Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on the ‘War for the Survival of Democracy’)

“In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

“I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”— U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa., June 27, 1936

That “war” continues, though in our country the prospects for victory look increasingly uncertain.

This Day in Environmental History (Birth of Harold L. Ickes, Combative New Deal Interior Secretary)

Mar. 15, 1874— Harold L. Ickes, a pugnacious former Republican Progressive for Theodore Roosevelt who became a stalwart Democratic New Dealer as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, was born in rural Hollidaysburg, Penn.

Assuming control of a department rife with corruption in the past, Ickes kept it remarkably free of graft and mismanagement even as he expanded its reach and influence through countless bureaucratic battles. Under his direction, the Interior Department:

* oversaw the construction of quite nearly 20,000 projects in a six-year period, including hospitals, bridges, the Key West Highway, the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, and Hoover Dam in in the newly formed Public Work Administration;

*supervised the creation of the innovative Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility corporation that provided low-cost electricity in seven southeastern states, as well as flood control, navigation, and land management;

*expanded the number and size of units in the National Park Service;

* was one of four department heads involved with the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Glorying in his reputation for abrasiveness, Ickes even titled his 1943 memoir The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon. 

When he wasn’t expressing irritation to subordinates, fellow Cabinet members, and even FDR (who regularly refused his periodic offers of resignation), he unleashed biting public comments about administration opponents. 

When GOP Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, for instance, spoke of his rise from poverty to success, Ickes mocked him as a “simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer."

Though he belittled Willkie’s Horatio Alger tale, his own was similar. A miserable childhood (grinding poverty, a philandering, alcoholic father, and a strict Presbyterian mother) spurred his ambition to escape—which finally came to pass when he became a journalist, then a lawyer with a thriving practice.

An advantageous marriage to the wealthy Anna Wilmarth lifted his status further, but at the price of deep unhappiness. He felt little compunction, then, even when he joined the Roosevelt administration, about spending countless hours at the office and pursuing extramarital affairs with younger women that could have caused scandal if exposed.

A 1916 tour of Glacier National Park on horseback intensified Ickes’ love of nature. Subsequently he found one of the few balms for his suspicious, self-righteous nature and chronic insomnia in the gardens of his Winnetka, Ill., home.

It surprised me to learn that it wasn’t Ickes’ passion for conservation but his advocacy for Native American rights that led him to seek a job with FDR in 1933. 

Lamenting that several others had an inside track with the new administration for the post of commissioner of Indian affairs, Ickes was alerted by a longtime Progressive Republican ally, Senator Hiram Johnson, that an even bigger prize was available: Secretary of the Interior.

A few potential candidates had already turned down FDR’s offer of the post. The incoming President had never even met Ickes before their interview.

But Roosevelt could sound a bipartisan note by selecting this onetime Bull Mooser, and someone with knowledge of the West appealed to him. 

Moreover, if FDR had any private reservations about Ickes’ bluntness, they were soothed over by the notion that, after all, this was a relatively minor Cabinet post compared with Justice, State, War, or the Treasury departments.

The new appointee was determined to make his department anything but minor. Given the interest that drew him to government service in the first place, it was natural that he would reverse the policies of prior administrations by employing more Native Americans in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and encouraging tribal religion and culture.

But he also set about on the accomplishments I listed at the start of this post—and, more controversially, clashing with other Cabinet members about their prerogatives, including, most prominently:

*Henry Wallace, another former Republican termed Democratic liberal, who successfully fought off Ickes’ attempt to move the Forestry Service from the Department of Agriculture to Interior;

*Harry Hopkins, a Roosevelt intimate who tangled repeatedly with Ickes over federal allocations for his own programs (the Civil Works Administration and Works Progress Administration) in the Commerce Department versus Ickes’ PWA; and

*Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, whose longtime friendship with and easy access to FDR provoked a sexist private observation of Ickes (“There is something to the old adage, ‘a woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they’ll be'”).

No fair judgment of Ickes’ career and character can be made without noting his commitment to civil rights and liberties for all. 

Heading the Chicago branch of the NAACP in the 1920s, he would, a decade later, offer Marian Anderson the use of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the acclaimed African-American contralto from singing in their auditorium.

Then, during WWII, when the Work Relocation Authority (WRA) was transferred to the Interior Department, Ickes, a staunch opponent of Japanese-American internment, endured hate mail and threats when he moved to roll back the agency’s discriminatory policy.

Along with Perkins, Ickes was the only Cabinet member to serve throughout FDR’s 12 years in office. But he did not survive long under Harry Truman. 

After disagreeing with Roosevelt’s successor over an appointment in the Navy Department, Ickes submitted another of his letters of resignation—except that this time, his boss accepted it.

Each day, Ickes dictated first drafts of diary entries based on hastily scrawled notes in meetings. Within two years of his death in 1952, his second wife and widow, Jane Dahlman, had published three volumes she had edited up to the start of FDR’s third term in 1941.

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes represents an as-it-happened insider’s account of policymaking through the first two terms of a President who delighted in keeping advisers guessing about his intentions. This dyspeptic American Pepys who recorded his impressions gave future biographers a chronicle that, these days, seems ever less likely to be repeated.

(The Whitewater scandal left Clinton administration officials, for instance, hesitant about putting to paper their impressions, particularly after the young Treasury Department aide Josh Steiner gulped and disavowed in congressional testimony diary entries on pressure from the White House. 

Investigations making use of contemporaneous notes also briefly involved—are you ready for this?—Ickes’ son, Harold McEwen Ickes, a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose handwritten memo on large donors led him to testify on Capitol Hill on financing for the 1996 Presidential campaign, according to this July 1997 article for the (Mass.) Standard-Times.)

Like another New Dealer, William O. Douglas (elevated from chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court), Ickes presents historians with a conundrum: how to assess a public official’s accomplishments and idealism with prickly personalities that may limited their effectiveness and fulfillment of their highest ambitions. 

(Both men, at different times, seethed over failing to be selected as FDR’s Vice-Presidential running mate.)

Moreover, historians also must keep these same private failings as they assess these New Deal chroniclers for their biases and even basic reliability.

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on the Three Things a Nation Must Believe In)

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32^nd President of the United States, “Remarks at the Dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York,” June 30, 1941

This Day in New York History (Birth of Hamilton Fish III, Political Scion and Arch-Isolationist)

Dec. 7, 1888— A shared upstate patrician background might have sufficed to put Franklin Roosevelt and Hamilton Fish III on a pleasant personal, if not political, basis.

Instead, the Republican Fish—born on this date in Garrison, NY—became an increasingly vociferous Congressional opponent not only of the Democratic President’s New Deal domestic policies, but also, problematically, of his attempts to “quarantine” Fascist dictators through aid to Western democracies at the outbreak of World War II.

Relations between the two Hudson Valley politicians (Fish was the congressman for the President’s own district) became so tense that FDR lumped the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, together with fellow GOP isolationists Joseph Martin and Bruce Barton, in the scornful, rhythmically charged phrase “Martin, Barton and Fish.”

For most of the postwar period, Fish has been regarded just as a cranky reactionary foil to Roosevelt, with, at worst, hidebound isolationist views. 

Since the airing of Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra last year, however, long-forgotten aspects of his approach to dealing with Nazi Germany have raised serious questions about his office’s involvement in disseminating Nazi propaganda and supporting violent far-right hate groups.

Those questions have been troubling enough that the Desmond-Fish Public Library in Garrison, after pointed and persistent inquiries from residents, is reviewing whether it should rename itself and/or engage in a “restorative justice” effort.

In the fall of 1941, during a federal investigation of Nazi activities in the U.S., George Hill, a top staffer for Fish, was seen carrying large bags to a Capitol Hill storage room and to the D.C. headquarters of the America First Committee that promoted non-intervention in World War II. 

The links to Fish were eye-opening and multiple: the congressman not only employed Hill but also controlled the storage room and had spoken at an America First rally. When files were destroyed at the America First office, a scandal arose as to whether Fish might have been the effort to tamper with evidence.

As investigators dug further, they found that Nazi agents had used Hill to send out order forms for recipients who wanted copies of the notorious antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It was all done with the “franking privilege” that allows members of Congress the right to mail material to their constituents for free.  

It is too bad that Maddow became so fascinated by the unmistakable contemporary echoes of the Nazi plot to undermine democracy that she did not explain why the isolationist movement that Hill hoped to exploit enjoyed broad-based support, across multiple ethnic groups and ideologies. 

But her revelations about isolationist Senators Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota and Burton Wheeler of Montana will surely lead many to look further into the careers of these once-boldface names in politics.

For me, though, the story of Fish—part of a political dynasty that included a grandfather who became governor of New York and Ulysses Grant’s secretary of state, as well as a father who also served in Congress—is particularly fascinating. It’s not just because his office was at the heart of the hullabaloo.

It’s also because a politician like Fish—who, like FDR, was inspired to join the Progressive movement by the President’s distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and who led an African-American regiment in WWI—became associated with some of the most arch-conservative elements in American politicians.

Consider, for instance, that in 1921, shortly after he began his term as a U.S. representative, Fish sponsored legislation creating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or that a year later, he secured passage of the resolution calling for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews; or that, in 1924, he secured passage of “adjusted service” certificates redeemable in 1945 for war veterans—legislation that President Coolidge feared constituted an undue burden on taxpayers.

But in 1930, he led a committee investigating Soviet Communist influence in the United States that, while uncovering no subversives, gave early exposure to the extremist views of Fr. Charles Coughlin.

Though he started out by wishing FDR well after the governor of New York won the Presidency, Fish quickly came to believe that the New Deal—and, consequently, the Democratic Party that supported it—was riddled with socialism.

From then on, Fish’s beliefs and actions drifted towards the fringe, as he:

*denounced FDR for establishing diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933;

*called for Roosevelt’s impeachment following his 1937 “quarantine” speech;

*spoke at a German Day rally in 1938 at Madison Square Garden, where the stage was filled with swastikas;

*took the personal airplane of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to an August 1939 conference in Oslo, then stated that German claims to territory were “just”;

*led GOP opposition to the Lend Lease Act, a “fascist” piece of legislation that would make FDR a “dictator.”

It might fairly be said after that last characterization that Fish couldn’t recognize a real dictator if he stumbled over one. Although he denied being antisemitism, pointing to his early advocacy for a Jewish homeland, it can fairly be stated that, like British appeasers, he saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against the rise of international Communism.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a happy 53rd birthday gift to the congressman. It left Fish scrambling for cover, as he was among the first to call for a declaration of war against Japan (although years later, he characteristically reversed himself, charging that FDR had conspired to get the U.S. into the conflict).

These days, it has become fashionable for some observers to say that the fate of Donald Trump should lie not with jurors but with voters. The termination of Fish’s political career does not exactly conform to this model.

True, Fish escaped legal accountability for any part he might have played in the Nazi subversion scheme when the investigation into that stumbled. 

Even with the growing pro-war feeling of the public during the war, he might have continued to represent his district except that he’d made a powerful enemy in his own party: Thomas Dewey.

Annoyed by Fish's support for fellow isolationist Robert Taft for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1944, the New York Governor helped redraw the boundaries of his congressional district, leading to Fish's loss of his seat. 

Maybe the true lesson of Fish's political termination--as well as those involved in the January 6 insurrection--could be that while voters might possess the ultimate power over a politician, they can be provided a great assist by fellow party officeholders who punish them primarily for their own reasons.

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, Asking ‘What is to Become of the Country We Know?’)

“Every generation of young men and women in America has questions to ask the world. Most of the time they are the simple but nevertheless difficult questions, questions of work to do, opportunities to find, ambitions to satisfy. But every now and again in the history of the Republic a different kind of question presents itself—a question that asks, not about the future of an individual or even of a generation, but about the future of the country, the future of the American people….There is such a time again today. Again today the young men and the young women of America ask themselves with earnestness and with deep concern this same question: ‘What is to become of the country we know?’

“Now they ask it with even greater anxiety than before. They ask, not only what the future holds for this Republic, but what the future holds for all peoples and all nations that have been living under democratic forms of Government—under the free institutions of a free people.” —U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), Address at University of Virginia, June 10, 1940

Flashback, August 1921: FDR Contracts Polio

Franklin D. Roosevelt—blessed with a patrician heritage, a famous name, and good looks—thought he and his family were merely in a struggle to put out a fire near his family summer home on Campobello Island in Maine in the second week of August 1921.

Instead, the following 24 hours began a fight for his life in which he found his personal advantages counted for little or nothing. Ultimately, he was forced to more actively manage his medical treatment, rethink his career and the plight of the downtrodden in this country, and he discover the importance of thinking of the box when it came to public policy.

For much of the rest of the month after he fell mysteriously and catastrophically ill, Eleanor Roosevelt—still figuring out what place she would have in the private and public life of a husband who had been unfaithful to her three years before—now found that relationship disrupted even more than before.

To her, on this vacation resort that was medically understaffed, fell the responsibility of easing the distress of her husband until help arrived; figuring out whether physicians’ advice squared with her husbands’ condition; and deciding when and how to inform her overbearing mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, about the grave danger now facing the son she had tried to save from harm.

FDR’s struggle with polio has long fascinated me, for historical, dramatic and personal reasons. That fight became the crucible for the indomitable personality who carried the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, perhaps the greatest crises any President faced since Lincoln dealt with the Civil War.

Broadway and film audiences applauded Ralph Bellamy’s bravura performance as FDR in Sunrise at Campobello. But that heroic version of the future President’s ordeal, as engaging as it was, was written more than six decades ago, when Eleanor was still alive and the family was sensitive about detailing tensions in their household.

As one of the fans of the Bellamy movie long ago, I thrilled to the idea of its hero defying incredible odds to stake out a new life for himself and a New Deal for the American people.

Some years later, I discovered a fact about a family member that brought this chapter in FDR’s life even closer closer to home.

In a blog post written 13 years ago, I discussed how my grandaunt, Hannah Riordan Spollen, an Irish survivor of the Titanic, had worked as a domestic servant for several years at Bellefield, the estate of FDR’s friend and next-door neighbor Thomas Newbold, where she would take the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt up in the elevator. (Bellefield now serves as the National Park Service headquarters at FDR’s estate.)

An Investigation and an Infection

Amid the multiple, rapid traumas that gripped the Roosevelts and the nation in the quarter-century after FDR’s medical crisis, a kind of amnesia developed over an investigation that had clouded his political future in the summer just before his health emergency.

As Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, FDR had approved a sting operation to ferret out homosexual sailors in Newport, R.I. A Senate subcommittee report deemed the operation entrapment and blamed it squarely on Roosevelt.

To be sure, the Republican-controlled Congress had ample reason to discredit FDR, the 1920 Democratic candidate for Vice-President who, at age 39, had a bright and seemingly limitless future ahead of him. But the report was stressful and damaging to him.

In late July 1921, FDR traveled to Bear Mountain State Park for a giant Boy Scout jamboree. It was meant to provide a setting for the kind of stress-free, meet-the-constituent events that any politician worth his salt welcomes—and which would get his mind off the questions being raised by some in the media about the Newport scandal.

Epidemiologists now believe that the water in Bear Mountain was contaminated, providing a kind of petri dish for the polio virus--and, due to FDR's recent stress and prior medical history of typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and respiratory illness, his immunity system was weakened. It took nearly two weeks, but when the virus took hold of an exhausted FDR on Aug. 10, the impact was devastating.

Once he and his children had put out the forest fire that day, he swam in a lake, followed by a dip in the icy Bay of Fundy. What began as a pre-dinner chill had turned the next morning into a high fever.

The Roosevelts’ regular physician on Campobello thought Franklin just had a severe cold. A second Eleanor was able to get thought at first that the cause of the crisis a blood clot in the lower spinal cord, then decided it must be a spinal lesion. But these diagnoses were wrong, as was the treatment for both: massage therapy to improve circulation.

Finally, on Aug. 25, an orthopedic surgeon surprised Franklin with a diagnosis of infantile paralysis—i.e., polio—and ordered an end to the massage therapy, which may have been worsening his condition.

By mid-September, Eleanor and FDR’s political adviser Louis Howe—who had rushed to the family cottage to help her with round-the-clock care of Franklin—had to arrange his transfer to New York Presbyterian Hospital for further medical observation and treatment. They devised an operation that became, in somewhat lessened fashion, the template for his life going forward: a complex, linked transportation system and news management that fell somehow short of modern notions of transparency.

FDR was taken on an improvised stretcher off Campobello, with Howe intentionally misdirecting reporters to a different spot on the island than the one they expected.  From that point on, FDR would go by boat, truck, and rail to Grand Central Station—a jumpy journey that exhausted him.

Once the polio diagnosis was made and accepted by FDR and his family, the debate over his future began. Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, preferred that he come home to Hyde Park, recuperate, and forget about politics.

But wife Eleanor and Howe did not want to foreclose that avenue for him—and Franklin, with his invincible optimism, decided that somehow, he would re-enter politics in some capacity, while doing all he could to recover fully. He even offered advice to another physician, Dr. William Egleston of South Carolina, on treatment of polio patients based on his own experience. (That 1924 letter also is one of the most extensive descriptions he ever provided on his personal ordeal.) His enthusiastic patronage of the Warm Springs spa Warm Springs in Georgia made it the prime place for polio patients to receive therapy,

Of course, FDR was not fully successful in achieving his hopes. Though he retained his upper-body strength to an impressive degree, he was never able to walk again without even limited adjustments for his disability—including a wheelchair, heavy braces, a male companion (often eldest son James or an aide) whose arm he could hold when he rose to his feet, and just a few steps to walk. Fiercely proud, and wanting all who came in contact with him to approach him as they would anyone else, he did all he could to minimize his condition. (He even largely got the press to accede to his request not to photograph him in his wheelchair; only a handful of such pictures exist out of the thousands of him in the Presidential library at Hyde Park.)

Nevertheless, Roosevelt did indeed re-enter politics, even running ahead of the goals originally set by himself and Howe (New York Governor 1932, the Presidency 1936). He used his office to publicize The March of Dimes, the campaign that ultimately bankrolled research for a polio vaccine.

The effort to eradicate polio has succeeded so markedly that the last Americans stricken by the disease are in their late sixties or seventies, and diminishing daily.

A man in a wheelchair, then, inspired a nation to rise to its feet again during the Great Depression.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1960 film adaptation of Sunrise at Campobello, showing Ralph Bellamy and Greer Garson as, respectively, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Bellamy repeated his Tony Award-winning role for the big screen, while Garson was nominated for an Oscar as the future First Lady.)

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on ‘Votes for Fearful Men’ and Peace)

“I do not think that you will ever cast the majority of your votes for fearful men. We face the enormous, the complex problems of building with our allies a strong world structure of peace. In doing that historic job, we shall be standing before a mighty bar of judgment - the judgment of all of those who have fought and died in this war - the judgment of generations yet unborn - the very judgment of God.

“I believe that we Americans will want the peace to be built by men who have shown foresight rather than hindsight. Peace, no less than war, must offer a spirit of comradeship, a spirit of achievement, a spirit of unselfishness, and indomitable will to victory.”—President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), “Campaign Address at Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts. November 4, 1944,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1944-45 volume, Victory and the Threshold of Peace, compiled by Samuel I. Rosenman.

Seventy-five years ago today, Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term as President of the United States. That fact testified both to the power of his charm, his bond with voters, and his driving will that pushed him and his country far beyond what anyone could ever have dreamed possible—except, of course, his own mortality. 

All of these qualities—part of the package that made Roosevelt the most consequential and controversial politician of his time—were on display during his Fenway Park speech—the last campaign rally in what turned out to be the last race of his life. 

Early in the speech, addressing the not-so-subtle digs at his health by Republican rival Thomas Dewey and GOP surrogates like playwright-turned-Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the President briefly and lightly sought to dismiss those concerns:

“Let me remind you that, having nominated Al Smith for the second time for the Presidency [in 1928], I was then running at his request for the Governorship of New York. And people were then—even then—saying that my health would not permit me to discharge the duties of public office.

“Well, you know, I think that it is by now a pretty well-established fact that I managed to survive my four years as Governor of New York. And at the end of that time I went elsewhere.”

The bravado in the face of foes that so endeared FDR to supporters coexisted with a blithe disingenuousness. Perhaps he felt that, having battled the aftereffects of polio for two decades, he would be damned if he would be counted out yet again. 

But the remorselessly intense effort to lead the global war against Fascism had taken a toll on FDR. Beginning in 1943, his health had undergone such a precipitous, visible decline that by March 1944, his  daughter Anna brought in a young Navy cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, to examine the President. 

The diagnosis: Roosevelt had reduced lung capacity, high blood pressure, acute bronchitis, and congestive heart failure. Without any blood pressure medication available at the time, Bruenn suggested shorter work hours, the use of digitalis to regulate the heart rhythm, dietary changes, and sedated sleep.

In the final weeks of the campaign, talk about the President’s health remained loud enough that he went into full campaign mode to demonstrate that he was up to the rigors of the job. He won the election, but, with little to no respite from his duties, FDR died the following April of a cerebral hemorrhage. 

I have mentioned FDR's disingenuousness about health—or, if you prefer, a refusal to accept that this could be happening to him—in this final campaign address. But equally present was his gravitas. Like the President he had served a quarter-century before as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt felt a heavy responsibility to the men he had sent into combat. 

More to the point, he felt he needed to accomplish the task left unfulfilled when Wilson was felled by a devastating stroke: the creation of an international organization to keep the peace (the United Nations).

In the end, FDR did bring into being the postwar order that, for another three-quarters of a century and maintained by Presidents of both major parties, managed to avoid a third calamitous global conflict. The last three years have seen another New Yorker in the White House, but one without either FDR’s (or, for that matter, Dewey’s) sense of responsibility. 

With keen political antenna, Roosevelt took notice in the Fenway Park address of the wild charges of Communism that polluted American discourse in the decade following his death. With his characteristic optimism—maybe the same variety that led him to defy concerns about his health—he chose to believe that the American electorate would never “cast the majority of your votes for fearful men.” 

Between now and next November, we will see if the current “fearful men” retain their hold on the White House and thoroughly undo the "strong world structure of peace" he worked so hard to construct.

Quote of the Day (Walter Lippmann, on the ‘Final Test of a Leader’)

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on….The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully. "— American writer, reporter, and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), "Roosevelt Has Gone" in The New York Herald Tribune (April 14, 1945).

Lippmann, longtime dean of American newspaper columnists, wrote these lines right after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, who, after three full terms in office and part of a fourth, seemed like an irreplaceable figure in American politics. I leave it to you, Faithful Reader, to figure out whether the current occupant of the Oval Office will pass the test that FDR aced. Or if he’s capable of it.

Quote of the Day (Franklin D. Roosevelt, on What Imprisons Men)

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.” —President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Pan American Day Address,” Washington, D. C., April 14, 1939

America’s 32^nd President died on this day 72 years ago today in Warm Springs, Ga. Many Americans could not imagine the future without him—largely because, having refused to be conquered by fate himself, he would not let his country give in to fear.

Historian William E. Leuchtenburg has titled his analysis of this outsized President’s legacy, In the Shadow of FDR. Roosevelt had his faults, but an easily cowed spirit was not among them, and he communicated this to his countrymen as they faced the Great Depression and the Age of Dictators.