The Hidden Campaign: FDR's Health and the 1944 Election by Hugh E. Evans

Author:Hugh E. Evans [Evans, Hugh E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9781315499031
Google: ImalDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-08T16:17:49+00:00

William H. Harrison

68

John Tvler

1841

Zachary Taylor

65

Millard Filmore

1850

Abraham Lincoln

56

Andrew Johnson

1865

James Garfield

49

Chester A. Arthur

1881

William McKinley

58

Theodore Roosevelt

1901

Warren G. Harding

57

Calvin Coolidge

1923

Franklin D. Roosevelt

63

Harry S. Truman

1945

Source: Adapted from Statistical Bulletin, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, March 1976, p. 2.

Each of the recently deceased presidents was awarded instant apotheosis, regardless of the attitude of politicians and the public during their lives. Twenty years prior to Roosevelt’s death Sigmund Freud discussed this phenomenon:

Towards the dead person … take up a special attitude, something like admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult task. We suspend criticism, overlook his possible misdoings … and set forth in the funeral oration and upon the tombstone only that which is favorable to his memory.47

An example is found in the words of Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons at the time of Roosevelt’s death: “In Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.”48 Inevitably, it takes months for the wound to heal and much longer to evaluate the president’s place in history. In the case of Roosevelt, the initial shock and the subsequent mourning process was heightened by radio and newsreel coverage of his death.

Denial and Deception

The widespread and prolonged reactions that greeted the death of Roosevelt were a social and psychological phenomen. His twelve years in office had been marked by the most profound changes in all dimensions of American culture. The Depression and efforts to provide relief, the preparations for war and the global military campaigns, brought pervasive, permanent structural changes to American society. From the theater to the stock market, banks to agriculture, all aspects of American life were profoundly altered by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The tangibles of post offices, roads, hospitals, schools, and murals all would endure, as would social security, wage and hour regulation, union rights, rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and insured bank accounts. The one constant in all these changes, for both those who deified him and those who demonized him, was Roosevelt himself. The illusion of permanence, of “immortality” was almost inevitable. In other countries, Roosevelt was so identified with these changes and the conduct of the war, that many people relied on him, not on America. Aid such as Lend Lease was often thought of as a personal gift from Roosevelt. After his death, correspondents in Italy wrote of small children dressed in clothes “which Roosevelt sent us from America” and earnestly said their prayers “for their benefactor.”49

This sense of permanence related to the person of Roosevelt produced two basic approaches to the news of his death—denial and deception. In his study of “Reactions to the Death of President Roosevelt,” social scientist Harold Orlansky provides an approach to understanding why many chose denial.50 Because of the belief that Roosevelt might live forever, this conviction of immortality was the basis for the belief that death was only an intrusion on the natural order of life—such as an “accident.”51 Thus,

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