FDR
By Jean Edward Smith
Random House, 858 pages, $35
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s beloved mother died in 1941. Her casket was carried to the grave by her most loyal servants, including a butler and chauffeur. The Secret Service was there, too, of course, but it hung far back from the ceremony. ” ‘I don’t think we belong in there,'” said the president’s personal bodyguard, Mike Reilly, ” ‘even if Congress says we do.'”
He was referring to the intimacy of the moment. But you can also hear, in his nervousness, overtones of class. Reilly was an Irish immigrant. Sara Delano Roosevelt had lived on an estate with a chauffeur and butler. The deceased, the mourners and the bodyguards had grown up in an America where Delanos and Reillys never met on terms of intimacy. Now, rigid distinctions of rank had all but disappeared from American life — to be vaguely, awkwardly recollected only at odd moments of ritual intensity, like funerals.
America had become democratic, in a way it had never quite been before. It was the accomplishment of a single man: the chief mourner, who had grown up attended by those same butlers and chauffeurs. The paradox drives “FDR,” Jean Edward Smith’s sturdy and accomplished new biography. “[T]his Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man,” Smith writes.
How did it happen? Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the sense of security and heady possibility into which he had been born, Smith suggests, and decided it should be the birthright of all Americans.
That wasn’t what aristocracies were designed for. “For three generations, the Hudson River Roosevelts had been a family of declining enterprise,” Smith writes. They were Democrats because that was the 19th Century’s party of stolid moderation (the first Roosevelt to break the mold — cousin Theodore, who became president while Franklin was at Harvard University — was the exception: a Republican).
But Franklin was his mother’s son, and Delanos were different. FDR liked to tell the story about the time a Delano family ship steaming to China with 8-year-old Sara aboard was set upon by Confederate privateers. That was a tall tale — FDR loved to tell them — but true enough to the family spirit. Some 20 years later, Smith relates, Sara packed her husband and 3-year-old only child Franklin off on their annual European cruise. A storm struck and the liner began sinking. Sara located her fur coat and wrapped it around her son. ” ‘If he must go down, he is going down warm,’ ” she proclaimed. ” ‘I never get frightened and I was not then,’ ” she later recalled. This serenely confident presence of mind was a gift she passed on to her son.
Franklin’s first job out of Harvard Law School was as a clerk in a blue-chip Wall Street firm (the steppingstone position was unpaid — shades of our own, revivified American class system, in which the ambitious young have to be able to afford unpaid internships if they wish to rise in many professions). He could have lived happily ever after as ” ‘just another corporate lawyer, summering in Newport and hibernating on Wall Street,’ ” his friend Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. observed. Instead, he was already laying out the steps it would take to become president.
In fulfilling them, a pattern was established: a man imbued with the kind of unself-conscious confidence proper to old money that knows it has nothing to prove, exploiting that confidence to divest himself of old money’s arrogance. Running for the New York Senate, he campaigned by automobile, a rarity in rural Dutchess County. Lucky for him that New York law gave the right of way to horse-drawn conveyances — it gave him the opportunity to impress the local farmers he chatted up with the respectfulness with which he deferred to them.
Class had its privileges, of course: Roosevelt outspent his opponent 5 to 1. He also was at this point still something of a dilettante, coasting on the family name. Glibly, he sat on the sidelines as the Legislature debated the most momentous issue of the Progressive Era: how to improve the dismal conditions for the working class.
On the next rung up the ladder, however, as the nation’s youngest assistant secretary of the Navy, a young populist came into his own. His Senate campaign manager had been an unsentimental and world-weary newspaperman, Lewis Howe. Howe became Roosevelt’s assistant at the Navy Department. In between Roosevelt’s work overseeing all the Navy’s World War I production contracts, Howe tutored him in the labyrinthine mysteries of the national Democratic coalition. One imperative he enforced was that Roosevelt handle labor relations personally. “Time and again,” Smith notes, Howe “would usher union leaders and delegations of workmen into Franklin’s office to chat with ‘the Boss.’ Always a good listener, FDR was at his best in these exchanges.”
He still did many of the things aristocrats do — if often with more enthusiastic aplomb — like serving on charitable boards. One of these was the Greater New York Committee of the Boy Scouts. He wouldn’t miss the annual jamboree. That was where, in 1921, he contracted a polio bug incubating amid the youngsters. Smith, a longtime political scientist who turned late in life to the craft of biography, renders the scenes that follow masterfully. He lingers on the name by which the disease was commonly known: infantile paralysis. A proud man, indeed, had become suddenly infantilized: bathed by others, turned in bed by others, forced to learn, step by painful step, to achieve something that resembled walking. All the while we see Roosevelt bearing up under the trauma with a confidence and lack of self-pity that was astonishing. “By next autumn I will be ready to chase the nimble moose with you,” he wrote one friend and hunting partner.
It was, in part, an acceptance of political necessity: He still was aiming for the presidency. And, once again, money helped: The 18-bedroom family “cottage” at Campobello, for instance, happened to already have an elevator. Roosevelt was aided in his psychic convalescence, too, by an almost militant loathing of introspection. (Roosevelt’s theology? A “serene confidence,” Smith writes, “in the divine purpose of the universe” that he seemed never to think to question.) But was it also, as we say now, denial?
Smith skillfully and subtly demonstrates that this modern-day concept doesn’t answer the case. Roosevelt had never deployed his privileges to avoid challenges — he sought them out. His infirmity intensified the habit. Paradoxically, his class helped breed in him a self-assurance that felt no need to lord over anyone else, ever. That same inner majesty seemed to help him accept with equanimity that he need no longer even be the lord of his own body.
His preternatural confidence sometimes hurt him: the hubristic court-packing scheme, the ill-advised spending cuts that brought about the so-called Roosevelt recession of 1937, his crusade against Southerners disloyal to the New Deal in the Democratic primaries of 1938, his mistaken confidence that Japan would not force a war, the awful internment of Japanese-Americans. But much more often, it led him to lead with an awesome calm and patience and a deep-dyed respect for the body he called “the Commander in Chief of us all — the sovereign people of the United States.” He knew by the dawn of 1939, for example, that America would have to confront the German madman Adolf Hitler, ravening to take over the world. He also understood the awesome political impediment to the preparations: a deeply isolationist public. Only that year, an amendment came within 22 votes of passage in the House that would have required a national referendum before going to war. Patiently, calmly, Roosevelt got to work. After British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said the best way to keep Hitler in check was to grant him his wishes, Roosevelt said “peace by fear has no higher or more enduring quality than peace by the sword.” After Hitler invaded Poland in fall 1939, Roosevelt maneuvered for repeal of the Neutrality Act, turning public opinion around overnight with the first presidential speech before a congressional session since 1923. He installed a Republican as secretary of war, and no less than the 1936 Republican vice presidential candidate as secretary of the Navy. And with a visionary bravura Smith compares to that of a great artist (“There had been no staff studies, no diplomatic discussions, no touching of political bases”), he invented the military-aid plan known as lend-lease and made the public enthusiastic about a program that practically amounted to giving ships and munitions to besieged Great Britain. He compared it to lending a neighbor a garden hose when his house was on fire. Now, really — would you insist on charging a friend for that?
” ‘I have been so struck,’ ” an astonished King George VI wrote FDR, ” ‘by the way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.’ ” The king was learning a thing or two about the art of democratic leadership. The trick, really, was to invest oneself with the confidence proper to a great nation, exploiting that confidence to divest a nation of greatness’ arrogance. On a visit to the U.S., the regent got a lesson from the master at his home in Hyde Park, N.Y.:
“FDR, who personally planned every detail of the trip, treated the King as a fellow head of state: no bowing, no curtsies to the Queen, hot dogs on the lawn. … Sara had urged Franklin to dispense with the usual cocktail hour. ‘Mother says we should have tea,’ Roosevelt told the King. ‘My mother would have said the same thing,’ His Majesty replied — at which point FDR reached for the martini shaker.”
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Rick Perlstein is the author of “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” and, due out next year, “Nixonland.”
