To cap off President's Week, I thought you might enjoy this rare photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, taken from the July 1920 Literary Digest.
Just 38 years old, two years before contracting polio, FDR is still the dashing young socialite, gracing Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet. We see him standing in front of one of his favorite cars, a Stutz roadster, holding a hunting rifle trying to mimick is famous Bull Moose Uncle Theodore.
Roosevelt that summer had used his celebrity name to win the Democratic Party's nomination for Vice President on the ticket headed by Ohio Governor James Cox. They would lose in a landslide to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coollidge.
There is an appealing innocence to this photo. Polio, the Depression, the strains in his marriage, the trials of returning to politics, restoring national confidence in tough times, facing Nazism and Facism in World War II -- these things all were in the unknown future.
For now, we just see an easy-going young man on a sunny afternoon. Life was good.
