Burns, James MacGregor. ROOSEVELT: THE SOLDIER OF FREEDOM, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Chomsky, Noam. DETERRING DEMOCRACY, 1992, Boston: South End Press.
Dallek, Robert. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1932-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979.
Davis, Kenneth S. FDR: THE NEW DEAL YEARS 1933-1937, New York: Random House Publishing, 1986.
Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. FDR'S SPLENDID DECEPTION, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company Publishers, 1985.
Higgs, Robert. Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review, THE FREEMAN, September 1998, http://www.independent.org/tii/news/x980900Higgs.html, accessed May 02, 2002.
Kimball, Warren F. THE JUGGLER: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AS WARTIME STATESMAN, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Leuchtenburg, William E. “The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy,” Conference on Leadership in the Modern Presidency at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on April 3,1987, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fdryears.htm, accessed May 5, 2002.
Namorato, Michael V. Department of History, University of Mississippi ,ECONOMIC HISTORY, EH.NET BOOK REVIEW , July 1997, http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0024.shtml, accessed May 1, 2002.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “A Message to the Congress on Social Security,” Jan. 17, 1935, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/nf/resource/fdr/primdocs/socsecspeech.html, accessed May 9, 2002.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “Purposes and Foundations of the Recovery (Fireside Chat)”, July 24, 1933, http://newdeal.feri.org/chat/chat03.htm, accessed May 10, 2002.
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. THE COMING OF THE NEW DEAL, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.
1. FDR REPRESENTED A WATERSHED IN ECONOMIC THINKING
Michael V. Namorato, Department of History, University of Mississippi ,ECONOMIC HISTORY, EH.NET BOOK REVIEW , July 1997, p. np, http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0024.shtml, accessed May 1, 2002.
Similar to his earlier study, Designs Within Disorder concentrates on what economists were saying during the New Deal, how Franklin D. Roosevelt listened to and responded to their suggestions, and the ultimate impact these economic thinkers had on long-term federal economic policy. In the case of Franklin Roosevelt, Barber believes that professional economists had a president who was willing to listen to them and who was a "consumer" of what they had to offer. Although not a great economic thinker, Roosevelt himself, in Barber's opinion, was "an uncompromising champion of consumer sovereignty" (p. 1). He provided those with more learning and understanding of economic matters an opportunity to develop their ideas. Roosevelt's Washington, in short, was a "laboratory affording economists an opportunity to make hands-on contact with the world of events" (p. 2). After much experimentation, the end result was an "Americanized version of Keynesian macroeconomics" which became part and parcel of governmental policy by the end of the 1930s. In this sense, the Rooseveltian years were "a watershed in economic policy and in economic thinking" (p. 3).
2. IN JUST A FEW WEEKS, FDR TRANSFORMED THE NATION’S ECONOMIC OUTLOOK
William E. Leuchtenburg, “The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy,” Conference on Leadership in the Modern Presidency at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on April 3,1987, p. np, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fdryears.htm, accessed May 5, 2002.
Only a few weeks after Roosevelt took office, the spirit of the country seemed markedly changed. Gone was the torpor of the Hoover years; gone, too, the political paralysis. "The people aren't sure...just where they are going," noted one business journal, "but anywhere seems better than where they have been. In the homes on the streets, in the offices there is a feeling of hope reborn." Again and again, observers resorted to the imagery of darkness and light to characterize the transformation from the Stygian gloom of Hoover's final winter to the bright springtime of the First Hundred Days. Overnight, one eyewitness later remembered, Washington seemed like Cambridge on the morning of the Harvard-Yale game: "All the shops were on display, everyone was joyous, crowds moved excitedly. There was something in the air that had not been there before, and in the New Deal that continued throughout. It was not just for the day as it was in Cambridge." On the New York Curb Exchange, where trading resumed on March 15, the stock ticker ended the day with the merry message: "Goodnite. ...Happy days are here again."
3. FDR WAS KEY TO SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR THE DISADVANTAGED
William E. Leuchtenburg, “The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy,” Conference on Leadership in the Modern Presidency at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on April 3,1987, p. np, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fdryears.htm, accessed May 5, 2002.
Roosevelt rested his legislative program on the assumption that government should actively seek social justice for all Americans, not least those who are disadvantaged. Starting in the spectacular First Hundred Days, Roosevelt brought the Welfare State to America, years after it had become a fixture in other lands. Although European theorists had been talking about der Staat for decades, the notion of the State got little attention in America before FDR. The historian James T. Patterson, responding to left-wing critiques of FDR, has written: “Roosevelt was no hard-eyed merchandiser; his opportunism was grounded in social concern and conscience, without which the New Deal would indeed have been mindless and devious.”
FDR’S OVERSEAS POLICY WAS EXCELLENT
1. FDR HELPED PROMOTE SOVEREIGNTY FOR COLONIZED PEOPLES
Korwa G. Adar, professor of International Relations at the International Studies Unit, Political Studies Department, Rhodes University, South Africa, AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1998, p. np, http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i2a3.htm, accessed April 22, 2002.
President Wilson's global campaign as the champion for the silent majority also set the stage for a United States democracy and human rights foreign policy in the twentieth century. Wilsonian precepts resonated clearly in the messsage of the Atlantic Charter which, although promulgated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson's intellectual heir, manifestly indicated US dissatisfaction with the lack of sovereignty for colonised peoples.
2. FDR’S LEGACY IS THE ABOLITION OF INTERNATIONAL ISOLATIONISM
William E. Leuchtenburg, “The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy,” Conference on Leadership in the Modern Presidency at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on April 3,1987, p. np, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fdryears.htm, accessed May 5, 2002.
Roosevelt's high place rests also on his role in leading the nation to accept the far-ranging responsibilities of world power. When he took office, the United States was firmly committed to isolationism; it had refused to participate in either the League of Nations or the World Court. Denied by Congress the discretionary authority he sought, Roosevelt made full use of his executive power in recognizing the USSR, crafting the Good Neighbor Policy, and, late in his second term, providing aid to the Allies and leading the nation toward active involvement in World War II. So far had America come by the end of the Roosevelt era that Henry Stimson was to say that the United States could never again "be an island to herself. No private program and no public policy, in any sector of our national life, can now escape from the compelling fact that if it is not framed with reference to the world, it is framed with perfect futility."
3. FDR’S INTERNATIONAL ROLE WAS FIRST-RATE
William E. Leuchtenburg, “The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy,” Conference on Leadership in the Modern Presidency at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on April 3,1987, p. np, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/fdryears.htm, accessed May 5, 2002.
As a wartime president, Roosevelt had wide latitude to demonstrate his executive leadership by guiding the country through a victorious struggle against the fascist powers. Never before had a president been given the opportunity to lead his people to a triumph of these global dimensions, and it seems improbable, given the nature of nuclear weapons, that such a circumstance will ever arise again. As commander-in-chief, a position he was said to prefer to all others, Roosevelt not only supervised the mobilization of men and resources against the Axis but also made a significant contribution to fashioning a postwar settlement and creating the structure of the United Nations. "He overcame both his own and the nation's isolationist inclination to bring a united America into the coalition that saved the world from the danger of totalitarian conquest," Robert Divine has concluded. "His role in insuring the downfall of Adolf Hitler is alone enough to earn him a respected place in history."
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