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.
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.
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.
Besides teaching American history and English literature three days a week as vice principal in the Todhunter School in New York (having to commute from Albany), Mrs Roosevelt runs the Val Kill furniture factory where reproductions of early American furniture are made to give work to the unemployed on the environs of the big Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park, N.Y. She belongs to several women’s clubs but never neglects her duties as mistress of a governor’s mansion…
In 1947 former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt penned this nifty essay about her least favorite word:
I do not like the word tolerance.
If you tolerate something, you do not like it very much.
Here are the results of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE‘s 1940 poll concerning FDR’s controversial run for a third term. The pollsters were interested in discovering the voter’s thoughts on the third term as a concept for future presidents – rather than gaining a better understanding as to the popularity of President Roosevelt.
The poll considered the opinions of citizens who voted for FDR in 1936 and those who sided with Republican Alf Landon in the same election. They concluded that 68.6% of poll’s participants were against a third presidential term.
The figure pictured in the far left of this image is one of the biggest spenders in FDR’s cabinet and
This is a 1943 editorial that was penned by Republican Senator Robert Taft (1889 – 1953) who explained in the most clinical terms that President Roosevelt’s loyal opposition on Capitol Hill can be relied upon to support him in all matters involving his roll as Commander-in-Chief. However, Taft implied, any further efforts to go gallivanting about the Capitol creating any more of those agencies with the New Deal trademark names like FSA, WPA, NYA, REA, TVA etc. etc. etc will be met with the stiffest opposition from the Republicans, who were well outnumbered, anyway.
Taft’s column was answered by his opposite number in the Democratic Party: New York Senator Robert F. Wagner (1877 – 1953); his column can also be read here.
The historian Henry Steele Commager chose to rank FDR at number 19 insofar as his impact on the American mind was concerned – click here to understand his reasoning…
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well-known for cracking wise about the members of the American business community, such as stock brokers, speculators, company functionaries and the leading corporate executives during the Great Depression – believing that there actually could be an economy worth saving if they didn’t exist. Throughout the Thirties the New Deal launched numerous tax laws and assorted other pieces of legislation that served only to stymy competition, raise prices and slow all economic growth. The editors of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE published this spirited and rational defense of corporate America in 1938 and it is attached herein:
American business, whatever its limitations, has produced a better living for more people than any other system of production… The American big-business system has fed people better and more generously. It has provided more convenient and more wholesome shelter. It has distributed vastly more of the mechanical aids to civilized living.
Click here to read about FDR’s tax plan from 1935.
Here is a short article that appeared a year and a half into the administration of President Roosevelt and it lays the nation’s economic short comings right upon the doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The writer articulated how unrecognizable the nation had become in such a very short span of time. The president’s anti-competition policies were reeking havoc on an already damaged economy:
The New Deal plan for cotton is destroying nothing less than the principal industry of the South… There is freshly disclosed evidence that the Public Works Administration works directly toward the retardation of private enterprise.
