When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’
The CIO put up half a million dollars for Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign and provided him with an immense group of active labor workers who played a large part in the sweeping victory he won at the polls.
But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality.
My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I always liked Barbara Howar and admired her spunk. I know that she considered me – and Alice Roosevelt Longworth – an exception to her negative feelings about Washington widows and single women, whom she basically found dispensable.
The point about Roosevelt’s New Deal was that it was visionary – for the 1930s.
Roosevelt was determined to stop Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe. He thought they finally had an agreement on Poland. Before Roosevelt died, he realized that Stalin had broken his agreement.
The fact of the matter is it’s very reasonable to ask the wealthiest estates to pay their share. We did that since Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president.
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn’t have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps – all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.
Theodore Roosevelt, when he was out of office, he would do things to draw attention. But when you are president, you don’t need to shout. When you are in office, you are the story.
I am a Republican. I’m loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And I believe that my party, in some ways, has strayed from those principles, particularly on the issue of fiscal discipline.
When Roosevelt came along, I approved of his program, generally. I figured an economic system should work for people, not vice versa.
So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist anymore.
I am a registered Democrat who is determined to return my party to the proletarian principles of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.
Roosevelt’s strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
Reading Edmund Morris’s ‘Colonel Roosevelt’ is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.’
When women were excluded from New Deal programs, Eleanor Roosevelt fought to include them. Roosevelt was among a handful of leaders who realized the U.S. economy would not escape the depths of recession without the full contributions of women.
The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.
Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know… I think the President has a land protection record that’s second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.
When I got a chance, I went back and shared those experiences that were important to me. George Washington High, the campus at San Francisco State, and even back to Emerson Elementary school and Roosevelt Junior High. I was happy to do it, to go back and see if all the same teachers were there.
George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I think we have to be fair in saying at this point that neither Roosevelt nor Lewis realized the peril to which they were exposing both the unions and the country.
If war is the solution, why didn’t Roosevelt declare war on poverty?
This isn’t just about today, this about generations to come. And you’ve got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he’s done it.
My role models were Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt, and my major crush was J. Edgar Hoover.
Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn’t know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn’t have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that’s often nothing but.
Previous presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon.
They do not say Roosevelt saved our system. They say he has given us a new one. That is logical.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.
If Obama’s vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
I was very careful to send Mr. Roosevelt every few days a statement of our casualties. I tried to keep before him all the time the casualty results because you get hardened to these things and you have to be very careful to keep them always in the forefront of your mind.
Roosevelt’s New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all.
Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.
Teddy Roosevelt… once said, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Jimmy Carter wants to speak loudly and carry a fly swatter.
It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.
A line from one of my 1997 columns – ‘Do one thing every day that scares you’ – is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don’t believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.
I used to be with a publishing house called Roosevelt Music. A gentleman there told me he had seen Peggy Lee perform Fever in Las Vegas and I found out later she wanted to record it.
There are some patriotic citizens who sincerely hope that America will win the war – but they also hope that Russia will lose it; and there are some who hope that America will win the war, but that England will lose it; and there are some who hope that America will win the war, but that Roosevelt will lose it.
When I began work on my first book, ‘The River of Doubt,’ which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.
My parents were admirers of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their parents and most of our relatives and neighbors were Republicans, so they were self-conscious in their liberalism and took it as emblematic of their ability to think for themselves.
The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!
I have always had a great deal of respect and admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a true humanitarian and champion of Women’s Rights and Civil Rights.
Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.
Most people today don’t feel that Barack Obama is on our side. We sense he’s incapable of doing what Roosevelt did, of loving his country so much that he was willing to run great risks in order to advance its cause, to free others from a new Dark Age – and protect our own liberty in the process.
Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance to those who have much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. This reconciliation package fails that test as well.
You can never study Franklin Delano Roosevelt too much.
A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
