Abstract
In 1921, a devastating attack of polio left FDR an invalid and his political career in tatters. The contrast with the later successful president could not be starker—clearly FDR faced a deeply personal ordeal and yet strangely, it is said, this was necessary for his development as a leader.1 Such personal events, according to some, had a deep impact on FDR’s thinking, making him more determined, empathetic, and even intellectual as a person. The reality was more complex—polio was but one of a range of daunting obstacles facing the aspiring politician during the 1920s. Articulating his thoughts on international affairs would require increasing care and attention to negotiate these challenges and ensure his ambitions were not thwarted.
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Notes
Freidel appropriately titled the second volume of his FDR biography “The Ordeal.” See Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal, (Boston, 1954).
Freidel, Ordeal, 93; and Geoffrey C. Ward, A First Class Temperament—The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York, 1989), 561–562.
On the sale of navy radio stations, see Carroll Kilpatrick (ed.), Roosevelt and Daniels—A Friendship in Politics (Chapel Hill, NC, 1952), 101.
There is a plausible medical case for incorrect diagnosis that posits the hereditary autoimmune illness Guillain-Barré syndrome. See Armond S. Goldman et al. “What was the cause of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Paralytic Illness?” Journal of Medical Biography 11 (2003), 232–240.
Donald A. Ritchie, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (Lawrence, KS, 2007), 72.
Sadly the major study of FDR’s rhetoric fails to cover the prepresidential period. See Halford R. Ryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rhetorical Presidency (Westport, CT, 1988).
Warren F. Kuehl and Lynne K. Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (Kent, OH, 1997), 39–41;
and Robert David Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 202.
See Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven, CT, 1997), ix and 11.
Melvyn Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979), 24 and 32.
Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 59.
Leffler, Elusive Quest, 79. FDR continued to blame German aggression for the war—see his column for the Macon Telegraph May 2, 1925, in Donald Scott Carmichael (ed.), F.D.R. Columnist—The Uncollected Columns of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Chicago, 1947), 64.
Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC, 2003), 123 and 150; See also Johnson, Peace Progressives, 5.
Quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, (Charlottesville, VA, 1998), 353.
See Claude G. Bowers Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (London, 1925), vii.
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (London, 1980), 180–181 and 212–214.
Harper emphasizes FDR’s Jeffersonianism during the 1920s. See John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G Acheson (Cambridge, 1994), 42–131.
This is perhaps the difference with Secretary to the Treasury Mellon who dedicated a statue to Hamilton outside the treasury in 1923. See Peterson, Jeffersonian Image, 345. Mellon later became something of a hate figure for FDR who supported tax evasion charges against him when president. See Ritchie, Electing FDR, 50; and David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (London, 2006), 505 and 513–516.
Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace After World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (Cambridge, 2006), 6–11.
Michael A. Butler, Cautious Visionary—Cordell Hull and Trade Reform, 1933–1937, (London, 1998), 5.
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© 2012 Graham Cross
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Cross, G. (2012). Finding a Voice, 1921–1928. In: The Diplomatic Education of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882–1933. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014542_6
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