Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn’t take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans’ responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.
Since his inauguration in 2009, President Obama has upheld FDR’s vision of America as a nation that keeps its word – a nation still committed to uphold the ‘four freedoms’ that President Roosevelt set down in the great Atlantic Charter of August 1941.
I learned the power of radio watching Eleanor Roosevelt do her show. I used to go up to Hyde Park and hold her papers. I was just a messenger, but it planted the bug of radio in me.
At some point, I stumbled across my two main protagonists: William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor of history picked by Roosevelt to be America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and Dodd’s comely and rather wild daughter, Martha, who at first was enthralled with the so-called Nazi revolution.
China not only fights for her own independence, but also for the liberation of every oppressed nation. For us, the Atlantic Charter and President Roosevelt’s proclamation of the Four Freedoms for all peoples are corner-stones of our fighting faith.
President Roosevelt’s leadership put the world on notice that the United States of America – with the freest, most dynamic economy the world had ever seen – was open for business.
I say let’s go back to a truer use of the word ‘freedom.’ Let’s start with President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. I would add the freedom to bargain collectively. Those freedoms are under attack today.
I would say that President Roosevelt probably was more intimately in touch with the press corps at the White House than President Truman was.
I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt’s, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans – but he was also a cold-blooded politician.
First lady has been a thankless position. Eleanor Roosevelt was brilliant and had strong views. She was criticized for her politics and for her appearance. Mrs. Roosevelt was attacked for being too involved in politics. Bess Truman was criticized for being uninvolved in politics.
My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.
