Word: roosevelts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fifty years ago, when Hitler's tanks were poised at the English Channel and his bombers were pounding London, Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that the U.S., though still neutral, had to supply Britain with the military equipment it desperately needed. "We must admit that there is risk in any course we may take," F.D.R. said on a national radio broadcast. But backing America's natural ally "involves the least risk now and the greatest hope for world peace in the future...
...begins one of Rudyard Kipling's most famous poems, which reads as if it were written for the British raj. In fact, this hortatory verse was addressed to Teddy Roosevelt with a clear message: having won the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. should claim the Philippines as a colony. Thus Kipling, as author Christopher Hitchens dryly observes, was "John the Baptist to the age of American empire...
Franklin D. Roosevelt once said he did not want any memorial to him to be any larger than his Oval Office desk. In fact, an inconspicuous block of marble about that size was erected in front of the National Archives Building in Washington 20 years after he died, in 1945. But as his place in history has grown, so too has the demand for something grander. Next year ground will at last be broken on a "gardenesque" layout of granite walls and waterfalls near the Potomac River...
Only twice in American history, he contends, did the rich gain so much: during the Gilded Age of the 1880s and the Roaring Twenties. Both periods were followed by countermovements: William Jennings Bryan's populism and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. "Only for so long will strung-out $35,000-a-year families enjoy magazine articles about the hundred most successful businessmen in Dallas or television programs about the life-styles of the rich and famous," he writes ominously. "And the discontents that arise go well beyond lower-class envy or the anticommercial bias of academe...
...have known and played for ten Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt was your first...