Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes
Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.
Hoovervilles were camps of people who lived in city parks or empty land. Tar paper shacks sheltered some—others lived in boxes. People had no work and no prospects of work; they had no money for rent; they just lived a meager existence as best they could under conditions that today exist only in the third world. They were named Hoovervilles for the President at the time whose ineptness and philosophy simply let things deteriorate. Republicans were critical of many of Roosevelt’s economic policies, but the president would periodically remind them and the nation of what the situation was when the Republicans last ran the country.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882-1945, 32nd President of the United States (Democrat, NY), Speech, Teamsters Union, Statler Hotel, Washington DC, September 23, 1944
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Great Depression had worldwide reach. Just as Herbert Hoover and his followers felt that there was no role of the national government in dealing with the depression, Japan had a major faction that believed that the only thing to do was wait the economic cycle out. Hiranuma represented the more activist faction who saw the necessity of national government involvement.
The silver enthusiasts believed that if the United States chose silver instead of gold to back the money supply, the U. S. economy would be greatly advantaged.
When he wrote this article, America was in the middle of the Great Depression. In its first 3 years, President Herbert Hoover, a great believer in private charity, was so rigid in his ideology, that he refused to allow the Federal Government to provide some relief to the vast number of people in need who had overwhelmed the capacity of private charities. At the same time, the more affluent whose generosity funded the charities, had seen their own fortunes slashed by the depression and the themselves were often failing. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, he was much more flexible and when Flexner was writing this article, the Federal Government was performing many functions that before were only provided by private organizations.
Greece's politicians had mismanaged the economy and then lied to the other nations of the Eurozone to obtain loans, and was in the midst of an economic crisis.
Germany was in a catastrophic depression with hyper inflation at the same time. Einstein was one of the few world leaders who realized that as long as Germans had not enough to eat, they were easy prey for demagogues like Hitler and philosophies like Nazism and Fascism.
It was the middle of the Great Depression. The “census” counted 15,000 homeless men in a small area of New York City.
New York’s highest court
This verse reflected the Great Depression of that time. Subsequently, as the American economy improved, it is rarely sung. In contemporary printed versions of the song, this verse is most frequently deleted.
The President had a series of radio talks to the people in which he addressed them directly and explained things as he then understood them.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.
