Prologue

The prologue recounts in detail the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. An illiterate farm worker with a wife and three-year-old son, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman with a penknife in front of her young children. Captured after a three-day manhunt, Stacy was lynched by a racist deputy sheriff and his body riddled with seventeen bullets fired by mob members. No one was charged with his murder, but the lynching prompted an effort by Black leaders and the NAACP to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill in Congress, using as a visual reminder of lynching’s horrors a photo of Stacy’s lifeless body hanging from a pine branch while several White children gaze at it. FDR refused, citing his reliance on racist southern senators for passage of his New Deal programs to combat the Great Depression. The prologue also explores the ancestral roots of Stacy and the family of the woman he was accused of assaulting. Both had ancestors among the early Virginia residents; Stacy’s were Black slaves, and his alleged victim’s were White farmers. The different cultures in which they were raised—one oppressed by the other—made Stacy’s lynching an example of White fear of Black men “violating” their wives and daughters.

The Fall of Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush was at the forefront of American research policy during World War II, but he suffered a steep fall after the war, and by 1948 had left government service altogether. What motivated such a significant loss of influence? Drawing on previously unexamined sources, this article traces the causes of Bush’s decline in authority to his loss of powerful allies, particularly with the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the retirement of Henry Stimson; to his long-standing feuds with military leaders; and to several political missteps on Bush’s part that alienated figures in Congress and elsewhere. Continued examples of personal conflict in the postwar period not only impacted Bush’s career, but also shaped the structure of the resulting institutions that emerged to fund Cold War–era science. Rather than an abrupt change occurring immediately after the war, the postwar transition to public institutions was both gradual and influenced by the personal networks that preceded it. Bush’s quiet departure from government was tied to the emergence of military dominance in American research, largely at the expense of civilian scientific leaders. Such a shift in control of research policy had a dramatic effect on resulting postwar initiatives, closely connecting scientific advancements to national security.

Nothing to Fear

Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal provided a bonanza for the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” The president and his cabinet members showered the columnists with strategic leaks, often to test the waters before making official announcements. This enabled Drew Pearson and Robert Allen to scoop the rest of the press corps on pending appointments and other issues. Although Pearson admired Roosevelt and his liberal policies, he resisted playing propagandist. He criticized the administration and irritated Roosevelt by revealing news the president was not yet ready to release. Roosevelt retaliated by prompting General Douglas MacArthur to file a libel suit against the columnists, and by denouncing Pearson as a “chronic liar.” Pearson used the column to attack his father’s critic, Senator Millard Tydings, which Robert Allen regarded as vindictive. The pressures of reporting eventually caused strains between the two columnists, leading Allen to quit the column after Pearson revealed damaging information about General George S. Patton during World War II.

Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Grand Strategy

This chapter assesses President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. By 1941, FDR and his key advisers were distilling some hard-won wisdom from their trial-and-error approaches in devising what had become known as the New Deal, and applying them to the world's burgeoning international crises. The key, for Roosevelt, was a New Deal–inspired set of ideas and institutions that animated a capacious reframing of the national interest. Internationalizing the New Deal meant reconfiguring the playing field of world politics in three broad, institutional realms: collective security, economic stability, and rule of law institutions. These three institutional pillars are usually what contemporary international relations specialists mean when they refer to “the postwar international order.” What made this institutionally focused scaffolding into “grand strategy” was the way any resulting improvement to the functioning of the international order was dependent on negotiation and diplomacy.

O “direito à cidade” enquanto categoria em disputa: uma análise dos conflitos políticos em torno dos usos cotidianos da Praça Roosevelt, em São Paulo

As cidades contemporâneas são palco de uma pluralidade de conflitos em torno dos usos de espaços públicos e também de suas regulações. Enquanto agentes e grupos políticos se mobilizam em prol do recrudescimento da distinção entre usos autorizados e usos não permitidos desses espaços, através da presença de policiais, tecnologias de vigilância e até mesmo da formulação de leis, outros se posicionam em defesa do “direito à cidade”, contra o policiamento ostensivo e a criminalização da livre apropriação dos espaços públicos. Esse artigo propõe reflexão baseada em pesquisa etnográfica realizada na praça Franklin Roosevelt, no bairro da Consolação (região central de São Paulo). Nos últimos anos, após uma reforma multimilionária que a transformou completamente, sob o pretexto de produzir “requalificação urbana”, diferentes projetos de gestão e mesmo de ocupação se fizeram presentes nesse espaço, estabelecendo alianças e relações conflitivas uns com os outros. Em meio à produção de ordenamentos urbanos divergentes, os usuários cotidianos da praça estabelecem extensões, tensões, rupturas e resistências a tais projetos ordenadores. A praça Roosevelt contemporânea é um território disputado, e essas disputas desvelam projetos políticos e projetos de cidade em uma dimensão mais ampla. O objetivo deste artigo é reconstituir alguns desses conflitos atuais, identificando os agentes coletivos que se constituem em torno deles, os discursos políticos e as redes pessoais ou institucionais que eles mobilizam em suas atuações.

Conclusion

The crisis of the 1930s made changes in American foreign policy a necessity, and events demonstrated that Franklin Roosevelt made the correct decisions on the major issues to protect American interests and meet the challenges. For FDR, World War II was the second chance for the United States to create a lasting peace, one based on the Grand Alliance, collective security, and the United Nations. Beyond just the defeat of Germany and Japan, it was an opportunity to build a world order that would produce peace and prosperity through a cooperative, multilateral international system. This was Roosevelt's great legacy, to envision a different world than the one that proceeded the war and to begin to establish the values and institutions it would be built on. In doing so, he transformed American foreign policy. Roosevelt was the most important and most successful foreign policymaker in the nation's history.