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February 27, 2005
REVIEW: The protean Roosevelt
AMONG 43 presidents in the 229 years since the United States declared independence, only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln can claim to be peers of Franklin Roosevelt. His two towering achievements, the New Deal and victorious leadership in the Second World War, leave no doubt that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was the greatest American president of the 20th century.
Even a selective list of FDR’s pioneering distinctions is long. He was the first and only US president to be elected four times (1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944) and therefore served the longest (1933-45); the first to broadcast over the radio; the first to launch his initial ‘hundred days’ to enact ambitious legislative proposals; the first to put economist J.M. Keynes’s theory into practice by using government spending as a tool to pull his country out of economic depression; the first to use a ‘brain trust’ of intellectuals and specialists to advise him; the first president whose wife was also a significant national figure; the first to court the Saudis for their oil reserves; and finally the first and only American chief executive who was in a wheelchair.
The 32nd US president was born in a patrician, wealthy New York family. He started politics at the state level in 1910 and rose swiftly to national office as assistant secretary of the navy (1913-20). The Democratic Party nominated him vice president in 1920 but lost the election. The next year he was stricken with polio. The years between 1921 and 1928 mark a watershed in FDR’s life. Though he regained partial use of his legs, he was handicapped for life.
The enormity of the setback would destroy any mortal. And it was then that Roosevelt proved that he was not an ordinary mortal. His courage in fighting his disability and his resolve to persist with politics defined his character. The nonpareil support he received from his wife Eleanor created an enduring bond that survived many vicissitudes.
FDR was elected governor of New York state in 1928 and reelected in 1930. He won the presidency in 1932 at the nadir of the great depression, an economic crisis of unprecedented severity. By 1933, when FDR assumed office, there were 16 million unemployed in the US. Poverty, hunger and deprivation in the United States reached a scale and depth that is unimaginable today.
With the same indomitable confidence that he displayed in fighting polio, Roosevelt proclaimed what was then unthinkable: that government could and would provide economic relief to the people. He assured troubled Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and offered his people a “New Deal”.
The New Deal was FDR’s domestic reform programme that was enacted in two phases. Immediate relief was provided in 1933-34 through stabilizing prices, regulation of business and agriculture, and extensive public works. The second phase (1935-41) contained landmark legislation such as minimum wage, work safety, and social security. The New Deal legislation made possible the next wave of progressive reform in the 1960s, and much of it is intact to this day.
FDR left an equally abiding mark in foreign affairs. He led the massive American war effort — both industrial and military — in the Second World War with decisive skill and unwavering strategic judgment. Physical handicap was no bar to his peripatetic diplomacy and domestic touring to encourage war production. He held numerous conferences with Allied leaders and worked to establish the UN. Most importantly, as Roy Jenkins emphasizes in the volume under review, Roosevelt established the preponderance of the United States in world politics. Jenkins dates the beginning of US preponderance to the Casablanca Conference led by FDR in January 1943, a dominance that shows no sign of waning 62 years later.
FDR’s sudden death in 1945 unleashed a torrent of memoirs and reminiscences, duly followed by biographies of all sizes and ever-burgeoning symposia on the New Deal and the Second World War. In this welter, Geoffrey Ward’s A First-Class Temperament (1989) is excellent on pre-presidential Roosevelt. Arthur Schlesinger and Kenneth Davis have published notable multi-volume biographies, but James Burns’ Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1970) are yet to be surpassed. The mammoth recent biography by Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (2003) tilts toward hagiography and is marred by unsupported assertions.
For all the hundreds of memoirs and biographies, FDR’s character is yet to be grasped fully. As Michael Janeway has written, “The question is how deeply he was an idealist, the real thing, and how much an opportunist, a poseur. Whether he was a truly great statesman, even a saviour, or an improviser, a talented but shallow tactician and charmer. Supremely elusive, he personifies a riddle about where the rhetoric of leadership ends and the man, revealed, falls short.”
Roy Jenkins’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an extended biographical sketch, not a full biography. But it is valuable because of the author’s unique insight into FDR’s character. Jenkins was one of the most accomplished British politicians of the last half of the 20th century. He served as home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, and later became the president of the European Commission, chancellor of Oxford University, and president of the Royal Society of Literature. In the decade before his death in 2003, Jenkins established himself as a pre-eminent political biographer with Gladstone (1996) and Churchill (2001).
Lord Jenkins thus evaluates FDR with the cool apprehension of a fellow holder of high political office and of a warrior in the electoral arena, a vantage point shared by almost no other FDR biographer. Only Jenkins could write a sentence such as, “Franklin bounded into his new responsibilities with all the enthusiasm of a large, well-bred, full-grown, but only half-trained puppy.”
Omissions are inevitable in a biographical sketch of this small size and the large personality of Roosevelt. Jenkins’ treatment of the Second World War leaves much to be desired. The author also overlooks Roosevelt’s draconian 1942 order to incarcerate Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Balance is restored by inclusion of topics often neglected by previous biographers e.g., Roosevelt’s marriage to Eleanor and the long political tribulations during his presidency.
Happily for the reader, the author wields his biographical skill to full effect. Jenkins’ work resounds with observations that gain resonance from his own experience of politics and government. FDR was protean, writes Jenkins, “Hence very difficult to get hold of. He was a hero who had many unheroic characteristics. He was much more an improviser than an ideologue.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a brilliant example of biographical sketch-writing and a fine introduction to the subject.
Reviewer’s email: kdastgirkhan@gmail.com
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
By Roy Jenkins
Macmillan. Available with Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400
Tel: 021-4310030
Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 1-4050-4632-5186pp. Rs995
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