FDR Cartoon Archive

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Portrait, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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A continuing project of high school history and science classes, this site presents thousands of political cartoons concerning the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Selected from the collection at the Hyde Park Presidential Library of Basil O'Conner—Roosevelt's New York City law partner—the materials are arranged into eight subject categories and often include brief background essays and questions designed to prompt further inquiries. Periods currently emphasized include 1932, "The Road to Pennsylvania Avenue"; 1937, "The Supreme Court"; and 1943, "The War Years."

Well-conceived and executed, the site also gives the texts of Roosevelt's inaugural addresses and a page of teacher resources and suggested projects.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself

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FDR delivers his 1st inaugural address
Question

Where did the line in FDR’s First Inaugural Address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” come from? Did he write it?

Answer

Columbia University professor Raymond Moly wrote most of Roosevelt’s speech, and talked over his initial drafts with the president-elect. Several days before the inauguration, Moly delivered a typescript of his final draft to Roosevelt, who was staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Roosevelt went over the speech then with Moly and copied it out in longhand. The line about “fear itself” was not in the speech at that point. Before leaving FDR’s hotel suite, Moly burned his typewritten draft in the fireplace.

Louis Howe

The next day, former newspaperman and Roosevelt’s long-time close confidante, Louis McHenry Howe, arrived in Washington. According to Howe’s assistant Lela Stiles, a few days previously, Howe had talked with a newspaperman and friend about difficulties that the country faced, and during the conversation Howe told his friend, “I don’t care what else Franklin says in his inaugural address as long as he tells the people that the only thing they have to fear is fear.”

When Howe arrived in Washington, FDR gave him his handwritten draft of the speech. Howe made his own changes and additions and had a secretary type a new draft. One of Howe’s changes had been to add the line, “So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes the needed effort to bring about prosperity once again.” FDR liked Howe’s addition, but then, on the draft, changed the end of the sentence, from “to bring about prosperity once again” to “needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” These were the words he used when he delivered the speech several days later at the inauguration, on March 4, 1933.

FDR liked Howe’s addition, but then, on the draft, changed the end of the sentence.
The Health of the Nation, the Health of FDR

Roosevelt’s revision of Howe’s sentence was in keeping with the revisions that he and Moly had made to earlier drafts. One of the guiding metaphors in the first versions of the speech had turned on comparing the country’s economic condition to a sickness, but Moly had ultimately decided that Roosevelt would be better able to inspire the nation to profound and wide-ranging action if he did not compare it to an invalid, but rather to an army preparing for war. The imagery of sickness in the early drafts yielded therefore to martial language in the last drafts. FDR’s change of Howe’s sentence followed along with this.

Nevertheless, the new version of the sentence still refers to fear and a rejection of being "paralyzed." Whatever else FDR conveyed to his listeners with this sentence, a message of reassurance about his own health was surely part of what they heard. Concerns about whether his polio had incapacitated him had sometimes surfaced during the election campaign and two weeks before the inauguration he had avoided the bullets of a would-be assassin.

Frances Perkins, who served as FDR’s Secretary of Labor, reminisced in 1946, more than a decade after the speech, about Roosevelt coming to terms with his having contracted polio in 1921. She wrote, “He learned in that period and began to express firm belief that the ‘only thing to fear is fear itself.’ He never displayed the slightest bitterness over his misfortune.” Perkins was a little unclear here about whether she was referring specifically to Roosevelt in the decade before he became president, and whether she really meant to place the exact phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself” in his mouth during that time.

Henry David Thoreau?

If Roosevelt had in fact often expressed those words, it is difficult to understand why his closest colleagues and even his wife Eleanor did not assume that he had thought them up himself and inserted them into the inaugural address, but looked elsewhere for the ultimate source of the expression. When FDR’s associate and sometimes-speechwriter Samuel Rosenman asked Eleanor about the expression, she ventured that her husband may have found something very much like it in a volume of Henry David Thoreau’s writings, which she thought he must have had with him in his hotel suite in Washington.

Thoreau had written the sentence, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” in his journal entry for September 7, 1851, in passing, as part of his comment on his contemporaries’ criticisms of Harriet Martineau’s arguments for atheism in her just-published Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. Ralph Waldo Emerson later quoted his young friend approvingly, and the phrase was indeed included in later collections of Thoreau’s writings.

Newspaper Ad?

Professor Moly, however, pointed directly at Louis Howe as the proximate source, and doubted that Howe—whose reading habits focused on detective novels—had found the Thoreau quote. He later told William Safire, “I do clearly remember that the phrase appeared in a department store’s newspaper advertisement some time earlier in February. I assume that Howe, an inveterate newspaper reader, saw it too. …" To Howe’s everlasting credit, he realized that the expression fully fitted the occasion.”

"To Howe’s everlasting credit, he realized that the expression fully fitted the occasion."

Moly's reference to department store advertisements sounds like the campaign used by Wanamaker’s. During the first few months of 1933, Wanamaker’s department store placed large display ads in The New York Times. The ads included a small box with inspirational messages of business and commercial platitudes or sentiments “from the founder’s writings,” those of John Wanamaker, who sometimes quoted people like Benjamin Franklin or George Washington. I do not see any of ads for the first two months of 1933 in which Wanamaker quoted Thoreau or anyone else expressing precisely the statement about “fear itself,” nor do I see a quote of Wanamaker venturing the phrase himself. However there are many platitudes there about confidence, cheerfulness, a positive attitude, persistence, honesty, and integrity. Perhaps Professor Moly saw an ad that I have been unable to locate.

Diagnosing the Health of the Nation's Businesses

The phrase “The only thing to fear is fear” did have some currency at the time among businessmen. Julius Barnes, the Chairman of the Board of the National Chamber of Commerce, for example, gave a news conference in early February announcing the organization’s effort to promote efforts to stabilize business suffering during the depression. The conference was reported by The New York Times on February 9. One of the subheadings of the article was “Fears Most Fear Itself,” and quoted Barnes as saying, “In a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself. Confidence, tempered with prudence, is necessary to the operation of even the most perfect business mechanism. The retarding effect of a sense of insecurity is promptly communicated from worker to consumer, from consumer to producer and the whole machine stalls, and the anticipated evil becomes.”

Many in the business community were in fact convinced that the country was suffering from a kind of psychic sickness, caused not by systemic problems in industry or banking, but by the nation’s irrational lapse into fear, which had caused an economic paralysis. It was the fear itself that needed to be exorcised. FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, also often spoke in this way.

By this metaphor, the nation was an invalid who had been afflicted with a mental problem, a paralysis of action. Its thinking somehow had to be turned around, toward a positive confidence. By changing the patient’s thinking, his body would naturally recover his mobility. The nation needed a mental healer.

The nation needed a mental healer.
New Thought

This sounds rather like the frame of reference of the quasi-religious “New Thought” or “Mind-Cure” or “Mental Science” Movement that blossomed in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As William James described it in his 1929 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, “The leaders of this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.” The movement was defined not so much by an organizational form as by the common assumptions and themes of a group of writers who specialties included what we would today called “alternative medicine,” speculative psychology, and inspirational literature. Their writings are dominated by perorations on healing and success. The business community, then as now, had a fondness for “motivational” speaking and writing, especially as it might make a sales force more effective. It is likely not an accident, therefore, that the head of the Chamber of Commerce would be diagnosing the chief of the nation’s problems as fear.

In fact, the precise phrase, “The only thing to fear is fear,” occurs in the 1908 book, Thought Vibration; or, the law of attraction in the thought world, written by New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson. He counseled, “Remember, the only thing to fear is Fear, and—well, don’t even fear Fear, for he’s a cowardly chap at the best, who will run if you show a brave front.” In 1918, Atkinson wrote The Power of Concentration under the pseudonym of Theron Q. Dumont, in which he declared, “There is no justification for the loss of courage. The evils by which you will almost certainly be overwhelmed without it are far greater than those which courage will help you to meet and overcome. Right, then, must be the moralist who says that the only thing to fear is fear.”

Another “New Thought” writer, the “naturopathic doctor,” Henry Lindlahr, wrote in his 1919 book, Practice of Natural Therapeutics, “Avoid fear in all its forms of expression; it is responsible for the greater part of human suffering. The only thing to fear is fear.”

Businesses had invoked these precise sentiments around the time they were published, during the domestic economic pinch prevalent during World War I, for example. On the 4th of July, 1917, the musical instrument firm of Edward Droop and Sons in Washington, D.C., paid for a large display ad in The Washington Post, under the large headline, “The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear.” The firm’s ad continued:

We refuse to be perturbed by the alarmists, the pessimists and by the timid who see things at night. As prophets in the past they have a batting average of about .001. The only times they have hit the truth is when they themselves created the conditions they feared by fearing them. Our slogan during these earnest times is “Keep Business Going.” We shall retrench in nothing, cancel nothing, fear nothing. Our faith in the existing and eternal prosperity of the United States of America is immovable. … We believe that this is the very time of all times that you should buy what you want—whether it be in our line or in any other. The only way to stop your business is to stop the other fellow’s. The only thing to fear is fear.

The phrase “The only thing to fear is fear” and its variants, therefore, were demonstrably “out there” in circulation within the business community during the first few decades of the 20th century. William Safire makes the point that it does not really matter where the phrase came from because it was FDR that used it during his speech to inspire the nation and it was he, therefore, who transmuted the linguistic coin into rhetorical gold.

For more information

Text and audio of FDR's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, at History Matters.

Bibliography

William Walker Atkinson, Thought Vibration: or, The law of attraction in the thought world, Chicago: The Library Shelf, 1908, pp. 46-49.

“Business to Make Stabilization Study: National Commerce Chamber Is Forming Committee to Work Out Formal Program,” New York Times, February 9, 1931, p. 3.

Theron Q. Dumont (William Walker Atkinson), The Power of Concentration. Chicago: Advanced Thought Publishing Company, 1918.

Davis W. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002, pp. 119-120.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: 1929, p. 93.

Henry Lindlahr, Practice of Natural Therapeutics. Chicago: The Lindlahr publishing company, 1919, p. 447.

“The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear,” Display ad for E. F. Droop & Sons, Company, Washington Post, July 4, 1917, p. 2.

Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Viking Press, 1946, p. 29.

William Safire, “Nothing to fear but fear itself,” Safire’s Political Dictionary, rev. edition. Oxford: University Press, 2008, pp. 481-483.

Lela Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1954, p. 235.

“The Value of a Silver Tongue,” Bankers’ Magazine (May 1927): 666.

Presidents in the Library

Date Published
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Photo, US Flag, Kennedy Library, Boston, Feb. 16, 2009, Tony the Misfit, Flickr
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Happy (almost) Presidents Day! Have your ever thought about all of the papers a presidency must create? Emails, memoranda, schedules, notes, speeches, letters, drafts, on and on and on, an entire term (or terms) set down in a sea of potential primary sources. But how can educators access this wealth of materials?

In many cases, all you have to do is go online. Before the 20th century, presidents had ownership of their papers, and many were lost to time or split up in private collections. However, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that his papers should become the property of the American people following his presidency. He donated both his papers and part of his Hyde Park estate to the government, and the first presidential library was born.

In 1955, the Presidential Libraries Act set rules for gifting the government with property and other resources to be used to establish the libraries, and in 1978, the Presidential Records Act made it official—presidential papers were government property.

Today, 13 presidential libraries house the papers of the last 13 presidents. The National Archives and Records Administration, which oversees the libraries, describes them as combination archive-museums, “bringing together in one place the documents and artifacts of a President and his administration and presenting them to the public for study and discussion without regard for political considerations or affiliation.”

Presidential Libraries Online

Each of the libraries maintains its own website. Though the resources available on each vary greatly, almost all provide biographical information on the president and first lady, student and educator sections, and a selection of digitized photographs and documents. Some have extensive searchable databases full of documents, photos, and other primary sources! Here's a list of the libraries:

  • Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA — features 13 simple online exhibits and Hoover Online! Digital Archives, a collection of suggested units and lesson plans for secondary students with primary sources.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY — the first presidential library, completed in 1940. Offers five curriculum guides, an online exhibit on the art of the New Deal, and the Pare Lorentz Center, which encourages using multimedia to teach about FDR.
  • Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO — offers a searchable lesson plan database and digitized photographs, audio clips, and political cartoons, as well as documents divided up by topic (topics include such teachable subjects as the decision to drop the atom bomb and Japanese Americans during World War II).
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS — features a selection of online documents, grouped by topics (topics include Brown vs. Board of Education, Hawaiian statehood, McCarthyism, and others), and transcripts of oral history interviews.
  • John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA — provides six online exhibits (including exhibits on the space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and desegregating the University of Mississippi), a photo gallery, major speeches, and a searchable digital archive. It also houses the Ernest Hemingway Collection.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX — features a photo archive, the presidential daily diary, selected speeches, and the subsite LBJ for Kids!
  • Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, CA — includes digitized documents, samples of the Nixon tapes, a photo gallery, video oral histories, four lesson plans, and online exhibits on Watergate, gifts to the head of state, and Nixon's meeting with Elvis.
  • Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI — features 10 simple online exhibits, as well as digitized documents and photos.
  • Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA — offers selected documents and photographs, including the diary of Robert C. Ode, hostage in the Iran Hostage Crisis.
  • Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA — includes an image archive arranged by topic, and the public papers of Reagan, arranged by month and year.
  • George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX — includes 12 lesson plans, a photo archive, and searchable public papers of his presidency.
  • William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, AR — has both virtual exhibits and a digital library in development.
  • George W. Bush Presidential Library — the newest of the public libraries, it does not yet have a permanent building. Many papers from the Bush administration are not yet available to the public (papers become public five years after the end of a presidency, which can be extended up to 12 years).

Remember that many of the presidential libraries offer museum tours and activities for school groups! If your school is close to one, consider a field trip or participating in the professional development opportunities the library may offer.

Beyond the Libraries

Looking for resources on a pre-Hoover president? Several libraries exist outside of the official presidential library system, including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, and the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum. Try the Library of Congress's American Memory collections, as well, for papers that belonged to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Characteristics of Census Tracts in Nine U.S. Cities, 1940-1960

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Logo, Data & Information Services Center
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A 28-page study, including charts, of 1960 census data compiled according to residence areas, or "tracts," within the cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Also provides census data for 1940 and 1950 with regard to Chicago and Detroit. Offers raw data and percentage computations on total population of tracts, number of males and females, African-American ethnicity, foreign origin, age, marital status, income level, education, units of substandard housing, rent amounts, employment figures, and salary levels. Also provides medical-related data, such as numbers of hospitals, hospital beds, pharmacists, and types of physicians in each tract. Of use for those studying mid-20th-century urban history. See "History Matters" entry Data and Program Library Service: Online Data Archive for information on other social science studies available at this site.

Still Going On: Celebrating The Life and Times of William Grant Still

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Photo, William Grant Steel, Still Going On
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An exhibit devoted to William Grant Still (1895-1978), "the first African-American composer to have a symphony performed by an American orchestra." Includes annotations on more than 100 documents relating to his life and work, such as articles by Still, correspondence, scores, audio clips, programs, photographs, newspaper reviews, and testimonials. Also provides a complete discography, bibliography of 80 titles, and timeline of the "cultural connections" fostered by Still and his music. Of value to those with a specific interest in Still's life, work, and cultural milieu, and to students of 20th-century classical music and the experience of African-American artists in general.

Longue Vue House and Gardens [LA]

Description

Longue Vue features Classical Revival style buildings and landscaped gardens, a collection of European and American decorative and fine arts pieces, and museum exhibits. The estate itself was designed in 1939–1942 for philanthropists Edgar Bloom Stern, a New Orleans cotton broker, and his wife Edith Rosenwald Stern, an heiress to the Sears-Roebuck fortune.

The house offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and educational and recreational events.

Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964

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Photo of Ella Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vechten, 1940
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This collection presents 1,395 photographs by the American photographer, music and dance critic, and novelist Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964). The site consists primarily of studio portraits of celebrities, most of whom were involved in the arts, including actors, such as Marlon Brando and Paul Robeson; artists, such as Marc Chagall and Frida Kahlo; novelists, such as Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather; singers, such as Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday; publishers, such as Alfred A. Knopf and Bennett Cerf; cultural critics, such as H. L. Mencken and Gilbert Seldes; and figures from the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

More than 80 photographs capture Massachusetts and Maine landscapes and seascapes; others include eastern locations and New Mexico. Many photographs of actors present them in character roles. Searchable by keyword and arranged into subject and occupational indexes, this collection also includes a nine-title bibliography and background essay of 800 words on Van Vechten's life and work. A valuable collection for the documentation of the mid-20th-century art scene.

Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum [GA]

Description

On January 28, 1942, 53 days after the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, the Eighth Air Force was officially activated in the National Guard Armory on Bull Street in Savannah, GA. Today, the Museum honors the men and women who helped defeat Nazi aggression by serving in or supporting the greatest air armada the world had ever seen—the Eighth Air Force.

The museum offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and research library access.

Caumsett State Historic Park

Description

In 1921 Marshall Field III purchased 1,750 acres of Lloyd Neck to create one large estate. He named the land after its Matinecock Indian name, Caumsett, which means "place by a sharp rock." Field created a self-sufficient English-style estate as a combination country club, hunting preserve, and home, complete with its own water and electrical supply. When the estate was finished, it had facilities for every sport except golf.

The site offers tours and some educational services.

C-SPAN American Political Archive

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Logo, C-SPAN.org
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This website, which draws from C-Span Radio, is a useful resource for researching or teaching 20th-century American political history. It assembles audio recordings from such sources as the National Archives, presidential libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. It "presents interviews, debates, oral histories, news conferences, and speeches with past presidents, legislators, and other important figures in American politics." Selecting "Past APA programs available online" provides the full list of 29 archived programs. Program subjects include persons such as W.E.B. DuBois; Indira Gandhi; Eleanor Roosevelt; NASA astronauts; Presidents Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford; and Civil Rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, and Thurgood Marshall. They also include thematic topics such as the Reagan presidency, women in journalism, ex-slave narratives, Iraq war stories, Congressional leaders, the voices of World War II, and American POWs. Many of the topics feature multiple programs.

All programs are recordings of the original C-SPAN Radio program and must be listened to as originally broadcast. Playback of the programs requires media player software to be installed (free downloads can be accessed from the site).

The above recordings appear to no longer be available on the C-Span website. The history section, http://www.c-span.org/History/, suggested as an alternative offers full video programming, often discussions of historical topics. However, the page appears to feature recent video, with over 2,000 "recent events" which cannot be sorted or searched. Video search does not offer an option to select material on historical topics, so searching will pull from the entire C-Span website. As a result, the site offers a great deal of undoubtedly useful material which is nearly impossible to access. Unpublishing.