FDR

Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America

Iwan Morgan

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780755637171
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Biografías políticas

One of the greatest American presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt built a coalition of labour, ethnic, urban, low-income and African American voters that underwrote the Democratic Party's national ascendancy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Over his four terms, he promoted the New Deal – the greatest reform programme in US history – to meet the challenges of the Great Depression, led the United States to the brink of victory in the Second World War, and established the modern presidency as the driving force of American politics and government. Iwan Morgan takes a fresh look at FDR, showing how his leadership enabled the United States of America to become the most successful country of the twentieth century. This astute and original assessment of a highly consequential presidency explains how Roosevelt enhanced the governing capacity of his office, promoted a constitutional revolution through his dealings with the Supreme Court, and forged a new intimacy between the president and the American people through his genius for political communication. It also demonstrates the significance of his organizational and strategic leadership as commander-in-chief in America's greatest foreign war, his role in holding together the US-British-Soviet Grand Alliance against the Axis powers, and his pioneering development of the national-security presidency that sought to promote a lasting post-war peace for the world. In fluid, immensely readable prose, Morgan focuses on the ways in which FDR transformed the presidency into an institution of domestic and international leadership to establish the modern ideal of the office as an assertive, democratic executive charged with meeting the challenges facing the US at home and abroad.

1
FDR’s pre-presidency

The making of a leader

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on 30 January 1882 at Springwood, near Hyde Park, New York, into an old, moneyed and well-connected family. His privileged background helped him rise to the presidency, but other factors were just as important. He developed a driving ambition more typical of self-made men in pursuit of political rather than financial advancement. A quick study, he learned the art of politics and the craft of government during tenures in state and federal offices. An attack of polio that left him without the use of his legs at age thirty-nine seemingly threatened his inexorable rise, but the determination not to be limited by disability only intensified his presidential aspirations. These diverse elements in FDR’s character and experience made him the president he became.

Roosevelt’s parents belonged to the social elite that was America’s closest equivalent to an aristocracy, its pedigree defined by ancestral settlement in colonial times, long-established wealth and commitment to public service. By the 1880s business tycoons were leading America’s march to modern economic might, making themselves ostentatiously super-rich in the process. Despite being surpassed in wealth, the thoroughbred heritage of families like the Roosevelts kept them atop the social order. These self-designated ‘best people’ considered themselves necessary counterweights to the materialism of the new-money class in undertaking public service and charitable activities that cemented societal solidarity in times of great change.¹

The American origins of FDR’s father, James, went back seven generations to a Calvinist Dutch family – whose name meant ‘rose field’ – come to New Amsterdam in the 1640s. FDR’s mother, Sara, traced her Delano lineage back to Calvinist Huguenot and English Puritan Pilgrims who settled the Plymouth Colony in the early 1620s. ‘May you always bear in mind’, James counselled his teenage son, ‘that in the past – on both sides of your ancestry – they have a good record and have borne a good name.’² Franklin inherited his parents’ deep pride that their forbears had helped to build America since its earliest days. He took the oath of presidential office with his hand on the family Bible, open at 1 Corinthians 13. Published in 1686 in Dutch, it remains the oldest Bible ever used in an inauguration, the only one not in English – and the only one used for four consecutive swearings-in.

The middle stretch of the Hudson Valley was home to a succession of patrician estates that followed each other down the east bank of the broad, slow-moving river. James Roosevelt’s 1,000-acre Springwood domain lay close to the centre of this cluster. The family residence was a comfortable and spacious seventeen-room mansion whose lived-in feel made it quite different from the garishly grand houses favoured by the nouveau riche. Given a pony when four, little Franklin accompanied his father on regular morning rides round his manor, sharing the sense of being masters of all they surveyed. For FDR, the house, the estate and the Hudson became, in biographer Geoffrey Ward’s words, ‘the great constants in his life’, to where he would always return to recharge himself physically and emotionally as his political career progressed.³ Arguably, no other president has possessed such a strong sense of identity with any single place.

Though the Roosevelts and Delanos were old-wealth families, they were not averse to making new money. James made profitable investments in coal, railroads and shipping in the mid-nineteenth century, but his speculative ventures incurred losses during the economically volatile 1870s and 1890s. Even so, he left a sizeable financial estate worth $713,000 – equivalent to about $20 million in 2020 values – on his death in 1900, with a third each after taxes and expenses going to Sara, older son James (from his first marriage) and the eighteen-year-old Franklin (held in trust until he was twenty-one).⁴ Sara, the much younger second wife that he married in 1880, was independently wealthy, thanks to a $1.2 million inheritance in 1898 from her father, Warren Delano, who made a fortune trading tea and opium in China. The adult FDR claimed a special understanding of that country from his grandfather’s stories while remaining blissfully ignorant of the nefarious source of his wealth.

Alongside moneymaking, estate management and travel, James made time for his patrician obligations as a pillar of Hyde Park’s Episcopalian church, overseer of its public school, township supervisor and mainstay of community charities. On his death, the nineteen-year-old Franklin assumed all his father’s social responsibilities, but his sense of noblesse oblige towards common folk would find far grander expression as New York governor and US president. His governmental activism provoked many of the so-called best people to designate him a traitor to his class. Dubbed ‘democracy’s aristocrat’ by James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt understood that some redistribution of wealth and power was necessary to make America a better country.⁵

Nothing in Franklin’s youth suggested that he would become a rebel blue blood. He grew up in a family that gave him supreme security, unbounded self-confidence and an understanding of his obligations. His doting parents let him have anything he wanted while expecting him to be responsible, unselfish and well behaved in return. They inculcated in him the lesson that life was about duty, work and achievement rather than self-indulgent pleasure. Delighted to have another son at age fifty-three, James schooled him in the role of estate squire that he was expected one day to undertake. When FDR became president, Sara was asked if she had always thought this was his destiny. ‘Never, oh never’, she answered. ‘The highest ideal I could hold up before our boy – to grow up to be like his father, straight and honorable, just and kind, an upstanding American.’⁶

Despite paternal anticipation that Franklin’s role in life was to be the Ringwood squire, his upbringing instilled grander ambition. A child made the centre of his parents’ universe might either be left unprepared for life’s challenges or, as in FDR’s case, grow up confident, resilient and focused on advancement. As historian Joseph Persico put it, ‘The rarity of hearing the word ‘no’ leads him to expect that anything is possible and to expect success as his due. Young Franklin saw the world in this light.’⁷ This also bred the self-centred assumption that he could count on the support of family, friends and subordinates to get ahead without necessarily reciprocating in kind. It was a feature of FDR’s political career that he surrounded himself with people who saw their role in life as being to serve him. When they were no longer useful or wholly committed in their dedication, he had no compunction in seeking new devotees.⁸

Though Sara was only twenty-seven when she gave birth, an excruciating 24-hour labour that threatened her baby’s life prompted medical advice against another pregnancy. Franklin consequently became the centre of her life – and remained so for the rest of her days. As a child he engaged in small-scale rebellions against the highly structured life she supervised while developing a keen sense of how far he could push the limits. Needing emotional privacy when away at school and college in his teens, he revealed in letters to her only what he knew she wanted to hear about his activities. This established a lifelong pattern of concealing his thoughts while seeming to reveal them. Despite exuding warmth, charm and good cheer in adulthood, FDR possessed what speechwriter Robert Sherwood called a ‘thickly forested interior’ that hid his inner self from view.⁹ As president, he often kept allies and adversaries guessing about his true intentions in order to maintain freedom of manoeuvre to advance them.

His parents wanted young Franklin to experience the outside world in the manner befitting their privileged class. The Roosevelts usually spent the winter social season in their Manhattan town house. In early 1887 they had an extended stay in Washington DC during which James took Franklin to visit with his friend, President Grover Cleveland, at the White House. In high summer, the Roosevelts retreated to their large vacation cottage on Campobello Island, where father, son and guests sailed the family sloop off the Maine coast. In combination with boating on the Hudson, these outings made Franklin a skilled sailor with a love of all seafaring matters. His passion for studying navigation maps gave him a prodigious knowledge of the world’s seaways that would serve him well as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the First World War and commander-in-chief in the Second World War.¹⁰

The young FDR also became familiar with the transatlantic world through eight visits made to Europe by age fifteen. The well-connected Roosevelts gained entrée to elite society in England, France and Germany. In preparation for this, Sara arranged a succession of governesses and tutors to home-school Franklin with a particular brief to make him proficient in French and German. On the first of their annual visits to the German spa town of Bad Nauheim, where James took the waters after suffering a heart attack in 1890, Sara enrolled her son for a six-week term at a local Stadtschulle, his solitary experience of public education. Such was his linguistic proficiency and ingrained self-confidence that he found the experience enjoyable rather than daunting. ‘I go to the public school with a lot of little mickies’, he wrote two cousins, ‘and we have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic. I like it very much.’¹¹ FDR’s language skills would prove useful during his presidency – he was able to translate Adolf Hitler’s radio broadcasts during the Munich crisis of 1938 for the benefit of aides, and he could converse in French during wartime meetings with Charles de Gaulle, who refused to speak English. By then, he had become the world’s best-known stamp collector, a passion that began at age nine when Sara gave him her own childhood collection to stimulate his interest in geography and foreign travel.

At age fourteen, Franklin was enrolled at Groton, the exclusive boarding school founded in 1884 some 35 miles north of Boston by Episcopalian minister Endicott Peabody. Pitched into spartan conditions, the hitherto pampered boy followed a rigorous daily schedule, slept in a tiny cubicle and received a weekly allowance of just 25 cents, but adjusted quickly. Classmates remembered him as self-confident to the point of cockiness, showing occasional defiance of authority to prove himself one of the boys without ever going too far and being highly competitive in everything he did.

Groton gave Roosevelt a first-rate classical education, provided his first experience of public speaking through school debates and exposed him to social humanitarianism through its charitable activities. Modelling his school on Thomas Arnold’s Rugby, Peabody wanted to instil manly Christian virtues in his charges to prepare them for future positions of leadership. His emphasis on privileged-class duty to serve others reinforced the message from Franklin’s parents. His exhortations never to rest on one’s laurels also made a deep impression on the teenage boy. What Peabody’s Sunday sermons did not do was instil in Roosevelt a deep religiosity. As an adult, he certainly believed in the existence of heaven and hell and sought God’s help through prayer but wore his beliefs lightly. When Eleanor Roosevelt asked his views on their children’s religious learning, he replied, ‘I never really thought about it. I think it is just as well not to think about things like that too much.’¹²

In 1900, Roosevelt entered Harvard as a sophomore after a strong performance in the entrance examinations excused him freshman requirements. A history major, he sailed through the next three years producing passable but undistinguished scholarship with little effort. One exception, written after inheriting his father’s community responsibilities, was a term paper exploring the history of the Roosevelts in colonial times. Though light on evidence, it concluded that some old families had not proved enduringly important because of their lack of ‘progressiveness’. The ‘very democratic spirit’ of the Roosevelts, in contrast, had guaranteed them lasting significance. ‘They have never felt’, he avowed, ‘that [because] they were born in a good position they could put their hands in their pocket and succeed. They have felt, rather, that being born in a good position, there was no excuse for them if they did not do their duty by the community.’¹³

Extra-curricular activities were Franklin’s route to becoming a big man on campus. Too slight in frame for the sports-field, he devoted his energies to various clubs and societies, undertook charitable work and fraternized with fellow students of like background at dinners and social occasions wherein he discovered the joys of nicotine and good scotch. His ultimate goal was membership of Porcellian, Harvard’s most exclusive social club, for which he was passed over – something resented for the rest of his life. As compensation, Roosevelt threw himself into working on the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, rising to become president in the 1903–4 school year. Though his editorial tenure was unremarkable, it ensured his reputation as a college notable.

While still at Harvard, Franklin shocked his mother at Thanksgiving 1903 with news of his engagement. He had hidden from her his courtship of distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, a childhood playmate and now a nineteen-year-old young woman with whom he had fallen in love after a chance meeting brought them together again. Wanting a better match, Sara got the pair to defer their wedding in the hope of them drifting apart, but it finally went ahead on 17 March 1905. For Franklin, marriage was a way to escape his mother’s close attention, to have a large family as compensation for being an only child and to build a future with a woman whose social concerns and activism he deeply respected. Above all, it was a love match – in the words of Eleanor’s principal biographer, ‘their affinity was chemical, intellectual, total’.¹⁴

In their first eleven years of marriage the Roosevelts produced six children – in order of age, Anna, James, Franklin (who died aged seven months in 1909), Elliott, Franklin Delano, Jr, and John. They had a yearly income of $12,000 from inheritances plus the $500 salary Franklin made as a law clerk with a Wall Street firm, a job secured through family connections after passing the state bar exam. Though sufficient for the bottom end of an upper-class lifestyle, including household-staff costs, this did not pay for suitable housing, vacations and school fees. For big-ticket outlays, the Roosevelts depended on Sara’s subventions that gave her considerable control over their lives. Increasingly resentful of her mother-in-law’s domination, Eleanor tearfully pleaded at the outset of her third pregnancy for her husband to do something about the situation, but he was uncomprehending of her unhappiness. In this matter, Franklin showed a capacity for ignoring contentious issues on which he did not wish to pronounce, a trait characteristic of his presidency. Eleanor also had to endure his self-indulgent routine of daytime work and evening socializing that left little time to help her raise their family.

Behind the façade of life as a lightweight, Roosevelt intended a change of course that would take him to new heights. At a bull session to discuss career objectives, the 25-year-old Franklin unveiled his presidential ambitions to fellow clerks. Years later, one of them recalled the plan he outlined: ‘First, a seat in the State Assembly, then an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy . . ., and finally the governorship of New York. Anyone who is Governor of New York has a good chance to be President with any luck.’¹⁵ Such was Roosevelt’s air of authority that no one sniggered at his intent to follow the route that his kinsman, the current president, had taken to the White House.

To the end of his life, Franklin considered Theodore Roosevelt ‘the greatest man I ever knew’.¹⁶ Being distantly related as fifth cousins earned him social kudos at Groton and Harvard. He took to wearing pince-nez, Theodore’s trademark, when diagnosed as short-sighted. More significantly, TR’s ascent to the presidency changed FDR’s youthful outlook that politics was a dirty business unfit for a gentleman. Now one of the ‘best people’ was fulfilling the obligation to serve by holding the top job in American government – and doing so with energy and style. Hopes of emulating his kinsman likely focused his fierce ambition and competitiveness on a career in the same arena. Marriage to Eleanor, one of TR’s clan of Oyster Bay (Long Island) Roosevelts, brought him into her uncle’s circle. The engaged couple attended his inauguration on 4 March 1905, lunched at the White House after the ceremony and danced at the inaugural ball. A fortnight later, Uncle Ted gave away his orphaned niece at her wedding. ‘Well, Franklin’, he joked, ‘there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.’¹⁷

Unlike the Oyster Bay branch, the Hyde Park Roosev...