FDR as Our Greatest Twentieth Century President
A few weeks ago I’d published an article on Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious radio priest of the 1930s, and my extensive reading revealed that he had been a far more formidable figure than I’d ever realized.
Although he was relegated to just a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, Coughlin had pioneered political commentary in the new medium of radio broadcasting, and partly as a result he had amassed an astonishing audience of perhaps 35 million regular listeners by the early 1930s, a total that may have amounted to one-quarter or more of all American adults. This enormous following probably made him the world’s most influential media figure, someone who dominated large segments of American society. Although the occasional fireside chats of President Franklin Roosevelt were hugely popular and FDR received thousands of letters each day, Coughlin’s own audience was much larger and his daily volume of mail far greater.
As a populist social reformer widely regarded as being on the left, Coughlin had been a strong and important early supporter of FDR and his New Deal economic policies, but he eventually came to regard these as a failure and turned against Roosevelt, also later becoming a leading figure in the effort to keep America out of World War II. That latter political turn led FDR to successfully deploy the full power of his federal government to drive Coughlin from the airwaves and permanently end his political activities.
Coughlin was hardly alone in his strong opposition to our involvement in World War II, with polls showing that some 80% of the American people held similar views, nor was he even the most prominent public opponent.
Earlier this year, I published a long article on the career of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his America First campaign, a political movement that had similarly sought to block our involvement in the war. In that work, I’d drawn very heavily upon an excellent 2024 book of that title by historian H.W. Brands, whose coverage focused entirely upon that Roosevelt-Lindbergh political duel of the early 1940s.
Although Coughlin and Lindbergh were the primary figures in those articles, in each case President Roosevelt had been their main opponent, so he also had a central role both in my political narrative and in the extensive reading that I had undertaken to produce it.
Prior to Roosevelt, no American president had ever dared to exceed the two term limit informally established by George Washington, but FDR shattered that tradition by winning a third and eventually a fourth term, becoming the longest-serving president in our national history. My school textbooks told the story of how FDR’s New Deal rescued our country from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and then how that same president went on to win the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the greatest military conflict in human history.
During his many years in office, FDR had hugely expanded the size and scope of the American federal government, establishing Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and numerous other basic elements of our society that I had always taken for granted. Along the way, he had become an enormously popular hero to a huge fraction of the American public, notably including a young Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an ardent New Deal Democrat, and despite his later decades as a conservative Republican still always lionized FDR and many of his policies.
Given such political achievements, it’s hardly surprising that Roosevelt’s Wikipedia page runs 21,000 words, with another 32,000 words devoted to his New Deal policies, with the former declaring:
Historians and political scientists consistently rank Roosevelt, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln as the three greatest presidents.
These articles and my reading led me to realize the very scanty and meager extent of my knowledge of FDR and his New Deal policies. For nearly my entire life, my understanding had been limited to what I had gleaned from my textbooks and absorbed over the years from my newspapers and magazines. However, about eight or nine years ago, I’d read a highly critical late 1940s book about Roosevelt and his presidency, and found it sufficiently persuasive that I’d later summarized some of its surprising information in a 2018 article. But in the back of my mind, I’d always wondered whether that account was merely a severely distorted and one-sided critique, a biased version of events that I had accepted because of my general ignorance of the subject.
Therefore, I recently decided to broaden my historical understanding of that era with an extensive study of FDR and his presidency, focusing my reading upon fully mainstream historiography, and that major project consumed much of the month of June.
The Privileged Life and Early Career of FDR
I’d been very favorably impressed with the Brands book, and noticed that the same author had previously published a lengthy 2008 biography of FDR that had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, so Traitor to His Class, a doorstop-sized work running around 900 pages seemed like a good starting point for my investigation.
From the beginning, Brands emphasized Roosevelt’s very wealthy and elite family background. The future president was a descendent of the early Dutch settlers who had founded New York, and he followed that family tradition by being educated at Groton and Harvard College. FDR seems to have been a mediocre student with few if any intellectual interests, and years later he always described his failure to be admitted to Harvard’s elite Porcellian social club as the greatest disappointment of his entire life. By all accounts, Roosevelt almost never read any books, with the sole exception being dime detective stories. I’d sometimes come across these sorts of striking anecdotes about FDR in my casual readings, but having them explicitly stated in such a weighty and widely-praised biography fully confirmed their credibility.
After college, FDR enrolled at Columbia Law School, though he found legal studies rather uninteresting, received mediocre grades, and dropped out before graduating. By contrast, he was a very active and enthusiastic member of the New York City Yacht Club, so despite his lack of a law degree, a yachting friend of his soon offered him an unpaid apprenticeship at one of America’s most prestigious law firms. Roosevelt found practical legal work just as dull as he had his law school classes, but the couple of years or so he spent in that position, half of that time working without salary, seems to have been the only real job he ever held in his entire life.
During that period, Roosevelt was already telling his friends that he intended to make politics his career and hoped to reach the presidency, something that struck me as an astonishingly bold goal for someone then in his late 20s with such unimpressive personal achievements. But his very successful subsequent political career owed much to a crucial factor that I had entirely failed to grasp.
When I first began reading candid accounts of FDR’s background and his personal characteristics, the historical analogy that immediately came to my mind was that of President George W. Bush, but I’d failed to fully appreciate just how closely the two cases matched. As most people know, Bush’s very successful career in Republican Party politics was almost entirely due to the famous name of his father, President George H.W. Bush, with many ignorant voters notoriously getting the two men confused. I think it’s widely acknowledged that if Bush’s last name or even his first name had been something different, it’s unlikely that he would have ever been elected to anything at all.
Similarly, I’d always found it an odd coincidence that America had had two presidents with the rather unusual name Roosevelt just a couple of decades apart, but until reading the Brands book I’d failed to understand that much more than mere coincidence was involved.
As the author emphasized, the two terms in office of President Theodore Roosevelt, followed by his extremely active and high-profile post-presidential career had made TR the foremost public figure of his era, also establishing “Roosevelt” as the most famous political name in America, perhaps even in the entire world. FDR came from an entirely different branch of that family, being only a fifth cousin of his important relative, although his wife Eleanor was actually TR’s niece. But FDR’s very famous last name was still regularly regarded as a major political asset, with Democratic Party leaders always glad to put up a Roosevelt of their own and capitalize on the huge fame of the progressive Republican of the same surname.
So when the Democrats of Dutchess County in Upstate New York heard that FDR might be interested in running for office, they eagerly recruited him even though he’d spent the last few years living in New York City. His district was a heavily Republican one and Roosevelt was wealthy enough to fund his own race, so he seemed like the ideal candidate. FDR was handsome and charming and he campaigned in an expensive and gaudy red automobile at a time when horse-and-buggies were still the main means of transportation, so as he drove around his rural district, his unusual vehicle often attracted as much attention as the candidate who rode inside it. The year 1910 happened to be a very good one for Democrats, so Roosevelt won an upset victory by 1,440 votes, entering the New York State Legislature, while his fellow Democrats gained control of both houses.
The election of a Democratic Roosevelt was considered a major political novelty, especially since most people incorrectly assumed that he was actually a close relative of the recent Republican president. The New York Times soon published a lengthy profile on the freshman lawmaker, with the feature writer even declaring that “His patronymic had gone before him.”
Back then, the notorious Tammany Hall Democratic political machine ran New York City, with the state’s Democrats being sharply divided into pro- and anti-Tammany factions. FDR became a leading figure in the latter camp, probably inspired by a mixture of TR’s progressive views and his own shrewd political instincts on how to make a quick name for himself.
Once again, the Roosevelt surname worked wonders, and the freshman lawmaker received a great deal of national media attention as he and his allies successfully blocked the preferred Tammany candidate for New York Senator, an office that was still selected by a vote of the State Legislature. Numerous newspapers all across the country hailed FDR’s efforts and ran his photograph, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer identifying the young officeholder with TR’s battles against corruption, while lauding his bright political future:
Franklin D. Roosevelt is beginning his public career fully as auspiciously…If none of the colonel’s sons turn out to be fit objects for popular admiration, may it not be possible that this rising star may continue the Roosevelt dynasty?
Over the years that followed, this same exact pattern would often repeat itself. Political opportunities of an important nature would regularly be showered upon a relatively young man whose own rather undistinguished personal achievements while in office would otherwise have passed almost unnoticed. Being a political celebrity with a famous last name was just as beneficial a century or more ago as it has been in recent decades.
A bitter political battle between progressive and non-progressive New York Republicans had allowed FDR to initially slip into office, and in 1912 this same Republican battle was repeated on the national level. Theodore Roosevelt came out of retirement to mount a vigorous third-party challenge to his own hand-picked successor President William Howard Taft, with the result of the bitter three-way presidential race being the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Meanwhile, FDR won a difficult reelection campaign by the same relatively narrow margin as before.
Franklin Roosevelt in the Wilson Administration
Roosevelt seemed generally bored by state politics and he was also enough of a realist to recognize that once internal Republican battles subsided, any hopes of reelection in his district would probably fade away. He had enthusiastically endorsed Wilson for the presidency, so he eagerly sought a position in the new administration. Wilson had appointed a North Carolinian newspaperman named Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, and FDR successfully lobbied Daniels for the position of Assistant Secretary, a perfect fit given Roosevelt’s love of yachting as well as his desire to follow in the footsteps of TR, who had himself served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy decades earlier.
Daniels had no interest or experience in either naval affairs or administration, and had been advised by his predecessor that the Secretary of the Navy did nothing but approve the requests of the various admirals. But being a Bryan progressive, he was extremely suspicious of all the corporate military contractors, and according to a contemporaneous observer quoted by Brands, rightfully so, with the navy brass mostly consisting of deadwood, often corruptly linked to their corporate suppliers.
Daniels had a good working relationship with his young subordinate, and given his lack of interest in naval matters, he delegated a great deal of authority to FDR. According to Brands, even though Roosevelt had barely turned thirty, he already had his eye set on the White House, and therefore made every effort to ingratiate himself with the leadership of the navy. This included pressing very hard for an aggressive new building program of battleships, destroyers, and submarines, a project aimed at making our navy second to none, which was an extremely radical American idea for that era.
FDR was hugely ambitious, continually seeking every possible path for political advancement. Despite being only in his very early 30s and lacking any significant accomplishments, he decided to run for New York’s U.S. Senate seat in 1914, the first time that position was determined by popular election. Roosevelt had only served less than eighteen months in the Wilson Administration and Wilson anyway discouraged his appointees from involvement in state politics, so when he faced the longtime politician backed by the Tammany machine, he was crushed in the worst election defeat of his career. FDR got barely a quarter of the vote in the Democratic primary, while his opponent went on to lose heavily in November to the Republican candidate.
The outbreak of the First World War later that same year proved a major political opportunity for FDR, with our sleepy peacetime navy suddenly facing the potential challenge of a world military conflict as the threat of German U-boat attacks gradually drew America into the war. Daniels was firmly aligned with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in the anti-militarist, anti-war camp, while Roosevelt took a very different position than his superior in public hearings, emphasizing the need to greatly expand our naval forces. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania almost led Wilson to declare war, prompting Bryan’s resignation with Daniels nearly following him out the door. Roosevelt railed against his superior in private, while emphasizing his very contrary views to Wilson and the rest of the government.
While the leadership of the Republican Party was strongly pro-war, the Democrats were sharply divided, with their urban Irish and German voters and their Western progressives strongly opposed, so Wilson’s very difficult 1916 reelection campaign had to carefully balance those conflicting elements. Wilson therefore campaigned on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” but then brought America into the conflict just months after his extremely narrow victory. Roosevelt took full advantage of this new opportunity, doing his best to promote naval shipbuilding, proposing some innovative wartime measures, and even hiring his own publicist to promote his activities.
On a much more embarrassing personal note, his wife Eleanor received some important media attention, being featured in a 1917 Sunday Times article on the importance of following federal guidelines to conserve food during wartime. The very affluent but rather insouciant Mrs. Roosevelt emphasized that both she and her numerous family servants were doing everything they could to economize:
Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable. Since I have started following the home-card instructions, prices have risen but my bills are no larger.
In 1918 FDR arranged to travel to Britain on an inspection tour, including a brief trip to the Western Front in France, a visit that allowed him to always afterward claim that he had “seen combat.” Although he was just a junior figure in the Wilson Administration, his famous last name once again opened many important doors, getting him lengthy personal meetings with King George V, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and many other top officials.
Upon his return home FDR planned to resign his government position and join a naval unit, thinking that he might see combat. As Brands explained, “With luck he might be decorated, even lightly wounded,” something that would prove very useful for a “president-in-the-making.” But the war ended too soon for his plans to come to fruition.
Many millions of those who reelected Wilson in 1916 did so believing that he had promised to keep America out of the European war, and they were outraged when he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany just weeks after his second inauguration. Wilson also soon enacted a military draft, the first and only such measure in our national history except for the Civil War fought more than two generations earlier.
Potentially forcing millions of Americans to fight and die thousands of miles from home in a foreign war proved extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, and harsh sedition laws were soon passed, threatening long prison sentences for anyone who challenged those controversial government policies. In 1912 socialist Eugene Debs had won 6% of the presidential vote, among the best results for any minor party candidate in history, but when he made a few disparaging public remarks in 1918 about government policies and the draft, he was quickly sentenced to ten years in federal prison for sedition.
All these factors together with Wilson’s other political blunders resulted in a sweeping Republican victory in the 1918 elections, followed by Wilson’s severe stroke and the final Congressional defeat of his effort to enroll the U.S. in the League of Nations, an international project that he regarded as his main public legacy.
As a result, the Democrats realized that they faced almost certain defeat in 1920, so they nominated a bland Midwestern governor to lead the hopeless effort. The Democratic convention then balanced that ticket by picking as vice president the young and attractive 38-year-old FDR, a Wilsonian progressive with a famous name. Just as expected, Republican Warren Harding won by a huge landslide with over 60% of the vote, while his party picked up enough additional Congressional seats to establish majorities larger than any they had enjoyed since the Reconstruction Era two generations earlier. This election represented the greatest political defeat that the Democrats had suffered since the Civil War and marked the beginning of the near-total Republican national political dominance of the 1920s.
But Roosevelt himself had meanwhile gained his first national platform, giving most American voters an opportunity to size him up and recognize that he compared favorably with the winning candidate. As Brands puts it, “If voters could envision Warren Harding as president, they could certainly envision Franklin Roosevelt.” So FDR was hardly damaged by being on the losing ticket, and he had now become one of the leading figures in the national Democratic Party, much closer to his longstanding goal of reaching the White House than might have seemed possible just a year or two earlier.
While he contemplated his next political move, Roosevelt’s new political stature and his Washington connections soon landed him a very lucrative position as a front-man and rainmaker at a New York financial house run by a sailing friend of his. That position paid him the pre-tax current equivalent of millions of dollars each year for part-time work with only vague duties.
This discussion of FDR’s early career has run far longer than I had originally intended, and was drawn from less than the first 150 pages of Brands’ 900 page volume, while it lacks any of the important events of Roosevelt’s dozen years in the White House. But although I had been somewhat familiar with his years in the presidency, I was very surprised by what these earlier years revealed about the future president’s personality and character.
Brands is a biographer sympathetic to his subject, but many of the basic facts he set forth in a friendly manner seemed quite remarkable to me. Politics obviously attracts the politically-ambitious, but I’m not sure I’d ever read a biography of someone who had been so firmly determined to reach the presidency from such a young age despite his complete lack of any personal achievements, notable or otherwise. Roosevelt was a handsome, charming fellow, but his only major assets seemed to have been his personal wealth and his famous political name, while he appeared to have no clear goals or interests in public policy, let alone any ideology, being almost a blank slate in that regard.
I recalled the stinging remarks that Texas Democrat Jim Hightower made decades later regarding a future President Bush: “He was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple.”
Years later, the eminent progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared that Roosevelt had a “second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament.” But this sounded exactly like the sort of thing Neocon pundits might have said about President George W. Bush in the years after 9/11.
I think all these aspects of Roosevelt’s personality are highly relevant as we begin to consider his later political career and his time in office.
Given the enormous hagiography that eventually enveloped FDR’s wartime presidency and continued during the decades that followed, I think this examination of his early career helpfully cuts him down to normal size, allowing the contrary evidence to become much more believable. Once we begin to think of Franklin Roosevelt as being more of a George W. Bush or a Warren Harding, subsequent matters begin to make much more sense.
