An Inaugural Year

December 30, 2024 - My book is now 3 months old!

My book is now three months old. I’m getting fantastic feedback. Would you be willing to write a book review on Amazon? Click this link to be brought over to Following the Front’s Amazon page. Your review will boost my rankings in a meaningful way, helping to raise the book’s profile.

Fun fact: WorldCat, which tracks library holdings, shows that “Following the Front” is owned by at least 69 libraries around the world, including Botswana! Maybe if everyone gave their library a little nudge….

As the new year approaches, I—like so many others—am taking stock. 2024 began exactly three weeks after my mother’s death. This was the year I learned to live without her. According to Merriam-Webster, ‘inaugural’ means marking a beginning : first in a projected series.

It has been an inaugural year for me here on Substack, too. I began posting in September 2023, right after my mother’s cancer diagnosis, and I continued (usually twice a month) throughout 2024. Additionally, I spent the first half of 2024 cutting down and finalizing the book’s manuscript, which felt uncomfortably reductive and not very creative. I wanted to write about Olson more, not less.

Substack provided me with the perfect outlet. Seeing all my entries now fills me with pride. Thank you to my subscribers for reading them! Some of my posts (always free) are getting over a thousand views. It appears that many of you are forwarding my posts via email, for which I am deeply grateful.

It is an inaugural year in politics, of course. Our nation’s next president will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025. Merriam-Webster says that ‘inaugurate’ means to observe formally the beginning of. The beginning of what, I wonder. I am struck by the fact that this definition sounds ominous at this point in time. The word’s root, ‘augur,’ means to give promise of, portend an outcome of an event or circumstance. When used as a noun, ‘augur’ means an official diviner of ancient Rome.

It seems to me that Olson could be considered an augur of sorts. He speaks to us, through his dispatches, from eighty years ago. What does he portend? His descriptions of WWII and the havoc unleashed across Europe by fascist governments are more than a warning…they are a promise, an outcome you can expect unless you take the necessary steps to uphold democracy and the rule of law.

Speaking of inaugurations, before WWII, on January 20, 1937, Olson attended the second inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an invited member of the press. Here are photos of his invitation, pass, ticket and program, now part of the Sidney A. Olson Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University:

Olson’s article, “The Boss Has Matured During Four Years in the White House,” was published in The Washington Post on the same day. That he was not a fan of FDR was irrelevant: his career was his first priority. Sid and Zembra had gotten married just four days earlier and they were eager to make a home for themselves (their first child, Whitney, was born ten months later). Olson was motivated to do a good job, to move up, to gain authority and corresponding pay raises along the way. This meant getting the story quickly, writing it accurately, while achieving that terribly delicate balance of facts and opinions.

In the article, Olson wrote that FDR “was born with a silver spoon the size of a ladle in his mouth….” On the other hand, he continued, “there is nothing to explain…his present deep preoccupation with the hungry, the shelterless, the unfortunate, the old and the sick—his concern for the underprivileged; nor is there anything there to explain his driving insistence on righting the wrongs done the people by maladjustments in our industrial, financial and economic system—his relentless attack on the ‘princes of privilege.’”

Olson’s role was to straddle the fence—politically, ideologically—at all costs; it was crucial to his success as a White House correspondent. A few months earlier, October 27-29, 1936, Olson had been among the press who traveled by train with FDR. And after the inauguration, Olson would continue to interact with the President, attending press briefings, correspondent dinners and soirées. In “Following the Front,” a fascinating and rather humorous exchange is described, in which Olson is said to have supplied FDR with the phrase “arsenal of democracy.”

In 1939, Olson left Washington to begin working at Time Inc. in New York. He returned to D.C. regularly and covered the political conventions of 1940 and 1944. FDR was still president when Olson departed for the European Theater of Operations in December 1944. The President was by then decidedly unwell; he held on until April 12, 1945, dying less than one month before Germany’s surrender.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year!