F.D.R. – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

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.

FDR on His Efforts to Pack the Court
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

In writing the attached article for Collier’s, FDR made his feelings clear that he felt a deep sense of urgency to alleviate the collective pain spreading across the nation as a result of the Great Depression. Believing that it was the Supreme Court that was prolonging the agony of the American unemployed, FDR quickly began to examine all his options as to how he could best secure a majority on the court:

Here was one man, not elected by the people, who by a nod of the head could apparently ify or uphold the will of the overwhelming majority of a nation of 130,000,000.

Time would not allow us to wait for vacancies. Things were happening.

Click here to read about American
communists and their Soviet overlords.

The Critics of FDR’s Supreme Court Scheme
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Attached are seven thumbnail arguments against FDR’s court scheme that were circulating around the country at that time:

[The President’s] move is dictated by expediency and not by a long-range view and that it comes only because the Supreme Court has decided against New Deal legislation 11 out of 16 times.

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.

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.

‘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…

John Nance Garner on F.D.R.
(Collier’s, 1948)

A printable article by John Nance Garner (1868 – 1967), FDR’s first Vice-President (1933 – 1941), who wrote a number of pieces for the readers of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE in 1948 outlining the various reasons for their contentious relationship.

Cactus Jack Garner bickered with F.D.R. on a number of issues; primarily supporting a balanced federal budget and opposing F.D.R.’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court. Within these attached pages, Garner tells how Roosevelt lost the support of his Democratic Congress.

Read about FDR’s African-American advisers here…

Inside Hyde Park
(Confidential Magazine, 1954)

Appearing in CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE during the early months of 1954 were these pages from a memoir that was written by the sergeant who rode herd on the New York Police Security Detail for President Franklin Roosevelt. As far as we can figure, Prisoner at Hyde Park by New York State Policeman Edward J. Dougherty was never published, but as you will soon read, it was full of many obscure and unheard of stories of FDR and the world he dominated while in the Empire State.

Roosevelt Takes Charge…
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

This 1933 magazine article anticipating the reign of FDR appeared on the newsstands on the same day as the man’s first inauguration. The article is composed of various musings that had been published in numerous papers across the economically depressed nation as to what manner of leadership might the Americans expect from their new President.

No President has ever inherited such a load of problems and responsibilities as Roosevelt.

Click here to read President Hoover’s
farewell warning to the nation.