Franklin Delano Roosevelt

FDR by Jean Edward Smith

Tier 2

This is a fine book. Fine. It’s not excellent. It’s not extraordinary. It’s fine.

This may seem insulting, but I don’t mean it that way. Smith set out to write a one-volume biography of a man who served as president for twelve years. And not just twelve years but twelve of the most influential years in our nation and the world’s history.

It’s not that this is a short book (almost nine hundred pages is anything but short), but rather that there is a colossal amount of information to cover. My mom once told me that as a child, my grandma didn’t understand that there were other presidents. She simply thought it was Roosevelt’s position. She was not alone in believing this.

Some may see this as a bad thing, some as good, but it is impossible to overstate his importance to the nation and its history. There are many arguments about the greatest presidents and FDR’s legacy, but there is no room to debate his place in the historical pantheon of presidents. Good or bad, love him or hate him, you cannot argue about his influence.

Smith’s book does an admirable job of detailing FDR’s life with an emphasis on his presidency. His writing is punchy and direct, and the book is well-paced. It is engrossing, and there are moments of brilliant storytelling. But it moves too fast for my taste. At one point, he attempts to deal with most of the New Deal legislation in one chapter. Again, as I have mentioned in previous posts, the failure here is not on Smith but on me. I wanted more. I wanted a multivolume examination of FDR that leaves no stone unturned. And yet, I turned to a single-volume biography. That is on me, not the author.

Obviously, if I felt that Smith, an accomplished biographer and historian, couldn’t cover FDR’s life in nearly nine hundred pages, it would be comical for me to try to do the same in this post. Instead, I’ll focus on two aspects of the man that I find particularly compelling—his legacy and the changing role of the United States and the presidency.

Let’s start with the latter first. Foreign policy was an afterthought for the first hundred or so years of the United States. The president might argue about tariffs or negotiate trade deals, but the nation was not a global force. There were incursions into this space and the expansion of our borders through wars and land purchases. A navy was built, and ambitions were laid out. It was clear from early on that the United States would eventually be a player on the global stage, but that time had not yet come.

There were presidents who focused more on international dealings. Some rattled sabers, and others spoke softly and carried a big stick. There was even a world war that the United States played a role in ending. In its aftermath, the nation seemed destined to assume its role as a player on that stage. And in some respects, it did. The Great Depression, after all, was a global calamity that originated in the United States. But the post-Wilson presidents returned to the safe confines of domestic politics and isolationism. The aftertaste of World War One (The Great War as it was then known) was bitter, and there was little appetite for more.

FDR changed all that. Maybe it was the times that changed it. His immense vision and ego always placed him at the global table. He was obsessed with his second cousin Theodore Roosevelt (who wouldn’t be) and looked to Teddy’s foreign policy as a guide. But one has to wonder if FDR would've ventured into global politics so aggressively if it weren’t for the renewal of hostilities in Europe that bleed out into the world at large.

But those events aligned to put him in a position of supreme importance when the world's axis hung by a thread. And, though he deserves considerable criticism for the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps and his failure to act more aggressively in assisting Jews during the Holocaust, one has to say he picked the right side. This is one of those moments in history when the right person was in the right place at the right time. The same can be said of his partner in the war, Winston Churchill (if you like biographies, there are several wonderful ones on him. A truly towering figure in history). Other presidents may have wavered in their support for the allies or their insistence on preparing for war. Other presidents may have considered it necessary to prepare for a future in which the Axis powers won the war. Roosevelt did neither. He saw only one path forward—allied victory. He always knew the United States would enter the war eventually and set the nation toward that path early on.

And after the war was won, the presidency changed forever. It was no longer a position that could focus primarily on domestic affairs. The nation was no longer able or willing to be a bystander to history. This has often led to horrific moments and awful decisions. It has repeatedly blemished our nation’s reputation. It has cost money and lives. It has doomed otherwise good presidents whose domestic policies were sound but foreign policies were abhorrent. FDR is the tipping point between what this job once was and what it has become.

This leads us to his legacy. There may not be a president who is more polarizing than FDR. Every president has their defenders and detractors. They have their moments in the sun and the shade (ok, maybe Buchannan didn’t have any moments in the sun). But few others seem to polarize so completely as FDR (maybe Reagan). Some blame him for the Depression, claiming he made a bad situation worse; others say he saved us from complete collapse. Some admire his New Deal policies as creating a social safety net in a time of extreme need; others say they crippled future generations. Some call him one of our greatest presidents; some call him one of our worst.

So, what do we make of him? Well, he was all those things and more. He was ambitious to a fault and cold to some he loved, but that ambition shaped the nation in his image. He was a visionary and an opportunist. He was complicated and president for far too long to make an easy and clean proclamation on his legacy.

What I will say for certain is that he was necessary. As I mentioned before, he was the right man at the right time. He tried. He didn’t always succeed in his policies, but the people needed to see someone trying. They needed to know that their president saw the pain and devastation that had taken hold of the nation and would do what he could to rescue them. Economics is far from a science, and no one will ever know if he made the economic impacts of The Depression better or worse. But he gave the people hope in a time of desperation.

To me, that is his legacy. One of hope and comfort in dark times. Those are the presidents we remember. Those who made the nation feel a certain way. And for that, I believe we should always look to FDR and remember that the president, at their best, can be a beacon of light in the darkness.