Theodore Roosevelt had loomed large in Washington for a long time - so when it was learned that his nephew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat!), was chosen to work in Woodrow Wilson's Department of the Navy he was an instant curiosity.
Click here to read a 1913 article about another young man on the move: Winston Churchill.
Between the years 1913 through 1920, FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels:
"Roosevelt had not been in office a month before he gave out a public statement urging a more adequate navy:"
"'The navy is not fit for war. We have today only sixteen ships we can send effectively against the first line of the enemy.'" Here are the "Chief accomplishments of the special Session of the 73rd Congress, March 9 - June 16, 1933"
These fifteen pieces of legislation were called "the Honeymoon Bills" - his critics pointed out that not one of them originated in Congress and added to their argument that Congress had been marginalized during the earliest period of his presidency.
FDR's critics had a thing or two to say about the first year of "The New Deal"...
Click here to read about FDR and the press.
"In certain quarters it is asserted that Mr. Roosevelt's 'New Deal' is nothing other than the first stage of an American movement toward Fascism. It is said that, although the United States has not yet adopted the political structure of Italy and Germany, the economic structure of the country is rapidly being molded upon the Fascist pattern."
FDR's D-Day prayer can be read here George Creel (1876 - 1953), the nation's first and only official censor (1917 - 1918), knew FDR for twenty-five years, and in this wartime recollection he made FDR wish that the two had never met. This is the type of article Creel would never have allowed to be published twenty some years earlier because it sought to reduce confidence in the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, with the war in its eleventh month, Creel gave it to FDR with both barrels:
"No man ever dreamed more nobly or had less skill in making his dreams come true." By the end of the war, FDR's administration had placed taxable personal income as high as 94%(!). His Brain Trust were all big believers in Federal intervention into the economy - offering all sorts of price freezes and wage freezes in order to limit competition during the Great depression (as if that was a good). As the war kicked-in to high gear, FDR installed a low ceiling upon all high-earners and capped their salaries at $25,000.00 per-year.
Click here to read about FDR's airplane.
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