Bear Paw Meanderings
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On this day in 1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia. He had just been sworn in for a fourth term in January of that year. It was war time and that was the reason President Roosevelt ran for a fourth term in the first place.
He was very ill at that time. In fact the ceremony of celebration of his fourth term and the swearing in of him for that term was held at the White House, not the capitol as he was too ill to go through all the ceremonies that going to the capitol would bring.
Then he went on a long and grueling trip to Russia to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to decide about how the countries would be divided up after the war was won because it looked like the allies were going to win the war that summer.
After coming home from that trip he addressed congress and for the first time sat while addressing them and told them that his legs were too tired to stand. That was the first and only time that he ever referred in public to the fact that he had had polio and could not walk at all. It was to their credit that no news photographer ever took a picture of President Roosevelt being carried from his car to a wheel chair and wheeled into one meeting or another.
FDR did not want to run for a fourth term. He wanted only to go home to his beloved Springwood estate at Hyde Park on the Hudson River in upstate New York. There he wanted to plant and grow Christmas trees just like he had his CCC boys plant millions of trees all over the United States during the dirty thirties.
But he was called for another term, running against Tom Dewey. He had no energy for the campaign until the Republicans spread a story that might or might not have been true that he left his Scotty dog Fala on a remote island. The story went on to say that he sent a destroyer to pick up Fala and bring him to FDR at an enormous cost.
That made FDR mad and he made a wonderful speech saying that the Republicans were not only picking on his wife and children but now they were picking on his dog and that Fala is a Scotty and very frugal and since he heard what the Republican fiction writers were writing about the enormous cost to bring Fala home, he just hasn’t been the same dog since!
Then FDR got into the election and, of course won.
FDR has always been a hero for me. I remember him being reported as saying as he was driven down Going-To-The-Sun Road next to St. Mary Lake that he loved Montana and loved Glacier National Park and after the war he was going to come back and build a summer cabin at St. Mary Lake.
What Montana kid would not love someone who said that about his state and park?
Well, FDR never came back but for generations of us, he has never left our thoughts.
Tonight I will lift a glass and toast this maybe best of all Presidents!
