Click image for more...

On our recent field trip, we visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt Little White House in Warm Springs Georgia. There's a great museum and you can tour the Little White House and grounds. It's near the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation.

The museum has some interesting artifacts and exhibits. Perhaps my favorite was the rural electrification exhibit. (FDR would probably not be happy with how TVA has turned out.) Also, for some reason I had never made the connection between the Roosevelt Dime and the March of Dimes. (There was also a traveling exhibit telling the horrifying story of Ravensbruck, the only major Nazi concentration camp for women with which I wasn't familiar.)

In the residence, there's a living room/study with a fireplace and bookshelves, along with a couch and a small wooden desk and chair. There's a photo of FDR sitting at the desk working on a major speech. It really struck me how one of the most powerful men on Earth was sitting at a simple wooden desk with a pen and paper plotting the fate of the world.

Contrast that to modern times, with jumbo jets, computers, and satellite communications that travel with the president 7/24. FDR's generation accomplished incredible things with little more than telephones and telegraphs, sometimes from modest, almost spartan remote outposts guarded only by a few Marine and Secret Service guard shacks.

FDR was sitting for a portrait in the study in 1945 when he was stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage. They took him to his bedroom where he died. The unfinished portrait is on display at the museum.