How the pampered only child of a wealthy landowning family in the Hudson Valley should come to stand before a screaming crowd in Madison Square Garden 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 enabled a man raised in the cocoon of privilege 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 society 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, and they are at the center of Robert Dallek’s new book, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political 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 generating candidates for high office whose commitment to the national interest exceeded their flaws and ambitions.”
To develop this argument, Dallek offers us a portrait of a more political Roosevelt, someone who loved the prosaic skirmishes of democratic life. This Roosevelt is not so much a patrician heir as a stumping pol giving speeches, campaigning for office, negotiating legislative compromises, reading the mood of a crowd, and managing to win over a roomful of skeptics and opponents. Being a politician—someone driven by the desire to win votes, garner public adulation, and exercise power—can involve more, Dallek tells us, than sheer ego, flamboyance, and a relentless Twitter finger. For Dallek, what defines political leadership in a democracy is the ability to translate an intuitive “feel for the public mood” into lasting social and institutional change.
But Dallek’s version of FDR’s story might not be as reassuring for American liberalism as he thinks. Roosevelt governed as he did more because of the swirl of social movements and ideas that surrounded him than because of anything intrinsic to his character or political sensibilities. He encountered tremendous resistance that he did not entirely know how to meet. Having started his career as a good-government reformer and then embraced a far more confrontational politics centered on support for a welfare state, Roosevelt changed with the times he lived in, times that he did not shape alone and that were not produced just by his good-spirited liberal politicking.