DBWI Franklin Roosevelt runs for President

After a slow start, Franklin Roosevelt became one of the top "Golden Age of Hollywood" screenwriters, especially after he started collaborating with Franklin Scott Fitzgerald at the suggestion of Paramount.

People are well aware he was the relative of a President, but there is also the unusual fact that Roosevelt had a political career first, and then went into the movie business. Usually with Hollywood and politics, its the other way round, though the career of Gore Vidal may be another example. But Roosevelt went much further than Vidal in politics, he was the Veep nominee for President for the Democrats in 1920.

Supposed he had returned to politics and run for President? The most obvious POD is to avoid his being afflicted with polio, the most common reason given for ending his political career.

But obviously he could not have gotten off the ground with the screenwriting -by all accounts the first draft of his first script stunk, and he pretty much had to finance and produce his first movie himself. Another POD is that he seriously considered running for Governor of New York anyway, even with the polio, once Al Smith got the Democratic nomination for President, but of course the Democrats never nominated Al Smith for President.

There are a number of PODs where the Democrats don't screw things up as badly as IOTL when they do get into power federally in 1932 due to the Great Depression. Given that it was pretty much a party of machine hacks and Southern Bourbons by that point, I've never found these timelines credible. But Roosevelt was different enough from the typical Democratic pol that maybe he could have pulled it off?

But then presumably "Gone with the Wind" and other movies in the 1930s and 40s turn out very differently.
 
OOC:

I dimly remember watching an alternative history episode of a TV program -maybe the Twilight Zone- where the POD was Roosevelt's screenwriting career taking off. I think the heros had go back in time and present it or something like that.

Googling the subject, the only thing I could find was this 1943 magazine article:

http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/FDR_Hollywood_biography_Trivia#.WVkzlzN2q9Y

This actually seems to be a bit of a stretch so I threw in some other ideas in the OP to keep FDR out of politics.

Checking Wikipedia, it seems there are a lot of opportunities to get FDR sidetracked or killed outright before he becomes President. Getting him killed by whatever he caught at Campobello is one obvious POD. There was also the attempted assassination in 1932. In 1918 he was nearly killed in the Spanish Flu epidemic, plus could have been killed by a bomb targeting Attorney General Palmer of the "Red Scare" crackdown. However, I wanted something after the 1920 VP nomination so that FDR would at least be well known enough ITTL to be discussed.
 
For starters, Huey Long wouldn't have gotten the Democratic nomination in 1936.
I'm not sure about that exactly. Roosevelt was born in to a very rich family that had a history of banking and investing. FDR could be very sympathetic as President, drawing much ire from the "Longites"
 
Wouldn't Hoover have turned his bully boys loose on Roosevelt. From what I've read Hoover hated his guts, thought he was a closet communist because of his support for the unions in the studios or something.
 

Greenville

Banned
Roosevelt not being president would save the United States and the world from much misery. The Great Depression remains just as long under any president in office. Little is done by Washington to prevent the crisis from happening again.

It's quite possible that the United States remains isolationist during this period and never gives Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union or Britain. Britain agrees to an armistice in World War II by 1942 because its munitions and food supply are cut off. The Soviet Union could capitulate by 1944 and become a rump state. Without the embargoes, there is no war with Japan and the Empire continues its occupation of mainland China. No nuclear weapons are probably developed until the 1950s when the Soviet Union is able to test and manufacture a few. The planet is safer for America to live in on a general scale without Roosevelt because there is no Cold War.
 
Peg Leg Pom above makes a good point. I forgot that Franklin Roosevelt did re-enter politics at one point, winning the Democratic nomination for Governor on the EPIC platform (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Poverty_in_California_movement ; its a fascinating bit of political history). The reception he got doesn't auger well if he had advocated similar ideas nationally. On the other hand, if he had won, he would have been ideal for a "Stop Huey Long" movement.

OOC: does someone have to explain what a "DBWI" is again?
 
Roosevelt not being president would save the United States and the world from much misery. The Great Depression remains just as long under any president in office. Little is done by Washington to prevent the crisis from happening again.

It's quite possible that the United States remains isolationist during this period and never gives Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union or Britain. Britain agrees to an armistice in World War II by 1942 because its munitions and food supply are cut off. The Soviet Union could capitulate by 1944 and become a rump state. Without the embargoes, there is no war with Japan and the Empire continues its occupation of mainland China. No nuclear weapons are probably developed until the 1950s when the Soviet Union is able to test and manufacture a few. The planet is safer for America to live in on a general scale without Roosevelt because there is no Cold War.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=alternate_history:double_blind_what_if
 
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