Mr. Hill study set 7 2024-2025 (WWII - America)

American Neutrality

Yet, during the 1930s, Americans wanted to once again avoid global problems and foreign entanglements. Many Americans came to see the First World War as a costly mistake (116,000 dead) and believed the nations sacrifice during World War I was pointless. Throughout the early phase of World War II, the United States was determined to remain neutral. Furthermore, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans were much more concerned with the problems of unemployment and care little fro problems in Europe or Asia.

Isolationism

Then, in the 1930s with the rise of fascist dictatorships and the spread of militarism in the world, many Americans once again began supporting isolationism. Isolationism is a political philosophy that advocated for foreign policy that opposes involvement with any other country and to remain neutral in international crises and wars. The isolationist movement was led by Republican politicians from the Midwest who believed the United States should remain neutral in a war, becoming a “Fortress America” protected by the oceans. Moreover, with an army of only 185,000 men and ranked eight in the world by size, many believed the United States was not prepared for war. Even before the fighting began, the Republican congress had enacted laws designed to prevent American involvement in any European conflict. From 1935 to 1937, the isolationist congress passed three Neutrality Acts, prohibiting arms shipments, loans, and credit to belligerent nations. Once was broke out in Europe, the America First Committee, and isolationist movement led by the popular American hero, aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 was the first man to fly across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. The America First Committee had a membership of 800,000 and it opposed U.S. intervention of any kind in the war. With nearly 95% of the public opposed to entering the war, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt worked to reshape America public opinion about the foreign threat of Nazism.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882-1945) is considered by historians to be one of the greatest American president-second only to Abraham Lincoln. FDR shepherd the nation through the Great Depression and his expensive legislative agenda to help Americans in the 1930s, the New Deal, laid the foundation for the modern American federal government. Moreover, Roosevelt’s leadership steered the United States to victory in World War II and his vision for the post-war world guided by the United Nations and a system of international alliances among democratic nations led by the U.S., established American foreign policy ever after. FDR is one of the great men in history.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Early Years

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was descended from two very prestigious and wealthy families. The first Roosevelt was a Dutch immigrant who arrived in New Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century and owned a small farm near the present-day site of the Empire State Building. His mothers family, the Delano, arrived in 1621, one year after the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth, and two descendant became president, Ulysses s.Grant and Calvin Coolidge. Franklin was born in 1882, the only child of affluent businessman James Roosevelt and his much younger second wife, Sara Delano. FDR’s father was fifty-four when he was born; although father and son were not close, his mother, Sara-half the age of her husband-was doting and domineering and she would be a dominant influence throughout his life.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Life of privilege

Roosevelt led a privileged lifestyle, living in luxury. The family divided their time between their sprawling estate in Hyde Park, New York, one hundred miles north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River and Europe’s finest hotels. The Roosevelt vacationed in their summer retreat on Campobello, a Canadian island off the shores of Maine where FDR, a very athletic young man, played tennis and gold, swam, and sailed on his yacht. FDR was home-schooled until he was fourteen and enrolled in the Groton School, and elite boarding school for the scions of the nation’s rich and powerful. He continued his education a Harvard University and then Columbia Law School.

Elanor Roosevelt

In 1903, he met his fifth cousin, Elanor Roosevelt (1884-1962): she was Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite niece. Theodore Roosevelt was from a different side of the same family that had split into two branches in the late 17th century. Elanor was born in Manhattan in 1884, but had a tragic childhood-she would be an orphan by age nine. Her mother was unloving and her parents were separated because her dashing father, Elliot Roosevelt (the younger brother of TR) was an alcoholic ne’er-do-well. When Elanor was eight when her mother died; less than two years later, her father died; she was raised by her grandmother and sent to an exclusive progressive English board school when she was fifteen. Brilliant yet insecure, Elanor Roosevelt suffered from depression for the remainder of her life.

Franklin and Elanor

In 1905, Franklin and Eleanor married; she was given away by Theodore Roosevelt. Their non-traditional marriage was more of a political partnership; they both led very independent lives outside of their marriage. Elanor Roosevelt was a feminist, an activist for social reforms, a businesswoman, a teacher, a campaigner for Democratic candidates, and an influential newspaper columnist. She was pivotal to him during his recovery from polio and instrumental to him staying in politics and running for president.

Elanor Roosevelt - First lady

Elanor Roosevelt redefined the role of First Lady, becoming the first to champion her own agenda-including her support for civil rights and equal rights for women. As First Lady she traveled the country for her paralyzed husband, during the Great Depression, she toured factories and coal mines and during World War II she visited soldiers and the wounded in the Pacific theater. Many historians consider Elanor Roosevelt the most influential women of mid-century America; she was the epitome of the modern “New Woman”-an independent woman with her own career outside the home.

FDR - Early Carrier

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became president and soon he became a role model for the nineteen-year-old Franklin-although TR was a Republican, Franklin became a Democrat. 1910, FDR won his first election as a state senator and as a Democrat supported Woodrow Wilson against TR in the election of 1912. During World War I, Wilson appointed Roosevelt to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and in 1920 he was the Democratic candidate for Vice-President. FDR possessed astute political skills and a magnetic personality, and despite losing the 1920 election, he had become a promising Democrat candidate on the rise who seemed destined for the White House.

FDR- stricken with Polio

In the summer of 1921, after visiting a Boy Scout Jamboree, FDR joined his mother, Elanor, and his five children at the family summer retreat in Campobello Island. After playing with his children and swimming in the ocean, FDR fell ill. At the age of 39, he was stricken with polio, a disease that can cause permanent paralysis; it is believed he caught it from a Boy Scout at the jamboree. As he lay paralyzed in bed during the summer of 1921, Elanor personally nursed him through the most terrible days of this illness. FDR was permanently paralyzed from the waist down and would never walk on his own again.

FDR - recovery

Within weeks, the muscles in his legs began to atrophy; in March, 1922, he began to strap fourteen pounds of steel braces to his paralyzed legs to help him stand upright. 1925, he began spending summers swimming in the recuperative warm waters in a rehabilitation facility for polio patients in Warm Springs, Georgia. In 1927, FDR purchased the facility and made it the nation’s premier center for hydrotherapy and physical therapy for the treatment of people with polio. Roosevelt also launched a fundraising drive and a foundation devoted to finding a cure for polio; the polio vaccine was finally discovered by Jonas Salk in 1955.

FDR - return to public life

His mother, Sara Roosevelt,advised him to abandon politics and resign from public life because he was an invalid, but his wife, Elanor Roosevelt, and close advises encouraged him to return to politics. In 1924, he made a triumphant return at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden appearing to walk to the podium with the help of crutches (and braces) to make a speech to a rousing ovation.

FDR- Public image

Realizing the American electorate would not support a disabled person for political office, FDR tried to maintain the illusion that his legs were not totally paralyzed by wearing his steel leg braces in public. He appeared to the American public as an active public official who merely needed a cane to walk; most Americans did not know the extent of his paralysis until years after his death. The press was very supportive of this deception and never photographed in a wheelchair-those few photos that remain today are private photographs.

FDR - champion for those less fortunate

FDR had always been aristocratic and charming, extremely intelligent and eloquent, but overcoming the adversity of polio changed him, infusing him with a great sense of empathy. While in Warm springs Georgia, he saw the brutal reality of rural poverty, seeing those who were, in his own words, “ill-housed, ill-clade, and ill-nourished,’ and he began to formulate economic policies that he would enact when he became president. Roosevelt, a patrician of extreme wealth and privilege, overcame this tragic episode in his life and became a champion of the downtrodden common man.

FDR - Politics of Hope

Roosevelt re-emerged as a political leader just as the country was suffering its greatest economic calamity-the Great Depression-and FDR now helped those who faced adversity and suffering with an optimistic outlook for the future. FDR believed that a great president needed “the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellow man.” Roosevelt reappeared on the political stage with unquenchable ebullience and an idealistic desire to help those in need to improve their lives.

The Great Depression

On October 29, 1929-Black Tuesday-prices plummeted precipitously on the New York Stock Market, and by mid-November, investors had lost $26 billion. Banks that had invested in the stock market went bankrupt, by 1933, more than five thousand banks across the U.S. had failed, wiping out $7 billion in depositors’ money-the life savings of many American families. After the crash of the stock market, businesses began to go bankrupt because of a lack of investments and the crisis deepened in 1931-1932. As a result unemployment rose dramatically and consumer spending decreased, forcing business to lay off workers, creating a vicious cycle. By 1933, 25% of the American workforce-thirteen million workers-was unemployed. The economic situation in the U.S. worst in the mid 1930s when a severe drought Oklyahoma and Texas turned the soil to dust, creating the Dust Bowl.

FDR - Political Comeback

In 1928, he was elected governor of New York, and ten months after he was sworn in the stock market crashed; as governor of New York when the economy collapsed in 1929, FDR was the only state chief executive to organize extensive relief efforts. He created in 1931 the first governmental emergency relief agency to create jobs and passed a law to provide unemployment insurance for those New Yorkers who had lost their jobs as well an old-age pension for the elderly. On the other hand, President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) believed that the American government should not intervene in the economy or in helping the unemployment, but he hope to encourage business leaders to steer the economy toward recovery. In 1932, the fifty-one-year-old Roosevlet was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president to run against the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover. FDR defeated Hoover and was elected the 32^nd President of the United States, promising that “The country needs bold, persistent experimentation.”

FDR - Elected President

In His inaugural address on March 3, 1933, FDR declared to terrified Americas that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Roosevelt took office six weeks after Hitler became chancellor. During his first term as president (1933-1937), FDR was consumed with domestic policies-especially ending the Great Depression-and not foreign affairs. After the inauguration, FDR sent bill after bill to Congress between March 9 and Jun 16, 1933-which came to be called the Hundred Days-and Congress passed fifteen major bills trying to jump-tart the economy, create jobs, and reform fiscal policies.

The New Deal

During the presidential campaign, Roosevelt had proclaimed,” I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.” Roosevelt’s numerous and far-ranging policies-from public (government) work project for the jobless to new regulations for banks and the stock market protecting consumers to relief for farmers to unemployment insurance and Social Security-was called the New Deal.