FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Excerpted from an essay by Doris Kearns Goodwin:

"I'll tell you," Franklin Roosevelt once told a friend during the toughest years of his presidency, "at night when I lay my head on my pillow, and it is often pretty late, and I think of the things that have come before me during the day and the decisions that I have made, I say to myself -- well, I have done the best I could and turn over and go to sleep." With this simple story, Roosevelt provides the key to understanding the essence of his presidency, for no factor was more important to his leadership than his absolute confidence in himself and in the American people.

"There's something that he's got," White House aide Harry Hopkins once told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. "It seems unreasonable at times, but he falls back on something that gives him complete assurance that everything is going to be all right.".....

"I think," Eleanor (Roosevelt) observed, "probably the thing that took most courage in his life was his mastery and his meeting of polio. I never heard him complain." And though anyone remembering how athletic and strong he had been as a young man could not fail to realize what a terrific battle must have gone on within him, "he just accepted it as one of those things that was given you as discipline in life." After his struggle with polio, he seemed less arrogant, less smug, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting. "There had been a plowing up of his nature," Frances Perkins commented. "The man emerged completely warm-hearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of philosophical concepts." He had always taken great pleasure in people, but now they become what one historian has called "his vital links to life." Far more intensely than before, he reached out to know them, to understand them, to pick up their emotions, to put himself into their shoes. No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and the underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand.

What is more, Roosevelt had a remarkable capacity to transmit his internal strength to others, to allow, as White House counsel Sam Rosenman observed, the men and women who came to Washington during the New Deal "to begin to feel it and take part in it, to rejoice in it-- and to return it tenfold by their own confidence." Frances Perkins claimed that "his capacity to inspire and encourage those around him to do tough, confused and practically impossible jobs was without dispute." Like everyone else, she said, she "came away from an interview with the president feeling better not because he had solved any problems," but because he had somehow made her feel more cheerful, more determined, stronger than she had felt when she went into the room. "I have never known a man who gave one a greater sense of security," Eleanor said. "I never heard him say there was a problem that he thought it was impossible for human beings to solve."

So it was in 1933, when in the midst of the worst days of the Depression, that the new President was able to communicate his own strength and assurance to a badly frightened people. In his first inaugural, Collier's magazine reported, the new President did not delude himself as to the difficulties that lay before him, and yet he was serenely confident of the outcome.... Within days of the inauguration, historian William Leuchtenburg noted, "the spirit of the country seemed markedly changed, a feeling of hope had been reborn."......

Closely linked to Roosevelt's confidence was his willingness to try everything. He never seemed to lose his faith that the right solution to a vexing problem would eventually turn up. When he made up his mind to do something, Eleanor said, he did it to the best of his ability, but if it went sour, he simply started in all over again and did something else. He ever spent time repining. "He recognized the difficulties and often said that, while he did not know the answer, he was completely confident that there was an answer and that one had to try until one either found it for himself or got it from someone else."

"I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat," Roosevelt liked to say. "What I seek is the highest possible batting average." His mind was almost always flexible and hospitable to new ideas, the writer John Gunther once observed. "He was one of those persons with the good luck to grow up slowly." Until the end of his days, he was always fresh, youthful in mind and receptive to experiment. "Remember," Eleanor once told a friend, "the nicest men in the world are those who always keep something of the little boy in them." That, she emphasized, was Franklin's strength.

During the Depression Roosevelt tried one economic cure after another--heavy spending, public works, direct relief, the NRA Codes, the Blue Eagle campaigns, regulation of industry, restrictions on spending. "He understood," Garry Wills noted, "the importance of psychology--the people have to have the courage to keep seeking a cure, no matter what the cure is. Those who wanted ideological consistency or even policy coherence, were rightly exasperated with Roosevelt. He switched economic plans as often as he changed treatments for polio." And while the New Deal did not overcome the Depression--it took [World War II] to fully mobilized the economy--the multiplicity of government programs kept the people going, and in the process preserved the system of democracy at a time when so many other countries in similar despair were turning to fascism or communism.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

From the article:


"THE NEW DEAL": A package of programs introduced by President Roosevelt aimed at ending the Depression by stimulating the economy and putting people back to work. The "New Deal" programs were enacted during the first hundred days of the Roosevelt Adminstration.

• March 9: Emergency Banking Act
• March 20: Economy Act
• March 31: Civilian Conservation Corps established
• April 19: End of the gold standard
• May 12: Emergency Farm Mortgage Act
• May 18: Tennessee Valley Authority established
• May 27: Truth in Securities Act
• June 13: Home Owners' Loan Act
• June 16: National Industrial Recovery Act and Farm Credit Act

<A name=nra>NRA: The National Recovery Administration was set up under the National Industrial Recovery Act. Its aim was to stabilize production and prices through government regulation of wages and working conditions. The symbol of the NRA campaign was a Blue Eagle thunderbird. Employers who signed NRA agreements were allowed to display the Blue Eagle at their businesses. Many business people opposed the effort as representing excessive government regulation.


"THE NEW DEAL": A package of programs introduced by President Roosevelt aimed at ending the Depression by stimulating the economy and putting people back to work. The "New Deal" programs were enacted during the first hundred days of the Roosevelt Adminstration.

• March 9: Emergency Banking Act
• March 20: Economy Act
• March 31: Civilian Conservation Corps established
• April 19: End of the gold standard
• May 12: Emergency Farm Mortgage Act
• May 18: Tennessee Valley Authority established
• May 27: Truth in Securities Act
• June 13: Home Owners' Loan Act
• June 16: National Industrial Recovery Act and Farm Credit Act

<A name=nra>NRA: The National Recovery Administration was set up under the National Industrial Recovery Act. Its aim was to stabilize production and prices through government regulation of wages and working conditions. The symbol of the NRA campaign was a Blue Eagle thunderbird. Employers who signed NRA agreements were allowed to display the Blue Eagle at their businesses. Many business people opposed the effort as representing excessive government regulation.

Quick, someone tell me that that isn't text book fascism.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

"THE NEW DEAL": A package of programs introduced by President Roosevelt aimed at ending the Depression by stimulating the economy and putting people back to work.

And, the New Deal programs did neither. Again, there were more unemployed at the start of FDR's third term than at the beginning of his first term.

As of this writing, no one on this forum has proven this to be false. What's up with you slackers anyway ... can't use a simple Google search to disprove my point?

Vi

__________________
Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

"the multiplicity of government programs kept the people going, and in the process preserved the system of democracy at a time when so many other countries in similar despair were turning to fascism or communism."

This is a joke! FDRs programs did NOTHING to end the depression OR perserve democracy. Other countries turned to fascism or communism because they didn't have a representative government in the first place.

Vi

__________________
Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

This is a joke! FDRs programs did NOTHING to end the depression OR perserve democracy. Other countries turned to fascism or communism because they didn't have a representative government in the first place.

You are dillusional. Have you been off your meds again. Take a couple of ziprexa, a few xanaxs, some millaril, 2 hits of window payne, 6 buttons of peyote, and post me in the morning!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Typical leftist rebuttal. You've done nothing here but deliver another personal attack. Where's the facts to prove me wrong, Med?

Vi

__________________
Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Who the fuck cares what You think of FDR? I believe he was the best president since I've been alive and really don't care what you think, so post your anti-FDR bullshit to your hearts content!

__________________
Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

lol
med you are sputtering like a sparkler.......
classic........ no discernable facts in sight.....hahahhh

I've eaten two full canna cookies, I chose this dose for medicinal purposes!!!!1
it's startin' to kick in........wow

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If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.
~ Frank Zappa ~

Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it.
~George Bernard Shaw~

And, here we have it again, folks! Another communist who has been given the opportunity to retort with provable facts ... and cannot produce anything other than personal attacks. Soooo typical of the breed.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

I should have known better than to argue with stoned out right wing zealots. How you guys can get stoned and not feel humanity is beyond my understanding. Robotic right wing philosophys have no place in my conscienceness. You are talking to the Hand! Reveal your true selves to be what you really are, rich robotic libertarian zealots with not one ounce of feelings for anything but Money! As Vi says Bah Humbug, a pox upon you both. Tell me something I won't believe, like how you work to better someone elses life. Otherwise I'm not listening

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.