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The attached article was written by FDR himself, and in it he explains the ‘court crises’ (as he called it) quite clearly. On page five, he eloquently lays out his plan for the Supreme Court.
When FDR sat down and planned whose voice on the Supreme Court he would most like to nullify, it wasn’t always that of Justice Van Devanter. Although Willis Van Devanter was a conservative, he was a thoughtful jurist who was known to, from time-to-time, vote in support of some of the New Deal legislation.
Bingo! Justice James Clark McReynolds was the stick-in-the-mud FDR wished to have disappeared from the court. This journalist observed that McReynolds “seemed to regard himself as the last Bulwark of a social order which Woodrow Wilson deemed too antiquated in 1914”. Indeed, he was cranky and crusty and disliked Jews and black people equally and didn’t seem to care who knew it.
FDR was right.
An anonymous Philadelphia journalist, dumbstruck by the sudden death of FDR, compared the fallen president to Abe Lincoln because both were successful military leaders. He goes a step further by insisting that Walt Whitman’s famous ode to Lincoln is equally applicable for FDR.
In this 1940 article, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) argues for a benevolent government that would see to the prenatal needs of expectant mothers and their growing children:
“But all children, it seems to me, have a right to food, shelter, an equal opportunity for education and an equal chance to come into the world healthy and get the care they need through their early years to keep them well and happy.”
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.
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.'”
Five months after the death of President Roosevelt, writer Michael Sayers (1911 – 2010) managed to get this FDR article to press while the public’s interest in the man was still hot. It addressed the tremendous lengths the Secret Service went to on a daily basis to protect President Roosevelt from Axis assassins and general kooks who wanted a shot at him:
“The White House detail, headed by six-foot Michael Reiley (1909 – 1973), stayed beside the President at all times. They became his shadows, unseen in the public glare, but always at hand… The President was not permitted to set foot in any place that had not been thoroughly investigated beforehand.”
Unlike his many predecessors, FDR used to encourage the American people to write him with their thoughts. At times, the President used to boast to Congress concerning the volume of his mail in favor of his programs, but the mails did not simply deliver stamped envelopes:
“Almost anything you can think of has arrived as a gift at some time or another – dogs, sheep, eagles, baby chicks, toads, alligators. Mr. Roosevelt has never received any lions, but Calvin Coolidge got two, from Johannesburg…”
“The Brain Trust’s very lack of practical experience was its chief asset. Unhampered by tradition and fairly drunk with the opportunity of translating college dreams into realities, they leapt to the battle, careless of obstacles and without fear of frustration.”
This article was published one month after the start of the war; it must have been a time when everyone had something to say about Harold Ickes (1874 – 1952) as he was composing the gas rationing laws for the home front. In this column, Ickes speaks for himself. He had been the one who saw to the President’s energy policy’s during the Great Depression and now he was FDR’s go-to-guy for gas during the war.
By cleverly borrowing from the state paper, letters and speeches of the Great Emancipator, a journalist from the usually pretty anti-New Deal Liberty Magazine was able to piece together a few paragraphs indicting
what they hoped Lincoln would think of the New Deal.
“The Brain Trust has devised a number of schemes for getting money away from the fellows who accumulated it during the Golden Age of Coolidge, and some of those schemes are working…”
