At a time when the world stage was crowded with dictators and "strong men" fiercely competing for the historical limelight, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, product of the normal workings of American Democracy, dwarfed them all. There was probably nobody who enjoyed a deeper or a more widespread respect. As for his predecessors, he so far over-shadowed them in the contemporary imagination that when Mr. Hermit Roosevelt, the son of a former President, joined the British Army, English newspapers invariably referred to him as President (Franklin) Roosevelt's cousin and never as President (Theodore) Roosevelt's son. Yet if one had asked any of the President's admirers in the streets of Cleveland or Manchester, of Gothenburg or Budapest, to name any of his achievements and these were considerable, he would probably have been quite unable to do it.
It was the personality of the man that counted. When he was inaugurated in the spring of 1933, in the days when every bank in the United States had been forced to close its doors, his countrymen trusted him to save the economic fabric of American society, In the autumn of 1939 there were many all over the world who hoped that he would ultimately save Western civilization itself. Perhaps it was because he had one of those magnetic personalities that do inspire confidence.
He is a big, broad-shouldered man with a natural warmth and friendliness which he could somehow infuse into those who met him, His great, beaming smile was, they said, worth a million dollars. He exuded his vitality and his assurance even by the words he chose to express it. He had that hearty assurance that thousands of big business executives used to assume; only in his case it was. natural, whereas in theirs it was too often affected.
America has had many Presidents who achieved their position from humble beginnings, Too often on their passage from log-cabin to White House they acquired a strong dislike of log-cabins and the sort of people who lived in them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.