Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt is the novel’s defeated incumbent and, after a period of political absence, the leading figure in the restoration of democratic government. His reassuring public voice and record of appointing Jewish officials make him a powerful source of confidence for the Roth family; his return to public life gives resistance to Charles A. Lindbergh’s government a national focus. Yet Roosevelt’s role is not simply that of a steady protector: he loses the 1940 election, vanishes into seclusion, and re-enters the crisis only as opposition gathers around him.

President, opponent, and source of reassurance

In 1940, Roosevelt’s Democratic Party nominates him for a third term. The convention’s decision and his radio acceptance speech are momentous to the young Philip, who has never known another presidential voice. Roosevelt speaks with an upper-class assurance that had helped ordinary families remain hopeful during hardship; in the Roth living room, his address seems to join the family’s private fate to the history of the country. The prospect that Americans might choose Lindbergh over the incumbent feels inconceivable to Philip, not merely as an electoral possibility but as a break in the political order he has known.

The novel makes the difference between the two candidates immediate in the family’s emotional life. Lindbergh is the first famous living American Philip learns to hate, while Roosevelt is the first he is taught to love. When the Republican convention nominates Lindbergh, the family’s previously assumed security as Americans is shaken. Roosevelt’s presence offers a counterweight: on learning that Lindbergh will be his opponent, he is said to have predicted from his bed at the White House, “By the time this is over, the young man will be sorry not only that he entered politics but that he ever learned to fly.” The anecdote, whether or not its details are reliable, comforts the family as a story of presidential confidence.

That reassurance has institutional as well as personal grounds. The narrative recalls Roosevelt’s appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court and Henry Morgenthau Jr. as Treasury secretary, and names Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harold L. Ickes among people known as friends of Jews. The free press and constitutional protections also remain part of the family’s imagined bulwark against oppression. Roosevelt therefore signifies more than a popular personality: his administration has placed trusted figures in positions of public authority, and his presence makes the constitutional system seem capable of answering political danger.

Defeat and withdrawal from public life

The Democratic Convention nominates Roosevelt on July 18, 1940, but the November election produces a decisive reversal. Lindbergh wins 57 percent of the popular vote and carries forty-six states; Roosevelt holds New York, while Maryland goes to him by only two thousand votes. At first, the result seems unbelievable. Within days, commentators describe it as inevitable, attributing it to the two-term tradition associated with George Washington, Lindbergh’s youth and athleticism, and voters’ desire for normalcy after the Depression. Lindbergh’s fame as an aviator lets supporters cast him as a leader for an unknown technological future, while his old-fashioned demeanor reassures them that progress need not displace familiar values. His promise of peace proves decisive for voters who want to believe that no war will come.

Roosevelt’s defeat also exposes the limits of the protection his presidency had seemed to provide. The neighbors who had feared Lindbergh’s nomination forget, in their immediate alarm, that Roosevelt and the Constitution remain in place; the election turns that fear into a new political reality. On January 20, 1941, Lindbergh takes office. Roosevelt returns with his family to Hyde Park and is neither seen nor heard from for a time. His silence becomes part of the story’s atmosphere: Philip’s family has lost the familiar voice that had made national events feel governable.

For Philip, Roosevelt’s withdrawal acquires a private, material shape through stamp collecting. Knowing the story that Roosevelt began collecting stamps as a boy and inherited albums from his mother, Philip imagines him back at Hyde Park arranging the specimens gathered during eight years in the White House. Roosevelt’s involvement with commemorative stamps gives the former president a continuing presence in the child’s collection. Philip seeks stamps Roosevelt designed or recommended, including the 1934 Mother’s Day stamp, originally designed by Roosevelt, and the 1936 Susan B. Anthony and 1937 Virginia Dare stamps. His mother gives him a block of four Mother’s Day stamps, and helps him acquire seven commemoratives Roosevelt approved in his first presidential year. The collection preserves a connection to a president who has disappeared from public view, turning political memory into something a child can hold and order.

Return to public opposition

Roosevelt breaks his seclusion in the spring of 1942, when Lindbergh’s administration hosts a White House state dinner for Joachim von Ribbentrop. The dinner honors the German foreign minister after the Iceland Understanding and makes him the first Nazi leader invited to the United States by an American government official or agency since the fascists came to power. Liberal newspapers criticize the invitation, and rallies and demonstrations spread across the country. Roosevelt addresses the nation from Hyde Park, asking Lindbergh to rescind it “for the sake of all freedom-loving Americans.” His appeal places the issue not only in the realm of diplomatic judgment but in the lives of Americans whose ancestral countries are under Nazi rule.

Vice President Burton K. Wheeler attacks Roosevelt for intervening in a sitting president’s foreign policy and portrays his position as a dangerous return to policies that might lead the country into war. The dispute makes visible the political divide between Lindbergh’s isolationist government and those demanding opposition to Nazi power. When Democrats hold a rally at Madison Square Garden, speakers denounce the “Lindbergh Bundists,” and Roosevelt’s appearance draws a ten-minute ovation. He declares that Americans, not Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler, are “the masters of America’s destiny.” The speech transforms the rally into a public demonstration that opposition has not been extinguished.

Roosevelt’s most forceful attack answers the president’s cultivation of his Nazi connections. Recalling the opening words of his famous first inaugural address, he warns that the danger lies in “the obsequious yielding to his Nazi friends by Charles A. Lindbergh.” He rejects the prospect of a Hitler-dominated America or world, invokes the choice between human slavery and human freedom, and insists that the Constitution and Bill of Rights cannot be surrendered. The speech’s language reaches beyond the Garden: Philip’s father claps in a Newark theater while some spectators boo and hiss, and the child fears that violence might erupt on the street outside. Roosevelt’s call for constitutional resistance thus arrives in the story not as an abstraction but as a sound dividing a public audience.

From Winchell’s funeral to the political crisis

Roosevelt returns to public view again after Walter Winchell is assassinated at a political rally in Louisville. Winchell’s body is brought to Pennsylvania Station and lies in state under police protection before his funeral at Temple Emanu-El. At the service, Roosevelt is among the speakers alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Governor Herbert Lehman. The funeral gathers mourning and political protest together; its public scale and Roosevelt’s participation make the assassination a national event rather than an isolated killing.

La Guardia denounces the violence and demands to know where Lindbergh is. Roosevelt then pledges support for the Republican mayor as a “national unity” candidate to oppose Lindbergh’s bid for a second term. This alliance crosses party lines at a moment when ordinary political distinctions seem inadequate to the threat. Roosevelt’s move also gives electoral form to the anger surrounding Winchell’s death: resistance is directed toward preventing the president responsible for the political climate from securing another term.

The crisis deepens after Burton K. Wheeler takes control of the government and declares martial law. During the roundup of alleged conspirators, Republicans in Congress praise the FBI, while La Guardia, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Roger Baldwin demand the release of Governor Lehman and the other accused opponents. La Guardia is arrested. Roosevelt travels from Hyde Park to New York to address an emergency protest rally and is promptly taken into custody “for his own protection.” The army closes newspaper offices and radio stations in New York, imposes a curfew, and seals bridges and tunnels. Roosevelt’s arrest makes plain how far the government has moved from the constitutional protections he had invoked at Madison Square Garden: even the former president is prevented from addressing the public.

Electoral restoration and the limits of victory

The restoration of democratic procedure comes through Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who ends the usurpation and insists that those responsible be dealt with by the courts. Two and a half weeks later, on November 3, 1942, the Democrats sweep both houses of Congress and Roosevelt wins a third presidential term in a landslide. His political return is therefore not achieved by a speech alone. It depends on a public reckoning, the dismantling of Wheeler’s government, and an election that gives the opposition control of the institutions through which constitutional rule can resume.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the declarations of war by Germany and Italy, the United States enters the global conflict. Congress approves the decision to go to war without a dissenting vote in either chamber. The next day after his inauguration, Roosevelt issues a full pardon to Wheeler for offenses committed during the period of his acting presidency. He cites the constitutional pardon power and the wish to spare the country a disruptive prosecution during wartime. The pardon shows that political restoration does not mean simple revenge: the returning president chooses to contain the legal consequences of the crisis even as the country turns toward war.

Roosevelt’s arc gathers the novel’s national and domestic fears into a single political figure. He begins as the reassuring incumbent whose defeat seems unthinkable to a child, becomes an absent former president whom Philip can only imagine among his stamps, and returns as a speaker and candidate capable of rallying opposition. His eventual victory restores constitutional government, but it does not restore the earlier world of peace: the United States enters the war soon afterward. Roosevelt’s significance lies in that distinction. He represents the possibility of democratic recovery, not the cancellation of history’s dangers.