FDR: The Man Who Could Have Been King

He was elected President of the United States 4 times, and a whole generation of Americans grew up unable to remember anyone else in the office. In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull apart the myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and look at what the textbooks leave out.For more than 2 decades, Roosevelt ran the most successful concealment operation in presidential history, hiding from the public the fact that he could not walk a single step unaided, with the full cooperation of a press corps that agreed never to photograph the wheelchair and Secret Service agents who ripped film out of cameras. But the deception about his legs might not even crack the top 3 most disturbing chapters of his time in power.We dig into the darker ledger of the New Deal, from the 6 million pigs slaughtered in 1933 while Americans stood in bread lines, to the Social Security carve-outs that cut roughly two-thirds of Black workers out of the safety net, to the federal redlining maps that still shape American neighborhoods today. We follow the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees turned back within sight of the Miami coastline in 1939, 254 of whom would die in the Holocaust, and the State Department memo that promised to postpone and postpone and postpone while the trains were loading.We walk through Executive Order 9066, signed February 19, 1942, and the camps that imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, without a single documented act of sabotage. And we end with the final deception, a dying man with blood pressure readings as high as 300 over 190 running for a 4th term in 1944 while his doctors lied to the country, a vice president kept in the dark about the atomic bomb, and the woman from a broken promise sitting in the room at Warm Springs when the end came on April 12, 1945.This is the story of the man who could have been king, and the 22nd Amendment America ratified in 1951 to make sure it never happens again.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [email protected] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.