FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT IN OREGON, 1934 (AP)
A
lthough Winston Churchill once
compared meeting Franklin Del-
ano Roosevelt to the feeling of
uncorking your first bottle of
champagne, many who encoun-
tered the 32nd president as a young man
would later express their great surprise
at the role he came to play in Ameri-
can history. The principal of Roosevelt’s
exclusive preparatory school described
him as “a quiet, satisfactory boy...not
brilliant.” At Harvard, Roosevelt enjoyed
beer nights, football, and shooting ducks,
perfectly content with his B in history
and D-plus in Latin. Frances Perkins,
who would become his labor secretary,
was distinctly unimpressed when she met
Roosevelt in 1910, shortly before he was
elected to the New York State Senate:
“There was nothing particularly interest-
ing about the tall, thin young man withthe high collar and pince-nez.... He had
a youthful lack of humility, a streak of
self-righteousness, and a deafness to the
hopes, fears and aspirations which are the
common lot.”
How the pampered only child of a
wealthy landowning family in the Hud-
son Valley should come to stand before a
screaming crowd in Madison Square Gar-
den in October 1936 and proclaim that
he welcomed the hatred of the country’s
“economic royalists” is one of the great
mysteries of American history. What en-
abled a man raised in the cocoon of privi-
lege to take the imaginative leap necessary
to create the New Deal? Why should
someone whose self-interest would seem
to point to maintaining the existing soci-
ety have described himself as a “prophet
of a new order,” as Roosevelt did when he
accepted the Democratic nomination for
the presidency in 1932?
These questions have been taken up
by FDR’s biographers for decades, andthey are at the center of Robert Dallek’s
new book, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Politi-
cal Life. A scholar who has written about
John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and
Richard Nixon, Dallek tells us that he
turned to Roosevelt to remind a younger
generation of what “great presidential
leadership” looks like. More generally,
he wants to reassure those questioning
the underlying wisdom of the democratic
political system in the wake of the 2016
election that it “has been capable of gen-
erating candidates for high office whose
commitment to the national interest ex-
ceeded their flaws and ambitions.”
To develop this argument, Dallek
offers us a portrait of a more political
Roosevelt, someone who loved the pro-
saic skirmishes of democratic life. This
Roosevelt is not so much a patrician heir
as a stumping pol giving speeches, cam-
paigning for office, negotiating legisla-
tive compromises, reading the mood of
a crowd, and managing to win over aBooks & the Arts
SWEPT UP BY HISTORY
Did the New Deal need FDR?
by KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN
Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisible
Hands and Fear City.