A Blueprint for War

According to the historian Susan Dunn, the twelve-year presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt went through three transformative periods of roughly one hundred days each. In the spring of 1933, the new president jump-started the New Deal with a host of relief measures, and in the summer of 1935 he proposed the programs that laid the foundation of the American welfare state. During FDR's third hundred days, the period between his re-election in November 1940 and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, Dunn claims that far more than the nation's economic and social well-being was now at stake ... during those hundred days, the president would initiate the pivotal programs and approve the strategic plans for America's successful leadership in World War II—leadership on which hinged the survival of the civilized world. (pp. 2–3) After his unprecedented re-election for a third term, the president finally was in a position to heed British prime minister Winston Churchill's desperate pleas for help before England would succumb to the Nazi onslaught. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to plan for a joint Anglo-American war effort against Germany, Roosevelt developed the lend-lease scheme, which would allow him to supply cash-strapped Britain “entirely at American expense” (p. 63

Blueprint · Economic history · Economics · Management · New Deal · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Presidential system · State (computer science · World War II · American Political and Social Dynamics · Engineering · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society