A devotion to democracy

New work paints FDR as a champion of the people

February 15, 2009|David M. Shribman

After a long, sometimes bitter, grueling presidential campaign that allowed Americans for more than a year to examine the tension between politicians who offer hope and politicians who offer experience, what the country is craving right now is . . . an 888-page book about an American president who combined hope and experience.

Lucky for us that H. W. Brands, the gifted University of Texas historian, has produced just such a book, an exhaustive but not exhausting biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You might wonder whether America needs another FDR biography, but this one is fresh, approachable, even-handed. Its size is forbidding, to be sure, but the prose is inviting, the story, though familiar, enthralling, and the lesson clear: A politician who believed that the presidency above all was a position of moral leadership used the office not so much to moralize as to raise morale.

Roosevelt had his detractors, then as now, and the title of this volume, "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," suggests the tensions that FDR produced in the United States during his dozen years in office.

Even so, Roosevelt remains the standard by which presidencies are measured. He may be remembered for expanding government, but what he really did was expand the presidency, a job designed as both head of government and head of state but that FDR transformed into something bigger still - one part pastoral and one part evangelical.

This is in one way a curious book. By virtue of its length, it provides remarkable detail about FDR's presidency but still argues that what distinguished it was not as much substance as style. "The style of Coolidge and Hoover was institutional and stand-offish: the style of Roosevelt was intensely personal," Brands writes.

Indeed, it is Brands's argument that FDR produced a unique bond between himself and the people: "He believed in democracy - in the capacity of ordinary Americans, exercising their collective judgment, to address the ills that afflicted their society. He refused to rely on the invisible hand of the marketplace, for the compelling reason that during his lifetime the invisible had wreaked very visible havoc on millions of unoffending Americans."