I have always admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an inspiring patriot. But I’ve also never moved past my first impression of him as an authoritarian. I still hold this general opinion after reading this splendid book; the difference is that Man of Destiny has amplified the intensity of it. I now admire FDR more for certain qualities and resent him more for others.
The 32nd president’s near-perfect reputation should baffle even his admirers. He was, after all, responsible for corralling Japanese-American citizens into internment camps after Pearl Harbor—a policy endorsed by the Supreme Court, whose 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States has never been formally overturned. (The author devotes just one paragraph to the wartime internment, which he calls “a disturbing example of how New Deal liberalism could so easily adopt authoritarian means.”) And although Alonzo Hamby appears sympathetic to many of Roosevelt’s policies, he doesn’t avoid plumbing their darker sides: FDR’s semi-dictatorship during the New Deal; the corruption inherent in running a siege economy; the tentacles of patronage that spread from Washington throughout the republic. It’s clear, for instance, that the administration used the Bureau of Internal Revenue to hound the likes of Andrew Mellon.
Then there was the government takeover of Montgomery Ward in 1944, when the Army actually surrounded the company’s Chicago headquarters, entered and fetched its aging chairman Sewell Avery from his office on the eighth floor, carrying him out to the street. For what? Something or other about a union election. It doesn’t even matter. Depending on your political views, as Hamby refreshingly notes, this was either righteous enforcement of smart law or something close to autocracy.
Why, then, do many even outside the progressive tradition look fondly on Roosevelt’s presidency? It may be because he was an effective steward of American power at a time when it was most critical, combining just the right amount of hard-boiled realism and democratic idealism. But while FDR could hit all the right notes about American liberty and democracy, Hamby sniffs out some hypocrisy:
During the Cold War, Jeane Kirkpatrick would define this syndrome by its most recognizable trait: demanding liberalization from everyone except Moscow. FDR’s own attitude toward Soviet Russia was an odd combination of resentment and admiration. He recognized that communism, especially under Stalin’s direction, was totalitarian; yet he could never quite condemn it the way an American progressive was apt to take on bankers.
Hamby, at any rate, doesn’t dwell much on Roosevelt’s ideology: This is as much a story of a man’s obsessive determination as it is a political biography. And many fine traits emerge in its telling, among them Roosevelt’s refusal to surrender to polio. This obstinacy made his career—as New York state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, vice-presidential candidate in 1920, governor of New York, and, finally, president and man of the people during the Great Depression and World War II.
Of course, the best populists are usually elitists who possess both the means and self-regard to speak for the people. Born into a patrician New York family, FDR was convinced of his own righteousness and felt entitled to exercise it over others, displaying all the qualities of someone who recognized no limit to translating his outsized will into political power.
And how jealous of this carefully acquired power he was! To give one very large example, his conduct of foreign affairs often meant reducing the Department of State to little more than a vestigial bureaucracy, concentrating enormous diplomatic influence in advisers like Harry Hopkins. When Averell Harriman became ambassador to Moscow in 1943, his line of communication ran directly to Roosevelt, not through Harriman’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Indeed, the president’s conceit could be overwhelming at times. “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department,” he said to Churchill in 1942. When Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin in Tehran the following year, Roosevelt was so determined to practice personal diplomacy that the only State Department official present was Charles Bohlen, who was largely confined to translating. Hamby’s account of the Tehran Conference is interesting not because of the finer points of statecraft but because it is a reminder of FDR’s obsession with his own position. Churchill wanted the Allies to exploit the Mediterranean as a base of operations. Dependent on American aid, however, he had to defer to Roosevelt’s priority: Operation Overlord, the code name for what would eventually be the landings in Normandy. At one point, Stalin questioned whether Britain was really committed to Overlord: “There followed a series of cutting exchanges,” writes Hamby, “with Roosevelt joining in the needling of Churchill.”
This might seem like an insignificant detail; but reading the scene, it’s difficult not to think of the social dynamics of a high-school cafeteria clique, each member jostling for alpha status, FDR sucking up just a bit to Stalin by deriding the least powerful (Churchill) in the group. If FDR made the American Century, it was through the relentless pursuit of a plan he seems to have hatched in the womb. And for those who got in his way—well, he ruthlessly put them in their designated place. Roosevelt was a man of destiny, and he was undeniably the author of it.
Robert Wargas is a writer in New York.
