant more weight and new boilers and turbines were also installed to keep up Arizona’s speed, which peaked at 20.7 knots (23.8 mph) during post-overhaul sea trials. Returned to full commission on March 1, 1931, Arizona embarked President Herbert Hoover from Hampton Roads, Virginia, for a ten-day tour of the Caribbean, calling at Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It was the sort of low-key inspection of naval operations combined with a warm respite from wintry Washington that American presidents happily undertook in those years. Franklin Roosevelt would soon become a master of it.

It wasn’t big news, but it was a big iceberg. Researchers joked about moving onto it and declaring it a new nation. It contained more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined. It had come off near a Roosevelt Island,

It had come off near a Roosevelt Island,

Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, was a nineteenth-century hellhole that housed prisoners, debtors, and the insane.

Now Wall Street's financial manipulation takes on a larger meaning. Although the Japanese had appeared to make the most of the internal strife within Russia during 1905, it was U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt who mediated a peace treaty that forced Russia to give up its Eastern and Baltic fleets and cede the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan. The Russian monarchy further agreed to hand over Manchuria to Japan and to abandon protection of Korea, which japan then annexed in 1910, to little international objection.