Showing posts with label Franklin Roosevelt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franklin Roosevelt. Show all posts
Monday, April 12, 2010
Truman's Very Bad Day
Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly on this day in 1945. He'd been dying for a long time, but nobody wanted to admit it. Losing him was too big a catastrophe to think about. A nondescript man in glasses was quickly sworn in to replace him, but nobody knew much about the guy. He was from somewhere in the Midwest. He wore a panama hat and liked to play the piano. Roosevelt had been president for so long it was hard to remember him not being president. Businessmen hated him, giving him little credit for rescuing the economy. The rich called FDR a traitor to his class. To the working man he was almost God. He was enormously self-confident and reassuring, and he was ubiquitous. People hung his picture in their homes and offices. Everybody knew his voice from the radio. Nobody had ever heard of Harry Truman. When Truman expressed his condolences to Mrs. Roosevelt she said she felt more sorry for him. He was the understudy who wakes up onstage. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to act, to say something so they'd know what he sounded like, wondering how quickly he would fail. He was sixty years-old. Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt each appear five times in A Book of Ages. Eleanor Roosevelt appears three times.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The Good War
Seventy years ago today Germany invaded Poland, assuming Britain and France wouldn't care about it any more than they had cared about Czechoslovakia. They did care this time. Neville Chamberlain was soon on his way out and Churchill, that irresponsible war-monger and back-number, was in Number 10 within the year. War would make him the man of the century.
But it's hard to call any war that killed 70 million people a good war. The heroes were heroic, mostly, and the villains were recognizable as monsters. The great novelists and artists of the 20th century set foot in this war. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Ernest Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. James Michener wrote some tales about the South Pacific and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical about it. Norman Mailer was a rifleman in that same theater of the war. Graham Greene missed being killed by a German bomb because he was sleeping with his mistress at the time. Evelyn Waugh was an officer so hated by his men that he had to be reassigned for his own protection.
Joseph Heller flew combat missions. So did James Stewart. Afterwards he could no longer play wide eyed innocents. War added a layer of grit and cynicism and suppressed anger to his civilian roles. It was John Wayne, roughly the same age as Stewart, who stayed home to play war heroes on film. Heller's novel distilled war's insanity into a phrase: Catch 22. Vonnegut lived the firebombing of Dresden and wrote a novel around it. Salinger took a bullet out of the war and once everybody was home and safe he put it in the brain of Seymour Glass.
These personalities and their own particular versions of WWII are each included in A Book of Ages, as are Eisenhower and MacArthur and Patton and Roosevelt and Truman and Hirohito and Hitler, the people who made it happen. And Anne Frank, the quiet 14 year-old girl who died at Bergen Belsen.
But it's hard to call any war that killed 70 million people a good war. The heroes were heroic, mostly, and the villains were recognizable as monsters. The great novelists and artists of the 20th century set foot in this war. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Ernest Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. James Michener wrote some tales about the South Pacific and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical about it. Norman Mailer was a rifleman in that same theater of the war. Graham Greene missed being killed by a German bomb because he was sleeping with his mistress at the time. Evelyn Waugh was an officer so hated by his men that he had to be reassigned for his own protection.
Joseph Heller flew combat missions. So did James Stewart. Afterwards he could no longer play wide eyed innocents. War added a layer of grit and cynicism and suppressed anger to his civilian roles. It was John Wayne, roughly the same age as Stewart, who stayed home to play war heroes on film. Heller's novel distilled war's insanity into a phrase: Catch 22. Vonnegut lived the firebombing of Dresden and wrote a novel around it. Salinger took a bullet out of the war and once everybody was home and safe he put it in the brain of Seymour Glass.
These personalities and their own particular versions of WWII are each included in A Book of Ages, as are Eisenhower and MacArthur and Patton and Roosevelt and Truman and Hirohito and Hitler, the people who made it happen. And Anne Frank, the quiet 14 year-old girl who died at Bergen Belsen.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Social Security
On this day in 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act. It had originated as a pension for old people without means––until 1935 most old people lived in poverty. But conservatives insisted it be a pension for rich and poor alike. The tax to cover it was capped to make sure wealthier Americans weren't paying too much in. And the provision for health care would have to wait until Medicare was passed in the 1960s. But Social Security did alleviate poverty among the elderly. It was efficient, practical, and the checks arrived like clockwork. Still do.
The first person to receive a Social Security check (number 00-000-001) was a retired secretary who'd worked for Calvin Coolidge's Vermont law firm. Her name was Ida May Fuller. She was philosophically opposed to the idea, being a lifelong Republican, but if she qualified she was determined to get the money."It wasn't that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I'd been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it."
Her first check, which arrived in January 1940, was for $22.54. During the last three years of her working life Ida May Fuller paid a total of $24.75 into the Social Security system. By the time she died at age 100, she'd received $22,888.92 in benefits. A nice return. She never thought much of the New Deal. Ida May Fuller appears twice in A Book of Ages.
The first person to receive a Social Security check (number 00-000-001) was a retired secretary who'd worked for Calvin Coolidge's Vermont law firm. Her name was Ida May Fuller. She was philosophically opposed to the idea, being a lifelong Republican, but if she qualified she was determined to get the money."It wasn't that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I'd been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it."
Her first check, which arrived in January 1940, was for $22.54. During the last three years of her working life Ida May Fuller paid a total of $24.75 into the Social Security system. By the time she died at age 100, she'd received $22,888.92 in benefits. A nice return. She never thought much of the New Deal. Ida May Fuller appears twice in A Book of Ages.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Big Bad Wolf
On this date in 1933 Walt Disney released an animated short featuring three enterprising pigs. Homeowners, if you will. The perils of home ownership and finance were something Americans had become deeply aware of since the onset of the Depression four years earlier. The film is most famous for the song it introduced. "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" expressed a new, almost jaunty, hopefulness. FDR had been in office for 84 days. The wolf might still be at the door but people had a new song to whistle at him.
On the same day in Washington, the new Federal Securities Act was signed into law. One more item in the president's New Deal, it introduced the novel idea of regulating markets. There were now rules that large financial operators, banks, stockbrokers––wolves, if you will––were expected to follow. The American economy has been a less dangerous place in the generations since.
It seems funny to celebrate Walt Disney and Franklin Roosevelt in one breath, but both took the side of the little guy. Disney wasn't always the name on an enormous company. He began as an individual, a small businessman. He arrived in Hollywood penniless. He took enormous risks. He worked very hard and was incredibly talented, but he was lucky and he knew it. He was banking on the luck of his audience too. He chose a mouse for his hero, not a large animal, not a wolf. Disney appears at ages 21, 26, 35, 53 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
Franklin Roosevelt, whom capitalists sneered at and called a "traitor to his class," was born rich, but his ability to understand the fundamental importance of the little guy in the market equation probably saved American capitalism. Remember, this was a time when extremisms of one sort and another were taking over around the globe, in Japan and Germany, Italy and Russia and China. FDR understood that capitalism needs its customers to prosper too.
Roosevelt had never been poor but he understood hardship of another kind. Just as his political star was rising he contracted polio. He was 39, and he would never walk unassisted again. He went to Georgia to convalesce, and it was at Warm Springs that he met people of all classes and types who were in the same boat he was. He was no better and no worse than they were. Their courage helped him find his own. It was at Warm Springs that FDR learned the common touch that helped him––helped America––work its way through the hardest times the country had encountered since the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt appears at ages 23, 39, 50, 53, 54 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
On the same day in Washington, the new Federal Securities Act was signed into law. One more item in the president's New Deal, it introduced the novel idea of regulating markets. There were now rules that large financial operators, banks, stockbrokers––wolves, if you will––were expected to follow. The American economy has been a less dangerous place in the generations since.
It seems funny to celebrate Walt Disney and Franklin Roosevelt in one breath, but both took the side of the little guy. Disney wasn't always the name on an enormous company. He began as an individual, a small businessman. He arrived in Hollywood penniless. He took enormous risks. He worked very hard and was incredibly talented, but he was lucky and he knew it. He was banking on the luck of his audience too. He chose a mouse for his hero, not a large animal, not a wolf. Disney appears at ages 21, 26, 35, 53 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
Franklin Roosevelt, whom capitalists sneered at and called a "traitor to his class," was born rich, but his ability to understand the fundamental importance of the little guy in the market equation probably saved American capitalism. Remember, this was a time when extremisms of one sort and another were taking over around the globe, in Japan and Germany, Italy and Russia and China. FDR understood that capitalism needs its customers to prosper too.
Roosevelt had never been poor but he understood hardship of another kind. Just as his political star was rising he contracted polio. He was 39, and he would never walk unassisted again. He went to Georgia to convalesce, and it was at Warm Springs that he met people of all classes and types who were in the same boat he was. He was no better and no worse than they were. Their courage helped him find his own. It was at Warm Springs that FDR learned the common touch that helped him––helped America––work its way through the hardest times the country had encountered since the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt appears at ages 23, 39, 50, 53, 54 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
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