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Small Capitals

Small capitals

:This article is about typography. For "small cap" in the context of the stock market, see Market capitalization. In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are uppercase (capital) characters that are printed in a smaller size than normal uppercase characters of the same font. Typically, the height of a small capital will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font. Small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally have a wider aspect ratio to facilitate readability. aspect ratio Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps; this leaves uppercase letters as they are but converts lowercase letters to small caps. How this is implemented depends on the word processor; some can use true small caps associated with a font, making text such as "Latvia joined NATO on March 29, 2004" look pleasing to the eye, whilst others cannot and simply reduce the uppercase letters by a fraction, making them look out of proportion. Small caps are often used for text that is all uppercase; this makes the run of capital letters seem less "jarring" to the reader. For example, the style of many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly and USA Today, is to use small caps for initialisms of three or more letters; thus: "U.S." and "FDR" in normal caps, but "NATO" in small caps. The initialisms "A.D." and "B.C." are often smallcapped as well. Some publishers' house styles, such as those of Newsweek and DC Comics, use small caps to refer to the name of their own publications inside the same or another publication. The text of a formal monumental inscription or the legend on a coin are often rendered in small caps: "Sir Christopher Wren's tomb in St Paul's Cathedral, which he designed, reads simply si monumentum requiris circumspice."

External link

- [http://desktoppub.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-smallcaps.htm Definition from about.com] Category:Typesetting Category:Typography

Market capitalization

Market capitalization, often abbreviated to market cap, is a business term that refers to the aggregate value of a firm's outstanding common shares. In essence, market capitalization reflects the total value of a firm's equity currently available on the market. This measure differs from equity value to the extent that a firm has outstanding stock options or other securities convertible to common shares. The size and growth of a firm's market capitalization is often one of the critical measurements of a public company's success or failure. However, market capitalization may increase or decrease for reasons unrelated to performance such as acquisitions, divestitures and stock repurchases. Market capitalization is calculated by multiplying the number of outstanding common shares of the firm and the current price of those shares. The term capitalization is sometimes used as a synonym of market capitalization; more often, it denotes the total amount of funds used to finance a firm's balance sheet and is calculated as market capitalization plus debt (book or market value) plus preferred stock. The total market capitalization of all the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange is greater than the amount of money in the United States.

Valuation

Main article: business valuation Market capitalization is a function of the price of a firm's stock and may not accurately reflect intrinsic value because of varying future expectations held by investors. It is common for a firm's market capitalization to exceed "book value" (shareholders' equity) because market prices tend to increase at a quicker pace than earnings accumulate due to value placed on expected future growth. For instance, in the late 1990s the shares of Internet-related companies were highly valued by the market, and tiny companies with almost no sales (but high growth) generated market capitalizations in the billions of dollars.

"Float"

The amount of shares available on the open market, the "float" (or "free float") is sometimes less than the total number of shares because a portion of the outstanding shares may be held by "insiders," and/or by the company as treasury stock. In addition to the float being perhaps much smaller than the total number of shares, a significant portion of the float may be owned by large institutional investors who rarely trade. As a result, on any given trading day, generally only a small percentage of shares is traded, as in the example of Yahoo!, about 1.5% (20,025,727/1,180,000,000). The sudden availability on the open market of all of a company's stock, as a result of both the insiders and the company selling all shares held, could cause a plummet in the stock price (if unexpected and not already priced in by the market).

Categorization of companies by market cap

In the U.S. companies and stocks are often categorized by market cap values as follows (figures given are approximate):
- Small-cap: a company whose market cap is less than $500 million
- Mid-cap: a company whose market cap is between $500 million and $1 billion
- Large-cap: a company whose market cap exceeds $1 billion In contrast to the definitions above, there is much discussion about what represents a "small cap" firm with little in the way of hard and fast rules. For instance, many investors view the Russell 2000 index (the 2nd and 3rd deciles of public companies when measured by market capitalization) as a proxy for "small cap", and the largest firm in the Russell 2000 is over $2 billion in market cap. Less used are the following terms:
- Micro-cap: a company whose market cap is less than $300 million
- Nano-cap: a company whose market cap is less than $50 million
- Mega-cap: a company whose market cap exceeds $200 billion Blue chip is used as a synonym for large-cap.

Examples

Examples of share valuation compared to market cap (price), and share ownership, from Yahoo! Inc. ([http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=YHOO], [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=YHOO]) Valuation measures
- Market Cap (intraday): 51.21B
- Enterprise Value (25-Dec-04)³: 49.04B
- Trailing P/E (ttm, intraday): 98.54
- Forward P/E (fye 31-Dec-05)¹: 74.50
- PEG Ratio (5 yr expected)¹: 3.66
- Price/Sales (ttm): 16.22
- Price/Book (mrq): 8.32
- Enterprise Value/Revenue (ttm)³: 15.51
- Enterprise Value/EBITDA (ttm)³: 71.99 Share statistics
- Average Volume (3 month): 20,025,727
- Shares Outstanding: 1.37B
- % of shares held by Insiders: 14%
- % of shares held by Institutions: 74%
- Float: 1.18B
- % of float held by Institutions: 86%
- Treasury Stock: $160M

Levels

Main article: Equity levels and flows Stock market capitalisation 2003 (compared with GDP converted to € through estimated purchasing power parity exchange rates)
- EU: €6.0 trillion (59% of PPP GDP)
- Japan: €2.4 trillion (75% of PPP GDP)
- United States: €10.7 trillion (108% of PPP GDP)

External links

Data

- [http://screen.yahoo.com/b?mc=100000000/&b=1&z=mc&db=stocks&vw=1 Yahoo! Finance - Stock Screener - Market Cap]
- [http://www.ecb.int/pub/spb/html/index.en.html ECB: Statistics pocket book] Category:Business terms

Typography

Typography (from the Greek words typos = form and graphein = to write) is the art and technique of typesetting; that is, of selecting and arranging typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line leading, character spacing, and word spacing for typeset applications. These applications can be physical or digital. Typography is performed by typographers. It was once exclusively a specialist occupation, but the advent of computers has given many more people the opportunity to experiment with the art. The primary function of typography is the presentation of text in a manner that is both easy to read and visually engaging. Visual interest is achieved through typeface selection, text layout, use of colour, and the interplay of text and graphical elements – all of which combine to give an "atmosphere" or "feel" to the material. Other issues that might interest a typographer involved with physical printed media are paper selection, ink choice, and the printing method. Typographers employ a number of common techniques, or conventions, to achieve eye-pleasing, legible results. Note, however, that these may depend on the culture (language, country). As an example, it is customary in French to insert a non-breaking space before a colon (:) or semicolon (;) in a sentence, while it in English it is not. Contrast typography with orthography (the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols, and the study of correct spelling according to established usage), and with typeface design. Typography is often an important element of graphic design, and in some applications of typography there is less concern for legibility, and more interest in using type in a purely artistic manner.

References

- Bringhurst, Robert (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5). Vancouver: Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4. Often referred to simply as Bringhurst, it is widely respected as the modern authority on typographic style for the English language ([http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/typographicStyle excerpts]).
- Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie nationale, Imprimerie nationale, 2002, ISBN 2743304820, for French typography

Supporting organizations

- Type Directors Club

External links

- [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fonts-faq/part4/ Comp.fonts FAQ: General Info] - Section four of six of the newsgroup FAQ
- [http://www.typographi.com Typographica] - a daily journal of typography
- [http://www.typolis.de/version1/indexe.htm Typography, Type and Design]
- [http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Graphic_Design/Typography/ Typography Directory]
- [http://euro.typo.cz/ Typo.cz] - information on Central European typography and typesetting
- [http://www.flywebmaster.com/webdesign/tips/typography.php Web Typography]
- [http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx Microsoft Typography page]
- [http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Typography EServer TC Library: Typography]
- [http://www.fontsite.com/ FontSite.com] - Some articles on basic typography for desktop publishers
- [http://diacritics.typo.cz Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents]
- [http://www.textism.com/textfaces/ Twenty Faces]
- [http://www.planet-typography.com/ Planet typography] - A magazine on contemporary typography + a directory, a manual and other topics related to typefaces
- [http://www.piggin.net/ Macro-Typography: A Style Guide] Category:Design Category:Typography ja:タイポグラフィ

Uppercase

Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. Majuscules are also known as upper case letters, because manual typesetters placed them on the upper shelf of a desk, keeping the more frequent minuscule letters on the lower shelf. Some languages make no distinction between majuscules and minuscules. Latin was originally written using only one set of letters, those which we now call capitals.

Usage

In alphabets with a case distinction, majuscules are used for: # Capitalization, # Acronyms, # Better legibility, for example on signs and in labeling, and # Emphasis in some languages. Majuscules sometimes are used for typographical emphasis in Internet text in place of bolding or italicizing. However, long spans of text in all uppercase are harder to read because of the absence of ascenders and descenders found in lowercase letters, which better aid recognition. In printed material where acronyms require a string of uppercase letters, they are frequently reduced in size by a point or more to make them easier to read. (By contrast, the "small print" in legal documents is often capitalized to make it harder to read.) In electronic communications, it is often considered in very poor "netiquette" to type this way because it can be harder to read and because typing in all majuscules can be seen as tantamount to shouting. Capitalization is the writing of a word with its first letter in majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscule. Capitalization rules vary by language and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalization, the first word of every sentence is capitalized, as are all proper nouns. Some languages, such as German, capitalize the first letter of all nouns; this was previously common in English as well. The terms "upper case" and "lower case" derive from Johann Gutenberg's use of two separate drawers, or cases, to store capital letters and small letters. The former were stored in his upper case; the latter, in his lower case.

Other meanings

Sometimes also a manuscript itself is called Majuscule, for example the majuscule Codex Vaticanus.

External link

- [http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Vaticanus/index.html Codex Vaticanus B/03] Detailed description of Codex Vaticanus with many images. Category:Alphabetic writing systems Category:Typography als:Majuskel ja:大文字

Grapheme

A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols. In a phonological orthography a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic — such as the spellings used most widely for written English — multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. An example of a trigraph is the tch in itch. Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme. For example, the minuscule letter a can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top, and without. Not all glyphs are graphemes; for example the logogram ampersand (&) represents the Latin word et (English word and), which contains two phonemes.

Ex (typography)

:Ex (typography) redirects here. For other uses of the term "ex", see Ex (disambiguation). Ex (disambiguation) In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the height of the lower case letters in a font. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font (which is where the terminology came from), as well as the a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, and z. However, in modern typography, the x-height is simply a design characteristic of the font, and while an x is usually exactly one x-height in height, this is not always the case. Letters whose height is greater than the x-height either have descenders which extend below the baseline, such as y, g, q, and p, or have ascenders which extend above the x-height, such as l, k, b, and d. The ratio of the x-height to the body height is one of the major characteristics that defines the appearance of a font. The x-height of a given font is called one ex in that font, similarly to the way the width of the uppercase m is called one em.

Aspect ratio

The aspect ratio of a two-dimensional shape is the ratio of its longest dimension to its shortest dimension. The term is most commonly used with reference to:
- images (see aspect ratio (image))
- paper (see paper size)
- the wing-plans of aircraft or birds (see aspect ratio (wing)). See also: Golden ratio, Ratio ja:アスペクト比

Word processor

A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. They are descended from early text formatting tools (sometimes called text justification tools, from their only real capability). Word processing was one of the earliest applications for the personal computer in office productivity. Although early word processors used tag-based markup for document formatting, most modern word processors take advantage of a graphical user interface. Most are powerful systems consisting of one or more programs which can produce any arbitrary combination of images, graphics and text, the latter handled with full-blown type-setting capability.

Characteristics

Word processing typically refers to text manipulation functions such as automatic generation of:
- batch mailing using a form letter template and an address database (aka mail merging);
- index of keywords and their page numbers;
- table of contents with section titles and their page numbers;
- table of figures with caption titles and their page numbers;
- 'see also' cross referencing with page numbers. Page number and footnote information is extremely hard to maintain without a word processor because addition or deleting of text can affect pagination; that is, page numbers can change in each edition. Other word processing functions include spelling and grammar checking. Word processors can be distinguished from several other, related forms of software: Text editor programs were the precursors of word processors. While offering facilities for composing and editing text, they do not offer direct support for document formatting. Batch document processing systems, starting with TJ-2 and RUNOFF, and still extant in such systems as LaTeX (as well as programs that implement the paged-media extensions to HTML and CSS), fill this gap. Text editors are now used mainly by programmers and web site designers for creating and modifying computer programs, and by computer system administrators for creating and editing configuration files. Later desktop publishing programs, meanwhile, were specifically designed to allow elaborate layout for publication, but offer only limited support for editing. Typically, desktop publishing programs allow users to import text that they have written using a text editor or word processor. The word processor has become a central component of the office suite and is increasingly only available in this form, rather than as a standalone program.

Origin of word processing

The term word processing was devised by IBM in the 1960s, and originally encompassed all business equipment—including manually operated typewriters—that was concerned with the handling of text, as opposed to data. Electromechanical paper-tape-based equipment such as the Friden Flexowriter had long been available; the Flexowriter allowed for operations such as repetitive typing of form letters (with a pause for the operator to manually type in the variable information). In the sixties it began to be feasible to apply the technology developed for electronic computers to office automation tasks. IBM's Mag-Card Selectric was an early device of this kind. It allowed editing, simple revision, and repetitive typing, with a one-line display for editing single lines. In the early 1970s Lexitron and Vydec introduced pioneering word-processing systems with CRT display editing, but the real breakthrough occurred in 1976 with the introduction of a CRT-based system by Wang Laboratories. (A Canadian electronics company, Applied Electronic Systems, introduced a similar product in 1974, but went into bankruptcy a year later. In 1976, refinanced by the Canada Development Corporation, it returned to operation as AES Data, and went on to successfully market its brand of word processors worldwide until its demise in the mid-1980s.) This was a true office machine, affordable by organizations such as medium-sized law firms. It was easily learned and operated by secretarial staff. The Wang word processor displayed text two-dimensionally on a CRT screen, and incorporated virtually every fundamental characteristic of word processors as we know them today. The phrase "word processor" rapidly came to refer to CRT-based machines similar to Wang's. Numerous machines of this kind emerged, typically marketed by traditional office equipment companies such as IBM, Lanier (marketing AES Data machines, re-badged), CPT, and NBI. These all, of course, were specialized, dedicated, proprietary systems. Cheap general-purpose computers were still the domain of hobbyists. With the rise of personal computers, and in particular the IBM PC and PC compatibles, software-based word processors running on general-purpose commodity hardware gradually displaced dedicated word processors, and the term came to refer to software rather than hardware. Early word-processing software was ludicrously clumsy in comparison to dedicated word processors; for example, it required users to memorize semi-mnemonic key combinations rather than pressing keys labelled "copy" or "bold." (In fact, many early PCs lacked cursor keys; WordStar famously used the I/J/K/M "diamond" for cursor navigation.) However, the cost differences between dedicated word processor and general-purpose PCs, and the value added by non-WP applications such as VisiCalc, were so compelling that personal computers and word processing software soon became serious competition for the dedicated machines. The late 1980s saw the advent of laser printers, a "typographic" approach to word processing (WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get), using bitmap displays with multiple fonts (pioneered by the Xerox Alto computer and Bravo word processing program), and graphical user interfaces (another Xerox PARC innovation, with the Gypsy word processor). These were popularized by Microsoft Word on the IBM PC in 1984, and MacWrite on the Apple Macintosh in 1983; these were probably the first true WYSIWYG word processors to become known to a large group of users. Dedicated word processors became museum pieces.

External links

- [http://www.sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=70 Word Processors] at SourceForge
- [http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"] - editorial by Allin Cottrell
- [http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/08/16/2038242.shtml FOSS word processors compared: OOo Writer, AbiWord, and KWord] by Bruce Byfield
- [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cis?q=word+processor Citations by CiteSeer]
- ko:워드 프로세서 ms:Pemproses kata ja:ワードプロセッサ

Text

In language, text is a broad term for something that contains words to express something. In linguistics a text is a communicative act, fulfilling the seven constitutive and the three regulative principles of textuality. Both speech and written language, or language in other media can be seen as a text within linguistics. In literary theory a text is the object being studied, whether it be a novel, a poem, a film, an advertisement, or anything else with a linguistic component. The broad use of the term derives from the rise of semiotics in the 1960s and was solidified by the later cultural studies of the 1980s, which brought a corresponding broadening of what it was one could talk about when talking about literature; see also discourse. In mobile phone communication, a text (or text message) is a short digital message between devices, typically using SMS (short message service). In computing, text refers to character data, or to one of the segments of a program in memory. In academics, text is often used as a short form for textbook.

References

- Mowitt, John. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Category:Discourse analysis ja:テキスト

Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic Monthly (also known as The Atlantic) is an American literary/cultural magazine founded in Boston in 1857 by a group of writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell (who would become its first editor). Originally a monthly publication, the magazine, subscribed to by 425,000 readers, now publishes ten times a year and features articles in the fields of political science and foreign affairs, as well as book reviews. The Atlantic Monthly was the first to publish Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (on February 1, 1862), and William Parker's the Freedman's Story (in February and March, 1866). In August 1963, the magazine published Martin Luther King, Jr.'s defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail". The magazine was a point of connection between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson--having read an article in the Atlantic by Higginson, Dickinson asked him to become her mentor. It has also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that managed to escape publication until 2001. The magazine has also published speculative articles that inspired the development of whole new technologies. The classic example is the publication of Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" in July 1945, which inspired Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart to develop hypertext technology. The Atlantic has always been known as a distinctively New England literary magazine (as opposed to Harper's and later The New Yorker, both from New York), and by its third year was published by the famous Boston publishing house of Ticknor and Fields (later to become part of Houghton Mifflin). The magazine was purchased by its then editor, Ellery Sedgwick, during World War I, but remained in Boston. On September 27, 1999, a deal was publicly announced to transfer ownership of the magazine once again, this time from Mort Zuckerman to David Bradley, owner of the beltway news-focused National Journal Group. Bradley visited the offices of his new property and promised that no major changes were in store, including a move to Washington D.C.. The magazine's publishers announced in April 2005, that the editorial offices would leave their long-time home at 77 North Washington St., Boston to join the company's advertising and circulation divisions in Washington, D.C.; the reason given for the move was the high cost of Boston real estate. Later, in August, Bradley told the New York Observer, cost cutting from the move would amount to a minor $200,000-$300,000 and those savings would be swallowed by severance related spending. The reason, then, was to create a hub in Washington where the top minds from all of Bradley's publications could collaborate among each other. Few of the Boston staff agreed to relocate, allowing Bradley to embark on an open search for a new editorial staff. Also in 2005 The Atlantic announced that it would cease including short stories in its regular issues, but rather in a single annual special edition. The magazine has one of the longest-running cryptic crosswords, compiled by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

Editors

- James Russell Lowell, 1857-1861

- James Thomas Fields, 1861-1871

- William Dean Howells, 1871-1881

- Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1881-1890

- Horace Elisha Scudder, 1890-1898

- Walter Hines Page, 1898-1899

- Bliss Perry, 1899-1909

- Ellery Sedgwick, 1909-1938

- Edward A. Weeks, 1938-1966

- Robert Manning, 1966-1980

- William Whitworth, 1980-1999

- Michael Kelly, 1999-2002

- Cullen Murphy, 2002-

Notes

# "No jobs at risk, Atlantic's new owner says", Boston Globe, September 29, 1999 # "Atlantic, 148-year institution, leaving city magazine of Twain, James, Howells heads to capital, Boston Globe, April 15, 2005 # "Atlantic owner scours country for cinder-editor", New York Observer, August 29-September 5, 2005

External links

- [http://www.theatlantic.com/ The Atlantic Online]
- [http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/atla.html Online archive of Atlantic Monthly] (up to December 1901)
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/v The Atlantic Monthly] magazines at Project Gutenberg, filed under Various
- [http://www.theatlantic.com/about/atlhistf.htm A History of The Atlantic Monthly] Atlantic Monthly Atlantic Monthly Atlantic Monthly

USA Today

USA Today is a national American newspaper published by the Gannett Corporation. The paper has the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States (averaging over 2.25 million copies every weekday), and among English-language broadsheets, it comes second world-wide, behind The Times of India. Its circulation figures are a matter of some dispute, however, as USA Today has many contracts ensuring distribution in hotels, often to customers unaware they are paying for the newspaper. USA Today is distributed to all 50 states and was founded by Allen "Al" Neuharth. Colorful and bold, with many large diagrams, charts, and photographs, USA Today was founded in 1982 with the goal of providing an alternative to the relatively colorless, wordy, gray papers of the time such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. USA Today is also well-known for its national polls on public sentiment. Early on, the newspaper strived to set itself apart in distribution methods as well. The paper is still sold in unique newspaper racks with curved edges that some say resemble television sets more than newspaper racks. USA Today was also eager to latch onto the business traveler and as such, was heavily distributed through airlines, airports, and hotels in addition to other sales outlets. The newspaper was also among the first newspapers to use satellite transmissions to send the final edition of the newspaper to multiple locations across the country for printing and final distribution in those regional markets. The innovation of using satellites and regional printing hubs allowed the paper to push back deadlines and include the most recent news and sports scores in each edition. The paper has proved to be a consumer success. However, some critics have accused it of trivializing news stories. It has a distinct prose style, which infrequently uses subordinate clauses in sentences, and tends to have no more than three brief sentences per paragraph, meant to allow for easier reading. As a result, in its early days it was derisively referred to as 'McPaper' or 'McNewspaper' in a reference to the simplicity and fast-food of McDonald's (which now distributes it). However, the style of using color, graphics and smaller features has been imitated by other printed newspapers and magazines. Its sports pages are particularly popular because of this and its broad range of coverage. From its start in 1982 until fall 2001, Larry King was a columnist for USA Today. In 2001, the newspaper moved into its new 30 acre (120,000 m²) headquarters in McLean, in Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., not far from its former headquarters in the old USA Today building in Arlington County, Virginia. On September 7, 2005 the newsstand price of a USA Today newspaper was increased from 50 cents (the paper's price since 1985) to 75 cents.

Journalistic fraud

In March 2004, the newspaper was hit by a major scandal when it was revealed that Jack Kelley, a long-time USA Today correspondent and nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, had been fabricating stories. The newspaper did an extensive review of Kelley's stories, including sending investigators to Cuba, Israel and Jordan, and sifting through stacks of hotel records to determine if Kelley was in the locations he claimed to be filing stories from. Kelley resigned, but denied the charges. The USA Today publisher, Craig Moon, issued a public apology on the front page of the newspaper. Many remarked on the similarity of this scandal to that of the Jayson Blair situation at the New York Times, although it received less national attention. See also: Journalistic fraud

Parodies

A few parodies of USA Today have appeared in various movies over the years, such as:
- the futuristic 2015 look of a USA Today seen in Back to the Future Part II (1989)
- a spinoff red planet version entitled Mars Today seen in Total Recall (1990)
- an animated, dynamically updating e-paper version seen in Minority Report (2002)
- a paper called BSA Today in an alternate reality where North America is still governed by the United Kingdom as the British States of America, seen in Sliders (1995)
- Universe Today appeared in Babylon 5

External link

- [http://www.usatoday.com/ USA Today website] USA Today USA Today ja:USAトゥディ

Initialism

Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations such as NATO, laser, or DNA, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced based on this abbreviated written form. Of the two words, acronym is the much more frequently used and known, and many dictionaries, speakers and writers refer to all abbreviations formed from initial letters as acronyms. However, some still differentiate between acronyms and initialisms: an acronym was originally a pronounceable word formed from the initial letter or letters of the constituent words, such as NATO /neɪtoʊ/ or RADAR /reɪdɑɹ/, from RAdio Detection And Ranging, while an initialism referred to an abbreviation pronounced as the names of the individual letters, such as TLA /ti.ɛl.eɪ/ or XHTML.

History

Acronyms and initialisms are a relatively new linguistic phenomenon, having only become popular during the 20th century. As literacy rates rose, the practice of referring to words by their first letters became increasingly convenient. The first recorded use of the word initialism in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is in 1899, and the first for acronym is in 1943. The word acronym comes from Greek: ακρος, akros, "topmost, extreme" + ονομα, onoma, "name". Nonetheless, earlier examples of acronyms exist. The early Christians in Rome used a fish as a symbol for Jesus in part because of an acronym—fish in Greek is ΙΧΘΥΣ (ichthus), which was said to stand for Ιησους Χριστος Θεου Υιος Σωτηρ (Iesous CHristos THeou (h)Uios Soter: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). Evidence of this interpretation dates from the second and third centuries and is preserved in the catacombs of Rome. Initialisms are known to have been used in Rome dating back even earlier than the Christian era. For example, the official name for the Roman Empire (and the Republic before it) was abbreviated as SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus), showing a clear precedent. Acronyms have been widely used in Hebrew since at least the Middle Ages. Several important rabbis are referred to with acronyms of their names. For example, Baal Shem Tov is called Besht. The word Tanakh is also an acronym. Acronyms and initialisms often occur in jargon or as names of organizations because they often serve as abbreviations of long terms that are frequently referenced, so a shortened form is desirable. Militaries and government agencies frequently employ acronyms and initialisms, perhaps most famously the US Government and the so-called alphabet agencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The correct meaning of an acronym is frequently domain-specific knowledge, and many acronyms have different meanings in different domains. This has led some to use them to obfuscate meaning from those without such domain-specific knowledge.

Written usage

Abbreviations have been traditionally written using a full stop/period to mark the part that was deleted. In the case of most acronyms and initialisms, each letter is its own abbreviation, and in theory should get its own full stop/period. This usage is becoming less common as the presence of all capital letters is sufficient to indicate the word is an abbreviation; nevertheless some influential American style guides still insist on the many-periods treatment, such as the one used by The New York Times (which recommends periods after unpronounceable abbreviations such as "K.G.B." but not for pronounceable ones (acronyms), such as "NATO" [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/opinion/07KRIS.html?ex=1391490000&en=f887afd296d59e2f&ei=5007&partner=GOOGLE]), but other style guides, such as that of the BBC, no longer require this. Larry Trask, American author of the Penguin Guide to Punctuation, states categorically that, in British English, "this tiresome and unnecessary practice is now obsolete"[http://www.informatics.susx.ac.uk/doc/punctuation/node28.html]. Some acronyms undergo assimilation into ordinary words, when technical terms become commonplace with non-technical people: often they are then written in lower case, and eventually it is widely forgotten that the word was derived from the initials of others: scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) and laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), for instance. The term anacronym has been coined as a portmanteau of the words anachronism and acronym to describe acronyms whose original meaning is not known to most speakers. While typically abbreviations exclude the initials of short function words (such as "and", "or", "of", or "to"), they are sometimes included in acronyms to make them pronounceable. Numbers (both cardinal and ordinal) in names are often represented by digits rather than initial letters; e.g. 4GL (Fourth generation language) or G77 (Group of 77). The traditional style of pluralizing single letters with "'s" ("there are two Q's in that word") was naturally extended to acronyms when they were commonly written with periods, and is still preferred by some people for initialisms. It is, however, very common to inflect them like ordinary words; thus the usual plural of "CD" is "CDs," with "CD's" being reserved for the possessive. When an acronym is part of a computer function that is conventionally written in lowercase letters, it is common to use an apostrophe to pluralize or otherwise conjugate the token (in computer lingo, it is not uncommon to use the name of a computer program, format, or function, acronym or no, as a verb, e.g., "John zipped the files" or "John zip'ed the files" means that John used the program zip on the files to conglomerate them), resulting in sentences like "be sure to remove any extraneous dll's after the program finishes uninstalling." In some languages, the convention of doubling the letters in the initialism is used to indicate plural words, for example the Spanish acronym EE.UU. for Estados Unidos ("United States"). This convention is followed for a limited number of English abbreviations, such as pp. for "pages". In some cases, an acronym or initialism has been turned into a name. The letters making up the name of the SAT college entrance test, for example, no longer officially stand for anything. This trend has been common with many companies hoping to retain their brand recognition while simultaneously moving away from what they saw as an outdated image: American Telephone and Telegraph is now simply AT&T, the company formerly named Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to "KFC". British Petroleum changed its name to "BP" to emphasize that it was no longer only an oil company (captured by the motto "beyond petroleum"); and Silicon Graphics, Incorporated changed its name to "SGI" to emphasize that it was no longer only a computer graphics company. DVD, curiously enough, has become bereft of official meaning, as some of its advocates decided the original "Digital Video Disc" moniker was too limiting and wanted to change it to "Digital Versatile Disc" yet were unable to bring all members on board. The initialism now has "no official meaning." Initialisms may have advantages in international markets; for example, some national affiliates of International Business Machines are legally incorporated as "IBM" (or, for example, "IBM Canada") to avoid translating the full name into local languages. This rebranding can lead to RAS syndrome, as when Trustee Savings Bank became "TSB Bank." A few high tech companies have taken the redundant acronym to the extreme such as ISM Information Systems Management Corp. and SHL Systemhouse Ltd.. Another very common example is RAM memory. This is redundant since RAM already stands for Random Access Memory. Sometimes, the initials are kept but the meaning is changed. SADD, for instance, originally Students Against Driving Drunk, changed the full form of its name to Students Against Destructive Decisions. YM originally stood for Young Miss, and later Young & Modern, but now stands for simply Your Magazine. When initialisms are defined in print, especially in the case of industry-specific jargon, the words forming the abbreviation are often capitalized for clarity. While this would be perfectly acceptable for proper nouns like Kentucky Fried Chicken, some usage writers have argued that it is technically incorrect for other terms like storage area network. Correct or not, such usage is widespread in English publications.

Nomenclature

Initialism originally referred to abbreviations formed from initials, without reference to pronunciation, but during the middle portion of the twentieth century, when acronyms and initialisms saw more use than ever before, the word acronym was coined for abbreviations which are pronounced as a word, like "NATO" or "AIDS". The term initialism is now typically taken to refer to abbreviations which are pronounced by sounding out the name of each constituent letter (e.g. HTML). In general usage, the term acronym is commonly used to describe all abbreviations made from initial letters, regardless of pronunciation. Many writers and speakers do not observe any difference between acronyms and initialisms. There is no agreement as to what to call abbreviations that contain single letters, but can otherwise be pronounced as a word, such as JPEG (Jay-Peg). These abbreviations are sometimes referred to as acronym-initialism hybrids, although they are grouped by most under the broad meaning of acronym.

Examples

- pronounced as a word, containing only initial letters:
- NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
- FIFA: Fédération Internationale de Football Association
- laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
- scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
- RAM: random access memory
- pronounced as a word, containing non-initial letters:
- Interpol: International Criminal Police Organization
- Gestapo: Geheime Staatspolizei ("secret state police")
- radar: radio detection and ranging
- CONMEBOL: Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (South American Football Confederation)
- pronounced as a word or names of letters, depending on speaker or context:
- FAQ: (fack or ef-ay-kyu) Frequently asked questions
- SQL: (sequel or es-kyu-el) Structured Query Language
- VAT: (vat or vee-ay-tee): Value added tax
- IRA: (ira or eye-are-ay): When used for Irish Republican Army, always pronounced as letters; when used for Individual Retirement Account, can be pronounced as letters or as a word.
- pronounced as a combination of names of letters and a word:
- OPEC: (OH-pec) Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
- JPEG: (JAY-peg) Joint Photographic Experts Group
- IUPAC: (AYE-YOU-pac) International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
- UEFA: (You-EE-fa or You-AY-fa) Union of European Football Associations
- CPU: (cee-pee-you) central processment unit
- pronounced only as the names of letters
- BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
- DNA: DeoxyriboNucleic Acid
- DNS: Domain Name System
- ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
- pronounced as the names of letters that also sound like words
- YRUU: (WHY-are-YOU-YOU?) Young Religious Unitarian Universalists
- pronounced as the names of letters but with a shortcut
- AAA: (triple-AY) American Automobile Association
- IEEE: (AYE-triple-EE) Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
- NAACP: (EN-double-AY-SEE-PEA) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
- NCAA: (EN-SEE-double-AY) National Collegiate Athletic Association
- shortcut incorporated into name
- 3M: originally Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
- W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
- E³: Electronic Entertainment Exposition
- recursive acronyms, where the acronym itself is the expansion of one initial
- VISA: VISA International Service Association
- GNU: GNU's Not Unix
- WINE: Wine Is Not an Emulator
- GOD GOD Over Djinn, from Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach

Trivia

The longest acronym, according to the 1965 edition of Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary, is ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC, a United States Navy term that stands for "Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command." The world's longest initialism, according to the Guinness Book of World Records is NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT. The 56-letter initialism (54 in Cyrillic) is from the Concise Dictionary of Soviet Terminology and means "The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for building mechanization and technical aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR." Sometimes an acronym's official meaning is crafted to fit an acronym that actually means something that sounds less "official." For instance, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon recently developed in the United States is popularly called the "mother of all bombs" since it is the largest conventional bomb in the world; it is widely assumed that the "mother of all wars" phrase was the true inspiration for the MOAB acronym. During the 1960s trend for action-adventure spy thrillers, it was a common practice for fictional spy organizations or their nemeses to employ names that were acronyms (or more accurately, backronyms). Sometimes these acronyms made sense but most of the time, they were words incongruously crammed together for the mere purpose of obtaining a catchy acronym, traditionally a heroic sounding one for the good guys and an appropriately menacing one for the bad guys. This has become one of the most commonly parodied clichés of the spy thriller genre. Some of the most popular were:
- C.O.N.T.R.O.L. and K.A.O.S. from the Get Smart series.
- F.I.R.M. from the 1980s TV series Airwolf
- M.A.S.K.: The Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, the mask-wearing cohort from 1980s saturday morning cartoon M.A.S.K.
- V.E.N.O.M. : The Vicious, Evil Network Of Mayhem, the evil mask-wearing cohort from 1980s saturday morning cartoon M.A.S.K.
- H.A.R.M. from the No One Lives Forever (NOLF) series of computer games, which were released in the 1990s, but were based in 1960s pop culture. What H.A.R.M actually stands for is never revealed, and speculation about its true meaning is the subject of several jokes in both games. (However, in the 1966 spy film Agent for H.A.R.M., it stands for Human Aetiological Relations Machine.)
- S.H.I.E.L.D. from the Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Marvel comics.
- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. from the James Bond series.
- U.N.C.L.E. and T.H.R.U.S.H from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (The meaning of T.H.R.U.S.H. was never revealed on the series, but in the novelizations, T.H.R.U.S.H. was stated to be "Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.)
- P.A.G.A.N. (People Against Goodness and Normalcy) from the film Dragnet.

External links

- [http://www.initialisms.com initialisms.com]— Acronyms, Abbreviations & Initialisms Directory
- [http://www.noslang.com Online Acronym Dictionary & Translator]— Lookup or translate slang and acronyms
- [http://www.acronymfinder.com Acronym Finder]— searchable database of acronyms and abbreviations (over 400,000 entries)
- [http://www.acronymsearch.com Acronym Search]—searchable acronyms and abbreviation database (over 50,000 entries)
- [http://lethargy.swmed.edu/argh/ARGH.asp Biomedical Acronym Database]
- [http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLPages/AsianPages/Acronyms.html Acronyms Used by Asian Studies' Scholars: a Dictionary]
- [http://www.siglas.com.br English and Portuguese acronyms searchable database (over 200,000 entries)] Category:Abbreviations Category:Types of words ko:두문자어 ja:頭字語 simple:Acronym

Franklin D. Roosevelt

:FDR redirects here. For other uses, see FDR (disambiguation). Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), 32nd President of the United States (1933-1945), is best known for his leading the U.S. through the Great Depression via his New Deal, his building a powerful political coalition, the New Deal Coalition, that dominated American politics for decades, and for leading a grand coalition that defeated Germany and Japan and created the United Nations. Born to wealth and privilege, he overcame a crippling illness to place himself at the head of the forces of reform. Universally called FDR, he was controversial in his day but now is considered in the top tier of American presidents.

Early life

Franklin Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, at Hyde Park, in the Hudson River valley in upstate New York. His father, James Roosevelt (1828–1900), was a wealthy landowner and vice-president of the Delaware and Hudson Railway. The Roosevelt family (see Roosevelt family tree) had lived in New York for more than 200 years: Claes van Rosenvelt, originally from Haarlem in the Netherlands, arrived in New York (then called Nieuw Amsterdam) in about 1650. In 1788, Isaac Roosevelt was a member of the state convention in Poughkeepsie which voted to ratify the United States Constitution - a matter of great pride to his great-great-grandson Franklin. In the 18th century the Roosevelt family had divided into two branches, the "Hyde Park Roosevelts", who by the late 19th century were Democrats, and the "Oyster Bay Roosevelts", who were Republicans. President Theodore Roosevelt, an Oyster Bay Republican, was Franklin's fifth cousin. Despite their political differences, the two branches remained friendly: James Roosevelt met his wife, at a Roosevelt family gathering at Oyster Bay, and Franklin was to marry Theodore's niece. Roosevelt's mother Sara Ann Delano (1854–1941) was of French Protestant (Huguenot) descent, her ancestor Phillippe de la Noye having arrived in Massachusetts in 1621. Her mother was a Lyman, another very old American family. Franklin was her only child, and she was an extremely possessive mother. Since James was an elderly and remote father (he was 54 when Franklin was born), Sara was the dominant influence in Franklin's early years. He later told friends that he was afraid of her all his life. He was home schooled under her supervision. Roosevelt grew up in an atmosphere of privilege. He learned to ride, to shoot, to row and to play polo and lawn tennis. Frequent trips to Europe made him conversant in German and French. The fact that his father was a Democrat, however, set him apart to some extent from most other members of the Hudson Valley aristocracy. The Roosevelts believed in public service, and were wealthy enough to be able to spend time and money on philanthropy. Roosevelt went to Groton, an elite Episcopal boarding school near Boston. He was heavily influenced by the headmaster, Endicott Peabody, who preached the duty of Christians to help the less fortunate and urged his students to enter public service. Roosevelt graduated from Groton in 1900, and naturally progressed to Harvard University, where he enjoyed himself in conventional fashion and graduated with an A.B. (arts degree) in 1904 without much serious study. While he was at Harvard his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt became President, and his vigorous leadership style and reforming zeal made him Franklin's role model. In 1903 he met his future wife Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore's niece, at a White House reception. (They had previously met as children, but this was their first serious encounter). Roosevelt next attended the Columbia Law School. He passed the bar exam and completed the requirements for a law degree in 1907 but did not bother to actually graduate. In 1908 he took a job with the prestigious Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, dealing mainly with corporate law. Meanwhile he had become engaged to Eleanor, despite the fierce resistance of Sara Delano Roosevelt, who was terrified of losing control of Franklin. They were married in March 1905, and moved into a house bought for them by Sara, who became a frequent house-guest, much to Eleanor's mortification. Eleanor was painfully shy and hated social life, and at first she desired nothing more than to stay at home and raise Franklin's children, of which they had six in rapid succession: Anna Eleanor (1906–1975), James (1907–1991), Franklin Delano, Jr. (March to November 1909), Elliott (1910–1990), a second Franklin Delano Jr. (1914–1988), and John Aspinwall (1916–1981). The five surviving Roosevelt children all led tumultuous lives overshadowed by their famous parents. They had between them fifteen marriages, ten divorces and twenty-nine children. All four sons were officers in World War II and were decorated, on merit, for bravery. Their postwar careers, whether in business or politics, were disappointing. Two of them were elected briefly to the House of Representatives but none attained higher office despite several attempts. One even became a Republican.

Political career

House of Representatives In 1910 he ran as a machine Democrat for the New York State Senate from the district around Hyde Park, which had not elected a Democrat since 1884. The Roosevelt name, a lot of Roosevelt money and the big Democratic sweep of that year were enough to get him elected. In the state capital Albany, he became leader of a group of reform Democrats who opposed the Irish-American Tammany Hall machine which dominated the state Democratic Party. Roosevelt was young (30 in 1912), tall, handsome, and well spoken, and soon became a popular figure among New York Democrats. When Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912, Roosevelt was offered the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt was more interested in elective office: in 1914 he ran for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, but was handily defeated in the primary by Tammany Hall-backed James W. Gerard. Nevertheless the Navy post was to be the making of his career. Between 1913 and 1917 Roosevelt campaigned to expand the Navy (in the face of considerable opposition from pacifists in the administration such as the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan), and founded the United States Navy Reserve to provide a pool of trained men who could be mobilized in wartime. He was also involved in the frequent American interventions in the affairs of Central American and Caribbean countries: he personally wrote the constitution which the U.S. imposed on Haiti in 1915. When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, Roosevelt became the effective administrative head of the United States Navy, since the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, had been appointed mainly for political reasons and was widely considered to be not up to the job. Roosevelt soon developed a life-long affection for the Navy. He also showed great administrative talent, and quickly learned to negotiate with Congress and other government departments to get budgets approved and a rapid expansion of the Navy pushed through. He became an enthusiastic advocate of the submarine, and also of means to combat the German submarine menace to Allied shipping: he proposed building a mine barrage across the North Sea from Norway to Scotland. In 1918 he visited Britain and France to inspect American naval facilities — during this visit he met Winston Churchill for the first time. With the end of the war in November 1918, he was in charge of demobilization, although he opposed plans to completely dismantle the Navy. The 1920 Democratic National Convention chose Roosevelt as the candidate for Vice-President of the United States on the ticket headed by Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. After eight years of Democratic government and twenty years of progressivism, however, the country was ready for a change, and the Cox-Roosevelt ticket was heavily defeated by Republican Warren Harding's Return to Normalcy. Roosevelt then retired to a New York legal practice, but few doubted that he would soon run for public office again.

Private crises

Return to Normalcy]] Roosevelt was a charismatic, handsome and socially active man, while his wife Eleanor was shy and retiring, and furthermore was almost constantly pregnant during the decade after 1906. Roosevelt soon found romantic outlets outside his marriage. One of these was Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer, with whom Roosevelt began an affair soon after she was hired in early 1914. In September 1918, Eleanor found letters in Franklin's luggage which revealed the affair. Eleanor was both mortified and angry, and confronted him with the letters, presenting Franklin with an ultimatum: stop seeing Lucy or get a divorce. Franklin's mother Sara Roosevelt soon learned of the crisis, and decisively intervened. She argued that a divorce would ruin Roosevelt's political career, and pointed out that Eleanor would have to raise five children on her own if she divorced him. Since Sara was financially supporting the Roosevelts, this was a strong incentive to preserve the marriage. Eventually a deal was struck. The facade of the marriage would be preserved, but sexual relations would cease. Sara would pay for a separate home at Hyde Park for Eleanor, and she would also fund Eleanor's philanthropic interests. When Franklin became President—as Sara was always convinced he would—Eleanor would be able to use her position to support her causes. Eleanor accepted these terms, and in time Franklin and Eleanor developed a new relationship as friends and political colleagues, while living separate lives. Franklin continued to see various women, including his secretary Missy LeHand. In August 1921, while the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada Roosevelt was stricken with poliomyelitis, a viral infection of the nerve fibers of the spinal cord, probably contracted while swimming in the stagnant water of a nearby lake. The result was that Roosevelt was totally and permanently paralyzed from the waist down. At first the muscles of his abdomen and lower back were also affected, but these eventually recovered. Thus he could sit up and, with aid of leg-braces, stand upright, but he could not walk. Unlike in other forms of paraplegia, his bowels, bladder and sexual organs were not affected. Although the paralysis resulting from polio had no cure (and still does not, although the disease is now very rare in developed countries), for the rest of his life Roosevelt refused to accept that he was permanently paralyzed. He tried a wide range of therapies, but none had any effect. Nevertheless, he became convinced of the benefits of hydrotherapy, and in 1926 he bought a resort at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he founded a hydrotherapy center for the treatment of polio patients which still operates as the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation (with an expanded mission), and spent a lot of time there in the 1920s. This was in part to escape from his mother, who tried to resume control of his life following his illness. At a time when media intrusion in the private lives of public figures was much less intense than it is today, Roosevelt was able to convince many people that he was in fact getting better, which he believed was essential if he was to run for public office again. (The Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, says that "by careful exercises and treatments at Warm Springs he gradually recovered", although this is quite untrue). Fitting his hips and legs with iron braces, he laboriously taught himself to walk a short distance by swiveling his torso while supporting himself with a cane. In private he used a wheelchair, but he was careful never to be seen in it in public, although he sometimes appeared on crutches. He usually appeared in public standing upright, while being supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons. Despite his known dislike of being seen in a wheelchair, a statue of him in a wheelchair has been placed at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Governor of New York

By 1928 Roosevelt believed he had recovered sufficiently to resume his political career. He had been careful to maintain his contacts in the Democratic Party. In 1924 he had attended the Democratic Convention and made a presidential nomination speech for the Governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith. Although Smith was not nominated, in 1928 he ran again, and Roosevelt again supported him. This time he became the Democratic candidate, and he urged Roosevelt to run for Governor of New York. To gain the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt had to make his peace with Tammany Hall, which he did with some reluctance. At the November election, Smith was heavily defeated by the Republican Herbert Hoover, but Roosevelt was elected Governor by a margin of 25,000 votes out of 2.2 million. As a native of upstate New York he was able to appeal to voters outside New York City in a way other Democrats could not. Roosevelt came to office in 1929 as a reform Democrat, but with no overall plan for his administration. He tackled official corruption by sacking Smith's cronies and instituting a Public Service Commission, and took action to address New York's growing need for electricity through the development of hydroelectricity on the St. Lawrence River. He reformed the state's prison administration and built a new state prison at Attica. He had a long feud with Robert Moses, the state's most powerful public servant, whom he sacked as Secretary of State but kept on as Parks Commissioner and head of urban planning. When the Stock Market Crash in October ushered in the Great Depression, Roosevelt showed his usual energy and imagination in responding. The Hoover administration took the traditional Republican view that the federal government should not interfere with the free operations of the economy, and that the states and cities should carry the burden of unemployment relief. Roosevelt therefore asked the state legislature for $20 million in relief funds, which he spent mainly on public works in the hope of stimulating demand and providing employment. Aid to the unemployed, he said, "must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty." Roosevelt knew little about economics, but he took advice from leading academics and social workers, and also from Eleanor, who had developed a network of friends in the welfare and labor fields and who took a close interest in social questions. On Eleanor's recommendation he appointed one of her friends, Frances Perkins, as Labor Secretary, and there was a sweeping reform of the labor laws. He established the first state relief agency under Harry Hopkins, who became a key advisor, and urged the legislature to pass an old age pension bill and an unemployment insurance bill. The main weakness of the Roosevelt administration was the blatant corruption of the Tammany Hall machine in New York City, where the Mayor, Jimmy Walker, was the puppet of Tammany boss John F. Curry and where corruption of all kinds was rife. Roosevelt had made his name as an opponent of Tammany, but he needed the machine's goodwill to be re-elected in 1930 and for a possible future presidential bid. Roosevelt fell back on the rather feeble line that the Governor could not interfere in the government of New York City. But as the 1930 election approached Roosevelt acted by setting up a judicial investigation into the corrupt sale of offices. This eventually resulted in Walker resigning and fleeing to Europe to escape prosecution. But Tammany Hall's power was not seriously affected. In 1930 Roosevelt was elected to a second term by a margin of more than 700,000 votes.

Election and first term as president

The 1932 presidential election campaign was conducted under the shadow of the Great Depression. Hoover was widely perceived as not doing enough to fight the Depression. During the campaign Roosevelt said: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people", coining a slogan that was later adopted for his legislative program. Roosevelt and his Vice Presidential running mate, John N. Garner of Texas, won 57 percent of the vote and carried all but six states. In February 1933, while he was President-elect, Roosevelt had a brief holiday in Florida. In Miami an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at Roosevelt, missing him but killing the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Zangara, who was later executed, said he had shot at Roosevelt because "the capitalists killed my life." When Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933 the U.S. was in the depths of the worst depression in its history. Some 13 million people, a third of the workforce, were unemployed. Industrial production had fallen by more than half since 1929. In a country with few government social services, millions were living on the edge of starvation, and two million were homeless. The banking system seemed to be on the point of collapse. There were occasional outbreaks of violence, but most observers considered it remarkable that such an obvious breakdown of the capitalist system had not led to a rapid growth of socialism, communism, or fascism (as happened for example in Germany). Instead of adopting revolutionary solutions, the American people had turned to the Democrats and to a leader who had grown up in privilege. Roosevelt indeed had few systematic economic beliefs. He saw the Depression as mainly a matter of confidence—people had stopped spending, investing and employing labor because they were afraid to do so. As he put it in his inaugural address: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He therefore set out to restore confidence through a series of dramatic gestures. He called a "bank holiday" to prevent a threatened run on the banks and called an emergency session of Congress to stabilize the financial system. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created to guarantee the funds held in all banks in the Federal Reserve System, and thus prevent runs and bank failures. Roosevelt's series of radio speeches known as Fireside Chats presented his proposals to the American public. During the first hundred days of his administration, Roosevelt used his enormous prestige and the sense of impending disaster to force a series of bills through Congress, establishing and funding various new government agencies. These included the Emergency Relief Administration, which granted funds to the states for unemployment relief; the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to hire millions of unemployed to work on local projects; and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, with powers to increase farm prices and support struggling farmers. Following these emergency measures came the National Industrial Recovery Act which imposed an unprecedented amount of state regulation on industry, including fair practice codes and a guaranteed role for trade unions, in exchange for the repeal of anti-trust laws and huge amounts of financial assistance as a stimulus to the economy. Later came one of the largest pieces of state industrial enterprise in American history, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built dams and power stations, controlled floods, and improved agriculture in one of the poorest parts of the country. The repeal of prohibition also provided stimulus to the economy, while eliminating a major source of corruption. In 1933, USMC General Smedley Butler reported to Congress that there had been a failed fascist coup attempt against FDR by capitalist interests in reaction to the New Deal. This alleged attempt was known as the "Business Plot" or "The White House Putsch". After the 1934 Congressional elections, which gave the Democrats large majorities in both houses, there was a fresh surge of New Deal legislation, driven by the "brains trust" of young economists and social planners gathered in the White House, including Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell and Adolf Berle of Columbia University, attorney Basil O'Connor, economist Bernard Baruch and Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School. Eleanor Roosevelt, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins (the first female Cabinet Secretary) and Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace were also important influences. These measures included bills to regulate the stock market and prevent the corrupt practices which had led to the 1929 Crash; the Social Security Act, which established Social Security and promised economic security for the elderly, the poor and the sick; and the National Labor Relations Act, which established the rights of workers to organize unions, to engage in collective bargaining and to take part in strikes in support of their demands. The net effect of these measures was to restore confidence and optimism, allowing the country to begin the long process of recovery from the Depression. The popular belief is that Roosevelt's programs, collectively known as the New Deal, cured the Great Depression. Historians and economists debate over the extent to which this is true. It is widely accepted that the New Deal implemented many of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, which advocated an interventionist government policy using fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate economic recessions and depressions. However, it is unknown whether Roosevelt was influenced by these theories directly, and questionable whether he really understood them. After a meeting with Keynes he once remarked that "He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist." The extent to which the large appropriations that Roosevelt extracted from Congress and spent on relief and assistance to industry provided a fiscal stimulus to revive the U.S. economy is also controversial. The economy recovered significantly during Roosevelt's first term, but fell back into recession 1937 and 1938 before making another recovery in 1939. While Gross National Product had surpassed its 1929 peak by the outbreak of World War II, unemployment remained about 15%. Some argue that this was mainly because the high tariff barriers erected in response to the Depression were not removed, and without a revival of international trade there could be no full recovery. It took the massive growth in government spending during World War II to fully eliminate the effects of the Depression and reduce unemployment to pre-Depression levels.

The second term

unemployment In the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt campaigned on his New Deal programs against Kansas governor Alfred Landon, who accepted much of the New Deal but objected that it was hostile to business and involved too much waste. In a lopsided year, he won 61 percent of the vote and carried every state except Maine and Vermont. The New Deal Democrats won enough seats in Congress to outvote both the Republicans and the conservative Southern Democrats (who supported programs which brought benefits for their states but opposed measures which strengthened labor unions). Roosevelt was backed by a coalition of voters which included traditional Democrats across the country, small farmers, the "Solid South", Catholics, big city machines, labor unions, northern African-Americans, Jews, intellectuals and political liberals. This coalition, frequently referred to as the New Deal coalition, remained largely intact for the Democratic Party until the 1960s. The Roosevelt ascendancy also prevented the growth of both communism and fascism. Roosevelt's second term agenda included an act creating the United States Housing Authority (1937), a second Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which created the minimum wage. When the economy began to deteriorate again in late 1937, Roosevelt responded with an aggressive program of stimulation, asking Congress for $5 billion for relief and public works programs. With the Republicans powerless in Congress, the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court was the only obstacle to Roosevelt's programs. During 1935 the Court ruled that the National Recovery Act and some other pieces of New Deal legislation were unconstitutional. Roosevelt's response was to propose enlarging the Court so that he could appoint more sympathetic judges. This "court packing" plan was the first Roosevelt scheme to run into serious political opposition, since it seemed to upset the separation of powers which is one of the cornerstones of the American constitutional structure. Eventually Roosevelt was forced to abandon the plan, but the Court also drew back from confrontation with the administration by finding the Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act to be constitutional. Deaths and retirements on the Supreme Court soon allowed Roosevelt to make his own appointments to the bench. Between 1937 and 1941 he appointed eight justices to the court, including liberals such as Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, reducing the possibility of further clashes.

Foreign policy 1933-41

The rejection of the League of Nations treaty in 1919 marked the dominance of isolationism in American foreign policy. Despite his Wilsonian background, Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, acted with great care not to provoke isolationist sentiment. The main foreign policy initiative of Roosevelt's first term was the Good Neighbor Policy, a re-evaluation of American policy towards Latin America, which ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had been seen as an American sphere of influence. American forces were withdrawn from Haiti, and new treaties with Cuba and Panama ended their status as American protectorates. At the Seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo in December 1933, Roosevelt and Hull signed the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, renouncing the assumed American right to intervene unilaterally in the affairs of Latin American countries. Nevertheless, the realities of American support for various Latin American dictators, often to serve American corporate interests, remained unchanged. It was Roosevelt who made the often-quoted remark about the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany aroused fears of a new world war. In 1935, at the time of Fascist Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, Congress passed the Neutrality Act, applying a mandatory ban on the shipment of arms from the U.S. to any combatant nation. Roosevelt opposed the act on the grounds that it penalized the victims of aggression such as Abyssinia, and that it restricted his right as President to assist friendly countries, but he eventually signed it. In 1937 Congress passed an even more stringent Act, but when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 Roosevelt found various ways to assist China, and warned that Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were threats to world peace and to the U.S. When World War II in Europe broke out in 1939, Roosevelt became increasingly eager to assist Britain and France, and he began a regular secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, in which the two freely discussed ways of circumventing the Neutrality Acts. In May 1940 Germany attacked France and rapidly occupied the country, leaving Britain vulnerable to German air attack and possible invasion. Roosevelt was determined to prevent this and sought to shift public opinion in favor of aiding Britain. He secretly aided a private body, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and he appointed two anti-isolationist Republicans, Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox, as Secretaries of War and the Navy respectively. The fall of Paris shocked American opinion, and isolationist sentiment declined. In August, Roosevelt openly defied the Neutrality Acts with the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, which gave 50 American destroyers to Britain and Canada in exchange for base rights in the British Caribbean islands. This was a precursor of the March 1941 Lend-Lease agreement which began to direct massive military and economic aid to Britain.

The path to war

At the 1938 Congressional elections the Republicans staged their first comeback since 1932, gaining seats in both Houses and reducing Roosevelt's ability to pass legislation at will. Roosevelt's campaign to have conservative Democratic Senators such as

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Foreign policy 1933-41

The path to war