WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- Fears of recession and war hover uneasily in our path, like giant icebergs in the fog of the unknown future. It therefore seems timely, amid the glowing sunlight of the early fall, to take a time out and recall the American president who confronted and overcame the greatest of these challenges in U.S. history.
Seventy years ago this season, Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for -- and won -- the presidency of the United States at the height of the Great Depression. The crises he faced after his victory dwarfed in scale even those now facing the American people at the troubled start of the 21st century.
And the odds -- both personal and political -- he faced in overcoming them, even with the comforting benefit of hindsight, appear almost impossible.
For starters, FDR saved democracy and the free market economic system from collapsing in the United States in his very first week in office. The entire U.S. financial system was literally disintegrating as he took the Oath of Office.
The specter of the social and economic disintegration of the United States -- a nightmare that even Abraham Lincoln never had to contemplate during the Secession Crisis of 1861 -- was believed by sober observers at the time to be dangerously possible.
FDR started in office as he continued. He acted boldly and decisively, declaring a bank holiday to freeze financial transactions, and he rushed through unprecedented emergency measures to throw the weight of the Federal Government behind banks and other financial institutions around the nation.
It was only a start. But it gave him, and the nation, the crucial breathing space they needed.
Over the following 3 years, from the beginning of 1933 to the end of 1935, FDR moved on. He made his wrong turns. The vast ambitions for nationally coordinating the economic life of the nation that he attempted under the 1933 National Recovery Act were collapsing under their own weight long before the Supreme Court struck down the NRA as unconstitutional.
But in his so-called Second Hundred Days of reform initiatives in the spring and summer of 1935, he pushed through unprecedented systems of regulatory control for the banks and stock markets and of social security safety nets for the old, the poor and the unemployed.
In doing so, he completely redesigned the structure of the Western, private property-holding industrial state. And he proved to be the only the leader of any major democratic industrial nation who was able to match the claims of fascism, Nazism and communism that he could roll back the Great Depression.
He also proved that democracy was capable of curing the horrendous suffering and social injustices that had previously been passively taken for granted as the unavoidable by-product of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the free market state.
FDR also prepared the American people for rising to the challenges of idealism, bravery and self-sacrifice that would be demanded of them in winning World War II. And no democratic leader since Pericles in 5th century B.C. Athens devoted more time to personally educating his people on the meaning of his policies or the nature of the nation's responsibilities than FDR did in his legendary fireside chats.
It is universally recognized that FDR transformed the nature of the Federal Government in the United States. It is almost unknown -- especially in his own country -- that he was one of the greatest military strategists of all time. He reached down below more than 50 generals to personally select George C. Marshall as U.S. Army Chief of Staff in September 1939.
It was Marshall -- backed to the hilt by FDR -- who personally cultivated and raised up the most brilliant array of battlefield talent to train and command the new armies of the United States.
Yet FDR did not hesitate to over-rule Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower when he refused to authorize an invasion of France in 1942, insisting on the invasion of French North Africa instead. Had the D-Day operation been launched 1 or 2 years before 1944, as all FDR's own top military advisers urged, the inexperienced young U.S. troops would have been cut to pieces on the shores and hedgerows of northern France by the still-formidable German Army.
When we survey the world in this early 21st century, as historian Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out, we do not -- thankfully -- see the world that Adolf Hitler wished to make: a world of racial purity purged by genocidal wars and ruled by a master race.
Nor do we see the world that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong visualized: a world run on the principles of Marxist-Leninist communist theory. Nor do we see the democratic nations of Europe, along with Russia and perhaps Japan running the rest of the world as their colonial territories -- which was the world that Winston Churchill wanted to preserve.
Of all the great leaders of the 20th century, the only one who succeeded in stamping his own vision and values on the political development of the globe down to the beginning of the third Christian millennium was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His stature appears underestimated most of all in his own country. Nearly 3 years ago, the editors of Time magazine showed good judgment in making him the most prominent political figure of the century. But they had him only as a runner-up -- with Mohandas K. Gandhi -- to Albert Einstein as man of the century.
Einstein's historic stature deserves to be celebrated. His 1905 papers on special relativity and the photoelectric effect led -- among other consequences -- to nuclear power and television. But had he never existed, the work of Max Planck on heat radiation, Marie Curie on radioactivity, Niels Bohr on atomic theory and Werner Heisenberg on quantum mechanics, and the experiments of Ernest Rutherford and Otto Hahn, would still have pointed the way to unleashing nuclear power.
In fact, it was FDR who was the key figure in unlocking -- and unleashing -- the secrets of nuclear energy. For it was he who took the enormous, multi-billion-dollar gamble to launch the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, out of fear that the Nazis would build it first. Even here, it was FDR, not Einstein, who was the decisive figure without whom history would have taken a far different turn.
Back in 2000, columnist Charles Krauthammer, among many others, urged Winston Churchill as the choice for Man of the Century. Churchill was certainly a highly attractive choice. Without his decisive appearance as national leader in Britain's moment of greatest peril in 1940, it is virtually certain that his country would have made peace with a victorious Hitler.
Then, without the Battle of Britain to knock the heart out of Germany's offensive tactical air force, the German Army could have taken Moscow by the end of 1941 and knocked the Soviet Union out of the war.
Under such circumstances, it is not inconceivable that Werner Von Braun could have been designing intercontinental ballistic missiles to bombard New York and Washington by the end of the 1940s.
But even if this dark scenario had come to pass, FDR would have maintained American independence and power and pushed ahead with both the Manhattan Project and the B-29 Superfortress bomber program, as he did anyway. That means that FDR or his successor could have bombed even a Nazi Germany dominant across Eurasia into submission in 1945 or 1946.
Without FDR, the Western allies could never have won World War II. He chose the key successful generals and insisted on the correct military strategies. He ordered the atomic bomb built when no one else would conceivably have dared to try to do it.
When he took office, democratic government appeared to be on the brink of extinction after 150 years in the United States of America. By the time he died, he had raised his nation to a summit of internal prosperity and global power and supremacy never before dreamed of by any nation.
Yet he fought World War II so skillfully, from the point of view of U.S. interests, that the combined U.S. battle dead from the entire war was less than the Soviet or German death tolls for the Battle of Stalingrad alone.
Had FDR never lived, or had he died before he could fulfill his historic destiny, the world that might have resulted is only too easy to imagine. Philip K. Dick, the brilliant science fiction novelist dubbed "the American Kafka," visualized such a world four decades ago in his classic alternative history novel, "The Man in the High Castle."
There it is revealed that the turning point that led to the subjugation of America by Nazi Germany -- and the extermination of the black and Jewish peoples throughout the world -- was the successful assassination of President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami on Feb. 15, 1933 by Guiseppe Zangara.
In the real world, Zangara's bullets killed Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago at FDR's side instead.
Even FDR's plans for the United Nations, much derided in the decades since, have ensured nearly 6 decades of overall peace among the major powers without any major conflict because of the veto power enjoyed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
At a time when another U.S. president must cope with the challenges of a new era of economic uncertainty and a new wave of unprecedented threats to the American people in their own, vast, continent-spanning nation, the practical lessons bequeathed to us by Franklin Roosevelt deserve renewed and respectful attention.
Amid the slow, lazy days of an early American fall, it is good to recall the president who showed democracy could be decisive and even big government could work -- when it really had to.
