Sunday marks 70th anniversary of death of FDR
Source: Dayton Daily News
DAYTON - On a warm spring day in April 1945 a country at war lost its commander-in-chief — a shocked nation mourned as the city of Dayton came to a halt and a 10-year-old girl lost the only man she ever called president.
“I didn’t understand how that could ever happen. How would the country function without Roosevelt,” Violet Gelhot, Springfield, said last week.
Today, April 12, marks 70 years since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who saw the country through the Great Depression and World War II. F.D.R., who ran for vice president with Gov. James Cox of Dayton in 1920, had been president for 12 years when he died — a death still fresh in the minds of some.
“I was playing outside, it seems to me it was a warm day, and it came over the radio,” Gelhot said. “I sort of grew up in that moment, I realized it was something I couldn’t just wish away.”
Read more: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local/sunday-marks-70th-anniversary-of-death-of-fdr/nkrYd/
"Learning From Franklin Roosevelt: Trickle-Up Economics
Our current political leaders could learn a few things from Roosevelt, who died 70 years ago, on April 12, 1945. As controversial as he was at times, he is now almost universally regarded as a hero who saved America from disaster. A recent poll of experts on the presidency ranked Roosevelt as our third-greatest president, after Washington and Lincoln.
His words from three quarters of a century ago seem almost eerily relevant in our present era of rising economic inequality. "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much," Roosevelt said. "It is whether we provide enough for those who have little."
The New Deal's opponents, just like some political voices we hear today, howled a lot about freedom, to which Roosevelt replied, "True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
This seems like such a common-sense sentiment that it shouldn't even be controversial. But many in our current political culture seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past.
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/preeti-vissa/learning-from-franklin-ro_b_7033710.html
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She was born in 1930 and he was elected in the 1932 election. He had a powerful impact on the children of that era who lived through the depression. Many have passed on, but that generation (often dubbed "the Silent Generation" or "Gray Flannel Suit Generation", after the popular '50s novel "The Man in a Gray Flannel Suit"
were always quick to reference him and the drama of that period of the depression and a war (where the irony was that the "war machine" was what propelled the country out of the 2nd-dip of the double-dip recession after the depression - mainly because we were making our own stuff... nowadays we don't).
