PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 10/28/1940 - HFSID 253491

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
President Roosevelt sends a letter of congratulations to an admirer about reaching the age of 90.
Typed letter signed: "Franklin D. Roosevelt", 1 page, 7x8¾, on White House stationery. Washington, 1940 October 28. Addressed to Mrs. Cecile Anna Wettach, East Orange, New Jersey. In full: "I have been much interested to learn that you will celebrate your ninetieth birthday anniversary on November first. It gives me real pleasure to extend hearty felicitations to one who has attained such a fine age, and to express the hope that in the days to come you will enjoy good health and many happy reminiscences of the past. Very sincerely yours," Including original mailing envelope (7¼x4½). 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. Fold crease not at signature. Fine condition.