America's Two Greatest Presidents Died in Month of April

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

This month marks the 150th and 70th anniversaries, respectively, of the deaths of America’s two greatest presidents.

Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” died from an assassin’s bullet on April 15, 1865, just six days after the Civil War had drawn to a close with the defeat of the Confederacy. He was just 56 years old.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his fourth term as president, died at age 63 of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, as the Second World War was drawing to a close. Nazi Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Japan on Aug. 15.

Lincoln, the country’s 16th president came from humble beginning, born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky in 1809.

The family moved to Illinois in 1830, and four years later Lincoln began his political career, becoming a lawyer and being elected to the Illinois state legislature as a member of the Whig Party.

In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed individual states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. It provoked violent opposition and gave rise to the new Republican Party, which Lincoln joined in 1856.

Four years later, Lincoln became the presidential nominee of the party and won the election in a four-way race. His views regarding the immorality of slavery led to secessionism in the south. On April 12, 1861, America’s most deadly war began.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which stated that all individuals held as slaves in the rebellious states “henceforward shall be free.” He won re-election in 1864 and the war ended five months later.

Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and died the next day.

Two of Lincoln’s most famous speeches, the Gettysburg Address of Nov. 19, 1863 and the Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865, are without doubt the greatest in American history.

FDR, as everyone called him, was the country’s longest serving chief executive, having been first elected in 1932. He had presided over the Great Depression and most of the war, leaving an indelible stamp on American politics for several decades.

Born in 1882, the 32nd president came from a prominent New York family, and attended Harvard University. He entered politics in 1910 and was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat. He was nominated for vice- president by the Democratic Party in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox of Ohio, but the party lost the election.

He was elected governor of New York State in 1928, and four years later became president of the United States.

 The 1929 stock market crash had led to the Great Depression. Factory closings, farm foreclosures, and bank failures increased, while unemployment soared.

Roosevelt undertook immediate actions to initiate his New Deal and created numerous federal agencies, including the Works Projects Administration (WPA), to aid the unemployed. FDR also brought in Social Security to help the aged.

His programs involved the expansion of the role of the federal government in the economy. Roosevelt’s policies united labor unions, big city machines, white ethnics, African Americans, and rural white Southerners and made the Democratic Party for decades the dominant force in American politics.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, brought the nation into the war. Roosevelt exercised his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and was responsible for the policy of “unconditional surrender,” leading to the complete defeat of the Axis powers.

Both men were deeply mourned. No other presidents have shaped the country’s history, during times of crisis, more than they did.