Your TR Source
Peter R. Fisher gives a brief review of Joseph Alsop’s FDR, 1882-1945: A Centenary Remembrance and praises it for its photographs and many anecdotes while acknowledging that its discussion of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s career is “superficial.”
Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal
1982
Alan R. Havig explores the ways in which Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) used the memory and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt (TR) to advance his own political career and causes. In doing so, he actually helped burnish the reputation of Theodore Roosevelt as a Progressive reformer. He looks closely at the 1920 campaign when FDR, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, attacked the Republican nominee, Warren G. Harding, for denouncing TR and the Progressives in 1912. Havig examines how FDR attacked the Republicans for abandoning TR’s Progressive legacy and how FDR’s adoption of TR’s mantle led to a long feud between the two wings of the Roosevelt family. He also looks at how FDR supported the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Havig also looks at how FDR used TR in 1936 to argue that the latter’s Square Deal had been a predecessor to his New Deal program. FDR, on the occasion of the dedication of the Roosevelt Memorial Hall in January 1936, quoted extensively from TR to demonstrate that he would have supported FDR’s extensive use of government to address the problems faced by the nation in the 1930s.