Traitor to His Class- The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H.W. Brands

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into a family advantaged by money and privilege in a state and nation where his uncle Theodore had blazed the way earlier in the century.  Were it not for the fateful event of an assassin's bullet against President McKinley,  Theodore might never have been President. 

 Were it not for the magical effect of the Roosevelt name and a persistent mood of "Progressivism" in the country his nephew Franklin might not have achieved the state offices in New York (which in themselves were, at the time a bridge to national office for both Republicans and Democrats)  and were it not for the massive financial collapse of 1929, Franklin probably would not have been elected President.   Were it not for the succession of crises first domestic and then foreign, he might not have stayed in office so long and been elected to an unprecedented four terms.  Roosevelt died in harness after having brought America and the world nearly to the end of a nightmare of world war and economic depression.

  That he did this as a man without the use of his legs after a bout with polio in the mid 1920's (or "infantile paralysis" as it was then often called) made his achievements all the more astonishing.  Clearly the force of his personality, his political judgment, and his mastery of radio made much of it possible. 

The political landscape of the 1920s and 1930s were, of course, very different from the one we have today.   The preceding World War, largely avoided until the last year by the participation of the US was seen as a senseless bloodbath.  If ever there was a war that seemed to come out of the blue and was started on the flimsiest of pretexts it was this one.

After all, what was the point of the first world war?  It seemed to be that the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, a veritable Mister Magoo, went driving around in an open car in Sarajevo tempting fate. The Austro-Hungarian empire was cobbled together from a variety of ethnic groups and nationalities, all of whom hated and mistrusted the others. 

That fate finally obliged him should have come as no surprise, considering that someone had thrown a bomb at him earlier in the morning, which apparently was not enough to make the Archduke alter  his plans sufficiently for the day, which were, wittingly or no, an early rendezvous with death, along with his consort.  Thus did the Habsburgs drag Europe and then the world into the most horrible, meat-grinding war the world had ever seen.  Perhaps it was inevitable considering the way the powers of Europe had lined up on the line of scrimmage simply waiting for the ball to snap.  The Kaiser and his generals and their armaments-building and poison gas-inventing friends were just waiting to try out some of their new toys of war.   They merely needed an excuse.  And everyone thought it would be over by Christmas.  Everyone thought it would be like the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. 

A few short years later with America back from not missing out on the last year of the war,  the women of America,  empowered by the vote, finally decided that America should go on the wagon with the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, which established the era of Prohibition.  

This did not go down well at all in the hard-drinking immigrant cities of the US and did not turn out well for a general respect for the law.  It was a bonanza for organized crime, bootleggers, and rum-runners.  It led to a generalized decline in respect for the law as the wets continued to live life as before, with alcohol one of the pillars of their existence.   A thriving  north of the border export market blossomed all over Canada and in the seaports of the US. 

Al Capone, a man all in favor of prohibition

Joseph Kennedy of Boston was very much in the spirit of the jazz age.   He made his fortune in the 1920s bending the rules of fair play in the stock market before such practices were made illegal shortly after Roosevelt made him (of all people) head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  According to some he was also a bootlegger although the evidence is circumstantial and anecdotal (Frank Costello said he was a business partner).  In any case his family was pretty heavily into the liquor business before AND after prohibition, and if Roosevelt's conception of businessmen was formed by examining the character of this man, no wonder his view of them was rather dim. Later he was named Ambassador to Great Britain during the critical run up to the Second World War.  As an ambassador he was singularly unsympathetic to Britain's situation and tended to view Britain as finished, done, cooked, and a waste of US resources.  Fortunately for the world, FDR didn't agree.

  But shortly after the First World War  everyone except the Germans wished to hammer swords in the plowshares and go back to loving everyone (except the Germans)  the way they did before the big nasty war. Pacifism was all the rage, as a theory of foreign policy: i.e. if we disarm ourselves unilaterally maybe everyone else will disarm themselves too (instead of taking advantage of our self-imposed weakness).   Germany did not much enjoy the postwar party, however, saddled as it was with enormous reparation payments, humiliated with territory loss, to which the hyperinflation of their currency promptly ruined just about everyone financially.   Germany was bent on revenge and that was clear even before Hitler took over, and found ways to rearm and train their military. 

In any case,  the problems of Europe seemed far away for Americans.  There was a nice wide ocean separating us from those unpleasant and unreasonable Europeans, and it was only gradually dawning on America that the rest of the world would not go away and most certainly could not be ignored.   Nor could the rest of the world ignore the United States.  So when the US stock market crashed in October 1929, it was a worldwide disaster.

To my mind, it is debatable whether much done in the wake of the crash was beneficial.  Hoover tried  and failed.  Clearly the practices of the stock market needed some reform.   Clearly the dislocation and unemployment of millions of ordinary persons needed to be addressed, but how?  

One of the stupidest moves on the part of the US congress was the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 and one of the dumbest moves of Hoover was to sign it.  This bit of economic isolationism sought to establish trade barriers to the rest of the world in order to help the US economy recover.  The result as history showed, was just the opposite.  It made a bad economic problem much, much worse as foreign markets slammed shut to American goods.  Smoot and Hawley or the President clearly weren't fazed by the hundreds of economists around the country who screamed "No!"  Clearly government had a lot to learn about macroeconomics.

It was an unenviable mess and the Republicans in 1932 were left holding the bag.   As is almost always the case, hindsight always favors the party out of power, and thus it was that Roosevelt and the New Dealers were swept into office in 1933.   And since this economic distress was not restricted to America, clearly, it led to political instability in Germany as well, where almost at the same time Hitler was handed the chancellorship by the by then senile Hindenburg. Not long afterward the Reichstag burned and German democracy and  was toast.

Meanwhile Roosevelt responded to the economic crisis by greatly expanding the role of government in everyday life, so much so that he ran afoul of the US constitution and an unsympathetic Supreme Court.   He then tried to pack the Supreme Court with enough sympathetic souls that the body would rule his way, but congress blocked that idea.  

Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933.

The National Industrial Recovery Act was a sweeping regulatory takeover of many industries and business as well as a reform of wage and hour rules and expanding the rights of collective bargaining.   This led to a lot of labor unrest and certainly did not make the cost of doing business any less than before.  There were lots of public works projects, the PWA,  The WPA, the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Social security was initiated.   Bridges were built, highways paved, but prosperity eluded America right up to the outbreak of the Second World War.   Brands does not go into any great detail on these measures or their economic consequences.  If anything it made Americans feel better even if their situation was going nowhere fast.  

It was clear from early on that Roosevelt actively sought the White House having grown up in the shadow of Uncle Ted's example.
But Theodore decided that nearly 8 years in office was enough and went off on safari in Africa, and left the highest office for his mountainous vice President to fill.  Four years later he discovered he wanted the office back, but with Taft blocking his return to the fold, he ran as a third party candidate, ensuring as a result the election of the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.   Franklin the Democrat, just like Uncle Ted the Republican before him was made the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  Franklin didn't want to stay long in that position with other offices he wanted to attain, but in the event, and with a World War going on, it turned out to be a more important job than he had expected.  

The weight of US armaments and manpower kind of tipped the agonized balance of the war which had by this time left the European participants exhausted in the critical last year of the war.  On November 11, 1918 there was an armistice, which led to the collapse of the German monarchy. The  highly punitive Versailles Treaty followed.   Wilson took center stage in this treaty process with his "Fourteen Points" in the culmination of the "The War to End Wars", but the peace was a miserable failure. The US, already souring on the foreign entanglement saw no reason to  endorse his ideas.    And then he was felled by a stroke that left him incapacitated and his wife making government decisions.  The economic recession of 1919-21 and a desire to return to "normalcy" led a political wave against the Democrats that was insurmountable.  Nevertheless a Vice Presidential nomination is often a step that can lead to the White House later on.  He became the running mate in the doomed candidacy of James M. Cox in 1920 against Warren G. Harding. 
  


Franklin had married his cousin Eleanor in 1905 and honeymooned in Europe for three months.  He was rich but his mother, Sarah Roosevelt controlled the purse strings.  She owned the estate in Hyde Park, NY where they lived for so many years.  Stricken by polio in 1921, he suffered permanent paralysis below the waist and spent years in rehabilitation efforts, and purchased a resort at Warm Springs, GA and also helped found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later known as the March of Dimes, an organization dedicated to research into polio, which remained a scary disease right up through the 1950s until the development of the Sabin and Salk vaccines.  

Franklin and Eleanor had six children, one of which died in infancy while the others lived to adulthood and a moderate amount of fame and notoriety.  The marriage was coming apart as early as 1918, when Franklin was having an affair with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's social secretary.  While Franklin considered leaving Eleanor, pressure from his mother and perhaps considerations of politics, when divorce was still a black mark on the career of a politician, led him to stay in the relationship.  They increasing led their separate lives even while officially man and wife.  When FDR died suddenly at Warm Springs at the end of the war, Eleanor was in California, and his current woman friend was with him there when a largely uncontrolled hypertension led to a brain hemorrhage and his death in April 1945, only a few days before the surrender of Germany in Europe.  

Eleanor, for her part, added considerably to the traditional role of first lady. 

While her husband as President had to hold together an uneasy coalition of conservative Southern Democrats of his party and the northern progressives, she was much more in the mold of the liberals as they became in the postwar period, when the movements for civil rights came to the fore, and the cognitive dissonance caused by being a Southern Democrat and being conservative finally began to give way, as it most certainly has today.   Not that civil rights was always a Democratic cause.  As late at 1921 Warren Harding put forward an Anti-lynching measure in congress with the backing of the NAACP, but Southern Democrats killed it in the Senate.  

The Second World War and Roosevelt's fending off of the isolationists in defense of our allies in the war, was to my mind the proudest achievement of Roosevelt's long tenure in office.  His 13 years in office paralleled almost to the day the tenure of Adolf Hitler in Germany.  He was fortunate in having in opposition Wendell Willkie as the Republican nominee, since even Willkie acknowledged the growing realization that the US would have to, sooner or later, go to war.

  Nobody in the US wanted to go to war, and most were hoping that having to commit American lives and resources to the conflict could be avoided.  A lot of Americans did not see any compelling reason to concern itself with what the rest of the world was doing.  Intelligence was such that Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were not negotiating in good faith and that war was inevitable, but he had to wait for the first blow to fall before declaring war.  When it did, at Pearl Harbor it came as a complete surprise. 

It was expected that the Philippines would sustain an attack, but the crippling blow to the Pacific Fleet, largely holed up in Pearl Harbor in Oahu was still more egregious.  Hundreds of American sailors had died on the morning of December 7, 1941.  The next day the President in a ringing declaration of war, said that December 7 would be a day "That will live in infamy".   Hitler waited a few days and then declared war on the US, perhaps deciding that America's  efforts to resupply the British had been tolerated long enough...and thus America was in it at last.  Churchill confided in his memoirs that that night he went to bed happy because he now knew that the allies would win the war.  The only unknown factor was how long that would take.  As it turned out another 3 and 1/2 years. 

Marshal Stalin, as he is called in the book,  comes off rather better in this story than I thought he was strictly due.  Maybe it was naivete on the part of Roosevelt that he thought he could trust Stalin, even in so far as having the US diplomatic party meeting in Teheran take refuge in the Soviet Embassy owing to the danger that Nazi-inspired assassins might still be prowling the streets.  Stalin is portrayed as a kindly, rational, and true representative of his people.   Not much is said about the literally millions of his Soviet countrymen who were murdered at his behest before the war, or of the broken promises about an equitable political settlement in Europe after it.

The book ends rather abruptly with Roosevelt's death.  Tributes to his leadership and friendship poured in on his death, and it is clear from his remarks that the author believed that Roosevelt was a great President, but anything more in the way of summing up was avoided.  

I expect that to delve much more deeply into policy would have made the book ten time longer than it was, but at the same time the book did not seem to me to penetrate much beyond the surface of history, it was a crowded and eventful life, and a single volume can hardly do it justice.