FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: CHAMPION OF FREEDOM BY CONRAD BLACK. HARPER COLLINS CANADA/PUBLIC AFFAIRS, 2003. 1,280 PAGES.FOR THE SURVIVAL OF DEMOCRACY BY ALONZO L. HAMBY. FREE PRESS, 2004. 512 PAGES.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but its patterns do recur. Consider the state of American politics in the 1930s: the President was a spoiled rich boy, unsuited for the job. Born to a family with impeccable establishment credentials, he never studied very hard in school, and made brief and unsuccessful forays into the business world. Many thought he entered politics simply because his family had already once held the White House. Moreover, the country required a resolute and intelligent leader: corporate bigwigs, after a decade of feckless stock-market speculation, had made a shambles of the economy. Weak at home, the nation needed to steel itself against real enemies abroad.
Although remembered today as the cheerful commander who saved his country from economic and military crisis, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, in his own lifetime, frequently regarded as a dangerous lightweight, rather like the current occupant of the White House. A distant cousin, Howland Spencer, described him as “a swollen-headed nitwit with a Messiah complex and the brain of a boy scout.” Walter Lippmann, the most respected political commentator in early-twentieth-century America, was equally condescending, describing him as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”
Even after he was elected president four times, by a population that loved him, Roosevelt never lacked for critics, particularly among the patrician class into which he was born. Dismissiveness gave way to cold anger when he revealed himself to be a populist tribune who was willing to fight the Great Depression by building up the welfare state and supporting the labour movement. Suddenly Roosevelt was a “traitor to his class,” to recall a famous but unattributed quote from the period. He’s a “crippled son-of-a-bitch,” said Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds, in a rather injudicious allusion to the president’s polio. The pundit and wit H. L. Mencken described him as “the Führer” and chortled in his diary when Roosevelt died, in 1945.
Conservatives felt an even greater animosity toward Eleanor. A champion of African-Americans within the Democratic Party, Eleanor also publicized fascist atrocities in Europe and would become the main public advocate for the UN,one of many international organizations her husband helped create. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kept a close watch on her activities until her death, in 1962, amassing a file of more than 3,000 pages. During the Cold War, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s sour-faced Secretary of State, noted that she was “more subversive and dangerous than Moscow.”
Given this history of right-wing hostility, it is surprising that two new books on Roosevelt and his era, both by conservatively inclined writers, are quite sympathetic. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom is the first. Its author, Conrad Lord Black, the erstwhile publisher of the National Post, is famed as an enemy of leftism (a category he defines, rather broadly, to include Jean Chrétien). The Roosevelt project is one Black has taken seriously. Indeed, some of his recent troubles at Hollinger can be traced to his spending more than $7 million in corporate funds on some FDR papers. (The purchase was first listed as a miscellaneous expense and later justified as an investment.) Alonzo Hamby’s For the Survival of Democracy is more of a solid academic history. Hamby, a retired professor at Ohio University, is politically more moderate, a disillusioned liberal who has often wandered into neo-conservative territory.
Both books represent a noteworthy new phenomenon: conservatives grappling honestly with the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Hitherto, the important books on the New Deal era have all been written by liberals or leftists: James MacGregor Burns, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Blanche Wiesen Cook. Conservatives have responded chiefly with insults and diatribes. Conrad Black’s own father shared the ridiculous notion that Roosevelt was “a socialist, if not a Communist,” as Black put it in his autobiography. As a teenager, Conrad once played Roosevelt’s speeches too loud, causing his father to say, “If I hear that sewer’s voice in this house again I’ll smash the records. Do you hear me, damn it?” Hamby’s book is sober and respectful; Black’s is downright celebratory.
Presidential biographies have always been staple reading in America, but the genre has enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the past decade. Books about John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy have dominated the bestseller lists. News anchors on CNN and public television have created an ersatz title of “presidential historian,” bestowed on talking heads such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss.
Of course, all this attention to past presidential glory comes in an age in which the leaders ensconced in the Oval Office have been either scandal-ridden or doltish. “Leadership,” not surprisingly, is a key word in both new Roosevelt books. Taken together, these books encourage comparisons between the two eras. They also invite us to examine the conditions that allowed Franklin and Eleanor to become unlikely champions of progressive politics during a time of economic hardship and war.
The presidency changes people. By the end of their terms, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon seemed much smaller men. Bill Clinton started off with great energy and purpose but seemed a lost soul when he left the White House. Roosevelt, by contrast, grew into office, acquiring gravity and a kind of nobility along the way. Politics transformed him and Eleanor. The Roosevelts came from an incestuous world of wealth and privilege. They knew each other as distant cousins long before they became husband and wife. (Roosevelts tended to marry other Roosevelts. This was the sunset of the Victorian age.) The Roosevelt lineage could be traced back to the Mayflower; the Delanos, Franklin’s maternal family, went back to the time of William the Conqueror. When Franklin and Eleanor married in 1905, the bride was given away by her uncle Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the United States. “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family,” Uncle Theodore quipped.
