University Daily Kansan Thursday, April 12, 1950
A Cloudy Place In History
A solitary figure on four unparalleled occasions was the choice of his fellow countrymen for the presidency of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was indorsed and reindorsed by a hundred million voters.
On this day in 1945 he passed away of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Now eleven years after his death, violent controversy still swirls around the way he used his authority and the results he got.
The stir which followed the release of the Yalta papers points up the fact that it may be decades before history can put Roosevelt in proper perspective. His role at Yalta has been hotly criticized and just as hotly defended.
Anyone else could have been taken in by Russia and the inscrutable Mr. Stalin. Perhaps FDR had an unjustifiable faith in the man. The relationship between Russia and the democracies has never been more than a working relationship which originally flowed from a bitter war necessity—stand and work together or fall before an arrogant racialist Hitlerism, Mr. Roosevelt, however, believed the relationship could be carried forward into peacemaking post-war times.
Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, FDR's wartime chief of staff, who was at Yalta said: "Yalta was no sellout. The agreements made between President Roosevelt and Stalin did not have any disadvantages to us—assuming the Russians would keep their promises.
"Several things were agreed to that the Russians didn't want. Mr. Stalin agreed to back Chiang. If Russia supported Chiang, we wouldn't have this Chinese trouble. As for this business of selling China down the river and giving away privileges in Manchuria, I never had the feeling we were doing anything wrong."
Admiral Leahy said the Pacific islands Russia was allowed to take over were only some Japan had seized from her years before.
The concessions made to Russia at Yalta were in return for Stalin's promise to jump into the war with Japan within 90 days after Germany's defeat. On the basts of predictions that it would take another 18 months to conquer Japan, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted Russia to come in.
Leahy said that it was a majority, not a unanimous stand. He said he personally urged the President not to push Russia to go to war against Japan.
"The Japanese were already defeated by naval and air power." Admiral Leahy said. "and there was no reason to throw in an army and get half a million men killed."
Admiral Leahy said he can see no major mistakes that Mr. Roosevelt made. But former War Production Board leader Charles E. Wilson observes that "Valta is going to be awfully hard to explain." However Robert E. Sherwood, author and latter-day Roosevelt speech aide, contends, with ex-adviser Samuel L. Rosenman, that any Roosevelt failure was not in making agreements with Russia but not "foreseeing that Russia would fail to keep them." Rosenman contended that all Roosevelt's mistakes were minor in the light of accomplishments.
Millions still idolize FDR's memory and nearly everything he did or stood for. Others detested him and believe that his four elections to the White House undermined the Constitution.
The person who knew him best, Mrs. Roosevelt, now 72 years old, says that at first her husband would be remembered longest and most
Now she says:
favorably for giving the American people a sense that "they participated in government."
"The greatest thing he accomplished was to make people all over the world feel that he, and therefore our country, actually was concerned about them and was interested in their problems."
In principle, if not degree, some others share that view. Then there are those who would agree with her that an outstanding weakness was an inability to get rid of people who were friends but no longer useful or effective.
Linked with this weaknes, Mrs. Roosevelt says, was the way in which "Franklin gave people the impression he agreed with them when he really didn't at all."
Many deeds of Mr. Roosevelt's administrations have become an indelible part of American life. Social security, for example, and bank deposits and housing loan insurance, and registration of securities.
Probably the criticism will roll endlessly on of Mr. Roosevelt's effort to revamp the Supreme Court, his unsuccessful attempt in 1938 to purge the Democratic party of key conservatives, his wartime call for "unconditional surrender," and his negotiations at Yalta.
Mr. Roosevelt's administrations were marked by a number of spectacular feuds. He wrote a House committee he hoped it would not "permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable," to block regulation of prices, wages and hours in the soft coal industry.
In his first 100 days that rewrote the economic laws, FDR held the hoop and Congress jumped through. Later conservative Democrats and isolationists of both parties began to drift away from him.
Mr. Roosevelt strongly rejected Communist backing as early as his first bid for reelection in 1936. Still, the names of men like Alger Hiss appear on the rosters of his administration.
He set and shattered precedents on a grand scale. He was the first chief executive to fly, to leave the country in wartime, to report to the people by radio, to place a woman in the cabinet, to write to the emperor of Japan—just because nobody had ever done it before.
And he was the first president, and the last according to the changed Constitution, to run for and win a third term and then a fourth.
Perhaps with the passing of another decade, or maybe many more, it may be possible for persons with an unbiased detached point of view to determine with some certainty whether the Roosevelt record, on balance, was one of blunders or blessings.
Jim Tice
Columbus discovered the Virgin Islands on his second voyage to the New World. The largest he named Holy Cross—in Spanish, Santa Cruz. The others he named Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgines, in honor of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins.
Wonder who'll be the happiest when the new Music and Fine Arts building is completed—music students or those instructors in Strong Hall whose lectures seldom are without competition?
Do you suppose the University will ever stop growing long enough so that you can walk from the Union to Lindley without hearing a drill hammer or an air compressor?
... Letters ...
Editor:
Long before any of you were in college, a Kansan staff member, one F Quentin Brown, of considerable repute in Kansas, was a patient in Watkins Memorial Hospital. In his convalescence, he enjoyed reading The Daily Kansan, but often his friends failed to bring the daily copy.
When he left the hospital he arranged to have several copies of the Kansan delivered for the hospital patients. This custom has continued feebly through the years. Of late, one of the hospital staff has been going over to the box near the library and bringing copies to the hospital.
Our Journal-World carrier, being
I think it is most unjust to accuse him of peddling The Kansan on his route. Perhaps The Daily Kansan is missing the public relations opportunity when it doesn't perpetuate the kindly act initiated by the late F. Quentin Brown.
a friendly chap, has lately been doing this for us. This procedure cannot be causing the Kansan any financial hardship, since I understand that each student is entitled to a copy.
Ralph I. Canuteson Hospital director
(Note: The Journal-world carrier referred to in Monday's issue of The Daily Kansan made no mention of the fact that he was taking the papers to Watkins Hospital. He
said only that he was taking the papers to some of the persons on his route, and added that several other Journal-World carriers followed the same practice. If the carrier was delivering the papers to the hospital, we agree that he has been unjustly accused. However, two members of The Daily Kansan staff saw the newsboy take approximately 40 copies of the paper, which he said were for subscribers on his Journal-World route. There were approximately 20 students in Watkins Hospital that day.)
No armed force has ever achieved success in Formosa without first occupying the Pescadores. The 64 small islands lie west of Formosa about 85 miles off the Chinese mainland. Makung is the chief port of the group.
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