My Fellow Americans by Yuvraj Singh
On January 20th, the incoming president delivers their inaugural address in a tradition that goes back to 1789, with the first inauguration of George Washington. The address tells our fellow Americans – and our neighbors around the world – that the best is yet to come and provides a roadmap on how to get there.
My Fellow Americans brings together all of the inaugural addresses – from George Washington’s first in 1789, up until Donald Trump’s in 2016 – with 63 essays from leading scholars, speechwriters, historians, biographers, and experts on the presidents and their era. Contributors have won the Pulitzer Prize, the…
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My Fellow Americans by Yuvraj Singh
The Unlikely Friendship of Elean
Photo: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images
For nearly three decades, educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, often called the “First Lady of the Struggle,” forged an unlikely friendship with another first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Bethune became a trusted advisor to both Roosevelt and her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and played a key role in shaping government policies for Black Americans during the 1930s and ’40s.
Bethune came from humble beginnings
Born in South Carolina in 1875, Bethune was one of 17 children, and both her parents and most of her siblings had formerly been enslaved. The family struggled to get by, and Bethune picked cotton with her family to survive. When she was offered a spot in a local school opened by missionaries when she was 10, she jumped at the chance, becoming the first in her family to learn to read. She later won scholarships to study in North Carolina and Chicago, where she developed a lifelong passion for the uplifting possibilities of education, particularly for young Black girls.
Abandoning her original plan to become a missionary, she moved to Florida and founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls. The school was an immediate success, growing from five students to more than 250 in just two years. In 1923, it merged with a nearby school to become Bethune-Cookman College, a four-year, coeducational school. Despite…
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https://www.biography.com/news/eleanor-roosevelt-mary-mcleod-bethune-friendship
Joe Biden should help Americans rediscover the ‘Four Freedoms’
BY GIL TROY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 01/07/21 01:00 PM EST 192THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
© Getty Images
Eighty years ago this week, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his eighth State of the Union address to a divided nation. As Nazis blitzkrieged Europe, Americans froze, unwilling to fight so soon after the Great War, yet unable to overlook Hitler’s threat. FDR tried mobilizing Americans to fight for four essential human freedoms: “The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship … everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want … everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear… anywhere in the world.”
We know the happy ending. Rallying around the Four Freedoms, Americans triumphed, spreading freedom at home and abroad. That’s history as immaculate conception — Patrick Henry chose liberty over death and freedom emerged; Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg and the American nation bonded; FDR proclaimed Four Freedoms and Americans mobilized.
Actually, the speech failed at first. It took the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 11 months later to drag Americans into World War II. Even then, most G.I. Joes knew what they were fighting against — not for. Deep into 1942, pollster George Gallup reported that the president’s words had “not registered a very deep imprint.” Without the help of an artist and his first lady, we wouldn’t be citing Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms today.
On that cold January day in 1941, the most aristocratic of presidents articulated the most far-reaching of freedoms, rooted in every person’s inherent dignity. It’s the great American paradox. Franklin Roosevelt had his limits — tolerating the lynching of Blacks, the relocation of Japanese Americans and the banning of European Jews. But, like most Americans, he believed in America, appreciated its democratic aspirations as “the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”
FDR was bred with this all-American faith in democracy and service. While paying today’s equivalent of $10,000 monthly for his Harvard undergraduate digs, he explained that his family’s privilege made him feel extra-responsible: “[B]eing born in a good position, there was no excuse” for not doing your “duty by the community.”
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms evolve from…
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Rethinking Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain
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BRITAIN AT BAY
The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
By Alan Allport
Neville Chamberlain after signing the Munich agreement, 1938. Alamy
“In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. … History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes.” Those were Winston Churchill’s words in one of the greatest, though least remembered, speeches of his life, his elegy for Neville Chamberlain days after Chamberlain had died in November 1940. They remain singularly apt for the years before and after Churchill spoke. That story, of how the British found themselves at war and then how they survived it, is the subject of Alan Allport’s “Britain at Bay.”
The author of several books, including a valuable study of British servicemen in 1939-45, Allport begins with a chapter called “Shire Folk.” This allusion to Tolkien becomes a riff on which he then plays throughout the book, and an unfortunate one for this reviewer, who has since boyhood suffered from acute Hobbitophobia. But the point Allport wants to make is a good one: The British saw themselves as a kindly, gentle, puzzled people, like those cute little critters in the Shire, which was not how others always saw them.
In a sharp turn, when this unusually informative and stimulating book really gets going, Allport takes two snapshots of violence…
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Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt
Collection Summary
Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt was a monthly hour-long series of discussions produced by WGBH for National Educational Television (NET) and featuring former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her guests. The 29 episodes in the collection that make up the entirety of the series have all been digitized and made available on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website. The brainchild of producer Henry Morgenthau III, the series was a forum for international political leaders, decision-makers, scholars, and journalists to discuss current world events and topics, with Roosevelt acting as host and moderator. Most episodes were filmed at Brandeis University’s Slosberg Music Center in front of a live audience. Guest panelists usually consisted of a key foreign figure or United Nations representative, a representative from American public life or academia, and a member of the press, in the hopes of fostering a well-rounded discussion. Produced in three seasons from September 1959 to June 1962, a period that began with hopes for peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the series covered the final period of the Eisenhower administration and continued as Cold War conflicts around the world intensified during the first years of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Episodes address a variety of subjects, including disarmament, the UN, Cuba and the threatened spread of communism in Latin America…
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https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/prospectsofmankind
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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eleanor-prospects-mankind-eleanor-roosevelt/