Roosevelt Funeral Train

Carl Lindblade talked about President Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral train. The presidential train was converted so that the casket could be seen by Americans who lined the thousand-mile route, from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., and from there on to Hyde Park, New York. The trip took four days in April 1945 and the train carried most of the U.S. government, including one dead president and one live one, both of their families, the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the diplomatic corps, leaders of both houses of Congress, and the nine justices of the Supreme Court. Mr. Lindblade talked about the interactions of the people aboard, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who had just discovered that her husband’s mistress was in the room with him when he died and President Harry S. Truman who was learning atomic secrets the former president had never shared with him.

This lecture at the Epsom Public Library was part of their Adult Summer Reading Program. close