Category Archives: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Margaret Suckley and the 27th Division

07 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in 27th (New York) Division, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Margaret L. Suckley, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Yesterday a friend and I braved the heat and ventured to Roosevelt Island to visit Four Freedoms State Park, architect Louis Isadore Kahn’s tribute to our only four-term president and the man who gave the world so much of what many people sadly take for granted today. When I got home I finished Jean Edward Smith’s FDR, an outstanding biography I have been reading over the summer in addition to finishing my book manuscript and boning up on my U.S. Grant. (Last week I picked up a brand new hardcover copy of the same author’s Grant for $5 that I will get to in a few weeks.) This morning I have been going through copies of “Gas Attack,” the newspaper published by the 27th “New York” Division during the First World War. The men had published a previous newspaper called the “Rio Grande Rattler” when they were stationed on the Texas/Mexico border during the Punitive Expedition in 1916. The reason I say all this is because in pursuing “Gas Attack” I came across this extraordinary photography that includes Margaret L. Suckley.

Margaret Suckley was a volunteer with the 27th “New York” Division when the unit trained at Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina in 1918. She went on to be a friend and confidant of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she met a few years after the war. The Elizabeth Suckley pictured here is presumably a sister or cousin.

The image we see here is from the May 4, 1918 edition, published at Camp Wadsworth and the last installment of the paper before the division shipped out to France. Suckley (the first vowel in her name rhymes with book) was one of the two dozen or so canteen women who provided refreshments to the men of the 27th Division. Most of these women were married and had spouses within the unit. Suckley though was not one of these. In 1918 when this photograph was taken she was 26 and unmarried. A few years earlier she had been a student at Bryn Mawr but for whatever reason her mother forced her to drop out before getting a degree. Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at this time but he and Suckley did not yet know each other; they would not meet until 1922. In the 23 years after that, until FDR’s death in April 1945, they would be confidants and close friends. She was one of the few people unafraid to tell Franklin when he was wrong. Margaret was one of the women present in Warm Springs when Roosevelt died.

(image/Gas Attack of the New York Division)

 

Fiorello La Guardia’s Memorial Days

28 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Purroy Mitchel, Memory, New York City, Preparedness (WW1)

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John Purroy Mitchel, New York’s boy mayor, died 100 years ago this coming July. Mitchel was in office from 1914-17, thus overlapping almost entirely with the early years of the Great War. Mitchel was a proponent of Preparedness and as such became a natural ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and others advocating for American readiness to join the fight. After Mitchel left office he joined the Army Air Service and was killed in Lake Charles, Louisiana when he fell out of an airplane during a training exercise in July 1918. Friends dedicated a memorial to him in Central Park near 90th Street and Fifth Avenue in November 1928. For years, especially throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Mitchel monument was a focal point of Memorial Day commemorations in New York City. One regular attendee was Fiorello La Guardia, who over the course of his tenure in office from 1934-45 observed at least nine of twelve Memorial Days at the monument to his mayoral forerunner, Fusion Party associate, and fellow World War 1 aviator.

New York Times, May 31, 1934: La Guardia is second from the right.

The photograph above shows La Guardia at the Mitchel monument on Memorial Day 1934. This would have been just over a year into the FDR Administration and with the Great Depression in full effect. This was also La Guardia’s first Memorial Day as mayor. There were still Civil War veterans marching in New York City’s Memorial Day parades in these years, about 25 this year. In the years after this their numbers dwindled into the single digits.

New York Times, May 31, 1944: La Guardia was pressing for full Axis surrender in the tense days before the Normandy Invasion.

The headline here in which La Guardia advocates for an “aviator’s peace” comes from the 1944 Memorial Day observation. While obviously the public did not know the exact day that the offensive to liberate France would begin, Memorial Day 1944 took place one week before D-Day. Thus we see La Guardia pressing for all out victory. Poignantly, 1944 also happened to be the first year that a Civil War veterans did not participate in Manhattan’s Memorial Day observation. Brooklyn and Queens each had one G.A.R. veteran in the ranks. Spanish-American War veterans, doughboys from the First World War now well into middle age, and active duty servicepersons including WACS, WAVES, and SPARS were all represented.

La Guardia was on hand again at the Mitchel memorial on Memorial Day 1945. He had gotten his “aviator’s peace,” at least in Europe. By Memorial Day 1945 V-E Day had passed and everyone was waiting anxiously to see what would happen in the Pacific.

Re-lighting the lamps of civilization

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, WW1, WW2

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Adrian Graves, Sir Edward Grey’s great-great nephew, at the Sir Edward Grey and the Outbreak of the First World War conference in London, 7 November 2014

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously remarked on 3 August 1914 as Europe began going to war that the lamps were going out all over Europe and that “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” It sounds like a far-fetched thing to say, but Lord Grey was not far off. He died in September 1933, just after Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany began unraveling the tenuous peace that had existed for the previous fifteen years. I say all this because today, May 8, is the anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Churchill waves to crowds in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945

Edward Grey was just one of the many men who played a role in both wars, some of whom did and some of whom did not live to see the end of what amounted to Europe’s Second Thirty Year War. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration and later the four-term president, died on 12 April 1945. Hitler, a young enlisted man in the trenches of France before taking over in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and unstable Weimar government, committed suicide on 30 April 1945 as the Soviets were tightening their grip on Berlin. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty in the Great War until forced out for his role in the calamitous Gallipoli Campaign. He had a way of returning to the center of things and in the image above we see him on 8 May 1945, 73 years ago today, as the prime minister, seeing the lights finally come back on after so many–tens of millions–of people had died.

(images/top, Foreign and Commonwealth Office; bottom, Imperial War Museum)

Saturday morning coffee

05 Saturday May 2018

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Great War centennial

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Lewis Hine image of Cantigny battlefield, April 1919

I’m wrapping up my coffee before heading to work to teach my last bibliographic instruction class of the semester. A friend and I were looking at these Lewis Hine images that The Atlantic posted this week and I thought I would share on this weekend morning. Apparently the American Red Cross commissioned Hine to take these images as a means of drumming up support back home for the Red Cross’s important work attending the sick, the wounded, and the hungry. We actually used the one above in the film we made last fall. It is hard to believe that we are now almost four years into the Great War centennial. I suppose it is difficult to comprehend from an American perspective because we did not join the war until April 1917 and really did not become fully involved until Spring 1918. The Battle of Cantigny, where the First Infantry Division fought so tenaciously, was in May 1918. Hine took the photo above almost a full year later.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt sailed for Europe on January 1, 1919, around the time Hine was taking the images that The Atlantic published this week as part of a series over the course of the centennial. It was not the first time Eleanor or Franklin had been on the Continent. Now in their 30s, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and his wife were already well-traveled and had seen much of the world. Still, they were shocked at what they saw in those months after the Armistice. Eleanor wrote at the time that “I never saw anything like Paris. The scandals going on would make many a woman at home unhappy. It is not place for the boys [the impressionable doughboys], especially the younger ones . . . All the women in the restaurant look to me exaggerated, some pretty, all chic, but you wonder if any are ladies.”

Though given the subject matter I don’t know if one can “enjoy” the photographs, they are indeed poignant and striking. Here they are one more time.

(Image/Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress)

April 4, 1968

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, Those we remember, Woodrow Wilson

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Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in November 1983, fifteen years after King’s death.

I would be remiss if I did not pause and write a few words on this, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was less than a year old when he was killed in Memphis. Oddly however, the older I get the more events like this seem less like “history” and more like current events. Here in full-blown middle-age, my entire concept of time has evolved. When my father was alive he lived within a few hour’s drive from Memphis. I visited each summer I would usually borrow his car and take an overnight side trip to somewhere or other. More than once that place was Memphis. I visited the Lorraine Hotel, site of the King assassination and home today to the National Civil Rights Museum, more than once. Walking in the vicinity one could see the empty lots that were the results of the riots and, later, urban renewal. I have not been there now in many years, but I believe that gentrification is at last moving things along.

I remember when MLK Jr. Day became a holiday in the early 1980s. Again, at the time I thought his death was part of some ancient past, and yet the creation of the holiday was only fifteen years after the shooting. The evolution of the holiday itself has a convoluted history, one mired in national and even international events. A search of the New York Times digital archive from 1983 pulls up all kinds of articles about the unresolved issues of the Civil Rights Movement as well as commentary from TASS, the Soviet news agency, offering their cynical take on the drama of the holiday hanging in the balance. When King was assassinated the Tet Offensive was in its fifth week. Bobby Kennedy gave the eulogy for King and would himself be assassinated two months later. All that spring and summer there were riots and political upheaval across the United States, in Paris, Czechoslovakia, and Mexico City just before the Summer Olympics.

Viewed a certain way, King’s activities can be seen in the context of the World Wars. His assassination came just fifty years after Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, and twenty-seven years after FDR announced the Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union address. King knew these things. It is not an accident that the Civil Rights Movement here in the U.S., and Independence Movements around the world, developed how and when they did. One can’t help but think of things like Ho Chi Minh at Versailles after the Armistice pleading his case for an independent Vietnam. King was reluctant to speak publicly against Lyndon Johnson because of all the president had done for Civil Rights, but in the year before his assassination King’s denunciations of the war in Southeast Asia became increasingly strident. In the library where I work, over the past fifteen years, a colleague and I have been ordering the King Papers as they have incrementally released. The historiography on the release of someone’s correspondence is itself a fascinating genre. History is a humbling thing and the deeper one goes the more one sees the relationships between what are very complicated events.

(image/White House Photo Office)

FDR, 1882-1945

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Those we remember

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The desk Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept in the family’s East 65th Street townhouse

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this date in 1882. On these winter days I sometimes think of the coming summer, when among other things I usually make a day trip to Hyde Park. When I was there last summer I asked the ranger if the site does something every January 30 to commemorate the occasion of the only four term president’s birth. She said the library & museum hold a brief ceremony every year, often with a contingent from the West Point Band just down the Hudson on hand to play. She emphasized the brevity of the ceremony. The winds blowing cold off the river in late January make a longer event untenable.

The photograph of the desk you see above was not taken in Hyde Park. I took the photo this past November at the Roosevelt House on East 65th Street. I sent the image to a friend of mine the night I took this. He was shocked at how modest and unadorned the desk was. I explained that, for all the wealth the Roosevelts had, they tended toward Dutch restraint. Roosevelt once famously said while president that he did not want a memorial in his honor after his death to be any larger than his desk. They honored that request in the mid 1960s. That it took twenty years to build even such a modest edifice is testimony to how long these things take.

When we think of the Hudson River Roosevelts we think of Hyde Park and Washington. Over course there were the twelve White House years. Thirty years before then, during the First World War when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin and Eleanor rented a house from her Aunt Bamie just off Dupont Circle. Still the Manhattan home, with his mother Sara living next door in a detached townhouse, was very much the family domicile for large stretches throughout their lives. I kept the image above in my photo stream for the past 2 1/2 months waiting until this winter day to mark the 136th anniversary of FDR’s brith.

More “eyes” for the Navy

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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1917 poster produced by the Sackett & Wilhelms Corporation of New York for the Navy Department

In the final week of January 1918 the U.S. Navy Department sent out a request to all Americans to please send any binoculars, telescopes, spy glasses, sextants, and visual aids of similar nature to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt care of the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue. This was the second such plea put out by the Navy in the past two months. Binoculars were the most desired item on the wish list. Strictly speaking any items sent were to be loans not gifts; the Navy offered $1 for the use of any item for the duration of the war. The dollar was actually a technicality; government agencies were prohibited from taking possession of any goods without payment. Thousands of packages flooded in to the Observatory over the last five weeks of 1917 and first several weeks of 1918. Still, the need was so great that the Navy issued the second plea.

Apparently word got around too that some people were holding back because they were unsure of if/how/when they would ever receive their items returned. There were enough letters to the editor of various newspapers complaining of packages sent but not acknowledged that Roosevelt felt the need to draft a communiqué explaining that the Navy was doing all it could to address the backlog. He made clear too that, while all items would be duly tagged before being sent to ships, submarines, and lookout points, the Navy could not realistically be expected to return every item to its proper owner. Equipment can be lost or destroyed in time of war.

Unpacking binoculars and other visual aids at the Naval Observatory, 1918

The return of items was no small thing. One citizen noted that his binocular set cost $50, which is more than $1000 in today’s currency. One of the reasons the visual equipment was so expensive, and for the shortage itself, was because many of the premier manufacturers of such items were Swiss, German, French, or other European concerns. These makers were either now on the other side in the Great War; or, if the country of origin were an American ally, it was just logistically impossible for companies to send such things. Also, it was not uncommon during the war for manufacturers to retrofit their factories to produce different goods for the war effort. Thus the call from Roosevelt in late 1917 and early 1918.

(images/Library of Congress)

Merry Christmas

25 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.

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Merry Christmas, everyone. I saw this 1942 Christmas card from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and fell in love with it for so many reasons. Judging by his white suit and her white dress the image would have been taken in that summer of 1942, seventy-five years ago. Franklin and Eleanor spent the Great War years in Washington and now here they are back in the District of Columbia as President and First Lady with the world at war a second time. One can only imagine the burden. In this image they seem to be trying to project an air of calm and tranquility in a troubled world. The white card stock is perfect for the photograph of two solitary figures sitting in white clothes on a veranda of the White House. There is no clutter on the table. Visually the picture is in balance with the concise message in simple black lettering on the right. Note that the card wishes the beholder a “happier” New Year, a subtle but telling word choice. The Roosevelts’ Christmas card went out to about 400 individuals.

Enjoy your day, all.

(image/White House)

A small Christmas Eve detective story

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Roosevelt family, Christmas 1939

I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. I came across the image you see above, which appears to an official Roosevelt Family Christmas portrait. Here is the image as I found it on Wikimedia Commons. It is titled Christmas 1941. For a few minutes I could not put my finger on it, but I knew something was off. The caption at the bottom reads 25 December 2041, with someone adding an addendum noting that “This date is not correct.” That is obvious true but something was still off. At first I noticed the relaxed poses of everyone in the picture; remember, this would have been just a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even at Christmas, they would not have been so casual. The poses are a tip, but still just circumstantial.

After another minute or so I got it: that is Sara Roosevelt, Franklin’s mother, sitting next to Eleanor on the left. Sara died in September 1941, so for this Christmas photograph to have been from 1941 is obviously incorrect. So when was it? I then looked at the baby, not quite yet a toddler, seated to FDR’s left. That’s John Roosevelt Boettiger, standing on the lap of his mother Anna. An internet search informs us that John is Franklin and Eleanor’s grandson and that he was born in March 1939. A retired professor, he is still alive today. Here he is the center of attention. Everyone is looking at the little tyke. With Sara in the picture we know definitively that this is not 1941. For this photo to be taken in 1940 little John would have been well over 21 months old. That seems unlikely. 1939, when he would have been nine months, is a far better bet.  Sure enough, outtakes conclusively show that this Christmas family photograph was taken in 1939.

I found this image in several places where they get the date incorrect, which is inevitable but always a little dismaying. Were it not Christmas Eve, I would go into that more depth. The point in analyzing the image today is to have a little fun. Merry Christmas, all.

(image/National Archives)

December 8, 1941

08 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in Florida, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory

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December 8, 1941: President Franklin Roosevelt appears relaxed after the pressure of having just signed the declaration of war on Japan. When he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration Roosevelt had overseen the construction of several of the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor. Note Sam Rayburn third from the right, who maintains a serious visage.

About a decade ago during a trip to Florida to visit friends and relatives, I brought with me some then-recent New York Times clippings about the recovery following the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a complicated months-long operation similar in many ways to the cleanup at Ground Zero after 9/11. The reason I was carrying actual newspaper clippings, as opposed to sending links right after reading them online, was because I was bringing them for a friend’s father. This was an older fellow who like many of his generation was not plugged into the internet that much. I knew however that he would appreciate the articles. He was greatly interested in American history and was himself an Armed Service veteran who had served in the Air Force a few years after the Second World War. I gave them to him at a restaurant over dinner.

Longtime readers of the blog may remember when I used to post every year on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. As some may also remember, I said that I would stop doing that after last year’s 75th anniversary. Yesterday I waited all day for the moment when someone might finally mention Pearl Harbor. It eventually happened in a text message from my friend at about 5:00 pm. This quickly led to a back-and-forth of missives on memory and the meaning to be found in the past. As things go his father, the man for whom I had brought those clippings now a long time ago, died earlier this year. This is the first December since, well, the birth of my friend almost sixty years ago, that his father is not here for the two to commiserate on the significance of December 7, 1941. Needless to say, it made for an emotional and reflective Pearl Harbor anniversary for my friend.

(image/National Park Service)