F.D.R.

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.

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…

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.

Dumping Justices
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The attached editorial was intended to serve as PATHFINDER MAGAZINE‘s introduction to six pen-portraits that follow on the next webpage. In order to better serve their readers the editors provided profiles of the oldest Supreme Court justices who FDR wished to remove.

[Justices] McReynolds, Sutherland, Van Devanter, and Butler are generally conceded to be the court’s consistently conservative bloc. In some cases, this bloc is viewed as not only conservative but also reactionary.


Click here to read the profiles of the six justices…

FDR vs. the Men in Black
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

An article written by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945) in which he rants on about all the triumphs of his first two terms, repeating in several places how much better his administration was than the one that preceded him, how popular he was with the voters and emphasizing throughout that the Federal Government had tremendous potential as a force for good during the Great Depression, but it’s efforts were blocked at every turn:

For a dead hand was being laid upon this whole program of progress – to stay it all.
It was the hand of the Supreme Court of the United States…former Supreme Court Justices McReynolds, Van Devanter, and Butler, whose judgments were all consistently against New Deal measures.

Click here to see an anti-New Deal cartoon.

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