Word: roosevelted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While other men in other lands were making 1934 history, the voters of the U.S. took pencil & paper on Nov. 6 and wrote their own ticket for Man of the Year. It was not a new ticket because they had picked Franklin Roosevelt as their Man of 1932 by electing him to the Presidency, but it was a different one. Two years ago a hundred million people looked to this cheerful, charming gentleman to do something in the greatest industrial crisis on record. This year they used their ballots again, not as a desperate hope but as a grateful reward...
What made the name of Franklin Roosevelt so big, so black, so bold, was the fact that the wealthiest single nation of the modern world had committed itself as never before to one man in a do-or-die attempt to pull itself out of a deep, dark economic hole...
...dominant figures of the 1930s came to power almost simultaneously: Adolf Hitler on Jan. 30, 1933; Franklin D. Roosevelt 33 days later. It was no coincidence. Each embodied drive and vision--one diabolic, the other democratic--at the very moment their respective countries, and the world, had reached a nadir of economic and social despair...
...Roosevelt promised--and delivered--"action and action now." His New Deal was an amalgam of "alphabet" agencies (AAA, NRA, WPA, SEC, FDIC, NLRB) and work-relief projects that set the jobless to work building dams, bridges, highways and airports. Congress enacted such now hallowed (but then seemingly radical) reforms as Social Security, unemployment compensation and federal insurance of bank deposits...
Probably more than any of Roosevelt's social programs, it was the war that ultimately wrenched America free from the Depression. But the apparent success of the New Deal raised the softer, more charitable side of the national psyche to an ascendancy over reliance on rugged individualism. Big Government would later expand far beyond anything the New Dealers had ever imagined--first during World War II, then in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon campaigned as philosophical opponents of Big Government, but once in power they made no real attempt to cut it back. Even...