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all'introduzione di "Gone with the Wind"PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
(1882 – 1945)
He was the 32nd president of the USA, from 1933 (defeating Hoover) to 1945, the longest-serving holder of the office and the only president elected more than twice (4 times). He belonged to the Democrats.
He led the States through the Great Depression and built a powerful political coalition that dominated the political life of the country for many years. He also played a decisive role in the military alliance that defeated Nazi Germany, Italy, and the Empire of Japan during World War II. Extremely popular, he was commonly called "FDR", and despite his crippling illness (due to a poliomyelitis), he led deep reforms and still nowadays he may be considered one of the greatest US presidents.
His family – originally from the Netherlands - was wealthy, being his father a landowner and the vice-president of the Delaware and Hudson Railway. His mother had great influence on his childhood, being a very possessive one with her only child, and she became very oppressive even when he had his own family.
He grew up in an atmosphere of privilege: he could ride, shoot, play tennis and polo and his frequent trips to Europe provided him with fluent French and German. His family believed in public service and spent much time and money on philanthropic activities. His Christian education made him feel the duty to help the poor. At Harvard University he knew his future wife, Eleanor. They married in 1905 and had six children in spite of the unfaithful behaviour of him. Their marriage became a façade mostly for Roosevelt’s mother intervention: considering the divorce a ruin for her son’s carreer, she preferred to buy a separate home for Eleanor. Once president, Eleanor greatly helped her husband becoming his friend and political colleague.
Before being elected as President, he was the Governor of New York from 1928 to 1932 and in those years he dismissed corrupted officials, reformed the state’s prison. Immediately after the Wall Street Crash (October 1929), he started a relief system that became the model for the New Deal. As he did not have deep knowledge about economics, Roosevelt he had recourse to many leading academics, social workers and to his wife who, taking a close interest in social questions, had developed a network of friends in the welfare and labour fields.
His presidential campaign was held under the shadow of the Great Depression and during a speech he said "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people", words that became the slogan for his future programme. When he became president, the US were facing its worst depression: a third of the workforce was unemployed, millions were on the edge of starvation and almost two million people were homeless. The banks were collapsing and violence was increasing, but he himself saw the Depression as mainly a matter of confidence, as people had stopped spending and investing because of their fear. His first 100 days of office were characterized by forcing a series of bills through Congress to establish and found new government agencies. This period (1933 – 34), called "the first New Deal", saw the birth of:
His proposals were spread to the country through his famous radio speeches called "Fireside Chats".
A second New Deal (1935 – 36) came after the 1935 Congressional elections in which the Democrats got large majorities in both houses. The White House was helped by young economists and planners who promoted measures and bills to regulate the stock market and prevent that corruption which had caused the 1929 Crash. They also proposed:
These measures led to a restoration of confidence and optimism and the country slowly found the necessary strength to come out from the Depression. Many people believed – and still believe – that the New Deal was the remedy against the Depression, but many historians and economists are still debating over it and many of them do not believe that. Actually the US economy recovered a lot during Roosevelt’s first term, but fell back again during a recession in 1937-38 and recovered in 1939 and it is demonstrated that unemployment remained about 15%. That is why many economists think that there was a problem of permanent structural unemployment. The economy started to grow only after 1940-41, but maybe also thanks many other programmes and reactions, as massive spending, price controls, guaranteed cost-plus profits, bond campaigns, controls over raw materials, prohibitions on new housing and new automobiles, subsidized wages and the conscription of 12 million soldiers employed in World War II.
Roosevelt’s second term (1937 – 41) saw a coalition of voters which included – a part from the traditional Democrats all over the country – small farmers, Jews, trade unions, northern African-Americans, intellectuals and political liberals. This coalition was called "the New Deal Coalition" and remained quite the same till 1960s. In his agenda the President included the following initiatives:
His only serious obstacle to his policy seemed to be the US Supreme Court, but deaths and retirements of the judges allowed the President to appoint 8 justices to it. The so-called "Roosevelt’s Recession" of 1937-38 led him to ask for bipartisan support for his controversial foreign policy and military plans.
As for foreign policy, we have to remember that after the rejection (and the failure) of the League of Nations Treaty (1919) the US remained isolated but Roosevelt had great care not to provoke isolationist feeling. The main initiative of Roosevelt’s first term was the Good Neighbour Policy which was characterized by a re-evaluation of a new policy towards Latin America: the US withdrew their armed forces from Haiti and new treaties established US protectorates on Cuba and Panama. Moreover Roosevelt signed the Montevideo Convention (1933) by which the US renounced the American right to intervene unilaterally in the affairs of Latin American countries. Nevertheless the US support for many Latin American dictators (to serve American corporate interests) never changed. Roosevelt’s remark about A. Somoza (the dictator of Nicaragua) is still famous: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch".
In 1935, at the time of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia and of Hitler’s rise to power, Congress passed the Neutrality Act. Even if Roosevelt was against it as, for him, it penalized the victims of aggression, he signed the act. In 1937 the Sino-Japanese War broke out and the President moved to help China and, at the meantime, warned that Germany, Italy and Japan were serious threats to world peace. When WWII broke out, Roosevelt started a secret correspondence with W. Churchill in which they planned various ways of circumventing the Neutrality Act: the President wanted to help Britain and France. When Germany attacked France (1940), Britain was in danger and Roosevelt looked for public support to help Britain. When Paris fell, the news shocked the Americans and the feeling of isolationism was about to end. Both parties supported the US intervention in war even if some isolationists accused Roosevelt of irresponsible foreign policy. In Congress he declared that the US had to be the "Arsenal of Democracy". Meanwhile he was secretly helping Britain by supplying it with the best US war airplanes. In March 1941 the US was officially directing massive military and economic aid to Britain.
The third term was from 1941 to 1945, that is to say full WWII, in Europe and in the Pacific. The US was supporting Britain, France, China and the Soviet Union. Due to the war, unemployment fell quickly. In 1941 the Lend-Lease Act allowed the US to "lend" military equipment in return for "leases" on British naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. The Lend-Lease Act was extended to the Soviet Union when Hitler’s Germany invaded the country. Roosevelt and Churchill met on August 1941 to develop the Atlantic Charter.
He did not want to involve the US in the war in East Asia, even if Japan had already occupied French Indo-China. He just helped China and restricted the sales of oil to Japan, while the US was carrying out negotiations with Japan in order to avoid war. The US undervalued the Japanese threat to attack the US, until the attack of Pearl Harbour (December 1941): 3,000 dead among the American personnel. The fault lay with the War Department in Washington, as since August 1940 had been able to decode the Japanese diplomatic codes and, consequently, were in the conditions to understand the imminence of the attack. Some historians assert the President was aware of the attack but he did not decide to intervene to have the pretext to bring the country into the war as a result of being attacked. After Pearl Harbour, Japan quickly occupied the Philippines, the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, Singapore and Burma so cutting off the American route to supply China. In spite of all that, Roosevelt decided that defeating Hitler’s Germany in Europe was more important than to intervene in Asia. Hitler declared war on the USA in December. Roosevelt met Churchill and together planned a broad alliance between the US, Britain and the Soviet Union. Even if Roosevelt, being the President, was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, differently from Hitler and Stalin, relied any strategic and tactical decision on the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, and later on his Supreme Commander in Europe, General Dwigth Eisenhower.
In order to protect the US against the Japanese, and as there was evidence of espionage by the Japanese living in California, in 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which created military areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded", so that the 120,000 people of Japanese citizenship were evacuated.
Even if Roosevelt did not agree with Churchill’s strategy to defeat Germany and, at the same time, to block the Soviet Union’s advance into central and east Europe, he was persuaded by the British Premier to undertake the invasion of French Morocco and Algeria, of Sicily and the rest of Italy and, later, the Cross-Channel invasion. As a result, most of France was liberated, but most of the Allies remained blocked on the German border and the final victory over Hitler’s Germany was achieved only when the Soviet Union had already occupied all of eastern and central Europe, just as Churchill feared.
Even if Japan was reaching its maximum extent in the Pacific, Roosevelt was aware that defeating Nazi Germany was absolutely important. The political agreements for that task were taken by the President, Churchill, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shed at the Cairo Conference (1943) and later at the Teheran Conference with Stalin who agreed to help to enter the war against Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. It was in Teheran that Roosevelt’s idea of the United Nations was presented and got the approval of the other leaders. At the beginning of 1945, with the Allied armies advancing into Germany, Roosevelt – already at his fourth term and aged 62 - went to Yalta to meet Stalin and Churchill again. Churchill, against Stalin’s expansionistic targets and still in defence of Polish independence, did all his best to assure the establishment of a non-Communist Polish government and free election in that liberated country. Roosevelt was not interested in fighting against the Soviet leader for fear of losing the Soviet support against Japan and in his idea of the United Nations. Roosevelt was deeply convinced that only the United Nations could be legitimated to solve all the postwar problems.
The 1944 elections saw Roosevelt’s fourth term, even if his health was rapidly worsening. He shocked Congress and the country when he announced his participation in Yalta Conference, but he could not help doing that. After Yalta he sent some messages to Stalin accusing him of breaking his Yalta commitments over a series of issues, like the Soviet behaviours towards Poland, Germany and prisoners of war. Stalin answered by accusing the Western Allies of plotting a separate peace with Hitler behind his back and Roosevelt replied with indignation.
On 25th April 1945 Roosevelt had to take part in the founding conference of the United Nations, but he died on 12th for a cerebral haemorrhage. The death of a President that had been on charge for over 12 years was a shock for the country and for the world. The US was aware of having lost the man who had faced the worst depression and the best triumph, like the complete victory on Hitler. His follower was his vice-president, Harry S. Truman, who carried out Roosevelt’s last plan: Japan’s defeat.
As for the civil rights, Roosevelt showed himself reluctant to support anti-lynching legislation because he feared the reaction of the Southerns of the Senate and House committees to block every bill he himself proposed to Congress. However he moved many blacks into important roles. In 1941 he issued Executive Order 8802 that created the Fair Practices Committee (FEPC), in other words the most important federal initiative to promote the rights of African Americans before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Order forbade discrimination and millions of blacks and women could achieve better jobs and pay. With Roosevelt discrimination was forbidden in any government agency, including the armed forces. Actually the blacks continued to be excluded from the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Air Force and only Roosevelt’s successor, President H. S. Truman, succeeded in desegregating the armed forces. Also Roosevelt’s attitude towards the Jews was ambiguous because he appointed many Jews among his best advisors – and many of his voters in New York were Jews -, but he said that Hitler’s persecution of German Jews was not "a governmental affair", in spite of his official condemn. When the American Jews asked him to allow the German Jews to settle in the USA, at first he suggested them to take refuge elsewhere, like Ethiopia, West Africa or Venezuela, later he allowed some of them to settle in the States, but in practice only very Jews from Germany were admitted. Moreover the US Department official in charge was an anti-Semite and he did everything he could to block Jewish immigration: in spite of complaints against him, Roosevelt did nothing to remove him. Even if when he was fully aware of the Nazi extermination, he did not take any initiative to rescue European Jewish refugees to the States. When in 1944 the President allowed the institution of a War Refugee Board (which gave a certain number of Jews to enter the US), most of the European Jewish communities had already been destroyed by Hitler. He was also against the idea of a Jewish migration to Palestine and suggested Poland as the new country for the Jews.