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

The Brain Trusters
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

A year and a half into FDR’s first term, journalist William E. Berchtold caught wind of a growing realization in Washington that most of the ’emergency’ legislation will become permanent. This didn’t bother him nearly as much as the fact that such imperishability also meant that the host of beta males who were positioned to maintain this behemoth would also be remaining (History has taught us that it was not FDR’s alphabet agencies that became a mainstay, but those of LBJ).

The Junior Brain Trusters
(New Outlook, 1934)

I have gathered my tools and my charts… I shall roll up my sleeves – make America over!

This was the motto to which the young folk began their work, nearly a thousand of them, which may be grouped for study purposes under the generic title, ‘Junior Brain Trusters’. They were, for the most part, young men from the colleges and universities of the larger eastern cities…. Many of them came as protégés of the Senior Brain Trusters themselves, brought from the classrooms by [Guy] Tugwell, [Raymond Charles] Moley, [Felix] Frankfurter – Professor Frankfurter being especially successful in drafting students and recent graduates from the Harvard Law School.

‘The Black Brain Trust”
(The American Magazine, 1943)

The Black Brain Trust consists of about 25 Negro leaders who have assumed command of America’s 13,000,000 Negroes in their fight for equality. They hold informal meetings to plan their strategy, whether it is to defeat a discriminatory bill in Congress or to overcome a prejudice against a private [in the army]. Few white men know it, but they have already opened a second front in America – a front to the liberation of the dark races.

More on this topic can be read on this website…

The Up-and-Coming FDR
(The Saturday Evening Post, 1913)

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.

FDR, Congress and the Plan to Pack the Supreme Court
(Collier’s Magazine, 1947)

Attached is an article by James A. Farley (1888 – 1976), who in 1933 was appointed by F.D.R. to serve as both the Postmaster General as well as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. During the Thirties, Farley was also FDR’s go-to-guy in all matters involving politics on Capitol Hill, and he wrote the attached article two years after Roosevelt’s death in order to explain how the Court-packing scheme was received in Congress and how his relationship with FDR soon soured.

Boss, I asked him, why didn’t you advise the senators in advance that you were sending them the Court bill?
Jim, I just couldn’t, he answered earnestly. I didn’t want to have it get to the press prematurely…

FDR’s Man in Foggy Bottom
(Collier’s Magazine, 1940)

This is a peculiar article about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull (1871 – 1955); the man who penned the piece was so obsessed with Hull’s hillbilly upbringing that he didn’t get around to writing about the man himself until page six.

FDR’s Sense of Sympathy
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

When a 22-year-old expectant father wrote to President Roosevelt complaining that he’d been unemployed for four months, FDR wasted little time in contacting one of his alphabet agencies and seeing to it that the gent was offered a defense job.

FDR’s Alphabet Agencies
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1934)

Listed herein are the sixty-two alphabet agencies as they existed in 1934. More were on their way and, as this article makes quite clear, a good number of them were created by the Hoover administration. If you’re looking for an article indicating that Hoover and Roosevelt had similar approaches to governance, this might be a good place to start.

The Alphabet Bureaucrats
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

It would be difficult to select the typical New Deal bureau. In not a few there is considerable friction between different degrees and elements of thought as to how far the New Deal should really go… The program is so vast, the limits of its intent so completely shrouded in the vague phraseology of the new idealism, that there appears to be plenty of work for all. [For example] unwanted surplusses were found in the electrical power and appliance field. It was perceived that here was a case of ‘under-consumption’ on the part of American homeowners. How to solve the problem? With another bureau, of course. And so we have the EHFA – the Electric Home and Farm Authority.

FDR and Congress
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

‘The New Deal Was Not Fascist”
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1933)

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

The Art Collection of FDR
(Art Digest, 1936)

A printable paragraph from the 1936 pages of Art Digest explaining the aesthetic tastes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his art collection.

The Temper of the Electorate
(The New Outlook Magazine, 1932)

Just weeks before the U.S. presidential election of 1932 this article appeared in a political magazine that indicated how the Depression-tossed voters were feeling after three years of economic set-backs. The article consists of 21 pithy little paragraphs that sum up their feelings:

I BELIEVE it possible to feel hungry under either major party, but that under the Republicans it seems to hurt more.

Click here to read about the extensive press coverage that was devoted to the death of FDR…

FDR’s Publicity Machine
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

To those who have followed the political career of President Roosevelt, this unprecedented emphasis on public relations and publicity is no surprise. No president has ever been more alive to the potentialities of maintaining a ‘good press’, of gauging public reaction to his policies and of timing his announcements to obtain the widest and most sympathetic audience possible… No party organization could afford the elaborate press relations machinery which existed on March 4, 1933. Its cost, including salaries, printing, supplies etc., is today in excess of $1,000,000 annually, and it is being paid for by the American taxpayer.

Click here to read about President Harry Truman…

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…