Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Born: January 30, 1882
Died: April 12, 1945
Term in office: 1933-1945
The first (and last) paid job* my mother Wilma had after getting her teaching credential was as a combination math teacher/girls physical education coach at the high school in the small Salinas Valley town that happened to be the home of my father Roy. They met at a town dance, romanced, and married after her second year of teaching. She became a farmer's wife and did not teach again.
Among the mementos of her time teaching were the yearbooks from those two years. As a kid in the early 60s, I found these records of the 1940-41 and 1941-42 school years very interesting. But there was a glaring difference in the student body make-up from one year to the next: whereas year one pictured a number of Japanese-American students, they were all missing in year two's book. They and their families had been forcibly removed to internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, a date the subject of this piece proclaimed would "live in infamy."
Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his military leaders permission to do as they thought best in the days and months following the attack and our subsequent entry into war with Japan. He did not stand in the way of the decision to place all Japanese-Americans in internment camps. German-Amerians and Italian-Americans did not suffer the same fate. **
Of course, FDR is remembered more for his New Deal efforts to pull the country out of the crippling Great Deptression, leading the country through (almost all of) WWII, his sufferings with polio, and his Fireside Chats (the radio wave precursor to televised addresses and over-used Twitter-ing).
One bit of trivia I learned in preparing this page, FDR was the first president to appoint a woman to his cabinet, Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor.
Peace to all, and put a cap on that fear of fear.
* Parenthetical observation: After she married my father, Mama worked hard as a farmer's wife, feeding him and the hired hands and the livestock, driving truck when needed, raising three kids, and having myriad other chores and duties, all without pay.
** Thanks to these sites for for confirming info: https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-franklin-d-roosevelt and www.mentalfloss.com
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