Abstract
A newspaper cartoon from the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, which is on prominent display at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, portrays FDR as the engineer of a train called “US Recovery ‘New Deal’ Special.” Strong-jawed and determined, the new president looks boldly down the tracks before him. His left hand, encased in thick railroad gloves, is on the lever, while his right is clenched for action. With Uncle Sam cheering him on from trackside, a confident FDR looks ready to drive that train right out of the Great Depression.
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Notes
For biographies of FDR, see James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harper & Row, 1956.
Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom (London: 2003).
H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Anchor, 2009). Probably the most vivid in term of narrative detail is Kenneth S. Davis’s massive biographical series: FDR Vol. 1—The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928; Vol. 2—The New York Years, 1928–1933; Vol. 3—The New Deal Years, 1933–1937; Vol. 4—Into the Storm, 1937–1940; Vol. 5—The War President, 1940–1943 (New York: Putnam/Random House, 1972–2000). For short but still very insightful studies.
see Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Times Books, 2003).
Richard Polenberg, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933–1945: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford Books, 2000).
Essential for understanding Roosevelt’s impact on his successors is William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of Roosevelt: Harry Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America: Policy in Pursuit of Reality, 2nd rev. ed. (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1996), chapters 2–8.
Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 13
Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), 38.
Ibid.; Charles M. Wiltse, The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy (1935; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 266.
Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and its Films (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 118.
Michael G. Krokones, “Motion Picture Presidents of the 1930s: Factual and Fictional Leaders for a Time of Crisis,” in Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 153, 174.
Michael Coyne, Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 22; emphasis in the original.
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 77–8.
Giuiliana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 16–35, 77–81.
Bergman, We’re in the Money, 92–3. Warner organized a Hollywood Bowl rally for Roosevelt during the 1932 election campaign. In gratitude for his support, FDR appointed him chair of the Los Angeles National Recovery Administration in 1933. Not all moguls were Roosevelt admirers, however. Louis B. Mayer, an ardent supporter of Herbert Hoover, prevented some MGM stars from attending the 1932 rally. See Mark Wheeler, Hollywood: Politics and Society (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 79.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Looking Forward (New York: John Day, 1933). For a review of the movie, see Mordaunt Hall, “Looking Forward,” May 1, 1933, New York Times.
Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009), 524.
See, e.g., Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism (New York: Bedford Books, 1995).
and William H. Chafe, ed., The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and its Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
For discussion, see Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
Rick Perlstein, Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).
and Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York 9 (1976): 26–40.
Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), chapter 8.
Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
Wallace Peterson, Silent Depression: The Fate of the American Dream (New York: Norton, 1994).
Ronald Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 66–7, 244.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), chapter 5.
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© 2011 Iwan W. Morgan
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Keyishian, H. (2011). The “Confidence” President: Franklin D. Roosevelt in Film. In: Morgan, I.W. (eds) Presidents in the Movies. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_6
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