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#FDR
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so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.
and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.
...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.
see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.
while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.
especially if the president of the united states is on board.
yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.
and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."
but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.
...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.
not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.
yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.
but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire
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muspeccoll · 7 months
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For Banned Books Week, we offer you this 81-year-old image from our collections.
No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny.
A print of this poster currently hangs in the hallway between our reading room and classroom, along with several other posters about libraries, books, and reading, dating from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Books are weapons in the war of ideas [graphic] / S. Broder. RARE FLAT D743.25 .B75 1942
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liberalsarecool · 5 months
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90 years later we are having the same conversation about capitalism and starvation wages.
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newyorkthegoldenage · 4 months
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Governor-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt played Santa Claus to 150 children at the Beekman Street Hospital, December 20, 1928. He wasn't as wary of being photographed with his leg braces as he was when he became president.
Photo: Associated Press
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Actually, the President of the United States is powerful
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US Presidents have lots of things they can do beyond signing or vetoing legislation. Their administrative agencies have broad powers that allow them to act without dragging Congress behind them.
For example, Jennifer Abruzzo, the ass-kicking superhero that Biden appointed as National Labor Relations Board General Counsel, has used her powers to establish a rule that companies that break labor law during union drives automatically lose, with the affected union gaining instant recognition.
For a followup, Abruzzo is using a case called Thrive Pet Care to impose a “duty to bargain” on companies. If a company won’t bargain in good faith for a union contract, Abruzzo’s NLRB will simply force them to adhere to the contractual terms established by rival companies that did bargain with their unions, until such time as a contract is signed.
But wait, what about the dastardly Supreme Court? What if those six dotards in robes use their stolen seats on the country’s highest court to block Biden’s administrators?
Well, Biden could do what his predecessors have done. Like Lincoln, Biden could simply ignore the court, embracing popular policies he was elected to enact, revealing the Supremes to be toothless, out-of-touch, undemocratic and illegitimate.
(Andrew Jackson was a monster, but when he ignored his own Supreme Court, he proved that the Supremes’ only leverage came from their legitimacy; recall the (likely apocryphal) quote, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”)
Like FDR, Biden could threaten to pack the court, creating a national debate about the court’s illegitimacy, which would add fuel to the court’s plummeting reputation amidst a string of bribery scandals.
-Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit: “I want to do it, now make me do it.”
Image: Fabio Basagni https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Sahara_desert_sunrise.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
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empirearchives · 3 months
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No one speak to me
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citizenscreen · 13 days
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“Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945)
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wandering-jana · 3 months
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Campobello Island. Home to a international park and one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vacation homes.
New Brunswick, Canada
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deadpresidents · 1 month
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At the FDR Presidential Library, I read that the British press considered it crass and undignified for the Roosevelts to share hotdogs with the King and Queen of England when they visited Hyde Park. Are there any other fun anecdotes about Presidents serving the wrong food to dignitaries?
FDR also served them beer with their hot dogs! From the accounts that I've read, King George VI enjoyed them and asked for more. Queen Elizabeth (that's the Queen Mother -- Elizabeth II's mom) had to ask for directions about how to eat the hot dogs, but apparently ended up using a knife and fork. Apparently, the King and Queen really appreciated the lack of formality in their visit to Hyde Park because it came on the heels of a very formal, month-long state visit to Canada. President Roosevelt and King George even went swimming together a couple of times in FDR's pool and went for a ride in FDR's custom-made car that allowed him to control everything with his hands due to his disability.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any incidents where Presidents served the wrong type of food to guests. I'm sure it has probably happened over the years, but State Dinners are pretty meticulously planned by protocol officials on both ends. One story that I always liked was President Reagan noting in a diary entry that Prince Charles (now King Charles III) was served tea during a visit to Washington but had absolutely no idea what to do with it because it was served with a tea bag.
From Reagan's diary entry on May 1, 1981:
"Highlight was noon visit by Prince Charles. He's a most likeable person. The ushers brought him tea -- horror of horrors they served it our way with a tea bag in the cup. It finally dawned on me that he was just holding the cup & then finally put it down on a table. I didn't know what to do. Mike [Deaver] escorted him back to the W.H. and apologized. The Prince [said], 'I didn't know what to do with it.'"
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pythiaswine · 1 month
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textbook henry laurens mention 😮
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fdrlibrary · 2 months
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It's inauguration day - the original one that is! FDR's first inauguration in 1933 was the last inauguration held on March 4th.
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pazzesco · 7 months
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The Great Binge: The Drug-Fuelled “Belle Epoque”
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque; French for "Beautiful Epoch" is a period of history, usually considered to begin around 1871–1880 and to end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was a period characterized by optimism, peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations. In this era of France's cultural and artistic climate (particularly within Paris), the arts markedly flourished, and numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre, and visual art gained extensive recognition.
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The Bar At Maxim's, Vintage Artwork By Pierre-Victor Galland
The Great Binge refers to the same period spanning 1870 to 1914 in North America. It was coined by modern historian Gradus Protus van der Belt to describe a time when drugs like cocaine, heroin, opium, absinthe, laudanum, and many more were freely available not just from your local pharmacy, tobaconists or the neighbourhood bar, but also from the barbershop, the stationers, and even confectioners.
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Morphine by Albert Matignon - 1905
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Georges Moreau de Tours - Les Morphinees The Morphine Takers - 1886
Between 1827 and 1842, over 27,000 pounds of opium came into the ports of the United States alone, where the drug found an unexpected distribution network of businessmen, presidential parents, and even Ivy League schools, which all had ties to the Opium trade in the late 19th century.
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The Illustrated London News print of the clipper steamship Ly-ee-moon, built for the opium trade, c. 1859
“Princeton’s first large benefactor, John Green, funded his contribution through the opium trade […] Yale University’s infamous Skull and Bone society was funded by the most successful family of opium dealers in America,” reveals Harvard’s magazine, The Crimson, adding that as America’s gateway institution for the drug that soon spread to other Ivy Leagues along the East Coast, “Opium once pervaded campus life at Harvard […] throughout the 1800s, its black smoke kept the university’s veins flowing with green and its faculty and students perpetually dazed.”
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The term “pipe dream” actually originates from the opium dens of turn of the century America where people smoking an opium pipe would come up with ideas, theories and fantasies whilst hallucinating.
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In 1908, President Roosevelt appointed Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner in the United States to begin targeting opium dealers. The irony here is that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, was an opium peddler, and his drug trade was responsible for the bulk of the family’s fortune. Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano, travelled to Hong Kong with her family to join her opium-trading father in the 1860s.
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Warren Delano (FDR's grandfather & Opium King)
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Sara (FDR's mother) & Philippe Delano in 1864, following their return home from Hong Kong. (Franklin Roosevelt Library)
The crackdown on the Great Binge inevitably began with the signing of the 1912 International Opium Convention to suppress opium smoking and to limit it to medicinal purposes. In the 1920s, in the US, an anti-drug crusade also saw heroin cough drops and cocaine tablets to slowly disappear from stores and bathroom cabinets.
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In the 1920s, in the US, an anti-drug crusade also saw heroin cough drops and cocaine tablets to slowly disappear from stores and bathroom cabinets.
During the Great Binge, the most notable drink in circulation was the Vin Mariani, an alcoholic beverage that combined both wine and cocaine.
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Angelo Mariani, a French chemist who invented a very popular beverage in 1863.
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Mariani tonic Wine — lithography by Jules Cheret
The French "Tonic" Wine received endorsements from Pope Leo XIII as well as many of the Belle Epoque’s most famous names, Sarah Bernhardt, Jules Verne and even Queen Victoria were all fans of the drug-infused cocktail.
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Pope Leo XIII even allowed his face to be used in Vin Mariani’s marketing campaign. He was very much a brand ambassador, citing that it strengthened him “when prayer was insufficient”.
Mariani's "Tonic" would spent the following century cleaning up its act & rebranding itself to become the world’s most iconic household brand: Coca Cola
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thegoodmorningman · 4 months
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Good Morning! Let's Make A Deal!!!
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newyorkthegoldenage · 3 months
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This is a fresco mural entitled "The New Deal," by Conrad Albrizio, depicting various phases of that program. It was unveiled in the auditorium of the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School on January 24, 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal, is standing in the center.
Photo: Associated Press
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UAW strikes created the middle class, this one can bring it back
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Big strikes like this one are about more than the striking workers. When the UAW struck GM in 1945/46, they transformed the American labor bargain. That strike gave birth to the defined-benefits pension, employer-provided healthcare, the cost-of-living allowance, and worker pay raises linked to employer profits. The UAW strike of ’45 created the American middle class.
Today, that middle class is an endangered species. American oligarchs have spent decades siphoning away the wealth of workers and gathering it into fewer and fewer hands. Today, “autocrats of trade” have replaced the aristocrats that American revolutionaries overthrew at the nation’s birth.
These new aristocrats are powerful and ruthless, but they’re also vulnerable. They lack the executive function and the solidarity to stop draining the American economy as it grows increasingly brittle. The plute’s “efficiency” comes from long, fragile supply chains, skeleton crews working punishing overtime, and regular federal bailouts for companies that are designed to be both too big to fail and too big to jail.
The UAW only has enough money in its strike fund to support all its workers for 90 days. Car bosses — like other C-suite sociopaths — are prepared to halt production for years in order to smash worker power.
But the UAW doesn’t need to send all of its workers to the picket line to shut down production. Their bosses have made themselves terribly vulnerable, by eliminating backup suppliers and by relying on workers accepting “voluntary” overtime to meet production quotas. Simply by shutting down just a few facilities and refusing overtime at a few more, UAW members can immobilize US car production while barely touching the strike fund.
-Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit: “I want to do it, now make me do it.”
Image: Fabio Basagni https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Sahara_desert_sunrise.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
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