Hail to the Chiefs Part XXXIIA: FDR the Early Years to the Depression
This is the blog entry that was over 25 years in the making. When I was about 8 my mom took me to see a movie called "The Journey of Natty Gann." The movie takes place in 1935. On the way home, I asked my mother about why most of the people in the movie did not have jobs. This gave my mother the unenviable task of trying to explain one of the most complicated economic disasters in history....to an 8 year old! She made a valiant attempt, but I wasn't satisfied.
In 4th grade, in the Gifted and Talented program, two of my friends and I had the opportunity to spend the bulk of the year doing a project on the topic of our choice. I suggested the Great Depression. To my surprise, the other two agreed. This was essentially my first research project, and the teacher did an excellent job of walking us through it. We interviewed people that had been children during the Great Depression, including talking to our grandparents. We also went to the library and looked at microfilms of newspapers from the era.
Over the years, I've still found the 1930's to be one of the more fascinating parts of U.S. History. I especially love the way the culture was affected by the times.....the music of Woody Guthrie, the unique brand of comedy, the artwork.....and of course, the political savvy it took to hold the country together when it seemed like democracy was doomed, and the two options were communism or fascism.
Initially when I started researching FDR for this president series, I was expecting to do a lot of mythbusting. While there will be some of that happening....like with Lincoln I found myself getting sucked in by the charisma and the skill. I am just a sucker for the gamechanger presidents. With three full terms and some change, I thought FDR merited more than one entry. In this one, I will focus on his early life, and the New Deal aspect of his presidency. In the next one I'll focus more on World War II. Also, as always with the major presidents, I'm going to include a reading list at the end as this is a president....and a first lady....that is worth looking into in more depth.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park New York on January 30, 1882 to James Roosevelt, and his second wife Sara Delano Roosevelt. He had an older half-brother named, I kid you not, James Roosevelt Roosevelt....or "Rosey." However as Rosie was roughly the same age as Sara Delano....Franklin was pretty much raised as an only child. Pretty early on in Franklin's childhood his father developed serious problems with his heart. Franklin was warned not to put any stress on his father....a.k.a......stress your dad out and you could kill him. With the combination of that, and his domineering mother, Franklin learned pretty quickly how to be very charming and pleasant.....and how to keep his real feelings to himself.
Most of FDR's early education was at home, or during their frequent trips to Europe. For high school, however, he went to Groton, a common boarding school for the privileged. This was FDR's first time being at school full time with his peers. While, of course, in his letters home he put on a brave face.....he was totally miserable, and never really fit in. His grades weren't anything special either. Although he did find the headmaster, Endicott Peabody, to be a huge influence on his later life, with his emphasis on the importance of public service.
After Groton, FDR went to Harvard. In this part of his life he became reacquainted with his distant cousin, and niece of the president, Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor, who had many social work projects in the tenements of New York City, would bring Franklin along. This was his first exposure to major poverty, and he was shocked. He also found Eleanor fascinating. On Eleanor's part.....as one who had a good-looking, charismatic, emotionally-unavailable father......doesn't take much effort to see why she was drawn to Franklin. The family did not approve. Sara.....well Sara wasn't going to be happy with anyone. As for Eleanor's relatives, they thought of Franklin was a "featherduster"....superficial. They married anyway. President Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away.....and stole the show.
FDR went to law school in Columbia, but dropped out once he passed the bar exam. He was never overly enthused about his legal practice, though. He also got involved in business ventures here and there that never turned out very well. But he was never hurting for money thanks to his trustfund.....which was controlled by his mother.
Politics were always his real passion. In 1910 FDR won his first election as state senator in New York. In 1912, right when the re-election campaign was heating up, FDR came down with typhoid. The campaign looked doomed. However, FDR sent out one of his best buds, the journalist and political strategist Louis Howe, to campaign on his behalf. It worked. One of FDR's friends commented "When a bull-moose and an elephant are both outrun by a man sick-a-bed it would seem 'Manifest Destiny.'"
Soon after that, in 1913, following in cousin Theodore's footsteps, he was asked to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy. FDR hired his friend Louis Howe to be his assistant. FDR was 6'3", lanky, and well-dressed. Howe was short and slovenly. FDR's son Elliot said when he would see them walking to work together everyday, "The two of them looked uncannily like Don Quixote and Sancho setting out to battle with giants." This experience with the Navy during the first World War would later serve him well during the second one.
During this period of time, it meant long hours at the office. One summer Eleanor and the family were up at their summer home in Campobello, while FDR stayed behind in Washington with their social secretary, Lucy Mercer. One thing led to another....and later Eleanor would discover a packet of love letters to FDR from Lucy. Initially, Eleanor offered Franklin a divorce. However Sara would have none of it. Sara pointed out that a divorce would wreck his family, ruin his political career....and she'd cut him off financially. So, the marriage continued. However this was the point when FDR and Eleanor stopped being husband and wife, and began a different sort of partnership. This was also when Eleanor decided to stop trying to be the traditional wife and mother, and started taking on her own projects....and becoming the dynamo we remember today.
In 1920, at age 38, FDR ran as the vice-presidential candidate with James Cox. It was a major defeat, but it put FDR on the map as a national political figure.
Then in the summer of 1921, after a political publicity trip to a boy scout camp, FDR came down with a virus. At the time it was believed to be polio, although some today believe it was Guillain-Barre syndrome. Regardless, FDR was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Traditionally at that time, family members with disabilities would be hidden away in a backroom. That was the route Sara wanted to take. She wanted to take FDR back to Hyde Park and care for him....where he'd have the life of an invalid. FDR wanted none of it, and neither did Eleanor.
Initially, FDR reacted by buying a houseboat, and hanging out in Florida to get away from the whole family. He spent the time hanging out with his friends, fishing....and probably a good chunk of time just being depressed. Eventually, he got over his despair and was motivated by wanting to walk again.
He went to Warm Springs, Georgia as he'd heard the hot springs there had curative effects on polio victims. While he did not find a cure for his legs....the place energized him. He bought the resort he was at, and it became a rehabilitation center that is still in use today. He started making inventions so he could be more independent, including revamping a car so that he could drive it just using his hands. (Apparently he was quite the speed demon.) He also loved being around the people of the community....and found it an eye-opening experience to see firsthand the poverty in that part of rural Georgia.
Meanwhile, Louis Howe was coaching Eleanor in public speaking, so she could keep FDR's name alive in the public sphere. She claimed she was just doing the speeches for him....but really, she loved it.
In 1928 FDR was asked to give the nominating speech for Al Smith at the Democratic Convention. He had built up tremendous upper body strength and worked out a technique by using leg braces, a can, and leaning heavily on his son Elliot, to give the illusion that he was actually walking. It was tremendously strenuous, but both FDR and Elliot worked together to make it look effortless. That famous gesture of FDR's of throwing back his head and grinning, was largely to draw attention away from his body. In later years, when FDR met Orson Welles he remarked that they were the "two best actors in America." When Al Smith was asked whether he was worried that he had just enabled a major political rival, Smith shrugged it off insisting "He'll be dead within a year."
FDR then accepted the nomination for governor of New York, which he won. Not long after was the stock market crash. This gave FDR a chance to experiment on a state level, what would later become the New Deal. In one of his earlier fireside chats, he commented "Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try SOMETHING."
The whole optimistic "Happy Days Are Here Again" attitude made a sharp contrast to President Hoover. In the 1932 presidential election FDR won by a landslide. However, on the evening of his victory, the man who would soon tell the nation they had nothing to fear but fear itself, confided in his son his own fears: "All my life I have been afraid of only one thing: fire. Tonight I think I'm afraid of something else...I'm afraid I may not have the strength to do the job."
Then there was the 4 months of awkwardness. FDR would not talk to the press about his plans for the administration, nor would he cooperate with the lame-duck Hoover administration. This meant 4 months for the situation to grow more dire. It was for situations like this that the 20th amendment was already on its way to being ratified. 1933 would be the last presidential inauguration in March. From then on, it would be in January.
The other event of note during the interegnum was when FDR was giving a speech in Miami that February. From the crowd, Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots. Mayor Anton Cermak was fatally wounded, but FDR was not hit. This is probably because when bystander Lillian Cross saw Zangara with the gun, she hit Zangara's arm with her handbag. FDR went to the hospital to visit Cermak and the other shooting victims. The secret service men were blown away at how throughout the whole thing, FDR was cool as a cucumber.
After the inauguration, the famous first 100 days started. Now while it is true that an amazing amount of legislation got passed, it should be noted that some of it was actually started during Hoover's administration....and Congress refused to follow through until Roosevelt was inaugurated. One thing FDR did right away that helped immensely, was lie through his teeth that he had the bank situation taken care of. He didn't....but the fact that the people were reassured, and willing to use banks again, helped take care of the banking crisis.
FDR was also a contrast to Hoover when the World War I veterans came to demonstrate for their pensions. Hoover had sent Douglas MacArthur out with the military to finish off the demonstration. FDR sent out Eleanor with sandwiches, and she chatted with the veterans about World War I. Eleanor proved to be vital for the administration. She was constantly running all over the country, usually in the most poverty-stricken areas, to both bring attention to the press what was happening in the nation, and also to keep FDR well-informed. She was also a good litmus test of just how far FDR could push his policies. If Eleanor would state an opinion that didn't go over well with the general public, FDR would shrug it off and make a comment about how he and Eleanor didn't agree on everything.
Thus the "alphabet soup" of government associations were put into action. There was the TVA, (Tennessee Valley Authority) for getting electricity into rural areas. There was the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) for Wall Street regulation. The first person to head that department was notorious speculator Joseph Kennedy because, according to FDR, "It takes a thief to catch a thief." (I'll be talking a LOT more about Joe Kennedy later....) It was the beginning of the FDIC to regulate banks, and Social Security....and a whole laundry list of others. A lot of wealthier Americans viewed the New Deal as evidence that FDR was traitor to his class. However he earned the lifelong loyalty of many working class Americans. My Granny who, by what she actually believed, really should have been a Reagan Republican, was a loyal Democrat partly because "FDR was there for us when nobody else was."
One of the myths about the New Deal was that it ended the Depression. It did no such thing. The jobs that were provided helped alleviate the symptoms. When FDR tried to cut some of the programs in 1937 to balance the budget, the economy went right downhill again, it the situation was dubbed the "Roosevelt Recession." Ultimately what ended the Great Depression once and for all was World War II. So if you want to give one person credit for ending the Depression, it would be Adolf Hitler. But we'll talk about him in my next blog entry.
Besides the bubble bursting in the stock market, there was an economic and environmental crisis happening in in the Great Plains....in a region of that area that was dubbed "No Man's Land." The area that used to be the home where the buffalo would roam......was divvied up into homesteads. Because of the unusually rainy weather in the 1920's, people got an unrealistic idea on how much wheat they could grow. Then in the 30's a vicious cycle started. Prices of wheat plummeted....so the farmers grew more so they could get more money....so the prices fell.....the combo of the overfarming, and then the drought....did a number on the landscape. The dust storms began.
I didn't realize the scope of the dust storms until I read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan. (Which I would highly recommend.) When I picture dust storms, I usually would picture the set of "The Grapes of Wrath"....and picture a dust storm about the size of a typical thunderstorm or blizzard. But no...these puppies were HUGE. There were a couple that were a couple of miles high, and hundreds of miles wide, that made their way out of the Dust Bowl, all the way to New York City and D.C. One advocate for the region got the apathetic senators to go for his cause when the dust storm started happening right outside the Capitol as he spoke.
For Roosevelt, this gave him the opportunity to try and make some changes to repair the environment. His vision was a line of trees from Nebraska to the Mexican border. Which actually wasn't a bad idea, but as soon as the rain started again in the 40's, a lot of people abandoned the conservation plans. Nonetheless, whereas Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to focus on environmentalist in terms of setting aside national parks and reserves.....Franklin's focus was restoration to the parts of the land that WERE inhabited.
So once again, of course, that barely scratched the surface....so here's the reading list I used for this blog entry.
"The Worst Hard Time" - Timothy Egan - once again, can't recommend it strongly enough. Besides being very informative, it's a compelling narrative. You want to find out what happens to the families in it.
"The Great Depression: A Diary" - Daniel B. Roth I'd especially recommend this for my conservative friends, or for people who want to hear the perspective of an American in the 30's that wasn't voting for Roosevelt. It is the diary of a lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio who was following the economy to see what he could learn from it. It gets a bit dry at times, but I found it interesting the perspective of an employed professional in the 30's....different than the usual takes on the era.
"FDR" - Jean Edward Smith - Thorough, readable....although sometimes it errs on the rose-colored glasses perspective a bit.
"Kennedy and Roosevelt " - Michael R. Beschloss This is about Joseph Kennedy's interactions with FDR. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one. I think the Joseph Kennedy biography "Founding Father" by Joseph Whalen covers it better.
American Experience - DVD's on FDR and Eleanor
For pop culture references.....this time around we're back to "Annie." First off, "New Deal For Christmas".....which I especially love because how many times are you going to have a Christmas song that lists off the members of the Cabinet?
This second one is also from Annie. First off, I like this clip because it was probably my first exposure to FDR even being mentioned. I was 5 when this movie came out, and I watched it repeatedly. The FDR part starts at 8:30 on this clip.
In 4th grade, in the Gifted and Talented program, two of my friends and I had the opportunity to spend the bulk of the year doing a project on the topic of our choice. I suggested the Great Depression. To my surprise, the other two agreed. This was essentially my first research project, and the teacher did an excellent job of walking us through it. We interviewed people that had been children during the Great Depression, including talking to our grandparents. We also went to the library and looked at microfilms of newspapers from the era.
Over the years, I've still found the 1930's to be one of the more fascinating parts of U.S. History. I especially love the way the culture was affected by the times.....the music of Woody Guthrie, the unique brand of comedy, the artwork.....and of course, the political savvy it took to hold the country together when it seemed like democracy was doomed, and the two options were communism or fascism.
Initially when I started researching FDR for this president series, I was expecting to do a lot of mythbusting. While there will be some of that happening....like with Lincoln I found myself getting sucked in by the charisma and the skill. I am just a sucker for the gamechanger presidents. With three full terms and some change, I thought FDR merited more than one entry. In this one, I will focus on his early life, and the New Deal aspect of his presidency. In the next one I'll focus more on World War II. Also, as always with the major presidents, I'm going to include a reading list at the end as this is a president....and a first lady....that is worth looking into in more depth.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park New York on January 30, 1882 to James Roosevelt, and his second wife Sara Delano Roosevelt. He had an older half-brother named, I kid you not, James Roosevelt Roosevelt....or "Rosey." However as Rosie was roughly the same age as Sara Delano....Franklin was pretty much raised as an only child. Pretty early on in Franklin's childhood his father developed serious problems with his heart. Franklin was warned not to put any stress on his father....a.k.a......stress your dad out and you could kill him. With the combination of that, and his domineering mother, Franklin learned pretty quickly how to be very charming and pleasant.....and how to keep his real feelings to himself.
Most of FDR's early education was at home, or during their frequent trips to Europe. For high school, however, he went to Groton, a common boarding school for the privileged. This was FDR's first time being at school full time with his peers. While, of course, in his letters home he put on a brave face.....he was totally miserable, and never really fit in. His grades weren't anything special either. Although he did find the headmaster, Endicott Peabody, to be a huge influence on his later life, with his emphasis on the importance of public service.
After Groton, FDR went to Harvard. In this part of his life he became reacquainted with his distant cousin, and niece of the president, Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor, who had many social work projects in the tenements of New York City, would bring Franklin along. This was his first exposure to major poverty, and he was shocked. He also found Eleanor fascinating. On Eleanor's part.....as one who had a good-looking, charismatic, emotionally-unavailable father......doesn't take much effort to see why she was drawn to Franklin. The family did not approve. Sara.....well Sara wasn't going to be happy with anyone. As for Eleanor's relatives, they thought of Franklin was a "featherduster"....superficial. They married anyway. President Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away.....and stole the show.
FDR went to law school in Columbia, but dropped out once he passed the bar exam. He was never overly enthused about his legal practice, though. He also got involved in business ventures here and there that never turned out very well. But he was never hurting for money thanks to his trustfund.....which was controlled by his mother.
Politics were always his real passion. In 1910 FDR won his first election as state senator in New York. In 1912, right when the re-election campaign was heating up, FDR came down with typhoid. The campaign looked doomed. However, FDR sent out one of his best buds, the journalist and political strategist Louis Howe, to campaign on his behalf. It worked. One of FDR's friends commented "When a bull-moose and an elephant are both outrun by a man sick-a-bed it would seem 'Manifest Destiny.'"
Soon after that, in 1913, following in cousin Theodore's footsteps, he was asked to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy. FDR hired his friend Louis Howe to be his assistant. FDR was 6'3", lanky, and well-dressed. Howe was short and slovenly. FDR's son Elliot said when he would see them walking to work together everyday, "The two of them looked uncannily like Don Quixote and Sancho setting out to battle with giants." This experience with the Navy during the first World War would later serve him well during the second one.
During this period of time, it meant long hours at the office. One summer Eleanor and the family were up at their summer home in Campobello, while FDR stayed behind in Washington with their social secretary, Lucy Mercer. One thing led to another....and later Eleanor would discover a packet of love letters to FDR from Lucy. Initially, Eleanor offered Franklin a divorce. However Sara would have none of it. Sara pointed out that a divorce would wreck his family, ruin his political career....and she'd cut him off financially. So, the marriage continued. However this was the point when FDR and Eleanor stopped being husband and wife, and began a different sort of partnership. This was also when Eleanor decided to stop trying to be the traditional wife and mother, and started taking on her own projects....and becoming the dynamo we remember today.
In 1920, at age 38, FDR ran as the vice-presidential candidate with James Cox. It was a major defeat, but it put FDR on the map as a national political figure.
Then in the summer of 1921, after a political publicity trip to a boy scout camp, FDR came down with a virus. At the time it was believed to be polio, although some today believe it was Guillain-Barre syndrome. Regardless, FDR was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Traditionally at that time, family members with disabilities would be hidden away in a backroom. That was the route Sara wanted to take. She wanted to take FDR back to Hyde Park and care for him....where he'd have the life of an invalid. FDR wanted none of it, and neither did Eleanor.
Initially, FDR reacted by buying a houseboat, and hanging out in Florida to get away from the whole family. He spent the time hanging out with his friends, fishing....and probably a good chunk of time just being depressed. Eventually, he got over his despair and was motivated by wanting to walk again.
He went to Warm Springs, Georgia as he'd heard the hot springs there had curative effects on polio victims. While he did not find a cure for his legs....the place energized him. He bought the resort he was at, and it became a rehabilitation center that is still in use today. He started making inventions so he could be more independent, including revamping a car so that he could drive it just using his hands. (Apparently he was quite the speed demon.) He also loved being around the people of the community....and found it an eye-opening experience to see firsthand the poverty in that part of rural Georgia.
Meanwhile, Louis Howe was coaching Eleanor in public speaking, so she could keep FDR's name alive in the public sphere. She claimed she was just doing the speeches for him....but really, she loved it.
In 1928 FDR was asked to give the nominating speech for Al Smith at the Democratic Convention. He had built up tremendous upper body strength and worked out a technique by using leg braces, a can, and leaning heavily on his son Elliot, to give the illusion that he was actually walking. It was tremendously strenuous, but both FDR and Elliot worked together to make it look effortless. That famous gesture of FDR's of throwing back his head and grinning, was largely to draw attention away from his body. In later years, when FDR met Orson Welles he remarked that they were the "two best actors in America." When Al Smith was asked whether he was worried that he had just enabled a major political rival, Smith shrugged it off insisting "He'll be dead within a year."
FDR then accepted the nomination for governor of New York, which he won. Not long after was the stock market crash. This gave FDR a chance to experiment on a state level, what would later become the New Deal. In one of his earlier fireside chats, he commented "Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try SOMETHING."
The whole optimistic "Happy Days Are Here Again" attitude made a sharp contrast to President Hoover. In the 1932 presidential election FDR won by a landslide. However, on the evening of his victory, the man who would soon tell the nation they had nothing to fear but fear itself, confided in his son his own fears: "All my life I have been afraid of only one thing: fire. Tonight I think I'm afraid of something else...I'm afraid I may not have the strength to do the job."
Then there was the 4 months of awkwardness. FDR would not talk to the press about his plans for the administration, nor would he cooperate with the lame-duck Hoover administration. This meant 4 months for the situation to grow more dire. It was for situations like this that the 20th amendment was already on its way to being ratified. 1933 would be the last presidential inauguration in March. From then on, it would be in January.
The other event of note during the interegnum was when FDR was giving a speech in Miami that February. From the crowd, Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots. Mayor Anton Cermak was fatally wounded, but FDR was not hit. This is probably because when bystander Lillian Cross saw Zangara with the gun, she hit Zangara's arm with her handbag. FDR went to the hospital to visit Cermak and the other shooting victims. The secret service men were blown away at how throughout the whole thing, FDR was cool as a cucumber.
After the inauguration, the famous first 100 days started. Now while it is true that an amazing amount of legislation got passed, it should be noted that some of it was actually started during Hoover's administration....and Congress refused to follow through until Roosevelt was inaugurated. One thing FDR did right away that helped immensely, was lie through his teeth that he had the bank situation taken care of. He didn't....but the fact that the people were reassured, and willing to use banks again, helped take care of the banking crisis.
FDR was also a contrast to Hoover when the World War I veterans came to demonstrate for their pensions. Hoover had sent Douglas MacArthur out with the military to finish off the demonstration. FDR sent out Eleanor with sandwiches, and she chatted with the veterans about World War I. Eleanor proved to be vital for the administration. She was constantly running all over the country, usually in the most poverty-stricken areas, to both bring attention to the press what was happening in the nation, and also to keep FDR well-informed. She was also a good litmus test of just how far FDR could push his policies. If Eleanor would state an opinion that didn't go over well with the general public, FDR would shrug it off and make a comment about how he and Eleanor didn't agree on everything.
Thus the "alphabet soup" of government associations were put into action. There was the TVA, (Tennessee Valley Authority) for getting electricity into rural areas. There was the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) for Wall Street regulation. The first person to head that department was notorious speculator Joseph Kennedy because, according to FDR, "It takes a thief to catch a thief." (I'll be talking a LOT more about Joe Kennedy later....) It was the beginning of the FDIC to regulate banks, and Social Security....and a whole laundry list of others. A lot of wealthier Americans viewed the New Deal as evidence that FDR was traitor to his class. However he earned the lifelong loyalty of many working class Americans. My Granny who, by what she actually believed, really should have been a Reagan Republican, was a loyal Democrat partly because "FDR was there for us when nobody else was."
One of the myths about the New Deal was that it ended the Depression. It did no such thing. The jobs that were provided helped alleviate the symptoms. When FDR tried to cut some of the programs in 1937 to balance the budget, the economy went right downhill again, it the situation was dubbed the "Roosevelt Recession." Ultimately what ended the Great Depression once and for all was World War II. So if you want to give one person credit for ending the Depression, it would be Adolf Hitler. But we'll talk about him in my next blog entry.
Besides the bubble bursting in the stock market, there was an economic and environmental crisis happening in in the Great Plains....in a region of that area that was dubbed "No Man's Land." The area that used to be the home where the buffalo would roam......was divvied up into homesteads. Because of the unusually rainy weather in the 1920's, people got an unrealistic idea on how much wheat they could grow. Then in the 30's a vicious cycle started. Prices of wheat plummeted....so the farmers grew more so they could get more money....so the prices fell.....the combo of the overfarming, and then the drought....did a number on the landscape. The dust storms began.
I didn't realize the scope of the dust storms until I read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan. (Which I would highly recommend.) When I picture dust storms, I usually would picture the set of "The Grapes of Wrath"....and picture a dust storm about the size of a typical thunderstorm or blizzard. But no...these puppies were HUGE. There were a couple that were a couple of miles high, and hundreds of miles wide, that made their way out of the Dust Bowl, all the way to New York City and D.C. One advocate for the region got the apathetic senators to go for his cause when the dust storm started happening right outside the Capitol as he spoke.
For Roosevelt, this gave him the opportunity to try and make some changes to repair the environment. His vision was a line of trees from Nebraska to the Mexican border. Which actually wasn't a bad idea, but as soon as the rain started again in the 40's, a lot of people abandoned the conservation plans. Nonetheless, whereas Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to focus on environmentalist in terms of setting aside national parks and reserves.....Franklin's focus was restoration to the parts of the land that WERE inhabited.
So once again, of course, that barely scratched the surface....so here's the reading list I used for this blog entry.
"The Worst Hard Time" - Timothy Egan - once again, can't recommend it strongly enough. Besides being very informative, it's a compelling narrative. You want to find out what happens to the families in it.
"The Great Depression: A Diary" - Daniel B. Roth I'd especially recommend this for my conservative friends, or for people who want to hear the perspective of an American in the 30's that wasn't voting for Roosevelt. It is the diary of a lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio who was following the economy to see what he could learn from it. It gets a bit dry at times, but I found it interesting the perspective of an employed professional in the 30's....different than the usual takes on the era.
"FDR" - Jean Edward Smith - Thorough, readable....although sometimes it errs on the rose-colored glasses perspective a bit.
"Kennedy and Roosevelt " - Michael R. Beschloss This is about Joseph Kennedy's interactions with FDR. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one. I think the Joseph Kennedy biography "Founding Father" by Joseph Whalen covers it better.
American Experience - DVD's on FDR and Eleanor
For pop culture references.....this time around we're back to "Annie." First off, "New Deal For Christmas".....which I especially love because how many times are you going to have a Christmas song that lists off the members of the Cabinet?
Click to viewThis second one is also from Annie. First off, I like this clip because it was probably my first exposure to FDR even being mentioned. I was 5 when this movie came out, and I watched it repeatedly. The FDR part starts at 8:30 on this clip.