God's Gift to the U.S.A.: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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"To the Greatest Man in the World," the letter said, and the postal authorities knew just where to deliver it. To the same place where they delivered letters addressed to "God's Gift to the U.S.A." and "My Friend, Washington, D.C." To the desk of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House. This was not pure sycophancy in the Post Office. The mailmen also knew where to deliver letters addressed to "Benedict Arnold 2nd" and "Chief Shooter at the Moon, White Father of the Pretty Bubbles."

And Roosevelt, the most loved and hated of Presidents, saved the envelopes. They became part of his famous stamp collection, which eventually numbered 1.25 million different items. With the instinctive frugality of the rich, Roosevelt also collected first editions, coins, ship models, naval prints, Christmas cards, portraits of Presidents, Dutch tiles and campaign buttons. But stamps were special. He not only approved every new issue that appeared during his presidency, but sketched the designs for half a dozen, including one for Mother's Day and one in honor of Susan B. Anthony.

It was his mother, the formidable Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had inculcated in him her own love of collecting and given him his first stamps. She was 26 when she married a widower twice her age, James Roosevelt, 52, a member of the landed gentry of the Hudson Valley and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt's fourth cousin once removed. Franklin was her only child, and she kept him in dresses and long curls until he was five. He was 14 before he first went to school, to Groton and then Harvard. He maintained what was known as "a gentleman's C average" and yearned to be popular. Though he became editor of the Crimson, he could not make the freshman football team, and he was crushed at failing to get into Harvard's fanciest club, the Porcellian. Girls who encountered him at debutante dances considered him a lightweight and nicknamed him Feather Duster. His newly widowed mother bought a house in Boston to be near by.

Roosevelt did better at Columbia Law School, then sampled life at the prestigious Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. When he married his high-minded cousin Eleanor in 1905, his mother bought and furnished their house. Roosevelt restlessly entered local politics, won a seat in the state senate, made himself a name as a "reformer" by blocking a Tammany Hall candidate for the U.S. Senate. Woodrow Wilson made him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Roosevelt went on to win the vice-presidential nomination in the doomed 1920 campaign of James C. Cox. The next year, after two long days of sailing and swimming at his summer home on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, he suffered a chill that was misdiagnosed, then the horrifying paralysis of polio. He was told that he would never walk again.

That a man seemingly so destined for limbo should be wheeled into the White House twelve years later was a great triumph of will. A number of his friends came to believe that it was the illness that transformed the amiable associate of 1920 into the magnetic leader of 1932. The long struggle endowed him with an extra measure of courage, of resilience and of sympathy for the afflicted.