Elected in 1932 at the lowest point of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) put the United States on the road to recovery with his New Deal economy and then led the country through World War II (1939–1945). Roosevelt died in office just weeks before the final defeat of Germany and Japan. FDR, as he was commonly known, was the only president to serve more than eight years, and the public and historians rank him as one of the top presidents in American history for his military and economic achievements.
Born in New York, Roosevelt belonged to the same upper-crust family as President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). He broke with the Republican Roosevelt clan in 1910, however, by running for office as a Democrat. Roosevelt served as secretary of the navy for President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), a Democrat, where he met his British counterpart, a young member of Parliament named Winston Churchill (1874–1965), with whom he would work closely during World War II.
While vacationing with his wife, Eleanor (1884–1962), in 1921, FDR was stricken with polio, a debilitating disease that paralyzed his legs. Despite his disability, Roosevelt challenged Herbert Hoover for the presidency in 1932, promising sweeping economic reforms if elected. Despite dire economic conditions, Roosevelt gave a famously optimistic speech at his inauguration, declaring that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Within months, FDR had embarked on a program that would fundamentally change both the federal government and the office of the presidency. The New Deal greatly expanded the federal government’s role in the economy and in the everyday lives of Americans. New Deal programs established a minimum wage, Social Security, and protections for labor unions. Roosevelt mastered the use of mass media by communicating with the public in his famous fireside radio chats, establishing a personal relationship with them unlike any previous president had had.
In 1940, Roosevelt broke with tradition by seeking a third term, and he was elected handily. Although in poor health, Roosevelt ran again successfully in the wartime election of 1944, but he died shortly after his fourth inauguration of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945.
1. Roosevelt’s landslide electoral college victory in 1936, 523 votes to only eight for Republican Alf Landon (1887–1987), was the most lopsided since the election of George Washington in 1789.
2. One of the blemishes on Roosevelt’s record was his decision not to support antilynching legislation out of fear of losing the support of Southern Democrats.
3. FDR and Eleanor were fifth cousins; her last name was already Roosevelt when they married.
Before dawn on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay departed from an air base on the remote Pacific island of Tinian. The plane, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets (1915–), carried a fearsome cargo. After six hours aloft over the Pacific, the twelve-man crew of the Enola Gay reached its intended target, the bustling Japanese port city of Hiroshima. From 26,000 feet in the air, shortly after 8:00 a.m., Tibbets unleashed the world’s first atomic bomb.
In an instant, the bomb incinerated downtown Hiroshima. About 140,000 Japanese were killed, and the city was turned into a smoldering wasteland. Nicknamed “Little Boy,” the atom bomb was like nothing ever seen in the history of warfare. The bombing, followed three days later by another atomic strike against the city of Nagasaki, forced Japan to give up and thus brought World War II to an end. On August 10, 1945, Emperor Hirohito (1901–1989) ordered the Japanese military to surrender rather than endure any more of the terrible atomic onslaughts.
More than sixty years later, the fateful decision by US President Harry Truman (1884–1972) to use the atom bomb remains extremely controversial. American planners knew tens of thousands of civilians would be killed in the bombing but went ahead anyway. Around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, civilians continue to suffer debilitating diseases caused by radiation.
However, most Americans, including President Truman, argued that in the case of the atomic bomb, the ends justified the means. Only by terrifying the emperor into surrender could the Americans avoid an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which Truman’s generals forecast would cost hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives. “Dropping the bombs ended the war, saved lives, and gave the free nations a chance to face the facts,” Truman wrote later, defending his decision.
Tibbets harbored no doubts about his critical role in world history. In 2005, a reporter in Ohio asked him if he would drop the bomb again under similar circumstances. “Hell, yeah,” he replied.
1. Even before the introduction of the atomic bomb, American bombing was taking a terrible toll on Japan. An earlier firebombing of Tokyo burned 84,000 people to death and destroyed 250,000 homes.
2. Two days after the first atom bomb was dropped, the Soviet Union, sensing Japan’s imminent defeat, finally declared war on Japan, just in time to reap the rewards of the Allied victory in Asia.
3. Truman’s plan B, had he decided against using the atomic bomb, was a November 1945 invasion of the Japanese mainland.
On March 25, 1931, nine African-American teenagers were arrested on a freight train in Paint Rock, Alabama, and charged with rape and assault. Two weeks later, after two white women testified that the young men had raped them in a boxcar, eight of them were convicted by all-white juries in nearby Scottsboro and sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Almost immediately, serious questions about the alleged crime began to emerge, and the fate of the condemned men—soon dubbed the “Scottsboro Boys” by the press—became a lengthy courtroom saga that exposed the injustices of Alabama’s racially biased criminal justice system.
At the time of the arrest, the nine men and the two alleged victims were on their way to Memphis to look for work. The case against them began to unravel when one of the victims, Ruby Bates (1913–1976), changed her story after the trial and said that no rape had actually occurred on the train.
In the North, doubts about the guilt of the defendants, combined with objections to the speed of the trial and the draconian verdicts, aroused major concerns among civil rights advocates. A communist-affiliated labor group asked Samuel Leibowitz (1893–1978), a well-known New York defense attorney (who was not a communist), to defend the accused on appeal.
Leibowitz, a Jewish attorney who was one of the era’s most famous defense lawyers, argued that the exclusion of blacks from the jury in Alabama had denied the Scottsboro Boys a fair trial. He eventually took the case to the Supreme Court, which sided with the accused and overturned the guilty verdicts.
Alabama retried the men, and several were again sentenced to death or given long prison terms, despite Bates’s recantation of her accusations. Leibowitz, the target of growing anti-Semitic hostility in the South, eventually had to take himself off the case to avoid hurting his clients.
In all, the case of the Scottsboro Boys had no happy ending. Some of the men were still in prison in the late 1940s. By 1950, four were paroled, nearly twenty years after a crime that may never have occurred.
1. After retracting her story, Bates had to flee Alabama. She died in Washington State in 1976.
2. One of the Scottsboro Boys, Haywood Patterson (1913–1952), escaped from prison in 1947 and fled to Michigan. He was captured there as a fugitive, but Michigan’s governor refused to extradite him back to Alabama.
3. The incident was one of the inspirations for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee (1926–).
In 1913, the United States Congress approved two pieces of economic legislation that would become milestones in twentieth-century American life. The first was a constitutional amendment permitting the federal government to levy an income tax. The second created the Federal Reserve System, also called the Fed, a central government banking system that has grown into one of the most powerful economic institutions in the United States.
As envisioned by its founders, the Fed had a twofold purpose. First, it was charged with managing the huge assets of the United States government, including the proceeds from the new income tax. Second, it was meant to regulate the financial industry as a whole by setting interest rates and banking policies. Congress hoped that the Fed could prevent the kinds of cyclical banking panics that had periodically damaged the American economy throughout the nineteenth century.
The creation of the Fed resulted from a bipartisan consensus that effectively ended one of the most contentious political debates in American history. Since the election of President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) in 1828, the Democratic Party had opposed the concept of a central bank as a boon to wealthy bankers; as late as 1912, party stalwart William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) still opposed the Fed, but he was overruled by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924).
For average Americans, the impact of the Fed’s creation was evident in their wallets. Every US dollar bill is now labeled Federal Reserve Note. In theory, the first bills issued by the Fed were backed by gold and could be redeemed for bullion. Now, however, the dollar is a fiat currency, meaning that it is backed by nothing and has value only because the Fed says it does.
In its modern form, the Federal Reserve has enormous power to manage the American economy and has occasionally come under fire for its policies. By design, the Fed is largely independent of the federal government and is sometimes accused of prioritizing stability over economic growth or reducing unemployment.
1. The United States was taken off the gold standard in 1933, and for several decades it was illegal to own gold as an investment.
2. Although the $100 bill is the highest-denomination bill printed by the Fed today, in the past it has issued currency worth up to $100,000 in face value.
3. The Fed has twelve branch offices scattered across the United States, which were established partly as a political compromise to avoid the impression the bank was purely intended for New York City financiers.
Located on a remote plateau northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the town of Los Alamos was a secret for the first several years of its existence. Once an ancient Native American community, the isolated site was selected by the US Army to house a group of scientists who designed and built the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II (1939–1945). Today, Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the world’s biggest physics and engineering research institutions in the world.
Early research on the atomic bomb was carried out throughout the United States. To centralize the project in a single location, head researcher J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) picked Los Alamos in 1942. The military officer in charge of what was code-named the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves (1896–1970), insisted on total secrecy. During the war, Los Alamos would not appear on maps, and the mysterious activities on the mesa were referred to only as Project Y. Mail had to be sent to a post office box in Santa Fe, and the town would not be allowed to have its own post office until 1947.
Eventually thousands of scientists would gather secretly in Los Alamos, including some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. After three years of frenzied research, the scientists completed the first atomic bomb, which was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The scientists were painfully aware of the destructive force they were about to unleash on the world. After the successful test, one of Oppenheimer’s assistants famously said to his boss, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
Nuclear research and testing continued in New Mexico during the Cold War of the mid- to late 1900s, although Oppenheimer and many other scientists eventually quit. The town’s existence was revealed to the public after two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945. Los Alamos is now one of the largest cities in New Mexico and home to an internationally famous government research center.
1. Los Alamos means the poplars in Spanish.
2. One of the scientists at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs (1911–1988), was a German-born Soviet spy who passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Based on the American design, the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in 1949.
3. The town had its own high school, where world-famous physicist Edward Teller (1908–2003) taught an after-school class on advanced physics.
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) was a Canadian, Quebec-born, who became famous as one of the most astute chroniclers of twentieth-century American urban life in novels including The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), and Herzog (1964). Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature for lifetime achievement. Bellow’s novels—comic on one page, deeply philosophical on the next—are considered among the finest examples of American literature of the late twentieth century.
When he was nine years old, Bellow moved with his family to Chicago, the city that would be the setting for many of his novels. He graduated from Northwestern University, was rejected by the US Army during World War II (1939–1945) for health problems, and wrote his debut novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. Nine years later, Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March, his first hit and still one of his most celebrated novels. Set in Chicago during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the book chronicles the exploits of its blustering hero as he careens from job to job searching for his calling in life.
In addition to his novels, Bellow was a prolific essayist, playwright, and short story writer; he even covered the 1967 Arab-Israeli war for Newsday. He taught at several universities, most famously at the University of Chicago, where he was a faculty member of the school’s Committee on Social Thought.
Later in life, Bellow developed a reputation as a contrarian and provocateur. He was unsparing in his criticism of authors he disliked, and he enjoyed jousting with leftwing and feminist literary critics. By Bellow’s own description, he was widely regarded as “an elitist, a chauvinist, a reactionary and a racist—in a word, a monster.” He continued teaching until his seventies, long after his books had made him wealthy, and published his last novel, the well-received Ravelstein (2000), at age eighty-five.
1. Before launching his literary career, Bellow worked briefly for Encyclopaedia Britannica, penning entries on great books.
2. Although rejected by the army in World War II, Bellow had more luck with the merchant marines; by the time he was accepted, however, the war was over.
3. Bellow almost died in 1994 after eating a tainted fish during a Caribbean vacation; he included the experience in Ravelstein.
Although short-lived, the CBS TV comedy The Honeymooners, which aired between 1955 and 1956, was one of the most successful and influential shows in the early years of television. Developed by comedian Jackie Gleason (1916–1987), who played main character Ralph Kramden, the show ranked third on TV Guide’s all-time list of best television shows, published in 2002, even though only thirty-nine episodes of the program were ever recorded.
Television was invented in the 1920s and 1930s, but TV sets did not go into mass production until after World War II (1939–1945). Although color TV technology was available, the early networks all broadcast most of their shows in black-and-white.
The Brooklyn-born Gleason, a former cabaret comic, first debuted the Honeymooners characters in short sketches for DuMont, a long-vanished television network that once competed with NBC, CBS, and ABC. He eventually moved to CBS, where the half-hour version of the show began airing October 1, 1955.
The show featured Gleason as Kramden, a bus driver, and Audrey Meadows (1926–1996) as his wife, Alice. Art Carney (1918–2003) played one of their neighbors in a Bronx apartment building, sewer worker Ed Norton, who was, to many viewers, the show’s most endearing character. Most of the show’s plots involved Kramden and Norton, who are portrayed as ordinary blue-collar boobs—instead of the upper-middle-class families portrayed on most TV shows at the time—getting mixed up in get-rich-quick schemes and kvetching about their wives.
Despites its enormous ratings, Gleason and CBS discontinued it after only one year. A pioneer of the sit-com genre, the show influenced television writers for decades. Reruns of the show still air in syndication, a testament to its lasting impact on the medium.
1. Gleason was famously rotund but felt his roly-poly figure made him funnier.
2. In one of his last appearances, Gleason appeared alongside Tom Hanks (1956–) in the forgettable 1986 movie Nothing in Common.
3. Gleason was nominated for an Academy Award in 1961 for his role as the real-life pool shark Minnesota Fats (1913–1996) in The Hustler.