freedom from fear: the life and presidency of franklin delano roosevelt
FREED OM FROM FEAR: the life and presidency of FRANKLIN DELANO R O O S E V E LT
wi ll i a m vand en h euvel
th o rn w i llo w p r e s s 2 014
william j. vanden heuvel is an international lawyer and investment banker who has served as United States ambassador to the United Nations, executive assistant to General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, special counsel to New York governor Averell Harriman, and assistant to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, among other public service roles. He is a founder and chair emeritus of the Roosevelt Institute and of New York City’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. Vanden Heuvel has been honored with the Theodore Roosevelt Medal, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal.
first edition copyright © 2014 william vanden heuvel
c o nt e nts Freedom from Fear
11
1: Polio: FDR's Letter to Dr. William Egleston
45
2: Working Together: Letter from Frances Perkins to Eleanor Roosevelt
53
3: The Forgotten Man: Radio Address from Albany, NY, in the Campaign for the Presidency
57
4: Fear Itself: Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address
65
5: FDR Meets the Press: A Selection from the First Presidential Press Conference
75
6: Talking to the People: FDR’s First Fireside Chat
85
7: The New Deal in Focus: From the Fireside Chat on the Works Progress Administration and Social Security
93
8: Rendezvous with Destiny: From FDR’s Speech at the 1936 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia 101 9: A Clash with the Court: From the Fireside Chat on FDR’s Supreme Court Reorganization Plan
10 9
10: A Timely Warning: Letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt
117
11: Arsenal of Democracy: Fireside Chat on the Threat of War
121
12: The Four Freedoms: State of the Union Address to Congress
137
13: Franklin Roosevelt, Conservationist: Correspondence on the Trumpeter Swan
151
14: Day of Infamy: Roosevelt’s Address to Congress After Pearl Harbor
155
15: A Plea for Help: Albert Einstein to Eleanor Roosevelt on European Refugees
159
16: FDR's Economic Bill of Rights: From the State of the Union Address 163 17: FDR's D-Day Prayer: Radio Address
171
18: A Final Meeting: Joint Statement at Yalta
175
19: Last Words: A Selection from an Undelivered Address
187
20: Churchill on FDR: A Eulogy
193
21: Renewing the Legacy: Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park
2 01
F R E E D OM FROM FE AR “History is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons become deprived of memory, they become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going. So a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future...” arthur schlesinger, jr.
T
he impoverished children of the Great Depression would never forget Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Americans who first read about Adolf Hitler not in history books but in boldfaced headlines would never forget FDR’s confident leadership through that dreadful storm. I was one of those children. I am one of those Americans, the son of working-class immigrants who grew up watching Franklin Roosevelt change the world and who grieved at his death in 1945 as if he were my father. I became a lifelong student of FDR, ever fascinated by the increasingly complex portrait that emerges as historians continue to plumb the archives for new material. These scholars consistently rank Franklin Roosevelt with Washington and Lincoln as one of the nation’s greatest leaders. I am confident that judgment will survive the tidal wave of events yet to come. FDR was the voice of the people of the United States during the most difficult trials of the twentieth century, that tumultuous, insane, brilliant, brutal, creative, awe-inspiring moment in the history of the world. He led America out of the despair of the Great Depression, and in the
11
11
process he remade the federal government into an instrument of social justice that would act directly for the welfare of all Americans. FDR was not an ideologue but, as he often said, a liberal — open to novel ideas, tolerant of others, broadminded, pragmatic. He believed no nation could be great so long as its people cowered in fear of forces larger than themselves. Workers and farmers and small businessmen and bank depositors must have rights in the capitalist economy, not find themselves utterly at the disposal of those FDR termed “economic royalists.” He insisted that Americans need not and ought not be plunged into destitution when age made them unable to work or a business downturn led to unemployment. The fruitful American continent, FDR believed, was the common inheritance of all Americans and must be preserved and used for the good of all. These were not wholly new values, but FDR launched the movement that brought them palpably to life: the New Deal. In the late 1930s global depression segued into world war. Now FDR rose to a second great challenge. He shaped and led the multinational alliance that fought its way to victory against dictators whose racist nationalism justified murder and pillage—and who, let us not forget, quickly gained dominion over a vast swath of the world stretching from France’s Atlantic coast to Stalingrad in the East, and from Burma across the Pacific to the tiny Gilbert Islands. FDR oversaw the expansion of America’s military from a force woefully unprepared to meet Nazi Germany—in 1940 it ranked seventeenth in the world, behind Portugal’s—to the most formidable fighting force history has ever known. Just as important, he wielded reason and the power of human compassion against the Axis powers’ madness, articulating the deepest aspirations of democratic societies. FDR identified the American way with the rise of human rights
12
“everywhere in the world,” as he said in his famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech—an ideal no less potent for the fact that our country has often fallen short of it. Four times the American people elected FDR president. By temperament and talent, by energy and instinct, Franklin Roosevelt was ready for the challenges that confronted him. He was a breath of fresh air in our political life—so vital, so confident and optimistic, so warm and good-humored. Like many Americans, I recall with great affection the hours my family spent around the radio listening to the mellifluous voice of a president who greeted us, “My friends.” Television and the Internet notwithstanding, no other leader in my experience has been so present among the people. He accomplished this while contending with a serious physical disability. FDR may be the only person in recorded history chosen as leader of his nation even though he could not walk or stand without help, his legs permanently paralyzed by an attack of polio which he suffered in 1921 at age thirty-nine. Those of us who lived through those times know the dread of the disease. I remember lying in bed at night as a child listening to the piercing screams of a neighbor boy, my school friend, in the throes of polio’s suffering. The pain of FDR’s struggle is almost unimaginable—learning to move again, to stand, to rely upon the physical support of others, and never giving in to despair, to self-pity, to discouragement. This life-threatening ordeal affected him profoundly, perhaps tempering the hubris of a young man who was at home in a world of privilege and protection. Born and raised on his parents’ verdant estate in Hyde Park, New York, FDR was a Hudson Valley aristocrat blessed with a storied family name, a strong-minded mother wholly devoted to her
13
13
only son, good looks, and a blithe charm. He became gentler and deeper after the affliction of polio. As FDR’s labor secretary Frances Perkins would recall, “The man emerged entirely warm-hearted, with a new humility of spirit.” As a New York state senator and assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1920, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a political reformer and liberal thinker. But it was in the prelude to his 1928 run for New York governor, as he fought, in polio’s wake, to regain his strength and his spirit, that FDR’s extraordinary mettle emerged. As he himself once remarked, after you’ve spent the better part of six months struggling to move your big toe, everything else seems easier. It was also during the 1920s that FDR’s remarkable wife and partner, Eleanor Roosevelt, a distant relative born into the same patrician society as FDR, faced and overcame her own trials —including the painful discovery of FDR’s relationship with her secretary, Lucy Mercer; the distressing trial of FDR’s polio; and the fears and insecurities that had haunted her since childhood. She began to develop the independent political life that would lead to her outspoken efforts to throw open the doors of our national life to marginalized groups. “One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life,” Eleanor wrote in 1960. She never did. Both of the Roosevelts were people of great personal courage. They gave that fortitude to their country at its time of greatest need. The British intellectual Isaiah Berlin has written that FDR was “one of the few statesmen of the twentieth or any century who seemed to have no fear at all of the future.” Indeed he welcomed the future with determination and optimism, and his very confidence greatly influenced how events would unfold.
14
franklin d. roosevelt, 1924