Comfort and Wisdom for Stressful Times: FDR's Inaugural Addresses
Comfort and Wisdom for Stressful Times: FDR's Inaugural Addresses
As the United States faces the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, many Americans are craving wisdom and direction from our government. While it’s a bit of a challenge to find wisdom in our current leadership, we can nevertheless still look back for encouragement to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the country through the Great Depression and the Second World War.
FDR served as president for three terms, and was elected a historic four times. Each of his four inaugural addresses were each aimed at a nation in some form of crisis, facing grave fears and concerns. Each of Roosevelt’s speeches can offer its own comfort and direction and lessons in our own fearful and unsure times.
In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke to the people’s economic fears. “In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.
More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it…”
In his second inaugural address, after his election in 1937, the Great Depression had ended, however many Americans were still feeling its aftershocks and beginning to see populist rhetoric emerge both in the states, and abroad.
During this speech, Roosevelt brought the nation together and called for transparency and civic duty, saying, “Overwhelmingly, we of the Republic are men and women of goodwill — men and women who have more than warm hearts of dedication — men and women who have cool heads and willing hands of practical purpose as well. They will insist that every agency of popular government use effective instruments to carry out their will.
Government is competent when all who compose it work as trustees for the whole people. It can make constant progress when it keeps abreast of all the facts. It can obtain justified support and legitimate criticism when the people receive true information of all that government does…”
In 1941, FDR delivered his third inaugural address as the world was in conflict and upheaval. London had been heavily bombed as Churchill and the British army tried to stop Germany’s Nazi invasion. In this speech, though America had not yet joined the allied forces, Roosevelt spoke to the people of what it meant to be a single citizen in a country undergoing a great challenge.
“Lives or nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit. The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.
There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate — that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future — and that freedom is an ebbing tide.
But we Americans know that this is not true.”
The fourth inaugural address, a few months before the end of World War 2, was a shorter speech. His health was waning, and the war was still raging, though Paris had been liberated and the tides seemed to be turning.
In this speech, FDR spoke to a fatigued nation, a nation in mourning. He spoke to men and women eager to resume their pursuit of the American dream, and assured them that their difficult sacrifice would be worth it in the long run.
In this fourth and final inaugural address, he said, “We Americans of today, together with our Allies, are passing through a period of supreme test. It is a test of our courage — of our resolve — of our wisdom — of our essential decency.
If we meet that test — successfully and honorably — we shall perform a service of historic importance which men and women and children will honor throughout all time.”
FDR was a leader for the ages, one whose words can still bring the citizens of this country great comfort. In my latest book, I write of Roosevelt’s great bravery during wartime, the sacrifices he made in his pursuit of victory—and the secret service agent whose job it was to keep him safe.
More about Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin:
The New York Times bestselling author returns with a tale as riveting and suspenseful as any thriller: the true story of the Nazi plot to kill the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. during World War II.
The mission: to kill the three most important and heavily guarded men in the world.
The assassins: a specially trained team headed by the killer known as The Most Dangerous Man in Europe.
The stakes: nothing less than the future of the Western world.
The year is 1943 and the three Allied leaders—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. Although the war is undoubtedly lost, the Germans believe that perhaps a new set of Allied leaders might be willing to make a more reasonable peace in its aftermath. And so a plan is devised—code name Operation Long Jump—to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.
Immediately, a highly trained, hand-picked team of Nazi commandos is assembled, trained, armed with special weapons, and parachuted into Iran. They have six-days to complete the daring assignment before the statesmen will return home. With no margin for error and little time to spare, Mike Reilly, the head of FDR’s Secret Service detail—a man from a Montana silver mining town who describes himself as “an Irish cop with more muscle than brains”—must overcome his suspicions and instincts to work with a Soviet agent from the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) to save the three most powerful men in the world.
Filled with eight pages of black-and-white photographs, Night of the Assassins is a suspenseful true-life tale about an impossible mission, a ticking clock, and one man who stepped up to the challenge and prevented a world catastrophe.
Night of the Assassins
The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin