Category Archives: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Happy Easter

21 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington's Mount Vernon, Monuments and Statuary, Washington, D.C.

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Contralto Marian Anderson performed at the Lincoln Memorial on 9 April 1939, Easter Sunday, after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, among others, stepped in. Those on the improvised stage included Ickes, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., U.S. Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr. (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley (D-KY), and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

Happy Easter, everyone. We’re out the door in a few minutes here to go to Mount Vernon.

It has turned into a beautiful weekend here in the Washington D.C. area after the hard rain and tornado that touched down in our vicinity Friday night. Yesterday I ventured to the National Portrait Gallery, one of my favorite cultural institutions. They had a stunning painting of “negro contralto,” as she was called in her time, Marian Anderson. Seeing the portrait reminded me that Ms. Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial was Easter Sunday 1939. Someone at the Portrait Gallery knew what they were doing; adjacent to her likeness was one of Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped arrange Ms. Anderson’s appearance on the National Mall after a local high school and the Daughters of the American Revolution both turned the singer’s representatives down.

Constitution Hall itself dated back a decade. First Lady Grace Coolidge used the same trowel that George Washington used to lay the cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol in 1793. Her successor, First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, opened DAR Constitution Hall when it opened a year later on April 19, 1929, ninety years ago this week. Now, ten years later, the organization was embroiled in controversy for turning Anderson away. That’s when Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes stepped in. Terrible as the episode was it was just as well in one respect: Constitution Hall has a capacity of 3,702, and the high school that turned her away only 1,000; a crowd of 75,000 turned out to see Ms. Anderson when she took the stage at 5:00 pm. Millions more listened on their radios.

An Easter performance at the Lincoln Memorial was appropriate, even poetic, for another reason: Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on Good Friday 1865, something that more Americans would have realized in 1939 than probably do today. The Sunday after his mortal wounding was Easter Sunday, and religious leaders throughout the Union states worked his death and apotheosis as our nation’s secular saint into their Easter sermons.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

Sunday morning coffee

14 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, Margaret "Daisy" Suckley

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Franklin Roosevelt’s longtime friend Margaret Suckley took this image of the president in early April 1945 at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. Accompanying him there as well in his final days was Lucy Mercer Rutherford, with whom he had had an affair in the 1910s.

I hope everyone spring is going well. I made the mistake of wearing a flannel shirt when I went into the city yesterday; it was by far the warmest day of the year so far and I was sweating profusely by the time I returned home. I suppose it’s time to put the heavier stuff away. Here is an image taken seventy-four Aprils ago when the weather was turning warm. Margaret “Daisy” Suckley took this photograph of President Roosevelt at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia days before his death. Roosevelt and his entourage–sans Eleanor, who remained in Washington–had arrived in Georgia in the last days of March just before Easter, which fell on April 1. Roosevelt essentially had gone to Warm Springs to die and surrounded himself with many of the people who meant the most to him, including Lucy Mercer Rutherford, the woman with whom he had had an affair during the First World War.

It is interesting how Roosevelt surrounded himself with a coterie of women who remained loyal to him for much of his life. Certainly he and Eleanor loved and remained loyal to each other in a complicated way that only they themselves could understand, if even they themselves did understand. Who among us can say they comprehend their own marriage, let alone what happens behind others’ closed doors? A reason she probably stayed in Washington was a sense that either the president or first lady should remain in the capitol with the war and so much else going on.

There in Warm Springs that long-ago April Roosevelt was surrounded in his final days by a woman he loved (Mercer) and a woman who loved him (Suckley). It was a complicated set of circumstances, not least because Roosevelt was aided in the whole thing by his daughter Anna.

(image/FDR Presidential Library)

Robert Moses vs President and First Lady Roosevelt

05 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Governors Island, Herbert H. Lehman, Robert Moses

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A model of Robert Moses’s unrealized Brooklyn-Battery Bridge

One of the biggest myths about Robert Moses is that he was so powerful that he managed to build whatever he wanted wherever he desired. In reality nothing could have been further from the truth; Moses worked within political and economic realities and more often than not had to change his plans to satisfy elected officials, citizens, insurance companies, and other stakeholders. One project dear to his heart was the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. If you have never heard of it, that’s because it never got built. The bridge would have gone fro the Manhattan Battery to Brooklyn Heights.

It almost happened. Moses pushed the initiative through the myriad city agencies and managed to get Governor Herbert H. Lehman signed off on the measure. It took none other than President Franklin Roosevelt to quash the deal. It was a personal thing with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; they were New Yorkers who owned a house on East 65th Street, Franklin was briefly a Wall Street lawyer, and their Roosevelt ancestors had roots in the city dating back to the mid-seventeenth century.

Eighty years ago today, writing from far off Seattle in her April 5, 1939 “My Day” column, Eleanor wrote obliquely of Moses and his proposed bridge:

“I have a plea from a man who is deeply interested in Manhattan Island, particularly in the beauty of the approach from the ocean at Battery Park. He tells me that a New York official who is, without doubt, always efficient, is proposing a bridge 100 feet high at the river, which will go across to the Whitehall Building over Battery Park. This, he says, will mean a screen of elevated roadways, pillars, etc., at that particular point. I haven’t a question that this will be done in the name of progress, and something undoubtedly needs to be done. But isn’t there room for some considereation of the preservation of the few beautiful spots that still remain to us on an overcrowded island? After all, lower Manhattan at Battery Park is one of the gateways through which many of us leave and enter our country. These moments are important moments in our lives and the irritation of an eyesore perpetrated in the name of progress will be bad for the souls of many Americans.”

If you look at the rendering above, you see that the proposed bridge would have cut through the harbor directly north of Governors Island, still a major headquarters of the U.S. Army. Further north, in the East River, was the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Besides ruining the beautiful views Mrs. Roosevelt speaks of, there were national security implications. And that was how the president and his Secretary of War, Harry H. Woodring, killed the thing, declaring the harbor too important for national security interests to have such a bridge cross through it. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was built instead.

(image/New York Preservation Archive Project)

 

The Marshall Plan turns 71

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Dean Acheson, Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman, Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill), WW2

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President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall shake hands as the chief executive sees Marshall off on the secretary’s way to the London Conference of Foreign Ministers on 20 November 1947. Marshall had given his Harvard commencement speech advocating aid for Europe five months previously and Truman would sign the bill creating the Marshall Plan five months later.

President Harry S. Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act on this date in 1948. Better known as the Marshall Plan after the Secretary of State who helped bring it to fruition, the initiative was one of the great successes of the Cold War. In April 1948 Europe was entering its fourth spring of peace, such as peace was; if you were living in Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe, or many other locales at the time you might have seen things differently. The most immediate crisis after V-E Day was relocating displaced persons and feeding the starving. Much of the latter task fell to Fiorello H. La Guardia, the former mayor of New York City who took the job of Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in spring 1946 and worked his characteristically indefatigable schedule for nine brutal months until resigning in poor health and passing on in September 1947.

Great as the work of La Guardia and his staff of almost 25,000 workers was, it was apparent that their endeavors were insufficient on their own and that a longer term strategy was necessary. On 5 June 1947, now two full years after the war’s end, Secretary of State George Marshall gave the Harvard University commencement address in which he laid out the case for an assistance plan to aid Europe. He called for a policy not to aid any particular country per se but a policy “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos” more generally. The Soviets themselves could have participated had they wished. Events moved quickly after that, with bipartisan support coming from both houses of Congress. The bill passed 69-17 in the Senate and 329-74 in the House. All that was left was for Truman to sign the measure into law on 3 April 1948.

People often take initiatives such as the Marshall Plan for granted, in large part because they were conceived so well and executed so efficiently that we take their benefits for granted. Men like Truman, Marshall, Dean Acheson, and the late Franklin Roosevelt understood the mistakes of the First World War. They had seen the Bonus Army in Washington and the rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe. That is why they created such measures as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill) and Economic Recovery Act (Marshall Plan). We would do well to remember just how difficult it is to execute good policy. It is extraordinarily difficult to solve problems well, and all too easy to undo good diplomacy through arrogance, carelessness, and ignorance.

(image/National Archives and Records Administration)

 

Sunday morning coffee

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Beatles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Style, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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A First Army field jacket seen at Brooklyn Flea, March 2019

I hope everyone’s week was good. Blogging will continue to be light in the coming days while the semester is in full swing. There is just so much going on. Yesterday I began Eric Rauchway’s new book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt and the First Clash Over the New Deal, which is about the four month interregnum between the November 1932 election and March 1933 inaugural. Almost fifteen years ago now I read Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America for a class on the Gilded Age with David Nasaw. I’m only about fifty pages in but the tone so far is very harsh toward Hoover. I’ll come back to it with more observations when I finish the book.

I was at Brooklyn Flea across the street from the Barclays Center yesterday, where I bough a small leather wallet and a pair of cuff links. I’m transitioning to wearing suits more and am making French cuff shirts part of my arsenal. I have three suits now and intend to get a solid grey worsted or flannel number over the summer in time for the fall semester. All in due time.

When I was at the flea market yesterday I saw what I though might be a pasteover Beatles Butcher cover. I don’t own any vinyl, nor do I plan on going down that rabbit hole, but when I saw a copy of Yesterday and Today in a bin I had to stop and look. The anodyne trunk photograph was pasted on, which led me to think it might have been a second state copy. I mentioned it to the vendor, telling him what he may have on his hands, and even got him to take a picture of me with the album cover. When I got home I examined the photo while reading online about ways to tell if a record is indeed a Butcher second state. (First and third state versions are obvious.) To make a long story short it was not a Butcher cover, and the giveaway was right there even though I was unaware of it in the moment: the copy I saw had an RIAA Gold Record seal, an indicator that this was a later pressing. And that was the end of that.

I did see and photograph the First Army field jacket you see above. Even had it been in my size I would not have purchased the coat. Putting it mildly, it is bad form to wear military gear with patches if one has not served with said unit. Seeing it though was something special. I always wonder when I encounter such things in second-hand places how they got where they did. Who owned it and where & when did he serve? Two years ago I bought a heavy winter coat, made in England many decades ago, in a thrift store in Pompano Beach. It is entirely speculation on my part but I can surmise that the double-breasted, full-length coat once belonged to a retiree who brought the piece down with him from the Northeast only to bring it to Goodwill upon realizing he would never need it in sub-tropical Florida. I think of him and who he might have been every time I put it on, and try to live up to his legacy.

La Guardia & FDR, October 1936

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, New Deal, Robert Moses

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Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt break ground on the “tube” connecting Manhattan and Queens one month prior to the 1936 national election. Members of Local 184 made Roosevelt an honorary member during the ceremony. After this long day, Roosevelt traveled north of the city to his home in Hyde Park. New Deal funds totaling $58,000,000 in 1930s dollars went into building the tunnel, which opened one month ahead of schedule in October 1940. Roosevelt was the first to drive across.

I wish the image quality were higher but there is surprisingly little documentation of this historical moment. Here we see Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and President Roosevelt at the groundbreaking for what we now call the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. The photograph is from the 3 October 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the day after the groundbreaking. I was not aware until I began co-teaching this course in January of the size and scope of the infrastructure projects built in New York City under the New Deal. Of course I was aware of such efforts as refurbishing Civil War battlefields, tidying parks, planting trees, building small-scale restrooms and picnic areas along byways. But large scale infrastructure is something on a whole other magnitude.

Municipal leaders outside Gotham believed the fix was in between Roosevelt and La Guardia. That is understandable given that Roosevelt had previously been the governor of New York and that he and Eleanor still owned a house on East 65th Street. The reality though was that New York City and State entered the New Deal process earlier than most locales because men like Herbert Lehman, Robert Moses, and Fiorello La Guardia were ready from the outset with plans. As the 1930s went on other municipalities caught up in real dollars.

This image we see here, grainy as it is, was taken about one month prior to the 1936 national campaign in which Roosevelt ran for re-election against Al Landon. La Guardia was a Progressive Republican supporting Roosevelt. Both men understood the power of publicity and the photo op. Roosevelt’s radio address was broadcast nationally. More than 100,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, turned out on 2 October 1936 to see Roosevelt speak, Mayor La Guardia, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and Senator Robert F. Wagner also sharing the stage. (Earlier the same day this photo was taken La Guardia and Roosevelt together attended Game 2 of the Yankees-Giants World Series at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, a game the Yankees won 18-4.) While many did not realize it at the time–though given his political instincts Roosevelt almost certainly did–the 1936 presidential election sealed the coalition of conservative white Southern Democrats, blue collar trade unionists, rural populists, African-Americans, and ethnic voters that largely held together until the tumult of the 1960s.

Snow day

04 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert Moses

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What is one to do when arriving at work and finding it closed for a snow day? Go to Panera Bread and get a little reading and work done.

This was me at 8:45 this morning after I got to work and discovered that my college was closed for the day.

When I arrived I pulled on the door to find it locked; then, I went around the corner to another entrance where the special officer told me of the snow day and closing. At first I was irritated with myself while retracing my steps down the street. So I went to Panera Bread, where I had a coffee and did some class work for 75 minutes before going to Trader Joe’s and stocking up on some things. The book here is Mason B. Williams’s City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York. As the title suggests the book examines the relationship between the American president and New York City mayor during the Great Depression and Second World War. I am about 1/3 of the way through and it is becoming one of those books that takes me in a different direction.

Co-teaching this course with its focus on Robert Moses over the Spring term has been a revelation; there are so many threads to pursue and I am learning something new literally every day.

Sunday morning coffee

24 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, New York City

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A young girl’s poem written in winter 1939 in anticipation of the coming spring and opening of the World’s Fair. The poem appeared in the 21 February 1939 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

I hope everyone’s weekend has been good. Yesterday afternoon I tried to see They Shall Not Grow Old at a theater in Brooklyn but alas it was sold out. The man at the counter told me today’s one showing would also likely fill up, so I bought a ticket for this afternoon’s showing. I’ve spent the morning continuing with this week’s lesson plans. Among other things I intend to focus much on the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Queens. Basically it was two fairs, one in 1939 focusing on an optimistic “world of tomorrow” and another in 1940 that played out after the German and Soviet invasion of Poland and onset of the Second World War. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle dedicated a great deal of space to the fair in the lead-up to its opening on 30 April 1939 when President Roosevelt gave the dedication address. That coverage included things like this poem we read above.

Unscaffolding the Trylon and Perisphere

23 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, New York City, Robert Moses

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A 1939 World’s Fair guide shows off the Trylon and Perisphere after the scaffolding came down, February 22, 1939

I don’t have much to add but wanted to share this photograph I discovered this morning while preparing for next week’s classes. Here we see a young woman standing before the Trylon and Perisphere after the remainder of their scaffolding was taken off on 22 February 1939. The World’s Fair coincided with the sesquicentennial of George Washington’s First Inaugural; President Roosevelt opened the Fair on 30 April, 150 years to the day after Washington took the oath of office in Lower Manhattan at Federal Hall. In winter 1939 Robert Moses’s crews were working long shifts to prepare the fair grounds in Queens in time to ensure the event opened on time come spring. Presumably they took the scaffolding off on Washington’s Birthday intentionally to promote the upcoming fair and emphasize the tie-in to the first president.

(image/Associated Press)

Madame Chiang-Kai-shek’s 1943 charm offensive

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington's Mount Vernon, WW2

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Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt host Madame Chiang-Kai-shek at Mount Vernon on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1943. The worldly, charming, and politically shrewd wife of the leader of the Chinese Nationalists was on a good will tour of the United States, officially to gain support for the war effort against the Japanese but also, more surreptitiously, for the Nationalist struggle against Mao’s Communists.

Here is an extraordinary moment in twentieth century.  The image depicts Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt with Madame Chiang Kai-shek at George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon on February 22, 1943, seventy-six years ago today. As early as 1943–more than fifteen months before the invasion of Normandy, five months before the Allied offensive on Sicily, with North Africa hanging in the balance and the Japanese still largely in control of the Pacific–President Roosevelt was already thinking of what a post-Second World War world might look like. Roosevelt believed that China would become one of the world’s Great Powers in the years immediately after the war. This was not an unreasonably assumption; then and now China was the world’s most populous nation. That alone made that nation a potent force. Roosevelt had nonetheless convinced himself that he was something of a China expert, basing his belief on the Delano family’s ties to the country dating back nearly a century. His grandfather had been active in what was euphemistically called the China Trade, which in addition to legitimate business activity essentially meant the sale of opium.

Roosevelt’s naïveté led to some unfortunate policy choices but one might forgive the president for his views on China, whose internal and external politics were exceedingly complicated. For one thing the Japanese had committed human rights violations there on an unprecedented scale. The Rape of Nanking, human experiments, and the imposition of slave labor were just some of their depredations. It is no wonder that President Roosevelt extended Lend-Lease aid to China to the extent that he did. Complicating it all however was the internal struggle between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. That was the real struggle playing out there. And that is the reason Madame Chiang Kai-shek visited the United States in early 1943. On February 18 she addressed a joint session of Congress, becoming the first Chinese person and first-ever woman ever to do so. Four days later this photo was taken on George Washington’s birthday at his Mount Vernon tomb, where she placed a wreath at Washington’s tomb.

Six years after this photo was taken Mao’s forces won the Civil War against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Roosevelt by that time had been gone for almost five years. Chiang Kai-shek lived until 1975 and his widow lived to be 106. She died in New York City in 2003.

(image/Mount Vernon)