David B. Woolner - The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace

That we shall die, we know; tis but the time And drawing days out, that men stand upon.

Julius Caesar, Act III; Sc. 1

F RANKLIN D ELANO R OOSEVELT IS CONSISTENTLY RANKED AS AMONG the most important and effective chief executives in American history. For most historians the two most significant aspects of his presidency remain the unprecedented nature of his response to the Great Depression and the skillful leadership he exhibited in the summer of 1940, when he made the critical decisionat great political riskto stand behind Great Britain in the twelve perilous months following the defeat of France in June 1940.

It was to meet the first of these catastrophes that FDR launched his famous first 100 days, a period of just over three months in which Congress under FDRs leadership passed an extraordinary fifteen major pieces of legislation. Many of the provisions enacted during this frantic periodincluding the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the requirement for transparency in the sale of securitiesare with us still. So, too, are several subsequent provisions of the New Deal that FDR promised the American people when he first ran for the White House, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the right of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. The social and economic safety net provided by these programswhich were designed, as FDR said, to lessen the hazards and vicissitudes of lifefundamentally changed the nature of the relationship between the American people and their government.

These achievements alone are enough to render FDR among the significant of our nations presidents. Yet he faced a growing international crisis that reached its climax less so with the German attack on Poland in

But FDR did not agree and, despite the fact that 1940 was an election year, resolved to support Prime Minister Churchills determination to fight on. The first manifestation of this support came in the form of an Anglo-American agreement to ship fifty mothballed US World War I destroyers to Britain, followed by secret staff talks among senior members of the British and American armed forces, an increased number of US naval patrols in the Atlantic, and, in March 1941, passage of the Lend Lease Act, which solidified Americas role as the great arsenal of democracy.

As with FDRs decisive response to the economic crisis he inherited in 1933, and his response to the fall of France, the role he subsequently played in crafting the Grand Alliance that would go on to defeat the Axis is likewise viewed as one of his crowning achievements. But to FDR, winning the war was never enough. Convinced that the global economic hardship of the 1930s was what gave rise to fascism in Europe and Asia and sent the world spiraling toward war, he foresaw that the United States had to fashion a new postwar order out of the ruins of the present conflict. This conviction underlay his January 1941 articulation of the Four Freedoms and the crafting of the Atlantic Charter eight months later. In short, FDR had committed himself to the establishment of a new system of international securityas called for in the last clause of the Chartereven before the United States entered the conflict. He never lost sight of this overriding ambition and, in spite of what Frances Perkins called his transcending preoccupation with the day-to-day demands of the war, always considered how each victory could be woven into a pattern of permanent peace and world organization.

To a certain extent, this focus on victory and the management of the war obscured FDRs determination to use the conflict as a catalyst for the establishment of a new postwar order centered on the creation of the United Nations. There is irony in this comment, for what also makes FDRs tenure in office uniqueaside from his election to four terms and the fact that he remains our only wheelchair presidentwas his willingness to hold two press conferences per week for virtually his entire tenure in office, meaning that by the time he died in April 1945 he had held a stunning 998 meetings with the press.