A lesson learned from FDR, by Jean Smith

 Being a great president requires one to grow when faced with crisis.

    There is no shortage of biographies of the famous 20th century president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (aka FDR), and a few of them I have already enjoyed in my personal book collection. However, it was only courtesy of my local used bookstore that I finally caught up with Jean Smith's 2007 massive biographical study of him, and I am quite glad I took the time to do so. Smith paints a compelling portrait of a man who went through great physical suffering, and came out the other end of it a more empathetic and determined leader, one uniquely suited to leading the United States through the great crisis years of the 1930's and 1940's.

    FDR's general life details are well known, and Smith recounts them in an in-depth and compelling fashion. Born a child of great wealth and privilege (his parents being deeply embedded in the fashionable wealthy society of Gilded Age America), FDR saw his elderly father die at an early age, and he became the sole focus of his loving-if-domineering mother Sara, who raised him to believe that he could have an important place in history. FDR was a relatively standard (if charismatic) Democratic politician who rose through the party ranks throughout the Progressive era, marrying his distant cousin Eleanor partly to more deeply connect with him his famous presidential relative's base (both brilliant people, FDR and Eleanor had a bizarre marriage of convenience, where they respected and had great affection for one another, but ultimately no real passion and accusations of various dalliances by both parties). FDR's life-changing experience came at the hands of a likely polio exposure in 1921, which left him virtually paralyzed below the waste and in need of assistance to move for the rest of his life. FDR's suffering put him in touch with ordinary people going through their own medical disasters, and gave him a deep empathy for the common man that he might have otherwise lacked. Overcoming great physical challenges--and in league with reporters willing to keep his maladies secret on a level that modern audiences find incredible--FDR convinced America to elect him president to fight the depths of the Great Depression through a new series of federal programs, that focused both on trying to restore employment and on improving the morale of America as it tried to recover from mass economic crisis. FDR ultimately ran for four terms partly to tackle the crisis of WWII, even as his own physical health went into sudden and alarming decline, and he died in 1945 shortly after winning his fourth election.

    Smith's book moves quickly given its length (nearly 700 pages), and my only criticism of it was one I have of many an historical biography, in that it virtually ends with "and then FDR died" rather than a significant discussion of his legacy. What I found far more fascinating than the general biographical outline was all the revealing details of FDR's character that Smith gleans through his study. One common nickname the era's wealthy gave to FDR was that he was a "traitor to his class," a child of incredible wealth and privilege who nonetheless deeply believed that the wealthy had a duty to their fellow men beyond hoarding their wealth and doing whatever they could to maintain their own power and status. He was a deeply committed capitalist who realized the system would eventually eat itself without necessary regulations and laws to mitigate the system's worst impulses. He was open-minded to almost all religions and groups, and campaign jabs aside, he showed a basic respect toward his political opponents. The only group whom he had nothing but contempt for was fascists, whom he saw as a pathetic threat to world peace long before most of his contemporaries did. One common criticism thrown at the president-for-life FDR was that he wanted to be a dictator, but by all accounts, he did not truly want his third and fourth terms, and ran for them out of the obligation that he felt the country desperately needed steady leadership in the face of World War II. It was a fatal miscalculation on his part that he hoped he could survive to the end of the war (when he had plans for peaceful retirement), but even when faced with the catastrophes of the depression and the war, the thought of interfering with and sabotaging democratic elections would never have occurred to him. 

    Roosevelt's main failings were on racial matters, which were born more out of ignorance and lack of will rather than malice and prejudice. He was deliberately vague and evasive when asked about civil rights for African-Americans, which was driven largely by his belief that whatever his own preferences were, that the nation would never accept the necessity of New Deal reforms and WWII preparation without the support of Southern racists (his wife Eleanor, without such concerns, never hid her contempt for Jim Crow). He expressed deep concern for the crimes of the Holocaust, but controversially took the position there was nothing he could do about it other than defeat Hitler (partly because he feared ordinary Americans would never allow masses of Jewish refugees into the country). Perhaps his single greatest crime was signing off on the Japanese Internment during WWII, which he seemed to have done in a hurry under pressure from West Coast leaders without considering the harm he was inflicting on actual loyal American citizens (he eventually expressed some regret for his rashness, but only years after the camps were opened).

    Overall, FDR's defining characteristic which made him such a beloved president was his open-mindedness, and his realization that when faced with great crisis, he had to be willing to reject past approaches that had failed, and to work with people of all backgrounds and beliefs toward a common goal of overcoming oppression and helping the nation to recover from disaster (these were traits he very much shared with his predecessor Abraham Lincoln). His personal and professional growth greatly contrasted him with other American presidents who have clearly shrunk when faced with crisis, and retreated into their own bubbles and prejudices. Overall, the passage of time has done nothing to dim FDR as an example of leadership to aspire to, and an icon from an era when Americans could try and unite around common causes rather than embrace all of their own worst prejudices and impulses.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A lesson learned from YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN BEGIN TO LIVE: TEN WEEKS IN BIRINGHAM THAT CHANGED AMERICA, by Paul Kix

There's never an "ideal" time to confront injustice--you just need to do it.      Lately I've been on a roll reading great books, but Paul Kix's new book recounting Martin Luther King's most famous protest campaign is a real page-turner, and one that feels deeply relevant in an era where people feel injustice happening on a global scale. As a man who has an interracial family, Kix tells a deeply personal story of how MLK, whose Civil Rights Movement had faltered and struggled for years to make major progress, finally awoke the conscious of America (and its ruling brothers JFK and RFK) with his Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's most iconic moments came in the wake of Birmingham, and what was ironic about its success was that everyone told MLK it was an "ill-timed" protest--that he was better off waiting and hoping for more gradual progress.     MLK took on great personal risk when he and his fellow civil rights leade...
Read more

A lesson learned from THE UNEXPECTED ABIGAIL ADAMS, by John Smith

Nostalgia be damned—life was MUCH harder in the past, especially for women.   Abigail Adams is perhaps the single most famous woman of the generation of America’s Founding, and as such she has long been the subject of much fascination and study amongst American historians. Interest in her especially piqued in the wake of modern feminist movements, as people gravitated toward an outspoken and clearly powerful woman in an era where such things were very often frowned upon. In John Smith’s highly readable biography of her, he demonstrates how a major reason for her success was in how perfectly she navigated what people saw as her “proper place,” while also pushing back against it at every opportunity. However, one thing that struck me reading about her life was how brutal and short life could be for pre-modern women, even for the most privileged and powerful. 18 th century people suffered from loss on a level it would be hard for us to conceive of today, and we have forgotten all th...
Read more

A lesson learned from TROTSKY, by Robert Service

  Cling to your ideas in defiance of reality at your own peril.   Most of the time, I find great new books when browsing my local bookstores, much to the chagrin of my monthly budget. But every now and then, I randomly stumble across a gem, as was the case with Robert Service’s 2009 Trotsky biography, which I happened to find in good condition for $2 at a local garage sale . I’ve read up a lot in my life on the infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and somewhat less on his ideological predecessor Vladimir Lenin, but until now I knew tragically little about the Communist Rev olution’s third-most famous member Leon Trotsky, the most prominent Soviet founder whom Stalin murdered in an effort to claim the revolution for his own. Trotsky’s an unlikable historical figure who still suffered a tragic fall in the classic Greek sense of the word, a man who so desperately wanted to believe in the revolution he led that he was blind to the real-world horrors he had unleashed on the wor...
Read more