The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1945, Qupperneq 3

The Icelandic Canadian
Vol. 3 Winnipeg, M)an., June 1945 No. 4
3xanklin 3)elano (f^oodevelt
*
On April 12, 1945 Franklin Delano Roosevelt died.
For many days, in radio addresses, newspaper editorials, church
services and in countless other ways the qualities of mind and soul of this
great humanist and the record of achievement of the statesman and the
visionary passed as an almost endless panorama before all peoples through-
out the whole free world. Now, though only a few weeks have passed,
we begin to look back and in retrospect endeavor to limit our view to
what was the most wondrous, the most beautiful spectacle in that
panorama.
We recall the healthy robust young man stricken with disease, his
suffering, the bravery with which he endured pain, his final victory over
the ills of the body.
We see the aristocrat who never lost the common touch—the truly
great man who made the humble as well as those of lofty places feel that he
was one of them, their friend even though they had never met or even seen
him.
We see him as the good neighbor—a quality born and nurtured with
him in Hyde Park. At first it reached to the boys in the neighborhood, then
to the farmers—the other farmers—in the district, who were the first to
vote for him. Then it expanded in the “Good Neighbor” policy to the whole
of the western hemisphere. Finally, as he left the scene, it was encompass-
ing the whole world.
And then, perhaps with less intensity of feeling but filled with
wonder, we view the tangible achievements. The financial collapse of the
early thirties which brought him to power; the steps he took to bring his
country out of the depression; the war since Pearl Harbor; the marshal-
ling of human and material assets on a scale unprecedented in the history
of mankind—a mighty effort by a mighty nation led by a mighty man.
All this is in the panorama but we pass it by. Something else is
there of a richer and more permanent hue. It is something the historian
of a thousand years from now will point to as one of the greatest achieve-
ments of any man in the world cataclysms of the twentieth century.
Roosevelt’s great contribution to his nation and indeed to the world
was the way in which he led his people from a narrow-minded self-centred
nationalism to a position of active cooperation with the forces of democracy-
in their opposition to tyranny and dictatorship anywhere in the world. He