Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away on this date in 1945, being the last President to die of natural causes in office.
The debate about many actions and policies of FDR continue 76 years later, but there is no doubt that his impact on the nation was the greatest of any President other than Abraham Lincoln.
Right wing critics still condemn FDR in so many ways on domestic and foreign policy, even in 2021, but can one imagine what the nation and the world would have been like if FDR had never been President?
So much of America today is based on FDR and the New Deal, and even those elderly citizens who are right wing conservatives, are not about to repudiate Social Security, and they all benefited in so many ways from FDR policies in other ways that many may not be even aware of.
There are certainly plenty of issues and policies that even an FDR scholar, such as this author, can find fault with, particularly the Japanese American internment, and the issue of the Holocaust, but in FDR’s defense, he was faced with a myriad of issues and also health problems that it is hard to imagine any future President handling the circumstances at the time any differently.