Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), America’s thirty-second president, was one of the nation’s most - if not the most - popular leaders, both in his lifetime and since. He remains the only president to have been elected to serve more than two terms in office. He guided the United States through the Great Depression, implemented the New Deal, and led the nation through World War II. His presidency began with an election that represented a decisive rejection of the old political order in the form of the Republicans, and established the Democratic Party in control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The New Deal that he brought to the American people went far beyond the domestic economic and social programs of the 1930s; the New Deal persisted, both in its economic implementation and in the ideology behind it, well into the 1960s, and the Democrats became the default party of government, holding the executive office for twenty-eight of the following thirty-six years. Much of FDR’s success rested on the creation of what became known as the “New Deal coalition,” his bringing together of organized labour (in the form of the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO]) that supported the Democratic Party and brought much of the urban vote with it, African Americans (some three-quarters of northern African Americans supported FDR for reelection in 1936), intellectuals, and the white South. The New Deal also represented a secular shift in a nation that had seen the influence of the religious right rise: one of the FDR administration’s first acts was the repeal of Prohibition - not an overtly secular act in itself, but definitely a rejection of one example of the extremes of right-wing morality. Over the course of his “First Hundred Days,” FDR began the implementation of the relief programs that would constitute the economic heart of the New Deal, at the same time keeping an eye on global events, which were building toward World War II. When the war did break out, his emphasis on America as the “Arsenal of Democracy” was an important step between neutrality and commitment, merging as it did the practical economic benefits of weapons production with a much larger idea of what the nation stood for, and might fight for. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR placed the American economy on a war footing, which saw its industrial productivity skyrocket, with all the benefits accruing from that and from mass mobilization of the population. FDR died in the final year of World War II, and the new world order that he had begun to broker at Yalta and Tehran would fall to others to accomplish. Yet FDR’s lasting legacy was that through his presidency, the American people - a people traditionally suspicious of government - were encouraged to have faith in that government, an outgrowth of their faith in FDR himself. It was this that really distinguished this era of America’s history, a faith in the efficacy of government that FDR’s cousin, the progressive Theodore Roosevelt, shared but had never been able to convince the electorate of wholeheartedly, and a faith that the nation relinquished in the election of Ronald Reagan in i980.
Benjamin Rush, perhaps today a less well-known Founding Father of the United States, was born near Philadelphia, and in i759 attended the College of Physicians in that city. His medical training progressed at Princeton and then abroad, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in continental Europe. In i769, Rush opened a private practice in Philadelphia, and also taught as Professor of Chemistry at the College of Philadelphia, publishing the first American textbook on the subject. Yet Rush did not confine himself to matters medical, but wrote a series of editorials on behalf of the Patriot cause in the years preceding the American Revolution, and was actively involved in the Sons of Liberty organization in Philadelphia. In i776, he represented Philadelphia at the Continental Conference and was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. Appointed surgeon-general of the Continental Army in 1777, but his opposition both to the Army Medical service at that time and to George Washington himself forced his resignation. In 1789, he was a member of the Pennsylvanian convention that adopted the new Constitution, and was later appointed as treasurer of the U.S. Mint, a post he held from 1797 until his death. Before that he had been appointed professor of medical theory and clinical practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and throughout his life he sustained a wide variety of social activist interests, including abolition, the broadening of access to education for all, including women (on the grounds that a republic required an educated citizenry), and for medical clinics to treat the poor. Although a slave owner himself (he had one slave), in 1773 Rush published “An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping,” in which he argued that slavery “and Vice are connected together, and the latter is always a source of misery,” and reminded his readers of “the Rod which was held over them a few years ago in the Stamp, and Revenue Acts.” In a precursor of the argument that Abraham Lincoln would use in his second inaugural address, Rush stressed “that national crimes require national punishments, and without declaring what punishment awaits this evil, you may venture to assure them, that it cannot pass with impunity, unless God shall cease to be just or merciful.” Rush also described the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, and was ahead of his time in his interest in mental as well as physical disease. His Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812) was the first American textbook on the subject.
Margaret Sanger (nee Higgins) was born in New York, one of eleven children born to a woman who had endured eighteen pregnancies. She was a contentious figure in her day, a day not fully comfortable with the dissemination of birth-control literature, which it tended to designate as “obscene” (under the terms of the Comstock Law - named for social reformer Anthony Comstock - of 1873), and has remained a controversial one since. Sanger trained as a nurse and worked for a time on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at the same time being involved in the radical culture that concentrated on Greenwich Village and included such figures as social reformer and author Upton Sinclair and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In 1912, Sanger began writing a regular column for the New York Call, entitled “What Every Girl Should Know,” about sex education and contraception. The particular column on venereal disease was suppressed on the grounds of obscenity. In 1914, she published the first issue of the feminist publication, The Woman Rebel, but it, too, ran afoul of the censors who were unhappy with Sanger’s advocacy of contraception, and so great was the furor - and the risk of imprisonment accompanying this - that Sanger was forced to leave for England. In her absence, her associates disseminated some 100,000 copies of her pamphlet on contraception, Family Limitation. Sanger returned to New York for trial in 1915, which never happened, rather to her dismay as she had hoped that the publicity would raise awareness of the issues. Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, which led to her conviction and imprisonment but did raise public awareness and, crucially, funds for the cause for birth control reform. In 1923, she opened another clinic, the Birth Control Research Bureau, making use if a legal loophole that permitted physicians to prescribe contraception. She had, in 1917, begun publication of the Birth Control Review, and three years later opened the American Birth Control League, to be followed, in 1929, by her formation of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. Sanger at least lived long enough to see birth control become legal (for married couples only, in Griswold vs. Connecticut [1965]). Sanger’s advocacy of birth control has been variously described as deriving from her experiences among poorer women whose health inevitably suffered during pregnancy but was also jeopardized by the widespread recourse to illegal and sometimes self-induced abortion, or as having a rather more eugenicist purpose in an era when population control carried overtones of racial control and national improvement. Certainly her reputation was affected by the impact of the eugenics movement and by her own support for the sterilization of the mentally ill, a subject ruled on by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck vs. Bell (1927).