دانلود کتاب روزولت ملت را جارو می کند – زمین لغزش 1936 FDR و پیروزی آرمان لیبرال

F ranklin Roosevelt was alone at a very bad time. Yes, there was Eleanor. There was, despite everything, always Eleanor. But their personal relationship had long lain in tatters—still wounded and bleeding from Franklin’s Great War tryst with her too-charming former social secretary Lucy Mercer. Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt remained a political team—but just barely. In 1928, when Franklin had narrowly stormed into New York’s governor’s mansion, Eleanor coldly and publicly proclaimed her decided indifference to his triumph—“I don’t care”—and that hostility never fully vanished. “[W]hen Eleanor was around you could always feel tension of a certain kind,” recalled FDR speechwriter Sam Rosenman. The Roosevelts’ eldest son, James, phrased it more harshly, labeling their marriage “an armed truce that endured until the day [Franklin] died” and recalling several instances when his father literally “held out his arms to mother and she flatly refused to enter his embrace.” One evening, at the White House, in late April 1935, Eleanor casually confessed—to James Roosevelt and to her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt—that her wifely heart would not fall to pieces if defeat visited her husband in 1936. When Eleanor departed the room, Sara painfully queried James: “Do you think [your] Mother would do anything to defeat Father? Is that why she stays in politics, just to hurt his chances of re-election?” Decades later, Eleanor’s devoted radio and television agent, Thomas Stix, sheepishly confessed to his client that he had voted for Socialist Norman Thomas in 1932—and not for her deceased spouse. “So would I,” she answered Stix, “if I had not been married to Franklin.”