Episode 16: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Part II

Show Notes

Overview

Today’s episode is all about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Actually, we have two episodes for you on FDR. He’s that important, and being the only person ever elected to the White House four times, he was also in office long enough to have created several legacies when issues of race arise. Just how important was he? Well, here’s one way to look at it: there have been three true existential crises in American history, moments not just of stress or strife, but perilous times when the very existence of the republic seemed threatened.

The first was when the nation formed; and when it was led by George Washington.

The Second was when it nearly perished in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was the man in charge then.

The third was the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s time. More than an economic crisis, the depth of the depression caused many in the United States to question if this democracy thing was really worth the effort—or even functional in a modern industrialized world. You don’t have to take our word for it, the people at the time let us know that democracy had one more chance to work. A quarter of Americans were out of work in March of 1933 when FDR took office. Millions were homeless; millions more hungry. And it had been this way for years.

Newly sworn in, Roosevelt told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself, but while that was the most-remembered line from his inauguration speech, rather it was his pledge to assume full executive authority if needed. And the crowd greeted this promise—to use full power—with a standing ovations and sustained cheers.

Why does this matter, especially for our story of race and the presidency? First, FDR’s speech shows the crisis nature of the moment, and helps explain how he sometimes felt that he had to trade racial equity for political expediency. Second, democracy was on the brink, and that ultimately, was a race issue. If democracy dies, who gets to participate in the democracy becomes an irrelevant question. You have to save democracy in order to expand it.

But it didn’t die. The Depression lasted throughout the thirties, and World War II followed soon after. The country eventually triumphing over each under FDR’s leadership.

So who was this guy? Born to wealth and privilege, educated at Harvard, married to another Roosevelt from an even more prominent branch of the family tree, FDR had everything. He was smart, good looking, and his political future seemed boundless. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I—Uncle Teddy’s old job—and then the Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate in 1920. The Democrats lost his year, but everyone knew Roosevelt was the party’s future.

Then he was smacked by the hand of destiny. He fell ill after swimming with boy scouts at a park near his home in New York and never walked again. It was, most likely, polio, and I say most likely only because medical historians have of late suggested other sinister diseases were to blame, but no matter the diagnosis, the result was clear. He was paralyzed and, not surprisingly, devastated. Yet in time he rallied, drawing on reserves of inner strength he never before knew existed, retraining both his body and his mind, and re-entering the political arena in 1928 when he appeared at the Democratic National Convention. The crowd, we are told, gave him a standing ovation that lasted more than an hour.

Four years later he’d be president, presiding over some of the worst times in the nation’s history, and I would argue he never would have become the great leader the moment required, had he not gotten sick. Lying on his back, unable to move, he learned something invaluable…he learned empathy. He’d done nothing more wrong than go for a swim, and suffered the rest of his life for it. Thus when he looked out over the national landscape in 1933 and saw millions of Americans who’d done nothing wrong, who’d played by the rules, yet whose lives were utterly devastated, well he understood that this was the moment they needed their government most.

What followed changed American politics and society forever. His New Deal put millions to work, gave millions more health care, education, and the same social security system still in use today—granted, it’s been updated a little since then.

He also led the nation to victory in World War II—a global war to defend democracy and defeat fascism. And yet, while fighting the war abroad against fascism and the war against poverty and suffering at home, he often failed communities at home. His New Deal programs sometimes didn’t extend to people of color, he often failed to take a stand against Jim Crow laws in order to keep southern Democrats in his corner, and he ordered thousands of Japanese Americans (many of whom were born in the US) interned in concentration camps.

There’s so much to talk about that we’ve given him two episodes. On part one of the FDR episodes, we spoke with Dr. Eric Rauchway, who gave us a fantastic overview of FDR’s entire presidency from the New Deal to World War II, and offers a great introduction to the racial issues during this period.

This week, we talked with Dr. Jill Watts, a professor of history at California State University San Marcos, and an expert on African-American history in the 20th century. She is the author of The Black Cabinet and talked to us about that work and how FDR’s black cabinet pushed him to include Black Americans in New Deal programs. Second, we talked to Dr. Natalie Mendoza, a professor of Mexican American history at the University of Colorado Boulder. We learned about the Good Neighbor program, labor demands and conflict in the southwest, and racial tensions along the US-Mexico border. Finally, we spoke to Jamie Ford, a novelist and author of Hotel at the Corner on Bitter and Sweet, a story about Japanese internment and the complicated history of Chinese and Japanese communities in the Pacific Northwest.

Together our scholars pointed out a couple of things. Roosevelt’s complexity. The rising enthusiasm among African-Americans in particular for rights commensurate with their wartime service, and yet their unequal treatment during both the New Deal and World War II. They also pointed out that, as we’ve come to learn for sure, America’s history of race relations goes far beyond merely black and white.

Guests

Jill+Watts.jpg — **Dr. Jill Watts** is a Professor of History at California State University San Marcos where she teaches United States Social and Cultural History, African American History, Film History, and Digital History. In addition to *The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt*, she is also the author of *Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood*; *Mae West: An Icon in Black and White*; and *God, Harlem USA: The Father Divine Story*. Both the books on Hattie McDaniel and Father Divine have been optioned for film. Dr. Watts have consulted on two PBS documentaries and have talked with radio hosts nationally and internationally about African American History, Women’s History, and Film History.

Dr. Watts was born in Los Angeles County but raised in her father’s home town of San Diego where she grew up in the neighborhoods of Emerald Hills and Southeast San Diego. After earning a B.A. from the University of California San Diego, Dr. Watts received an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the UCLA. Before returning to San Diego to teach at California State University San Marcos, she taught at UCLA, Weber State University, Cornell University, and Santa Monica College. She was a fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. In 2017, Dr. Watts was selected as a Brakebill Distinguished Professor at California State University San Marcos. She have served as the History Department’s Chair, the coordinator of the History Graduate Program, the program director of Film Studies, and the co-director of Women’s Studies. She helped establish the Digital History component for CSUSM’s History graduate degree.

Follow Dr. Watts on Twitter. Dr. Watts’s website.

**Professor Natalie Mendoza** specializes in Mexican American and Chicanx history, U.S. Latinx history, U.S. civil rights history, and the history of race and racism in the United States.

At the undergraduate level, Professor Mendoza teaches courses on Mexican American and Latinx history in the United States. Some of the courses she offers include: "American History since 1865," "Mexican American History since 1848," and "Latinos/as in the US since 1848." At the graduate level, she teaches a pedagogy course called "Teaching History in the University."

Professor Mendoza graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from Sonoma State University in Northern California where she taught high school history for a short time before earning her Ph.D. in History from the University of California Berkeley. Her current book project, Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Identity and Civil Rights during World War II, examines the impact of geopolitics and war on intellectual thought, identity formation, and civil rights activism within the Mexican American population in the pre-Chicano period. Her first article, “Good Neighbor in the American Historical Imagination: Mexican American Intellectual Thought in the Fight for Civil Rights, 1930s-1940s,” is forthcoming in the Western Historical Quarterly. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Professor Mendoza was the David J. Weber Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies Clements Center for Southwest Studies in Texas, where she spent the year revising her Good Neighbor at Home manuscript.

In addition to studying the past, Professor Mendoza has an active research agenda in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History (HistorySoTL), a body of literature that uses theoretical and evidence-based research to examine the discipline-specific problems in the teaching and learning of history. Professor Mendoza first came to CU Boulder as the project lead for the History Teaching & Learning Project (2017-2019), in which she relied upon her training as a historian and her expertise in HistorySoTL to direct a department-wide effort to improve undergraduate curriculum.

Professor Mendoza has also done extensive work to improve history education at multiple levels. She has consulted for K-12 social studies teachers in both California and Colorado, taught a pedagogy course and facilitated workshops for graduate students at UC Berkeley and CU Boulder, helped found the Teaching History Conference to support teachers and professors across the K-16 continuum, and served on an ad hoc committee for the American Historical Association tasked with drafting a statement on the value of SoTL in History to the discipline. Professor Mendoza currently serves as a regional officer for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, and as an advisory board member for #PlainTalkHistory, a website resource for critical history lessons for a multiracial democracy.

Follow Dr. Mendoza on Twitter.

jamie ford.jpg — **Jamie Ford** is an author most widely known for his bestselling Seattle-based novels. His debut, *Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet*, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list, won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction. *Hotel* was named the #1 Book Club pick in 2010 by the American Bookseller Association and is now read widely in schools all across the country. This multi-cultural tale was adapted by Book-It Repertory Theatre, and has recently been optioned for a stage musical in NYC, and for film, with George Takei serving as Executive Producer.

Jamie's second book, Songs of Willow Frost, was also a national bestseller.

His third novel set in Seattle, Love and Other Consolations Prizes, was named by Library Journal as one of the Best Historical Fiction Novels of 2017.

An award-winning short-story writer, his work has been published in multiple anthologies, from Asian-themed steampunk set in Seattle in the Apocalypse Triptych, to stories exploring the universe of masked marvels and caped crusaders from an Asian American perspective in Secret Identities: The first Asian American Superhero Anthology, and Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology. He’s also written in other genres: speculative, dystopian, crime noir, and middle-grade horror.

His essays on race, identity, love, heroes, and complex families have been published nationwide.

His work has now been translated into 35 languages.

Jamie is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer, Min Chung, who emigrated from Hoiping, China to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. Ford earned a degree in design from the Art Institute of Seattle and also attended Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. Having grown up in the Seattle area, he now lives in Montana where he’s on a never-ending search for decent dim sum.

He can be found tweeting @jamieford and on Instagram @jamiefordofficial. Jamie’s website.

Call to Action

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Show Notes

Overview

Guests

Call to Action

Further Readings

Episode 17: Harry S. Truman

Episode 15: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Part I