HYDE PARK – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 138th birthday celebration is being held at his Hyde Park home, a National Historic Site, on January 30, 2020, at 3:00 PM.
Members of the community will honor President Roosevelt with a wreath-laying ceremony in the Rose Garden. Remarks will be presented by Kirsten Carter, Supervisory Archivist, from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. The Honor Guard and Color Guard will be provided by the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY.
Birthday cake and beverages will be served after the ceremony in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor Center.
When alive, President Roosevelt used his birthday as a way to raise money to find a cure for infantile paralysis. January 30 became known across the nation as the day to raise money for Polio research and treatment. Beginning on January 30, 1934, 4,376 communities across the country held 600 “Birthday Ball” celebrations, raising over one million dollars for the Warm Springs Foundation.
According to documents at the FDR Presidential Library, The Birthday Balls continued to generate approximately one million dollars per year, but the revenue was still not sufficient to support the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 as a national organization to help victims of polio all across the country and not just in Warm Springs. To heighten awareness, radio personality and philanthropist Eddie Cantor urged Americans to send their loose change to President Roosevelt in “a march of dimes to reach all the way to the White House.” Soon, millions of dimes flooded the White House, and this campaign became known as the “March of Dimes;” in 1945 the Foundation raised 18.9 million dollars. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, took the name of its popular campaign to become the March of Dimes. The funds raised by the Birthday Balls and March of Dimes financially supported the creation of a polio vaccine by Jonas Salk in 1955, eradicating the disease throughout most of the world by the 1960s.
The March of Dimes fundraisers resulted in FDR saying “In sending a dime,…and in dancing that others may walk, we the people are striking a powerful blow in defense of American freedom and human decency.”
