Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

worst ills of the Great Depression—emergency measures to put the jobless to work, to save the banking system from collapse, to restore businesses and farms to productivity. In the first of his great environmental programs, he brought thousands of young men into a Civilian Conservation Corps and put them to work planting trees and fighting forest fires. In one of the hardest-hit regions of the country, he established the sprawling Tennessee Valley Authority, a regional plan to generate badly needed electric power while preventing disastrous floods and soil erosion.

The country gasped at the audacity of his program, then largely embraced it. Roosevelt was a tonic for sick souls.

More enormous reforms followed in the wake of the Hundred Days, both before and after FDR’s reelection in a landslide in 1936. There were programs to help young people get jobs and go to college, to provide Social Security pensions to old people, to help workers organize in labor unions. In a gigantic construction campaign to give jobs to the unemployed and stimulate the economy, his administration built dams, bridges, and tunnels; civic auditoriums and schools; highways and post offices and airports. There was even a program to put unemployed artists, writers, and musicians to work, practicing their crafts in the public interest.

All these laws, programs, and projects became known by the term FDR had introduced in the 1932 campaign—the New Deal. He wasn’t talking about a business deal. He was talking about quitting an old game, shuffling the cards, and starting over.

Month by month, year by year, the country began to climb out of the crisis. It was slow. High unemployment continued; people were still hungry. Critics on the left said FDR’s activist program wasn’t enough, that more radical measures were needed. On the right, conservatives began to call him a “traitor to his class” and warned of a slide into socialism. But even they had to concede that his strong show of action may have headed off a revolution.

In 1937 the rising economy took another downward lurch. The president’s critics called it the “Roosevelt recession.” But by 1940, the nation, though still scared and certainly scarred, was looking backward at the Great Depression. That was due in part to the New Deal. But it was also due to a new crisis, this one across the oceans. American factories were roaring again, making materials for war.

By the precedent set by George Washington but never written into law, presidents left office after two terms. Roosevelt’s two terms were nearly up.

But in the spring of 1940, the Nazi armies of Adolf Hitler swept across western Europe and threatened to invade Great Britain. The military leaders of Japan had conquered much of China and were demanding concessions from the United States and its allies in the western Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt was deeply wary of the threats these dictators posed to U.S. interests. But he had played his cards cautiously, knowing most Americans wanted to stay out of war.

With the Nazi armies’ blitzkrieg drive to the English Channel, the crisis seemed so grave that many Americans could not imagine proceeding without Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. He agreed to run for a third term, the only president to do so, and he won.

So he was in office on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, Germany, Japan’s ally, declared war on the United States as well.

Roosevelt said that “Doctor New Deal” must now become “Doctor Win-the-War.”

His most consequential decision as commander-in-chief was to declare Germany the primary enemy, despite the thirst for revenge that so many Americans felt in response to the Japanese “sneak attack.” Historians have judged the “Atlantic First” strategy to be the right call. If Germany had been allowed to conquer its remaining foes in Europe—the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union—then Hitler would have stood astride half the world. So Roosevelt directed the navy to hold off the Japanese threat while the United States armed the British and the Soviets, all the while building up armies and weapons for a great strike back at Germany. That came when Allied forces attacked the German occupiers of France on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day.

In both theaters of war, despite horrific losses, the United States and its allies made slow but steady progress against their enemies. By the fall of 1944, when Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term as president, there was little doubt about the eventual result. It was just a question of how long the war would last and how great the suffering would be.

Through those twelve dark years of pain and upheaval, Roosevelt’s leadership was the beacon in the darkness. Because he so evidently believed that all would be well in the end, people took hope. And it was no small thing that they knew he had come through a great personal ordeal, rising from near death to reclaim his life and his future. In the end, nobody much cared whether he could walk.

On April 12, 1945, in his white cottage at Warm Springs, he put his hand to head and said, “I have a terrific headache.” A blood vessel had burst in his brain. A few minutes later he was dead. He had been in poor health from high blood pressure and a bad heart for many months. Probably he should not have run for his fourth term. But he had beaten one disease. Perhaps he thought he could beat another as he had the first—by trying this and trying that, coming back again and again, keeping everlastingly at it until death itself might give up in the face of his smiling persistence.

One time he had tossed off an idea for some big project to an aide.

The man said, “Mr. President, you can’t do that.”

FDR replied, “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t do.”

The way Roosevelt portrayed his disability in the intense spotlight of the presidency has been called a “splendid deception.” That isn’t