Then As Now

On page 485 of the paperback edition of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize winning “No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt - The Home Front in World War II,” published originally in 1994 by Simon & Schuster, an apparent truth is written: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt giving his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944, at a time when the world was at war, when neither Nazi Germany nor Japan had yet to surrender. World War II is the context and background of this book about the man and wife of the title an…