PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 06/08/1934 - HFSID 154908

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
The President signs a typed letter thanking Mayor James Ross of Lancaster, Pennsylvania for an engraving of President Buchanan.
Typed letter signed: "Franklin D. Roosevelt", 1 page, 7x8¾ (folded), on White House stationery. Washington, 1934 June 8. Addressed to Honorable James H. Ross, Office of the Mayor, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.In full: "I have not had an opportunity before this to thank you for that very interesting old engraving of James Buchanan. It will occupy an honored position among my treasures. I need not tell you how grateful I am to you and to the good people of Lancaster for that wonderful welcome on the evening of May thirtieth. I shall hope the next time to be able to spend a little more time." Roosevelt had been president for less than two years when he wrote this letter about his Memorial Day visit to Lanacaster. Thenation was still in the depths of the Great Depression and had only just begun to recover the previous year. Worse, Germany's President Paul von Hindeburg had about two months to live after Roosevelt wrote this letter, allowing Adolf Hitler to declare himself Führer of Germany. But things did improve in the United States in 1934; bank suspensions fell in 1934, and unemployment started to fall from its peak of almost 25% the previous year to just above 20%. The economy had hit bottom the year before, when Roosevelt had been elected, and now had nowhere to go but up. ROOSEVELT (1882-1945, born in Hyde Park, NY) is an American politician who served as president during two of the most difficult times in world history, the Great Depression and World War II. He also served as president for four terms (1933-1945), longer than any other president in history. Roosevelt's parents were from old New York families, and he was raised in privilege. Theodore, his fifth cousin, was elected president in 1902; his leadership style and lust for reform made him Franklin's hero and role model. Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Senate in 1910; he ran as a Democrat in a district that hadn't elected a Democrat since 1884, but ran on his privileged name and rode a Democratic landslide to the State Senate, where he joined reformers in opposing New York City's Tammany Hall Democratic machine. He resigned in 1913 when appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-1920), where he worked to expand the Navy and founded the Navy Reserve and where he met Winston Churchill for the first time in 1918. He ran as vice president with James M. Cox of Ohio, but they were handily defeated by Warren Harding. He contracted a paralytic illness in 1921 while vacationing in Campobello Island, New Brunswick, widely believed to be poliomyelitis, which permanently paralyzed him from the waist down. Not many people knew at the time that he was paralyzed, though, thanks in part to a cooperative press. He was elected Governor of New York (1928-1932), a governorship that was marred by his reluctant deal-making with the faltering Tammany Hall machine during his 1930 re-election run. He was elected president in 1932, three years into the worldwide Great Depression, a depression that contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Roosevelt tried to get people back to work with the New Deal and prevent the same thing happening in the United States. The New Deal was a patchwork of programs that scholars now agree had limited success at best in ending the Depression, and some of its programs, like the National Recovery Administration (NRA), were determined to be unconstitutional. However, programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps employed hundreds of thousands of Americans and programs like NRA and the Tennessee Valley Authority injected billions of federal dollars into the economy. Roosevelt was also responsible for Social Security benefits for the elderly and minimum wage laws. He began re-arming the United States in 1938, in the face of strong isolationism, and declared that the United States would become an "arsenal of democracy" against Hitler. But the isolationism dissolved with the attacks on Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered World War II. Roosevelt's administration put the nation on a war footing while coordinating strategy with his counterparts Churchill and Josef Stalin, the so-called "Big Three". He died four months before V-J Day and the official end of World War II on Aug. 12, 1945. ROSS, a Democrat, had been elected Mayor of Lancaster in 1933. He also owned the James H. Ross Ready to Wear Department Store. After BUCHANAN, 15th President of the United States (1857-1861) and also a Democrat, left the White House, he retired to his Wheatland estate near Lancaster where he died in 1868. Lightly toned, soiled and creased. Paper loss on right edge. Adhesive residue on verso, does not show through. Page has been folded in four horizontally and unfolded.