By Mark Rhoads
Americans have faced and overcome many big challenges in the past greater than the challenges we face today. After the presidential election of November 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a personal handwritten letter to the GOP nominee he had defeated, Wendell Willkie of Indiana. Mr. Willkie was going to England on a personal fact-finding trip and he personally delivered FDR's letter of encouragement to Prime Minister Winston Churchill whose country was then facing Nazi Germany mostly alone before America's entry into the war at the end of 1941.
Mr. Churchill read the FDR letter on radio to his nation and it started with two stanzas from a poem by American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The original poem referred not to England but rather to America in a different time of challenges on hundred years before. But it also applied to England in 1940.
Click Here to read the entire poem O Ship of State.
