F.D.R. – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

The World Press and the Death of FDR
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

At 5:45 p.m. telephones rang simultaneously in the Washington bureaus of the AP, UP and [the International News Service] on a conference call from the White House. The familiar voice of Steve Early, who had retired only recently after twelve years as White House press secretary, called the roll to make sure all were listening. Then: ‘Here is a flash. The President died suddenly early this afternoon’

Swiftly the news went around the world… No president had meant quite so much to the press as Mr. Roosevelt. Few in history had been more consistently and bitterly opposed by a majority of publishers. Perhaps none had more admirers and fewer detractors among working newsmen. No president since his cousin Theodore, who coined the word ‘muckracker’, had on occasion denounced press and newsmen alike more harshly. Yet most newsmen forgave him his peevish moments. Certainly none had been more news-rich and none had ever received the voluminous coverage that President Roosevelt had. Over the years, the Roosevelt twice-a-week press conference was the Capital’s biggest newsmaker.

FDR: The First One Hundred Days
(Literary Digest, 1933)

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.

‘Why I Compare LBJ with my Father, FDR”
(Coronet Magazine, 1964)

Doesn’t LBJ remind you of FDR?‘

That’s the question I hear most of these days. He does, and touring through the poverty-stricken states of Appalachia with President Johnson, I saw why.
– so wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (1914 – 1988) in the attached article that was penned some 23 years after his father’s death.

Harry Hopkins – FDR’s Right Hand
(United States News, 1944)

This article makes it quite clear that Harry Hopkins (1890 – 1946) wore many hats in the administration of FDR.
During the first five years of the New Deal he had the unique title Special Assistant to the President, he not only wrote speeches for FDR – Hopkins also oversaw the goings-on at the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Between the years 1938 through 1940, he served as Secretary of Commerce and when the war came he supervised the Lend-Lease program, the Chairman of the Munitions Assignment Board and traveled frequently as the President’s representative to Moscow and London.

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, it was discovered that one of his additional duties was being a Soviet agent.

Click here to read about another member of the New Deal Brain-Trust…

Read an anti-Gandhi article from 1921…

The Twilight of the New Deal
(United States News and World Report, 1946)

The crusading spirit that Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to summon up in the minds of Government employees at the outset of his first administration, and again in the years that followed, now is vanishing. The spirit and imagination of Mr. Roosevelt brought into public service would not have been there.

It was this quality that captured the enthusiasm of engineers like J.A. Krug; of lawyers like Oscar S. Cox, Ben Cohen and Thomas Corcoran; of economists like Robert Nathan, Launchlin Curie, Leon Henderson and Isadore Lubin.

Integrating the Home Front
(Collier’s Magazine 1941)

Although the Roosevelt administration believed that integrating the armed forces was far too risky a proposition during wartime, it did take one important step to insure that fair hiring practices were followed by all businesses that held defense contracts with the Federal government; during the summer of 1941, while American industry was still fulfilling its roll as the arsenal of democracy, a Federal law was passed that criminalized racist hiring practices. The attached editorial from Collier’s Magazine applauded the President for doing the right thing.

Read an anti-Gandhi article from 1921…

The 1940 Election Polls and FDR
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

The attached article was written by Dr. George Gallup (1901 – 1984), the pioneering American pollster and founder of the Institute of Public Opinion. Gallup’s article reveals some surprising information about American voters and their thoughts concerning FDR’s 1940 bid for re-election against Wendell Willkie (1892 – 1944).

The Champ is Gone
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

This highly personal column appeared in one of New York City’s evening papers and seemed characteristic of the feeling experienced by much of the U.S. after hearing about the unexpected death of President Roosevelt.
Written by Joe Cummiskey, the column stands out as the type of remembrance that is thoroughly unique to those who write about sports all day long, which is who Mr. Commiskey was:

Somehow or other, if you were in sports, you never thought of FDR so much as connected with the high office which he held. Rather, you remembered him most the way he’d chuckle, getting ready to throw out the the first ball to open the baseball season. Or how he’d sit on the 50 at the Army-Navy game…

His Female Chief-of-Staff
(Literary Digest, 1938)

Missy Le Hand (1896 – 1944) was a pretty big deal in the life of President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had many secretaries, but only one was a woman (and she was the first woman to ever serve in this capacity to a U.S. president). When the Germans attacked Poland, the State Department called her first, knowing full well that she was the only one in the White House with the permission to wake him up. Although this article lists many of the personal tasks she was charged with, it should be known that Missy Le Hand was the target of many Washington influence-peddlers.

Sam Rosenman: FDR’s Right Arm
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

Samuel Rosenman (1896 – 1973) was an attorney, judge and a highly placed insider within the ranks of the Democratic Party, both in Albany and the nation’s capital. It was Rosenman who helped articulated many of FDR’s policies, wrote numerous executive orders and conceived of the moniker New Deal. He was the first lawyer to hold the position White House Counsel and he was an indispensable advisor to Roosevelt throughout the course of his New York governorship as well as his presidency.

‘Outlines of Fascism”
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

Will fascism come in the wake of the New Deal? The writer surveys its rapid post-war spread through Europe, reviews its origins in the writings of Pareto and Sorel and indicates steps that lead to its establishment.

An article about FDR’s Alphabet Agencies can be read here…

An article that refutes the argument as to whether FDR was a fascist can be read here…

The Four Inaugurations of F.D.R.
(from the Truman Inaugural Program, 1949)

A one page history regarding the unprecedented swearing-in ceremonies of the four-term President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945).

Read a 1933 article about FDR and the disaster that he tried to fix…

The GIs Hear About the Death of President Roosevelt
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Gathered from all the various battlefronts around the globe, the attached article serves as a archive of spontaneous reactions uttered by a smattering of stunned GIs when they heard that President Roosevelt had died:

Pvt. Howard McWaters of Nevada City, California, just released from the hospital and waiting to go back to the Americal Division, shook his head slowly. ‘Roosevelt made a lot of mistakes,’ he said. ‘But I think he did the best he could, and when he made mistakes he usually admitted it. Nobody could compare with him as President.’

Click here to read about President Harry Truman…

Diplomatic Relations with Japan
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

This article is about the diplomatic relationship that was maintained between the United States and Imperial Japan during the earliest months of the FDR administration.

Click here to read about the Japanese rejection of the Washington Naval Treaty in 1935.

FDR’s Funeral
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

Here is a series of articles from YANK magazine that reported on the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of these four correspondents was assigned to write about the general sense of loss that New Yorkers felt upon learning of the death of their president:

Not in my lifetime or in yours, will we again see see such a man.

CLICK HERE… to read the obituary of President Kennedy.

He Re-Organized
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Congressional eyes bulged last January when President Roosevelt handed Congress his plan to streamline the executive branch of the Government. He asked for sixspecial assistants, two new cabinet officers, an auditor general (to supplant the all-powerful Controller General), a reshuffling and consolidation of boards and bureaus and an expansion of the civil service in all directions.

A Cartoonist Slams FDR
(Click Magazine, 1939)

Rube Goldberg (1883 – 1970), one of the iconic, Grand Master ink slingers from days of yore, applied his signature thought pattern to presidential politics in the creation of the attached FDR cartoon. Unlike President Roosevelt, Goldberg recognized that the New Deal was naive in their belief they could create and fund numerous government agencies that bedevil small businesses, reduce productivity, and fix prices while expecting the whole time that the national economy would bloom as a result.

‘The Roosevelt I Knew”
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Here is the recollection of FDR by a woman who worked closely with the man for nearly thirty five years as political colleague, state governor appointee and Labor Secretary: Francis Perkins (1880 – 1965).

Secretary Perkins and President Roosevelt were a vital team when it came to crafting many of the labor laws that are still enforced today. Click here to read a 1937 magazine article about the creation of the first minimum wage laws…