My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.

Wallace recalls how immigrant parents—having fled Tsarist/early Soviet Russia’s repression and insecurity—experienced the United States as a dramatic moral and political contrast. Their near-reverence for Franklin D. Roosevelt signals how the New Deal era, with its language of democratic solidarity and its expansion of social protections, could feel like a guarantor of dignity and safety to newcomers. The blunt, comic hyperbole (“sun rose and set…”) underscores not only admiration for FDR but also the intensity of immigrant gratitude: Roosevelt becomes a symbol of the freedoms and civic belonging they believed America uniquely offered compared with the authoritarian world they left behind.