F.D.R. – Page 4 – Old Magazine Articles

The Navy Mourned
(Newsweek, 1945)

It was no secret around Washington that President Franklin Roosevelt was partial to the U.S. Navy. The admirals and other senior officers of the navy certainly knew – and loved it. The attached essay was an appreciative salute to FDR composed shortly after his death by Admiral William Pratt (1869 – 1957):

Other men, military in training and veterans of successful land campaigns, have sat in the White House, but never before in the history of our country has any man ever sat there whose instincts at heart were essentially those of a sailor.

A Day in the Life of F.D.R.
(Literary Digest, 1937)

The attached article presented a dusk till dawn account of one day in the life of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945).
Written during his first term (prior to the war), the journalist recounted who the reoccurring players in his life were, the time of his rising, the preferred meals, the length of the meetings, distractions, recreations and other assorted minutia -but you’ll not read the word wheelchair once. This is a fine example of the press black-out that was in place in order to prevent the public any knowledge whatever of Roosevelt’s paralytic illness, which rendered him paralyzed from the waist down (he suffered from Guillain-Barré syndrome which he contracted in 1921).

Read a 1945 interview with FDR’s economic adviser, Bernard Baruch; click here.
Click here to read about the four inaugurations of FDR.

FDR’s Doctor Speaks
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Published ten months after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice-Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy, reminisced about Roosevelt’s illness and his observations of the man:

The Pearl Harbor attack put a pressure on the President that never lifted.

With the flower of American youth fighting and dying on land and sea, he looked on any sparing of himself as a betrayal…

From Amazon:

FDR’s Deadly Secret

FDR’s Doctor Speaks
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

The Pearl Harbor attack put a pressure on the President that never lifted.

With the flower of American youth fighting and dying on land and sea, he looked on any sparing of himself as a betrayal…

From Amazon:

FDR’s Deadly Secret

Leon Trotsky Speaks About FDR and the Great Depression
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1938)

Two and a half years were left on the clock for the exiled Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) until he would have to keep his rendezvous with an icepick in Mexico – and while living it up on this borrowed time he granted an interview to this one correspondent from a Beverly Hills literary magazine in which he ranted on in that highly-dated and terribly awkward Bolsheviki language about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his social programs.

Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.

‘A Message to the White Collar Class”
(Pic Magazine, 1941)

A very self-conscious column regarding the American class structure.

Justice Pierce Butler
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

More articles about FDR Supreme Court scheme can be read here…… KEY WORDS: Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler 1937,Justice Pierce

Justice Willis Van Devanter
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

More articles about FDR Supreme Court scheme can be read here…… KEY WORDS: Justice Willis Van Devanter magazine article,Justice Willis

Justice Charles Evans Hughes
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

More articles about FDR Supreme Court scheme can be read here…… KEY WORDS: Justice Charles Evans Hughes magazine article,Justice Charles

Justice Charles Evans Hughes
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

More articles about FDR Supreme Court scheme can be read here…… KEY WORDS: Justice Charles Evans Hughes magazine article,Justice Charles

Justice McReynolds
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

One of FDR’s primary targets was the 75 year-old Justice James Clark McReynolds, attached you will find a four page profile of the man.

African-Americans, FDR, and the 1944 Election
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

A segment from a longer article regarding the 1944 presidential election and the widespread disillusionment held by many Black voters regarding the failings of FDR and his administration:

…the Negro vote, about two million strong, is shifting back into the Republican column.

The report is largely based upon the observations of one HARPER’S MAGAZINE correspondent named Earl Brown.

The group that advised FDR on all matters involving the African-American community was popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…

When New York City Mourned F.D.R.
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

With the exception of the attached piece, there is no magazine article in existence that illustrated so clearly the soul-piercing pain that descended upon the city of New York when the word got around that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. YANK correspondent Bill Davidson walked from one neighborhood to the next recording much of what he saw:

Nowhere was grief so open as in the poorest districts of the city. In Old St. Patrick’s in the heart of the Italian district on the lower East Side, bowed, shabby figures came and went, and by the day after the President died hundreds of candles burned in front of the altar. ‘Never’ a priest said ‘have so many candles burned in this church’.
A woman clasped her 8-year-old son and said, ‘Not in my lifetime or in yours will we again see such a man.’

The FDR Assassination Attempt
(Coronet Magazine, 1960)

The attached article recalls that seldom remembered day in February of 1933 when Giuseppe Zangara (1900 – 1933) fired fifteen bullets wildly into a Florida crowd in an attempt to murder President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt.

Her Life Since Leaving the White House
(’47 Magazine, 1947)

Attached is a 1947 article that reported on the post-FDR life of The Widow Roosevelt since assuming the position of the United States delegate to the newly established United Nations:

Mrs Roosevelt’s performance during the first session of the U.N. General Assembly in London during the winter of 1946 surprised and pleased even those who had once been her husband’s most bitter foes.

Bad Press Day for Eleanor Roosevelt
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

During a 1936 visit to a research facility devoted to finding a cure for children’s lung ailments, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was remembered by a reporter for having blurted out a highly insensitive question:

What is the use of saving babies, if they can’t earn a decent living when they grow up?

With two years to think about her impulsive inquiry, the reporter responded with outrage in formulating an answer.

Eleanor Roosevelt Was a Very Different First Lady
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

Written not too long after she assumed the title First Lady; Eleanor Roosevelt (1906 – 1975) was causing a dust-up in Washington:

With the Constitution making no provision whatever for the duties of President’s wives, they have heretofore confined their activities largely to the social side of the white House.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s governmental activities are approved by those who see in them altruism, sympathy for the downtrodden, and a great desire to serve others. Her activities are opposed by those who feel that she is not properly a public servant because she is not responsible to the American electorate or directly accountable to it at election time.

The ”Chief Woman-Elect”
(New Outlook Magazine, 1932)

Half a dozen women who have known Eleanor Roosevelt in the past twenty years all agree that this is the first president’s wife in not a few presidential terms who might have achieved election to something in her own right; who might give ear to the women of the country. And although just listening to other people’s troubles isn’t enough, it is conceivably something.